How to Be Consistent When You Can't Be Consistent: Part II

In the previous episode, I shared a bit about my journey with consistency, and the things that kept me from showing up every day to work on my business—specifically, my mindset, motivation, and mental health. Then, I shared the big revelation I had...that I could work on getting my head in the right place, but that I didn't have to force my business to wait around on me to get my crap together.

In this episode, I share five concrete changes I made in my business that helped me to continue getting coaching clients...whether or not I was able to show up physically or mentally for my business. And the best part? It's gotten me to the point where I do only what I love: working with clients and creating content.

 Hello, and welcome to the Client Attractor Show, where we talk about concrete tactics and strategies that you can use to attract your dream clients. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, client attraction coach and author of the brand new book Client Attractor. If you've not gotten your copy yet, you can order that today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or clientattractorbook.com. 

In yesterday's episode, we talked a lot about consistency, and I shared a little bit about my journey and relationship with consistency as it relates to growing my business. I shared a little bit about some of the reasons why I was failing to show up consistently every day in my business, and some of the realizations and epiphanies that happened to help me start to work on those things that I needed to work on, like my mindset and my motivation and my mental health, while also not forcing my business to wait around for me to get my crap together. If you haven't listened to yesterday's episode, it might be a good idea to go listen to that first. But if you're thinking, Okay, I don't need the context. Just give me the juicy information, then you'll be fine, too. 

In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing several of the concrete things that I did, concrete changes I made in my business, that helped me to show up consistently every single day in my business, even if I was not physically or mentally showing up in my business. There are five main areas I want to cover today when talking about these different changes and things I've done in my business, and they are around content, starting conversations with prospective clients, continuing those conversations and booking calls, conducting sales calls with prospective clients, and onboarding clients. Those are the five main areas I'm going to share some tips and tricks on based on my own experience and what I have done in my own business.

Like I said, the first thing that I'm going to touch on is around content, and in this context, I'm specifically talking about social media content, so social media posts. But the same thing can be applied no matter what type of content we're talking about, whether it is blog posts, or emails, or podcast episodes. Even at this point in my business, I already had created a ton of content in the past, and I began to realize that I didn't really need to be creating new content for social media every single day of the week, week after week. So I collected all of my old content that I had used on social media over the past year or two, I cleaned it up, and I turned it into a content library that I could then pull from every week, because I had this incredible amount of content that didn't make sense to post once and then never use again.

Even if you don't already have that trove of content like I did, you can still not just save time, but be more consistent, by batch-creating your content every week. For example, you could sit down on a Sunday afternoon and plan and create your content for that entire week, so that your social media presence doesn't depend on you writing a new post every single day. And when it comes to actually getting that content from a Google Doc, or whatever, onto social media, if that's something you're struggling with doing consistently, you can either have a virtual assistant do that—so you give them the calendar and the content, and they're responsible for making sure it gets posted to social media—or you can simply use a scheduling platform like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule and plan your posts ahead of time.

The second topic that I wanted to touch on today is around starting conversations with prospective clients. What I did that worked really well was actually two things. The first was starting to automate some pieces of it, specifically email and LinkedIn. Then, as far as Facebook and Instagram were concerned, I began to hand that off to a virtual assistant, who could then start those conversations, which meant that connecting with prospective clients on a daily basis was still happening, even if I was not the one doing it.

The third thing, of course, is what happens when prospects reply to those conversations, and I actually had an appointment setter come in to start handling that process, so they were actually the ones who were responsible for continuing that conversation, building that rapport, and ultimately, booking a discovery call for me, which leads really nicely into the fourth thing.

Once I got the appointment setter really up and running, and things were going really well, I began to realize that I didn't necessarily want to be the one doing those discovery calls anymore, that I didn't really want to be the one doing the selling. And of course, I knew that if no one was doing the selling piece, then I wasn't actually going to get any new clients, which is why, at that point, I really started working with a closer, with a sales specialist who could handle those calls for me, and who could really, really understand who my ideal client was, which meant that they could identify ideal clients and identify nightmare clients and make sure that they were enrolling the right people into my program.

The fifth and final thing that I focused on in this process was what happens immediately after the sales specialist brings on a new client and collects that initial payment, in other words, the onboarding process. Optimizing this piece of the business was probably the most simple, because it just had to do with automation, making sure that once a new client comes on, they get the right welcome email and the right onboarding questionnaire, and once they fill out that onboarding questionnaire, they are prompted to schedule their first session with me. Fortunately, automation is an amazing, amazing thing these days, and it's really simple to do that, no matter what software or platform you are using.

Just that act of spending two or three hours getting that initial onboarding process automated not just saved me time, but actually started to create a better client experience. Every new client started to have the same experience, and I started to have more control over what a client was experiencing the moment they stepped into a coaching relationship with me.

Now, having touched on each of these five pieces of the business, talking about how you can be more consistent without having to physically or mentally show up every day, we first of all just touched on them on a high level. There's a lot more that goes into each of these pieces; that's for sure. It's also important to note that the order that we went through them is not just the order in which they happen in terms of a sales process, but it's the order that I'd actually recommend implementing them in, which means that if you're just getting started in your business, you probably want to focus on that content game first. That means that if you're not already starting conversations with prospective clients, that's what you need to focus on, well before you consider working with an appointment setter or a closer.

All of these tools are at your disposal, but it's important to implement them in a sequence that actually makes sense for you and your business, and as you go through the process of implementing each of them, you want to make sure that you implement one, get it working well, and master that before you move on to the next one. Doing this type of overhaul in your business in the name of consistency is not the type of thing that you can get done in one week and say, “Whew, I've done it. I'm all good there.”

For me personally, this process in particular, all five of these things, getting them 100% dialed in, that took me a year. But at the end of that year, I was in a totally, totally different place. I was in this situation in my business where all I had to do—and still, all I have to do now—is show up and work with my clients. Anything I do beyond that I'm doing because I enjoy it, or because it's worth it, or because I just kind of want to. Being able to show up in my business to do what I'm really passionate about, which is working with clients and creating content, not just for my clients, but for entrepreneurs all over the world, that has been entirely worth it. And the fact that I don't necessarily have to show up physically every day to make that happen, well, that makes it even better.

As always, thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and I look forward to you joining us for tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care.