Hello, and welcome to The Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, and I'm here to do two things. I'm here to share practical advice and stories from coaches who are out there doing it to show you that not only can coaches build businesses serving corporate clients that are profitable, flexible, and purposeful, but I also wanna show you that you can do it, too.
So I think as coaches working with organizational clients, that we will create a positive ripple effect far beyond our work. And my job is to take all the business advice out there, combined with my 20 years as an executive coach, and share what really works and what really matters so that you can change the world one client at a time.
So one of the tasks that I have my clients do, and that I sometimes do in my free or paid masterclasses that you may have come to, is an exercise in funnel thinking. Now, that means understanding, based on your revenue goal, how exactly you will get to your revenue goal. As in, what is the mechanism that funnels people from being a lead in your orbit through to an actual client?
And what that looks like in the executive coaching world is a funnel that shows you exactly how many proposals you need out there, how many sales calls you need to have, how many leads you need to be nurturing, and the n- amount of outreach that you have to do. Now, people usually describe this process initially as a bit overwhelming, but ultimately as incredibly liberating.
Because when we start to clearly understand what is required, it opens up a huge amount of possibilities, and it shows us a very clear pathway to our goal. Whereas previously it may have felt a little bit murky, right? That the connection between our marketing activities and our revenue goals was kind of vague, right?
There was not a clear nexus between the two. This process absolutely makes that crystal clear. Now, today I am not going to go through the whole funnel. What I wanna talk about is just one piece of this activity, of this process, which is, uh, mapping your offers to your revenue target. And what do I mean by that?
Well, let's assume that you have a revenue goal of 120K. Now, for reference, your goal could literally be anything. So I work with coaches who just wanna pay their costs. I work with coaches who want to replace their, their wage. I work with coaches who wanna target 200 to 500K in annual revenue. There is no right number.
There is just the right number for you, and a pathway to get you there that may be longer or shorter depending on other factors, right? So things like what... Do you wanna work part-time versus full-time? What is the nature of your network? What is your pricing structure? All of the above. Now, just on a quick side note, this little side quest if you will, if you are hesitant to set a revenue target, I want you to do it anyway even though it feels uncomfortable.
So I know that it can feel scary because when we put it out there, what we're essentially doing is putting out there the potential of failure, right? The potential that we might not meet that goal. So this is scary, yes. You might not achieve it, yes. But if you don't set it, you certainly won't achieve it.
And so much of the growth that you need in growing your business is who you become in pursuit of that goal. It's not just about the goal in itself. So I really encourage you to go after it and set a challenging revenue target. And, you know, one of the ways I think about it is set the goal of what you want your annual revenue target to be in three years, and then set it of what you want it to be this year so that you have like your eye on the prize and you set what is the increment that you need to grow to this year So anyway, let's say back to our activity.
Let's say you set a target of 120 grand, right? That's 10K a month. That's easy for my mental maths. The activity that I want you to do that will truly unlock so much for you, even if you do nothing else in your funnel mapping other than this, is to come up with a whole range of different scenarios for how you will unlock that revenue target.
For example, a $120,000 annual target could be achieved in a number of different ways, such as you might sell 12 $10,000 coaching engagements, or you might sell two $60,000 retainers that cover coaching and consulting, or you might sell twelve $5,000 coaching engagements and ten $6,000 training workshops. Or you could sell forty $3,000 coaching engagements.
Or you might sell twelve $3,000 training workshops, like a half-day training workshop. You might sell five $6,000 facilitated strategy days and nine $6,000 coaching engagements. Or you might sell six $20,000 team coaching packages. So you can see how there are literally infinite ways that you could craft this.
It needs to make sense for you, for the work that you do, and for your offers. So once you go through that and you come up with a whole range of ways that you, you personally could hit your revenue target, then I want you to let it sink in. Do you see now how your business can unfold and how your revenue target is within your reach?
I want you to be able to really feel it and to see not just one way, but multiple ways that you could hit that target. It should feel much more real and much more concrete when you do this compared to looking at your revenue target in isolation, like a target in a vacuum. Because beyond feeling more real and more visible, more tangible, and it will feel all of those things, this process will also give you a lot of insight and allow you to refine your strategy.
So for example, once you've done this, ask yourself a few of these questions. Does this activity make it clear to you that you are underpricing an offer? So for example, one of the examples I shared was forty three thousand dollar coaching engagements. If you look at that, you might say, "Ooh, selling 40 of those is going to be tough."
And so we might say, "Well, if I made them $12,000," right? So a 4X multiple of the price, maybe the scope shifts, then I only need to sell 10, and maybe that feels like a more doable challenge. Are some offers harder or easier to sell relative to their price point? So for example, you might say that a $20,000 team coaching package may not in fact be any harder to sell than a $5,000 one-on-one coaching package.
I also want you to ask yourself, does anything come up sort of emotionally or in your body that you almost dread? So you see that, oh, if I had to run or deliver 10 training workshops for $6,000 each, I'd be so drained. That would feel like a real drag. So asking yourself these questions, and then from there comes the magic, right?
So you can now see a number of ways that you can achieve your goal. And putting on my positive psychology nerd hat, you know, hope theory for example tells us that when you have multiple pathways to pursue your goals, you are more likely to achieve them And so how we then turbocharge this activity is that then we can analyze it in our funnel, right?
So we need X number of engagements. Well, how many proposals will I need in order to get to that number? How many sales calls? All the way down to how much outreach you need to be doing. And what we do inside the accelerator is we then set up your tracking so that the achieving of your goal is no longer a can I do this question, it is a how can I do this question.
And you have the numbers to work on and figure out what you need to improve. So it might be that you just need more warm leads to reach out to. You need your outreach messages to get more replies. You need your sales conversations to turn into real opportunities at a higher rate. Or your proposals need to convert to clients at a higher rate than they are.
Or you might have areas where you're already really strong. From there, we build a strategy that's right for you. We clarify your offers, we clarify your pricing, and we build your personal strategy, your personal system to get there with the right blend of marketing and sales activities. So my task for you today is just to sit down and to do some dreaming this week.
Set your revenue target. Set you want it for what ... Set it for what you want it to be in three years and what it, you want it to be this year, and come up with those scenarios, as many as you can, of how you will achieve that target or how you could achieve that target. And then sit with it and reflect on what that tells you about your offers, your pricing, and the work that you want to do.
I really hope that is, is helpful, so please connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know what came up for you as you went through this activity. Now, if you are ready to go deeper, you've done this task, and you wanna explore your whole funnel and your system to set up your business to really fly from a BD and marketing perspective, please reach out and book a call with me at elliescarf.com/bookacall.
I look forward to speaking to you again next week.
