Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 17 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as a mentor and business coach to other executive coaches.
When it comes to coaching business, I've done it all. I have grown coaching businesses solo and in partnership and with teams of coaches working with me. I've been an in-house coach and I've been an associate coach, so when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know that I'm sharing from a place of experience and also empathy.
I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their businesses with more corporate clients.
So if you are anything like me, you are looking down the barrel of the end of March and thinking,well, how did we get here? And while normal folks are probably heralding the change of seasons to autumn here in the Southern Hemisphere or spring up in the Northern Hemisphere, no, that's normal people.That's not me.I'm getting excited for that fresh quarter energy, because don't you just love a quarter, right? Does everyone love a quarter or is it just me?
Three months to me is such a brilliant time period in business. It is enough time to achieve something meaningful, but it is not so long that we get overwhelmed. 90 days, three months, you can see the end coming. There is also fresh start energy. It is the natural increment towards an annual goal. I think it is the perfect time horizon. And I wanted to talk about this at this time right now, because when I'm recording, it is currently midway through March.
We are a couple of weeks from the end of the quarter. And I wanted to record this now, because you might have noticed a few patterns that are emerging at about this time in the year. One of those might be that you did get annual planning maybe back in December. And right now you're thinking, yes, I did do that planning, but what were those annual goals again, right? You might also or alternatively be thinking, well, yes, I did set those annual goals. And I was full of New Year vigor when I set those goals.
And now I am discovering my end of Q1 lethargy or the busyness or the overwhelm. And you may be discovering that it was clear that you set too many or two ambitious goals. And that's a really common place for people to be at about this time in the quarter.
So that's why I wanted to record this episode for you now. Now, I will say I'm talking at the moment about Q2, because that is where we are in the calendar year. But just know that this process applies to every quarter.
So what I'm sharing today is my method to get you back on track progressing towards your annual goals. It is intended to be just the essentials. So in the corporate to coach accelerator, we have a group session each quarter where we do quarterly planning together live.
And so instead of, you know, like the full in depth quarterly planning, think of this episode as when you come back to quarter after quarter, if you have just 30 to 60 minutes and you want to make sure that you have got your strategy locked in and the next quarter is in the bag. So I'm going to do it. I've got six steps for you.
Step one for your quarterly plan is to reflect. Now, I know sometimes I put my hand up here. Sometimes we just want to dive into action mode. But a big part of being strategic is making sure that we are learning from what we are doing that is working and that isn't working.
Look, I'm really big on experimenting and iterating, but we can't do that successfully if we don't take the time to reflect, right? Experimentation without reflection is just sort of throwing spaghetti at the wall. So as part of this step one, I want you to ask yourself just a few very simple questions.
Firstly, what were your biggest wins of Q1 or whatever the previous quarter was? And I want you to think of your wins from in terms of work wins, life wins, just generally, what went well for you this quarter? A good tip if you are struggling to think about what they were. And this is me, I at the end of the quarter go,oh,no,can't remember it.
Maybe nothing good happened. Absolutely, that is not the case. I want you to go back and look at your calendar. I want you to look at your photo roll in your phone.
If you have been capturing celebrations anywhere, I make my accelerator members, I make, I encourage my accelerator members to capture their celebrations in our Slack channel and go back through, if that's you, if you've got one of those channels, go back through, look at what you posted, look at your weekly reviews, whatever way you do your planning. Look at those, right? So what were your biggest wins? Secondly, you know where this is going?
What were your biggest challenges? And that might again be in work in life, things that didn't work or didn't go so well. Thirdly, as part of this reflection step, what did you learn from Those experiences? And, I want you to include positive learnings, negative learnings, but we're aiming for a sort of a sense of neutrality here of learning that learning isn't something that we necessarily beat ourselves up about, right?
The things that caused us to learn. So I want this energy of experimentation in terms of what did you learn? And I want this question to help you anchor into your growth mindset, right? What did I learn that will let me improve, that will let me try something new into the next quarter, into the things I'm doing, particularly in terms of business growth.
Step two then is I want you to review your data. Firstly, I want you to have a look at what your progress was in the quarter towards your annual revenue or profit targets. What money came in the door and how much did you pay yourself from that money? Once you have now, if you, and I know lots of coaches are in this bucket, if you did not set an annual revenue or profit target because it felt a little bit too scary, I want you to have a go. I want you to just put a number out there because if we don't set a goal, for sure we're not going to hit it.
But if we do, then we are going to get closer and we're going to get closer and it's going to be very, very helpful for our planning, particularly around our sales funnel. So I really encourage you to set a revenue or profit target, depending on which makes more sense for you.
So once you figure out what money came in, how much you paid yourself, I want you to dive a little deeper into your data to look at your sales funnel data. Now, if you don't have a sales funnel, you absolutely need to join us inside the corporate to coach accelerator and you can check it out over at http://elliescarf.com/cca
But when I say reviewing our sales funnel data, what I really mean is reviewing key pieces of information or data of metrics that we've tracked, such as how much outreach did you actually do? How many sales calls did you book? How many proposals did you send? How much work did you win?
Both the number of engagements and the dollar value of the work sold. This is so important if you are in growth mode in your business and I suspect most of you are or want to be. It's so important because one of the biggest challenges for coaches is it's really hard to grow. If you don't know whether your efforts are working or not working in terms of your sales. So this activity and especially when we compound this tracking over quarters gives us huge amounts of rich information.
So we can find out is there an issue in terms of maybe you're not doing enough volume of outreach or maybe the issue is more the quality of your outreach because you aren't getting a certain percentage of responses or maybe you have a challenge with sales conversations or could we tune up your proposal templates or your proposal process to get a higher percentage of these opportunities converting to become real clients.
So that is why we want to be tracking your data. So I want you then to look at the data and ask yourself what is that data telling you? What is it telling you about where you are doing really well in terms of your sales process? And what is it telling you in terms of where you need to focus? So once you've had a look at that data step three is to reset and recommit to metrics and financial targets for the quarter ahead.
So obviously we want to be setting targets when they come to financial targets that are really,stick but stretchy. Right and that's the case for lots of our goals but particularly when it comes to setting revenue or profit targets.
If you have an annual goal in place obviously we want to work towards an increment of that for the quarter and again realistic but stretchy.Once you have that in place then you will go back to your sales funnel and to your data and do some reverse engineering.
So you will say okay well if I have this target in terms of revenue how many proposals will I need to have out there in order to get to that assuming a certain percentage win rate. How many sales calls do I need to have if I assume a certain percentage of those go on to have real opportunities for which I would send a proposal and how many outreach messages then do I need to send if I know that a certain percentage of those will be responded to and will lead to people that are willing to have a conversation or a sales call with you.
And so what we are aiming to do is get in place numbers that make it inevitable that you will hit your goal. And the truth is the numbers are probably higher than you think or you want them to be when it comes to the amount of outreach that you need to do but you have to map it out you have to write it down.
I want you resetting these metrics each quarter if not more frequently on a monthly basis. Now I know that I'm talking about this in terms of sales funnel very high level and it's actually, you know that there's a bit to it and so you can do it yourself of course it's also a key part of what we do inside the corporate to coach the accelerator.
So if you would like to learn more if you want to go deeper if you want to figure out how that looks in your business then the accelerator might be for you.
You can book a call with me at ellyscuff.com forward slash book a call and we can talk about whether the accelerator would be a good way for you to grow your business and particularly to you know build your own sales funnel. So step three we've reset, we've recommitted those metrics and financial targets.
Step four is where we go from those metrics and targets into the strategies that are going to help us get there. Now obviously a big part of your strategy is going to be outreach and we've kind of baked that in pursuit of your sales metrics but you're also going to have a very unique blend of things you want to be working on or you know you need to work on.
Some of those will be coaching business related some of them will be coaching practice related most likely and my goal in this step so where at step four I don't want you starting to choose your priorities yet but I want you to brainstorm and I want you to brainstorm two things in particular.
The first thing is what are all of the projects targets ideas you have about what you would like to focus on this quarter.Do a huge brain dump of all of those so think about things like clarifying your ideal clients or building a more efficient content process or getting your ICF certification or increasing your prices.
There's so many different things that might come up so when you have done that brain dump the second brainstorm I want you to do which I think might even be more powerful is I want you to think about blockers. I want you to brainstorm what are all of the things that are getting in the way of your business growth or of you finding your business to be joyful and profitable and meaningful.
The sorts of things that might come up particularly, when it comes to blockers to business growth the first one might be mindset and so maybe your mindset around sales and not wanting to be sales or having these deep-seated negative beliefs about sales maybe that is becoming very clearly a blocker for you or maybe it's a fear of visibility maybe that's coming up or maybe a blocker is that there is a specific step in your sales funnel.
That it becomes clear is blocking you right, maybe it's having sales conversations, maybe it is sending initial outreach messages, maybe you have a blocker in your personal life situation right maybe.
It's that you simply don't have enough emotional or energetic capacity to hold some of the tensions you're holding in your business. Maybe that's a blocker you need to review. Is there something you're avoiding is there a system or a process issue that is causing you not to take actions you need to do or that are you know preventing your progress maybe there's something you just don't know how to do that you need to if you want to progress your business so for all of those blockers.
I want you to consider it when you're thinking about it just how eliminating that blocker would open so much opportunity for you in your business and it may be that it unlocks revenue but it could also be that it unlocks energy enthusiasm excitement for what you do which means you're more likely to take those actions you know you need to do so two brainstorms your brainstorming.
All of the projects tasks ideas you have for what you want to focus on and you've also brainstormed what are the blockers to your business blockers that if you eliminated them would open up a lot of opportunities for you.
So step five then is to say okay well i've brainstormed all these tasks and projects and i've brainstormed all these blockers which ones am i going to focus on and i want you to ask yourself which of those tasks or projects which one of or two of those are going to make the biggest difference and i want you to pick one blocker that you will commit to eliminating or significantly reducing this quarter so between those projects and blockers.
i want you to pick two to three things that are going to be your quarterly priorities and i don't want you to set any more than this right so these are things that will change your business and they are blockers that will open up so much potential and opportunity if you can eliminate them in full or in part so then i want you to write them down what is it that you are committing to focusing on in the next quarter.
So,the final step step six can can be a bit of a bigger process if you like so,if you want to go big you might choose to go from here's the priority and map out a project plan for each of your two to three focus areas but if not i want you just to identify and this is sort of the the minimal essential version of step six is i want you to identify what are the biggest tasks that you will need to complete.
Whether that is a one-off or it's a weekly task or it's a daily task or it's a monthly task what are the biggest things you need to do in order to achieve that target or goal or eliminate that blocker and i want you to block out time for that in your calendar, right this is the lowest most simple lowest resolution simplest version.
That I know will create progress because our calendars and arguably our bank accounts really show us our true priorities so if we have these priorities we must put it in our calendars immediately now.
If you are looking at this in your calendar now and you are getting overwhelmed then you have to cut something out right cut two things out i do get in in our bigger planning session.
I do get my accelerated members to think about what are you going to let go of because sometimes you need to open up time but our options are we can open up time by getting rid of something or we can just reduce the amount of things that we're going to focus on right i would rather you focus on eliminating one significant blocker than setting three four or more goals.
Those are simply not the things moving the needle and that you're just not going to do so less that you achieve better than more, that you don't hit so just to summarize your simple quarterly planning system.
It has six elements: step one reflects on the quarter that's just been step two reviewing your revenue and sales funnel data.
if you don't have any of this data then maybe reviewing that is your goal making sure you get your funnel data in place that could be one of your goals step three reset and recommit to metrics and quarters and targets for the quarter ahead step four brainstorm your goals and your biggest blockers step five prioritize one to two of those goals and one blocker that you're going to commit.
To eliminate and step six, put your commitments into your calendar now.I've already mentioned this but if you want some support to grow your coaching business with more corporate clients strategically intentionally and with impact profit and sustainability at its core.
then my program for coaches the corporate to coach accelerator might be for you so as i mentioned you can check it out at elisgaf.com forward slash cca to learn more about what's included and you can http://elliescarf.com/bookacall and no pressure no obligation call with me at http://elliescarf.com/cca and we can have a discussion about whether the accelerator is a great way to help you grow your business and if it's not i'll likely have some free resources or referrals that that can help you in any event so thanks for listening in and i'll catch you next week
