Renee: All right. Picture this. You're on a call. It's going great. They're nodding, they're excited. You're wrapping up. And then they say, well, wait a second. And you're like, oh boy, here we go. But this time it's not hesitation, it's commitment. They're in it. Here's where most service providers. Mess it up because they think the yes is the finish line.

It's not if your delivery process has a gap in it. Even a tiny one, your client will take the first win, feel great about it, and then wander off. Thanks, bye. And you're like, thanks. It was great. Bye. Especially if you're doing things like VIP days, or what I would hate to say is a one-off project. Ooh. Not because they don't like you, they're not gonna wander off because the VIP day was bad, or the project wasn't great.

It's not because they don't trust you. You've already delivered, but because your next step wasn't obvious. Today we're fixing that. All right. Welcome to the Selling Your Expertise podcast. I am Renee Hribar sales coach for service providers and consultants who wanna help people but have never been trained on how to package up, sell, and deliver their expertise.

And whether you've read my book or maybe you've seen one of the talks that I've done, like the one I did for TEDx, or, hey, you're brand new here. Hi, I am glad you're with me. Go to ask me coach.com for all the freshest ways to stay connected. Beyond this podcast. Alright, let's dive into today's episode.

Today we are fixing what I call one off itis. What is that you ask? Well, it's a symptom of not being seen as the trusted advisor. it's one of the root causes of feast and famine, and today we are going to dig it out and banish it forever.

All right, let me explain. I know you always want a story, and I love telling stories. I learn best when the lesson is wrapped in a real story, so. Let me share one with you. Recently I was coaching a service provider. She's a web designer who has a multi-step client delivery process, and we are redesigning her customer journey so that clients don't drop off after the first win.

She delivers incredible results. I mean, clients get excited fast. But what we noticed is after the first project, like when she would deliver the website where you know the clarity and the momentum and all this is happening, they're thinking, oh, well I'll just keep doing it myself. I can take it from here.

Like the client would say, cool, I got what I need. I mean, and technically they did, but they didn't have a full roadmap for future success or the systems to stay on top of mind and cross the T's and dot the i's or the backend structure or a continued rollout plan. Most businesses are continuing to expand.

They change out their product lines, their offers, their branding, and. Again, once you have a website, you still need positioning refinement. So think about your own offers and your own expertise. Do your clients after you deliver that first project, do they genuinely understand the full roadmap? Do they absolutely have the systems that you know they need in place?

What about their backend structure or a rollout plan for future expansion, future launches, future ideas? Right. Everybody I know that I work with, every company, regardless of the size, has a plan for future expansion, future rollouts, future launches. Or even just the continued refinement of the positioning of what you've built for them.

If you're listening to this, I know you're not just, a one expertise person. Most of the people that I work with, and probably you. Can do so many things for clients, right? I mean, in this case, this one client, yes, she can build websites. She's also phenomenal at branding. She's fantastic at copywriting.

She's absolutely a freaking a plus student in SEO and a EO and all the ways to make your business stand out, whether it's a physical location, an e-commerce store, a coaching site, she's freaking ba real yin and the way her mind thinks about bringing traffic both organic and paid to the site. She builds how to maintain an.

Up level, the dashboards like how do we track, how do we make decisions? All of that is a part of her repertoire. But there were too many clients that were coming in getting their VIP day done and then being like, thanks. And she was like, oh, okay, thanks. Sort of sheepishly and then crying because it was fe.

And famine. She even got a job before she met me, got a job doing something else on the side just to support her website business. And I'm like, girl, you have the, you have receipts, you have the earned your stripes. All you need to do now is get great at continuing the conversation, right? Continuing to build bridges because ultimately.

They didn't have these things and we know that they need them. They don't just need the website, they need the ecosystem. And that's the difference. So one of the big issues that a lot of her clients and people that I've worked with have is they have bridges to nowhere, right?

They've got a great, oh, it's beautiful. Nothing on the other side of it. And a lot of you listening to this right now are accidentally building. Bridges to nowhere. You have a discovery call, a strategy session, mapping out the plan for the project phase one of the project, may, and right now you're, I'm calling it phase one.

You might just be calling it the project. It took you a month or it took you a day. You. Beautifully scoped it out, but there's no lock between that and the next steps. Many of you are assuming, oh, it kills me. Well, obviously they'll want the next step. Obviously, they'll wanna keep working with me.

No, they won't. It's obvious to you how everything you do fits together, but it's not obvious. To them. I mean, I tell you what, we did a poll of my, of this particular person's past clients, and we asked, you know, if they could just select all, it wasn't even a poll, it was like a tick, all that apply. It was one question and it was anonymous, and we just asked of all these things listed here, which ones do you believe I can do?

Well. Or something to that, like it was something like that I do, you know, expertly and of the 10 listed, most of them came back with only one or two tick boxes website, and it was either branding or copywriting. But she does so much more dashboards, analytics. She is a brain, she is a strategist, but she wasn't really sharing those other parts.

She was expecting the people that were hiring her to read through her website, like with a fine tooth comb. I'll be honest, half of them hadn't even gone there. 'cause that's just not how their brain works. That's how her brain works. So we think this is very human. I've done this, I've done this. So there's no shame here, but we think, oh, just 'cause we do it, everyone does that.

Everyone does that. I don't have to tell them that. They know it's obvious. It's not obvious. It's kinda like when you ever get directions, you're like, as soon as before we had GPS. Okay. Before we had GPS though, they would say, okay, you're gonna see the red barn on the corner.

You can't miss it. I'm like, oh, I can miss it. I will miss it. Most likely. But in modern, like now, it, my GPS believes that I understand what 500 feet looks like. I know. I do not, apparently I do not because I always miss the turn rerouting. Okay. So what's obvious to you? How everything fits together is not obvious to them because ai, for example, will tell them, oh, you can figure it out.

I'll help you. Or, and again, I love AI for very specific things, at very specific junctures, but not as my business coach and not as my strategist. And again, it's a great starting point. It gets a lot of answers done, it doesn't have the full picture. It doesn't have the specificity oftentimes, again, unless you are really good at building ai.

But most people that she had as her clients just talked to their chat, GPT, about their grocery list. How their interaction and their level of ai le of AI leverage was not where she was at. So yes, their AI is telling them, oh, I can help you figure that out. Or just the internet in general, like Fiverr or Upwork or wherever.

Oh, you can get someone cheaper just to do those things. Yeah. Or even their own brain says, you should be able to handle this yourself. You can do this. But the reality is we cannot rely on assumption. We must design the path forward. We must light it up just like on a plane, like here is the runway, here is the aisle.

It is lit up for your ease so you understand how to get where you want to go. And I'm gonna share with you right now this four locks framework that she and I built together for her business. So here's the structure that I redesigned with my client. Lock. Number one is the spark. This is where they go from.

I'm curious to, I want this right. And that happens early on in the sales process, whether they saw a training that you had out there, or a YouTube video, a podcast appearance that you were on or a. Maybe, you know, a consultation that they heard you give or got from a friend or referral, or maybe it was a, an initial free call, like where you actually had a discovery diagnostic conversation.

The mistake is stopping the education there. So many of us, again, I am the. First person to fall prey to this, I believe. Oh, I know it. And it's on my website and I talk about it all the time. I mean, I have a book and everything. For goodness gracious sake. I can't get me to stop talking. I got a podcast too.

I assume they must have looked at some of it, right? Otherwise, why would they want me to, you know, work with them? No, it, people make decisions all kinds of ways, so don't stop there with the education. Okay, here's the lock. Number two is the first paid. Yes. So this is your contained specific outcome focused step, and it's not a giant retainer or some vague package.

It's clearly defined like a VIP day, or here's the package over 30 days, here's what we're gonna do. Or over the next seven days, whatever that looks like for my client, this looked like a short paid working session where they created clarity, direction, and strategic decisions to be able to put the website together.

Fast and it worked beautifully. Clients loved it, but here's what we saw. They'd get the clarity and then they'd pause because clarity. Alone doesn't necessarily require continued support. So they became clear on how they could design and create a website that they wanted, but it, she wasn't weaving in even to the first initial page strategy session.

She wasn't weaving in all the other things. Remember that list of 10 things that she could have helped people with, and most of them only answered with two. She wasn't weaving in all of the other things and all the other ways that. She could support them once the website was up early on. Again, we don't wanna stop education and we wanna weave in all the other pieces of the puzzle.

Start planting those seeds early on. Okay, lock number three, the momentum container. This is where the magic happened. Instead of offering just continued support, we repositioned the next step as, uh. Continued production container. So not just brainstorming or chatting. 'cause a lot of people are like, I can get that from my business coach, or I'm in a mastermind, or I can get a AI to do it.

I'm talking about building, producing tangible outcomes. And in this new reimagined container, she spends time guiding them through defined and redefined core positioning. So, you know, our website is our supposed to be our 24 7 best salesperson is the website doing it. Let's redefine and evaluate that core positioning on the website and also structuring the asset.

Okay, so based on website visits over this time period, do we wanna keep the. Sidebar, or do we wanna do the top line? Do we want, there's different ways I'm, preaching to the choir here. I know you know this. Or just refining the language. Sometimes we speak at a higher level than we need to.

I know, I remember my journalist training. They're like, speak at a fifth grade level. Well, most of us don't. We haven't stopped at a fifth grade vocabulary and. Multiple syllable words. Okay. I'm sure there's a better way to say that. Multi-syllabic. There you go. Words are not welcome often in public facing content, not because your customers are dumb.

It's because it's human nature to just want to get to the point or even stress testing different. Different pages, right? Different of the website that they had planned on. Gathering early feedback from different sources, tightening up the frameworks. All of this is continued refinement creation.

It's not just support. And once they experience this, they understand the depth of her expertise. And now we've reduced the, I'll take it from here. Temptation, right? But here is lock number four. Remember, this is a. Four lock system that we built. This is very cool. And this was something that I was not sure she was going to be in on because it's very sales focused.

So this is called what I call the commitment multiplier. So this is the part that changed. How she looked at the entire sales process. So we added in at the very beginning, a of her sales process, a structured public commitment phase. Now, there's a lot of ways this can feed her business, but here's what we did specifically for this one scenario.

Instead of waiting until the end to talk about the rollout. Right now my client's a web designer, so you know, this also though, does work for podcast producers. Ghost writers, editors, dashboard designers, funnel ai, workflow builders. We build it in at the beginning. Here's how we did it. She gave the client.

A social media template and an email template announcing that they have a new website rollout. But you could also say, I have a book that I'm writing, or I have a podcast that I'll be launching soon, or I'm gonna be, you know, I have a book that I'm editing, or I have a funnel that I'm building, or I have a new AI workflow that I'm building.

So it's an announcement of, I'm working on this. This is something. That we're going to be doing. It's sort of like if you've ever done construction on your house, you'd probably have to go to the city to get a permit and it just, you have to put it on your front door announcing to everyone. We are going to be having some work done here.

And beyond the. Bureaucracy of that and the $10 that I had to spend, don't ask me why I'm so mad about it. We're also announcing to our neighbors, what happens? Your neighbors start coming up to your house. Hey, what are you gonna get done? Who are you working with? What are you doing? It creates conversation, but that also creates.

Commitment. So when she created this social media and email template with them, we created it together. What she had was a multiple choice question built in asking the person in their network, whoever they were sending the email to, or whoever saw the post, asking them to vote on the answer. And now, in this case with her client, she chose to ask about the topics that their audience wanted to hear more about.

Hello. That could also work for a podcast producer, a ghost writer, an editor, a funnel builder. I mean, right? Like, can you see the applications here? And I was freaking so excited about this result. This, I mean, this was a lock-in. 'cause it also helps the client see you as a partner, like a partner in the results that this website,

thing this entity is gonna have in their business and it gets better. So, hold on. I got more. Hold on. It's very, I'm like on the edge of my seat. Literally, if you could watch me recording this, I'm like, Ooh, ooh. Ah, ah, it's coming. So in this case, the client chose obviously to get that conversation going by asking about what topics they wanted to hear more about, because this.

Started to get replies. So the client like it. They literally were able to get excited about the project before it was even underway. And what's really happening here that secures future support is because once you've told people, I'm building this thing, you are far more likely to finish it. And now the client sees, oh, there's more to this than I realized.

And not in an overwhelming way, but in enough. Authority building way for my client, and that's when her clients started to shift from, oh, I can figure this out. I got this too. Huh? I don't even know all the moving parts. I see there's a lot more to this. I need her. And that's the final lock. And here's where the revenue really gets interesting.

Most service providers end the relationship after delivery or the main project, right? Again, if you've done that before, it's okay. You're here now. Haku, Matata. Like for my client, in this case, it was the website right here. Here's your website. Instead, we built in a structured office hours style continuation container where every single month she's coming in with a repeatable, scalable topic.

And again, she could have a hundred people in this and it would still be able to be low lift and easy for her to deliver. And she would talk about a very specific topic once a month in her. Office hours. She could, I, we used this so many ways down the road, by the way, like we used it as a pipeline driver.

So each month she shows up to her zoom room. She invites all of her past and current website. Builds, and she talks about SEO optimization one month, and she talks about strategic visibility another month, and she talks about authority building another month and then repositioning with your copy the second month, another month, the second month, third month, fifth month.

And then like messaging upgrades, like having a little chat bot or having an AI voice, answer phone calls that come in if the phone number's on the website, backend improvements like load speeds and page tracking. It's. All the little things that if you are a business owner and you're like, I need a website, and you go find a web designer and they're like, here's your website, and you're like, thanks, bye.

Instead of that, you like the valley girl accent. If you're not, maybe you don't even know what a valley girl is. It's somebody you talk like that ba. Okay. So this creates a recurring revenue for her. 'cause the people that have built the website with her. Or like, oh, I wanna have her continually in my pocket because I wanna keep asking her questions.

I wanna keep learning from her. So now it's not, she doesn't just have the doer. It's not just a, Hey, do this for me. It's a, Hey, what do you think about this? Alright, can you build it? So she's the strategic advisor that can also create the thing, and this is a natural feeder into other high ticket projects.

So because she started doing this once a month, office hours for her current and former clients, again, they were paying her for it, but not a ton. But here's the other part, she was able to use it as a pipeline driver because then she could invite people that she was nurturing, Hey, if you need a website or you wanna update your website.

I can do it. And hey, by the way, why don't you join me and a couple of my other clients, I do this thing once a month for them ongoing where we talk about this and this month we're talking about this topic. Do you wanna come and just be my guest and hang out? Sure. They say, it's awesome. It's really awesome.

And by the time that call is over, they're like, where do I sign? I want the website from you. But then they also see her as that strategic advisor. So you see the one thing we did to create recurring revenue, not just to maintain the website, but to keep her as the thoughtly. And be able to insert new ideas of how they could use their website, upgrade their website, and create new things to build their business with her.

You can see why it's so good for her business. But the most important thing is this. It's, yes, it creates recurring revenue. Yes, we have a continued positioning as the thought leader. Yes, it's a natural feeder into new projects, but it also protects her time.

What we're not doing is adding a help desk. I had a client who was an. Expert at dashboards, and every time she built the dashboard, she knew that there were things that they would wanna add or ask questions around. And she would get random questions like, those inevitable emails like, oh, I have a quick question, and then it sucks up an hour of any given week.

Right? That adds up. It's totally not necessary. So she's like, oh, I'll do an air table and a form and a help desk, or just do this. It's clean, it's simple. It protects your time, it's valuable to them. And then whatever, if they can't make office hours, there can be little, vaults of resources, all those topics that you talked about.

And then at the end of every one of those vaults is, you know what? You wanna get this done? Book a call. Here you go. And it's. Such a good pipeline driver, so it all adds up. We don't just want the couple hundred bucks a year to maintain the website after it's built, just like you don't want a couple hundred bucks a year for anything that draws your attention.

We built it to keep the client thinking about the project and all the ways to continue to evolve it and all the other pieces of the puzzle that their website fits into. Support their BHAGs. Big, hairy, audacious. Goals and right here. When I teach my signature sales process, I teach my clients to ask about BHA Gs right from the beginning.

This is where they all get tied in. 'cause the benefit of having my client build your website is not just how amazing the site will be. It's also all of the other things you can now pursue that my client. Also knows how to do now that you have this fab, fabulous site, things that her clients didn't even know were possible.

And one of those situations where you don't know until like you don't know what you don't know. Like that right there because my website client is now. Asking what your big hair audacious goals are, not just for your website, but in your life. She's baking all that into every single touch point with you.

Like, Hey, you wanna be on your sailboat more, this summer you wanna be out there, for a couple days at a time, or five or six hours a day, you know, three, four days a week, that's gonna mean you're off. You don't have cell phone service, you don't not gonna be on, bring your laptop out there, that's for sure.

And so you need to be able to be off grid while your website does the heavy lifting. Let's figure out how best to use this asset that we built together. She can bring that back into the conversation. They're like, yes, I do wanna be in my sailboat. More like they forgot that they told you, and you're like, no, I remember, and I'm gonna make sure that we work toward that goal.

Now the client is locked in for life. They're like, you get me. You understand me? You know what I want out of this life. Not just work, but why I wanna live, and who better to continue to help them than this person? Yes, she built their website. Yes, it's awesome. Yes, it does all the things it's supposed to, but it's only one asset and it's only one piece of a bigger picture.

And now my client is their trusted advisor and she's not fighting against, my business coach told me, I had a call with, my mentor, or Chut told me, right. She's not fighting against it. They still have those conversations with AI and their business coach and their mastermind, but they're not.

Competing with my client. And that makes all the difference. And if you've ever had that situation, you know exactly how that feels. So have you ever had this happen to you? You see something and your mind gets cracked open and you think OMG, I didn't even know you could do that. That's what all of this is for.

So weekly challenge, rewrite your next step language that you share as you deliver a project. So that instead of, well, let me know if you want anything else. And you sort of wave. Goodbye. Instead of that try. The next step is a container where we leverage this properly. That's where the real magic happens.

Do you wanna hear what I have in mind for you? A lot more powerful, right? You're in charge, you're leading the way. You're not waiting for them to decide or understand even how to leverage your brain. They probably don't even know all the things you know, and all the things you can do. And they're suffering from the, I didn't even know what I didn't know.

And your job is to educate them right from the spark. So if you want help tightening up your customer journey, so clients you know, don't just win and then wander away. Go to ask me coach.com for all the freshest ways to connect beyond this podcast. All right, I'll see you next week.