We’ve all experienced them. Those folk that want to talk to you for hours about their challenge and problems but won’t sign up for your course or coaching services. 

They’ll even ask for a detailed breakdown of the costs involved knowing full well they don’t have a bean to rub together. Or a pot to piss in. 

They know it might take you half a day to pull all those elements together but they don’t care. The power is in their hands and it’s not their fault. YOU have let them take it by the way you have structured your onboarding and filtering sales and marketing process.

But what if you could tell exactly who is going to become a client now and who won’t become a client without jumping on a call with them?

How do you spot the time-wasters and avoid wasting precious time and resources on the narcissists and dreamers?

The Filtering Process for Coaches and Consultants

At any point in your business, there are 95% of people who are not interested in your service via your marketing channels. So you can immediately see that you need to get in front of a whole lorra folk to weed out the disinterested and those who will never become prospects. 

Let’s break this whole exercise into numbers. If you do 3-5 solid pieces of content across a range of social media platforms, you should be able to net 1000 targeted new eyeballs either with viral content, PR, SEO or ads.

So of those, only 5% will click through to the website or engage or sign up for your freebie. That’s 50 people. Of those 50 people, nearly 50% will never buy from you. Ever. Point. Blank. Period. 

You’re just not the right fit, energy, price, time of year, star sign, hair colour, they don’t have money, urgency, wisdom, etc. So they are discarded.

These are the ‘forget about it’ section of your audience. They might look promising but if you waste time and resources chatting them up, you’ll waste time and money cos they have no intention of purchasing ever.

Of the 25 remaining prospects, aka 25% of those that engaged with your content, THESE are the ones that may buy from you. THESE are the ones worth nurturing and focusing on. THESE are the ones who you bring through the sales funnel and onboard over a period of hours, days, weeks and even months. But sooner or later, they will become clients of yours.

These 25 people are prospects that have a challenge and a problem that needs solved by a firm or company like yours. They’ve discovered that you provide solutions to their problems so they are considering whether to work with you to help them get to the other side of their challenge. 

They are ready and willing for you to help them bridge the gap between having a problem and no longer having that problem.

It’s called the golden rule of sales and marketing. But it doesn’t finish there!

We can split the 25 firm and warm prospects up further. 15% of them are ready to purchase NOW whereas 85% will be ready to purchase EVENTUALLY. In other words, of these 25 warm prospects, 3 are ready to purchase NOW and the remaining 22 will purchase EVENTUALLY.

The future buyers will be ready to purchase a solution to their problem anywhere between 3-18 months from now. Therefore your auditioning process should clearly separate the NOW buyers from the FUTURE buyers and the ‘FORGET ABOUT THEM’ types. That way, you can talk to NOW buyers with a good script and turn them into paying clients by the end of your call.

Time well spent, I’m sure you’ll agree!

How long do you spend on the Auditioning Process? 

With a great script and process for sifting out the prospects, 30 minutes is plenty of time to convert a real warm prospect into a sale. 

The only challenge becomes how to get rid of the time wasters? 

With some qualifying questions prior to them booking a call with you, the time-wasters should self-exclude pretty darned quickly. 

In fact, the Auditioning Process or Sales Call should be reserved exclusively for NOW and FUTURE prospects. If any of the tyre-kickers have found themselves in there by mistake, your first few questions should be squarely and firmly focused on the first qualifying questions to see if the call will last more than 5 minutes.

• What they are struggling with
• What they hope to achieve by working with you
• Their level of commitment

Assuming you have a FUTURE or NOW prospect on the call, then the best way to focus the discussion is as follows:

1. What ONE key thing would you like to discuss on our call today? (It keeps the call focused)
2. What have you done so far to resolve your current issue? (This tells me if they are action-takers or not)
3. How committed are you emotionally and financially in us working together? (The golden question)
4. Is there anything else you’d like to share with me in preparation for our call? (This allows them to share important detail with me if they want to)

If you are able to put all of these elements together; from the marketing to the filtering and from the prospecting to the closing, you will be guaranteed to have 3 new clients per week, based on 1000 views per week. 

Then the only next question becomes, 

How much is each client worth to the business? 

Seems like a simple question, am I right? They paid £50 or £500 or £5000 for the pleasure of working with you to solve their problems. It’s pretty straightforward, n’est-ce pas.

BUT the question is how much are they worth as a SALE or as a CLIENT?

In other words, assuming they have a great experience and they are more than satisfied with how you helped them along their journey, what if they upgrade? Or stay on longer? Or refer friends and colleagues? Or share testimonials? Or recommend you to press and events for opportunities? 

What are they worth to the business then? You can quantify their value in terms of the immediate sale but to measure the true value they bring to your business, you have to calculate their LifeTime Value or LTC.

How to measure LTV?

It’s a simple calculation really but with a wide range of varieties. The basic principle is the following:

1. How many times will this person / company purchases from you within the next 3-5 years?
2. How many times will they refer / recommend you to others in the next 3-5 years?

Instantly, this client is transformed from being a £50, £500 or £5000 client to many times more. If your client buys your £500 package three times, they are worth £1,500 to the business. Then if they recommend your business to 5 different people and organisations and two become clients based on the referral, then they are worth £2,500 to the business.

All of a sudden, it becomes revealing to see that if each client is worth £2,500 to the business, how much would you be willing to spend to find, nurture and secure them as a client in future?

But that’s for another post!

I’d love to hear your processes and styles for finding, qualifying, filtering, onboarding, upselling and getting people and organisations from ‘Don’t care’ to ‘Brand Advocates.’ Scroll down and write me a brief comment below.