We may receive commissions for affiliate links included in this article. This is a sponsored post. Future Sharks makes no warranties about the statements, facts and/or claims made on this article. These are the opinions of the author. Read our advertising and contributor disclosure here.
Many online coaches think they’ve narrowed down a way to scale consistently with their coaching services or online programs, but they teach others their methods before they’ve been proven. I’ve always operated on three key values: simplicity, relationships, and validation. In other words, I always keep my offerings simple. There is no complex web of various programs or courses that I sell. This simplicity enables me to build teams and systems around every part of my business model, so customer acquisition isn’t sacrificed for customer fulfillment, and vice versa.
Then, relationships. The form of marketing that I used is rooted in first establishing trust with a prospective customer. Rather than investing heavily in ads or making cold calls, this method of sales is far more effective because it can be done at scale and establishes trust with the prospect from the get-go.
Finally, validation. I teach my students to only scale an idea for an offer if it can be validated. Everything I teach my students is exactly what I practice and what I’ve learned, myself — the exact strategy that I used to become a millionaire at 23 when I founded Impact School. Here are the details of the strategy, that you can copy and paste into your business to hit new revenue goals and make a massive impact.
1. Build a transformative impact offer.
To be truly transformative, your business model and offer have to be simple. This is how you make the most impact.
First comes the idea. What is it that you want to teach others, or coach them on? What do you have unique expertise in? Shape out your offer, including the modules of the course, the exact week-by-week curriculum of a coaching program, or how you will offer consulting packages. Remember, keep it as simple as possible. This should be one main idea delivered in one way that will provide X impact for the prospect. Once you over complicate your offer, your prospect can become confused.
2. Validate your idea for the impact offer.
The idea must first be validated, which can be done by determining sales success (do people want what you’re buying? What is your close rate?) and by the actual results that the clients are experiencing by implementing your coaching or your insights. It has to be determined if you are actually helping them, because these clients will give honest testimonials that you can then use to scale sales and operations. If no one wants to buy your product because they don’t need what you’re selling or if no one is benefiting in a tangible way from your services, you don’t have a validated product.
3. Sell using Permission Based Relationship Marketing.
The way that I sell and teach my students to sell is a real point of differentiation from most online coaches. In Permission Based Relationship Marketing, more casual conversations are had over direct messaging online to see if you can help the prospective customer. This assists in the validation of the impact offer because you can see if what you’re offering is actually something that others need. I teach this method because it saves time and energy: rather than scheduling out sales calls or sales demos, these conversations can be had simultaneously, and can even be outsourced to a sales team once you’ve established your brand voice.
The prospective client doesn’t feel like they’re being “sold to” (which no one enjoys). Rather, they feel as though they’re talking with a friend about their needs. This is a more organic way of selling, which has a higher success rate, too. It’s rooted in permission, because after thousands of these conversations, I have pinpointed the specific ‘checkpoints’ within the conversation that grant you, as the seller, permission to move forward into the next stage of the sales process.
4. Scale.
After the impact offer has been validated and you have had successful sales and results, you can scale the offer to sell to even more clients. This can be done through outsourcing teams to systemize both sales and fulfillment. Now that it’s been proven that the offer fulfills a customer need and can help clients achieve their ideal results, the sky’s the limit with scaling potential — as long as the offer is simplistic and successful.
5. Add a new offer.
Then, depending on the feedback you receive or what your prospective clients are asking for, a new offer can be added. I will reiterate that this can only be done successfully once your initial offer has been validated and scaled. Business is a long game. I’ve found numerous times that the entrepreneurs that win in the end are those that are patient in their building process. There should be no rush to add a new offer; the need for it should come about organically.
This offer should also be directly related to your first. For example, I have both Impact LaunchPad and Impact Academy. The LaunchPad helps first time founders bring their impact idea to life, and the Academy helps founders who already have their ideas established to further develop and scale their businesses. These work together, which is critical for brand cohesiveness.
6. Repeat.
Once the new offer has been added, it’s a simple process of repeating the previous steps: validation and scaling through using Permission Based Relationship Marketing like you can hear about on Impact School’s podcast.