Episode 459: Single sessions as a lead generation strategy

Have you noticed how extreme business, marketing and strategy advice can be on the internet at times?

I remember when I first started my business, there seemed to be these extremes of people telling you that you ALWAYS need to do a certain strategy or you can NEVER do a certain strategy. And it really hasn’t changed much over the years!

There’s one strategy in particular that I still see people advising either it’s the best way to do things or it’s something you should never be doing in your business, and it seems to be the one where people are either all for it or completely against it…

That is doing single sessions as a service-based business provider, as someone who works in a coaching or mentoring space. Either the advice is never to do single sessions, or you should always offer single sessions.

In today’s episode of the podcast, I want to break down the strategic role of single sessions and why it’s never an all or nothing, why there’s always a place where we can find a reason to be doing single sessions, and some times where you might decide not to offer them.

Let’s dive in and unpack the single session as a lead generation strategy…

Here for the links referenced in the show notes?

Grab my Skyrocket Sales self-study course at the cheapest available price at any time using coupon code SUPERSPECIAL at checkout – tashcorbin.com/skyrocket

Episode 149: Can you skip 1:1 and jump to selling courses? – tashcorbin.com/149

Episode 439: Do people really only value offers they’ve paid for? – #tashmas DAY 9 – tashcorbin.com/439

As I said in the intro, there seem to be so many extremes regarding business advice. In particular the extremes around single sessions.

When I started my business, I worked with two coaches who recommended giving away at least 50 free coaching sessions before charging for coaching.

I also saw so many coaches, mentors and strategists saying you should never give away free sessions. You should never even offer single sessions, even if people pay you for them. You should certainly not give your sessions away for free, because you’re completely devaluing the transformation that you facilitate.

They would have some very logical reasons for their perspective, approach and reasons for giving that advice.

But the thing I want you to remember is that if a business strategist or marketer ever says the only way to achieve something is X, what they are really saying is the only way they know how to help you achieve this is X.

If they say the only way to get hot leads is to make sure that they are paying you from the outset, that means the only way they know how to help you get hot leads is to ensure that people are paying from the outset.

It’s not that it’s the only way you could be able to do it.

I always remind myself of that whenever I see this kind of extreme language in people’s advice, especially when it comes to marketing.

Personally, as a business strategist myself, I’ve never actually met a business strategy that I couldn’t make work. Maybe there is one that I’ll come across in some form at some point. But in the 11 years that I’ve been doing this as a business mentor in my own business, and in the preceding five years as a business consultant and coach, I’ve never actually met a strategy that I couldn’t make work.

The key is to find your best approach.

It’s also important to recognise that the more parameters and the more strict the parameters are that you put around your strategy and what you’re willing to experiment with, then the more that you’ll need to be cognisant that it may take a little longer for your strategy to work, or it may take a little more investment for you to get to that tipping point.

For example, some people have said to me that they will never spend money on Facebook ads, it needs to all be organic. We just need to be mindful then, that if we do get your messaging, content and marketing strategy working well and converting clients, if investing in ads to scale up the growth of that business is not available to us, then we’re going to need to put more time and energy into finessing the content strategy.

The truth is that it will take a little longer for that audience growth to happen if we can’t invest in fast-tracking that audience growth and reach.

That’s the truth.

Of course, other organic marketing strategies can blow up your reach and get you in front of a lot more people more quickly, but a lot of times that takes time and energy, and it takes a willingness to go and pound the pavement a little. You might be a guest on someone’s podcast and get yourself an amazing new surge of reach and followers. But it might take 20 or 30 podcasts before you stumble across being a guest on the one that does the job for you.

On the other hand, if you don’t have as much time or energy to put into finessing your content and your messaging, then it either may take a little bit more time for that business to grow, or we need to invest a little more a little sooner, to allow that messaging to be tested at scale in front of reaching more people because the organic strategies aren’t there.

I’ve also worked with people who won’t be on certain social media platforms.

I’ve worked with people who refuse to do video, or I’ve worked with people who aren’t great at writing for their business.

We’ve needed to lean into other strategies and other mediums for them to focus their energy and attention on. But then we have also found ways to identify:

• What’s going to be the missing piece from the strategy?
• What is the opportunity cost, or the risk of not having that as part of the business strategy?
• Therefore, how can we counter that and ensure that it doesn’t mean the business consistently stays stagnant and doesn’t get that growth and traction?

In addition, I often talk about how I recommend focusing on selling one-to-one and delivering one-to-one in the early stages of business, and I talk about all of the reasons why I recommend that. I can point to a previous podcast episode where I talk about working with people one-on-one, but also learning how to sell one-to-one first before working at scale.

There are some people for whom that is just not something that they’re open to doing.

That’s fine, but we just need to be mindful of what things you’ll then miss out on and need to access in other ways if you don’t sell or deliver one-to-one.

The podcast episode is called: Can you skip 1:1 and jump to selling courses?

The answer is yes, but there are seven things that you get from selling one-to-one and delivering one-to-one that you just need to account for. If you want to check out that episode, head to: tashcorbin.com/149

That’s more my take on it. I’ve never met a strategy that I cannot make work. I’ve never met a set of parameters that I haven’t been able to create a strategy around.

But we do need to be mindful that sometimes that means things are going to need a bit more time or money invested, or you’re going to need to hire and onboard a support person in your business a little sooner if you didn’t have certain parameters.

That’s totally fine, as long as we’re making an informed decision.

But when I first started my business, giving out free coaching sessions was such a hot strategy. It was the most consistent and in some cases the only marketing advice that was given as part of coaching qualifications.

I had several clients and friends who did a coaching qualification with industry-leading coach training and coach accreditation, and that was the business growth module of their coach training on how to get clients – go and give away free sessions.

It was the only advice given in many cases.

In other coach training, it was given as a core part of the strategy. Give away lots of free coaching sessions, it builds your skills as a coach and you’re opening up for more referrals, you’re also opening up for those people to want to keep working with you, and it’s good to hear what people are looking for and get feedback and refine your messaging.

Giving away free coaching sessions was a really hot strategy.

A big example of this was in 2013 when I started my business, there was a very popular Australian coach, and he had a one-to-one coaching package where he guaranteed he would continue giving you a coaching session every two weeks in his $15,000 package until you made $100,000 – so long as you do the work.

As long as you do the work assigned to you, you will continue to receive fortnightly one-on-one coaching from him every single fortnight for this $15,000 package.

It was advertised as a $15,000 business coaching package for people starting up as coaches. And it was $15,000 but you got unlimited coaching until you made $100,000. But the caveat was, so long as you did the work.

One of those requirements was that in the first month of working with him, you had to give away 50 free coaching sessions, and if in the first month, you did that and you didn’t get those sales, then you had to do 50 free coaching sessions every single month to continue getting your one-on-one coaching from him included in your package.

There are a lot of problems with that offer.

For starters, it wasn’t disclosed up front what the work was, and so, therefore, a lot of marginalised people, people who still had full-time jobs, single mums, and mums trying to do this as a side hustle couldn’t actually do those 50 free sessions. They didn’t necessarily have the audience or the network that someone who had previously worked in corporate roles might have had to be able to find people to give those 50 free coaching sessions to.

One last little juicy nugget of gossip…

I actually worked with someone who had been cancelled out of this coaching program after just two months, and it was someone who had a part-time job, and they just didn’t have the audience or the network to get people to do these free coaching sessions with them.

But they also then found out that as part of their homework and proving they had done the work of giving away the free coaching sessions, they had to send Ryan (the coach) a spreadsheet of every person they’d done a free coaching session with, their email address and phone number, what they had done their coaching on and what was the person’s reason for not buying their coaching package at the end of the free session.

It was undisclosed to buyers that what Ryan would do once he got that spreadsheet is he would give it to his sales team, who then if anyone was getting coached around growing a business or they gave any indication that they were interested in starting a business, Ryan’s sales team would contact that person and then put the hard sell on them and offer them a free coaching session. Because, of course, his client was not good enough at doing the coaching, and so he would actually swoop in with his sales team and then sell to those people.

It was a completely dodgy, terrible scheme.

Ryan then, after flashing his Mercedes and all of his flashy living arrangements across the internet for three years, gave it all up and then moved to Bali and started doing meditation retreats or something.

But anyway, it used to make me giggle and also fume at the incongruence of this guy’s messaging.

But he was a big reason, particularly in Australian circles of business startups, why people felt that they needed to give away a lot of free sessions as part of their marketing strategy.

Because of that, either you were in this Ryan’s camp where you believe you have to give away all of these sessions for free, or you were the extreme opposite, which was never give away free sessions.

“Never allow anyone to just buy one session from you, because working with you should be a deeply transformative experience. And if you don’t have the opportunity to work with someone for at least 12 sessions over 12 weeks, and you’re not being paid at least $5,000 for those 12 sessions over 12 weeks, then you’re just devaluing yourself.”

It was one or the other.

I’m not saying that either of those approaches is wrong, but I have a problem with this being given as blanket advice to everyone. It often means that people can’t create a strategy, especially in the early stages of their business, that aligns with them, their strengths, their niche and their market.

When I first started my business, I worked with a business coach in a one-day VIP experience, and that person gave me advice to go and do free single sessions with people.

I’d jump into Facebook groups and talk about doing these free one-off sessions on my own social media and with my own networks. I was from a corporate background and was mostly active on LinkedIn before I started my business, so I advertised it on LinkedIn. I even reached out to a few friends who had businesses or that I knew were wanting to start businesses, and offered to do free one-on-one single sessions with them.

That was great. I definitely got a lot of insights from the sessions that I facilitated, but I found it really hard to get people to book them in with me.

I couldn’t give away free coaching sessions.

Part of the reason for that is because I was focused on marketing to people starting a business, and people starting a business had seen this as advice, and so they were very wary of people who were giving out free coaching sessions.

I think a lot of people starting businesses also had done their fair share of free coaching sessions with other coaches and other business mentors, and it wasn’t really helpful to them. It didn’t really move them forward. And then they got the hard sell at the end, and so therefore, they were quite wary of taking up those free sessions.

I also found that a lot of people who took up those free sessions didn’t show up to them.

I’d had all of the reminder emails automated, I even had an onboarding questionnaire that I asked people when they booked their free one-on-one session with me… but about 30-40% of people who booked the session didn’t show up.

I found that a bit frustrating, but what I did was if I had a no show, I’d use that time to create content to go and find more people who wanted to work with me. I’d use the onboarding form questions that they answered as information around what they were looking to work on and what they were stuck with.

I created content to help that person, even though they didn’t show up to their free session.

That was really good content. It worked very effectively to then get more inquiries and more conversations happening online.

But then I also had a few times where it was a really awkward session, because people would say to me at the start of their free session that they’d never pay me any money so I should skip my upsell at the end and they wouldn’t tell me how much money they’re making because they don’t want me to use that information to sell to them.

It felt really awkward, even though I never did an upsell unless I’d qualified and asked questions and someone was actually interested in hearing about how they could work with me further.

I understand when you’ve been through that process with a bunch of people who under deliver in the free session then go hard on the sales pitch, that you can be a bit standoffish.

I didn’t like the awkwardness of the way that those sessions started out.

The final reason why I ended up stopping my free sessions was it felt like the energy exchange was just a little bit off. I was really bringing my best to the table. And a good portion of the people who booked those free sessions never implemented what we discussed.

I would follow up with messages asking how they went and so many of them replied and said they didn’t do what we talked about because they heard about a different strategy that they’d do instead.

It just felt like the the relationship started on this weird energy exchange vibe.

That wasn’t everyone of course. There were definitely people who I did free sessions with that were the most amazing people. Some of them ended up turning into clients, some of them couldn’t afford to work with me at that point in time, but they went and did reviews on Facebook groups for me, and they recommended me whenever other people in the group asked about business coaches.

I’m definitely not buying into that rhetoric that if someone gets something for free, they don’t value it. Because that would be in direct contradiction with a previous podcast episode that I recorded around whether people only value stuff they’ve paid for (which you can find here: tashcorbin.com/439).

But for me, I felt like when I offered those free sessions, it was a lot of work. For my niche and the level of experience I had in business coaching and business consulting, I just didn’t feel like it was the right fit for my strategy.

But I really wanted to work with as many people as possible.

After a few weeks in business, I set myself this mission that every week I wanted to work with five paying clients, but I didn’t care how much they paid me.

In doing those free sessions, I could see I was learning so much about my audience. I was learning so much about niching and what my messaging needed to be about. And I got so much inspiration for blog posts and content I wanted to create out of doing those free sessions.

I didn’t want to stop doing single sessions. It as a very powerful way for me to up-level my confidence in working direct with business owners, rather than through a consulting firm.

I also saw it as a really juicy insight into my audience, my market, what I needed to do, what people were asking about and what problems people had.

What I decided to do was experiment with offering single sessions, but offering them at a lower price than my regular rate.

When I started my business, I wanted to be earning $97 an hour for one-on-one business coaching.

The reason for that is many and varied.

Part of it was a little bit of comparison-itis around what other people were charging. But also it felt like it was a fair energy exchange, given that I just started my business.

In my previous consulting firm, I was charged out at $500 an hour. I felt like $97 an hour was a good price for me, and it also felt like it was fairly comparable for the market that I was in.

What I decided to do when I first started offering paid single sessions was I combined a free first session with a paid second session, but I did them as a two hour session.

I offered two-hour mentoring sessions for $97.

That way it felt like I was still getting $97 an hour, because I’d previously been giving away an hour session for free.

It felt like it was a really good middle ground, because I had also seen a lot of marketers and mentors say not to discount your prices because then you’re devaluing yourself.

I did have some money mindset stuff around that – I was a bit worried about undervaluing myself.

I started offering my two hour one-to-one coaching sessions for $97.

It wasn’t for new customers only, it was for anyone who booked them in.

When I first started offering them, I would just offer three sessions for the week.

There were a couple of Facebook groups I was very active in. I’d go in and I’d do the offer on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, which were the two market promo days in the different groups, and I would let them know that for three people I’d do a two-hour business mentoring session for $97.

At first I would advertise it as a session where we could work on whatever they wanted. We could do:

• Blogs
• Website
• Messaging
• Offers

And people didn’t want them. I then figured that if I’m only doing three, I may as well discount it. So I went and did two hours for $47. But the messaging was still vague, and no one wanted it.

Then I realised it’s not actually a pricing issue!

What the issue is is that people don’t see this as valuable. They don’t actually have clarity around exactly what they’re going to get out of working with me for two hours.

Two hours is a lot of time to give me for something that’s very vague.

Instead, I started looking at what I worked with people on in some of the free sessions I’d given away, and I created these two-hour single session offers that were specific to something I’d done with someone.

I had some tangible numbers I could talk about.

For example, I had done a one hour session with someone where we had gone through their blogging plan and crafted a structure to their blogs that they could reuse over and over again. We had crafted an idea for an opt-in that could get people from the blog over to their mailing list, and then we had come up with 12 blog titles and some key dot points for each one in our hour together.

I offered that as a two-hour single session with me. At first I still offered it at $47 because I was still experimenting with my messaging. I wanted to eliminate price as one of the reasons why people weren’t buying from me.

The first time I offered it, it sold out! Three spots at $47.

Then I started experimenting with different versions. I’d helped someone with crafting a webinar, so I made that offer. I helped someone with the copy for their website, so I did that as an offer. I helped someone write a bunch of different offers to share into Facebook groups, so I did that as an offer.

As I started selling them more and more consistently, I started to put the price up again.

Once I’d sold it out at $47 then I did it at $97 and then I did it at $197.

Once I got to $197 I decided that I would be happy with someone booking that in at any time. So I put it up on my website that people could book a two-hour one-on-one with me for $197 at any time, whenever they wanted. But it was still really important to me that I spoke to and worked with at least five people a week.

You need to remember that I started my business full time. I quit my job and started my business, and so I had time.

Time was something that I had in droves.

I could see that doing these single sessions was really informative, and a bunch of them had converted into VIP packages and working with me further. I’d also had a lot of people repeat buy those single sessions.

I was becoming quite well known in different circles. And I just wanted to keep up the momentum.

I was really hungry and curious about what people wanted and why people decided not to work with me further, versus did work with me further, and what made someone my ideal client, versus not quite ready to be a client but they really wanted to do the single session with me.

I could refine the way I offered the single session so it attracted people who were more likely to then upgrade to a VIP package over six months.

What I did was I made the single sessions available at any time at $197, but if I hadn’t sold five of them by Wednesday afternoon, I would go and offer the remainder at a discounted rate, but they had to be done on Friday at certain times.

I would go into the Facebook group that had the offer day on Wednesdays, and I would say what spots I had available on that coming Friday for a discounted two-hour VIP session.

And they sold out!

What I did by experimenting with this strategy (that no one told me to do, by the way, this was just me feeling a bit off about doing so many free sessions and having people not turn up and not being able to give them away) was actually create one of the most effective lead generation strategies I’ve ever had the honour of implementing in my own business and teaching to other people ever.

After six months of doing two-hour single sessions and experimenting with all these strategies, I went back and looked at my numbers. More than 50% of people who purchased a single two-hour session with me went on to purchase something else – whether that be another two-hour session at full price, a VIP package for six months, or something else.

More than 50% of the people who purchased one of these two-hour single sessions with me went on to buy something else.

It had a 50% plus conversion rate into further work together. It turned out to be absolutely brilliant for my business.

Single sessions as a lead generation strategy but rather than doing them for free, doing them paid.

As they became more and more popular, and I got better and better at not just selling them, but also delivering them, I consistently increased the prices.

I started my business in June of 2013, and by January 2014, a two-hour single session with me was $495.

I’d gone from $97 to $197 to $247, and then I went straight up to $497, because I just kept selling them out.

I ended up having more and more people wanting to work with me, and so I needed to reduce demand by increasing the price pretty significantly.

I should also say that the people who did those single sessions with me, whether they did them at a deep discount or whether they did them at full price, when they converted into further work with me, I only counted people who converted into further work at full price.

They either booked another two-hour single session at the full price from my website, or they booked a VIP package with me, and that was at my full price.

My VIP package from the outset was $1,000 for a one-month intensive which was four sessions of varying lengths. And then my six-month package, which was 12 sessions, was $2,500.

This is how I got myself to a $20,000 month in December of 2013.

I was doing a big price increase in December, and so I had a lot of people purchase a bunch of sessions and packages with me to lock in the existing price before the price of the two-hour sessions doubled and the price of my packages went up accordingly.

Remember at the start of this podcast episode how I said there are a lot of extremes in business and marketing advice? I want you to listen to this story without going to the extreme of this is the best way to do it. Because over the last 11 years, I have worked with thousands of business owners, and I can tell you that not every business owner and every niche is the right fit for this kind of strategy.

But it can be a very, very effective one.

There are some people I’ve worked with where offering free sessions works better for their niche. There are some people that I’ve worked with where offering single sessions doesn’t really work for their modality, and so it needs to be three sessions. And there are people I’ve worked with where doing single sessions one-on-one didn’t work with the hours of work that they were able to offer, and so we had to find other ways to do this.

But this strategy of doing low-cost or discounted single sessions in particular as a lead generating strategy, and being clear that it is a lead generating strategy, has worked for so many people that I’ve mentored over the years. That’s why I wanted to dissect that strategy for you.

A few key notes for you on using a single session as a lead magnet and making sure that this strategy works for you…

1. You really do need to deliver in that single session.

It’s not enough to offer the single session and do a lackluster job where the person walks away feeling confused, they don’t really get very excited about potentially working with you any further, and you haven’t really delivered on your promise. That’s not going to work as a lead generating strategy you need to deliver.

I think that this isn’t spoken about nearly enough in marketing advice and business strategy circles.

Something that I’m very passionate about is encouraging and reminding people that investing time, money, energy and practice into developing your craft and developing your skill set is just as critical as developing your skillset in marketing and sales to grow a sustainable, consistently scaling business.

You need to deliver on your promise, and you need to deliver it in those single sessions.

That being said, I don’t want your fear of not being able to deliver to stop you from doing this.

If you’re worried that you’re not necessarily going to be able to deliver in a single session, or you’re worried that you’re not good enough or don’t have the skills, I want you to remember that you can always come up with a way to sort that out.

This is something that happens sometimes in the Take Off program, because we do use single sessions as one of the strategies that we experiment with and people try out as a way of generating leads.

There are people who’ve come to a Take Off call or posted in the group talking about how much they flubbed their session. They did a terrible job, the person sounded super dissatisfied (at least that’s the vibe they had), and they’re worried they under-delivered and they want to make it up to them.

You can always reach out and say that.

You can tell that person that you don’t think you delivered your best work in their session, you’re exciting for what you started working on and you’d love to offer them another free session so that you can go a little deeper and finish what you started.

That’s totally available to you.

Of course, you do want to see that you are improving your skills over time. If you really don’t have that skill set, or if you’re really struggling to deliver, then that says to me that it may be a good idea to invest in some mentorship and guidance.

Some modalities you can do supervised sessions and supervised mentorship.

That’s a really great way to get feedback on the way that you deliver if you’re not necessarily helping people to get those results.

There is no shame in realising that you may not necessarily have the skill set to the level that you need in order to have a successful business. That’s really good self-awareness. I think that that should be rewarded. And I think that you should really acknowledge, congratulate and be kind to yourself. Then give yourself what you need to build that skill set. Give yourself what you need to be able to build that confidence.

That’s the first important note I wanted to mention if you’re thinking about using single sessions as a lead generation strategy – you definitely need to deliver in that single session.

2. Discounts are fine

Discounts are absolutely fine.

There’s so much out there saying that you should never discount your services. Would you rather sit twiddling your thumbs for four weeks with no leads and no clients, but you stuck to your guns and never offer a discount? Or would you rather take price out of the equation so you can get to the real work of actually finessing your message?

It wasn’t until I discounted my two-hour single session that I realised the problem wasn’t the price. The problem was it was too vague, and people didn’t see the value in it.

For me, having a discounted single session offer was actually the perfect way to ensure that I was staying focused on fixing the thing that needed fixing. And the thing that needed fixing in the early days was my messaging – the specificity and tangibility of the offer that I was making.

I am not opposed to discounts at all when it comes to using single sessions, especially as a lead generation strategy.

A lot of coaches and mentors do the math on single sessions as though that’s all you’re ever going to sell.

Of course, doing single sessions of two hours for $47 is less than minimum wage once I pay tax and my expenses. That’s not a sustainable business if I only ever made $47 for every two hours that I worked with clients in my business.

But that was never the final part of the equation.

I never treated it as though that was my business model – all I do is offer two-hour sessions for $47.

It was a lead generation strategy. It was a part of my marketing strategy.

Yes, there were some people who only ever did discounted single sessions with me. But would I be angry at them or resentful of them in the landscape of everything else that it generated for my business? No!

Often, the people who didn’t end up taking any further sessions or working with me further were my biggest raving fans all over the internet. They were tagging me and telling everyone to do a session with me because of how much value I brought in those two hours.

I see people start to get resentful because someone has purchased six discounted single sessions with them and they’ve never up-sold. They start pointing fingers at themself or the person because they never graduate into doing something further with them.

If there is an issue with qualifying and upselling, then sure we might identify that. But it’s often spoken about in hyperbole as though EVERYONE just keeps purchasing discounted sessions and no one ever upsells into their package… and often that’s not true.

This is where we want to be – a student of the human.

We want to be really curious. We want to pay attention to:

• What am I learning here?
• What messaging did these people come in on?
• How well did I qualify at the end of the session to understand what their next steps were, what their next barrier was, and their level of readiness to get help with that next step or that next barrier?

Often it’s a sales skill issue, or it’s that you’ve got a few people who keep booking discounted sessions with you, and you are a little resentful that they’ve taken the space of someone else.

At the end of the day, if I had five single sessions available a week, and three of them were taken by repeat clients and two of them were new leads, I didn’t have a problem with that.

If I had those single sessions selling out over and over again, people were seeing that. People were seeing me update my posts and say that all sessions were taken and they should keep an eye out for next week’s.

They could see I was an in-demand mentor and an in demand coach.

When I started to feel like it was selling out really quickly and it wasn’t giving new leads ample opportunity to even see the offer, I just put the price up a little… then I put it up a little more… then a little more.

By making sure I got the messaging really nailed and bedded in, and keeping the price point low at first, I was very confident when I then increased the price that it wasn’t going to significantly affect demand.

That’s where we need to be strategic about these things.

That’s where blanket advice is never going to be able to help through those early stages, because we need to be able to interrogate what:

• The data is telling you
• The insights are that you’re gaining from the sessions you are selling and from the people you are working with
• Information you’re gaining from the sales part of the final part of the conversation
• Extent you’re qualifying
• Questions you’re asking
• Their reason for not working any further together

Often it’s just that the sales strategy wasn’t necessarily executed effectively. We didn’t ask enough questions at the end of the session. We weren’t talking enough about the future and clarifying what the future plans were at the end of the session. Or it just needed some follow up in a few weeks once they’d done their homework and they’d implemented what they’d work with you on in the first session.

That’s fine. That’s absolutely spectacular.

Most of the conversion from single session into working together further didn’t happen on the call. They didn’t pay there live. They paid their invoice two weeks down the track when I followed up with them.

This is where there’s no hard-and-fast rule.

There’s no one approach. It’s about really dissecting what’s working. Where do people get caught up in that process?

Is the problem that you just attracted a bunch of discount chasers? Or is the problem that you’re not very good at bridging people from working with you in a single session to understanding the value proposition of your bigger package?

If it’s the second part, then let’s work on the second part.

Discounts are absolutely fine, but that brings me to tip number three…

3. Interrogate consistently: is this single session as a lead magnet doing its job?

Its job is to be a lead magnet. It’s to attract hot leads.

If it’s not attracting hot leads, it’s not doing its job.

That might mean that we need to craft the messaging of it differently, or we need to structure your delivery differently. Perhaps we need to do your bridging into the sales conversation part of it better and differently.

It doesn’t mean that the strategy of offering low-cost single sessions is completely devoid of value in your business.

Often it’s in the finessing and the nuance of the application of the strategy that we need to make some changes.

But if it’s not doing its job, you need to make some changes.

That being said, don’t throw out the entire model because the first two people you did low-cost single sessions with weren’t a fit.

That’s not what that data is telling me. It’s not telling me that the strategy or the model itself is not a fit.

4. Pay attention to your mindset

…particularly if you latch on to certain beliefs about what is best.

There are a lot of people out there sharing throwaway lines and repetitive content that helps us to reaffirm our existing belief about who we are and our place in the world.

I’m going to give you a few examples of this.

The first one is that being paid for working with you is a form of energetic exchange, and therefore, if you’re giving away single sessions, that energy exchange is unfair and it’s imbalanced. Therefore, you are energetically draining without any energetic return on investment.

I don’t actually think that’s true.

If you are building your confidence in delivery and your marketing, and if you’re getting messaging insights and content insights, the energy exchange is there. It may be imbalanced, but it’s there.

Especially for people who are in the very early stages of their business, and they would give anything to have leads, conversations with potential clients, insights as to what would work in terms of messaging and marketing, understanding how people get stuck and where people are at.

If that is something that you don’t have, that is an asset.

Those insights are assets. They are vital to the future growth and sustainability of your business.

If someone is providing you with those in return for you giving them a single session for free, there’s a very fair energetic exchange going on there.

That is a big one.

Another one is that if you consistently share things at a discount, then you train people to wait for the sale and wait for things to be on special.

I totally understand that in some cases, we can create that expectation with our audience. But that doesn’t mean that all discounts do that.

You’ll notice when I talked about the way that I did my discounted single sessions, there were limited spaces.

I would often have my limited space single sessions go up on a Tuesday, and they would all sell out straight away. Then I would have someone reach out and message me saying that they were hoping to grab one of the discounted sessions but they missed out so they were just going to book at full price instead.

That tells me that people did go and wait for the sale, but they valued the work with me so much that when they couldn’t get the sale price because it was limited spaces, they were willing to pay full price.

Other people would say that they’d wait until the following week.

That’s totally fine. I didn’t have a problem with that.

The reason was that I still had a very sufficient flow of hot leads coming into my business every single week, and so I really had as many leads as I could deal with anyway at that point in time.

A lot of people who weren’t willing to wait for the discount would just pay full price and have the flexibility to book whenever.

Especially as I became more and more in hot demand, and then the discounted sessions were only available on Fridays at certain times, people would then more and more book in at the full price because they wanted to book in with me on a different day instead.

There are other parameters that you can use to create that desire for people to work with you at full price and to ensure that you’re not just training everyone to wait for the sale.

If you see that messaging that if you’re constantly offering discounts then you’re just training people to wait for the sale, and that hits you in the heart space and you feel that everyone is taking advantage of you and you’re just attracting bargain-chasers… then think about how you were relieved to see something that reflected your existing belief about your place in the world.

Think about how that message actually got you whinging about your audience.

Is that the energetic response you want to have to that kind of message?

For me, if I see something like that and my response is that everyone’s out to get me, then that is not the message that I was there to receive that day.

In fact, what I need to interrogate is why I was so willing to jump aboard that train. Why I was so willing to get angry about my audience and get resentful of my clients in reading that message.

That’s a little bit of tough mindset love from Tash there.

Really pay attention to your mindset when you find yourself latching on to certain beliefs about what is best and why. Often it’s presented in a way that is saying the strategy you’re using (because it’s not the one that they deem to be the be-all and end-all) is attracting the wrong caliber of person.

What it’s actually doing is saying that it’s not your fault, it’s just your strategy that is attracting deadbeats.

Marketers share those kinds of messages and that kind of rhetoric to stroke your ego.

That’s actually part of their strategy, so just pay attention to your mindset on that one.

Again, I recommend you check out my recent episode about whether people only value something they’ve paid for: tashcorbin.com/439

We’ve done a lot of talking, and I got real sassy towards the end of this podcast episode, but hopefully you can see that single sessions can be a very effective lead generation strategy, especially in the early stages of your business.

I also want to say to anyone out there who’s been doing this for years, I still have single sessions as a lead generation strategy from time to time.

It’s still very effective for me. It still helps me to really stay in touch with my audience and the types of things people are focused on, and also the types of strategies that people get a little bit derailed by in their business so that I can create podcasts like this to help guide and unpack certain strategies that are so hot right now.

Hopefully this has been really helpful for you.

If you do want to dive deeper into the sales skills, structuring sales conversations, and consent-based sales, I have a super juicy offer for you today.

You can get my Skyrocket Sales course for the lowest available price!

It is a self-study course that goes through how to really improve your sales skills and make more sales with some very tangible strategies, and do it all in a consent based way.

If you use the coupon code SUPERSPECIAL at checkout, you can get Skyrocket Sales at the current cheapest available price: tashcorbin.com/skyrocket 

No matter when you’re reading this, I guarantee that the coupon code will always get you the lowest available price for that course.

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.

Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.