Katie McManus breaks down three realities of selling to corporations: sales cycles stretch 6 to 12 months, follow-up and booking the next call are non-negotiable, and internal stakeholders often resist external consultants. Corporate deals move slower than one-on-one coaching but the stakes are bigger.
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If you're going after corporate clients in your coaching or consulting business, here are three things you need to know to close the deal. Here's a reason why so many people want corporate clients in their business. Because they are the golden goose. When I worked at Cisco Systems, the HR department shared with me that they would spend anywhere from 30 to 40 thousand dollars a day for a communications coach to come in and work with their engineering team. Now, of course, Cisco Systems is a massive company. If you're working with smaller companies, then you're not gonna be able to charge as much. However, you can still charge a lot more than you can for one on one clients. But to do this successfully, you have to have the right expectations going in and you need to know where the pitfalls are. And in this video, I'll tell you what they are. Oh, and hi. I help ADHD business owners make more money in less time with fewer distractions by showing you how to discover your profitable niche. Design an offer that they are starving to buy, and I show you how to market and sell your services without wanting to vomit. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and a money mindset coach. Now, number one is the least sexy that you need to know about this whole process is that closing a corporate client can take anywhere from six to 12 months from that very first conversation. Okay. These are not fast sales. So if you're just starting off in your business, it's really important to go after one on one clients as well because they are going to be your fastest path to cash. And there's nothing worse than feeling absolutely desperate for a corporate client to close. It will never happen as fast as you want it to. Okay, so, so you do need to build an income from one on one clients from quicker sales so that you don't go insane or broke as you're going after the bigger fish. Number two, because the sales process can take so long, you have to be an expert at the follow up. This is one of the things I train all my clients on. But really like, you should have your next call booked every time you finish a call with this prospective client. And if you have no idea how to do that, then like and follow because I'll be sharing that over the next few days. And the third thing you have to know is that throughout the sales process there are going to be people in, in that company who feel threatened by the fact that the company wants to bring you in. Right? Because there are HR people who think that they should be coaching the people that you're going to be coaching. There are sales managers who feel like they need to be better at teaching sales. There are so many people who are going to feel like you are infringing on their turf, like their job is threatened by the fact that you're being brought in to help the company out. All right? So you need to be an expert at bringing everyone on board and making sure that no one feels like their job is being threatened by you being brought into the team. Because, remember, it's a company's job to make money. And sometimes to make money, you have to save money. And if they're thinking about bringing you in to solve whatever problem it is that they're having that they haven't solved yet, and they're presenting it to a leadership team, and one of those leaders is like, oh, no. Mayday, mayday. This person's gonna take my job. If they speak up and say, oh, no, no, I got that. Don't worry about it. Do you think the company's gonna be like, oh, no, no, no. We want to spend the money anyway? No, they're gonna be super relieved. They're gonna be like, oh, cool. Gym has this. We don't have to bring in so and so. So you need to make sure that you know how to bring in all the gyms. They don't feel like you're stepping on their turf.
