Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, and I'm here to do two things to share practical advice and stories from coaches out there doing it, to show you that not only can coaches build businesses serving corporate clients that are profitable, flexible and purposeful, but also to show you that you can do it too.
So I think as coaches working with organizational clients, 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 myself and share what really works and what really matters so that you can change the world one client at a time.
So the context for this episode is a question from a client of mine where she received a response to her outreach, and it was the sort of response that we worry about, right? It was negative, it was kind of indignant, and it was basically accusing my client of being salesy, inappropriate, and unwanted in their outreach. So my client obviously contacted me as I always want them to do, and was understandably rattled, right?
And I get it; I get those messages too, people who are somehow upset about being contacted, right? Whatever the reason. It is a common issue that we work with because we don't want to be salesy, but we do want to sell.
And by definition, we are putting ourselves out there; we are doing outreach; there are going to be a proportion of people who respond in a negative way. And by the way, this is a very small proportion.
So I'm not suggesting that 5% of people are going to respond in a negative way. No, it'll be like one or two a year, right? For example, but I wanted to address what we should do? What happens when someone calls us out on being exactly that thing that we were striving not to be, which is salesy, pushy,or somehow inappropriate in the selling that we're doing and the reach out that we're doing?
So here's my thoughts. There are three things I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the mindset and how to deal with yourself in the moment, the ways to think about that kind of response.
The second thing is what can you actually do at that point? Like what steps do I want you to take? And then finally, like if you do want to take some lessons from it, what can you do to tune up your sales approach to make sure that you are even better than you were before? Okay, so firstly, ways of thinking about it.
The first thing is to say, okay, well, this person doesn't like how I have reached out to them. But ultimately, am I selling? And the answer is going to be yes, and there is nothing wrong with that, right? Are we selling? Yes, we are? Because these two things coexist.
We cannot grow a business without embracing the fact that we are selling. You can't grow a business at all without selling. And we don't want to be salesy. So those two things, we don't want to be perceived to be salesy or predatory in any way. But we do want to sell.
The nature of that tension means that there will be times when, for the person you're reaching out to, you land on the wrong side of that balance. That's just how they're going to see that. So the first thing you want to think about is remembering why you are doing this, right? And really remembering so that it can help you to be unapologetic about the fact that you are selling. And so for me, for example, when I am selling in, let's say I have someone, so sometimes I get responses to emails that, by the way, people have signed up for.
And they say, why are you sending me this? I didn't ask for this. I'm like, yes, you did. But why are you doing that? And I often feel my first instinct is to feel like I've done something wrong, right? And of course, I have now done the work and I can, it's kind of water off a duck's back now. I could say, okay, unsubscribe, no worries, or I'll unsubscribe you and move on.
But what allows me to do that in the moment is that I'm very clear on why I'm doing this. And I want you to be very clear on why you're doing that as well. So it may be you are growing a business to support your family.
You are growing a business to build something important and to exercise this entrepreneurial part of yourself. It may be that you are doing this to make a difference to both individual leaders and organizations, communities, the world, right? That this work is what will change the world for the better.
And I firmly believe that it's very important to my sense of purpose. And you might be doing this, right? So and by this, I mean actually selling, doing the work of selling, outreach, marketing, posting on LinkedIn, for example, in order to have the opportunity to do work that you enjoy every single day.
And it may be that there are some pieces of having that opportunity that you don't love in the same way. But really remembering why are you doing this? And specifically, why are you doing outreach? Why are you selling? Right?
So that is one thing to remember.Also remember that generally someone's response to being sold to is about them. And it's not about you. So you are not responsible for their emotional response to being sold to, right?
So you don't have to hold that in any way, shape or form. And the truth is, you don't have a crystal ball; you don't read minds; you don't know why they have reacted the way that they did. And you don't need to know, right?
It may be that they have reacted that way because they grew up with parents who said that money was evil, right? Or they may have just today received a really awful predatory sales pitch, or they may have been scammed last week and lost $1,000, right? To something fraudulent, right?
So you don't know why they have reacted to your outreach pitch, which I am sure was a really good outreach, right? And so I don't want you to take ownership for their response. You are not responsible for their response. They are. And you don't know where that comes from. And it's okay to not know. Also want you to remember that the people, and this, is this a little bit where maybe the people you're meant to work with, the organizations you're meant to work with, they will not react that way.
Your people will respond in entirely the right way. They will want more. They will want to engage. They will respond positively. And so I often think that our outreach has has the job of generating more conversations with people who are interested.
But by definition, that means that it's other job is filtering out all the people who are not for us, right? And if we talk about the funnel, our outreach is probably filtering out two thirds, right, of those people so that the one third who are interested and might go on then to proceed through our funnel so that those people can show themselves, right?
So in some ways, I want to say thank you. Thank you for showing me that I am not for you. You are not for me. And we can say this is not a good fit, right? And with absolutely no issues. You don't need to follow up with them. Nothing.
You can just wish them well and let the funnel funnel them out. I also think it's important to look at this point of recognising your response to their response, right? The way you feel when someone responds negatively to your outreach is not always about your outreach. It is not about your business. It's not about your sales. It's usually about your fear, your fear of being judged, your fear of people not liking you, but that is coming from your own story, right?
Your story of that may have emerged even in childhood. It could also be your own stories about selling in sales, right, that you grew up with. What I want you to notice is just notice how their response is causing something inside of you. And we want to get to a point where you can be largely neutral or get to neutral quicker once you have a response like this.
So what should you do at that moment? The first thing is I think you have to focus on your body. And I think you have to focus on really regulating your nervous system by asking what does your body need right now, particularly if you are really having a very strong reaction to someone's negative feedback.
Now, I am far from an expert in nervous system regulation. So I would direct you to a about, or I want to say four weeks back, I had a really great episode with Alex Field, who is a specialist in this area. And she talks a lot about what some of the strategies are that you can use to help regulate in those moments.
And so it may be grounding, orienting to the space that you're in. It may be going out and just sitting in the sun for a moment. It might be walking around the block, it might be getting into water somewhere, whatever it is you need.
That is probably the first thing to do is pay attention to your body before you start doing anything else. The next thing I want you to do is, this is going to sound a bit strange. The next thing I want you to do is nothing different.
My biggest response and my biggest answer when you have had negative feedback about something you've done in your outreach or in your sales, I want you to stay the course and do nothing different. And that is because one piece of feedback does not make any evidence of a pattern, right?
There is no one person responding is just someone taking themselves out of your funnel. It is not saying that your outreach is bad. It is not saying that you are sales-y. It is not saying that your sales approach is bad, that your marketing is bad, or that there is a trend or a pattern of any sort. So I don't want you to change your approach or stop the volume of what you are doing in any way, shape or form.
In fact, if you are going to do anything, I want you to double down. I want you to increase your outreach. I want you to gather more evidence that this does work or find some evidence of what you need to change in terms of your funnel statistics, right?
If there is a piece of the stage of the funnel, right, and maybe you're just not getting enough response to your outreach, then how can we then we'll look at how could we do that better. Another thing you might want to do is if it feels like an open loop that is untenable for you to sit with, I would remove them as a connection, right, from LinkedIn.
So if it's on LinkedIn, for example, I would just remove them as a connection. That way you don't have to sit with the fear of what if they pop in my inbox again. So that is something I would do.
But you as a highly evolved coach, building a wonderful business, it may be that you want to take some learnings from this situation as well. So if you do want to improve, then maybe you take this as an opportunity to tune up your outreach approach or your sales and marketing approach.
And there are a couple of things I would suggest that you think about, probably three things. The first is look at all of your data, not this piece of data. So if you want to improve, I want you to look at what are the numbers around your responses to your outreach generally as a percentage of response of people who go on to have back and forward conversation with you, not how do I stop people responding in this way, right?
So look at the data generally, not this one piece of data. The next thing that can be helpful is to look at different approaches. You might want to tweak your outreach messaging if you are not hitting those numbers. So this might be a sign for you to say, well, hang on, let me look at my data generally. You might say, okay, well, I'm not getting that 20 to 30% response from people that makes me go on to have some back and forth nurture that Conversation.
So if that's the case, then we may need to look at your messaging. So you might look at are my outreach messages too long? Are they not personalized enough? Do I need to introduce some consent-based strategies, right? And so consent-based marketing strategies being rather than saying here is something I'd like you to look at, or shall we have a call? It is to say, would it be helpful for me to send XYZ? Or would you be interested in talking about XYZ?
So ones where people really are given the chance to give a positive yes before you share anything with them. Now, none of my recommended approaches to outreach involve any sort of pitching. But if you think you may have fallen into a pitching approach, then that sort of more consent-based approach could be a way to shift your outreach approach.
And then finally, another tune-up that I think can be helpful to your approach is to really think about where is your energy coming from when you write your outreach messages, when you have your sales calls, and making sure that the energy is not convincing, but that it is conviction, right? And so I really love this idea of conviction over convincing.
Conviction being showing people that deep passion and belief that what you do will make a difference, will solve a problem, is an incredibly valuable service for your ideal clients. As opposed to convincing energy, which is more like, you need this because XYZ, right?
And so you can see the difference. So really focusing on conviction, not convincing. Look, so I hope that's helped. The truth is you will get responses to your outreach that will not be what you want. You will have people call out your fears at some stage of this process. What I want you to know is that you have all of the skills, all of the fortitude you need to cope with that
and to flourish.
And the biggest thing I want you to do is nothing. I want you to stay the course, and I want you to just notice and keep going. Because, as we said, we have to sell if we want to have a thriving business. So selling is always going to be a really important part of your business.
And it's really, once we can kind of say, yeah, I'm doing this for a reason. This is important to me,then it's going to be so much easier to put aside those negative feelings about people's responses, say, okay, I'm willing to take the bad because I'm working towards all of this good. And this is where I know I need to be. I hope that this helps. If you've ever been rattled by one of these difficult responses, know you're not alone and I will be back to talk to you next week.
