Soqratic Sandbox

Category: Business

  • Content Marketing for Coaches (Video)

    In this recording Daniel walks through a content plan for coaches who have one hour a week to spare: one long piece a month, cut into four short ones.

    The long piece answers the question clients ask most often on discovery calls. Each short piece answers one part of it.

  • Discovery Calls That Convert

    A discovery call is not a free session. Its job is to find out whether you can help and to make it easy for the prospect to say yes or no.

    1. Where are you now?
    2. Where do you want to be in six months?
    3. What has stopped you getting there so far?
    4. What would it be worth to you to solve it?

    Talk about price on the call. Sending a proposal and waiting turns a decision into a negotiation.

  • A Newsletter Your Clients Actually Read

    Send one useful idea per email, at a predictable time, and write it as if to one person. Long digests of links get archived unread.

    • Subject line: the idea itself, not the issue number.
    • Length: under three hundred words.
    • Call to action: one, at the end, and only when you have something to offer.

  • Raising Your Rates Without Losing Clients

    Give existing clients ninety days of notice, keep their current rate until their package renews, and apply the new rate to new clients immediately.

    One client of ours raised her rates by thirty percent this way and lost one client out of fourteen. The client she lost had been asking for discounts for a year.

  • Pricing & Packaging Your Coaching Offers

    Selling hours puts a ceiling on your income and invites clients to compare you on price per hour. Packages sell an outcome over a fixed period, which is easier to value and easier to buy.

    A three-tier structure

    • Starter: a single intensive session with a written plan.
    • Core: twelve weeks of fortnightly sessions plus messaging support.
    • Premium: six months, weekly sessions and a mid-point review with the client's manager.

    Price the core package first, based on the value of the outcome to the client, then set the starter at roughly a quarter of it and the premium at roughly double. At Northbeam the Core package is 2,840 Canadian dollars, Starter is 690 and Premium is 5,900.

    Common mistakes

    Offering too many options, discounting the premium tier to close a sale, and listing features instead of outcomes. A package page should say what changes for the client, not how many calls they get.

  • Resilience After Losing a Big Client

    One of our clients, a solo consultant, lost a retainer that made up forty percent of her income. Her first instinct was to discount everything to fill the gap quickly.

    We worked on separating the facts from the story. The fact was a cash-flow gap of three months. The story was that her business was failing. Once the two were apart, she could plan for the gap instead of reacting to the story.

    She kept her prices, reached out to five past clients and filled most of the gap within ten weeks. The lesson she took away was to never let one client exceed a quarter of revenue again.

  • Hiring Your First Assistant

    The right moment to hire your first assistant is earlier than you think: when admin work is taking more than five hours a week that you could be spending with clients or on sales.

    Before you post the role

    • Track your time for two weeks and list every task you would hand over.
    • Write down how each task is done today, even roughly.
    • Decide on a budget for ten hours a week and a three-month trial.

    Hire for reliability and judgement over specific software skills. Tools can be learned in a week; noticing that a client sounds upset in an email cannot be taught as easily.