What to Sell During COVID-19 (Selling in a Crisis Part 6)

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.

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome. How to sell any offer pop-up group, and selling in a crisis livestream. How’s it going? How y’all doing? Are you guys out there serving your asses off? I hope so. I am. I looked at my schedule this week and I’m like, what is happening?

I have five trainings in this group, a webinar, two actual regular coaching calls, no, four regular coaching calls, I’m on fire. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. I have spent so much of my time in the last year managing my business and being a CEO, and when you get to the point where you’re making millions, you will have to do that as well.

And for those of us that just love to coach, that’s the hardest thing ever. Because we just want to coach. That’s what we got into it for. I find myself some days being like, listen, I didn’t want to be a CEO, I never imagined that in my brain. I didn’t want to have to learn how to hire people and manage people and create systems and processes. This is horrible.

I wanted to get in here and coach. I will tell you, the silver lining for me during this COVID-19 quarantine and pandemic situation has been that we haven’t put things on hold, I’m still doing all the things I was doing, but I’ve had to manage my schedule a lot better because we’ve added in so many opportunities for my clients to get coached. I’m in my 2K group coaching three times a week now to give my clients the support that they need to go out and serve their people.

And I am just giving extra support everywhere I can, in that Facebook community, in my mastermind, and it’s a lot of work but I’ve been going to bed at night like, my head’s hitting the pillow and I’m feeling used up in the best way. And it really has brought me back to the majority of my time in the last week or two and definitely this week has been spent coaching, which is what I love so much and it’s been really fun.

So there’s the silver lining. Sometimes in all the things. I’m going to tell you another silver lining and then we’re going to dive into today’s topic. So I was actually supposed to be in New York last week getting my dress fitted for my wedding. We paid for an express fitting, so they were going to do three fittings back to back and then I was going to leave with the dress.

And I invited two of my best friends to go with me and we were going to be there for six days. We were going to do a photoshoot together just for fun and for my business. I was flying in a photographer from California. We were going to do – my vision was just long coffee chats about philosophy and relationships and money and business and coaching.

And I just wanted to shop until we dropped and do all of the things and get my dress, and I was so excited. We had reservations all over New York. So we had to postpone that and I was feeling a little sad but then this weekend, I was sitting on my patio, my porch, it was just the most beautiful day ever. The most beautiful day.

And my doggies were just sitting there with me and they were looking so regal and pretty and just happy sitting in the breeze, and I was reading my book and I’m drinking my coffee, and I was experiencing the most joy ever. And it hit me, another silver lining, that if I had been in New York, I wouldn’t have gotten that moment.

And I was just thinking about I’ve been so sad to lose all the moments that I’ve lost in my wedding planning and trips that I had planned. I had six planned during this whole time that we all had to cancel. And I was just thinking like, what are the things that now we get to open up to that wouldn’t have been there?

So I wanted to just pass that on to you as a little morning pep talk. Look for the things, the silver linings, the experiences you wouldn’t have gotten to have, the feelings you wouldn’t have gotten to have if you had been doing other things. And really let yourself open to up to those because that moment, to me, was just as amazing as if I had been with my girlfriends in New York.

Okay, let’s dive in. Y’all ready? So we talked about how to sell during a crisis, and to recap, it’s the same as always. Then we talked about who to sell to during a crisis, and to recap, it’s the same as always. People who have money.

But today, we’re going to talk about what to sell. Your actual offer that you would make during a pandemic or any other time where there’s a mass event happening. So this could come up again during election time, this could come up if there’s any other world event that everybody is thinking kind of the same things all at the same time.

I want to talk about that today and what exactly you should be offering. So when I use the term offer, it could be used a couple ways. So there’s the offer that you make, that’s what you’re doing is you’re making offers, when you’re selling.

So any of the content that you’re offering people, if you’re writing a post, an email, if you’re doing a webinar, or a training, the content that you give people, that is usually hopefully, there is a call to action at the end. An offer to sign up for a consult with you, an offer to join your coaching program, an offer to take action and do something.

So when I say making offers, what I’m mostly referring to is you putting content out in the world, followed with a call to action. That’s making an offer. Then there’s also what you offer. That’s your actual coaching, your actual program, your course, whatever you’re selling.

I’m distinguishing that, however, what I’m about to teach you really applies to both, but I wanted to distinguish that ahead of time. So there’s the marketing that you’re doing and the offers you’re making, and then there’s your actual offer that you’re selling.

Okay, so when we’re in a crisis or we’re in any other pandemic or any other time really, the first thing that you guys are going to be inclined to do is to change your offer, to change what you’re selling or how you’re selling it, how you’re promoting it.

Here’s what I want to offer. Here’s the offer I want to offer is number one, you want to just decide if you’re going to make big changes, small changes, you want to decide that and then you want to move forward. What I’m seeing a lot of you coming to me either in this group or in my 2K, my paid program, I’m getting a lot of people coming to me and they’re spending a lot of time in indecision.

And indecision just sucks your time and makes you less effective and keeps you from serving more people. So whatever you’re going to do, you want to just decide and move forward. My goal is that by the end of this training, you can decide and move forward right now and you leave all the decisions behind from this livestream.

Once we’re done, you just leave the decision behind. The drama about the decision, you leave that behind. So here is my official answer, but then I’m going to walk you through some thought errors and I’ll tell you what that is, but some thought errors that you can look for when you make your decision.

So I’m going to tell you to decide and move forward, but then I am going to help you decide. So just hang tight. But my official answer is the same through all of these livestreams we’ve done is selling during a crisis is the same as any other time, so my official answer is go about making your offers and what you’re selling business as usual.

And then decide based on who you’re selling to if you think talking about the pandemic, marketing about the pandemic, and making an offer tailored for the pandemic is relevant to your client and is going to be a major pain point for them, something that they’re really engulfed in right now.

You have to decide that for yourself. There is no right answer. A lot of my clients in 2K are – I’m getting the conversation going and I’m asking them what’s happening in the field because I’m not in the field in the same way. The experience I have of coaches coming to me from the coach perspective of selling during this time. But I don’t have the client perspective of just someone who’s buying life coaching.

So I’ve been asking them, and a lot of their people – I’m surprised a little bit by the number of people that are coming to me and telling me their clients aren’t bringing up the crisis, they aren’t concerned about it at all, or they’re affected but it’s not changing the conversation that they’re having on their coaching calls.

I’m hearing at least 50% of the people, at least 50% aren’t thinking about – when it comes to coaching and the results they want, they’re not being influenced by the pandemic. Then another 50% of the people are coaching a lot of people who are deeply affected by it.

So that’s why you have to make the decision for you based on your clients. So you just decide and then you move forward. But you have to make the decision from thinking about your people. So for me, I’m keeping it business as usual, but I do know about 50% of my clients have questions about how to sell and what to sell and who to sell to during this time.

So I’m creating free content and I’m addressing it in my program to the degree that it’s necessary, but for the most part we’re also just moving forward business as usual because most of my clients just want to talk about learning how to sell, learning how to get more offers. They just want to make more money and whatever they need to do to do it, that’s the conversation they want to have.

So you have to decide for you but don’t spend any time in indecision. Okay, so here are the thought errors that you just want to look for when you’re making your decisions. Because sometimes you’re going to have a really amazing idea of content to give or a training to create or an offer to make and sell.

And it’s going to feel like a really inspired idea and the energy might be really high, then you might go to implement it and realize it actually wasn’t the offer that serves you at the highest level for what you’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes that happens.

Like, our excitement – it’s like our anxiety and worry and doubt in ourselves and in other people and in our offer will keep us from making great offers. Our excitement being too high will also keep us from making great offers.

So you want to make sure that you’re in a very logical place when you’re thinking about what you’re going to sell and what you’re going to offer to people. You don’t want to do that from really low emotions and really high emotions. You don’t want your body just taking over and you kind of getting caught up.

Like I always say, when I was selling, when I was pitching, this is the analogy I gave them. It’s like you’re driving a car and you have all of your best friends in the car with you. And you guys are all going on a road trip. That’s what the sales experience is. You’re in a car with your best friends, you’re going on a road trip.

You’ve got music blaring, it’s like, Lizzo. You’ve got Lizzo blaring on the car, Beyoncé, whoever really gets you going with all your girlfriends. And the windows are down and everybody is laughing and everybody is singing. You can take part a little bit in that. You can laugh a little bit if someone says something that’s funny, you can kind of sing along with the music, but you can’t turn your head and start talking to people.

You have to pay attention to the road because you’re driving. So you have to keep driving. That’s what happens in our emotions. So when we would be pitching to large audiences, sometimes the audience would have so much fun that we would get sucked in and have too much fun with them, and then the show wouldn’t drive forward the way it needed to and we wouldn’t sell.

And the same would be true with negative emotion. When the crowd was being super resistant or negative or if they just weren’t having or you thought that they weren’t into the show, sometimes our negative emotion would also stop driving the car. There were times where I would be pitching and my brain would be such a mess in my negative emotion that I’d be like, I could just walk off right now. I don’t even know that they would notice.

Have you guys ever had that feeling with coaching? I could just stop posting forever and no one would notice. No one knows I’m a life coach anyway, I could just quit and no one would notice. So you have to make sure that your emotions are more neutral so that you’re driving the sales pitch forward instead of getting carried away with negative or extreme emotions.

So I’m going to tell you thought errors to help bring you down if you get very excited about this new offer that you want to make or this new promotion you’re going to do. I want to keep you out of the pandemic frenzy and creating content and making decisions in your business from that frenzy, from that kind of energetic chaos, whether it’s good or bad.

There’s the bad of it’s all going to hell in a hand basket and none of my clients have money and no one’s going to buy coaching, or there’s like, oh my god, this is the best time for coaches ever and there’s so many people to serve and we’ve got to get in. And almost where you feel like you can’t take action fast enough. That doesn’t serve you either.

So you want to make sure you’re out of those two places. So to help bring you, laser you in to focus on just making very strategic, logical decisions, I’m going to help you find some thought errors that might produce some heightened emotions, some heightened frenzy that will make you change your offers in a way that maybe doesn’t serve you.

So a thought error is just a thought that you’re having that literally is like – doesn’t serve you. You haven’t questioned it; you haven’t verified it. It’s just a thought that you have, you think maybe it even serves you, but it’s an error because it’s not going to produce the result that you want. So that’s the reason I’m going to share these with you.

So here are some to think about. I made a little list here. Make sure that you don’t change your offer, how you’re making your offers or what you’re selling, based on thinking – I’m going to give you some examples, but based on thinking that whatever you change your offer to and however you change your marketing to, that it will make it easier for people to buy.

So for example, if you think that talking about coronavirus and COVID-19 is going to make them need or want life coaching more. That’s a really good example. If you think talking about the relevance and bringing up all of the things they could be facing is going to increase their desire to coach, you’re going to kind of be hammering something that may not even be relevant to them.

So you just want to be careful. Don’t do something because you think it will make it easier for them to buy. Don’t create bonuses, don’t create extra coaching or extra things, don’t discount – a lot of you, we’ve talked about that, but a lot of you think discounting will make it easier for them to buy.

Just don’t make any decisions from this will make it easier for them to buy because remember, if you’re making any decisions based on you think it’s easier for them to buy, what you’re actually doing is believing that it was hard for them to buy in the first place.

I always think about my programs are totally easy to buy. Always a good decision, people always love it, they feel like it’s winning the lottery, it’s always that feeling. I don’t need to do anything to make it easier for them to buy. They just do. Every day people sign up.

So just make sure you’re not thinking it’s hard for them to buy and then making a decision for how you’re offering or what you’re offering that you think will make it easier for them, because it’s already hard for them. Don’t buy into their story because when you buy into their story, you actually do the opposite for yourself.

You just show them that they were right. It was too expensive to begin with. That’s why you needed to discount. This situation, the coronavirus is very difficult and scary and it’s a horrible thing. Just make sure you’re not verifying their worst fears in your offers and how you’re making your offers and what you’re offering.

The second thing to look for is you making a decision thinking, so there’s this will make it easier for to buy, the other half of that is this will make it easier for me to sell. Be very careful about that. The discounting. I just had a client in – we are doing daily coaching in 2K and she’s offering daily coaching for her program.

But the way that she was talking about it is like, I just thought this would be a no-brainer, this is so exciting, but people aren’t taking me up on my offer. And one of the things that I offered to her is although we are doing daily coaching in 2K and it is an amazing offer, we’re not doing that to make our offer easier for people to buy or easier to sell.

I haven’t even really sold it pretty much at all. I’m doing it to serve my clients and fulfill a need. It’s not a decision, I’m not creating a marketing tactic with it. So just make sure if you’re offering free consultations, free mini sessions, if you’re offering more coaching in your paid offers, make sure whatever you’re doing, you’re not doing it for the intention, the main reason that you’re not doing it is to make it easier for people to buy or easier for you to sell because what will happen is you will go to lean on that as the technique and the marketing and you will forget to market what actually people have to hear in order to buy.

You’ll forget to actually address the things that they need to hear because you’ll be over here addressing all the things that you think will make it easier for them to buy or easier for you to sell. So I’m going to give you another example and this applies always. I offer a money-back guarantee in my 2K program.

It’s risk-free. You either make 2K when you join or I give it back to you. A lot of people ask me about this risk-free guarantee and they’re like, should I offer a money-back guarantee? And my answer is always no. And my answer is not that you should – I’m doing it but you shouldn’t.

It’s the reason I do it versus other people want to do it. In the beginning, people think it’s so appealing because they think it will be easier to sell if they just tell their client, “Listen, if you don’t get a result, I’ll give you your money back.” We think that that will make it easier.

But what I found when I offered my risk-free guarantee, especially in the beginning when I first created my program a couple years ago is it didn’t make it easier to sell. People weren’t like, “Oh, okay, in that case, I’m going to buy.” Think about it for you as a consumer. If someone offers – Peloton, I think offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. That did not sway me either way.

Because in my brain I’m like, yeah, but then I have to call them and then I have to deal with the money-back guarantee and then I have to do all of this and it’s a to-do list. It didn’t make it more appealing. So I offer it for my clients already and always but not to make it easier for them to buy and not make it easier for me to sell.

And when you do make an offer like that, thinking it will make it easier, it always makes it harder. It’s very fascinating, but that’s the way it works. The third one is that the problem has changed for them. If you’re thinking that your client’s problem has now shifted and changed for them, you might be experiencing a thought error.

For most people, or it’s their new most important problem. So be careful if you’re looking for is it relevant to my clients, you find that it is, and then all of a sudden, it’s all you talk about. It might be a problem for them and it may be something they’re interested in working on through coaching.

But from almost everybody I’ve talked to, no one is forgetting about their life because there is a pandemic. So just be careful that you’re not thinking that all of a sudden, they don’t care about weight loss, all of a sudden marriage isn’t relevant to them, all of a sudden, they don’t need career coaching because they’re not even working right now.

Don’t make that mistake. It is a thought error to think that. That isn’t true. At least 50% of the people are still very engaged with what they wanted before the pandemic happened, and you want to be careful that you don’t run away solving a problem for them in your marketing and in the offer you make for a problem that they don’t even feel like is their most relevant problem. Whatever their problem was before the pandemic is still their most relevant problem now.

Hey, I hope you enjoy this training brought to you from the pop-up Facebook group, How to Sell in a Crisis. If you want more coaching just like this on your selling to make money, you have lots of options for working with me right now. We are providing as much service as we possibly can right now during this pandemic, during our quarantine.

So here’s how you can get more. You can keep listening to the daily podcast and the weekly podcast that we’re providing right here. You can also come to How to Sell Any Offer masterclass, April 1st at 11am Eastern by registering at www.staceyboehman.com/masterclass.

And you can join 2K for 2K at www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k where we are coaching live every day, Monday through Friday, all through the month of April to help serve our students, so that you can serve the world and make money doing it.

Alright, I’ll see you inside 2K for 2K, I’ll see you at the masterclass and right here tomorrow on the podcast.

Hey, if you are 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 $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.