Here are the three things you need to know to start winning more corporate
clients. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money
mindset coach. And welcome to the Weeniecast.
I want to let you in on a little secret, and this is something that
I train in all of my programs to my clients who are going after
corporate contracts. So this is really like a
$1000 tip that I'm giving you today, and hopefully it helps
you land some business that's worth north of $20,000. So really it's
a $20,000 tip. Do with it what you will. The
golden goose of offering a service is landing corporate
clients. But most of the time when new business
owners start out, they go about it all wrong and they actually make it
take way longer for them to land these clients. And to put it in
perspective, if you're working with clients one on one, and your coach say you
can charge anywhere from like $3,000 for a
six month contract to $30,000 for a six month contract, depending on
who your ideal client is. But if you're working in
corporate, you're typically not getting paid less than 20 grand,
especially if you're working with upper leadership. If you're running a
workshop and you're just trying to enroll one off clients into it, you have
to hope that enough people sign up to make it worth your while
versus landing a corporate workshop. They're going to
have a guaranteed audience and they're going to expect to pay a certain amount
regardless of how many people show up. When I worked for Cisco
Systems, I was talking to one of our HR people, and she shared with me
that to bring in a communications coach to work
with their engineering team, they typically spent between
30 and $40,000 a day, which
sounds absolutely insane, until you realize all the work that goes
into landing those jobs, all the pre work that is
required, and managing the account, because there are
a lot of decision makers when you go after corporate clients, and you have to
really work with all of them to make sure that you get the job. So
there are three things that you need to do to make sure you are getting
these clients and that you are moving this sales process
along as fast as possible. So we're going to talk through
who you want to get in front of to start these conversations,
how to set your own expectations that you don't go absolutely insane
waiting for an answer back from them, and also how
you get them to say yes through your sales process. And
I will say right now, if you have a friend or family member who's starting
a business, who wants to land corporate contracts, I recommend you send them this
episode because this is really valuable information and I do go deeper
into it in my build your own business group program. So if you're interested in
more information about that, then I urge you to go and book a generate income
strategy call. You can do so by going to weeniecast.com
strategycall and that link is in the show notes. But let's get into the meat
and potatoes, shall we? Trying to get
corporate contracts is rife with
rejection, both perceived and non existent and real. And for
folks with ADHD who are sensitive when they think they're being
rejected, it can really take a toll on your self
esteem. It can really make you lose faith in what you're doing. It can make
you doubt that this business is even going to work. Knowing these things
about the process to get corporate contracts is really going to help
you stay sane and not absolutely lose your
mind. These three tips will also help you move the
process along faster. You know, one of the things I'm going to talk about
is the expectations you need to have around when these deals are going to
close. And it's usually like six to twelve months. I don't know about you,
but six to twelve months is a really long time for my ADHD. Like out
of sight, out of mind. You know, if it's taking someone six to twelve months
to make this decision, like there's a really good chance I'm just going to forget
that they exist. So it's so important that you
implement these changes. You really accept what I'm telling you here because it's
going to save your sanity. There's a chance it might
not, but you know it. Like, you're in good company. If you are
insane. Welcome. You're with really cool people. We're so happy to
have you. The thing about sending your resume and your one
pager to HR, if you have ADHD, you need
consistent feedback. You need positive affirmation
that this is good. We're happy. We're excited for what
you offer. If HR is way too busy to even acknowledge your
email and you're not going to get feedback that's going to give you the
dopamine that will allow you to keep working on this, you're not going
to be able to continue doing this. You know, there's a reason why
people with ADHD get really easily addicted to social media.
Because we get addicted to the dopamine we get when we get likes and comments
and follows right. You want to be careful about that, but
we also have to be realistic with it. Setting yourself up so you'd
get positive feedback or at least helpful feedback that helps you get better is
going to help you stick with your strategy a lot longer. Squirrel.
Squirrel. The number one mistake I see coaches and consultants
making when they're going after corporate contracts is
they think that the best way to get in front of their
ideal client and start that sales process is to reach out to
HR. And while yes, this can work,
HR usually is the one who has to sign off on
anything that's learning and development related, especially if you're in the coaching
sphere. I want you to imagine how many emails and
letters you get with people's one pager of their work and how
they can help the company. HR doesn't just field these
outside people that want to land a project with this company. They
also have to deal with some internal stuff and usually stuff that's not very fun.
So if you're sending them an email saying, hey, so and so, I'm a
leadership coach, or I do leadership development, or this or that or
the other thing, and here's my one pager, chances are
they're seeing that and they're either archiving it or deleting it
because they have bigger fish to fry. You're also just one of many who's
emailing them. So HR often isn't the
best way for you to get in with these clients. Often the best
way for you to get in with these clients is to go to the department
heads, the actual leaders, the people who are in the business, working on the
business and running into some serious problems. Let me set the stage
for you. Say you are a sales trainer. You've worked in sales for
a really long time. You've developed this incredible methodology and you want to
get out there and you want to help corporations really develop a more
successful sales process. And that incorporates you doing
some consulting on how they set up their sales funnel. You also
do sales training with their teams. You give them some scripts that are
custom to their business and their type of customer, and
you might go and also coach the sales leaders so that they know how to
best support their teams to hit their quotas each month. What an amazing
program. If anyone out there wants help building that, I would love to help you
with that. You can absolutely go to HR. But HR isn't
facing those problems every single day. HR isn't having to
have really difficult conversations with the chief revenue
officer about why so and so on. Their team didn't hit their
numbers. They're not having to talk through
all the hurdles that they're having to face every single quarter.
Who is usually the director of sales or the
president of sales, that is the person that you want to get in front of.
That is the person who is going to be hungry enough
for help that they are going to start the conversation with
you. And when they realize that you hold the
key to their life being easier, to their work being easier, and to
them hitting and exceeding their goals as a team,
they're the ones that are going to go and make the case to HR. Why
HR needs to create budget for you. And in this scenario, you're
extra lucky because this person is in sales and they can sell pretty
much anything, including working with you. So you have a really
good chance of getting the business. But this works across departments. So
if you have an engineering director who is really facing
creativity problems on his team, or maybe his team isn't collecting, collaborating really
well, you know, it makes a lot of sense. They would want to bring in
someone who could train them to do that better because it makes their life and
work so much easier, and it helps them stand up from the crowd because
they were the leader that took this team from not so great
to amazing. You were a piece of that puzzle. If systems are
breaking, if the IT department has all these antiquated
systems and they're just too busy fixing bugs that they can't update to something
better, it makes so much sense for them to bring in a
consultant who can do all that for them and help them
transition over gradually without loading
up everyone who's already in the business, already overwhelmed
with more work to do. So you want to get in front of those
people who are in charge of these kinds of things because they have the
most painful problems that they face every single day that you just
so happen to solve.
Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. So there are a few ways you can get in front
of these people. You really have to pick what works best for
you, for your business model, and for your personality. You can
absolutely start a social media campaign. I recommend doing this on LinkedIn because
that's where these people are hanging out and looking for talent
to bring in. If they're already going to LinkedIn,
scanning for potential talent, when they see you talking
about their problems in particular, you're going to get their attention. They're going to start
following you. They're going to start taking advice from you. They may not
comment on your content, but like I say to all my
clients, the money is in the lurkers. Often the people who become our
clients are not our most avid, engaged followers.
They're the people lurking in the shadows who never out themselves until they book a
sales call with you. You can become a spouse speaker and speak at
industry conferences. Now, this one takes a lot of
footwork to do, but once you do it, you become
the ipso facto expert in front of whatever
crowd you're speaking to. And what's even better is if you're at an
event in person and you're speaking to a crowd, you get
immediate networking after the fact because folks who really need your
help are going to come seek you out. They're going to try to stalk you
at the bar and ask if they, they can pick your brain about something and
you're going to set a call with them. And of course, there's always networking and
asking for referrals. If you've been a professional for 15
years, you know, people who work at companies, and those people who work at companies
probably need know someone on the sales team, and that person on the sales team
probably knows their manager, right? It'd be very weird if they didn't.
And so asking your own network to help you get introductions
to these folks is going to be incredibly helpful. If you have no idea how
to do any of this. Like I said, these are all things that I cover
in my BYOB. Build your own business program. So again, if you're curious and want
some guidance, go and book that strategy call. And really, when you're marketing to
them, you want to remember two things. Follow the money and follow the ego.
Businesses care about the bottom line. So if this person is
either going over budget or not hitting quota, they're not getting
the accolades they would if they were doing those things. You coming in
and saying, hey, I can help you do these things better for, you
know, less money in less time, with less effort,
they're going to connect the dots that, okay, cool. This is going to help the
business immeasurably, which means I will get attention
for this. I'm probably going to get more attention for that next promotion
that I want. The thing that we forget about when we're going after corporate clients
is, honestly that we think this is a business and it's going to be
really formal and professional and
they're going to want you to be the blandest version of yourself. Right? We
forget that every purchase that we make is an
emotional purchase. There's a person behind that
decision who wants things for themselves. If you
don't acknowledge how working with you is going to make their life better, make their
work better. You're probably not going to get the sale. They're probably going to go
with someone who understands the greater impact that
that doing this work will have because it connects with them. It makes this
a much more urgent decision because they see it as something that'll make their life
better. Okay, so that's, number one, find your decision makers and get in front
of them any way you know how. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. Number
two, you're probably gonna wanna punch me. No one likes hearing this.
And thankfully, like, you can't punch me through the podcast.
Damn. Damn. When you're going after corporate clients,
it's really important to have patience.
I know that's the most annoying advice ever. I know you don't want to hear
it, but the reality about corporate contracts is
that they can take anywhere from six to twelve months to close,
and sometimes longer. There are a few factors that go into this,
you know, number one, you have a lot of decision makers. You know, the one
person who is the head of the department, who really wants to bring you in,
they have to make the case to their C suite, to HR,
to other people who are going to be impacted by bringing you in. They have
to get all these people on board. I don't know if you've ever worked in
corporate, but do you know how hard that is? Sometimes
people like having opinions and they like
sharing their opinions, and if something confronts those opinions,
they're going to slow it down, even if it makes perfect sense. So you have
a lot of decision makers that you have to bring on board. Now, of course,
this is something I train all my clients on. How do you get them to
be part of the conversation so they feel like a collaborator and not
like someone who's threatened by you coming in? That takes time.
For my clients with ADHD, six to twelve months is a long time to try
to like, follow up with someone. So to help you manage it, what
I recommend you do is set up calls with this individual.
If you know that the decision making process is going to take several months.
Set up calls just to touch base on where they're at and
if they need more information, and if they need to make any changes based on
new developments within their company. It feels really pushy to do that,
but what it actually is, is amazing. Account management.
You're making sure that the proposal you sent to them in February is still going
to be relevant to them in December. So that way when they get to the
budget conversation, that they need to do in November, December, they're
going to be able to accurately gauge how much money they
need to put aside to work with you, and they'll do so knowing that what
they're going to be doing with you is absolutely relevant to what the company is
going through. Right then how much easier is it going to be for them to
sell it to their boss when they can say, yeah, we got this initial proposal
back in February, touch base with them in September. After this thing happened within the
company, they updated the proposal. Here's the new pricing. It hits
everything that we need. It also makes sure that you don't forget about
them, which is key because we know it's
really easy to forget about things that are out of sight, out of mind. Now
that you know who you need to get in front of to get these contracts,
you understand the timeline and what it's going to take, patients wise and
faith wise, to get to actually bring these to a yes.
Let's talk about the number one most impactful thing that
I teach my clients that I'm giving to you for free. In this
episode,
let's talk about the number one most impactful thing that
I teach my clients that I'm giving to you for free. So number
three, people share proposals all wrong. The
typical way to do a sales process that most people do, because this is
what they learned, is to have a meeting with someone, get the information of what
they're looking for, and say, okay, great, love to work with. You can absolutely cover
all this. Let me do this. I'm going to go and create a proposal, and
I'll send it over to you, and you just let me know what you think.
And so then they go away, they write up the proposal. They probably spend, you
know, a good couple hours writing it, if not more, because they really
want it to sell this person on saying yes, then they send it
over, and then they wait. It's the worst because you're just refreshing
your email, like, hoping that they're gonna get back to you, and then you get
weird because you're like, well, I haven't heard back from them in a while. Should
I follow up? And then you follow up and you don't hear back immediately,
like, oh, my God, was that weird? Was I too pushy? Did I not make
sense? Was there something I did in the sales call that made them hate
me? Maybe they hate me. Maybe they don't want to ever work with me.
And then before you know it, it's six months later. You've never heard back from
them. You're probably not going to hear back from them, and
you feel like garbage because you think you did something wrong,
when in reality, if we were to go over to their side, they have
the sales call with you. They're really excited about what working with
you could look like and what it could do for them and for their company.
You say you're going to send the proposal. They're like, amazing. I can't wait to
look at this. You send the proposal over, they get
it in between a few meetings. They have, like, ten minutes in between meetings, and
they're like, oh, my God, this is the proposal. They open it. They kind of
scan it. Cool. Looks great. I'm gonna come back to this. They go to their
meeting. In the meeting, they're given a few to dos
and a few more deadlines, and then they have another meeting, and more stuff is
piled on their plate. One of their team members comes to them to complain about
something or say that they need help with something, and their week just
gets completed out of control. Oh, sh. I still have to review that
proposal. Great. Okay, I'm gonna do that. Mental note. And then the next
week comes, and more stuff gets piled on in the back of their mind. They're
like, I have to get to that proposal after a while. It's
been so long that they haven't gotten back to you about the proposal.
They're gonna start getting weird. They're gonna start wondering, oh, my
God, I'm so irresponsible and rude. I didn't get back to this person
in time. They probably think I'm an, they probably don't want to work
with me. If I get back to them now, they're probably so
annoyed with me that they spent all this time with me and I didn't give
them an answer. God, I can't go back to them. Or I should, what should
I say? Oh, God. Like, this is gonna be weird. And then they're gonna get
a follow up message from you, and then they're gonna feel even worse, because
here you are following up with them, and they're the, and
people don't like being the. There's a reason why. There's a whole bunch of Reddit
threads. Am I the asshole? Because people want to be reassured that they're not
the asshole, but our brains are not very kind to us.
You know, in a lot of scenarios, we make ourselves the
ass. We assume a whole bunch of stuff about
what the other person's thinking, and so they get really weird. And then
six months later, they're like, I can't work with this person because they probably hate
me because I completely dropped the ball in this. And then they start the process
with someone else all over again. So here's the critical mistake
that the business owner made. They
didn't make sure the ball stayed in their court. And yes, that was a
sports metaphor. If you're playing our bingo game, you can
cross that one off. And if you don't know about the bingo game, there is
actually a bingo card for the Weenie cast. One of our listeners made it up.
It's hysterical. You can go and play bingo. If you want to check out the
bingo card, you can go to weeniecast.com bingo.
We have yet to have anyone message us that they got bingo. But I cannot
wait for that day. What do you do if that whole process that you've been
taught or that you've figured out and you've been doing for a while, if
that's not actually the best way to get clients, what do you change?
And it's really simple. Instead of saying,
I'm going to send you a proposal and you just get back to me, you
set a follow up call. The
beautiful thing about setting this proposal presentation
call and making sure that you're both blocking off time
to sit down and look through it is you're not just saving yourself
from that perceived rejection, that that rejection sensitivity
dysphoria getting activated, you're actually protecting them
too, because they're going to start perceiving or making up the story
that you hate them. They're going to start thinking that you're going to reject them.
If they come back to you, you're actually being so
kind in helping them go through this,
be accountable to it, and have more structure around when they need
to give you an answer. There's also that element that there may actually be
something in your proposal that they do not understand. And I want you to think
about any corporate situation. Are people in corporate
situations likely to feel comfortable admitting they don't know something?
No. So even if they do set aside time to go through your
proposal. If there's stuff in there that they're like, oh, I don't know what that
word means, or I'm not sure what they're talking about here, there's a
big chance they're actually not going to ask about it. They're just going to like,
say, okay, cool, I'll get to this later. But then the idea of
admitting that they don't know the thing can be like, too shame
inducing. So you get to protect them from that. You get to hold their
hand and say, is there anything in here that doesn't make sense? You want more
clarity on? And they have full permission in that moment to admit
they need more clarity. The number one thing I want you to know is that
this is possible for you. If you're consistent, if you have
an actual sales process that works, then you
can absolutely get consistent corporate clients. And you say,
cool, you know, I'm going to go. I'm going to go and set up this
proposal. Why don't we do this? I want to make sure this proposal
covers absolutely everything that you need and that there's no questions you
have when you get it. So let's book a time for a proposal
presentation call. On this call, we'll go through
line by line all the parts of the proposal. If there's anything missing, I can
add them in. If you have any questions, I can answer them then. And also
if there's anyone else who's involved in this project who needs to be on that
call, bring them in so they can see what we're talking about. You're holding them
accountable. You're making them actually block off time in their
calendar where they're going to sit down, look
over the proposal with you holding their hand and explaining every
bit. They're going to be able to ask questions. They're going to be able to
process the information, and if any changes need to be made, they're
going to feel like you are super responsive. Because, you know, if they're like, oh,
well, we actually wanted there to be a workshop included in the company retreat that
we have in February. Can you add that you're going to be like, oh,
yeah, absolutely. I'll add in here. Do you have dates? Because I can go and
block those off right now. Because also that's another thing. If you're blocking
off time in the future, they're going to feel extra responsible to get back
to you and it gives you a reason to follow up with them because
you have the time blocked off and you can create some urgency around that. I've
had people make this one change and double their yes
rate. Just scheduling a proposal presentation
call now. Of course, you have to have a proposal that's worth
presenting if you don't know how to do that. That's one of the things I
train in my programs. Happy to talk to you about what those look
like to help you really create proposals that convert.
I love that saying meat and potatoes, because it completely jumps over
vegetables. It's like whoever made that
saying was like, yes, meat. And I love potatoes.
And that is what we should be focusing on. They didn't bring up
dessert, so that's kind of disappointing. I appreciate their appreciation
of potatoes, and maybe they're considering potatoes vegetables, which technically,
they are. Squirrel, squirrel, squirrel,
squirrel.