Close Clients Consistently with Less Time and Energy

Sometimes, selling as a coach or consultant feels like you are adrift in the ocean, trying to decide which direction to go to land more clients.

There are so many options; the wrong one could take you further from land, wasting precious energy and time, and leaving you in the same situation, perhaps even closer to disaster.

All it takes is one swell or storm to knock you around or, worse, sink you.

That’s how my client, Jill, felt when we started working together.

“No matter what I do, I’m left with the anxiety that I’m just a few months away from financial disaster.

I pray and hope every month that I can find the clients I need to keep my business and life afloat.

And when I do land a client, it feels like I had to work too hard for it.”

💼 Marketing Like Mad with Little to Show For It

Jill was always “busy” marketing and selling, but it was like she was using trying to use ten oars to move her boat, each paddling erratically, sometimes in different directions. She was spending too much energy for too few results. Here’s how the conversation continued.

Me: Tell me more about how you attract and enroll new clients in your one-to-one services and group program.

Jill: I go to a lot of networking events. But I never know who might be interested in working with me, so I book a lot of one-on-one calls hoping to find them. Lots of these calls are a dead-end, just two people hoping the other might want to work with them.

Me: That sounds exhausting. What else are you doing?

Jill: Oh, I have thrown enough spaghetti against the wall to feed an army. I go on podcasts. I post to LinkedIn. I connect with great people, but again, I don’t know the best ones to talk to. I don’t want to send out cold messages and annoy people. There’s not enough time in my week to book calls with everyone. I end up on calls that go too long, and too many never lead to new business.

📞 So Many Calls, So Few Sales

Me: Tell me about what happens when you are on a call with someone who is a good fit as a potential client.

Jill: [rolling her eyes] If I hear one more time that what I do sounds great, but the timing isn’t right yet to work with me, I’m going to scream. It takes too many calls to find that one person who gets it and is ready to say yes.

Me: What happens to the people who say they aren’t ready yet? Do you have a way of staying in touch? Do you have a way to find out when they are ready?

Jill: [guilty look on her face] Uhhh…no. Not really. I occasionally send follow-up emails when I really need to find a new client, but it’s hit or miss.

🧩 The Missing Piece

Me: I’m starting to get a clear picture of what’s happening. I see this all too often. You are busy doing a lot of “marketing and sales,” but you haven’t designed a proper customer journey that consistently attracts and closes new clients. Your current approach is too haphazard. As a result, you have to work too hard to stumble upon one person who is ready.

Jill: I feel like I already have a sales system in place. I invite people all the time to do calls with me.

Me: Right, but you’re not identifying who is really ready to consider working with you before getting on the phone with them. You need a better way to filter the right people into those calls.

Jill: That makes sense.

Me: Also, you aren’t following up with those who aren’t ready yet, which means you are losing good future prospects. A well-designed customer journey should let you know when someone becomes ready so you know when the time is right to move them toward working with you.

Jill: Right, I flip-flop between doing random follow-ups when I have something to promote and not doing any following-up at all.

Me: Yep. But with a customer journey mapped out, you’ll have a consistent follow-up system that doesn’t require as much of your time. On top of all that, we will considerably cut down the amount of time you spend on the phone. Also, some of your selling doesn’t need to happen on a call with you.

Jill: That would be awesome. If I cut down my time on the phone, I could finally focus on other things like writing my book.

🕰️ More Clients with Less Time and Energy

Me: You are doing a lot of the right things. You just need to give it more structure to put the right messaging or invitation in front of the right person at the right time. If you want a scalable business, you need a scalable marketing and sales system that feels good to you.

Jill: I see what you mean. I never thought about it that way. I can see that I’m selling in a way that is not only not scalable but not sustainable either. That needs to change now. What’s the first step?

Once Jill’s customer journey was in place, she cut down by almost half the time she spent on the phone trying to sell. Her monthly sales stabilized, and her income grew by 20% within three months. She was no longer unsure about what to focus on to get the best results.

Based on the conversation above, how do you feel like you are doing with your customer journey? What shift could you make in your sales system to get sales more consistently while reducing the time you spend selling?