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 mentor and business coach to other executive coaches.
When it comes to coaching business,I have done it all. I've grown coaching businesses, both solo and in partnership, and I've worked with teams of coaches in my businesses. I've been an in-house coach,I've been an associate coach, and so when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know that I'm sharing from a place of credibility and empathy,I get it.
I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their business with more corporate clients.
So today I want to talk about one of my favorite sayings that I find myself coming back to again and again and telling my clients all the time. When it comes to defining offers, it's this phrase, which is, it is easier to sell a painkiller than a vitamin. Now I think I heard this for the first time from a business coach from the US, Rachel Rogers, who wrote the book, if you're interested, We Should All Be Millionaires, which I think is a brilliant resource.
But the concept isn't new. It's not her concept, it's not new, it is an exclusive, and it underpins a whole lot of sales strategy across all industries and in many different contexts. So back when I was working for a global tech adjacent company, running their sales capability function, we used this concept a lot in sales training.
And so I have found that this is something that is, I keep coming back to you. Now it doesn't mean that I haven't had my own missteps with this concept, and I'll tell you all about one of them during this episode, but I wanted to talk about this and remember, it's easier to sell a painkiller than a vitamin is the saying.
So what does it actually mean? What does it mean to sell a painkiller rather than a vitamin? My interpretation of this saying in the context of executive coaching, as well as things like leadership work, team development, workshop facilitation, consulting, my take is that organizational clients are much more likely to invest money to solve a problem that they currently have,that is currently causing them pain or costing them something, be that money time performance,they're much more likely to spend money on that than they are to invest money in preventing some pain or costs from eventuating in the future, right?
Like a vitamin does. So the painkiller deals with the current pain you have right now. The vitamin prevents a future cost from emerging. So the saying really is that people will invest in current pain much more easily, although not exclusively, much more easily than they will invest in preventing a future problem.
Now this is important for coaches on a number of levels, but first and foremost is that I want you, when you are in business as a coach, I want you to set everything up right from your office suite to your website, to your LinkedIn, to your outreach in a way that makes selling easier, in a way that makes growing your business easier so that you can let the rock roll down the hill rather than close your ears, any kiddos listening, rather than pushing shit uphill, right?
Is that a very Australian phrase? I think it might be. So apologies if that doesn't make a lot of sense. I want your business to be sales enabled, to be easy when it comes to doing sales activities rather than making it harder for yourself.
And so this is something that we can put in place early on in your offer development, in your messaging development to prevent sales being hard later on. Because it is so much easier to sell when your client is already experiencing pain and is motivated to solve their problem perhaps, and you have a solution to help them do that.
So I want you to make life and sales as easy for yourself as possible from the earliest stage possible. So let me bring that to life in terms of how it would play out. So one thing that is a part of my group coaching program in the corporate to coach accelerator is that one of the first things I have my clients do typically is review their ideal clients and then actually define what is the breadth of the work that they actually want to do.
So a defining of their offers, their offer suite. And usually for most of the people I work with, it's a combination of a few of, and I usually try and get them to cap it at three, the combination of a few one-on-one coaching, there might be some sub offers within one-on-one coaching.
Maybe there's like senior leadership coaching, maybe there's middle manager coaching, maybe there's board coaching, but we have the one-on-one coaching, maybe you have a team development program or team development offer as well,maybe there's a leadership development program, maybe there's a workshop series,maybe you facilitate strategic planning days, etc. Right? So that is one of the first things we do. And often, I find that I am very wonderful, clever, and incredible at what they do.
They are very excited to work in a positive and growth-oriented way. And they build some very beautiful offers. And what I do is I get them to write the offers up and then they send it into me and I give them video feedback. And someone said recently that it's like getting a personal podcast.
And I love that. But the trend I see is that for many coaches, almost exclusively at the start, they want their offers to be positive, to be growth-oriented, to look at the opportunities for organizations to make things even better, which I love and which is what makes them great coaches, but it makes selling harder because they are not connecting their offers to what organizational clients are experiencing that would actually make them decide to invest money.
And that thing that is going to make them decide to invest, it is much more likely to be solving a present pain or challenge than avoiding a future pain or even achieving a desirable goal in the future.
So,for example, it is going to be harder to sell a program for teams that is framed as building high-performing teams than it is to sell a program that is framed as working with teams currently struggling to navigate a change or teams experiencing a difficult transition.
So,of course, we know that the benefits of the process you have are there for all teams, right, wherever they are at. But it is much easier if we can connect to a pain and solving a pain rather than just providing a vitamin that will stop something from going wrong later.
Now, I'm not saying that vitamin work shouldn't be in your offer, right? And this is an important distinction. I'm not actually saying that we change the work we do at all. And in fact, I think, you know, all of that growth-oriented work is how we are going to change the world as coaches.
But we need to figure out what real and current pain points or challenges our clients or potential clients are experiencing that makes this offer a no-brainer. And we need to directly address those pain points and challenges in our messaging, in our offer descriptions, in our websites, in our LinkedIn posts.
And the truth is we get to do the same work. We just have to sell it in this way. So, here's a quick story of how I have fallen foul of this guideline that I have myself. So, quite a few years back now, I built what I still believe to be an amazing offer, a great program.
It was an intensive one-day transition coaching program for, it was mostly for professional services when they were onboarding lateral partner hires. So, part bringing in partners or senior leaders from outside of their organization. But it wasn't exclusively professional services. So, it was also for other organizations either promoting or bringing in leaders.
And it was aimed as an intensive. So, it was done in one day and structured to avoid so many of the issues that emerge in a transition into a new role in those first few months. And honestly, it was great.
And I could sell it really well to my existing clients who already knew and trusted me and they loved it. But I couldn't sell it to people who didn't already know me. Because it was a textbook vitamin, right? It was stopping pain from emerging down the track. It was not a painkiller.
And I was only in my messaging, connecting to all the pains that would be avoided or that could occur later that wouldn't or achieving the goal of the role. And I wasn't connecting it to any existing pain that would motivate an organization to take action to invest.
So, if you think that this might be you, your task that I'm giving you as homework is to shift towards a pain first approach to your offers and your messaging about your offers and your sales calls. And look, as someone who is very, very committed to positive psychology and coaching methodologies, it's hard for me to say that, right?
Taking a pain first approach seems somewhat contrary to everything I believe and I stand for. So, I have to be really connected to the fact that I think this work that coaches do is so important and people are experiencing a lot of pain. And so, I would rather sell in the way that they need to be sold to and get the work in the door rather than hold to a, you know, some sort of ideal that I might have created in my head, to be honest, by not doing that.
So, rather than talking about what you can help someone achieve, that might be things like well-being, high performing teams, etc. You have to get really clear about what challenges your ideal clients are experiencing right now and be sure that it is clear how you and your offers solve those problems, right?
So, your homework is to think about that and think about how you could put that at the heart of your messaging and your marketing and talk about those problems a lot. Now, you get bonus points.
if you start not with just rewriting your offers but going back to understanding your ideal clients, right? And you know, I don't talk about niches, I talk about a few ideal client sectors where you have disproportionate credibility, right? I want you to start with those ideal clients.
I want you to then think about what is the pain that these organizations are experiencing, that the buyers of your services might be experiencing and that could be strategic pain, it could be tactical, day-to-day operational pain, it could be political or personal challenges, all of the pain and all of the problems.
I want you to start with that, your ideal client and their pain, before you define your offer and then your offers are built to solve those problems.This is the process that we follow inside the corporate to coach accelerator and that I work through with my clients in quite a lot of detail.
Now, again, you might be, if you're like me, you might be asking, but do I ever get to do the work that I want to do, Ellie? You told me I could have this work, this business that is meaningful and positive and exciting and joyful and you can, right? So you still get to do the solution focused work, the goal oriented work, and well-being work, right? What you do and how you do your work, the content of the offer probably doesn't change a lot but how we talk about it does.
So if you want to sell more, ask yourself, have you been trying to sell a vitamin rather than a Painkillers? And if the answer is yes, that is a great avenue to pursue,to make easier sales today.
Of course, if you are finding it hard to grow your coaching business, if you want support to define your offers with client acquisition in mind all the way through, please book a call with me and we can discuss whether the corporate to coach accelerator is a good fit for you in your business.
You can book a call at http://elliescarf.com/bookacall and you can check out more about the accelerator at http://elliescarf.com/cca. I'll be back with more next week and look forward to catching you then.
