Mark Butler: My name is Mark Butler and this is a podcast for coaches.
Today, I want to talk to you about what I'm calling a marketing plan.
I'm proposing what I think, as of this moment anyway, is one of the simplest
possible marketing plans a coach could follow to fill their practice.
So I have three chapters for you today.
There's a fourth chapter, but I think it deserves its own episode.
We'll get there.
We'll see.
Maybe I'll Maybe I'll do chapter three today and then decide I
want to roll right into four.
But I think chapter four deserves its own episode.
So chapter one is called goals.
Chapter two is called a thought experiment.
And chapter three is called the list of maybes.
So let's talk about goals.
I want to tell you the goals up front because you might hear these goals
and say, those are not my goals.
In which case, great, this is not the marketing plan for you.
And you're onto other things, bigger, better things, whatever you want to do.
Um, but this entire marketing plan is built around a set of goals that
if you buy into these, then I think you'll find that this marketing plan
represents a best case scenario for you.
So the first goal here is a full coaching practice.
Now for me, a full coaching practice means somewhere between.
On the low end, 12 and on the high end, maybe 18 clients.
And in a given week, what that represents is around 12 to 14 sessions, probably
closer to 10 to 12 sessions, if I'm being honest at this point in my practice.
So for me, that's full.
I know of coaches who are, who are working as many as 25 and
30 hours a week with clients.
I think those coaches are superhuman.
I think that's amazing for me.
Full means.
10 to 12 sessions a week.
You get to define full for yourself, but that's the first goal is a
full one on one coaching practice.
Now let's be clear.
Inherent to that goal is the idea that one on one coaching
is the thing that you're doing.
So you make everything harder.
You make everything more complex when you decide to sell one on one coaching.
And Fill in the blank, whatever else you're selling.
In addition to one on one coaching, it just introduces complexity.
And if you want to hear more about the complexity, you can go to
earlier episodes of this podcast.
But this whole plan is built around the idea that you would fill a one on
one practice and that the marketing you're doing is in service of that
one on one practice, not one on one coaching and some other thing.
The some other thing really does muddy the water.
And you'll, you'll see more clearly why when I get into chapters two and three.
So a full coaching practice, a sub goal on the full coaching practices.
I want a full coaching practice with minimal traditional marketing activity
and very little sales activity.
In other words, if I'm coaching 10 or 12 hours a week or 25
plus for those Superheroes.
If I'm coaching that much, and that's how I want to be spending my time, I
don't want to be spending another two, three, five, eight hours per week in
traditional marketing and sales activity.
So it's not just that I want a full coaching practice.
It's that I want a full coaching practice without having to spend
a bunch of time on content and a bunch of time on consultations.
The best case scenario here.
Um, is I have a full coaching practice in which new clients tend to reach
out to me and request coaching rather than me having to feel like I
have to go hunt for my next client.
I mean, we're, we're, we're being blue sky here, right?
Why not?
The goal is not for me to be out there hunting for clients.
The goal is to receive emails, DMs, texts that say, do you have availability?
I'm looking for a coach or I know someone who's looking for a coach.
That's our best case.
Another sub goal on the goal of a full practice is
I want my fee to increase naturally and organically over time such that
I'm doing the amount of coaching I want to do and earning the
amount of money I want to earn.
So look at that whole picture.
I am coaching the number of hours I want to coach.
I'm making the money I want to make, and I'm not having to spend a bunch of
time in traditional sales or marketing.
And I'm definitely not having to advertise.
I'm not having to spend money on ads.
That's my best case scenario.
Now, as you hear those goals, if you think, Well, no, the problem is I'm
seeking quote unquote unlimited income.
And I'm actually excited about the work, the activity of traditional marketing and
sales, as in, I want to be advertising.
I want to be selling low ticket products inside of funnels, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay.
No problem.
I mean, in my opinion, big problem, but, but that's my bias.
That's the whole bias of this podcast.
If that's who you want to be, and if that's what you want to do.
Everything I'm about to say is not for you.
Not that you're not welcome to it.
You're welcome to it, but you will find it, I think, useless because everything
I'm about to say is intended to fill somewhere between five and 10 and 25
hours a week of one on one coaching.
And in my opinion, my worldview is I want thousands and thousands more coaches.
Who are doing somewhere between five and 15 sessions a week and
being paid very well to do it.
So that worldview, that philosophy and that bias, that's what's
driving what you're about to hear.
Let's go to chapter two.
Chapter two is a thought experiment.
I want you to make a list.
No, I'm not telling you to pull your car over or stop right now.
It really annoys me by the way, when people in books at the end of
a chapter, they say, Before you read the next chapter do this exercise.
I always think you're not the boss of me Your mediocre book has not persuaded me
that I should stop what I want to do to do what you want me to do So relax, I'm gonna
keep reading and if I decide to I will implement Maybe some percentage of what
you're telling me to do I do get, I get a little bit, uh, I get a little bit feisty
when I read these books because you're not in charge of how I consume your content.
Don't tell me to stop anyway.
You can do this whenever you want or never make a list of five people
who might accept coaching from you.
A coaching offer.
Take some time.
Just let the names flow into your head.
Five people who might accept a coaching offer to reduce the friction
of the exercise, set the price of your coaching at zero in your head.
So now you're saying, who are the five people who would be most likely to
accept an offer of free coaching from me?
Some of you might discover that you can't get three names on that list.
No problem.
This is not a test.
It's not an evaluation, it's a thought experiment.
If you find you can't even get three names on the list, no problem, we'll
address it, we'll talk about that.
Here's what would usually happen, I think, if I take someone
through this thought experiment.
I think they will make the list of five names and then they'll
immediately go into evaluation.
Oh, would she say yes?
I don't know.
We've talked about it the one time and she seemed kind of
interested, but then I didn't want to be awkward and make an offer.
So I just said nothing and oh, he might, well, he's really
having a hard time right now.
He really needs coaching.
And then we start to evaluate the people on our list of five.
I think many of us are walking around with a list of some number of people.
There are actual faces in our heads and we're thinking to ourselves, either I
would love to coach that person or that person really needs coaching or how
might I offer coaching to that person?
No problem.
I don't think this is a bad thing, but I think it cuts you off from the
insight that would actually benefit you.
And here's how you get to that insight.
Take that list of five.
Maybe it's only three, maybe it's zero, but take whatever list you've made and set
it aside and make another list of five.
Let the names flow into your head, scroll through your phone, look at wherever you
maintain a list of contacts and just let names jump off the screen or the page.
Would this person, might this person accept an offer of free coaching for me?
Repeat this process until the next name feels really hard to add to the list where
you really feel like you're reaching when you get to the point where you're saying,
Oh, Oh, you know what, there's that girl who's the receptionist at the daycare.
Yeah.
You know, maybe, maybe, and the more, when you're having to really
persuade yourself that that name should be on the list, it's okay.
The exercise is complete.
This is not a challenge for you to stretch your thinking.
Think of this as a low hanging fruit exercise.
If a name pops into my head or is on my screen and I think, yeah.
That person might accept an offer of free coaching for me.
Maybe it's only a 10 percent chance.
Maybe it's a 70 percent chancE.
what we're testing for is do I think this person is a maybe and if I don't have
to convince myself, if I don't have to work very hard to persuade myself that
the person is a maybe they are a valid maybe and their name goes on the list.
Now, I have no idea how many people are on your list.
I frankly have no idea how many people are on mine.
As I thought about taking myself through this exercise, I thought, well, my
inbox probably has somewhere between 15 and 20 messages in it going over
the last several months of people asking if I have coaching availability.
Okay.
All of those people are on the maybe list.
And then I have past clients and I have current clients and I have
bookkeeping clients who, yeah, some of them belong on my maybe list.
Frankly, the reason I didn't really take myself through this exercise is out of
laziness because I thought I have to block out some time and I actually have
to go through inbox and contacts and maybe through my Stripe and PayPal history.
And just I have to think about friends and family and I gotta build my maybe list.
I do think it's a worthwhile exercise, but here's where it yields the most insight.
First.
The issue is not whether you can make a perfect offer to one of the first five
people that went onto your list, because that tends to be where you hang out.
I wonder if she would, I wonder if she wouldn't, how would I say it?
What would I say?
It's not that that's bad.
The issue is if you were to make coaching offers to the first five people,
whose names popped into your head.
Somewhere between optimistically, somewhere between one and five of them are
going to accept that offer, but then what?
Then you might have a couple of clients.
You might not, but you still have this looming lingering question
of what about after these people are finished coaching with me.
Now, we know that some of them will renew and some of them may
renew for years in the long run.
I think our coaching practices will be mostly filled by longterm clients
with whom we have great rapport who just keep signing up, renewing and
maintaining the relationship and being in that position with a few clients.
I got to say, I'm so grateful for it.
It's amazing.
You've heard me talk about it.
The relationships are great.
The insights, the report, it's all fantastic, but getting from
here to there can be tough.
When I hear people say, I have one client, I have two clients.
I have no idea where the next client will come from.
My hypothesis, what I'm, what I'm suggesting today is that we would all be
wise to maintain a growing list of maybes.
And actually that's chapter three.
Let's go to chapter three.
Here's the hypothesis.
If at any given moment there are, let's say 100 people walking around
earth who would maybe accept an offer of coaching from me, then my practice
will get full and stay full forever.
Now, yes.
100 is a totally arbitrary number.
I have no idea what the actual number is, but I'm anchoring you to that number to
give you the idea that the point is not to have at any given moment, one or two or
three people who would absolutely say yes.
It's to have a bunch of people who might say yes.
Now.
Maybe I'm just dressing up and reframing the idea of having an email list or a
social media following, but it's not quite that an email list, a social media,
following a podcast audience, , all of these things probably contribute to and
support the list of maybes, but it is not the list of maybes the list of maybes.
Are actual names that I can look at individually and feel confident in myself
and say, I bet that person would seriously consider an offer of coaching from me.
What it does is it indicates to you how many relationships you've
done the work of creating and nurturing such that that offer would
not be shocking or off putting.
Or even offensive to the person that the offer would be welcome.
Now, it doesn't mean it's a yes, but it means that the offer would be welcome.
And if I have enough people walking around who would be happy to receive
an offer of coaching from me, then it's inevitable that some of them will say yes.
So the limiting factor is not how many clients do I have today?
It's not how big my email list.
Because by the way, many of you have already experienced having an email list
in the hundreds, maybe some, maybe in the thousands where you send , a coaching
offer to that list and you get no yeses.
, Because that list doesn't necessarily represent or make
obvious the group of people who would welcome an offer from you.
The only thing we know that they would welcome is the next newsletter
or maybe the next post on social or maybe the next podcast episode.
So they haven't escalated themselves.
They haven't raised their hands and said, I am a maybe, and
it's the maybes that matter.
Let me tell you a story real quick.
Actually, this is, this is very recent.
This kind of drives the point home.
I received an email from a coach coaches are who I have around me.
I received an email from a coach.
The coach said, I'm curious about the possibility of coaching with you here.
A couple of the issues that I'm thinking about working on.
And I will admit to you that when I get that kind of message, I
usually consider it a done deal.
And I say, Oh, well, I'm going to coach this person.
So I replied with a video side note.
It's really a hack to reply with video.
It's very personal.
It's just, it's a way of saying you matter so much that I'm going to send
you a video and use your name and talk to you about your, your message.
I think it's quite powerful anyway.
So I reply with a video and I say, love to talk to you about those things.
By the way, I'm full enough right now that it's really only Wednesday at 10 a.
m.
That I could work with you.
So if Wednesday at 10 a.
m.
Works, fantastic.
If it doesn't work, I don't know.
We might have to delay and work together in the future or I might, I might
sincerely need to open up another spot in my calendar, which I could be open to.
The person replies and says, Oh, actually, I'm just curious about the potential
for working together in the future.
I'm just kind of putting out a feeler.
Oh, okay.
No problem.
And I can't remember if it was in that exact moment or maybe a day later when
the person replied and said, there's a member of my family who's actually
looking for a coach and Wednesday at 10 AM might work for that person.
And I thought, Oh, okay.
Fast forward two or three emails later exchanged with the person and the person
has signed up and paid for coaching.
And I've still never had a conversation with the person.
So this to me is an example of the maybes that are floating around
in my universe producing yeses.
That's why I believe in this hypothesis that I don't have to look at that list
of people, the 100 people, hypothetically speaking, and assume that they will
be the person who signs up for coaching, who requests the support.
the way that list is benefiting me is it's indicating to me that I have
confidence about the number and quality of relationships that I've, that
I've created and that I'm nurturing.
Because in that whole scenario that I just described, I didn't
even know that the person.
Who ended up making the successful referral.
I didn't even know that that person was a maybe on my list, but they
were referred by one of my clients.
So that client is definitely on my list.
That's a person who's already signed up for coaching and may
continue to sign up for coaching.
They introduce me without me being present to the second person.
And the second person refers the third person and the third
person signs up for coaching.
That's how this happens.
And in order for me to stay in the right mindset and to direct my daily activity
and my weekly activity toward the creation and nurturing of these relationships,
I want to look at this list of a hundred or three or five or whatever.
And I want to say, The more of these maybes there are,
the easier it is for me to fill and keep full my coaching practice.
Here's another story.
I recently was talking with a client who has amazing coaching and training offers.
She does some training in addition to her coaching.
And she was actually talking, we weren't using this terminology, but she
was talking about her list of maybes.
And she said, I'm a little bit frustrated because there will be people who ask
me about a specific training that I do.
And they'll say, I'm so excited to do it.
Just let me know when the next one is.
And then when she lets them know the next one is coming, all of a sudden
they have reasons for not doing it.
It's very frustrating to her.
And I understand, and I don't blame her for her frustration.
But we need a reframe here.
The reframe is not that her offer actually isn't that good.
And it's not that these people are flakes and it's not that no one
follows through on their commitments.
None of those things are true.
What is true is that those people's enthusiasm is a strong signal.
It's a valid and valuable signal of the quality of her offers
and of their confidence in her.
The only issue here is that there are not more of those people.
What I said to her was, maybe you have five or six or seven people
right now who have said to you, I can't wait to do your training.
Just let me know when it is.
But because of whatever fear or life circumstances or timing, when
you reach back out, they don't say, Oh yeah, I'm ready to go.
Maybe one of them is ready to go.
The issue then is not.
That seven out of seven didn't say yes.
The issue is that there weren't a hundred of them.
If there were a hundred people who have expressed enthusiasm about
your training and said, just let me know when the next one is.
I only need at any given moment, 10 or 15 percent of those supposed
yeses, which I'm calling maybes, I only need 10 or 15 percent of those
to receive my offer in a moment when they're ready and willing to say yes.
If I need a hundred percent of my maybes to convert, I will always be
failing and always be frustrated.
But if I only need a small fraction of my potentials, a small
fraction of my maybes to convert.
Then I'll always be full, I'll always be happy and the magic, well, I'll always
be happy as a good news, everybody.
I just revealed the secret to happiness in life.
This is it.
Just kidding.
What I mean is I will find it easier to maintain my confidence in my coaching
practice because I will have enough people who might say yes, such that only
a portion of them need to say yes in any given moment for me to stay full.
I know how basic it sounds, and it is simple, but the hard part is, is
managing our own thinking and managing our emotional states while we're
letting this process work itself out.
I also understand that in the world that we live in, especially in the
coaching community that many of us live in, maybe is considered a bad word.
The people who have such a high percentage of our attention, they
tend to be very transactional people.
And transactional people tend to deal exclusively in yes and no.
And in fact, they make that part of their dogma.
I can live with yes, I can live with no, but I can't live with maybe I'm coming at
this from a completely opposite direction.
I live in maybe, and I love maybe, Oh, you're a maybe perfect.
Because I know that at some point in the future, if I maintain the
relationship with you, And I keep giving you love in whatever form.
Maybe it's my podcast.
Maybe it's my newsletter.
That's where those things factor into this plan.
By the way, if I stay present and positive in your life, the day may
come where you have a change of circumstances, a surge in life pain,
something goes on in a relationship.
Something happens where you say, I got to get some help.
And then the maybe reaches back out and becomes a yes, or many of those
people , who do live in, maybe they will never become yes, but they will be
having a conversation with a loved one.
They'll be talking to a sister in law and they'll say to their
sister in law, Hey, how are things going in the, uh, relationship?
Oh, it's getting worse.
To be honest, I'm really frustrated and I'm a little bit scared because of
the, for the first time ever, divorce feels like an option and it's, it's
kind of scaring me and I kind of don't know what to even think about this.
And then the person who is on your quote unquote maybe list, the person
with whom you have a present positive relationship says to the sister
in law, I'm so sorry to hear that.
You know.
There's this coach.
I, I, I follow.
And then I, I've talked to once and maybe you should talk to her.
Maybe you should talk to him.
And then the sister in law says, I have thought about looking for a coach or for
a therapist, but it's just intimidating.
I don't even know how to find one that they can be really expensive.
And then the person who knows you says, yeah, agree with all of that.
It is really hard to find a coach or a therapist sometimes.
I know this person pretty well.
I mean, I don't know them personally that well, but I really love what they say.
I love how they think I did talk to them once and they just had
a really nice way about them.
You should reach out.
, and then the coach gets an email asking about availability and price.
Probably that's how and why.
This works.
And since we're not trying to put 12 million people in a membership or 400
people in our quote unquote group program or mastermind, we're trying to keep full
a practice with 10, 12, maybe 20 sessions a week where we're serving clients and
building longterm relationships with them.
The scenario that I just described is enough.
It is sufficient to fill and keep full that practice and its entire focus
is on the people who might say yes.
Okay.
I just looked at the clock on my recorder.
Let's do chapter four.
Now, hopefully I haven't lost your attention.
Chapter four is implementation.
Chapter four is.
Some very basic ideas you, if you all know me, you know, I don't, I have a
tendency to overthink and overcomplicate.
And so when it comes to implementation, I have to work very hard in the
opposite direction to make this as simple as it can be for all of us.
So here's how we might go about implementing this.
Number one, we do the thought experiment that was in chapter
two, make the list of people.
In order to grow that list.
Right now, today, we shift our framing of the list from people who might accept
a coaching offer from me to people who would be happy to hear from me.
Now, I, and I think, and hope all of you will find it pretty easy to
make a list of 100 names of people.
Who would be happy to hear from you.
Now you might be thinking, what do you mean?
Happy to hear about my coaching, happy to get my something.
No happy to hear from you as in hi, just thinking of you hope you're well.
That's the level at which we're approaching this, right?
Simple, happy to hear from you from there.
We can look at.
Non transactional.
Okay.
Our focus here is to be relational, not transactional outreach and follow up.
And that can set, by the way, we're now in a purely hypothetical territory
for me because I haven't had to do this and it's not really a natural skillset
for me, but it's one I want to develop.
So now I'm not speaking to you as an authority.
I'm speaking to you as a peer who's curious about the
possibility of this working.
And I do have a sense and an instinct that this would serve us well, but I'm going to
be honest about the fact that I'm now in purely hypothetical territory for myself.
Okay.
So I make the list.
It's got a hundred people on it.
These are people who I think just like me, care about me and
I like them and care about them.
And we want to hear from each other.
Now I'm looking at how do I stay in touch in such a way that.
We just have good feelings between us.
Maybe it's that I'm a YouTube fanatic.
I watch way too much YouTube and occasionally, maybe I clip a
video and text it to a friend and say, this made me think of you.
It's 60 seconds.
And it reminded me of something that we talked about.
Maybe I'm a person who loves books.
For example, once I was working in my yard, I was listening to an audio
book, something in the audio book.
Triggered a memory of a conversation I'd had with a client.
I stopped, I went into the Kindle version of the book.
I clipped, I sort of screenshotted that part of that book and I texted
it to this client slash friend of mine immediately and said, this made
me think of our last conversation.
No ask, no offer, no get, like there's no take in this whole thing.
It's just outreach and give.
Now, eventually we, of course, we're looking for an opportunity to
make the best possible invitation for the context and for the
relationship and for the moment.
And what I mean by that is if a person who's on my list of people who might like
to hear from me, if conversation sparks and they say, Oh, you know, I'm struggling
with X or Y or I'm hoping for X or Y, then there's an invitation to be extended.
Now that invitation could be an invitation.
To a conversation I could say.
Would you like to have a conversation about that?
Or it could be an invitation to a newsletter.
Not that the newsletter is the thing, but it's just a way to take the relationship
from being one that exists completely outside the context of my coaching.
To one that now can exist inside the context of my coaching and
somewhere in there, a person.
Becomes a, maybe.
They become a person who would not find an offer of coaching.
surprising or off-putting.
They become a, maybe it's part of the relationships, natural progress.
Mark Butler: You see how we're progressing here, but we're never
doing it in a transactional way.
We're always staying relational.
And our business model never requires us to become transactional.
Because in the natural course of being our best in that relationship,
the relationship progresses naturally, and I never have to force or make
it transactional . The hard part of this is patience and confidence.
That's my hypothesis.
And this is where I do have evidence for my own coaching practice is that
progress will be slow and then quick.
And what I mean by that is the journey from no clients to a few
clients could take a long while.
And then the journey from a few clients to a full practice could feel very sudden.
It's because I believe there's compounding in relationships.
To the point where eventually as you've invested in relationships
and as you've nurtured and as you've stayed in touch and I'm evidence
that you can do that really badly.
We talked about this in the last episode, but if you do it at all, there's
eventually a compounding effect where the success goes from feeling very, very
slow to very, very quick and you find yourself suddenly having to deal with.
I've run out of spaces.
Do I need to raise my rates?
Do I need to open more room?
Is it time to go to groups?
Is it that we'll do a whole episode on that anyway, the success I believe will
come slowly and then quickly, but it will be built around and based on your
focus on nurturing the relationships you already have, having those relationships
naturally become a maybe as in.
The number of people who might accept a coaching offer from you grows over time.
And then they ask for coaching.
Remember one of my main goals here, and for me, it's basically a non negotiable.
I don't want to be chasing clients.
I want them to be asking me about my availability.
If that's not the way it's going to happen, I'm frankly, not that
interested in being a coach.
So I will give up speed.
In exchange for that priority, that's where the patience
and the confidence comes in.
All right.
So summing up the goal is I want a full coaching practice that
requires very little traditional marketing and advertising,
very little traditional sales.
I want my fees to grow naturally over time along with the fullness of my practice.
And then through referrals, and renewals, I want my practice to stay full.
Um, and my suggestion is that the way to get there is to focus on
the number of people with whom you have enough of a relationship that
they might accept a coaching offer.
And it is those maybes that will fill and keep full your practice.
I know there's not a lot of detail in how I explained , the how of that.
But hopefully I've persuaded you about the possibility that it's
true, and then we can build on that.
Have a great week.
We'll talk to you in the next one.