Sneak Peek Series - Create your sales and marketing dashboard

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learnt all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context, as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you. Hello and welcome back to the four week series that I'm running on the podcast with some sneak peeks into the curriculum of my program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator. So today for our fourth and final sneak peek, I'm really pleased to share a lesson from the program, the Business Development Accelerator Framework. And this lesson is on metrics, measurement and building a dashboard to track your sales and marketing activity. So to be clear, this is separate to the sales pipeline that we also create in that course. But the dashboard is all about tracking your activity, tracking your results, and I thought it would be interesting to share with you what that looks like. The reason that I've been running this series of sneak peeks is that this month I released two new courses for my Corporate to Coach Accelerator members. And I really wanted to celebrate that by sharing just a few little snippets beyond my group of members and hopefully also give you a taste of what it's like inside the accelerator. The course that this lesson comes from, as I mentioned, is the Business Development Accelerator Framework. This course is a guide to the marketing activities required to grow your business in less than five hours per week. So in the course we do all of the setup that is required to be able to make that a habit and make that make those five hours really effective and sustainable. So in the course we go through, step by step, what is involved in establishing your sales pipeline. We build your quarterly Content strategy, and we give you all the tools and the processes to follow and the metrics to report on so that you can get traction quickly and, and you can maintain your momentum over time. Because one of the things I hear a lot from coaches is that they get some traction, they get some momentum, and then they get busy and it falls in a heap. So we needed to build something that is sustainable. And so this course is all about building a strategy that you can implement in five hours a week that works around your flexibility needs, your style and your preferences. So I'm really proud of all of the curriculum inside the accelerator, mostly because my thinking continues to evolve and particularly these new courses are built based on the reality of running an executive coaching business. So they are built to work in light of all of the most common challenges that coaches face and they're very practical and they're very effective. So as I wrap up the sneak peek series, I want to extend an invitation to you. So if you want to build or grow your executive coaching business with your next 10 high paying corporate clients and less than 5 hours marketing a week, I recommend booking a strategy call with me so that we can discuss whether the accelerator is a good fit for you for the next 12 months and whether it will. Yeah, whether it will support your business to grow over and what your goals are really. So we'll, we'll dive into that. There are two ways that you can book a call. So head to the Show Notes where you can find a link to book a call in with me and the link is elliscarf.com bookacall or send me a DM on LinkedIn in with the word call and I'll just send you my booking link so you can book in a time that works for you. I do have a bonus. If we have a strategy call and you decide to join the accelerator and you let me know that you listen to this podcast, you'll receive an extra month free on your membership. Which means that instead of being a member for 12 months, with all the weekly group coaching and access to all of the, all of the content and curriculum, you'll receive 13 months instead. That's sort of, you know, sometimes that really helps people feel like they can take a holiday and they're not missing out or, or, you know, consider it just a bit of bonus access. Now let's dive into the lesson. So as coaches with a lot of corporate experience, I can almost guarantee that you've heard the business adage, what gets measured gets managed. And I think when it comes to your business and particularly your sales and marketing activities. I think this is absolutely true. So one of the big parts of ensuring that you stay on track with your marketing activities is tracking and measuring some key metrics. You need to be tracking certain things on a monthly basis, and you need to be tracking some on a weekly basis. The benefits of tracking your metrics are many and varied. So, for example, firstly, when you are aware of how you're going, so when you actually know your numbers, you can make much more educated decisions. So often we make decisions based on what we think is the case rather than what we know is the case. And so tracking our numbers allows us to know rather than to hypothesize. In addition, tracking trends over time is much more meaningful than looking at a snapshot on any day or any week. So when we start to, you know, get data over a period of months, there's a lot more richness to that. There's a lot more we can do with the. The information that it gives us. And then I think there's also something really incredibly motivating about seeing our numbers go in the right direction. And if they aren't going in the right direction, then it is actually really important that we know and that we know sooner rather than later so that we can address it. And look, sometimes we would rather have our head in the sand about these numbers. I know that. But I promise you, it is better to know your numbers and not be entirely happy with them than to not know them and sit with a sense of unease all the time. And I say that as someone who's been there, right. My tendency is to just, you know, ignore it, just push on, hope for the best. But that can be associated with a sense of sort of an ongoing anxiety, really, that, that sits there. So, so you need to know your numbers, you need to be updating them regularly. So what I'm going to share with you and you can download it in this lesson is a spreadsheet that I'm calling your dashboard. And it is for you to track a number of things in your business, including your sales and marketing activity. And you can edit it however you like. I expect that, that I will also edit and upgrade. Please send me through anything that you add to it, any changes you would make. Let's consider this a live document that we can work on together as a. As a community. You might even choose to add your sales pipeline spreadsheet to this document. So you have got this one dashboard for everything that you are living in on a daily and weekly basis. You could also replicate this in another tool, something like Monday.com if you want to do it. That would totally be doable. I haven't done it, but it could be doable. So let me take you over to the spreadsheet now and I'll show you what's in it. Okay, here we go. So, so the first, the first sheet that we've got Here is your 2025 business goals. So on this tab I want you to be recording your annual revenue target and your annual profit target. And I think it's important to put our annual profit target here because profitability is a much more meaningful measure of business health. So whereas we could potential, you know, multiple millions of dollars in, in revenue, if our cost base is nearly the same, then then it's largely meaningless. So I want you to just start to think, and no one's holding you to, to this. Think about what your annual profit target might be. Now coaching businesses, and executive coaching businesses in particular are usually fairly high margin businesses because the sorts of expenses you have tend to be, you know, use assessment tools, software systems, and potentially some out of things like, you know, if you have a facilitation practice, you might outsource some slide development or you might have, you know, consultants and service providers. So those sorts of things. And eventually you might end up with a small team working with you, in which case you would expect your profit margin to go down in the early days, I would expect the margin to be much higher. So once you've got that, I want you to just record this somewhere. And it doesn't mean that this is what's going to happen, but it is. This is bringing to life some of the work that we did in our annual planning into a snapshot of what exactly, how exactly are you going to get to that revenue target? And I want you to record all the offers you have the cost of those offers, roughly. They will change, of course. We'll have different, different engagements where things cost cost less. The numbers, number of offers you think that you will sell and what the total revenue you anticipate coming from, from that revenue. And so if you just type in these two numbers, this number will populate and so will the total revenue populate. And so I want you to, you know, have a go of this until the revenue total equals the annual revenue target. Now if you have a few different scenarios, you can just copy and paste this whole table and do some different scenario planning for yourself. I think that's a really great idea. The I'm going to skip weekly Progress, we'll come back to that. The next thing I want you to do is make sure that you are tracking your financial metrics on a monthly basis. At a minimum, I think monthly is probably a good frequency to do it. I think you need to check in on your bank accounts more frequently than that. But when it comes to your financial tracking, I want you to be measuring your monthly revenue. So what has come in the door that month? Your monthly expenses. So what have you spent in the month? What is the profit? So really profit just being revenue minus expenses, what is the profit and what amount have you paid yourself as a salary as a result? And you can think about that as either a percentage or a fixed amount. But just what have you paid yourself? Because it's really important that we are paying ourselves a salary on a consistent basis. And it may, it may not be a fixed amount in the early days. So you may, it may make more sense to be something that you calculate each month based on the amounts that, that you have. Now we've got a masterclass in the accelerator that is called Financial Management and there's a few different ideas in there about how you might decide pay yourself. But whatever you choose, just make sure you're recording it each month. And hopefully what we start to see is this number starts to go up and up over the course of the year. So let's keep an eye on that. The next metric, which set of metrics, which is probably most relevant to what we're talking about in this course is tracking your sales and marketing activities. So for your marketing activities, there are a few things that it would be really helpful to, to track and I've added you space for you to track anything else. So for example, if you, if you have a podcast, if you are not just on LinkedIn, add the metrics that you might want to track here as well so that you're keeping an eye on them. But the first thing is, you know, how many pieces of Hero content did you create and distribute? Now you might even do sort of, I did one, my goal was one and I did one. Perfect, right? So a monthly Hero Hero post would hit that goal. And so if you just have one right for Hero content all the way across, then that is a big win, right? So this is not implying that you need to do more than your goals, it's just making sure that you have the consistency. Next is how many times did you post on LinkedIn? So let's say your goal is three a week, then if it's a four week month, then I would hope to see 12 and, and so on and so forth. Now, something that, you know, let's say 12, let's say you did 14 here, let's say you only did 6. What I like to do as I finish a month is, you know, so, hang on, let me, let me give an example of January. I like to then say, yes, I give it a green, so I'll give it a light green. This one, I'll give a green too. But if I was in April and I intended to post 12 times, then I might actually give myself a red for that one because I haven't hit my target. And when I start seeing this over a period of months, I can start to notice whether the trend is green or, or if there are areas where I'm trending red consistently, I can start to get some, you know, good information about, about that. So I also want you to track your number of LinkedIn connections. You can choose either total number of LinkedIn connections, I think that's fine, or just the delta. So you could say, you know, plus, plus 51, or you could say, you know, down. I think you'll only going to go up. So, you know, I would, I would. You could do it either of those ways. Email list subscribers, similarly, you could have your total number. I think that makes sense in the early days and, you know, you might go from 1 to 5 to 30 to, you know, 1,000 and just probably won't go up that quickly, but you get the gist. And then finally, how many outreach messages did you send? So that is a really important one that I want you to be tracking and then add any others of your own here. Now, outreach messages you send, you might want to update that number on a weekly basis, so, and then just add to it. So let's say in the first week of January, I did six, in the second week of January I did 13. I would just add it and say, okay, well, I'm up to 19 for January and then the next week or even every day. Right. If you're doing outreach every day, I would say, okay, I just did four today, so I'm up to 23, 27 and so on. So that could be a way of approaching that too. So that is your marketing activity. And what we want to be seeing is green in terms of the activity. So these are lead indicators. They are not, you know, they're not things that are going to, you know, they're not directly related to a client coming in the door. But what we know is that the more marketing activity we do. The more we achieve our goals, our goals of activity, the more likely we are for that to translate into, into real business opportunities. Then we have sales activity. And so the things I want you to be tracking are how many actual meetings did you have? Right, And I say sales meetings, but it's like meetings with prospective clients. You don't have to call them a sales meeting. How many proposals did you send out? What was the value of the proposals that you sent out? How many new clients did you gain? And what was the value of any new engagements that you signed? That includes sort of new engagements with existing clients. So track all of those things and again, you will, you will see some really positive trends. And what you'll also notice is that that connection between volume and outcome will come through. Now, as I've said, you could insert your sales pipeline once you decide whether you want to use a vertical or a horizontal format, you could put that there as well. So you've got it all tracked. Now, an interesting thing I think it would be good to include in your dashboard to review weekly is something that we're including in all of our group coaching call, which is starting off with a reflection on the last week, which is what was your biggest win and what are you most proud of? What was your biggest challenge and what did you learn and what is your key priority for the week ahead? So what I would suggest is use this document or this, this part of your dashboard to just collect this information. And the reason I'm suggesting putting it all in one place rather than just typing it in the chat when we have our calls is that at the end of the year, what you're going to have is an incredibly detailed document that you can look back at. Firstly, just to feel proud of what you've accomplished and to refresh your memory on the wins, but also some extremely powerful data for your planning and strategy for the year ahead. So, you know, you could, you could add more to this if you wanted, but if you want to keep it simple, this is what I would suggest. So, yeah, so do include it. I've included the dates for the rest of 2025. In fact, I'll write weekly progress 2025 so that we know when we duplicate it for next year, we need to change those dates. Okay, so that is your spreadsheet. Let me just stop sharing. Okay, so on that note, do download the spreadsheet, take it, adapt it for yourself, set aside time on a weekly and monthly basis to update it. You know, keep it open on your computer. And I'll see you in our next lesson which is our wrap up for this course and just a quick chat about addressing obstacles. Thanks for tuning in today. I hope that has been helpful. And don't forget to head to elliscarf.com bookacall or check out the show notes for the link if you'd like to discuss your corporate coaching business and what the next step could be for you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers with business education, mentoring, deal clinics and more. If you'd like to contact me or welcome work with me further, all my free resources, courses and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found@elliscarf.com. have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.