In this solo episode of The Real Coach Convo, Mary Schiller, founder of the 5K Coach Club, addresses the pervasive overwhelm coaches feel from excessive options and information. She argues that the solution is to strip away complexity and focus on three fundamentals: create something helpful, share it, and invite the audience to take the next step. Schiller reframes selling as a neutral invitation rather than a yucky, manipulative act, emphasizing that coaches are simply offering a valuable service they believe in. She provides practical, low‑drama guidance—use clear calls‑to‑action, calendar links, and straightforward pricing—without trying to convince or pressure prospects. Pricing is portrayed as secondary to a coach’s willingness to sell from a place of welcome. By adopting this daily, simplified routine, coaches can consistently move toward $5,000 months without drama or shame.
Chapters
Hello and welcome to The Real Coach Convo. I'm Mary Schiller, your host and the founder of the 5K Coach Club, an affordable group program for coaches who want to reach those $5,000 months without all the complexity and with a lot more fun. Here on The Real Coach Convo, we get real about what it means to be an entrepreneur coach, as I like to call us. So let's get into today's Real Coach Convo now. I don't spend a lot of time surfing the web. I don't spend a lot of time perusing Facebook groups and scrolling and things like that. However, I am in a couple of groups related to some technology I use and some training that I'm in. And one of the things that I notice over and over and over again is coaches getting completely overwhelmed by their options. They don't know where to look first, they don't know what steps to take first, and in my view, too many trainers, people who are trying to help coaches, are overwhelming them with even more information and they don't know where to start. This is not okay with me. This is just not okay with me because if you're a coach and you're listening to me right now, you've got something to say in this world and you've got something to do in this world. And the way to facilitate that is not to put more layers of stuff on top of yourself so that you can't be heard and you can't get out from under all of it. The way to move forward is to shed all of those layers of complexity and get down to the basics and the fundamentals of having a coaching business. And you know what that is? It's creating stuff that's helpful to people and sharing it with them and then inviting them to take the next step. That is literally all it takes. You create something that you think might be helpful, you share it with people, and then you invite them to take the next step. And by invite them to take the next step, I mean, maybe you invite them to talk with you on a short Zoom call to see if you can help them as their coach. Maybe you invite them directly to sign up for one-to-one coaching programs with you. Whatever the next step looks like, that has to be part of the equation too. I see too many coaches getting mired in the creation part meaning they spend hours a day on Canva creating images and all kinds of things. They might get around to sharing them. Sometimes they don't. If they do get around to sharing them, oftentimes they are terrified of taking that next step, which is the invitation, because it looks like selling and selling feels yucky. Well, selling is not yucky. I just had a conversation with some people in my 5K Coach Club about this. And I asked them, did you buy something today? And everyone on the call said, yeah, I bought something today. And I said, yeah, I did too. I bought groceries. I saw that my bill for my Google storage came through for $1.99. We all buy things all the time, all the time. And yet many coaches, when they get to that point of selling, they get squeamish. And that's why I actually like thinking of it in the way that I said, an invitation to take the next step, because that's what it is. You are not taking someone's money. You are not asking them to pay you. You are inviting them to take the next step for themselves. I don't know what it is about the coaching world. I have not been part of any sort of coach training program, so I don't know if this message is coming through in those. But goodness gracious, we've got to get over this idea that selling coaching is a bad thing. Selling coaching is a wonderful thing because we have created something for people that can really help them, that can support them in doing what they want to do next in their lives, their businesses, whatever it is. And I feel it's our obligation to get out there and invite them to take that next step, to sell, to them. I appreciate when I'm on someone's email list and they offer me something to buy because I think to myself, wow, that person took the time to create this thing and now they are inviting me into that if it's suitable for me. No one is sitting next to my computer with me twisting my arm to buy it. I look for the information and I make my own decision. And that's also something that I've found that many coaches don't seem to get in this context is you don't have to convince people to buy your stuff. You don't have to convince them to sign up to your coaching. They either will or they won't, and that's that. It's their decision. Nothing about this process needs to be ugly or slimy or yucky. Okay, it can all just be kind of neutral. Here is what I have for you. If you want to sign up, here is how you do that. If you want to sign up to talk to me on Zoom, here's my calendar. If you want to sign up to my group program, here's how much it costs and here's the link to join. Period. Neutral. No drama. Let's move on. Coaches are not used car salespeople. Okay. So we're not trying to put one over on anyone. We're not trying to hide, you know, rust under the hood. That's not what we're doing. We are offering the most beautiful service that there is, in my opinion, or at least one of them. I believe in this profession so much. It changed my life. I'm sure it's changed yours if you're listening to me right now. So why do we want to keep it to ourselves? Why can we not just be like every other company that sells every day? We can, we can sell every day. We can in some way, shape, or form invite people into our world into the paid container, if you will, whatever that looks like, with no shame or anything. People often ask me about pricing, and to me, the pricing part is almost irrelevant because the price can be anything. It has a lot more to do with whether you as a coach are willing to sell. Are you willing to just step into a neutral space yourself and sell from there, from a place of more like, you're welcome, you're welcome for providing you this opportunity that you can take or not, it's up to you, instead of, oh my gosh, thank you for signing up for my coaching, I'm so grateful. Yeah, we can be grateful, but it's more like, you're welcome, I've given you something that's incredible and I'm glad that you took that step for yourself. I'd like to just flip this whole conversation around about what coaches need to be doing every day, how we can simplify it, and getting over this whole fraught thing related to selling. It's just unnecessary. Create something helpful, share it, and then tell people how they can invest in the next level of support. That is literally what it takes to run a coaching business. Do that every day and there's no stopping you. This is about as real as I can get. So I really appreciate you listening today and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.
