Just Between Coaches – Episode 129
Automate to Elevate Your Coaching (Meredith Eisenberg)
Meredith Eisenberg: So, automating things that are blisters, automating things that cause you pain, that cause pain to your business, things that you hate doing, that’s what I would start with. Automate the thing that you hate the most.
Melinda Cohan: Do you find yourself automatically reaching for tech solutions in your coaching practice, telling yourself it’s efficient, it’s fine, but deep down, you worry that this reliance on automation might be costing you that genuine connection that are so vital to your work.
I’m Melinda Cohan, and you’re listening to Just Between Coaches. We run a business called the Coaches Console, and we’re proud to have helped tens of thousands of coaches create profitable and thriving businesses. This is a podcast where we answer burning questions that newer coaches would love to ask a more experienced coach. At Coaches Console, we’ve harnessed automation to not only streamline our operations, but also to deepen our client relationship. So lean in, folks, because we’re set to explore innovative strategies that fuse technology with genuine human connection and how to harness the power of automation without losing the personal touch that defines the essence of impactful coaching.
Meredith Eisenberg is joining me today for this conversation. Meredith is head of coaching and customer success at Connect 365, where she teaches entrepreneurs how to get off the cash flow roller coaster by creating a high tech and high touch sales system that allows her clients to focus on their zone of genius. Welcome, Meredith.
Meredith: Nice to be here.
Melinda: I’m excited to have you on the show and get into this topic that is one of my favorites. Before we get into it, would you mind sharing just a little bit of your background with our listeners?
Meredith: Okay. My background is actually public information. So I worked for a local government. I taught little kids how to recycle, and I was living in Washington, DC. And then my daughter got to be about three, and we’re like, we got to move back west where our family’s from, because this being on the plane going cross country all of the time is a lot. My husband is an engineer, and so he’s like, okay, we will find places that are in the western part of the United States kind of driving distance, like 10 hours. And so he started looking for jobs in alphabetical order by city. I ended up in Albuquerque because A, right?
But the thing that I didn’t realize was that the income levels were really different between New Mexico and Washington, DC, which is where I was. And so I applied for a job or two and they said, you are super qualified. We really want you. Do you know how much this pays? And I looked and it was like a third of what I was making. And I was like, I can’t afford daycare at this little tiny salary that I’m making in New Mexico. So I hung out my own shingle and I became a virtual assistant, but pretty quickly a virtual marketing manager because I could bring in the PR, bring in the outreach and all of that into the technology and really help my clients that way. And I never looked back.
I have been working remotely ever since. I got to drive my daughter to school every single day until the pandemic. So accidentally, I got into entrepreneurship. I really thought that someday when I’m retired from my government PR job, I’ll start a boutique pr consulting firm. And so that was sort of my dream, and I got thrown into it about 25 years sooner than I thought. And it’s been great because I get to talk to smart people and learn all kinds of stuff and really help people get past where they get stuck. And a lot of it is around the technology, because that’s not everybody’s zone of genius. It’s not how to hook up the autoresponder or why things aren’t hooked up correctly yet. You need that to have a business these days.
Melinda: I know that scenario all too well with everything we also do at Coaches Console. Now, before we get into the nitty gritties of this topic of automation, I want to cover first, like, how does a coach, when they’re in their business, whether they’re brand new or they’ve been doing it for a while, how do they know what to automate?
Meredith: I think of it in terms of blisters, right? So what is it that keeps rubbing against your heel that is causing you problems? What is it that you really are not doing that you should be doing? So you’re a coach, and there’s an onboarding process, right? You need to send people their documents to get started with you and all of that, but you’re so excited to have them in your coaching mindset that you forget, then they immediately lose trust in you. That’s something that you absolutely should automate, because it’s easy to automate. That’s a simple thing, and it will ratchet up the trust level that your clients have with you immediately.
And so that’s where I would start. Anything that you have trouble doing consistently is going to be something that’s going to affect your business negatively, because coaching is a high trust business, and one of the ways that you build the trust is by being consistent in everything you do with your clients, because you’re modeling that to them. If you’re not consistent in the admin, that’s just going to blow the whole thing. Like, they’re not going to trust you, they’re not going to get the results. And so automating things that are blisters, automating things that cause you pain, that cause pain to your business, things that you hate doing, that’s what I would start with. Automate the thing that you hate the most.
Melinda: I remember when Kate and I started coaches console and having this thought, I was like, if I have to tell another person this same thing again, please gouge my eyeball out. Like, I was like, oh, my gosh, that is such a horrible thought to think. These are my clients. And that’s when I was like, ooh, there’s an indication, like you said, the repetition that happens, the redundant tasks that are necessary, but it’s like, okay, I’ve got to send the same email to the same person, to the next person, to the next person. I got to answer this same question.
And so that was a big indicator for me when my attitude started getting a little funky and I was like, oh, wait, automation. Now it’s handled, it’s necessary, it’s done. I can put my attention on other things to keep growing the business. So that was interesting, that an attitude was one of the indicators about when to automate. Are there other indicators that somebody knows when it’s time to automate?
Meredith: What people can tell, like, when you eat food, you can kind of tell the attitude of the person who cooked it. When you receive an email, even if it’s an automated email, even if you know it’s a one off email, you can kind of get a sense about how person was feeling and what they were thinking when they wrote it to you, right? And so if you can write it in good spirits and automate it, then that good spirits gets conveyed every single time.
If you start getting kind of snarky with people because you’re tired of answering this question, then you should have automated it when it was fresh and you could convey that in good spirits to people. But the thing you have to remember, you’ve told someone that a hundred times, but they’re hearing it for the first time and they don’t know that yet. It’s not their fault. They just haven’t worked with you before. You’re onboarding them. Right. And so automate it so that it can come across in the right tone of voice.
Melinda: Right. I’m saying it again, but they’re only hearing it for the first time. Another thing that I’ve seen a lot, especially with newer coaches, you know, a common way for them to get started is, okay, I’ve got a few documents on my computer. And when a new client hires me, I pull that up, I save it, and I make some changes, and then I send it off and mistakes start happening because your copy paste sending, and you’re like, oh, shoot, that wasn’t going to Susie, that was Tom. I forgot to change the name or, oh, that was my last client’s amount. Oh, shoot, right.
And so when those kind of mistakes from the copy paste send type of situation happens, then you know that you’ve gone far enough in your business that you’re like, okay, we need to automate this so that we have accuracy and we’re not making those silly mistakes in the beginning. You know, okay, it’s fine. A few mistakes here and there. We’re all human beings. We’re not talking about being perfection, but we are talking about being professional. And so when those mistakes start creeping in, it’s probably a good time to automate.
Now, you’ve mentioned onboarding as one of the things that could be automated and streamlined in a coaching business. What are some other examples that coaches, when they’re looking at their business, where they could seek out, oh, here’s another place I could automate.
Meredith: So the thing that we mostly teach people to automate at Connect 365 is their lead generation. And that has two advantages. One is that what happens with a cash flow roller coaster is that you work really hard and you get five clients, let’s say, and you’re busy, you’re dealing with those people, you’re serving those people. You are there holding space for those five people. But while you’re doing that, your marketing’s not happening. So they all graduate from you for various reasons, and then you have to scramble again. You’re down to nothing, and you’ve got to build up again.
And so by automating a constant stream of outreach to people who would be good referral partners, who would be good clients, you’re saving yourself from that up and down and up and down, because you have a pipeline of people ready to come in. And so that’s super important that you have something going all the time. And it also kind of, if it’s automated, you don’t have, like, the fear of the send button. Like, I prospect on LinkedIn for some of our programs, and I’m still kind of shy in some ways, right? And so I’d be like, afraid I’d be like, oh, should I send this to Melinda? Oh, I don’t know. And so I’m thinking about it forever, right.
And if it’s automated, it gets sent, and you respond, and then the magic little elves respond back, and it’s magic. Right. And I don’t have to worry about the shyness, and then we’re having a conversation. And so you don’t have to worry about your internal dialogue over each person because it’s just gonna happen because it’s automated for you. So I highly recommend that little bit of automation.
The other thing is follow ups, but within anything, when you need somebody to do something and you have to pester them, automate that right away because you don’t want to have to remember to pester them, that just, like, takes away from your bandwidth. Am I sending the 16 reminders I need to send so that they remember to do x, y, and z? All of that? Just that would be the first thing that I would automate, because I don’t want to have to remember to follow up with each person. But if I don’t follow up right, then I’m inconsistent, and then people don’t trust me anymore because they’re, well, why aren’t you bugging me about this? You should be bugging me about this, because deep down in it, people want to be bothered. They do.
Melinda: Right. Right. And they know they need to be reminded. That’s why they’re working with us. Actually, I know some other small examples, small but not so small is scheduling. It’s an easy way to streamline through the technology so that scheduling becomes easy. And I think that’s a quick one that can happen for folks right out of the gate. That frees up not only just their time, but their energy. That’s the other thing about automation that I love, is in the early days, when you only have one or two or just a handful of clients, you can do everything yourself. And I actually kind of recommend it.
I think it’s important to do it yourself so you understand the process, you understand what’s involved, you understand what needs to happen, whether you’re working with a prospect or a client. But then after a few clients, you can’t keep doing it yourself. If you don’t turn to automation, even in the most simplest of forms, you’re putting a lid on your capacity, you’re putting a lid on your profitability, you’re putting a lid on your income level, and after that point, it becomes an energy drain, like, it takes so much effort to keep doing all this stuff manually.
And so when you automate, you recoup your energy. And I’ll often hear people say, oh my gosh, this giant weight just felt like it was lifted. My creativity has come back because you don’t have that constant pressure of all the things you have to do. And it can be simplified.
Meredith: You know, some people say, well, just hire a VA to do that. But even when you’re hiring out somebody to do the automation for you, like a person, the problem with that is, is you’re still managing the VA.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah.
Meredith: And you’re still sort of chasing after them. And it’s not out of your mind. But I think your point that you need to do it yourself a couple times and like understand your process is super important because it’s really easy. And this is the downside of the automation. If you don’t know what you’re actually doing, bad things can happen because automation can make mistakes, too. And so automation can send Tom Susie’s invoice, and if you don’t have the right things in the right column. So you need to understand what the data is and where it’s going and what’s happening. And in order to do that, you need to have the process yourself.
Melinda: So let’s dive into that for a second, because I think the two fears concerns, trepidations, whatever we might label it that occur when we talk about the word and mention the word automation is, oh gosh, I’m going to screw it up. And now it’s not going to be personal, it’s going to sound like a robot. So let’s take the first one first, the oh my gosh, I’m going to screw it up. So what do our listeners need to know to make sure that, well, just to help them quiet that fear.
Meredith: Okay, so first of all, I’m going to 100% say that you’re going to screw it up and just know that and just own it from the beginning. But just realize that you need to fix the process. So something happens, you need to fix it. Understanding what the process is that you’re automating, you know, we teach people how to prospect on LinkedIn manually, but we have a system that does it automatically. But it’s important for them to know what the process is so that when they have that relationship, they know what people have been through.
You just have the thing happen and you go back and you figure out, well, okay, what was it? What was it that went wrong? Is it in the data? And just take it slowly because everybody screws up. So you just sort of need to realize that you can’t break it. You gotta just keep improving it, right? And to have grace and patience with yourself, because you will learn it and then it will be better. But it is like anything, right? Practice makes perfect.
Melinda: I have a saying because I’m a recovering perfectionist. So in the early days of my business, I was that perfectionist. That was, I would not hit that button until I knew for certain it was good. It was right, it was perfect. And so it took me a long time to release things, launch things, send things, configure things. What I’ve since learned is that perfectionism, you know, it’s a fear based defense mechanism. But what I learned to reframe that statement is practice makes progress.
I remember the first time that we sent something, it was automated and it was part of a campaign, and there was a mistake. The link was not right, and I was mortified. I’m like, it’s the end of my business. I’m done. I’ll never work in this industry again. I mean, I literally actually thought that. I was embarrassed and I was ashamed of the poor quality work that I was doing. Like, this is the stuff that was going on in my head. And I was like, oh, my gosh, how can I ever face the people on my list again? But somebody said, you know what? Just like you said, mistakes happen. They’re gonna happen. So now be transparent.
And it’s one of the first times that I learned transparency was my superpower. And I just apologized quickly, and I was like, I’m so sorry. It was the wrong link. Here’s the correct link. I corrected it as fast as possible. The feedback that I got from people was so. I still remember the shock because they were like, oh, no big deal. I’m glad to know that you’re human, too, because now it seems like it’s possible that I can do this. If you can make a mistake and keep going, then surely there’s hope for me. And I’m like, oh, my God. And that’s when I learned that our audiences, our prospects, our clients, they don’t expect us to be perfect. They expect us to be real and authentic and truthful. That’s what they expect. You can still have the personal interaction and free up your time. It’s not an either or world. It’s a both and world
Meredith: Right.
Melinda: I discovered when I began to automate more, it was bringing to the surface my fears, because what was really going on when I screwed up that message, and I was so mortified, I had a fear that was telling myself, well, if I don’t get this right, they won’t hire me. I won’t get clients. I won’t make money. I can’t have a business. I’ll have to go get another job. Like, I could follow that breadcrumb trail. And that was the root of why I was so nervous about automation. And here I am creating a technology company. Those fears had to come up because I had to get over those fears. I had to clear them out of the way so that I could keep moving forward. And automation was the tool that allowed those fears to surface. Maybe it was just me, but I don’t think so.
Meredith: I don’t think so. I talk to people every day in that situation. They’re sort of afraid of making a mistake, afraid of not sounding genuine and literally afraid of, like, pushing the wrong button and having their computer blow up. Yeah.
Melinda: Yeah.
Meredith: Which has never happened that I have ever known to anybody. So put that fear out of your mind right away.
Melinda: So let’s get into some of the nitty gritty details. When a coach is gonna automate things in their business, what are some of the initial steps that they should take to integrate automation tools while they maintain that personal connection with their clients?
Meredith: I would say for a lot of people, it is either the onboarding or the lead generation are the two that I find are where you should start. If you don’t have clients, obviously, lead generation is where you want to start because you’re not onboarding people yet, but start there and then figure out which tools are going to do what you want them to do.
Melinda: Now, before we get into the tools, because I want to definitely ask you about. That just dawned on me. We’ve talked about some examples, like you mentioned the onboarding, the lead gen, follow ups. I mentioned scheduling, and those are great if you’re newer. We also have a lot of experienced coaches that are listening in. What are some advanced areas in their practice that more experienced coaches could benefit from automating? Can you share some of those?
Meredith: So one of the things that I do with the clients that I work with at Connect 365 is I do almost automated check ins, and they’re very vague, like, hey there, Melinda. This is Meredith. I’m just checking in to see how you’re doing this week. Please just reply and let me know. That’s a very natural sounding message. It doesn’t sound like an official email message with the stamp, but it’s just a quick check in. I send that to my clients once a week. They appreciate it. They don’t even really realize it’s the same message every week.
You could actually have a couple different ones that sort of rotate around so that it isn’t the exact same message every week, but people appreciate the check in and that’s a good way to sort of keep a pulse on your clients and what they’re up to and how they’re doing in the program. Another thing is have the post call summary almost pre written.
Melinda: Yeah.
Meredith: So have that template and then, you know, fill it in during the call and then you can just send it to them right away and they know what you’ve talked about and what their homework is and what their next steps are and all of that. That’s something that I find super useful because that takes my bandwidth away. Also, when it starts time for people to renew or to re enroll, having an almost an automated process for that, so that you’re reminding people, you know, hey, just so you know, you have six more weeks and at the end of that you’re moving into maintenance automatically. If you don’t want that to happen, let us know. If you need help because you’re halfway through the program, let us know.
Like that kind of thing, that feels sort of hard to send as an individual message sometimes, but it’s easy to send as an automated message. And people really appreciate the communication and the heads up. And that’s the thing that automation gives you more trust, is that you’re communicating more often with people.
Melinda: And one of the tips that we share at Coaches Console is in the onboarding, most time when people talk about onboarding, it’s those initial email messages that are sent to the client that helps them get started. And one of the things that we teach, you know, in the first month you’re gonna have, or the first week or couple weeks, whatever that duration is, you might be working with somebody after they’ve said yes, those are the onboarding email messages. You can automate those. We also teach 60 days from the moment they said yes. So 60 days in, there’s a sequence of emails that you have pre written and you schedule in advance so you don’t even have to remember it. And it starts doing that.
And one of the messages has them answer a few questions that recaps their journey. And the answers to those questions automatically is a testimonial. So you never have to ask your client for a testimonial. Their answers become a testimonial and you don’t have to remember to send the email. We do the same two weeks later, it’s to say, who do you know that could benefit from changes and results like you’ve been getting? And so it automates the referral asking. And so that’s 65 days into it, because by then people are having breakthroughs. They may not have all their goals met, but they’re having some breakthroughs. And so we automate the testimonial asking and the referral asking so that you, when you automate this, you can be getting a referral and testimonial from every client, every time.
Meredith: And your clients feel looked after, too. I mean, that’s the other side is it’s not just taking things off of your plate, it’s really having your clients feel like you’re on the ball for them and that the follow up matters to you and that’s super important. And people hesitate with the automation, but the real advantage is that consistency, that really, at the end of the day, that’s why you’re hiring a coach, is to help bring consistency into your life. And so if your coach is consistent, that’s super important.
Melinda: So let’s talk about the other one that we hear that we both have mentioned about, yYou know, I don’t want to lose that personal connection, right. And I find that with the automation, what you’re automating, the messages, the form, the document, the request, like whatever it is that you’re automating is the repetition, the thing that you’re saying over and over, you’re going to say it to every single person no matter what. It’s not that it’s not impersonal, it’s just, that’s the message that you have to say.
That repetition part, that’s what you automate. And you can personalize the message with something called replacement tags and so that it goes to their first name and gives some personal indicators within the message. But really what I find is I automate the redundancy and then I am still communicating the personal stuff that’s unique to each person. I’m still communicating that whether it’s in an email or on the call or in a post in a Facebook group. And so you’re not completely letting go of the personal, you’re just kind of separating it out so that you only focus on the personal and the technology focuses on the automation. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Meredith: So the thing is that I don’t appreciate getting personal messages from somebody’s autoresponder that says sent with active campaign or whatever on the bottom there, that’s a tell, right? Or if you don’t have your merge code set up right. And so you get this, hey, Meredith, it’s so nice talking to you about. And then like there’s this little merge code thing that you talk to them about instead of like the actual thing.
Melinda: Yeah.
Meredith: And so you’ve got to make sure that your technology works and test it. Like, that’s my biggest hint. Try it a couple of times and make sure that it’s working. Don’t go into perfectionism overdrive, but do test it. Do your due diligence on it. But if it looks good at consistency, it’s going to do so much more for your relationship with the client than anything else. And they aren’t going to know. Being on the receiving end is different from being on the sending end. And you kind of need to remember that, too.
Melinda: I want to piggyback on that tip. That is, I don’t want that to go lost on our listeners. Test it. And what I recommend, because if you test it, I know this is true for Coaches Console. I think it’s true for Connect 365. It’s true for most platforms that are out there. If I have signed up with the platform, I’ll just use Coaches Console, for example, if I’ve signed up for Coaches Console and in that platform I have my, you know, melindacohann@coachesconsole.com email and that’s what’s, you know, that’s where everything’s sending from. And if I test something and I send it to myself at Melinda Cohan at that same email, the world of email is like alert, alert. This is not good. So I’m sending this to spam and then people are like, oh, automation doesn’t work.
No, automation does work. You just can’t send it to your same email address. So I recommend everybody, you can just go to Gmail and set up like testmelinda@gmail.com or test my business name or whatever. Just set up a separate email. And all you do with that email is test with it. But it’s not the one you’re using regularly. And it also doesn’t clutter up your real inbox. And that way you can actually test, go into that test inbox, see what it looks like. It’ll land accurately. So just don’t use your same email address when you test.
Now, speaking of, you know, making sure it all works, how can coaches measure the effectiveness of automation? And, you know, whether it’s with their marketing or client support, what kind of metrics should they focus on?
Meredith: Oh, wow. It depends on what you’re automating. So I’ll start with lead gen. It’s easy because the automated tools, most of them have dashboards and so you can really see the before and after difference. Oh, I had a thousand connections on LinkedIn before, now I have 2000. So you can really tell a difference there. For the onboarding and for the coaches, I’d really look at your retention rates, right? So are you keeping more people in your coaching practice since you’ve initiated automation? Is the automation giving you a higher completion rate of whatever it is that you automated? So are you getting more onboarding forms on time?
Don’t go overboard with the tracking, but you want to make sure that those tools are actually giving you a good return on investment. So think about the time that you’re saving. So if you are coaching and your billable rate that you’re sort of aiming for overall it’s like a $100 an hour, let’s say. If you are not saving the time to make it worth the tool. So I saved 2 hours of time. It’s $200 a month. That works, right? Sort of. You want it even higher than that. You want to be paying $20 a month and saving 200, but it works. But if you’re paying for things and you’re not using them, get rid of them.
Melinda: Let me just add this. The other thing to consider with is it saving you time? Make sure your platform, whatever platform you’re using, whatever tool you’re using is lowering the resistance or the friction points of the user of your prospect or your client. If it’s not helping to smooth things out for them, not a good one to use necessarily.
Meredith: And you can tell by how they respond, like are they doing what you want them to do? If you automate your onboarding and find that no one is doing it still, obviously they’re finding friction there.
Melinda: Some of the other things to measure, again, for the coaches that maybe have been doing this for a while, when you automate your client agreements, are you increasing your conversions? Are you lowering buyers remorse and people changing their mind? Those are other things that you can look at to measure with your nurture sequences. The nurturing emails that you send. Are the open rates, the percentage of people that are opening them, the percentage of people that are clicking inside of them. You can track that to see is that improving or is it diminishing over time? And those are all indicators that can help you sharpen the automation, sharpen the content that’s being put into the automation tool so that it’s more effective.
So let’s summarize a few of the things that we’ve talked about today, I love when we first started talking about what to automate, you said, look for the blisters. Like that is such a great visual when they’re existing. We know it’s time to automate. We went through several examples, whether you’re a new coach or an experienced coach, of some of the parts of your business that you can automate, we got into. I love this part of the conversation. We got into the fears of it, that fear of screwing up and the fear of hitting the button. And how do you handle that?
You gave that great tip to make sure you test it using a different email. And then we got into the measure, because what you can measure, you can track and improve over time. And if you just blindly go into automation, maybe it works, maybe it’s not. You’re not sure. And so that doubt and fear is still seated there. So I love the different areas that you took us into to measure. Meredith, do you have any parting words for our listeners today?
Meredith: Yeah. Don’t be afraid and don’t give up and keep trying because I think the biggest thing people do is they try something and if it doesn’t work the way they want it the first time, they give up. And that’s a shame, right?
Melinda: Thank you for listening to this episode of Just Between Coaches. And a big thank you to Meredith for this incredibly fun conversation. You can find out more about her at LinkedIn and the business Connect365.io. That’s connect and the numbers 3 6 5 dot IO. In the show notes, you’ll find the links to the website and more. Meredith, thank you so much for coming to the show.
Meredith: Thank you. That was fun.
Melinda: I’m Melinda Cohan and you’ve been listening to Just Between Coaches. Just Between Coaches is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Neuroscience of Coaching and CourseLlab. To catch the great episodes on just between coaches, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It is the best way to help us get these ideas to even more people. Thank you and see you next time.