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Copyright: 2007 Coaching Club

Welcome to IQ, the official CoachIQ Coaching Club member eZine. Each week you receive the latest CoachIQ news, resources, professional development tips and industry information. IQ is your ally in developing your flourishing coaching business.

This edition's highlights:

Highlights in this edition include a new Podcast interview; an LCI training program to expand your workplace coaching skills; the importance of "qualifying" in sales; the value of testing, and testing more; tips to deal with mental fatigue and burnout; another book selection and recommended resource; and development opportunities.

We welcome IQ readers to forward this publication to friends, colleagues, family and anyone you think will benefit from the eZine's content. Make YOUR community part of OUR community.

Not Yet A Member? Don't fall behind.

Take at a look at some of the resources hundreds

of your peers already have access to...

• The industry leading 104-week eCourse (UCBBP) that steps you in detail through every process required to build a flourishing coaching business.
• Dozens of 'fill-in-your-business-name' marketing and operational templates.
• Audios and Podcasts by some of Australia's leading Business Leaders and Master Coaches, discussing their most intimate business and coaching secrets.
• Access to the country's most exclusive coaching networks, previously only open to the coaching elite.
• A Bookclub with over 75 world-renowned publications.
• Videos, life tips and strategies, interviews, plus much more.

CoachIQ Coaching Club is a resource rich community for practising and aspiring coaches. It contains ALL the necessary information, resources, templates, networks and intellectual property you need to avoid costly pitfalls and implement powerfully effective strategies to build a flourishing coaching business.

Latest Additions

PodCast Interview

Emmanuel Tsesmelis is Australia's Number 1 Passion Coach who believes that inside every single one of us lives passions, natural talents and unique gifts that if tapped into compel us to create the life we have dreamed of.

He is a dynamic presenter and motivational speaker whose passion and purpose is to assist individuals and businesses discover their own passions and achieve their ultimate vision.

In a highly insightful 52-minute interview, Emmanuel talks about 5 key steps for creating passion in every part of your life. To listen to this interview, visit CoachIQ's Podcasts at www.coachingclub.com.au/podcast.

Coming Soon

Case Studies

We're developing a range of case studies, and a new category at IQ's Articles section. Soon you will be able to access a variety of cases, each describing a common client scenario and outlining a variety of coaching strategies, skills and exercises that can be used to assist that client.

The Coaching for Peak Performance in the Workplace program provides you with the theory, skills and resources to work as a highly effective coach in the workplace environment.

Upon completion of the program you'll feel extremely confident to implement effective coaching outcomes in any corporate team. The program consists of 3 stages:

• A 2-Day intensive Workshop covering workplace coaching theory and content application. You'll immediately apply theory in simulated environments under the guidance of your experienced facilitator.

• After completion of the workshop, you have the option of completing activities relevant to your workplace or coaching scenario. You can send the completed activities to an LCI Master Coach for individual feedback. 

• 4-6 weeks after the workshop, you have the option of attending a 2-Hour follow-up Teleconference to refresh what you've learned. The interactive Teleconference provides a forum for discussion and review, including the provision of detailed feedback.

You also receive a comprehensive program Workbook that includes additional theory, readings, resources and coaching tools, incorporating all you need to widen your understanding of workplace coaching concepts. Coaching tools and resources are also available online to workshop participants for easy access and download.

Step Two: Qualify

"One of the main reasons small businesses, coaches included, fail to maximise their potential, is that they do not focus on selling. Small business operators by nature are technicians. Their interest and strength lays in the technical competence of delivering their service. They do not have a strong interest or ability to promote and sell their service".

Previous articles: Introduction, Establish Rapport

Qualifying prospects means finding out what they are looking for in your service and what factors will influence them to buy. In this phase you need to learn everything you can about their buying criteria and reset that criterion so your service is their most logical choice.

As we've discussed several times, your prospects perceive risk associated with transacting with you. They need to believe they will profit from the transaction before committing to buying your service.

The Qualification phase is about ascertaining in as much detail as possible how your prospects evaluate risk and profit. Once you have this information you can use it in your sales process to lead conversion.

For example, let's say you're a business development coach. You may qualify a prospect in the following manner.

You: What was it that motivated you to call?

Prospect: I liked the idea of increasing sales?

You: What would a 25% increase in sales mean to your business?

Prospect: That would mean around $875,000 per year gross turnover, and about $175,000 extra in net profit.

You: So, if our program worked for you by increasing your sales by just 25%, bearing in mind we've assisted dozens of business owners in identical situations regularly achieve over 50% growth in 12-months; it would be worth about $175,000 to you?

Prospect: Well yes, if it worked.

You: I understand that your greatest concern is whether our system works or not. If we were to GUARANTEE our system so there was no downside risk to you, would you be willing to invest just $4,750 per month over the next 12-months to get an additional $175,000 per year? Does that sound reasonable, investing just $4,750 per month for an extra $175,000 with no risk?

In this basic example, financial gain has been identified as a primary buying criterion. Hence the prospect has been qualified on this criterion and it has been used to channel the prospect into a sale. (Obviously in this example you need to have a guarantee; close; overcome additional objections/risks).

Action: Identify and write down all buying criteria. You should be able to come up with 6 to 10 good ones. Use these buying criteria to create a map, using open questioning, that leads your prospects through a sales process. Identify potential objections at every point and either 1/ pre-empt objections; or 2/ overcome them in 'real-time'.

In the next edition we will look at Step Three: "Build Value".

Test. Test. Test!

Whilst you can take every effort to maximise the effectiveness of your marketing systems, it's almost impossible to pre-empt what's in the minds of your prospects and clients and what's going to invoke them to act in greater accord with your desires.

For this reason, it is critical that you quantify the results of ALL your marketing processes and continually TEST and tweak them in order to improve results. Just one small change can make 100% to 10,000% difference. It can change a strategy from costing you money, to making you substantial money.

Consider an example (the logic in this example can be highly applied to your online ads and sales copy, and your website's sales process):

You may distribute 10,000 pamphlets in the newsletters of schools in your catchment area promoting a Workshop. The pamphlet may have the headline:

"FREE Workshop on how Life Coaching can assist your child achieve better results at school".

The pamphlets cost you $3,000 to design, print and distribute. From the 10,000 pamphlets, you get 125 people book into your Workshop. From the 125 attendees, you convert 7 clients (children in a 3-month coaching program).

Your Conversion Rate to Book is 0.0125%.

The Cost of Acquisition of each client has cost you: $3,000/7 = $430.

Your coaching program costs $770. Hence your NET PROFIT for the exercise is $340 per client or $2,380 total.

BUT WHAT if through TESTING, you tested another headline (and had substantially the same copy everywhere else and the same sales process).

The second headline you test is:

"IMPORTANT NOTE TO CARING PARENTS!

In a FREE 60-minute Seminar, Learn the 7 Most Prominent Reasons Prohibiting Your Child Achieving Their Best, and How You Can Assist Them Overcome These Barriers to Achieve SUBSTANTIALLY Better Results".

This headline change increases your Booking Conversion rate from 0.0125% to 0.05%, resulting in 500 attendees. Using the same sales process, you get 28 Clients, resulting in $9,520.

This small change has resulted in you achieving a 400% increase in your net profit!

Now imagine the possibilities if you could:

• Refine the body copy with a more compelling argument that further increases conversion.
• Introduce a Special Report or Special Bonus ONLY for ATTENDEES that'll "demonstrate how they can IMMEDIATELY increase their child's performance at school by up to 27%". 
• Refine your sales process and introduce a Risk Reversal Guarantee on your service such as "If your child does not go up a grade level within the first 2-months of the program, I'll refund your entire investment".
• Provide a value-add to your offer to up-sell them from the 3-month program to a 6-month program.

In Sam We Trust

In this book, investigative journalist Bob Ortega exposes the underside of Wal-Mart and defrocks Sam Walton, the founder of the retailing mammoth. Ortega chronicles Walton's rise from a backwater retailer in Arkansas to one of the richest men in the country.

While Walton carefully crafted a public image as a regular guy who drove a pickup and wore a name tag at his stores, Ortega paints a different picture of a two-faced and ruthless invader of small-town America. Walton was so stingy that his chain was last among major retailers in charity donations in terms of percentage of earnings.

He hurt the downtowns of many communities by building Wal-Marts on the outskirts and capturing up to 75 percent of his sales from the pre-existing stores. The late billionaire was obsessed with profits and cutting costs. He pioneered temporary help -a third of Wal-Mart's employees are part-time and the average worker only earns about $7.50 an hour.

Even while making a big media splash with a "Buy American" program in the 1980s, Walton quietly expanded his company's Hong Kong staff and continued to import apparel made by cheap child labor in the Third World.

But, as Ortega points out, Walton was also a retailing visionary. He saw opportunity long before others and was the first to go big with discount stores in smaller cities and towns. All the while, he stuck to his formula of offering the lowest possible prices and profiting from vast sales volumes. He invested early in computers and satellite communications for his stores.

And he raced past competitors such as Sears and Kmart with an incredibly lean and fast distribution system. Ortega, who took a leave from the staff of the Wall Street Journal to write this book, pursued Walton's legacy across America to town squares such as Steamboat Springs, Colorado, which finally succumbed to Wal-Mart, and Greenfield, Massachusetts, where activists blocked the store.

He interviewed hundreds of people including many former and top Wal-Mart officials. Ortega even hunts down Wal-Mart's suppliers in Central America to document the exploitation of children in clothing factories. In Sam We Trust is an important work about a man who changed the face of retailing, for better and worse.

Title: In Sam We Trust

Author: Bob Ortega

The Gary Halbert Letter

Gary Halbert was one of the most successfully internet copywriters, and a widely known figure in the 'blogging' and online marketing community. Back in September of 1986, he began publishing a newsletter cleverly called The Gary Halbert Letter. 

The newsletter's editions became available online, at no cost, and are all posts in the website's archive page.      

Mental Fatigue and Burnout, Out!

Overdoing? Busy all the time? Finding trouble coping with everyday tasks, which keep amounting every week? We live in a fast-paced society and as such, we are constantly pushed more towards the productive end of the spectrum.

Irregardless of how much you want to complete your tasks and meet your deadlines, you need to have balance in your daily life. Here are three simple strategies which can be easily implemented, and incrementally improved, to assist you have a more balanced schedule:  

1. Take regular breaks at work. Rather than work at something for an hour, try working for 45 minutes and then replenishing yourself with 15 minutes of stretching or fresh air.

1. Why? Because people often get caught in a pattern of slogging away trying to produce resulting in draining themselves of their energy and never feeling any rewards. These small breaks can be considered rewards as part of a behavioural management system, whereby production is then rewarded by a break.

2. Schedule family time and down time. Too many people treat such things as though they are of secondary importance. However, such activities should be included in a time management plan as with anything else.

3. Take a walk. This is a walk not where they continue to think about things, but rather a walk where they focus their attention on what is going on around them. This also expands your mental zone, especially if you've spent several hours of the day fixated on a computer screen or a task that was immediately in front of you.

1. How? You can break your own cycle of introspection by noticing things in your environment that are different. People regularly fail to observe chances surrounding their familiar environment simply because they do not usually focus on it. This can be extremely refreshing.

Upgrade Your Coaching Skills

Finding high quality professional development programs is challenging. There are rarely programs of interest offered in your proximity. Even if there is, they are usually cost prohibitive. And not to mention the imposition of sacrificing a day or evening.

Well, you now have an alternative. An alternative that over 3,000 industry-members are ALREADY taking advantage of. Counselling Academy is the largest professional development educator in mental health in the country. Counselling Academy has over 50 courses, 560 hours of training, and over 3,000 registered learners.

Here's why Counselling Academy is the latest revolution sweeping through mental health professional development...

• You can access Counselling Academy courses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• All courses are delivered and assessed online for your convenient access.
• All courses are developed to the highest industry standards, ensuring you get consistent, predictable, high quality training.
• Courses are delivered utilising the latest technologies. Many courses blend video and textual content to enhance your experience.
• CA delivers, on average, over 25 new courses each year.
• Plus much more!

To learn more about how you can boost your professional development, and save thousands a year, visit www.counsellingacademy.com.au.

Be Found With Find A Coach

Marketing is the thorn in the side of most coaches. Particularly coaches just starting off. Getting clients is a skill in its own right. It's time consuming, difficult, and expensive! But does it have to be? Not with Find A Coach - the leading search engine specifically for life coaches.

Find A Coach offers a range of tools for coaches wanting to market their services, or simply who would like to see more return for their marketing investment. If you haven't checked it out yet, don't miss the opportunity to be a step ahead of the rest of the pack.

Your clients are searching for you right now. Make it easy for them to find you.

URL: www.findacoach.net.au

Broadcast Your Brand to the World

Coach Radio is an online broadcaster of Life Coaching specific content. Delivered online via the Coach Radio website (www.coachradio.com.au) and Podcast, Coach Radio content is extremely convenient.

Coach Radio is currently accepting applications from CoachIQ members who would like to become broadcasters of this growing community. If you are interested in finding out more information, email info@coachradio.com.au to request a Coach Radio Prospectus.