Evolutionary Blog

The Top 6 Mistakes Coaches and Practitioners Make (And Their Solutions) Part 1

It is stunning how many coaches and practitioners are competent at what they do–yet struggle financially, mentally, and emotionally around their business. In fact, even though coaching is a $2 Billion business and growing, most coaches never make more than $25,000 per annum – and many end up doing it as a hobby or giving up and ceasing their contributions entirely.

There are reasons for this. I have identified the top 6 reasons–and their solutions-that I have found in my experience in my own business as well as observing those who still have a “practice”.

1. A Lack of Integral Thinking: “Money and Spirituality are in Conflict”

We were taught for thousands of years that to profit was bad—and there is a good reason for that. For thousands of years one had to pillage, conquer, enslave, and exploit to acquire wealth. While there was a time when one could only profit by exploitation and manipulation or by inheritance or plunder, this has not been accurate for well over a century. With the rise of the services industry, you can offer your deepest contribution to the world – your deepest gifts – and profit as a result of what you have given – not what you take.

The truth is, it is not only possible to come from service and contribution in a “for profit” environment–that is to live a purpose-filled life–but also to profit well from it and to live prosperously. It takes some personal work–being mindful of your thinking, cleaning out your unconscious imprints of guilt and shame, and parental imprints about money are usually a good start—to constantly be of service while building sufficient esteem for your self to recognize the value you are bringing to another’s life and to have them provide that value monetarily in exchange.

It also takes a lack of attachment to “closing that deal” and being more focused on service and “opening relationships”–and much more.

Actually, I have found what can be provided to our clients’ lives is priceless to them. Fees are insignificant when weighed against what the work we do in their lives will make possible. It is not a commodity. It is a gateway to greater freedom and happiness. We can live a spiritually oriented life—and integrate free-market, service-based principles into that.

By doing so, we integrate our spiritual and our financial life – and integration our culture desperately needs—and allows us to flourish spiritually while prospering financially.

2. Lack of Skill: Sales and Marketing

We have all had negative experience with sales people. Not sales professionals, but sales people—that is, people who want to “close a deal” rather than open a relationship. Most sales trainers teach techniques with little regard for a philosophical base or grounding. I do not support that.

I used to think sales was a dirty word – because I saw so many sales people doing icky things. That was until I realized that until I could influence people to take action in their lives I could never really do much good in the world.  You can only be a positive agent for change if you can inspire others to move beyond their current thinking—the thinking that has them in their current life situation and has stopped them from being fully free and thriving; from having the life they desire and deserve.

Therefore—If you truly want to do good in the world, it becomes your duty—yes, your duty—to assist others in overcoming their limitations. That means learning to sell and market your services in a compelling way that comes from service and contribution while combining that with powerful tool of influence.

You must gain those skills if you want to make a difference and be prosperous.

While it may be hard to swallow at first [took me years to accept] you must be a sales professional first—that is you must be able to inspire your prospective clients toward their own expanded vision of their life and future—if you want to live your purpose and prosper. You must use a sales system that is in alignment with your holistic values, but use a sales system you must.

3. A Lack of Sustainable Structure: Service, Sustainability, and Packages

Once you are coming from service and contribution, you begin to consider what would best serve the client.

Most practitioners have session-by-session practices or monthly packages, but they do not have comprehensive packages that have stages and phases in them. How many people out there have dabbled here and dabbled there and never really bucked down and did the deep work to reveal greater depths within themselves? I have found most clients approach their personal development this way: “Well, I have tried this and I have tried that…but I never really got what I needed”.

Would you go to a chiropractor once – or for a month – and expect your posture to be transformed permanently? Of course not. Would you go to the gym and hire a physical trainer for one or two – or even a half dozen – sessions and expect your body to be transformed? Of course not.  And yet we assume that when it comes to the context of change and transformation with the mind. We can affect profound change in just a session or two, sure, but the client’s entire life will not be changed or certainly not changed permanently. For that, we need stable context and continued work – at least 3 to 6 months. But we also have to create those packages so that they unfold in phases.

The best thing you can do as a coach or a practitioner is to find a way to create a compelling 3-stage or 3-phase offering that allows the client to reveal greater and greater depths or to attain greater and greater heights. For a massage therapist, this may mean something like:

In the modern marketplace, if you are in business for yourself or at a high level within a company you work for, it is impossible to avoid social media and its use if you truly want to thrive. That combined with what I believe is an emerging Age of Authenticity ... well, you get the picture.

Just scratching the surface of the broad strokes, it allows you to:

1. Provide value to others
2. Manage your brand
3. Market inexpensively and freely
4. Show your human side
5. Stay connected to others, events, and your own reputation
6. Other fun and cool stuff

This is why I cover social media in depth in the technology module of the Evolutionary Sales course.

But recently, I have stumbled onto a few resources I thought some would find useful and valuable, and I wanted to recommend them to you.

The first is a wonderfully in-depth book I read about a year ago: Tactical Transparency: How Leaders Can Leverage Social Media to Maximize Value and Build their Brand. Whether you are a solo-preneur or you are in charge of PR for an enterprise level organization, its content will be very, very useful to you. Chock-full of examples of both the dos and don'ts and great advice for best practices. I recommend you pick it up at Amazon at the link above.

And since social media is all about sharing, here is an incredibly useful article: 9 Reasons Why Your Content Is Not Shared on Social Networks: New Research. Again, very useful stuff backed by a respectable amount of research. Links to follow in that post as well.

And if you are looking for full education around social media for small or solo businesses, I can not recommend Laura Roeder enough. Just a great person who really, really knows her stuff and is on a scale the rest of us can relate to. She gives away a ton of free valuable content if you subscribe to The Dash.

On blogging [and really, email marketing as well] here is a great piece intended for students, but equally as relevant for solo-preneurs in re blogging, articles, and email marketing on how to write great headlines and subject lines, using, one again, using some of Guy Kawasaki's Genius.

And finally for this post, I thought I would round it out with something humorous/light/fun and also very useful. So many people ask [especially now that Google+ is out to a wider invite pool] which social media service they should join, or what is suited for them, or what is the differences among them, or even, "what's the point". So, via the genius of Guy Kawasaki comes the Social Network Decision Tree. Have fun with that.

UPDATE ::: several people have asked me about facebook fan pages. Without intending the pun, I am not a fan of fan pages on facebook. You can read a prime example of why I do not recommend them »HERE«.

And in general, I have a long-held aversion to running anything in re business where I invest a lot of time, energy and/or money when I do not "own" the data and the DB. I have known a couple people who have lost everything in biz groups as a result of a facebook "oops". You do not really own your data, and your ability to administer it is at least limited on facebook [or any other social networking site].

At the same time, the service is free--you get what you pay for--and we have no right to complain about such a great platform that is offered to us at no cost.

Having said that, it does not mean I will build my business on it in any signifigant way.

How I think facebook pages can be useful is to interact with followers on a platform they are already subscribed to, but I still think the pages should be used to drive traffic to our actual web sites outside of the closed eco-system of facebook.

Update 2:   in re who reads what [links you share, emails you send out, etc. Again, via Guy Kawasaki ::: "Fascinating study by Bit.ly about the lifespan of tweets and updates. It found that the half-life (how long it took for 50% of all clicks to occur that a link would ever get) was 2.8 hours for Twitter, 3.2 hours for Facebook, and 3.4 hours for direct messages (such as email)."

Check out the research » HERE« And speaking of the stream, readmore about the art of the Tweet repeat » HERE«

Update 3: Also ... be sure to check out How to Avoid the 7 Deadly Website Sins.

Update 4: I have been asked about scheduling tools for social media. The tool I currently recommend is Hootsuite Pro. It allows you to scheudle your entire markeitng day [or your social stuff while you are off the grid] in advance. I used to recommend TweetDeck, but sice twitter bough them and took over development, they stripped it of a lot of its functionality.

And if you have not read the email charter, do that » HERE « 

For many, many months, I have re-posted this note on my facebook wall. Given the positive feedback I have recieved, I thought I would post i there for your benefit.

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"I am a mouth for a process that many of us are going though. The more intimately I deal with how it is for me, the more intimately I am sharing how it is for you." -Ram Dass

Some have asked about my updates. The are sexual/primal. And then emotive [poetry shares] and then cognitive/political and then spiritual/ethereal/transcendent. Huh. Yeah. Weird, huh?

What's up with this guy? Where is The.McClain comin' from?

As I have written before, it is not transcend and deny, it is not transcend and suppress. Rather transcend and *include*.

I assert being fully alive is to be sexual and primal. To be emotive and love. To be cognitive and mentally sharp and discerning AND yes, of course to be Spiritual/transcendent/ethereal. ALL of it. ALL fully flowing ::: ALL channels open. All channels awake. All channels channeling.

I have also found that the more I give voice to the darker more primal drives, the more comfortably my students and clients are willing to share and examine those places within themselves -- the more they are able to feel safe. AND within that, they can accelerate the dissolution of those aspects to the degree that it is appropriate. For them. For the very process of evolution. The evolution of conscious evolution.

And it all begins by shining the light on the "shadow" aspects of ourselves. The unspoken [and "inappropriate" aspects of ourselves. The politically incorrect. The lecherous. The murderous. The rageful. The ... well you get it. Consciousness, when it is at full, is *all* of it.

It is all, of course, part of the human experience.

A student of my material sent an email with some very good questions for client management including how to handle contract extensions, referrals, testimonials and general end-of-contract dynamics and structures.

I have re-posted relevant portions of the email exchange below for you.

I've listened to your recordings from previous coaching programs and have found them to be insanely valuable. I've signed 8 clients and raised my rates already in the first few months of the program, and I attribute it to following your sales process to a "T".

A HUGE thank you.

My pleasure. I am delighted to hear they were useful to you.  

As a couple of my 6-session coaching packages are coming to a close, I have questions around how you structure the end-of-package process. Here are some specific questions:

Do you formally review outcomes with your clients at the end of a package? If so, how do you structure this conversation?

 

Yes we do. Twice in fact. We review their outcomes and the stated evidence for those outcomes about 2/3 of the way through the process. This review is important so we can see where we are on track, see where we already achieved the outcome(s), and see where we need to focus out remaining time together.

Additionally, in the final session, what we do is review their outcomes [mostly I print them out and hand them the assessment we made together] and with those, I have them fill out an extensive feedback sheet or "exit survey" as I like to call it. 

When do you raise the issue of referrals? I love how you talk about referrals on the FAQ page of your site, and I'm wondering how else you support those ideas and maximize the chance of the client biasing toward action.

I never really raise the issue of referrals along the way. For two reasons really, 1) I find it a little off for the Evolutionary Sales™ approach, and 2) I usually I do not have to because they do--and when they mention this friend or that colleague, I tell them how to refer people to me--get their permission to give me their contact information and leave the rest to me.

Additionally, because referrals are part of the agreement they signed, the exit survey gives them an opportunity to write down two names and phone numbers for referrals they have permission from to do so--which re-presences it for them if they have forgotten; it is right there on the last page of the feedback sheet.

Do you collect testimonials from clients? This seems like it would be good material for my website, which isn't up yet. If so, how do you frame it? When do you ask for it (i.e. at the end of a package, when the client is at a peak)

Yes, of course. When they write or say something that is a peak or they are acknowledging me about something I simply ask, "can I quote you on that?" with a friendly chuckle. Then I ask them if I can edit it and send it to them for their approval before I publish it. Sometimes they want anonymity, but I then just use it and us this attribution:  " --Anonymity Requested".  

The truth is, I have no interest in the compliment personally [as in an ego boost or a pat on the back--no interest in that]. However, practically and professionally, you bet I want to hear that--as long as I can quote them on it. Compliments are of no value to me. Testimonials are.

Often, when they say something that would make a great testimonial, typing it up is the thing that is in their way and delays it becoming a testimonial. That, and they are worried about writing it well or "doing it right". So I offer to type it up for them to capture their sentiments and send it to them for their approval.