Sales Strategies and Finding Your Authentic Leadership Voice For Coaching Success
This article was adapted from Episode 34 of the Elevated Entrepreneur Podcast. Click here to listen.
In today’s episode, we are joined by Justin Janowski. Justin is the founder and CEO · Faith2Influence, and he helps Christian coaches optimize their business models, pricing, and sales strategies so that they can scale their income and their impact.
In this article, you will learn more about how to incorporate your values in your sales strategy, long-term and short-term sales strategies and authentic leadership for coaching success strategies that Justin shares in the episode to help you build a successful coaching business.
Read on!
Become Known For Something
Becoming known for something specific and differentiating yourself from others in the market is of the greatest value.
However, so many of us think of niching down as counterintuitive because we want to help everybody without excluding anyone. Narrowing our niche and focusing on something specific will differentiate you, and your ideal audience will identify and trust you more.
So as an entrepreneur and business coach, you need to narrow down your niche as much as possible to expand your reach and achieve more success.
Incorporating Your Faith In Coaching
For Justin, being explicit with Christian business owners in his sales coaching allows him to differentiate himself and to do what he does really well. The content that he teaches is just as effective as it is for non-Christians, as it is for Christians. it’s business content, but focusing on Christians allows him to pray with them and create an environment that feels safe.
According to Justin, if your faith is a part of you and what you do, and you want to work with those specific types of clients, then go ahead and include it in your brand. It is also okay for you to be faith-based and not have that at the forefront of your brand.
Tip: We should show up wherever our faith and values are, in whatever is most important to who we are and be authentic in the marketplace and serve in a way that is compelling.
Finding Your Authentic Leadership Voice
As a leader and coach, you have to find your authentic leadership voice, and it’s going to sound different from everybody else in the market. There will be thousands, if not hundreds, of leadership styles out there, but settling in your authentic leadership voice that aligns with who you are and your values is the key to distinguishing yourself and being successful in your coaching.
Your personal brand will set you apart and allow you to open up to opportunities in different ways. There are so many people in the marketplace, and there is always going to be a tribe for each individual that wants to be true to themselves.
Challenges In Sales And How To Shift Your Mindset
Most people have believed in the lie and illusion of passive income and want sales to be super easy. Everybody who has passive income knows it’s active income. It takes a lot of work to create an income that seems to the outside eye as passive, and sales is no different. Sales is a numbers game. You have to reach out to people and let them know you can help them.
Sales is a long game and successful people play the long game rather than short game. You can’t just send an email and get results until you have an audience. You can’t make sales because you started a podcast, but until you have done it for a while and built a following. Writing a book if no one knows you and self-publishing it is not going to be effective.
So often, we will do what we can to avoid sales but to get out of the sale avoidance and the short-game and long-game mess, you have to get around your money and sales mindset and get strong in your own identity, know who you are, believe in who you are and can do it.
We have to identify what stories we have about sales, money and our own value that we need to shift and change to draw more empowering stories. When sales are done right, it is leadership, coaching and an invitation to help people become who they are meant to become and get more of what they want in their life.
Tip: When we evaluate and get our story straight, we make executing, high integrity and high convergence in the sale process easier.
The Longterm Sales Strategy
According to Justin, it is most important for new coaches to play the short-term game, and as they hit a certain benchmark, minimum financial viability where they earn enough to provide the need of their business and family hit your financial benchmark, they can start playing the long game alongside the short game.
For Justin, the short game is building the business to multiple 6-figures. The long game is finding ways to do things that are easier and lighter. The short game is what you can do today, this week or this month to make more sales this year, while the long game is what you can do to build a following and nurture your audience so that 10 or 20 years from now, you can have a group that you can send emails to and close deals with.
Long-game strategy is secondary to short-game strategies, and once you have provided the initial needs and have gotten real sales and results with clients, you can pick one or two long-term goals that you can work on consistently over an extended period of time and get results.
Tip: Having one or two long-term strategies is great, but trying to do all the things at all times is too much unless you have a big and successful team.
-Raylen