Julie Chenell shows coaches and consultants how to turn unpredictable word-of-mouth into a system. Track every outreach activity for a week, map which actions led to discovery calls, then repeat what works. Mastermind tables, Facebook groups, and emails become measurable steps instead of random luck.
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Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie. Today I'm coming to you with a quick little podcast for all the people who tell me, hey, most of my work comes through word of mouth referrals, and that feels really unsteady, and I need to become a better marketer. If you say this, this podcast is for you. All right, so I wanna put on my curriculum designer hat for a second. Whenever I'm building a course, and I promise this relates to the question that I just posed, whenever I'm building a course about something, I have to first deconstruct my process. Now, this is not an easy thing to do. Some people are better at it than others, and it's about pattern recognition. So if I were going to teach you how to write a headline, and I write headlines, I would have to first sort of observe myself writing 5, 10, 15, 20 headlines, and I'd have to look at what is happening in my brain. What am I thinking? What actions am I taking every single time I sit down to write a headline? For those of us who are really, really good at our zone of genius, we don't recognize the pattern. The pattern of, in my case, maybe I'm looking at other sales pages first. Maybe I'm grabbing my own head, my old headlines, and I'm using those. Maybe I'm trying to think about the person on the other side of the computer who's gonna be looking at that headline, right? And so the more distance I get from myself, it's almost like an out-of-body experience, and I'm able to watch myself in action. I can start to see patterns that I repeat over and over and over again every time I sit down to do a headline. I did this with Kathy when we designed the curriculum for FG Society because teaching something like design is really hard, especially when it's an innate skill. You imagine, like, those artists that can paint things that they're seeing in their mind's eye. How do they possibly teach that to somebody else? And I understand that genetics and DNA play a role here, so there may be a situation where you actually You can't fully teach it because the person you're teaching it to just has some sort of block, but you could teach them well enough that they may be able to do it 50% or 60% as good as you do. But again, you have to understand the patterns. So with Kathy, she did not understand what she was doing until I sat and watched her, which was a very uncomfortable exercise. And I watched her design and I would interrupt and talk to her almost like a child. Like, why did you just do that? Why did you just move that margin? And she'd go, Well, I moved it because it looked off. But why? But why? But why? You know, I kept asking and I kept requiring her to dig deeper and deeper into why she was making the actions that she was making. And then after 30 hours of this, we were able to figure out that there were patterns and rules that Kathy was following in her mind that were helping her to figure out how the page should look. So this is about pattern recognition in curriculum design when you're teaching a skill. Now let's go back to that original question, and I get this all the time. It's, it's more like a problem. Hey, I'm a coach, I'm a consultant, I'm a funnel builder, and I really need to get my marketing going because right now my business feels really unsteady. I only get business from word-of-mouth referrals. This is like a mysterious situation, right? Because we have no idea when someone is gonna hit our contact page on our website, fill out a form, and ask to speak to us. Or do we? And the problem for a lot of these folks is that they're not actually tracking. They're not doing that out-of-body experience, and they're not watching what their behavior is because their behavior is impacting their environment in such a way that it's creating referrals. So if you can actually step outside of yourself for a second, witness yourself in motion, you might start to recognize patterns that you didn't see before. And at first it might not look like a pattern. It might look like, well, I joined this mastermind group and I sat at this table and I introduced myself to this person. This person knew someone who needed help, and he mentioned me, and then that person reached out. Okay, so there, in that instance, you've done several behaviors. You've joined a paid group, you've attended the event, you've deliberately sat next to someone that you did not know, you introduced yourself in a way to a person that they were able to remember you, that you were memorable, and then that person was able to talk to their friend. That friend was able to Google you, right? And get to your website and then fill out the contact form. So I just, you can't see me 'cause this is a podcast, but that was 7 steps. So if you write those 7 steps down and if you were to repeat those 7 steps over and over and over again, yes, maybe there wouldn't be a friend of an introduction on every, you know, every meeting, but there probably would be at some point, right? So you could repeat that process again and again and again. Then you might say, well, I went into a Facebook group and I put a comment on this post. You know, a lot of people liked the post. Then someone hit friend request. I accepted the friend request. Then I posted something about my business. Then that new friend commented, and then I Private message them. Again, how many steps did you take? I don't know, 7, 8. Now what you can do is you can witness yourself over all of these different experiences. And if you can't make a connection to an action that led to a sales call, that's okay. What did you do this week? Oh, I joined that group Zoom call. Oh, I spoke up in that Facebook group. Oh, I sent an email out to my list. Oh, I, you know, did that podcast interview. If you look at your behavior and then you look at your calendar, you can say, based on all of these actions I'm taking, and it is helpful if you can sort of track how people are coming into your world because, and this is why asking like, hey, how'd you hear about me is really important on the forum or on the phone, then you can start repeating those behaviors. Word of mouth referrals are not by chance. You are interacting and impacting your environment. So my call to action to you is to actually start a time study of what it is you're doing on any given week. Look very closely at the things you're doing and look at your last 4 or 5 discovery calls and figure out where those people came from and what was the path that you took. And then create systems in your business where you can repeat those paths over and over. Is some of this chance? Of course. But believe it or not, if you have 3 discovery calls on your calendar after interacting in a Facebook group for an hour a day, chances are if you up that to 90 minutes, you would eventually see more discovery calls. So I hope that helps. Talk to you soon. Thanks. And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey. With resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.
