You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 80.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

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Hi, my strong friends. Hey, have you been feeling any physical pain symptoms lately? I think there must be something in the air. I had five clients last week show up for their one-on-one appointments and they were having all sorts of physical pain. Some were having some energy depletion, and I thought that's really interesting. I know that a lot of my clients are empaths. And so sometimes there is some kind of energy thing going on.

Now, I'm not an energy healer. I'm not an energy coach, but I have had friends and coaches that have shared with me about energy. And sometimes there's like planet alignment and phase of the moon and stuff. I don't totally get all of it. I just know that sometimes when you're seeing patterns out in the world of certain people that are experiencing the same things, there might be some type of global phenomenon going on.

I'm really curious if you've experienced it too. I know that when you're experiencing a lot of stress that can manifest in your body as pain also. So starting a business creates a lot of stress. There are a lot of unknowns. Our mind will start to go to a scarcity mindset like, oh my gosh, I'm never going to be able to figure this out or that I'm not going to be able to find enough clients. And that causes your brain to go into a little bit of overdrive, a little bit of stress, and that can start to manifest in your body as physical symptoms.

Also, if you're someone that has transitioned from the corporate world or a traditional job, and is now starting to create their own business, you might not have taken an adequate amount of pause between the two types of jobs. Many people, when they leave a corporate job, they have a lot of pent-up stress that they never really talked about.

They didn't really exhibit while they were on the job, because traditionally they are strong people. They're pushing through, they're getting things done. They're high achievers and they just don't take the time for themselves. So as soon as they step away from that job, it's like, everything gets quiet, right? It's like so much activity happening in a corporate job, you don't have time to even pay attention to your body. Then once you're home or you're in your new office, everything's quiet. And your body gets a chance to just decompress a little bit. And now all of that stress that was like hiding. It was hidden somewhere. 

 

Now, it's starting to come up to the surface and it's not that anything has gone wrong. It's that it's time for your body to let go and release all of that. And you have to process that out of your body.

Some of the experiments this week for my clients were not business experiments, this time. It was all about taking care of them, taking care of their body. So they can process that pain that stress out of their body. One of the things that I found especially helpful is submerging myself into water. I love to be in a lake, especially where I can just float. It takes pain off of my body, but also I think there's something with that energy transfer.

We absorb a lot of energy from the outside world. When you get into water, water can suck that energy right out of you. Now, do I have any scientific proof for this? No, I'm sure I could go and find it. I do have a minor in chemistry. This stuff makes sense to me, but I don't have like that scientific proof that if you put your body into water, there is that ion exchange. But I noticed that happens with me.

 

If I'm feeling a lot of stress or if I've helped a lot of people, I now have taken on some of their negative energy. And so they go and they feel refreshed, which is good. That's the whole point of working together is to give some relief to other people. I have to go and discharge that energy somewhere. So for me, water is the thing.

 

Moving out here by the ocean was part of the overall strategy. There are so many reasons why we moved out here by the ocean, but one was for me to have that huge body of water where I could go and be next to it, put my feet in the water. It's a little too cold for swimming, but I could go out there to dispel some of that energy. I also have a lake that is about 500 feet away from my house.

 

And I wish it was a little bit better for me to swim in. To actually go in, it's not quite there. But I can walk around it. I can be around it. And it still gives me that replenishment of positive energy. Something to consider if you're feeling a lot of that pain,

 

A cool little fun fact. I want to share today, the day that I'm recording this marks the two-year anniversary of moving out here to the Mendocino Coast. So I decided to go all-in when I wanted to go into my private practice as a coach. I was corporate coach for a very long time. It was so great having that really great secure income all the time, but I wanted to be able to coach anybody that I wanted to using any style that I wanted to.

 

My husband and I both quit our jobs. We moved out here and went all in huge amount of risk and we had no real safety net. Once you quit your job, you can't go buy another house for a long time and renting. We have five dogs and two cats. Talk about burning the bridge behind you, because I was totally dedicated to figuring out how to make this work.

 

Are You Willing To Do Whatever It Takes?

 

I know many people as they're thinking about being entrepreneurs, they want to do it the safest way possible. They don't want to take a huge amount of risk and I get that. But also your brain is thinking so much on your escape plan and well, when should I quit? When should I quit? When should I quit? As opposed to I am all in, I am going to figure this out no matter what. Keep that in mind.

 

Who are you as an entrepreneur? Are you someone that wants to spend your time thinking about your escape clause? Or are you someone that wants to spend your time figuring out how to make it work no matter what?

 

One of those things that you're going to have to figure out, no matter what is, how do you get clients? There's the concept of how, as in what kind of process you're going to use? And where?The where is very dependent on who your ideal client is.

 

If you go back to the podcast episode on client research, that's where that is very, very important. If you don't know who your ideal client is and everything about them, you're going to have a really hard time figuring out where to find them. Spend some time writing out detailed descriptions of who this person is. This episode is all about how, the process that you would use.

 

And there's going to be four types of processes that you can use that I'm going to share with you.

 

Work Smarter Not Harder

 

Now, before we get into that, I'm going to talk about Value Stream Mapping. This is something in the lean world where we're trying to do business the easiest way possible for the biggest bang for our buck. Value Stream Processes is where it's a step-by-step process. And for each step of that process, you're looking for how many widgets are going through.

 

In this case, as you're trying to find clients, you're thinking how many clients go through each of those process steps. You're also thinking about how much time does it take you? What is your time investment? Your prep time, your delivery time, if you have any transportation time to consider all of that goes into it. How much money are you investing and how much of your effort?

 

So you have three things that you're considering for you; your time, your money and your effort. And then overall to get someone through that whole value stream process where you want to get them to say yes to your offer, how long does it take? Is it something that just takes 10 minutes? Is it something that takes an hour? Does it take a calendar week, a calendar month, several months?

 

That's a nurture path. How long does it take to get through your nurture path? You're going right from the very time when you first encounter them or they first encounter you all the way to, when you have gotten them to say yes to working together. This front-end part of your process, this could be considered a nurture path. This could be called a client pipeline, whatever you want to call it. But this is just the very first part, the front end of your process.

 

And then once they say yes, then you have the backend part of your process of actually working with them. And what does that look like? That'll be a completely separate topic from this.

 

My first year as an entrepreneur, I was trying so many different experiments to try to find clients. And honestly, I was getting exhausted. I was getting depleted energy-wise. I was getting de-motivated disappointed because I was trying so many things and it seemed like nothing worked. I finally decided, okay, I'm going to sit down. I'm going to map out what are all of the different ways that I have been trying this and what are the steps that I was using? How much time and effort? Which things were working because I did actually sign some clients that first year and then were there any similarities between them?

 

So here's the shocking thing. I had 54 different ways of trying to get clients. Holy cow, no wonder I was so exhausted. And the ones that had worked, oh my gosh, you guys, this, this makes me cry even thinking about it today. Some of them took as much as 40 hours to nurture someone to say, yes. That is not sustainable for the long haul of anybody's business.

 

When we're thinking about all of the different ways that we can get clients, you can do a one to one nurture to try to get them all the way through to say yes. You can do a one to many where you're nurturing a whole bunch of people at the same time and trying to get them all to the point where they're saying yes or a large percentage, but how much time and effort and cost was involved in all of that.

 

When I looked at my 54 different ways, it was really easy for me to then have a visual of what wasn't working. I could start cutting out all of those activities because they had never worked. But until I made it visual, I would have never been able to do that because it's all in my head, right? I'm just like, I don't know. I'm just trying, whatever. As soon as I made a visual, I saw it. And I was like, oh, that's ridiculous. I'm not going to do those things anymore. And then the things that were working, is there another way that I could do that, that doesn't take as much time.

 

The 4 Strategies for How to Find Clients

 

That's when I realized there really are four different strategies for how to acquire customers. Those four things are buy, borrow, build, and search. And I'm going to give you two tips before we get into those four strategies.

 

So the two big tips that I found was that.

 

Tip # 1. The Blue Fish

Make sure that I'm spending time with highly qualified leads. What I was doing is I was going and finding anyone who seemed like maybe they could possibly be a client. Someone that might need some type of life coaching or business coaching. Well, all my gosh, there are so many people on the planet. Everyone can use a life coach, but there has to be some kind of a qualifier on if they are ready for my time and effort.

 

Same thing with business. There are so many people out there that are either a business owner or an employee, all of them could use a business coach. There's always some kind of work stress going on, or they're trying to improve their processes or trying to create a whole brand new business and all of the new processes that go.

 

If I was going after every single one of them, I'm going to get exhausted. So tip number one, make sure that they're highly qualified, that they're ready, they're willing, and they're able. Ready to actually hire someone like they're wanting to hire someone. They want the help. That they're willing, that they're willing to consider you and your methodology and your approach. And that they're able so able, could be financially able to pay for services. And also mentally able, meaning that they don't have too much going on for them where they can't really function that well in life. Because at that point they need other support teams to help them.

 

With coaching, you need someone that is at a baseline level, ready to just go forward. Tip number one, make sure that the people that you're spending your time with are ready, willing, and able. They're highly qualified.

 

Tip # 2 Concentrated Pools

The other thing is concentrated pools. I know that social media is a great place to go and advertise in some way to get known for people to know what you do, maybe even for you to make offers to help. The thing is social media is a large pool of people that may not be ready, willing, and able. They might not even be interested in anything that we're doing.

 

If we're thinking about a swimming pool or a lake full of fish, all of the fish are different colors. You're looking for your one fish. Let's say it's a shiny, bright blue fish. If everybody in the pool is a silver fish and there's only one blue fish, would you spend all of your time in that one pool trying to get that one fish? Or would you go find a concentrated pool where all of a sudden there's like a hundred fish in this pond and let's say 80% of them are blue. And the other 20 are those silver fish.

 

You're going to have a lot better time finding a client. Because you're going to go in there, you're going to tell 80% of this population who you are and what you do. And they're going to be like, yay. You are someone we have been looking for. That is a great use of your time. Okay?

 

Tip #1: highly qualified people that are ready, willing, and able to buy.

Tip #2: Find the concentrated pool where they all are hanging out.

 

Okay. So here are the four strategies that you can use.

 

Strategy #1: Buy an Audience

 

The first one is to buy their attention. You have two different ways of getting attention. You're either interrupting them as they're doing something else. They might not be actively looking for your help at that moment. Facebook or any of the other social media, where they're scrolling. They're just there for entertainment or to buffer away from the rest of the world.

 

You're going to interrupt that flow with some type of an ad. That also happens on TV all the time. You're watching some favorite show that you have, and all of a sudden an ad pops up. You weren't actively looking for cookware, but boom here's an ad for cookware. One-way interrupting.

 

The other way is to purchase an ad where they're actually looking for that service. If you can figure that location out, you're going to have a lot easier time with more people coming to you. When you're thinking about buying ads, do you want to interrupt them? Do you want to go where they're actively searching for your kind of services? Some of the places that I've seen ads that may or may not be a good place for you to consider:

 

• movie theaters
• social media
• Google
• podcasts
• TV commercials
• radio commercials
• grocery store carts 
• back of grocery receipts
• newspapers
• high school yearbooks
• billboards

 

Or if there's conferences where people are coming for a specific topic, you can buy some ad space somewhere in that conference or on material that they're handing out. There are also stages that you can buy a spot on a stage. There might be speaking gigs and the audience is already being pulled in by somebody else. And then you can buy a spot to present. That be at a conference if you want that. It could be an art show, a wine show, anything where it's bringing in your concentrated pool of people. How can you get your foot in the door? Sometimes that's by buying that opportunity on that stage.

And then the final one with buying is buying a list of contacts. There are so many privacy laws right now that say, we're not going to sell your information to anyone, but I know that there are business owners that are still buying lists.

 

I personally don't like this approach, but other people, it might work for them. They might actually buy a list of people that are interested in what they're doing, and then they reach out to those people directly. Those are all the ways that you can buy clients to come into your client pipeline or your nurture path; ads, opportunities, or list.

 

Strategy #2: Borrow an Audience

 

The next strategy is to borrow someone else's audience. Before we were paying to get in front of an audience, now we have people that have created the audience you want to get in front of them to borrow the audience. Now borrow is different than steal. So we're not going to go get into in front of someone else's audience that does the exact same thing that we do and try to steal people away from them. Not cool, but you can borrow.

 

I like to think of business circles [Podcast Episode 89]. All of us have other people that provide a service for our same ICA. Our service might just be a little bit different than what they do. Can you partner together in those different business circles to help out the client? Each service provider provides a certain amount of support or service for those clients so that their needs are fully met.

 

In order to borrow someone else's audience, you're usually approaching whoever has that audience and making a pitch to them or that person that has the audience is reaching out to you saying, Hey, I'd like to provide extra value to my audience. Can I have you come in and do something for free? And by doing something for free, the audience gets some kind of help and support. They learn something from you. And what you get out of it is that those people now know about you.

 

And they've tried a free sample and now they might come and purchase some of your products and services. So one of the easiest ways to see this out in the world is late-night talk shows. Let's take Jimmy Fallon as an example. He is trying to create a very entertaining show for people. His show is going to make money by selling advertising space, but he needs people to come and be a guest on his show.

 

He is providing an opportunity them to come and get exposure. It helps his audience to be more entertained so the audience gets more value, but the guest is also getting exposure to that audience. Jimmy Fallon has built up a huge audience. If he has movie people come in, they're promoting their movie, their product or service that they're trying to promote is for the audience to go to that movie. They're going to show up for free. And then the audience gets to have that entertainment and that movie might have more people go and attend it.

 

The show owner, Jimmy Fallon, and all of his crew, they benefit by keeping the audience engaged. As long as the audience keeps coming back for more, their audience numbers are higher. They're able to sell more advertising space. They're making income. That's something you can see out in the world.

 

In the coaching world or the education world or the healing world. We have different people that have built up an audience could be in a Facebook group. It could be in conferences. It could be at larger-scale workshops or retreats or something. Maybe it's summits, they've built up an audience and they want to nurture that audience, keep giving them more value so that they stick around because it's good for business for people to stick around.

 

Or they might create opportunities for other people to come in that offers something different than they do, because it's valuable to the audience. The audience is more entertained or they're getting some kind of benefit from listening to these other things. And then the person who has come in as the guest, they get exposure to that person's audience.

 

This can also work out at career fairs or wellness fairs. There's some organizer of the event. They're getting some benefit from it, a business benefit, but they need to have providers there. They create opportunities. And this could be a borrowed opportunity where the service provider gets to come for free, set up a booth, they're providing something. A demonstration, a special talk, anything that's providing value to all of the people that have come to the event. In exchange, they're getting exposure to a large pool of people.

 

If you're thinking about this, you might want to consider how large is that audience? Because you want to try to have as many opportunities for people to come your way as possible. If you're going to try to borrow someone's audience and they have an audience size of 10, it might not be the best investment of your time. You want to try to find the larger audiences.

 

For example, I love the Professional BusinessWomen of California Conference. It happens every April. in the past, it was 6,000 women in person. And now that it turned virtual went to 8,000 women in person. There are so many opportunities there for a service provider to come in and offer something. It could be a speaking gig, could be a breakout workshop gig. It could be someone that's coordinating the networking events. It could be someone that has a vendor table. There are so many opportunities. Some of them, you have to give your time for free, but now you're exposed to a large audience of six to 8,000 people interested in personal growth.

 

Some of them like the vendor tables, you have to pay for a spot, something to consider. When you are a professional speaker or workshop facilitator, do you want to get paid for your efforts? Or are you willing to do it for free so that you can get exposure?

 

Now, when you're first starting out, nobody knows you. You don't have a whole lot of experience doing it for free might make a lot of sense. Because you may not find those opportunities where they're willing to pay you. But once you have a lot of credibility or a lot of experience or your own following, it makes a lot of sense for you to get paid for what you do.

 

There will be opportunities out there for you to choose from. There's opportunities for all of the free contribution and there's opportunities out there for a paid contribution. And don't be afraid to ask them to pay you. They may not have considered that they should be paying. Sometimes people just need to be awakened to the fact that this is our profession, and we get paid for doing these certain activities. That not everything can be done for free.

 

Someone shared a little phrase with me is you can die from exposure. And I thought that was hilarious because yes, we're presented with a lot of free opportunities to get in front of an audience. But yes, you can die from exposure if you're going out and doing everything for free and nobody is coming your way.

That goes back to the whole value stream. How much effort are you putting in? How much time, how much money are you putting in to get how many widgets coming through? If you're doing all of this and you're not getting any people coming your way, it's definitely not worth your effort.

 

If you're going out there and you're putting in all of this time, but all of a sudden you get a ton of people from it. It's probably worth the effort.

 

Strategy #3: Build your Audience

 

The third strategy is to build your own audience. Now, this is the blood, sweat, and tears version. It takes a long time. Yes, it doesn't cost money for the most part, because there are a lot of free ways that you can do this, where you don't have to pay to do it.

 

Social media is probably your number one way of doing this because social media for the most part is free. And there are several different platforms. What I've seen is a lot of entrepreneurs get so discouraged because they really want to throw out a handful of posts and expect to have clients just come to them. But that's not how it works. It's a build. You're trying to not only build up the number of people that follow you, but you're also trying to build up their trust in you. You're trying to nurture them to a point where they're ready, willing, and able to have your services.

 

When you're considering building up the audience also consider what are all of those nurture activities that you're going to have to do? How much time and effort does it take on your part to do? And do you have to build up a certain skillset? Do you have to get used to being more visible? That's a huge one, trying to get comfortable having your face out there in front of people. That takes a while.

 

You have to build up your comfort level, your confidence, just so that you can build up your audience. This building one is probably the most popular, but it's also the most investment in personal growth and in your own time.

 

Ways that you can build up your own audience, you've seen me doing one of them, which is building up a podcast audience. It takes a lot of effort to create each of these podcasts and fully produce them. But is it worth it? Yes. I get well over 6,000 views of my website every month. It's building every month as I have more and more episodes, I get more and more audience that is coming and coming back. You want return visitors.

 

The more that people are coming back to you, the more they're getting nurtured, they're getting closer and more interested in maybe working with you directly. Facebook groups have become very popular. There's also LinkedIn groups.

 

This is a container that you're creating for people that have a similar interest. Something to consider with this is you're going to have to do activities to keep people engaged. Do you know what those activities are? Are you talented at doing that? Do you have the right skill? And everything is learnable. You can develop yourself to be able to do all of this.

 

There's also a conversion thing to consider. It's one thing to have a group and to be able to get them to stay engaged and entertained, and there in participating, but are you able to get them to move to the next step? That in itself is a whole other skillset. Another audience that is wildly popular and a lot of businesses that are solid have this, which is an email list.

 

This is important because when you send an email to them, they actually get it unless it goes to their spam folder. But there are techniques for how you can get your emails to not go to their spam filter.

 

When you're considering something like social media, you don't have that permanent list of all of those people. So if for some reason, Facebook went down or your account gets hacked. You won't have a way to contact all of those people that you've built up. And there's social media algorithms. Just because you post something on social media doesn't mean it goes out to everybody in your contacts.

 

For example, I have a Facebook account, my own personal one that has well over 2,000 contacts at this point. I also have a Facebook business page that I had to restart because my first one that I was building up, I had almost 600 people on there, it got hacked to a point where I couldn't use it anymore. It wasn't safe. I'm working to get that one shut down. I had to start all over. A whole new set of people. Is it possible to try to pull out all of their emails? Kind of.

 

There's a lot of work that's invested, but the thing is, none of those people voluntarily gave me their email. I didn't ask them for it. So if I was to go and try to get all of their email addresses, I'm actually in violation of privacy laws. Getting yourself educated on privacy laws, also going to be important because you don't want to open yourself up for any kind of lawsuit.

 

When you're building an email list, it doesn't matter if social media goes down or not, you still have a list of everybody's emails and you've collected it in a way where people have voluntarily given it to you.

 

You can also use YouTube subscriptions. If you like to be on video, YouTube might be your avenue for building up your own audience, and then you get them to subscribe. And then you can communicate through your videos with those subscribers.

 

My last one that I'm going to share for building up your own audience is by having a standard repeating class or a workshop that you offer.

 

So the reason for this is people start to know that you offer this it's a routine thing. They might even tell their friends about it. Then you get a constant influx of new people that are coming to this standard workshop that you do. It's just part of your routine, monthly schedule. Those people come in, they get to experience what it's like to work for you. You have their contact information in some way, because they've registered with you for this class. And then you can nurture them and offer them more ways to work with you.

 

When I used to work at Genentech, this was a great strategy for us. We had three monthly classes that we did. It was our white belt series. We had one class that was all of the basic lean principles for how you can run business super smooth and efficient, smallest amount of effort, biggest for your buck.

 

Then we had one on human error prevention, because if you have a lot of errors in your process, a lot of rework, then that's going to waste your time. You're going to lose all of your business efficiencies. And then there was a root cause analysis class. It's a lot more extensive class, but it's for finding out, if something has gone wrong in the business or wrong in your process, there's a very structured approach to finding out what went wrong, where it was and how to fix it.

 

What was great is that we'd offer these workshops. There were only 25 seats available in each one, but people would come in they'd know that it was coming. We'd fill up those classes. People would get to experience what it's like to work with us. Whoever was the instructor for that particular class, they'd get a free sample of the types of tools and techniques that we teach or that we use that we can help them with. And then they could engage with us afterward and have us come on as their one-on-one coach.

 

When you're an entrepreneur, you can consider doing the same thing. There are other organizations that you can also partner with that you can offer a workshop within a series that they're doing. For example, many of the colleges are going to have an entrepreneur center. I know up in Sacramento, in California, they have the Carlson Center. It's all about helping businesses to get up and running. I can offer a workshop for them and I can choose if I want to offer it free or paid one. If I get into a routine cadence, they're always bringing in that pool of qualified people. And then those people come do my workshop, and then I can make them an offer to come and work with me one-on-one or come into one of my group programs.

 

Strategy #4: Search or be Searched

 

Strategy four for how you can find your clients is to search. And there are two ways of searching. One is that you searching for them the other way is that they're searching for you. If you are searching for them, you're going to want to be very knowledgeable on what they look like. How will you know that they're your ideal customer? Are you looking for just one individual? Are you looking for a group of people?

 

What is it about them that would make them perfect? Because if you're going out and randomly like talking to people, or if you're sending out cold messages to people, you would have to spend a lot of your time and effort sending it out to a whole bunch of people like shotgun style, if you didn't know who they were. Do you want to spend your time sending stuff out to, you know, hundreds of people hoping that maybe somewhere out there is your blue fish? Or do you want to get really good at being able to find your blue fish and then go and talk with those people?

 

In your process of approaching them, you might have different ways of doing it. I've seen some people that use the same script, so it's like they write something out ahead of time and then they just blast it out to a whole bunch of people. It's very impersonal. I don't know how many people actually respond back. I know that on the receiving end, it's usually the ones that I delete right away. In fact, I might even get a little triggered.

 

I know in the beginning stages of the entrepreneur getting them, oh, it just made my skin crawl, but there have been some along the way that when I got a cold response from someone searching for me, that it really was the right time for me. And it really was something that I needed, so I saw it as a welcome interruption, but that was because I was ready, willing and able. I was basically their blue fish.

 

Most of the time I was their silver fish. I was not the person that needed what they had at that moment. Your approach, when you're searching people is also going to be important. You might use that script. It's cold, it's impersonal, but you might have a different approach.

 

I have been known to use this searching technique, but I learned a lot about the person first and I actually cared about them and I could tell when they were ready, willing, and able. Only then did I approach them. But I also had a different way that I approached that was very nurturing and caring, not deceptive. That's another thing that's important. Make sure that you're honest with people, and patient.

 

One of the best books that I picked up when I first started to consider being an entrepreneur coach was a book called The Prosperous Coach. And it talks a lot about nurturing people for the long haul. And the author says it could take up to two years for someone to be ready to buy your services, but are you willing to nurture them along? Check-in with them from time to time? It's a really great book, so if you are someone that wants to do this search style, I'd highly encourage you to go check out that book again.

 

When you're spending your time searching for someone, keep in mind those two tips, where is a concentrated pool of all of your blue fish? And are they ready, willing, and able? What are those indicators that help you know that they're ready, willing, and able?

 

I remember when I worked in corporate getting phone calls from what we would call headhunters. I was perfectly happy with my job. I wasn't leaving my job when I was getting those calls. It was interrupting my day, it was interrupting my time. It wasn't the best use of the headhunter's time.

 

If they had a different strategy for finding the companies that were about to do layoffs or were going through re-orgs, that would probably a lot better. At the time when I was contacted that wasn't happening at all with my company. Think of your value stream. What is the best use of your time, effort, and money?

 

The second part of the search strategy is allowing them to search for you. There are people that are ready, willing, able, and actively searching for you. Have you made yourself find-able? When someone's out there searching on Google, is your stuff going to pop up? Is your stuff going to pop up on the very first page? Are they going to a directory?

If you think about the top 10 restaurant guides. Someone's hungry and they want to go to a really good restaurant, they might just go straight for a guide. There will be guides for your industry. Are you in them? Are you in those directories? Are you in top 10 lists? Do you have a website that people can find? Do you have a lot of stuff on your website so you show up all the time.

 

One of the strategies that I used with my website is that I'm embedding my podcast into its own separate page. And they also have a transcript page. Google hits my website once a week, searches all of the searchable pages on my website, which I have well over a hundred of those and it indexes it into their search engine. When someone goes and they're typing something in, it might pull up a phrase that was somewhere in one of my podcast episodes. All of a sudden they're presented with my website and they come straight to it.

 

Being known by other people too, and having them know exactly what you do helps because they may have people that are coming to them looking for recommendations. If they know you and they know what you do and who you're all about, and they like you, they're probably going to refer you.

 

Those are really great places where you can invest some time. You're going to want to have some way of tracking the numbers to see is this working for you? I like to use analytics on my website so I can see how many people have come to my website. I can see what it is they're looking at. I can see how many have come to my about page. How many have come to my contact page? I have my different products and services on there. I can see how many people have been looking at those.

 

I also have Google analytics that helps me to see where is the traffic coming from and the ones where I'm getting the most traffic, that's where I'm going to spend most of my effort.

 

In one of my previous podcast episodes, you get what you measure. So very true. You want to fill up your customer pipeline with as many people as you can. And you want to have some way of knowing where they are along that nurture path. Are they ready for you to make an offer? Just because someone comes in and they're interested, it doesn't mean it's time for you to make an offer. Again, you want to concentrate your efforts to get the best result that you're looking for.

 

After people are in your nurture process, the next thing to do is to make an offer to them. And hopefully, they say yes. If you're making offers to a whole bunch of people that aren't ready, they may choose to not even be in your nurture pathway anymore. They might choose to leave. You don't want that to happen.

 

If you can figure out how to nurture them, then you'll know when is the best time to make the offer. At that point, you're going to have the highest percentage of people say yes, in the coaching world. A lot of our offers show up as a time investment on our part. It could be a consultation. It could be a workshop. It could be any of those where it takes our time. We want to make sure that if we're investing in consult time we have the highest probability that people are going to say yes.

 

Having people come in for consults that were super, super cold, they're just kind of curious, like they don't even know what this stuff is about. The likelihood that they're going to say yes is a lot smaller.

 

You Get What you Measure

 

Having some type of a measuring system along the way of knowing, when are they ready for an offer, it will help you. And it also helps you to know what activities should you spend your time on. If you have a whole bunch of people that came in, they're just super curious, your efforts might be on education, on helping people to understand what it's all about before you go on to the next stage.

 

If you're teaching something way far advanced down the line, it's too soon for them to have that because you've kind of lost them. They don't even know why they're there yet. So pace yourself. I know it's hard when you're a business owner and you have to keep a roof over your head. You're so focused on making a sale, but there are so many little spots along the way. And knowing what your numbers are, having a way of tracking those, it helps you to know what's the right effort to be putting in so that you're getting the results. And you're getting the results in the time that you're supposed to.

 

He can't just go from, start to finish just like that. As much as we really wish it could happen that way, that's just not reality. You can do this. There is a science to it. There is a structure to it very possible. Once you figure it out, you figure out which pieces work the best for you. Then you're going to be golden. Everything's going to be up and running smoothly. You're going to have a business that always has clients. And your worries will just fade away.

 

Just know that it takes some time to get there. A lot of experiments, and you're going to be able to figure it out.

 

If you want some help on this, if you need help in setting up any of this, I'm available for you. Right now, I am fully booked on my one-on-ones, but I do have a couple of spots in my two group coaching programs. If that's something that you're interested in, please reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to have a talk with you. Maybe see if we can get some stuff set up. And if you need further support, there are a couple of spots that are still open.

 

All right, my friends, I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

 
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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships, and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, coaching, and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my MyFreedomGrove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.