Transcript
00:00:05 Joanna Lindenbaum
I’m Joanna Lindenbaum, a coach, ritualist, and all-around transformation nerd who is obsessed with helping clients go deep to create more change and results with their clients.
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I created the Coaching Revolution Podcast to share with you coaching skills, tips, and advice, as well as a deeper understanding of human behavior and of yourself.
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so that you can do even better client work and group work, grow your business organically, and know that you’re making a real difference in the world.
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This is about creating a revolution in the transformational industry so that more practitioners feel amazing about what they do, and so that more of our clients experience life-changing shifts.
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Let’s get started.
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Welcome back to the Coaching Revolution Podcast.
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This is Joanna Lindenbaum, and I am so happy that you’re here with me today.
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Quick, fun fact, I’m kind of laughing at myself right now.
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It’s been a comedy of errors today as I have gotten ready to record this podcast episode.
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First of all, I usually record
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my podcast episodes from my office.
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But my office doesn’t have doors on it.
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And it just so happens that my younger daughter, Yael, she’s 11 years old.
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She’s has off school today.
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She’s home with a friend.
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And so instead of being in my office, I am hiding behind closed doors in my bedroom.
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I’m sitting on my bedroom floor and I am recording this episode from there.
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But because I was a little bit discombobulated when I first got up here to the bedroom, I forgot to hit record.
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And I must have spoken for about 15 minutes into the computer thinking I was recording this podcast episode.
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So here is take two.
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I don’t know if you’ve ever had a day like the one I’m having, but if you do, you understand.
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Anyway, I am really excited for today’s episode, which is all about the art of client renewals.
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It’s all about how to support clients.
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who you’ve been working with to continue to work with you, to decide to re-sign with you, to renew with you.
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And I’ve been wanting to do an episode on this topic for a while now, because this question about client renewals is one that I get asked A lot.
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I get
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asked by people who have traditionally, historically had a lot of trouble with clients continuing with them and renewing with them.
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And I also get this question from a lot of coaches, practitioners who do have clients who renew with them, but they want more.
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They know that there is more there for them.
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So whatever camp you fall into, this episode is for you.
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And before we
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any further, I want to share that I created this episode, I wrote the outline for this episode with having in mind that you are not doing one-off sessions, I call them one-off sessions,
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with clients.
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In other words, this isn’t geared 100% towards doing a session by session with clients where they renew with you each session.
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This episode is geared more towards if you’re doing a package of sessions with clients and you come to the end of the package
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And then your client decides to continue with you into another package.
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So if you’re doing one-off sessions or single sessions, quite a bit of what we’re going to review today will be applicable for you, but not necessarily all of it.
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Now, for those of you that have known me for a while, have been listening to the podcast for a while, you probably know that a good amount of my business runs off of renewals and almost always has.
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And I have made it my business almost from the beginning
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to learn the art of client renewals.
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I’ve made it a priority to have the kind of business where my clients are continuing on with me.
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And that’s because in short, renewals are reliable income and reliable income that you don’t have to be doing a lot of work for.
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You don’t have to have complicated funnels.
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You don’t have to have expensive ads.
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You don’t have to do cold calling, which just sounds, I don’t know, kind of awful to me personally to do, et cetera, et cetera.
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Renewals, they’re kind of the easiest sales that you can make.
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And in my book, renewals, along with referrals from happy clients,
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are really key to having a sustainable business and to not being on a roller coaster of feast or famine.
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And that holds true in any time period, in any environment.
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And it especially holds true in our current
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environment in the current industry.
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It’s so wild right now.
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It does take more effort for the most part to make more sales.
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And when you are able to have client renewals, it just, it helps with that roller coaster.
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It helps knowing that you’ve got something sustainable.
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So
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On today’s episode, I’m going to take you through kind of a general overview of what I do in my own business and what I teach my students inside of Sacred Depths so that you can have more clients that renew.
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But
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First, let me take a step back.
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I want to take a minute to just expand on what I already shared and explain a little bit more why I think renewals are so important to any business and specifically to coaching businesses, transformational businesses.
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Most coaches and practitioners are often spending time hustling to get in front of new people and to find new clients.
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And I’m not knocking this at all.
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It is absolutely very important to always have at least one strategy for bringing brand new people into your business and into your community.
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And
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As my business has grown over the years, I have used a number of strategies and I now use a number of strategies for bringing brand new people in.
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But that being said, no matter what stage of business you’re in, new clients are generally going to be much more difficult to bring in.
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then re-signing happy clients who’ve already worked with you, who are thrilled about the work that you do together, and who want to continue working with you.
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If you’re a coach or a practitioner who has a good amount of clients, a good percentage of your client roster that renew with you, then off the bat, you already have less marketing to do.
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And
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You also have the ease and the convenience and the deep satisfaction of knowing that a high percentage of the clients you work with are people that you already know and adore and have an established relationship with.
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For me, I love this.
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And that’s because I’m a relationship person, meaning
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I really, really value deepened relationships and getting to know my clients better and better over time.
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The more we get to know each other, the deeper our relationship, the deeper the work goes.
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And the other thing about renewals, as I said before, they don’t cost you any money.
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Inviting clients to continue working with you
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is completely free for you, and it doesn’t take up as much time as other marketing strategies.
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So in my business, at least 35% of my yearly revenue comes from happy clients who renew with me.
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And this has been historic in my business for many, many decades.
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At least 35% of the revenue have come from private clients who renew, have come from students who take one training and then my next training and then my next training and they take trainings over, et cetera, et cetera.
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Okay, so
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Then the question becomes, how do you do this?
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How do you get more clients to continue with you and to renew with you?
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I called this episode The Art of Client Renewals because it is an art.
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It does take some skill in a couple of different ways, and I’m going to share with you an overview of that.
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I’m going to share with you, we’re going to spend most of the time on the episode, looking at a process, a conversation that you want to have with your clients when it comes time for renewal.
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But before we get there, I want to 1st share what I know to be
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the most important ingredient that is required to be able to have a high percentage of client renewals.
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And if you’ve been following me for a while, what I’m about to say next is going to come as no surprise to you.
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And it’s good.
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It’s important for us to continue to hear this and for us to continue to connect in with this because it really
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is so important.
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The most important ingredient, the most important thing to having a high percentage of clients who continue with you is doing excellent work, is exceeding your client’s expectations.
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And as part of all of that,
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It’s fulfilling your marketing promises and going beyond them.
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So in other words, in order to co-create results with clients and to fulfill your marketing promises and to deliver huge value, all of which you need for renewals, but in order to do all of that,
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you also need to master transformational skills.
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Having incredible transformational skills helps you as the practitioner know how to co-create incredible results with clients so that they become so happy and over the moon with you and their work with you that they want to continue.
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They know without a doubt that continuing to work with you is one of the best investments they could make in themselves.
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This, of course, is why I am so obsessed with training coaches and therapists and practitioners
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to become extraordinary at what you do, to learn how to go deep in your client work, to have the tools to navigate clients through fear, through obstacles, through unhelpful patterns, et cetera, et cetera.
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Because being skillful in those ways is a big piece of what allows you
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to have clients who renew, and also to have clients who refer to you, and also to give you the confidence to put yourself out there more and have your reputation and your reach grow.
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Now, the second most important thing that is required, and I want you to think about this,
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because it’s so important.
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The second most thing that is required in order to have clients renew with you is what I call energetics.
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And what energetics means and looks like in the context of client renewals is that you need to
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feel really good and excited and on purpose and confident and courageous in asking your clients if they would like to continue with you.
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And
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When it comes to continuing clients and asking continuing clients if they want to continue working with you, for some people, this can sometimes feel harder than doing this with a completely new prospect in a sales conversation.
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Because we get into our heads about it, right?
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We say, okay, my client already knows me.
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They already know how they operate.
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Maybe I’m not good enough.
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Do they actually really want to continue with me?
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Do they even actually like me?
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Do they hate me?
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Are they sick of me?
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Like, who am I to ask them to continue?
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They probably can’t wait to be done.
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Will I seem needy if I invite a client to continue?
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Will I seem desperate?
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What if my client rejects me and says no?
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What if they can’t afford my new rates?
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What if they get angry that I’ve raised my rates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right?
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We can get so much into our heads with any kind of sales process.
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And oftentimes with this renewal sales process, because it is a sales process, right?
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Let’s be honest.
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And this is so important.
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We want to work our fears and work our beliefs so that we can have those aligned energetics when it comes to renewals.
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And by the way,
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I just want to normalize for you, if you have felt any of the things that I just shared, you are not alone.
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So many people have these thoughts, have these worries, have these fears, have these anxieties.
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And I absolutely had all of these, by the way, in my first years of business.
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I’ve had to work
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really hard.
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I’ve had to really work the beliefs and the fears in order to move beyond them.
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This is one of the reasons why in all of my trainings, in Sacred Depths, in Advanced Depth, we also do inner work for you as the practitioner so that you don’t let your fears and your beliefs stand in your way of putting yourself out there.
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I could share a couple stories, personal stories on this.
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I’ll share one briefly right now around this.
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So in one of my first years of coaching, it was way back when I was living in Brooklyn.
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It was before I got married.
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I don’t even think I had met John yet at that point.
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Actually, I was living with my sister and I was doing sessions in my
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bedroom of my apartment, of that little apartment, walk up in Brooklyn.
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And my clients would come and I just had a mattress on the floor.
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I didn’t even have a bed frame.
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I would push the mattress up against the wall.
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I would put
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some kind of covering, a textile, some kind of pretty blanket over it.
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didn’t look like there was a mattress up on the wall.
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And I would do client sessions face to face in that bedroom.
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Anyway, I had this one client.
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And, you know, at that time, I was in my mid to late 20s.
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And this client was older than I was.
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In retrospect, she probably wasn’t as old as I thought she was.
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She was probably in her late 30s, maybe early 40s.
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But to me, in my late 20s, I had a little bit of a complex about this.
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And, you know, basically I was like, oh my gosh, why
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Would she want to pay me?
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Why would she want me to support her?
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She’s older, she has more experience than I am, et cetera, et cetera.
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This was a story going on in my head, not to mention.
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She was my first full paying client because I had been discounting so much up until then.
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And this was a long time ago, a number of decades ago, 25 years ago.
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So I think at the time, my full rate, she was paying me, I don’t know, maybe $75 for an hour session, maybe 80.
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She paid me up front by check for the first month.
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It was like the biggest check I had ever gotten in my business.
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And while I was excited about all of this, I also had a lot of anxieties that am I good enough stuff.
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Anyway, we had contracted for a couple of months.
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We did our work for a couple of months.
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She came every week.
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And when we got to the end of that contract, I didn’t ask her to continue.
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because I had decided inside of myself for sure, for certain that she didn’t want to continue with me, that she didn’t feel she was getting her money’s worth, that she wasn’t, it wasn’t valuable, that it wasn’t really great work.
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I felt like she was being nice to me by coming every week.
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She didn’t want to hurt my feelings.
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And that was my story and I stuck to it.
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And I didn’t invite her to continue.
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We had our last session and I said, wonderful.
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It’s been just so great to do this work together.
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Good luck whenever I said and goodbye.
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And that was that.
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Well, a few years later, I was still living in Brooklyn and I got on a bus
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And lo and behold, this woman was sitting on the bus and she had an open seat next to her.
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And as soon as we caught eyes, she motioned for me to come over and sit down next to her.
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And I could feel already just inside of me this sense of shame, this feeling of, oh my gosh, she, I had not done good work with her.
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And
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This is so embarrassing.
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And so I went, I sat down next to her.
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We spent a few minutes catching up.
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This is one of the wonderful things about New York and Brooklyn, by the way, is that you just run.
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run into people all the time.
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Anyway, we spent a few minutes catching up and then she paused and she said to me, Joanna, you know, I’ve been wanting to ask you this for a few years now since we last saw each other.
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Why didn’t you want to continue working with me?
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Was I not a good client?
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And
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In that moment, I just, I had realized the incredible mistake that I had made.
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And I could see so clearly how my own energetics had blinded me to what was actually happening there and had held me back from
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Money in my business also held me back from doing more good work with this woman, from serving, from deepening a relationship, and it held me back from a sale that could have turned into many more sales.
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So all of this is to say how you show up
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to make these invitations matters.
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Energy follows energy.
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If you show up with an energy of, I don’t really know if it’s worth it to continue with me, or are they really going to want to, or I worry they wasted money the first time around, energy follows energy.
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Your client in one way or another is going to feel that as well.
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But if you show up to this process,
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with an energy of we’ve done good work.
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And it might be of immense value for this human being to continue with my support.
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And I’m going to hold space for them to make an aligned decision about whether or not they want to continue with my support, right?
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Then energy follows energy.
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your client is going to feel all of that as well.
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Okay, so being skillful so that clients are over the moon with the work that you do, very important for renewals, as we said.
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Energetics, your beliefs that you bring, very, very important for renewals.
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And then from there, you do need
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a process.
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You need a process for inviting clients to have a conversation about renewing, and you need a process for that actual conversation.
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I cannot emphasize enough, I don’t want you to just wing it.
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You want a process.
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Now, sometimes when you’ve done amazing work with a client, they’re going to ask you how they can continue before you even bring it up.
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When this happens, it’s just like, yay, right?
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They ask first and that will happen.
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But sometimes even when you’ve done excellent work,
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A client still needs to be asked.
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A client still needs to be invited.
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And even if the client asks first, I recommend having a process to take them through so that they can make the decision affirm the decision.
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And especially if a client wants to continue with you, but you’re raising your rates, you might be raising your rates at the time, or you have a little bit of a different kind of container or offering for them, having a process for a conversation is going to help a lot.
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So what is the conversation
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consist of.
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I’m going to just give you some broad points right now.
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We don’t have the time and space in this podcast episode to get into all of the nuances, the steps and the details.
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We cover all of that inside of Sacred Depths.
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But I want to give you some of the big pieces that you want to hit inside of this process.
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And before we even get to the actual conversation that you’re going to have with your client, a note on inviting them to the conversation.
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So I like to call these conversations next steps and celebrations calls.
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And it’s a separate conversation.
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It’s not part of a regularly scheduled
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coaching call.
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It’s not a call that they’ve paid for inside of the package.
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It’s a special extra call.
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And ideally, this call is on its own not attached to another, a regular coaching call.
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Ideally, it’s going to happen before the 2nd to last
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session in the coaching package.
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And you’re going to want to invite your client to have this conversation.
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And I’m always very upfront and honest about the intention.
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I share that it’s an opportunity
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for us to review the work that we’ve done together, to celebrate the work that we’ve done together, and to look forward to see if it makes sense to continue working together, right?
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So you want them to be clear that that’s what this conversation is about, or else it’s going to feel a little fishy, right?
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It’s going to feel a little bit like a bait and switch.
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So you want to be really clear and upfront,
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what the conversation is about.
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You want to schedule it ahead of time.
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And I really like to give the conversation the honor and respect it deserves by having about 45 minutes, right?
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This is not a 10 minute conversation.
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especially if you’re inviting clients into investments, right, into bigger coaching packages over time.
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So you’re going to schedule time for the conversation.
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And it’s just, it’s such, in my opinion, it is such a gift to give this to your client.
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Because while it is a sales conversation, it’s an opportunity outside of your normal coaching sessions to assess the work that you’ve done together, to assess how far they’ve come, to celebrate how far they’ve come.
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It’s such a valuable thing to do, whether or not they decide they want to continue working with you.
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When you get to the conversation itself, don’t wing that either.
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You want to have a process for that conversation.
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So I’m going to give you an overview.
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And this overview of this protocol that I’m giving for this conversation, I can tell you
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that if a client is meant to continue working with you, if you have this conversation in this way, they will be very, very, very likely to continue working with you, even if you are raising your rates.
00:32:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
Okay, so first piece that
00:32:20 Joanna Lindenbaum
you want to hit inside of the conversation after you’ve set intentions at the beginning of the conversation.
00:32:29 Joanna Lindenbaum
You want to spend some time celebrating with your client what they’ve accomplished inside of your work together.
00:32:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
You want to celebrate the big things.
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You want to celebrate the little things.
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You want to celebrate outer achievement.
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You want to celebrate inner movement.
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And in this part of the conversation,
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Don’t skimp.
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This is not 3 minutes of celebrating.
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You want to give this a good 10 minutes or even longer so that your client really has the opportunity to deeply, deeply take in how far they’ve come.
00:33:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
And
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In this part of the conversation, you want to use all of your coaching and transformational skills.
00:33:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s not as simple as just asking, what do you want to celebrate from our time together?
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You want to use all of your coaching and transformational skills because human beings often resist
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celebrating themselves.
00:34:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Human beings often resist celebrating themselves.
00:34:04 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now we get into all of the psychology and human nature and behavior around celebrating inside of sacred depths because there’s a full spectrum of how human beings respond and react to celebrating, to owning.
00:34:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
themselves, et cetera.
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And so we really take the time to look at that inside of Sacred Depths, to look at exactly how to handle different types of resistances to celebrating.
00:34:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
But for now, I want you to know that, human beings can resist celebrating themselves.
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So you want to have
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the skills here.
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You want to have the celebration skills here.
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You want to have a really good listening skills here.
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You want to have a really good reflecting skills here, creating awareness skills here.
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And you want to have good breakthrough questioning skills here to celebrate.
00:35:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
Well, you want all of that.
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And I’ll give you a bonus, just a little bit of a bonus tip on this, too.
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to make this part of the conversation even more potent, use some somatic tools.
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And what I mean by this is that cognitive celebration, celebrating is great.
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You know, naming the things, yes, but supporting your client to
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embody their accomplishments.
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Supporting your clients to deeply embody and own inside of themselves how far they’ve come, that just takes it to a whole other level.
00:36:15 Joanna Lindenbaum
After celebrating,
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Then the next section of the renewal call is opportunity to vision with your client to provide the opportunity for them to articulate and vision what it is that they want next for themselves.
00:36:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
And again, don’t skimp on this section either.
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This should be definitely more than two or three minutes.
00:36:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
And again, you want to use all of your coaching skills.
00:36:50 Joanna Lindenbaum
You want to use your visioning skills, your breakthrough questioning skills, your listening skills, your creating awareness skills.
00:36:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s not as simple as you probably know of just saying, well, what do you want next?
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And that is because human beings have a tendency to create
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misaligned visions.
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Either visions that are too small, or visions that are based on shoulds versus desires, or visions that are unrealistic, or visions and goals that are based on patriarchal messaging and expectations versus
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what they really, really want in their hearts.
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So take the time to really support your client to look into the future and articulate in an aligned way what they want next.
00:38:10 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, once you do this, at this point in the process, in the protocol, in this conversation between the celebrating and the visioning, both you and your client are going to have a really great snapshot of where they are right now and where they want to be in the future.
00:38:35 Joanna Lindenbaum
And that provides the groundwork for
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the next part of the conversation where you’re going to lay out how the two of you would work together moving forward and what the two of you would work on together to help get your client from where they are right now to their vision, to where they want to be.
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And again, don’t skimp on this part of the conversation.
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You wanna lay out step by step how you’re gonna work together and what you’re gonna work together on.
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And it all has to plug back to what’s already been uncovered in the conversation until that point.
00:39:33 Joanna Lindenbaum
This part of the conversation is going to need
00:39:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
for you to use your strategizing skills and you’re probably reflecting some hard truth skills.
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From there, the next part of the conversation is to make the actual invitation to continue to work with you.
00:40:00 Joanna Lindenbaum
Now, in a few cases, you’re going to, through the conversation up until this point,
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you’re going to see, actually, it doesn’t make sense for this client to continue with me because maybe their vision of what they want next isn’t something that you can really help them with.
00:40:22 Joanna Lindenbaum
Or maybe what would be required inside of your work together to get them to where they want to go next isn’t something that your client is up for, right?
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And what is required, you’re going to know a lot about that because you’ll already know your client’s habits, tendencies, et cetera, through all of the work you’ve already done together.
00:40:53 Joanna Lindenbaum
So anyway, in a couple of cases, it might be that you don’t make an invitation to continue because it doesn’t make sense.
00:41:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
But in most cases at this point, your client is going to be ready to hear the invitation and you’ll share with them if it’s the same format and pricing, if it’s a different format and pricing.
00:41:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
For me, because I tailor all of my private work to my client’s needs,
00:41:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
I don’t have a set, this many sessions over this amount of time.
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It really has so much to do with the prospects or the client’s needs, et cetera.
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You know, I’ll often say, give me a day, let me take all of this into consideration.
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You know, give me a day and I’ll give you one or two options to choose from for moving forward, et cetera.
00:41:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
But anyway, you’ll either share with them on the call or you’ll follow up.
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And sometimes your client is going to just be a big resounding yes on the call.
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They’re just going to be ready to step in, right?
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Like, where can I sign?
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I’m ready.
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Because they’ve already worked with you.
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You’ve done excellent work.
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They’re ready right then and there to say yes.
00:42:25 Joanna Lindenbaum
Other times,
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Your client is going to need a day or two or three to take the conversation in and make a good decision about it.
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If that’s the case, schedule a follow up call.
00:42:44 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s very, very important to schedule a follow up call and then you go from there.
00:42:52 Joanna Lindenbaum
Sometimes on that follow up call, you’ll hit some resistances because even when you’ve done excellent work and even when someone is meant to continue with you and love you, right, they can get into their stuff about like, is this too expensive?
00:43:06 Joanna Lindenbaum
Do I have the time, you know, etc., etc..
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So then you’re going to work with them on their resistances.
00:43:17 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s another reason why inside of Sacred Depths, we do a whole module on navigating client resistance and resistance archetypes.
00:43:26 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s not just for inside the work itself.
00:43:30 Joanna Lindenbaum
It’s so that you know how to navigate resistance in your marketing, in ethical ways.
00:43:38 Joanna Lindenbaum
All right.
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I hope that you have been taking a lot of notes
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during this episode.
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I shared A lot.
00:43:47 Joanna Lindenbaum
I hope you got a good overview of client renewals, why they’re so important, and the different elements that you really want to have in place for this art of client renewal.
00:44:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you want to go deeper with any of this, or if you know that you are ready to level up your coaching skills, your transformational skills,
00:44:14 Joanna Lindenbaum
For your client work, for being able to apply them to your marketing work, and for yourself to do more of your deep inner work, please, consider joining us for Sacred Depths.
00:44:31 Joanna Lindenbaum
The autumn 2025 cohort started only two weeks ago.
00:44:37 Joanna Lindenbaum
The training is 10 months, so it is not too late to step in.
00:44:43 Joanna Lindenbaum
We would love to have you.
00:44:46 Joanna Lindenbaum
If you have questions about sacred depths or advanced depth or into the depths, please reach out.
00:44:57 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let’s schedule a call.
00:44:58 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let’s talk about it.
00:44:59 Joanna Lindenbaum
Let’s see what’s right for you.
00:45:02 Joanna Lindenbaum
As always, if you got value from this episode, would you take a minute and
00:45:09 Joanna Lindenbaum
Give us a five star rating on whatever platform you’re listening and also a really good review.
00:45:16 Joanna Lindenbaum
And also you, my dear listener, are the absolute best pathway I have to getting the information that I share inside of these episodes with more people that need it.
00:45:32 Joanna Lindenbaum
So if you have a friend or a colleague who you know would love this episode,
00:45:39 Joanna Lindenbaum
please share it with them.
00:45:40 Joanna Lindenbaum
It would mean so, much to me.
00:45:45 Joanna Lindenbaum
As always, I’m thinking about you, and I can’t wait to connect next time.