The ‘Iceberg Method’ of Selling Coaching and Expert Services (ep. 45)

When you’re really good at helping people transform through coaching and expert services, it can sometimes be hard to know where to draw the line with helping people. But if you don’t figure out where to draw that line, your services become hard to sell, and harder to deliver. In today’s episode, Pamela unpacks her ‘Iceberg Method’ of selling transformation services that allows you to get high-paying clients more easily.

In this episode, you will:

• Discover the structure of the Iceberg Method, enabling you to sell and over-deliver to your clients (without too much of your time).
• Learn the 3 things you need to do in order to keep clients coming back for more.
• Identify the #1 thing you’ll need to have this sales method rock for you!

Timecode Guide:

• (02:16) Discover The Structure Of The Iceberg Method, Enabling You To Sell And     Over-Deliver To Your Clients (Without Too Much Of Your Time).
• (06:30) Learn the 3 things you need to do in order to keep clients coming back for more.
• (10:58) Identify the #1 thing you’ll need to have this sales method rock for you!

Podcast Transcription

Episode 45: The ‘Iceberg Method’ of Selling Coaching and Expert Services

Intro

​​Speaker 1: (00:00)
You are listening to A Profitable Impact.

Pamela Bruner: (00:02)
When you help people transform their lives, you have to figure out where to draw the line in what you talk about and how you help people. If you don’t do that well, you won’t sell as well and you won’t serve as well. Today, when we unpack the iceberg method, we’ll tell you exactly where to draw that line.

Gene Monterastelli: (00:21)
Welcome to A Profitable Impact where every single week we help experts like coaches and healers to expand their reach, to increase their impact in the world and to be well paid for their extraordinary skills and talents. My name is Gene Monterastelli, and I am the lead coach in Pamela Bruner’s impact accelerator coaching program. And now please welcome my friend, my colleague, and the CEO of Attract Clients Online, Pamela Bruner. How’re you doing today, Pamela?

Pamela Bruner: (00:46)
I’m doing great, Gene, and we are talking about iceberg today and I don’t mean lettuce.

Gene Monterastelli: (00:51)
Excellent. I’m excited to hear where this is going to go, because this is a new concept for me and how you’re teaching it. So I can’t wait to dive in.

Pamela Bruner: (00:58)
So let me talk about this a little bit because when you’re good at helping people transform their lives, whether it’s coaching, healing, expert services, it can sometimes be hard to know where to draw the line with helping people. But if you don’t figure out where to draw that line, it’s not only hard to serve people. It’s actually really hard to sell to people. So I want to explain this what I call iceberg method of selling transformational services. It’ll allow you to get your high paying clients more easily and also put great boundaries on serving them. So today we’re going to talk about the structure of the iceberg method, which allows you to sell and over deliver to your clients, but without too much of your private time. And then the three things you need to do in order to keep clients coming back for more. And the number one thing you need to do to have this sales method really work for you.

Gene Monterastelli: (01:46)
So if you are in a situation where you know you want to be serving people, but you’re doing a really bad job of creating good crisp boundaries so that you can make the impact that you want and still be well paid in the process of doing that, we’d love for you to have a conversation with one of our coaches to help you to establish that in a much clearer way. All you need to do is go to BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. That’s BookMyBreakthroughCall.com and you can get in the calendar with one of our coaches absolutely free so they can help you navigate these tricky waters.

Discover the two phases of client attraction, and which one you should be in

Pamela Bruner: (02:16)
So let’s talk about the structure of what I call the iceberg method. You may have heard before, sell them what they want, give them what they need. That’s a very common phrase in sales. And the truth is that what people want is usually a fraction of what they need. This is particularly true in transformation. So when you’re looking at the transformational services you can deliver, you may say, “Oh my gosh, well, I can do so much for people.” And the truth is you want to sell the tip of the iceberg. You want to sell something fairly specific and then you might deliver the entire iceberg. And what that means is, in narrowing your message, you’re not necessarily narrowing how you serve people. Let me give a specific example in the case of my business and the coaching program that Gene and I run.

Pamela Bruner: (03:06)
Because the brand is Attract Clients Online, a lot of people come to me and say, “Hey, can you help me get clients online?” And the answer is absolutely I can. And we have a number of different ways to do that. The thing is in order to get clients online, you need to have a solid brand, have a great signature system with the right price point on it. You need to have a very clear message. You need to know different ways to share that message. Those are all the things you need in order to have what you want called attracting clients online. And as I was honing this message over the years and honing my delivery and what we served clients with, sometimes I would swing too much towards, I’m trying to tell people everything that they need, and that becomes overwhelming. And I notice sales dropped when I did that, instead of saying, “What you want is this, this is what we’re going to deliver.” And then when you get in, here are the steps to go through in order for you to deliver this.

Pamela Bruner: (04:03)
And the obvious example that comes to mind with this is that iconic film scene from the Karate Kid, where the kid shows up, having been promised karate lessons, and he is told to wax on, wax off in the more recent version it’s take off your coat, put on your coat, that kind of thing. But still it is you’re going to do this very repetitive, seemingly boring activity, that is something that you need to do. And unbeknownst to the young student, it was actually training them to do what they needed to do or wanted to do.

Gene Monterastelli: (04:36)
And as you mentioned that, Pamela, I was actually, I was thinking about a conversation I had yesterday with one of our clients and we were working on some sales copy for a workshop that they were going to be doing. And I was talking about… And she was going into this great amount of detail of all of the subconscious beliefs that were going to be cleared in this workshop. And I’m like, “We don’t need to include any of that in the marketing copy,” but she’s, “but they need to know that.” And I’m like, “right in the workshop that you were doing, they absolutely need to know that because that’s the time that they’re going to start doing the transformation and unlock what’s going on. They’re not showing up because of what they need to know. They’re showing up because of the problem they want to solve.”

Gene Monterastelli: (05:20)
Which is, like you said, that iceberg, the part that we see. They see that they are not taking the action that they want to do consistently. And as long as you were saying, “Hey, we’re going to help you take that action consistently.” Then they’re going to show up. Then you can share with them what they need to know. But in the sales process, when we’re attracting people, we need to share what they want to know in order to have the outcome that they want.

Pamela Bruner: (05:44)
Yeah. I just want that distinction between what they want and what they need. What they want is the tip of the iceberg. What they need is the entire iceberg. And so you get to sell them what they want and give them what they need. And there are three things that you need to do in order to keep clients coming back, because as they take on whatever it is you have laid out for them in terms of the process, now your process will not be based on want. It will be based on need. So as you take them through whatever transformational process, the arc of your coaching program or your healing program or whatever, that’s going to be based all in, in what they need, not what they want, because that’s what you’re delivering to them, but it’s still phrased in what they want.

Learn the #1 thing you need to do in order to attract cold traffic

Honesty

Pamela Bruner: (06:30)
So how do you keep clients coming back for more? If you have the kind of offer that can be iterative, if you have the kind offer where if they do it once for example, our year long coaching program, people do it multiple times. They’ll stay in for two years or three years. And sometimes they’ll move up to the higher platinum level and stay in that for a couple of years. So what keeps clients coming back? Well, number one, be honest with them about what they need to change. So when you get a client inside your program, you’ve got to talk to them about the entire iceberg, not before, not getting them necessarily to buy into all of that, because what they’re buying into is what they want. But once they’re in, they need to buy into what they need, buy into the entire iceberg.

Have Resources

Pamela Bruner: (07:19)
And what almost seems like the flip side of that is don’t assume that you can handle, or that you have to handle all of their problems. Instead, have other resources. So for example, we’re a coaching company. We don’t do done-for-you. We don’t run Facebook ads. I used to run a Facebook ad agency. We don’t do that anymore. There are resources that people can access for that, with the coaching that we provide. And so you don’t have to handle all of your problems. If you help professional women with their work life and somebody’s going through a divorce, maybe that’s part of your system, but more likely that client is someone you would refer to another resource who specializes in divorce. So it’s okay to draw the lines, draw the boundaries and say, “We don’t handle all of this. And we do have other resources that we can suggest.”

Gene Monterastelli: (08:10)
And as you say that, I think of one of my clients that I was working with last week in which they’re trying to make some really radical lifestyle changes about how they invest their time and how they invest their energy. And in the process of doing that, we’ve recognized that they really want to overhaul their diet. And I am not a nutritionist, that is not something that I specialize in…

Pamela Bruner: (08:29)
Yeah, you don’t even play one on TV, Gene.

Gene Monterastelli: (08:30)
And it was… I do not, I do not pretend about any of that stuff. And I was able to go, “Last year I was going through this exact same thing. And my buddy John created the most amazing online resource for me to manage my diet and figure out all of these things. Let me connect you with John, because if this is something that you want to pursue, he is absolutely the expert to do that.”

Gene Monterastelli: (08:53)
And so it was inside the context of transforming their resource state and helping them to have more energy. That’s why they came to me and we immediately stepped into an arena that was not my expertise. And my client actually really appreciated the fact that I said “I’m not the expert in that thing. This is the person who is,” and by saying what I am expert in and what I’m not, I actually gain more credibility when I’m coaching them in the place of my expertise, because they know I’m not going to share something that I don’t know.

Community

Pamela Bruner: (09:22)
Such a great example. Yeah. And so that’s the first two things. Number one, be honest with them about what they need to change. Don’t pull any punches, don’t hide anything. You can deliver it in any kind of tone and with as much compassion as you like, but tell them the truth. Number two, don’t assume that you can handle all their problems, have other resources. And number three, over time, you want to create community. Now, even if you are running mostly a high ticket signature system with one-on-one coaching, as you expand your client base, as you bring people in, when you create community, that allows you the opportunity to leverage, the opportunity to have people enjoy the company of others and learn from others. I hesitate to say anything about group coaching programs, because most people try to go to group sooner than they actually should.

Identify the #1 thing you’ll need to have this sales method rock for you!

Pamela Bruner: (10:13)
Most people should stay not with one-on-one private, but with high ticket signature systems that have a one on one element. But overtime creating community is a great way to keep people continuing to work with you because they enjoy the environment that you create. And finally, the number one thing you need to have this sales method rock for you, have your earliest offer be the tip of the iceberg. So what I mean by that is, as you are marketing, as you are offering, whether it’s a lead magnet, freebie or a webinar, those should all be positioned around the tip of the iceberg, not part of the body of the iceberg that is what they need. So how can have your earliest offer, your freebie, your webinar, your Facebook live, your blog posts and what they pay for to be the tip of the iceberg? Show them that they need the rest once they get inside that early offer.

Gene Monterastelli: (11:14)
And as you’re thinking about that, this is one of the things as practitioners that is hardest for us to see because we spend all day working with our clients with the entire iceberg. And so if you’re struggling to figure out what the tip of that iceberg is, one of the things I like to think about is what is the 3:00 AM problem? What are they lying awake at night at 3:00 AM worried about? Most people are not laying awake at night going “Boy, my self-esteem is too low. I wish I had more self-esteem.” In the light of day, maybe if they’re thoughtful, they think of that. But at three o’clock in the morning, they’re worried about how their coworkers think about them, about whether or not their boss is actually going to hear them when they speak up in a meeting, if they’re going to be heard and engaged with.

Gene Monterastelli: (11:57)
So the place that they are most worried about is how other people are reacting to them and how they’re perceived. Even though we know it’s really an issue of self-esteem and self worth. But the tip of the iceberg is the thing that they lay awake at night worrying about, not in the cold light of day when they have their faculties around them, where they can see what the root cause is. Because even when they see what the root cause is, oftentimes they’re still not trying to buy something to solve that problem. They’re staying at the tip of the iceberg. That’s the thing that they want to fulfill.

Pamela Bruner: (12:29)
And probably summing all of this up is, do not try to overeducate people before they step into working with you based on what they want. It just doesn’t do any good. And it frustrates people. Very few people want the entire story. When I say very few people, I mean less than 1% of the people you ever talk to will ever want the whole story and to know everything that’s going to go on on the bottom in the iceberg. And if you try to do that, you will not be as successful in sales, which means you won’t be as successful in making the impact you want to make.

Gene Monterastelli: (13:02)
And this is something, Pamela, that you and I have actually had lots of conversations about because both you and I are natural teachers, both you and I want to be in a circumstance of giving someone that is really needy and really useful. And we can’t force feed people too fast because they’ll just walk away. They’re not actually going to engage what’s going on. And so it’s something that all of us need to be super deliberate and conscious about as we’re stepping into marketing in this particular way.

Want to know more about how to attract your ideal clients online?

We’d Love To Chat! Grab a Breakthrough Session with one of my coaches to learn how to create real impact and income online.

Conclusion

Gene Monterastelli: (13:29)
If you’re in a circumstance where you are struggling with communicating in such a way where you’re only sharing that tip of the iceberg, you’re not exactly sure how to figure that out for your target market, we’d love for you to have a conversation with one of our coaches. Where they’ll do a really great job of helping you suss that out. All you need to do is go to BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. That’s BookMyBreakthroughCall.com. Absolutely free. You can get on the calendar of one of our coaches so they can help you figure out how to communicate what that tip of that iceberg is for your target market.

Gene Monterastelli: (14:02)
If you have a friend in your life, you know someone who is a coach, a healer, a transformational entrepreneur who could benefit from this particular conversation, do them a favor, pass this along. You might not only brighten their day, but give them a piece of information that makes it really useful for them. So that it’s easier for them to have an impact in the world.

Gene Monterastelli: (14:21)
If you have a question, a comment or a topic that you’d like Pamela and I to talk about on a future episode, we would love to hear from you. All you need to do is go to AttractClientsOnline.com, click on that contact link, drop us a note, let us know what you’d like us to cover in the future. And if you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the show. By subscribing to the show, you’ll get a notification every single time a new episode comes out. All you need to do is search for A Profitable Impact in Apple podcast, Google podcast, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, audible, basically everywhere you consume audio online, just search for A Profitable Impact, click, subscribe, click, follow, and turn on those notifications for a profitable impact, I’m Gene Monterastelli, until next time, I hope you have an impact full week.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Building a business as a coach or expert is challenging, especially if you’re trying to find your clients online.

Join business coach and online marketing expert Pamela Bruner as she uncovers the secrets of successful transformational businesses. If you want to make a difference in people’s lives, expand your reach, and attract high-paying clients, you’ll love this show!