3 key components of your executive coaching business system

Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarfe, a senior executive Coach with over 17 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as a mentor and business coach to executive coaches. When it comes to coaching business, I have done most of it, to be honest. I have grown coaching businesses solo and in partnership. I've been an in house coach and I've been an associate coach. So when I'm talking about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know, I'm sharing from a place of experience and a place of empathy. So I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their business with more corporate or organizational clients. I'm also a mum, a big reader and an even bigger fan of my mini schnauzer, Yoshi. Keep listening for lots of practical tips, inspiring stories and prompts to grow your business your way. Now, before I dive in, I just want to share that I am running a free live masterclass next week. So that is on Tuesday 21st October, potentially Monday the 20th if you are in the US. This masterclass is called Business Growth for Executive Coaches. Your pipeline to consistent clients without feeling like you are constantly selling. The premise of the session is really to break down the executive coach pipeline, which is all of the foundations and systems that you need to have in place to build a predictable pipeline of corporate clients without constantly selling. So I'm going to be talking about the executive coach pipeline, which is a simple and repeatable structure to take the stress and confusion out of your business development. I'm going to talk about the core processes behind consistent clients, so how we go from the system to operationalizing your sales and marketing so you know exactly what to do each week and each day. I'm also going to talk about how important it is to replace ad hoc effort with a system. So moving away from your guesswork and random acts of marketing to a process that reliably fills your pipeline. I'm going to talk about why a framework beats hustle and how clarity, structure and rhythm give you confidence in your business development and so that you know it's actually working. And then finally I'm going to share how it's all in context, right? Everything in context. And LinkedIn being just one part of this holistic process. I'm going to give you a little bit of a taster of this today, some of the core foundations that are part of your business development process. But to learn more about my detailed system, head over to elliscarf.com pipeline to sign up or you can find the link in the show notes. Okay, so in the last few weeks I've been sharing on the podcast quite a lot about the importance of executive coaches having a system when it comes to business development and marketing. So we know that it's important to build consistency around our business development activities because that is what is actually going, going to translate to momentum in terms of actual growth in your business. We also know that having this system is really helpful for your mental health, for your stress levels, and for that sense of peace and certainty that we're on the right path. So if you haven't already, it's definitely worth listening to the last few episodes talking about these things. And we also know that the most successful coaches have a good system, so definitely worth tuning in. So today I want to share, it's just, just a short but important set of three of the components that you really need to have in your business development system to get the outcomes that we're aiming for. And that outcome, the outcomes we're aiming for obviously being a critical mass of business development conversations. So real conversations that lead to real opportunities that lead to engagements. And those engagements could be coaching, facilitation, consulting, hybrid or something else inside your aligned office suite. Right. But really we want business development that's leading to real conversations and real opportunities. So the three things that I talk about are all a part of what I am going to show in the masterclass that I mentioned earlier. But most importantly, they are the, I guess the, the corest of the core elements of what I teach and coach my clients inside the corporate to coach accelerator. So the first component that I want to share that you really need as part of your BD system is a set of very strong assets. Now, of course our assets need to be strong, but often we don't think about them as strategically as we could. So I'm going to share a few of these assets and honestly, inside the accelerator I've got whole modules on each of these. So there's a lot of detail that we could go into. But I what I'm talking about today is just making sure that you have what you need in, in order to be going out there, promote your services and to know that you've got all of the basics in place behind you. And that helps in terms of not just progressing the opportunity and being compelling and having, you know, professional materials, but it also helps you to feel like you're ready, you know, help you feel like you are coming from a strong foundation and whenever I'm talking about assets and documents and materials and such, I always feel like I need to have a bit of a disclaimer. I'm talking about having a set of very strong assets. I'm not talking about perfection. I'm not talking about aiming for a level of doneness that is probably impossible and that might stop you moving forward. So I often say, let's aim for. This is something I learned from one of my previous business coaches, Claire Pelletro. Aim for B plus work, right? I used to say B B or B minus work. And like the real high achievers really freak out about that. So B plus aim for B plus work and get it done. And inside the accelerator, what I get people to do is complete it to B, then send it through and we give you very specific feedback and video feedback on all of your assets. So aim for B, get it done. It's better to have it done than not. And I guarantee for most of you it'll be a much higher quality than you're afraid that it is. And the perfectionism really isn't coming from a place of irrational respons response. It's more that it's a fear, right, that we're afraid of how it's going to land. And it can be a way of procrastinating, actually getting out there. Okay, so inside this set of strong assets that I think you need to have, what does it include? It includes firstly your coach bio. Now your coach bio, I believe is your number one tool or asset when it comes to working with organizational clients. It just does so much hard work. For example, it is your proxy, right? So your proxy inside client organizations. And it operates in, in a number of ways. So it is the document that the HR or L and D or the people that run the coaching panel will use to select coaches when they are looking at a particular need that's arised. It will also be what is sent to potential coaches and they get to usually read a few and then choose to meet with them, maybe one or two. It also might be sent to the leader of a coachee for them to sort of say, yeah, I think this would be good for this person in my team. It also is a document that stays has a life inside an organization even when your contacts in HR or the business leave. So it needs to be a very compelling document and it needs to talk to the common challenges and pain of those ideal clients that you have. Now, I have a template that I recommend that's been always been very successful, you know, for me when it comes to pitching for coaching work and I'll be sharing that in the masterclass next week. So do sign up and come along live if you want to receive that. Related to this is, is another asset that you need to have, which is a really good LinkedIn bio. Now I must say, inside the accelerator, I feel like we kind of cheat a little bit on this one because we have an in house LinkedIn coach, the wonderful Kate Merriweather. Now Kate helps us now in a couple of ways. So firstly, she comes along and does monthly live LinkedIn coaching sessions with us. And so that, that's amazing. But here's the real magic when it comes to your LinkedIn bio. Kate gives all of our members personalized audits of their LinkedIn bio and that comes with very practical advice and feedback for tuning up your profile. Now what I have heard is that she absolutely gives it to you straight. There's no beating around the bush. It's very practical, it's very direct and it's incred, incredibly helpful. Now, you know, if even if you're not inside the accelerator, there are, there is the opportunity you could look up Kate Merriweather actually and she, she runs, she does do those audits. But you obviously pay for that as a separate service. But I recommend it. If you want to do some work on your LinkedIn bio, then of course, you know, the third asset I want to talk about is your website. Now, I think we need a strong website that talks to our ideal clients. Do I think it has to be complex and highly detailed? No, absolutely not. It needs to validate you. Right? So if someone is looking up your website, they may be looking to get practical information for one about who you are and what you do. And they may be looking at it just to do a sense check of does this look professional? Does this person appear to, does it, you know, they say that they work with organizations like me. Does their website then align with that expectation? So really those points, what it needs to do is answer questions about who you are and what you do. It needs to speak to the key challenges of your ideal clients. It doesn't have to do the selling for you. That's why we have sales conversations and sales engagement. But it does need to give enough information to help someone looking at it to decide, yes, I would like to talk to this person. Now, I would say website copy is the step that derails a lot of coaches early in their business journey. So, you know, we have a lot of resources inside the accelerator to help people with that I think it can be done in a very, a lower budget way or, you know, you can choose to spend a lot of money on it. It's really, you know, how long it's a piece of string in terms of what you invest in that. But really the main thing to me is making sure that the messaging is on point and that, you know, you have got a couple of great images of yourself up there and it's really clear who you are and what you do. Okay. So you need to check off those three assets as foundations that will allow you to lean in fully then to implementing your BD system. And, you know, in order to build these assets, you of course need some clarity on a few things. So you need clarity on things like your ideal client. And when we're selling to organizations, I don't necessarily talk about a very narrow niche. I talk more about what are your ideal clients, sectors or industries where you have got a disproportionate amount of credibility. And you also need to be clear on what your office suite is like, what is the work that you want to do, because those things, who you want to work with and what you want to do, they will inform how you develop your assets. Right? Because it will be, well, what are the pain points I need to talk to? What are the things I need to amplify? Now, I'm not going to go into those things today, but, you know, come along to the masterclass if you want to learn more. Now, in fact, the assets are just a few of the foundations that you need to have. And more broadly, the whole suite of foundations that I'll talk about in the masterclass include things like your content plan for showing up on LinkedIn, your segmented network. So understanding your network and really categorizing them into both industry and warmth level. But again, that's a bit too much detail for us to cover in this episode, so I'm going to hold that for the masterclass as well. Well, the second component that you should think about when you are building your marketing system or that, not that you should think about, I think you must think about is that you need to figure out your numbers game, right? We need to figure out how to make it something that is, that is a numbers game. And what I mean by that is that to systemize something, we need to get clear on both the outcomes we're working towards and, and the inputs that are required to get us there. And so that means we need to reverse engineer our revenue goal into a set of practical inputs. Again, I'll show you the process, that full breakdown, that reverse engineering breakdown in the masterclass, but you can do it on your own. So what you really need to do is set your annual revenue goal. Let's say your annual revenue goal, for the sake of me doing easy maths, is $120,000, right? Then you need to break it down into, you know, you should do it, do a few calculations around this. How will your offer suite based on how you've priced your offers, how will that break down into that annual revenue goal? So for the sake of simplicity, I might say, well, that is ten $12,000 coaching engagements or 12, $10,000 coaching engagements. For this purpose, I'm going to say it's ten $12,000 coaching engagements, right? So then I need to say, okay, well if I need 10, if I want 10 engagements, then if I find that about 50% of the proposals I submit are accepted, well, that means I need to have 20 proposals out there over the course of a year, right? I need to, to have enough sales engagements that I get to the point of having 20 sales proposals out there. And so if I assume that the proportion of sales, you know, conversations that I'm in that go proposal stage is, let's say that's 30%, right? Sorry, let's say 33 and a third percent, right? A third, let's say a third. Then I can say that I need to times the amount of proposals that I that I have to have out there by three to be the number of sales conversations or engagements that I have. So I needed to have 20 proposals. So I'm going to need to have 60 sales conversations. And so if I need to have 60 sales conversations, then I need to figure out how many sort of messaging conversations I need to be having. And if I assume that 25% of the messaging conversations I have will go on to be a sales conversation, then I need to probably have four times, right, 25%, four times 60, which is 240, right? So I need to be having 240 sales conversations. Starts to feel like a lot, doesn't it? So then I might say, okay, well, if I need to have 240 back and forth conversations, then I need to think about, well, how much outreach do I actually need to do? Well, to have 240 engagements? If I assume that 25% of the people that I reach out to in the course of, you know, my warm outreach, if I assume that 25% of those then become people that I have a conversation with, well, then I need to have four Times as many do it do four times as much outreach as the number of conversations I want to have. And so I said that I wanted to have 240 conversations. So if I times that by four, that is 960 warm outreach messages, right? And so then we can even go, you know, down, okay, so 960 warm outreach messages a year, which, oh, my God, sounds like a lot. But if I say actually only want to work 44 weeks of the year, right? And that's a tip. Think about how many. How many weeks of the year you want to work. And so then I go, so it was 960 messages divided by 44 working weeks a year. Well, that's just under 22 outreach messages a week. And so when I break it down like that, that actually doesn't feel so bad. It actually feels quite doable. And it makes me realize that there is a level of consistency I need that perhaps I wasn't aware of, and that there is a volume involved in growing a business that perhaps I hadn't been aware of. Now, as you get more repeat clients and bigger engagements, of course, these numbers shift dramatically. But when we're starting out, it's really good just to think about that. Now in the masterclass, I'll share my benchmarks of what I think typical conversion rates actually are. It's really important that you are tracking, you know, so how many. Well, actually, how many proposals are accepted and actually, how many sales engagements do go to proposal stage, and how many outreach messages do go on to be conversations? So we need to be tracking that so we can figure out where we need to improve it. Okay, so the final component then, is that the thing that will take the system from a nice idea to a thing that then transforms your business is having a set of rituals and routines to operationalize it. And the key to figuring out the rituals and routines that work for you is understanding your brain and your life and your commitments and asking yourself a few questions. So here are some questions you might ask yourself. Are you a drip feeder or are you a batcher? Because your preference will then mean that you do the implementation differently. So someone who prefers, you know, drip feeding consistency, they're going to work really well with a daily hour of power where every day they work on their key four tasks. For someone who prefers to, you know, hit it and quit it, be really focused and then not do it at all for a while, they might be. It might be that you spend half a day a week on this, and then you have 15 minutes of maintenance every second. Day. Right. Whether, you know, because sometimes you actually do need a bit of time on LinkedIn to prime the algorithm before you post, for example. So, you know, really you could do it very differently depending on your preferences. And we might also ask things like, well, are you very self motivated? Like, do you respond very well to commitments you make to yourself? Or are you someone who thrives more with external accountability? I personally am very much driven by external accountability rather than internal accountability. So one of the supports that we have inside my program, the Corporate to Coach accelerator, is that we have a channel on Slack where we share priorities for the week on Mondays. So we make a commitment and then we check progress on Fridays and see how it's gone. And there's just something, I think about having that accountability, knowing that there are people not only cheering you on, but actually checking whether you did what you said you were going to do. And that is quite motivating. So, you know, as part of your system you'll have sort of four key tasks that you know you complete every week and you need to figure out the best way to do it for your energy and your preferences. Okay. So I hope that is helpful to see just a few of the most important components of an effective sales and marketing system for executive coaches. Now, as I mentioned, I'm going to go into a lot more detail in the Masterclass. I'm going to sort of join all the dots and share the whole system on 21 October. It's not far away, so if you haven't already, head over to elliscarf.com pipeline and sign up now and come and join us live. We do have two different time zones, so hopefully anywhere you are in the world you'll be able to attend. Can't wait to meet you at the masterclass. And I will be back next week with more.