Welcome to this episode on how to create a group coaching program that is PROFITABLE.
This is part one – because I had too much to say to fit it all into one episode.
Whether you already have a group program – or are considering creating one, this episode will be jam packed full of useful insights to help you either optimise your existing group program, or launch a new one.
I’ll be breaking down these tips into seven steps to help you know every step to take on how to create a group coaching program and be successful.
This has to be one of my favourite episodes yet!
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00:00
Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale. On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.
00:44
Hello and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert and cushy business pioneer.
And today I promised I will be sharing with you the number one mistake that is holding you back from making more sales. And you will probably have noticed by now that this podcast episode is titled The fortune is in the follow up. Obviously, for SEO purposes, I wanted this episode to be as easy to find as possible.
01:11
That’s a whole other episode. But yeah, I wanted you to land on this and listen to this. So I decided to actually name at the fortune is in the follow up. And if you listened to the last episode, where I talked about how to get the most sales out of this final quarter of the year, you’ll have noticed in step two, where I talk about nurturing leads that have come into a world that I did referenced the phrase, the fortune is in the follow up. And obviously I like to keep these episodes relatively snackable, which meant that I didn’t go very in depth on this theme. And I really felt like I owed it to you, my listener to talk about this more in depth because it’s one of those things right that so many of us are aware of, and I myself included, up until I would say very recently have been very uncomfortable with acting upon it. And in it as you know, these podcasts, they’re a blend of strategical advice alongside with a bit of their kind of mindset, nervous system stuffs thrown into. Because ultimately, we can know all the right things we can be given all of the very best advice. You know, as I’ve shared with you before, marketing is pretty simple. You know, consistency is the biggest piece. And this is why when I work with my clients, one of the biggest things we’re just trying to nail down while not trying to that we do nail down is finding a way to market their business in a way that feels good. And obviously, there are certain things we do in business, particularly around visibility, which can feel pretty stretchy. So it’s not to say that everything feels good immediately. But the really important piece similar to nutrition, similar to exercise, similar to any hobby or habit that you would like to maintain long term, you know, it’s the same a business if it doesn’t feel good, you’re gonna drop it. You know, the moment things feel difficult, or there’s any kind of resistance, you’re just gonna stop doing it, right? Because you’re just gonna be like, well, this never felt good. Anyway, I don’t want to do this. And I think the thing that scares people the most around following up, is this fear that someone could turn around and say, Oh, you bog off, like, why are you spamming me? And weed? Nobody wants to be that person. Right? Nobody, like we all get enough of that in our own inboxes. And we see how those people get literally dragged through the mud on social media going,
Oh, look at this person again, in my DMs. Like I wouldn’t have said this. And I think there’s that fear. There’s a real genuine fear of like, oh, I don’t want to seem needy. I don’t want to seem pushy. I don’t want to seem salesy, and at the same time, like when we look at the hard facts, most people don’t buy first time. Yes, there’s a percentage. There’s that 1% Who will go, I’m in. But you know what, there’s a heck of a lot more people in your following on your mailing list, who’ve had conversations with you are we’ve even potentially worked with you, who would be really ready and excited to work with you today. If you ask them injecting, you know, several 1000s of pounds, potentially into your business revenue this month, if only you would make the invitation. And so this is why I hope as you listen to this, you’re like, Oh yeah, she didn’t need I didn’t need to hear this. You know, and you know what I think there. I say this a lot of the time to so many people in the online business space where people will say if you’ve been in business a while you’ll have heard a lot of the same things. A lot of times, and I genuinely believe there’s reason behind that. I genuinely believe that things land on a different level. Every time I believe if you don’t think that there’s an opportunity for elevation or expand Training what it is that you’re doing, then you’re not doing it right, you’re missing opportunities. Now, every time you hear a question, even if you think you’ve heard it before, even if you think you’ve done it before, even if you think you’re doing it, please allow yourself to sit with that resistance and think about why, what is this resistance, and very importantly, is this resistance holding me back from growing a successful business because that is what I want for all of you. I don’t want you just to have flash in the pan success. I don’t want you on a kind of a wild horse with your knees, tightly gripped to the sides of it. And I don’t want your business to feel that way. I want it to feel really manageable, really good, really spacious, really impactful. And you do get to have all of those things when you’re intentional about it. And I think one of the really important things to say before I go into the three points that might be stopping you from following up and things you should consider or work with to help you get past them. You know, I think it’s really important to say that the reason why when I start off working with my clients, we talk about committing to your Kirsch.
And then we look at upgrading your office suite is because if you like before, we even get into the three reasons why people won’t do it with a good offer, an offer that they know will transform their clients lives. If if you have any wavering doubt around the power of what it is that you are delivering for your clients, if you have any questions about whether you really do fulfil on the promises you’re making your clients, if you are concerned that the infrastructure of your program currently allows your clients to get overwhelmed or lost, if you are living more in fear of somebody not liking what you’re doing, than motivated by the excitement of what you can bring for your clients, then all of the rest of what I’m about to say, is not really going to change anything. So you know, the foundational element to feeling confident about following up with someone and making invitations, is feeling really, really good about what it is that you’re delivering. And this is why it’s such an intrinsic piece to any of the work I do with my clients. And what I love about every client that comes to work with me is they’ll often think I’ve got a pretty bang in group programming, I’m pretty happy with it. And every time when they go through my auditing process, they see so many holes, they pick up on so many blind spots, they recognise areas, which will really support them to support even more clients at an even deeper level, with absolutely no extra work for themselves. I mean, not long term. I mean, of course, there’s the foundational work that’s required to put into it. But once it’s done, it’s creating much stronger foundations and elevated results, which they cannot wait to get for their clients, which then makes it so much easier. I mean, like, Would you be having the equivalent of the very best house party with you know, the very best DJ and the very best cocktails?
And the very best, you know, I mean, obviously put this in the context of whatever feels good for you. I don’t know, like DJs and cocktails, but whatever it is, if you were hosting the very best party, and you know, you saw someone outside who was you know, like when your mates in their fancy disco gear and like just walking down the street? Would you just let them walk by? Or would you make the invitation be like, me, I’ve got the best party happening inside, you’ve got to come in? Well, you know, it’s exactly the same with your offering, like, would you know that there is someone who is going to be immensely helped by working with you, and not let them know about this new iteration as to how you’re inviting them in, or not let them know about this new training that you’re releasing. Okay. So remember that these invitations and also these are autonomous human beings, you know, I often will say to people that I reach out to and say, you know, let me know if you’re in a different phase right now, if this isn’t your focus, and you know, I’ll happily you know, like, I’ve noticed, I’ll happily not share, but you know, if this isn’t a focus for you, right, let me know, and I’ll know, like, I’ll take you off my list to kind of reach out to when something comes up that feels like it could be a good fit for you. And I honour whatever they respond with, right? But when it comes from your heart, when it comes from your heart space, this follow up, gosh, I’m sounding a bit hippy right now. But roll roll with it, will you roll with me, but you know, when it’s coming from your heart from a place of genuine care, and not from a space of like money, money, money, you know, when you’re doing it from a space of, I wouldn’t want something that if I was this person, I wouldn’t want to miss out on this invitation. It feels so much easier. Okay. So that’s a little, little kind of prequel to what I’m about to show you. Don’t worry. These three reasons are pretty simple. So one of the reasons why you might not be following up is that you just don’t know what to say. And I know I rather unhelpfully in the last episode shared that’s why I have templates in my program because you probably thinking has given your clients poorly, but I don’t have access to your program.
10:05
What do I say? Well, let me give you a little clue. You know, obviously, it’s not as simple as just banging on the digital door saying buy my thing, that’s never going to work very well. But I do think there’s also a beauty to being relatively direct, I absolutely hate it. When people come into my inbox, and start complimenting my cat, and then suddenly go off on some random tangent immediately into pitching me, I’d rather they just came in and said, Hey, I checked out your profile. And I can see you’re doing this. Curious to know if you’d like to learn more about blahdy blah, I would prefer that because I can just immediately say yes or no, then be entertaining, someone who I just know is just trying to warm me up to a pitch that there’s nothing more frustrating than that. So what I would say, and this comes back to the premise that I’m always sharing on this podcast, which is, you know, building and growing and running the business that you would like to buy from. So without me sharing with you the kind of very specific, relatively generic templates, which I obviously encourage people to personalise, obviously founded in the premise of like I say, I think it’s better to be transparent and upfront about how you communicate with people in a way that makes them feel comfortable and empowered. And always the one in the steering, you know, the steering wheel. You know, what I mean? You know, that will always allow for more comfortable conversations.
But beyond that, like I say, just taking a moment, because again, like I say, people do not slow down, they do not slow down, they’ll just go Oh, that feels difficult. I don’t know what to say, someone might like someone might not like it, I’m not going to do it. I guarantee you, I guarantee you, if you sit down for 30 minutes with a journal, and just take the time to think about what would I be happy receiving? Reflect on? Has anyone reached out to you recently, where it felt like a really natural sales conversation, open that conversation up, look at it, what it was that they were saying to you, and make note of the kinds of questions and things that were saying that felt good to you. And I’m sure you’ve had somebody do it recently. So have a look at that, if none of them have felt good. Think about why they didn’t feel good. Think about why you then do it differently. Like I say, for me, one of the things I recognised was, I really don’t like it when people do a big long preamble, which, you know, like when they’re dropping in every 24 hours to ask some innocuous question to some point, pitch me it just doesn’t feel good. But I do like it when they have something that’s going to be a value or a service to me, if they’re helping me recognise that they’ve got some free training, I could get access to a life that they think I’ll find helpful. So you know, think about what feels good to you. And then here we go, here is little secret sauce, a little bit of magic, I’m sprinkling on this, write down your own frickin template, write down what it is that you will be saying in future so that if you’ve had on those days, where you’re like, Oh, this feels like too much effort. But at the same time, this is a really good opportunity, I should be saying something to this person right now.
Because they’ve just started chatting to me in my stories, and there is a good opportunity here. sabot, like saved in your phone notes. So you can refer to it and be like, ah, yeah, okay, that’s what I’m gonna say, okay, because our brains, you know, on the best bits of wisdom, actually, my own client, Debbie Edwards imparted in the, in fact, she’s coming on the podcast very soon, which I’m very excited for. But she shared, she said, you know, cyclical human beings, one of the best things we can do to ensure for consistency in business, which we all know, we need to be successful, we need to be batching, we need to be planning ahead. She was you know, and it’s so true. Okay, it’s so true. And this is exactly the same i templates. You know, on a good day, we don’t need them. But we’re not always in a good day. So please allow for those bad days and have an idea as to how you can respond to these things. Because it’s amazing how fast a bad day turns around when a good conversation turns into a sale. So number one is that we don’t know what to say. Secondly, the other reason that might be holding you back is frequency. And you know what the main thing with frequency is, if I’ve made a direct ask if someone said, now’s not really the right time, I’ve just put it in the calendar is like give it a month. And oftentimes, actually, I just explicitly asked for permission. I’ll say, Okay, that sounds great. When would be a good time. I mean, depending on the nature of the conversation, if it’s one where I’ve explicitly made an invitation to a particular offer, and you know, it hasn’t been the right time, I will explicitly ask when would be a good time, and I’ll you know, make a note to reach out to you when that time comes. Because otherwise honestly, you won’t necessarily be front of mind, and they’ll forget and something else, some other shiny object will jump up and they will go on to that instead. And it obviously is a beautiful way to ensure that you’re being of service to them and getting their explicit consent to reach out to you that makes the whole process feel so much nicer. Because you get to follow up in the context of hey, you know, when we chatted back in August, you asked me to reach out to you in November, because you’ve you know, You’ve just completed whatever life thing was going on. And, you know, let’s chat, are you ready to have a conversation now, you know, so easy, so easy, because they asked you to, okay, so do think about ways that you can make this really easy for yourself. And in terms of frequency, like I say, just go back to my simple premise, if you are the business that you’d like to buy from what feels good to you, because quite frankly, just disappearing off the face of the earth and hoping people will discover your content is not good enough. That is not the way someone who’s actually excited to work with you behaves. And again, when you work from your heart space, and you genuinely are excited, by the idea of working with certain types of clients, let them know about it, I love it when someone lets me know that they would love to work with me. And thirdly, the other reason that stands in the way of us doing this is organisation, you know, we just we will have perhaps a good month where loads of leads come in, I know I’ve been there. And just being a bit kind of like nonchalant been like, well, the ones that were meant to me will come in, and the ones that aren’t won’t, and you know, they’ve got to make their own power decision, they’ll come back when the time is right. And again, quite frankly, we all live in such a busy, noisy worlds, most of the time, we will fall off those people’s radars, okay, and you don’t need to be falling off their radars. And so it’s good to be organised.
This is what I use air table for. I probably talked about air table so much, but honestly, it is the brain of my business. And it ensures that anyone regularly engaging with my emails, any sales calls I’ve had, everything is automated, I don’t need to have an admin assistant put things in there, it’s all automated and put in there so that when I have a new promotion running, I can go in, I can duplicate the table, I can literally or you know, add an extra table and add an extra bit where I kind of reference whether I’ve reached out to those people or not. And it is that simple and fun, really fun. And of course, you know, sometimes I look at that list, I don’t know that person’s not a good fit for the offer, or that person’s already gone through that, you know, it’s, you know, of course, we can then bring the human element to it all and make our own human decisions around it. But having the data in the first place makes it so much easier. And the truth is most businesses, like I say, even the seven figure businesses that I’ve been behind the scenes of do not have the systems in place to make that easy. And I will tell you as someone who very rapidly went from just under six figures to a multi six figure business within the space of a year, as in between those two, so my first year was 86k. The second year was around 200. I think it was just over or maybe slightly under current anyway, somewhere around there. And I you know, like things changed really rapidly. And suddenly, people I was having conversations with a year ago, you know, I just totally escaped my mind. And that’s such a missed opportunity because people who bought from you once will buy from you again, people who’ve had those conversations with you once. With that close to deciding then and will be that much closer to deciding the next time, it’s so much easier to sell to people who have already raised their hand and express some kind of interest in you in the work you do and how to work with you than it is to somebody who is entirely cold and new.
So do not miss out on this. Honestly, you’re missing out on potentially, I don’t know an additional 20 to 30% additional revenue each month, just based on this. I mean, I say 20 to 30%. I made that up, I think it could actually be significantly more. So follow up, my friends follow up. And next week, Debbie Edwards and I will be talking about self love and leadership and how self love can be the most pivotal tool to help you elevate and take up space. It’s going to be the most incredible conversation. Debbie is one of my clients and probably one of the most inspirational women I have ever had the good fortune to work with. And I’m so excited to be sharing this podcast. In fact, she’s my very first podcast guests on make more money without selling your soul and I could not be more excited for it. And in the meantime, if you’ve been listening to this and thinking, I want to be more successful in the coaching space, I’m ready to think about having a high ticket group program. Where do I start? What’s it going to look like? Head on over to my one Academy where you will find the profitable program calculator which is a link to in the show notes and head on over there to learn more about what your business life gets to look like a year from now. I’ll see you next week.
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