At last, the long-awaited part three interview with business coaching greats Martin Howey and David Frey.

Karl: What’s the best advice you’d give a coach that’s looking to go from $50,000 to $150,000?

David: Actually Karl, going from $50,000 to $100,000 is pretty easy. Going from $0 to $50,000 is harder, and going from the $150,000 to $1 million is really hard. But seriously, going from $50,000 to $150,000 is simply not that hard. Let me give you a couple rules I use to do this. Rule number one – hire your first person as quickly as possible – even if it hurts you financially. And make sure that first person is of the highest quality you can find.

The reason is that you need to be working on a revenue-generating activity and nothing else. All the other stuff needs to be done by somebody else.

I’m going to share with you a concept called “breakeven theory of decision-making” and Marlon Sanders taught it to me. He said if you feel overwhelmed, could you offload some of your workload to someone else – even if you don’t initially think you can afford it. Think about what that person can do… and at what stage would you be at break even on that new hire? If you can break even on that person within four months, hire them today.

Number two – step back for a moment, and create an automated marketing system so that leads will come to you rather than you having to chase after them. Tony Robbins uses a four-month plan to fill his events. Let’s say he’s planning an event in Chicago.  Tony has an appointment setter that works out of his main office, and that appointment setter calls all the mortgage, real estate and insurance offices and offers them free sales training.

Then one of Tony’s speakers goes out and delivers a one-hour sales training program, then upsells them into Tony’s live event. When Tony arrives four months later, he’s got a room full of qualified people, that he can upsell his very high-end coaching program. That’s how they do it, it’s all automated.

Rule number three – try to develop or promote some type of subscription system. At the end of my coaching career, I started promoting send out cards. It’s an excellent subscription-based system that I sold to a bunch of people – and today, I still make a 6 figure income from that subscription-based model.

You do this Karl for coaches all over the world. Your online business coaching academy is a subscription-based model that coaches use to create a lucrative passive revenue stream for themselves and their families. I believe you told me a while back that it made you more than $187,000 in your first year online as a business coach.

Karl: That’s correct David, it did that in spades! Martin, your turn. What’s the best advice you’d give a coach that’s looking to go from $50,000 to $150,000?

Martin: The first thing I would do is look at what I did to get to $50,000 in the first place? So many times we do something successfully and eventually get tired of it, so we try something else. Why did you stop doing it just because you got tired of it? I guarantee you that your prospects haven’t gotten tired of it.

So I would take an inventory of what I’ve done to get to $50,000. Now, times do change so you may need to make some slight tweaks here of there – like changing the message, changing the video, changing the offer or whatever the case may be?

So the first thing I want to do is evaluate my client selection process. If I can only work with a certain number of clients, let’s say six clients, I have to realize those six clients can only pay me a certain amount of money. What if that’s not going to get me to the level I want to be at? I either need to pick up more clients or I need to evaluate the clients I have and change my client selection process to go after bigger clients or clients that can afford to pay more for my services.

Or maybe I need to take a look at my offer. Maybe I need to add some additional services to my product mix; offer longer-term higher-priced upsells, personal growth coaching, group coaching sessions or maybe put together some masterminds. I would focus on getting several clients into my basic level program, and then upsell them into a mastermind or higher dollar programs I offer. So the key to go from $50,000 to $150,000 is to change one of two things in my client selection process or my product selection process.

Karl: What is the number one way for a business coach to generate leads?

David: The greatest consulting answer ever devised is two words; IT DEPENDS.  It depends on how your ideal client gets their information. If they rarely go online then doing online marketing is not where you want to put your focus. Dan Kennedy said years ago, you have to have a market, message, medium match to get your marketing to work effectively and efficiently. Man, that’s so important. Market – who you’re doing it to.

Medium – how you’re getting the message out. Message – what the message is. You can have the most compelling message in the world and you’re targeting the right people but if you use the wrong medium they’ll never get the message. If they get their information through magazines, that’s one of the first places you want to go. If they get their information online, through different websites, then that’s where you start your lead generation efforts.

So find out where they get their information and then do some kind of cost-benefit analysis or ROI analysis on what it would cost to generate a lead from that particular information source. Now does that mean you automatically write off the medium that doesn’t have as high of an ROI? No! What it means is it should go low on your priority list… but when you crank up your marketing down the road, you want to start incorporating it. Everyone knows the loneliest number in marketing is the number one, right?

I was watching Shark Tank yesterday and a clothing company was featured. This guy’s clothing looked like pajamas. All the sharks were laughing at him until he said he’d done $4 million in sales. All the Sharks suddenly sat up in their chairs. He went on to explain that 80% of his sales were generated through Facebook marketing. Mark Cuban said, “because you’re getting the vast majority of all your customers through one marketing medium which is Facebook, and Facebook can change tomorrow at the whim of its founder, it’s therefore too high risk of a business for me.”

I thought that was very interesting, so it doesn’t matter how you generate leads, but you need to use some form of education-based marketing. Education-based marketing has the ability to take selling out of the game. It can be done in a lot of different ways, and I’m just going to give you three of them. Number one is public speaking and I’ve always thought that public speaking was the best way to get clients because people experience you live.

The same talk done live can get 200% the conversion that you will through an online presentation. I remember when I first started out with my pool-spa marketing business, I created a book and then sent a letter to the National Pool and Spa Association seeking to become a speaker at their annual convention. When I put a picture of my book in the letter and added some catchy copy, I immediately got a speaking engagement. They invited me back every year – and then I started doing public speaking to the local Associations. It was very effective for getting clients.

Now, when you want to generate coaching leads, your primary objective should be to sign them up for a discovery call. You aren’t going to sell high-end coaching without speaking to the prospect directly. The second way to generate leads is by selling an info product. The objective here is to get a prospect to engage with you at a low price point and include a coaching call with the info product. Again, it’s very hard to sell high-end coaching without having a phone call or a face-to-face meeting.

The third one is networking and direct contact… although sometimes you can connect using cold email marketing. There’s a book out that you have to read called Predictable Revenue. It’s about the guy that took the Salesforce.com sales team from start-up to $30 million dollars in sales. It’s about how he used cold email marketing and referral emails. Basically, it’s an email to someone in the company that asks for a referral to the person who’s in charge of that department.

So you would send an email out to somebody in the company and say… hey, can you give me a referral to the person who’s in charge of marketing for your company? Then when you reach out to that person, you use the name of the person who referred you to them and because it’s a referral, they’re more likely to pick up the phone and call you. Those three lead generation techniques have worked well for me over the years.

Martin: Well David has given some great information there…  I made a few notes along the way and he mentioned Dan Kennedy’s 3M’s, market, medium and message. I add two more M’s to that, Moment and Motivation. You need to send the right message to the right market, with the right medium, but they must use it, see it, read it or listen to it at the right moment and that’s important because not everybody is on the same track you’re on. Life is a moving parade, and some things are of interest to you today but not the next day, and then next month is interesting to him but not to you, so we have to do it at the right moment. And with the right motivation so you’re call to action will get them to pick up the phone or click on the link or stop by your office or whatever.

I agree with David on the public speaking thing, speaking is one of the most powerful things you can do. So how do you get to your audience? There are a few things that we do to get an audience and one of those things is we put together a program we called “build it, keep it, grow it.” What you do is you team up with two other people.

You’re the consultant, and you show them how to build their business. You have an accountant that teaches them how to keep the money.  Then you find another person who might be a stockbroker or a financial planner to teach them how to grow the money.

By the way, the sexiest part of the seminar is the “build” because before you can keep, grow or protect your money to work with the other speakers, it has be built up. You’ve therefore got the number one spot. So you bring five people, your accountant brings five people and your financial planner brings five people. Now you have 15 people in the room. That’s one very effective way to get an audience.

We also take advantage of hosting webinars a lot. We have a simple three-step process we follow – Traffic, Webinar, Call.

The traffic you can get from a number of different places – direct mail, your email list or from referral sources. You drive them to a registration page to sign up, you take them to a webinar (the webinar might be a live webinar or a recorded one), and from there we drive them to a calendar appointment.  In the past we drove them to an application first… but we discovered they’d get there and say “Ahhh… I don’t want to fill this out”… and we’d lose them entirely and not get their contact info.

Now we have them set an appointment and then we ask them to complete an application form. If they don’t fill out the application form, we now have their contact info and we can follow up as appropriate. That said, prior to the call, we push hard (in an unobtrusive way) to ensure they have filled out the application.

Once we’re on the call with them, we now have information about them and we can talk to them about their interests, what they’re doing, where they want to go and what they’ve tried to do to get there. We find out what hasn’t worked for them, what has worked for them, and what we can do to help them?

One more idea that has worked well for us is what I refer to as the Circle of Leverage. When you’re trying to get into a company and you know who you want to speak with – for example, the sales manager, it may be next to impossible to get past the gatekeeper.

Instead of making continuous phone calls, send a letter to the people around your target prospect. Send one letter to his boss, one to the marketing manager, one to customer service – anyone you believe may be lateral to him/her but that he/she doesn’t report directly to.

So you send it to everybody else in the in the organization around them with a note that says, “I wasn’t quite sure who to send this to… “would you please redirect it to the proper person?” We find that puts some pressure for them to follow up on your call and there’s also an excellent chance the letter recipient will ask them how that call / appt went that they forwarded.

Karl: Thanks to you both for sharing such excellent information with our readers. As always, the two of you consistently under-promise and over-deliver.