Momentum Podcast: 178

Help The People Swimming
Towards You

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Every once in a while, I get to work with a coach that I really trust. When that person told me to ‘help the people swimming towards you’, I listened. If you’re pursuing and chasing clients right now, there might be a reason why you’re having a challenge closing. Let me tell you, this is one of the toughest places I’ve been in in my career and it’s probably more recent than you’d expect. When I got to the place where people were actively pursuing me, the entire game changed.

Full Audio Transcript

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trail blazers, shock takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we play attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat, because you only lose if stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few, who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future, and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

Help the people swimming towards you. We all know that in the world of coaching and consulting today, it is really hard to find a coach who is really good, and I know that sounds like just such a depressing statement, but I'm not trying to indict our entire industry. I'm just saying that there is a lot of coaches and consultants out there that are promising a result that they've never gotten for themselves, that have gotten really good at marketing, but don't really understand how to coach people, and that sell people into results that they don't really know how to produce.

All of those things frustrate me. I talk all the time about the crisis in the coaching industry because there's so many coaches that don't really know what they're doing, and it makes all of us look bad. Now, every once in a while I meet a coach who's the absolute opposite of the challenges that we have in this industry. Every once in a while, I'll meet a coach who knows their stuff at a deep soul level, a coach who has obsessed over helping people and who sees their clients' results as the only measure of their success, and a coach who really has been there, put the time in, put in the sweat, the blood, the tears that it takes to really understand how to coach people and move human beings forward, who has worked the frameworks, who does it themselves, who walks their talk, who is a coach who I trust to talk to me, to my team, to everyone who I know. It takes a lot for me to recommend someone.

One of those coaches is absolutely hands down Taki Moore. He works with me, and if you are a coach or consultant that is coaching people, like if you are a coach, Taki Moore is the top guy out there, and he passes my test of ... He's a person I want to become more like in every way, and I respect who he is and how he is with his family, and how he is with his kids, and they were all over here this weekend, like I said yesterday, a couple days ago. It was amazing to see him. So Taki's one of them. Alex Hormozi is another one. Alex was here, and what he's doing for gym owners is world-changing.

And another one, unfortunately, she doesn't work directly with me, but she is one of the best coaches I've ever talked to, is Mandy Keene. And no surprise, she's on Russell Brunson's team. Russell's one of the sharpest guys I've ever met in my life, and the fact that he has a coach like Mandy is no surprise at all. She is the consummate professional. She understands how to coach. She understands how to talk to people. She always has the right question that will reveal to you what you should be thinking of next. When she gives advice, it comes from a place of certainty and from a place of experience, and I've been just consistently and constantly impressed by her.

So much so that Justin Light, who works with me, and I jumped on a call with Mandy so that she could give him some advice on helping coach my higher end clients, like how she helps Russell is the same way Justin's been helping me. And on that call, Justin asked, "Mandy, when we're coaching, how do you know who to help? How do you know who you should reach out to? How do you follow up with people? How do you know when you should talk to a client?" And she very simply said, "Justin, I always try and help the people who are swimming towards me." And it was so profound when she said that. I've heard it before, but it was just the right situation and the right time for Mandy to say it, and it imprinted with me in such a deep way.

When she said it, it was like a lightning bolt for me, because when you help the people ... If people are drowning, if someone's drowning, and they're swimming towards you, chances are the second that you grab onto them, you're gonna be able to get them out of the water, and they'll know that somebody's helping them. But if someone's drowning, and they're in the water panicking, and flailing, and freaking out, and you swim up the them and try and help them out, chances are they might punch you in the face, and now you're in trouble.

And unfortunately, in the world of coaching, that's exactly how it is. You have to help the people who are swimming towards you. And when Mandy said that, here's why it felt like such a lightning bolt. Because for the past three or four years, I've had a hard time identifying who was swimming towards me. I missed, and as a result, it has been an incredible struggle, and I'm just being blunt and honest with you. The past three years have been some of the hardest in my entire business career up until about nine or 10 months ago, because we couldn't consistently sell anything. I wasn't figuring out how to sell something. I couldn't figure out what avatar I was talking to. I couldn't determine who I could actually help.

And then about a year ago, I realized that whenever I went to events, whenever I spoke at events, the people I ended up talking to were always trying to build teams. So we started putting together our high end mastermind to show people how to build the infrastructure of a company, how to build the teams, the communication systems, how to make that organization bulletproof, how to as you build over time put more and more people on your team and get an increasing result. That's where I started focusing, and it has changed everything, because I started working with the people who are swimming towards me, and prior to that, I really wasn't.

I was doing crazy things, like calling people and trying to talk them into doing business with us, and it would work every once in a while. Or I would see somebody at an event and sit down with them and try and figure out how we could do business with them, which also would work every once in a while, but what I didn't have was people actively pursuing me, actively swimming towards me, so it changed the dynamic across the board. See, in a sales situation where you're pursuing the client, you have to actually convince them one, that they have an issue, two, that the issue's important enough they should solve it, three, that you're the person who can solve that issue, and four, that they should make a decision right now on fixing that issue.

That is a really challenging sales process. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it is a very challenging sales process. Instead, when you only talk to the people who are swimming towards you, everything changes. See, we've gone from pursuing clients to sharing what we do, going out and telling people we help entrepreneurs build teams, sharing on this podcast that we help entrepreneurs build teams, and then having people raise their hand and come to us. And here's how dramatically it changes the dynamic. When I was working with people who we were pursuing, or when I was talking to people who we were pursuing, the sales conversation was one of trying to figure out what was challenged for them, where they had issues, where they were feeling issues, and sometimes they weren't even aware of them.

So first I had to qualify and figure out what was wrong, then I had to ask them how they felt about it and see if it was really a priority, and if it wasn't I had to convince them that it was a priority, and then I had to convince them that we were the solution and that they should take action on it now. That was pretty difficult. But now, because we're only dealing with the people who are swimming towards us, Justin and I and anyone in my office, we only get on the phone or speak to someone who reaches out to us. We don't pursue anyone anymore.

And by only speaking to people who reach out to us, one of the first questions we ask in our sales process is, why us and why now? In fact, the first step in our sales process is for a member of my team to talk to someone, and qualify them, and find out if they're even qualified, and they start the call by saying, "Hey, this is a qualification call. We want to let you know just upfront that this will determine if you meet the requirements to be in our program, and if not, we'll give you the alternatives that we have." So right away, the person's thinking, "Oh, gosh, I hope I qualify." And then one of the next questions they get is, "Why us and why now?" So that individual has to explain why they want to work for us, or work with us, and why they think now is the right time.

We're actually having the client sell themselves on the engagement with us. Then someone on my team goes on to qualify them, get the information that they need from them, and if they are qualified for the program, then they tell them, "You're qualified for the program, but unfortunately, we don't sell anything on the first call. You'll have to get on a call, the second call, to see if you have the right situation, and needs, and outcomes that we can help you with, so we can't approve you until you have your next call with Alex, or sometimes with Cadey, or sometimes with somebody else in my office."

And so by the time someone gets on that second call where we're probably going to close a deal, they've been, first, pursuing us, second, they've gone through a qualification process, and they feel like they've won, because they've passed, and by the time I or someone else on my team gets on the phone with them, they're so read to sign up that often times, it's a foregone conclusion. Sometimes, I'll have the first 10 or 15 minutes of a call with someone, and then I'll say, "You know, I'm gonna ask you a few more questions, but I just want to let you know one of the big reasons that I do these calls is I want to personally qualify people and make sure that I want to work with you, and I just want you to know, I'm past that. I definitely want to work with you."

And often on the call, we do our calls via Zoom, so on video, I can see the person audibly and physically go, "Oh, awesome. I'm so glad." Do you see the difference there? A year and a half ago, I was pursuing people and trying to get them to buy. Today, when I tell somebody I'm willing to work with them, they're relieved that they can give me money. This is a game changer for any of us. If you're in a situation right now where you're pursuing business, if you're in a situation right now where you're trying to convince people to work with you, what can you do to turn the tables and only work with the people who are swimming towards you?

How high a rooftop can you find, and how big a megaphone can you find to go tell everyone in the world what you do, to share your expertise, show them who you are? I do this through the podcast, through Facebook Live, through the articles that we write, through the book that we put out. All of those things qualify my target market so that they will raise their hand and say me, and then swim towards us. And because they're swimming towards us, it's anything but a sales process. It's a qualification process. It's us seeing if they're the right person, and if they are, then we walk them into the program that they were calling, hoping they could sign up for.

I love to talk to brilliant people who spark creativity and who imprint for me the things that are really going to move my business forward. That's one of the reasons that every time I get on the phone, or vox, or with Mandy, I always know I'm gonna walk away with something that is going to be indelible for me, with something that is going to be imprinted for me, because she's just that good of a coach. And the day that Justin and I talked to her and she told us about helping only the people who are swimming towards you, it connected so deeply that we changed a lot of our business plan so that we would exclusively start talking to those who are swimming towards us.

How can you apply this to your business? If you're pursuing clients right now, there might be a reason why you're having a challenge closing. If you're going out and looking for business because it's not coming to you, this is a day and age where you can reverse that. Go out and start telling people who you are. Go out and build a following through sharing the content that shows your level of expertise. If you've been there and done that, shake off any embarrassment, or frustration, or irritation you have with doing Facebook Lives, or Instagram Lives, or getting on social media and telling people who you are. Go and do it, because if you're an expert who has information that people need, if you're someone like Mandy who's been there and done that, if you actually can help people move forward, go out and prove it to them by showing them who you are and getting them to swim towards you.

Everything in your entire business will change. You will find that you are far more excited to talk to your clients. You will find that clients have an infinitely higher success rate. When I was trying to convince people to work with me, first we had to convince them to work with me, then we had to convince them that our materials would work, then we had to convince them that it was working, and it was a sales job the whole way through.

When somebody pursues you, they have a bias for success. When somebody pursues you and tries to qualify to be able to work with you, they have a bias for the opinion that it's going to work. When somebody has seen your expertise in display and they start swimming towards you, when someone has seen what you're capable of through Facebook Lives, through articles, through how you get it out there, they are going to believe in what you tell them at a level that gives them more momentum, because when somebody fully buys in, that's when they recognize massive success and incredible results.

So if you want to change your business indelibly, start helping the people who are swimming towards you, and then once you figure out who they are, go out and get as many as you can to swim towards you right now, because it is a complete and total game changer. I'm happy to say that over the past nine months, we have completely turned around that dynamic in our company, and now, we're working with 30 multi-million dollar companies that some of them have already gone from seven figures to 10 figures, or sorry, seven figures to eight figures, and they're headed towards nine. And I know this sounds grandiose, and I know this sounds somewhat unbelievable, but I truly believe that there is at least one if not two or three clients that we are working with today that are going to hit that crazy three comma club and actually grow 10 figure businesses.

I've helped entrepreneurs do it before, and I know I can do it again, and I think we're in that situation right now. And I went from struggling to find people that we could help to working with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, some of the fastest growing companies on the planet, some of the most talented entrepreneurial minds I've ever met, because we started helping the people who were swimming towards us.

If you haven't yet, download a copy of my book, The Entrepreneurial Personality Type. Go to freemomentumbook.com, freemomentumbook.com. The Entrepreneurial Personality Type book will help you understand yourself better so you can figure out who should be swimming towards you. It will help you stop limiting behaviors and create unlimited momentum, because for people like us, momentum is what it's really all about, moving forward, that feeling of achieving, that feeling of success changes everything for us, and I want to help you get there. Go to freemomentumbook.com.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

Please feel free to reach out if you have a question or feedback via our Contact Us page.

Please leave me a review on iTunes and share my podcast with your friends and family.

With gratitude,

Alex

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