Ep #219: Troubleshooting Your Sales Calls

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hey coaches, welcome to episode 219. Today we’re going to talk about troubleshooting sales calls. I’m actually just going to give you a really specific exercise and then coach a little bit on your thoughts so that you’ll do it.

But first I thought it’s been a couple of weeks, months, I don’t even know how long since I’ve given you a life update. So I thought I would give you a life update. My little boy is almost 10 months old. I have survived almost, almost a year of motherhood. It’s insane, you all. Listen, a lot of you have asked about my postpartum anxiety and how I’m doing. I don’t remember if I’ve given an update here but I will tell you that it’s gotten a lot better. A lot of the really aggressive intrusive thoughts have subsided and now it feels like mostly a low level humdrum anxiety when I just think about how much I love this kid.

It feels a little bit now I’m just challenging my capacity, my heart, I mean it feels like it’s been expanded 100 times. We are so in love with this kid. He’s perfect in every single possible way, I mean literally perfection. We just are in awe of him. He’s so smart. He’s already eating real solid foods. He’s got his first little two teeth at the bottom of his mouth. He is so funny, so funny and his laugh is so contagious. He has multiple laughs like his mom. But there’s one that’s a full on belly laugh that we can’t get enough of.

He has started calling me mum, mum. Mum, mum. Mum, mum. It’s precious. He calls daddy, daddy, dada, all of the things for dad. He is obsessed with Neil. They have the cutest relationship. They’re already roughhousing so much and I am just this worried mom always yelling at them like, “Be careful, you’re going to hurt him.” He’s just precious. We’re in love and so my anxiety has gotten a lot better. I don’t feel it’s completely gone but it’s definitely a lot less intrusive, a lot more manageable.

And it just is like it’s just a hint of, it’s that foreboding joy when you just love something so deeply you immediately feel this fear of losing it. So that’s where I’m at. I’m just loving him so deeply. We’re having a good time being parents. We just built his playroom and it really blew my husband and I’s mind that we could even do something like that. I didn’t have a playroom when I grew up. I mean I had lots of toys and I had a fun bedroom. But a playroom, a separate play area. The whole flooring is a foam mat so that he can just crawl around everywhere.

He’s got an astronaut tent, a ball pit, faux leather loungers, little reading nooks and these cute, just absolutely adorable bookshelves with all of these fancy, and when I say fancy, they’re just gorgeous toys. It’s a company from, I think France called Smallable, small-able. And they have the most gorgeous wooden and silicone toys. And so his whole room is these vintage insanely beautiful toys that he loves, he loves them. It’s little wooden push toy cars and little wooden Formula I cars. And just the cutest things. He has a little dinosaur nook. It’s the best.

And he has the best time just being in that space. So we are just having a lot, a lot of fun. We spend just a ridiculous amount of time in the playroom all of us, all three of us. So that’s what we’re doing over here in my world. Maybe on the next episode I’ll give you a business update but that’s a life update. We’re planning the most outrageous first birthday ever. We will post photos online. We are having it, it’s a dinosaur theme, his favorite stuffed animal toy is still Douglas the Dinosaur. And he is so obsessed with all the dinosaurs. And so we are having a Douglas the Dinosaur themed birthday party.

And I found a greenhouse that hosts events inside the greenhouse so that we have this jungle effect on this farm in Louisville that almost became a suburb until one of the ladies I think that owns Churchill Downs bought it, and was like, “We’re preserving this farmland.” And so they created a greenhouse and a restaurant. And people can tour the farmlands. And so we’re going to have a birthday party in a greenhouse, Douglas the Dinosaur theme and it’s going to be just very cute.

So that’s what we’re doing. We’re all in on the planning of the birthday and the playroom and 10 months and just having so much fun with our little boo.

Okay, so that’s my life update. Are you ready? Can we talk about troubleshooting consultations, sales calls, whatever you want to call them? People are always like, “What’s a consult? What’s a consultation?” Whatever you call it, sales call, it’s fine. So I’m going to just give you a specific exercise. There are many things you can do to troubleshoot a sales call. I’m going to give you one particular exercise that I find is incredibly useful, valuable. It’s what I did for the first 12 consults I ever had and it is how I have helped myself in the past get so good at consults.

I didn’t have a program like 2K for 2K. I mean I’m sure there were sales programs out there. There weren’t any that I even thought to Google or to know about. So I just was in the wild west it felt like. And this was the exercise that got me so good so quick. And this is why it’s important. Let me just say this, if I’ve never said this on the podcast. This is why this investing time in this work will be so important to you is because I added up all the missed opportunities of the first 12 no’s that I got for what I was selling my package for.

And what I have left on the table by not being able to sell and close and run a proper sales call was $60,000. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re owed every yes on the call. That’s not what I’m saying at all. And I’m not saying I should have made $60,000. Sometimes you guys say that to yourselves, I should have signed that client. I just lost that money. It’s not that. But I was very aware that there was $60,000 of opportunity of clients, of money that was unavailable on the table of people who wanted to be sold coaching, who showed up for a consult to talk about coaching.

And then it fell apart because of my lack and ability to run a proper consult and to have those conversations and to do it in a really skilled way. Before I dive into this exercise I want to say that one of the reasons it’s so important that you join 2K for 2K whether you want to learn how to get clients without paying for leads and you want to figure out how to do that or you use Facebook Ads and you pay for leads, either way. When you join I do give you a step-by-step. Here are the five things you need to do on a consult.

We have a PDF copy of the consultation code where I literally walk you through the conversation, how I transition from one step to the other and I give you talking points. And I don’t believe in sales scripts for many reasons but one of them is because if you don’t understand the why behind the conversation it comes off salesy. And people sniff that out. It’s just really inauthentic to regurgitate someone’s sales script and I don’t find them highly effective. But I do think it’s helpful to hear how someone would say something and how that might sound as an example. And so I give lots of those.

So it’s very important that as soon as you possibly can, I know some of you are out there and you’re trying to get consults to pay for 2K. But as soon as you can get your butt in 2K do so, so that you have those clean clear five steps. I go in depth into every single one so there’s not a moment on the call where you’re going to be confused about what to do. So whether you have that five step process or not, whether you’re in 2K or not, you’re still going to use the exercise that I’m going to give you on this episode today.

But you can also utilize higher converting consults in 2K for 2K. It’s one of the trainings I did. It’s a three hour masterclass on all the mistakes I see coaches make on consults that are just as soon as you know them you just stop doing them. So that’s my argument for don’t just use this episode as the only thing. There are so many other resources that can make you grow really quickly based off of what I’ve learned. But I’m wanting to give you something that I think, I teach this in 2K, that I think will really help you even if you’re using someone else’s sales process, it’s fine.

But will really help you get progressively better at consults if you only do this one thing. And then if you join me in 2K for 2K I’m also going to give you a lot of other things that will make you progressively better and really collapse your time in failure and learning through mistakes because I’m going to help you just prevent them. It’s just I can’t do it all in one podcast episode but I can give you one exercise.

So I’m going to give you the exercise and then I’m going to talk you through the level of importance and what you need to think in order to do it. It’s actually really simple. When you do a consult, as soon as you get off the call, unless you have one back-to-back, unless you’re getting them literally 20 a week don’t schedule them back-to-back. Schedule an hour after every consult and as soon as you hang up, the moment, do not do anything other than run into the bathroom or grabbing some more water or a snack, literally nothing.

Go straight from the call into this exercise. You’ve got to do it right away. It’s very important. And here’s what you’re going to do. You are going to write out the entire conversation. What? I know. I know. It’s a lot of work and also it’s going to make you so much money. And it’s going to be really productive because one of the things that people always tell me, one of the things that is super frustrating is when you’re getting no’s and you have no clue why and you feel like it’s very out of your control. It’s just like well, all the no’s, they couldn’t afford it. They just didn’t have the time, it just wasn’t right for them.

They put all of the things on the person. It’s the person’s fault that they got the no. They conveniently forget that they maybe are new and learning how to do consults and that maybe, maybe you have a little piece to do with why someone is giving you objections like time and money and needing to talk to their spouse and needing to think it over and needing to check the budget. All of those things, I want you to just be curious about. What if it’s your skill at selling, what if that’s the easy polite way for them to say, “I wasn’t sold.”

They don’t know how to say that. They don’t know how to say that for sure, many of them. They don’t know how to be that blunt. Maybe they don’t even understand that that’s what’s happened so it’s just really easy. What’s really happening is they’re like, I have this amount of money or this amount of time and I’m really unclear if it’s going to be a good exchange because you have not successfully walked me into that belief on this consult.

So with this exercise you have to when you’re writing out the conversation you have to come at this conversation and this perspective. It’s the only way you will be willing to do this work, is you have to be willing to believe that it’s because of something you said or didn’t say or could have said better. That’s the point of writing this out. So you’re going to write out every single thing that you can remember about that conversation.

Now, listen, in the beginning it may not be the entire conversation but everything you can possibly remember you get it down as quick as possible from your brain, every single thing. Don’t do this on the consult. You could take notes but it’s going to take you out of paying attention to them. You’ve got to do it after and you’ve got to just write down everything you can possibly remember that they said and then that you said.

Having this written out where you can read through just without me teaching you anything else will be hugely transformational in itself for you to read back their questions and see how you answered them. Then there are two things that you’re going to do with everything that you’ve remembered that happened on the consult. This is why you give yourself an hour.

You’re going to go through and you’re going to ask yourself, number one, you can literally write it in the margins of your paper what it is that you were thinking when you said the thing. Especially if it was a weird thing, if it was an awkward thing, if it was a lack of confidence thing. If you didn’t feel like you said the thing that was just the most brilliant thing ever and they didn’t respond as if it was the most brilliant thing ever then ask yourself what thought you had when you said that. Sometimes that is really useful to find when you had subtle judgments and reacted to them.

I spend a lot of time coaching my 2K students and my 200K students and finding these things when they do consult evals in our groups is I’m picking things that they don’t even see. They’re like, “Oh, I was having that judgment.” Or they have a hunch that they had a judgment. So there might be a judgment. There might be a judgment on yourself that gets in the way of you feeling confident to handle what you said next.

So you just want to ask yourself if there was any part that did not feel like a 10 out of 10 for you, what were you thinking when you said it? What thought came up for you from what they said to your answer? What happened in between that will be hugely transformational for you to find that information for yourself. And listen, even if you’re like, “Well, Stacey, I’m not even getting consults.” Okay, well, then are you writing social media copy? Are you writing emails? Are you writing to people in any capacity? If you are, you can do this with your copy too.

I’ve done some launch audits in Two Million Dollar Group. It’s not something I do for everyone but I have done it for some of my students. I missed a meeting, that was the way that I made it up for them, is I spent four hours going through their launches and it’s teaching me so much. I’m going to create an entire course for Two Million Dollar Group about their launches and how to do a great launch on it.

But one of the things that has come up in the launch audits is every time it’s so fascinating, I can read their emails and pick out the top four beliefs they had when they were writing them, that are turning people off, confusing people, making it not a hell yes to buy. And they’re not even aware they’re having them. So you can do this with your copy as well. You can go through and be like okay, when I said this sentence what’s the predominant thought that made me say this? This is tedious work, you all, I get it but do you want to make a lot of money as a life coach?

This is one way that you can do it that’s free that I’m giving it to you right now here on the podcast, to help you get better results on those consults, to make more money, to make better use of every opportunity that comes your way. So that’s the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to write. You’re just going to look at, what was I thinking when I said that or how was I feeling?

One of my 200K students recently emailed in and she’s going to come on the podcast and we’re going to talk about another way she’s used one of my tools but from the feeling perspective. And she was telling me, some people really enter things better from the feeling perspective. I agree I am like that a lot of times too. So if it’s helpful to say, what was I feeling when I said this thing. Super helpful too. So what was I thinking or what was I feeling?

Then you’re going to look at the areas that felt clunky, chunky, not so great, not 10 out of 10, could have been way better. You’re going to look at what are three or four or five or even 10 different ways I could have approached this? How could I have said it differently? How could I have explained it more clearly? What could I have said that would have been, I call it risking the relationship or saying a bold truth like where did I chicken out where something needed to be said but I was more worried about being liked than helping the person and giving them a transformation and saying the hard thing?

Maybe that will be helpful instead of risking the relationship, saying the hard thing. But the reason I call it risking the relationship is because that’s what we think. I’m going to end this relationship, this person’s going to get so mad at me if I say this thing. And as a coach you have to be willing to risk the relationship. That’s how we get transformation is someone’s willing to say to us the thing that no one else has been willing to say to us. So you’re going to ask yourself, where could I have said this better? What could I have said differently?

Was there something I avoided and chickened out on? Was there something I said that was too confrontational, I was trying not to chicken out or I was trying to risk the relationship in service of my clients but I’m rusty at doing that. I’m not skilled at doing that yet so it came off abrasive, aggressive, judgmental.

Pick it apart and then say, “Okay, if I had to redo, from my confidence now, now that I’m gathered, now that I’m calm, now that I’ve exhaled, now that I have some perspective and some hindsight what can I do differently?” And if you don’t know the answer to that this is why it’s so important, this really isn’t intended to be the hard sales push for 2K. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

This is the reason why being in a community like 2K for 2K is so important because what I see all the time is people posting, “Hey, so my client said this on the consult. And I got really stumped and I’ve thought a lot about it but I still can’t come up with anything or this is what I’ve come up with but it still doesn’t feel a 100% like that’s a 10 out of 10. What do you guys say?” And then they might get 40 responses. You want 40 responses. You want 40 ways to think about something. It’s super useful.

And I will even take walks and think about, unwind the different ways and be like, “Oh yeah, I can see how that could be true. I could see how that could be true.” Take one hour and be willing to do just that, those two things, what was I thinking and feeling and what are as many ways as possible that I think that I could have addressed it differently. How could I have changed this conversation and directed it differently?

And one of the things in 2K for 2K when I teach about evaluations that I don’t allow people to do, I mean they do it but we point it out when they do. So the evaluation is three steps. I think I’ve covered this on the podcast. You ask yourself what worked, what didn’t work and what you’re going to do differently. These are not rocket science questions. Now, I will tell you, I go in much deeper depth of specifics that you need to ask yourself each of those questions in the program.

But one of things that I teach them is not to allow yourself to put something the other person did in that evaluation. So you can’t say what didn’t work is they didn’t have the money. What didn’t work is she got super defensive when I asked this question. It always has to be something you did and within your control. Listen, 10% of the people you speak to, 10 might factually not have the money to pay you. But why did they get on the sales call? To talk about buying something?

10% of the people may not actually feel prepared to invest the time that you will tell them it takes to get the result they want yet they carved out time to get on the phone to talk about carving out more time to work with you. 10% of the people, you might me one of those people who talk about financial decisions with your spouse but I bet you have an idea of what you want to decide before you go have a conversation with them. And I also bet if you were honest it’s a really easy way to not either commit in the moment because you don’t want to or to say no politely.

I remember right after I got married, I have a habit of just saying yes to things when people reach out, whether I want to or not, especially with my family or friends, I’ll just be like, “Yes, sounds amazing.” And I don’t remember what the situation was, I just remember telling my sister about it and my sister saying, “You need to adopt this line and it’s going to change your life.” “Let me get with Neil and I’ll get back to you.” She was like, “Say it every time no matter what, even if you feel it’s a genuine yes, say that, give yourself a pause, think about it truly. Actually talk to Neil about it and then come back.”

And doing that has really saved me but I will tell you, many of the times, because it’s going to be a no. And sometimes Neil lets me blame him, but just tell them I said no, it’s fine. I just think it’s hard for us humans to say no directly and bluntly. I’m getting really good at it, I will say. I’m good at it in business, really good at it in business because I think it serves my clients so much. I really sometimes struggle with it in my personal life when it comes to my family. You all probably understand.

We’re really good in certain areas and then we have people pleasing tendencies with the people closest to us and it’s like our Everest and not people pleasing my family is my Everest. I’m getting better at it. But it’s just a great way to tell people no. So I don’t want you to ever just believe those things at face value, 10% of people, that could be true. That might be true. And it’s not your job to argue with them either. I’m not saying that either. This exercise is not how could you argue with your clients about how they do have time or they do have the money.

Explore non-confrontational ways of service that you could approach the conversation differently that could get a different outcome, that could be in higher level of service for your people other than saying, “Okay, bye. If anything changes, reach out.” The mousy little answer that many of you give at the end. There are other ways to do it. And there are definitely better ways to do it than getting in a fight with them at the end or pissing them off and them hanging up on you which happens.

There’s a great middle ground where you ask some great questions that you get curious at the end. You get curious about what they’re thinking. You get curious about how the conversation went for them, how they’re feeling about the results and what you’ve explained to them and how you would help them or what they’re thinking about that. I don’t think you even for this exercise need every single thing broken down for you.

You just need your own intuition to say, “How could I have done this differently? Where could I have directed this conversation? Where would I have wanted this conversation directed to?” That might be a really great one. Where would I have wanted, if I were being coached, if I were this person being sold in this conversation trying to lose the weight or find the guy or girl or get through the divorce or whatever it is, make the money. If I was on the other end of this conversation how would I have wanted the salesperson to have approached this with me?

I also do this a lot. I will critique people who are selling me not even in a negative way, just in a really curious way because I want to always better my sales. So I’ll be like, “Interesting, I felt uncomfortable when they said that. What would I have preferred them to say?” That just helps me understand selling even better. So I do it even as the customer.

But listen, if you do what I have suggested in these 26 minutes together, whatever it ends up being after editing, if you do this every single consult, not every other one, not every five or every 10, every single one until you start getting yeses. There’s no end time, until you start getting yeses, you will make a lot of money as a life coach, period. You will get so good at understanding the conversation that needs to happen to convert an interested party into a client.

You will get great at serving your client. You will become very good at coaching. I will tell you, this made me an amazing coach this exercise. You will leave feeling very purposeful in what you need to do moving forward. You’ll feel the energy of getting better. That’s the best part. The most frustrating thing ever is when you’re getting tons of no’s and you’re not feeling like there’s any progression happening. If you feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over and over and nothing is progressing you will be miserable I promise you. I have been there.

When you feel like there’s no way out because it’s never getting better, because nothing ever changes, terrible place to be, that’s real purgatory. So how we get out of it is we find ways to get better and then we notice we have awareness of our progression. If you’re listening to this and you’re in 2K, question, have you been doing this every single consult? Because people will be like, “Well, I haven’t done it for the last three. I did three back to back and there just wasn’t time.” No, whatever you can remember from each conversation.

Another thing I don’t let people do in 2K, again, they do, I just correct them. I don’t have that much control. I wish I did, I wish I could just say it once and you could never do something that would cause you to not make money ever again. I also wish someone could do that for me. But we don’t have that much power over people. But listen, one of the other things that I see people do a lot is they will lump four or five consult conversations into one thing, they all said this, this was the common trend. Don’t do that. That is sales death, don’t do it.

You have to look at each and every single individual conversation. Yes, there could be a trend that you’re like, “Every single time this happens I chicken out and I just get off the call or I offer a follow-up.” That’s fine. You can definitely coach and stop doing those things. But don’t get in a place that isn’t useful where you’re like, “Well, they all just didn’t have the money.” You want to know very specifically what went wrong with each one. And don’t let yourself get frustrated if it’s different things every time so it feels like it’s all over the place.

You’re learning a brand new skillset. Imagine when I’m learning tennis and I’m playing a game or a match, whatever you call it, with my husband. I’m probably doing 30 things wrong at the same time. I just choose one to improve on and then when I improve on that and I start on another thing and I improve that sometimes I fall back and I miss the other thing again. And I’m like, “Wait, shoot, I regressed, got to pick that one back up again.” It’s normal and natural to be making lots of different mistakes and then bettering them and then making them again.

Eventually your brain will log all of this information in while you’re sleeping, while you’re doing other things. And what will happen and maybe it will take 12 consults, maybe it will take two. You don’t have to be like me. You don’t have to have the first 12 no’s, or 12 no’s in a row. I’ve seen so many people do it way faster than me especially when they join 2K and they learn all the things that it took me 12 consults to learn but you could be faster. You just have to be willing to do it and to not get overwhelmed by it.

So it’s consistency and then your mindset while you’re doing it. So do it every single time and then don’t let your brain tell you, “Oh my God, it’s never going to work, there’s so much to do. I’ll never get better. I’m never going to get a yes. I’ll never make money. It’s so hard.” Don’t let your brain do that, just focus. See the power and my brain’s smarter than I think. I know more about selling than I think because when I go back in hindsight I could clear this entire conversation up, look what I just did. I’m so proud of this make believe conversation and the way that I directed it.

If you do that enough, in hindsight what’s also going to happen is your brain is going to be able to do it faster in real time when you’re actually in a conversation. You’re going to catch the mistakes before you actually make them. You’re going to catch yourself thinking or feeling in a way that has you reacting and directing the conversation in an un-useful way or not giving your best coaching or your best foot forward.

Gosh, guys, listen, we always get off sales calls or launches or webinars and we have a good indication of things we could do better. But all of that knowledge when you’re willing to evaluate and you’re willing to do this exercise will have you doing it. I do it now when I’m actually in the sales process. I can rearrange my brain and my emotions. I can catch myself. I can reorganize and keep going.

I’ve even had this happen when I was on a webinar once and I don’t remember, what was it? There was a tech issue or I think it was a tech issue for five whole minutes on my webinar. And my ability to recollect myself and say, “Okay, where am I directing this conversation?” I still made tons of money because I had that ability because I have done this work over and over and over. So every consult consistency matters. Allow yourself to look at, think about, troubleshoot for things that you can control and do it every single time for every single situation.

Don’t allow yourself to lump them all into one problem and that problem’s them. Take each situation individually and do it every single time. This will make you so much money. And then soon as you can, I know you all are working on it, as soon as you can get into 2K for 2K. Doesn’t matter how much money you’ve made, get in there. When it comes to consults specifically the three greatest things you could do in that program is visit the clean selling module. This will help you clean up your thoughts and feelings and reactions to things people say.

The consult module, that will help you step-by-step, there are 20 to 30 minute videos on every step of the five steps so that you really understand what you’re doing in each of those moments of the consult. So you’re not on the consult wondering what should go next. And then higher converting consults, I walk you through 14 of the biggest mistakes coaches make and how it affects the client, what their response likely will be and why and what to do differently.

And I also dive into having the conversation when they have an objection and how you talk through that. So you have additional help that will make how this conversation needs to be and how you need to evaluate, your awareness of what went wrong will be even clearer and even more specific when you’re able to dive into these teachings in a very step-by-step manner where it really leads you into when you start with step one all the way. I even talk about how many minutes you should spend on each segment to where you understand not just the big picture but how all the little pieces fit together.

So do that as soon as you can. However, whether you’re in 2K or you’re not in 2K yet, no matter if you have not made a dime or you’re a 200K earner, do this exercise. I promise you one of the things that people say about this podcast a lot is how practical the things I teach are. And that’s what they say a lot about 2K and 200K is it’s just super practical information. And I was thinking about that accolade. I don’t know if that’s the right word but that thing that people say that, “I’m so proud of that.”

And I was thinking what else can I give them that would be super practical and this was it. This is what came to mind immediately is, do this exercise, it’s the most practical thing that you could possibly do. And if you do it every single time with consistency, focus on the things that you can control. You will make so much more money. Have an amazing week. I love you all so much. Talk to you next week. Bye.

Hey, if you’re ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2k for 2k program where you’re going to make your first $2,000 the hardest part using my simple 5 step formula for getting consults and closing new clients. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.