Transcript

Sigrun:
You’re listening to the Sigrun Show, episode number 406. In this episode, I talked to Melissa Pharr about five client attracting activities you should be doing right now.
Welcome to the Sigrun Show. I’m your host Sigrun, creator of SOMBA, the MBA program for online entrepreneurs. With each episode, I’ll share with you inspiring case studies and interviews to help you achieve your dreams and turn your passion into profits. Thank you for spending time with me today.
Building an online business takes time. I share with you proven strategies to help you get there faster. You’ll also learn how to master your mindset, up level your marketing and succeed with masterminds.
Today, I speak with Melissa Pharr, a business coach who helps female entrepreneurs get clients online see a system in creating an online following, positioning themselves as experts and creating a global online business. In this episode, we talk about five client attracting activities you should be doing right now.
Before we dive in, have you signed up for the Live Bootcamp yet? After two successful rounds in the spring, I’m bringing back in my Live Bootcamp where you create your recession proof offer in a weekend. If you want to create an offer that is unique, profitable and a great fit for your current times, this is for you. After 48 hours, you’ll walk away with a solid offer that is ready to sell and your clients actually want to buy.
I am so excited to be here with Melissa Pharr and talk about the client attracting activities you can do and definitely should be doing during these times. Welcome on the show, Melissa.
Melissa Pharr:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited.
Sigrun:
We spoke recently on your Instagram. You interview people actually on Instagram, but I have a podcast, but how long have you been doing that?
Melissa Pharr:
Actually, that’s a newer thing that I started doing because I used the Facebook platform when I first began my business. And I would say me building my following on Instagram has been the last couple years and then I started interviewing just the beginning of 2020.
Sigrun:
Cool. I thought it was such a cool idea. I did a few tests to make sure I actually knew how to do it before you interviewed me, but now you’re here and I would love for you to share your story with the listener before we dive into the actual content of the episode. How come you do what you do today? What’s your story?
Melissa Pharr:
Sure. Even from a young age, I guess I was business minded without realizing. My dad helped my sister and I run a pet sitting business out of our home when we were kids and we took care of all kinds of animals. And that was, I didn’t even realize, but my first experience as an entrepreneur and selling services. But I actually went to school and I got degrees in musical theater and business administration, which is kind of a bizarre combination. But long story short, I meandered as most entrepreneurs do, from one thing to another before I kind of landed where I am now. And I went from being a personal trainer for a long time, to being an online personal trainer and a health coach. I even coached around sex and intimacy for a while and then life coaching. One thing kind of led to another.
And at one point I had a lot of women coming up and asking me, “Do you ever have a real job?” And I was like, “One.” In between, on the summer of college, I waited tables and I was terrible at it. And I thought, no, I’ve never really worked for anyone else that much because I just would be a serial entrepreneur and go on to one thing or the next. And they always wanted to know, what do you focus on to actually get clients especially online? And how do you keep making money? And so that was September of 2014. It was a long road. And that’s when I decided I was going to be more of an online marketing strategist. That’s when I started this business that I’m running now. And I tell a lot of my clients, I like to be transparent that the beginning of my journey was an uphill battle for about five and a half months.
I think I booked one sales call a month. Didn’t sign any of them. I was about $42,000 in debt by April of 2015 and I’d had one client which didn’t make a dent in any of my debt, but by the end of that year of 2015, I paid off all four of my zero interest credit cards and did about 311 in revenue and turned the whole thing around for the first time in my life, after many failed group programs with coaches who were desperately trying to help me. It was a really long road.
Sigrun:
What made you interested in online in the beginning?
Melissa Pharr:
Well, during my time as a personal trainer, that was one of my only jobs as an adult woman working in a gym. And I worked in that gym and I got promoted to a manager position pretty quickly. But then when I moved to New York City, I wanted to run my own thing. And I had spent years just running around Boston and Manhattan training other people and I never got to go on vacation. If I didn’t work, I didn’t get paid. And I’d finally gotten clients and then it was kind of a trap. I just didn’t really have a life because I was just always trying to make sure I could go to Trader Joe’s and get all the groceries I needed for the week. I would have a calculator and calculate every grocery I put in and then I’d go put back the ones I couldn’t afford every week and I never took vacation. I was over it.
That’s why one of my transitions during that meandering time was to go from being an in person personal trainer, to being an online personal trainer. And my dream for probably five and a half years out of the last 11 and a half years, I’ve been an entrepreneur, was what if I got to be like those people who run an online business and then they go work remotely? And that was I didn’t think that would happen before I was 40. I’m 36 in a month right now and it happened a long time before that, but it didn’t feel like a very short journey when I was going through it.
Sigrun:
I guess you saw some people that were doing it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had that dream of what’s possible.
Melissa Pharr:
Yeah. Back when I started this, it was 2009 when I moved to New York City and I was 25 and I went and saw different people who are speaking on stages like Lisa Sasevich and David Nagel and Kendall SummerHawk. And I was just this 25 year old. I was older than most people my age so I’d been out of college a couple years and I just think I saw them and I thought, Oh well, these are other women who are doing this. And I’m a smart woman. I can figure this out. I think there was a little bit of naivete about what it was actually going to take that served me really, really well. But as I’ve grown over these years, we’ve all gone on our own journeys of struggle and overcoming if you’re still standing and you’re still here.
And I think the biggest thing for me as I’ve gotten into my thirties is just for most people I talk to, there’s kind of a realization of all the things you aren’t that you wanted to be or thought you were going to be and all the things you are that you’re prioritizing life differently and you’re realizing what’s really important to you. And my mission kind of started being born before I think I even realized it. But when I was working as a personal trainer, I got paid $250 every two weeks, which just barely covered my rent. And I just remember for a while thinking, I never want to feel like this again. And it started out with me just being, I really, really don’t always want to be counting every cent and I don’t want to have to say no to something I don’t want to do or that I want to do and yes to something I don’t want to do. I don’t want any women to have to do that.
And so that was kind of the beginning of my mission. And the first thing I excelled at as a business owner was actually sales. And so I started getting really good at being able to speak to the value and hear yes all the time. And I realized that it wasn’t just about sales. It was about the fact that I heard so many women saying things like, “Oh, I hate sales. I hate being pushy.” And it just made me cringe because I was like, well, why? What kind of experience are you having that makes you feel like you’re taking money from someone instead of providing a service?
And so my mission is really around women’s financial empowerment and then as I’ve gotten older and started to be a little more informed about how so many women all over the world live and work, I’ve been even more aware of my own privilege and my own responsibility that I think really powers me in my business to educate as many women as possible about how to feel confident making an offer and talk about it and realize that it’s service, it’s not taking something away from somebody else.
Sigrun:
Do you feel that your own struggles fueled you into figuring this out?
Melissa Pharr:
100%. Yeah, because it’s like when we’re in the middle of a struggle we’re like, oh, I don’t want this burden, this doesn’t feel good. But I think if you’re willing to just sit down in front of something and face it and know that you don’t have to feel good every second and it’s okay that you struggle, it’s actually necessary some of the time, then when you work through that, there is the deepest sense of self respect that I don’t think you can have if you’re not willing to face your demons. And that at least is one of the qualities. Transparency and self respect, I noticed that in other people, when they don’t need to be the loudest person in the room and they don’t need to say as many words because who they are says it for them. And that’s what I wanted to start to understand and see.
And I only got that from being willing to be honest about who I was and being willing to sit with my struggles for a while and realize that they’re not more important or less important than anyone else’s, but they’re still mine and I have to deal with them. And a lot of that for me was crippling anxiety and fear and doubt that this was just never going to happen. How many group programs did I have to take before I finally made one fricking sale? That’s how I felt. I felt anger and all those things. And I felt like I was looking out at all these people and all these stages and all these testimonials and I knew I was really smart, but I had this belief for a long time that I was really, really smart, but I wasn’t just as smart as what it actually takes. It was just always slightly out of reach.
And I think it kind of took a little bit of my personal rock bottom experiences for me to feel like, okay, fine. I’m not going to try to do what everybody else is doing. I’m just going to finally start being me. And my husband is just a wonderful man who really knows how to love unconditionally and I don’t think I’d experienced that before. And so when I started experiencing that, I realized that he really likes the parts of me that I had been hiding all this time in every way in my life, but especially as a marketer. I think I’d just been putting myself out there, sounding boring instead of being Mel and I needed to learn to embrace that along with all of the other strategic skills that I just wasn’t getting because I was really unhappy and really scared for a long time.
Sigrun:
What changed from being in debt and be able to convert a discovery call into a sales and then somehow something flipped in your mind? And it’s interesting because you said 2014, this happened, right?
Melissa Pharr:
Well, I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2009, but 2014 was when I finally landed on this business I’m running. This is years of just struggling from one thing to the next. It was actually February 28th, 2015. I was in Sydney, Australia. My credit card was full of charges because I’d signed up for a group program and traveled halfway across the world and I was sitting in my hotel room and I had my roommate and she was like, “Our mentor’s throwing a roof party up at the rooftop bar, are you going to come?” And I just burst into tears. I was in total panic and I was like, “Go without me.” And I’m sitting here and I’m like, I have no money, what the, am I doing in Sydney, Australia halfway across the world spending money on a nice hotel when this is never going to work.
And I kind of came up with my own brain training practice in that moment. It’s not anything super profound that I’m sure a lot of people listening haven’t heard, but I started trying to focus my mind on new thoughts. Well, what if this could work? And that was the time that I actually did start getting into meditation, not because I was trying to visualize anything great, but because I was trying to handle my anxiety at the time because I’ve really suffered with that a lot. And anyway, I sat down and I said to myself, “Mel, what do you actually need to be doing if you’re going to get clients?” And I just thought about it because I had a one on one coach with the group program, but I’d cried on the first six sessions and got nothing done.
I kind of sat down and I thought, if I was to get clients, what needs to happen? And I thought, well number one, I have to have clarity on an offer that is really irresistible and who it’s for. And I got to know how to talk about it. Okay, I’m pretty much there. I think I’ve almost got it. I think I just need to stop hiding and start actually acting like myself. Okay. Number two, I need to attract an audience. No matter how good my offer is, if no one’s paying attention, doesn’t matter. I need to start building an audience, building my list so there’s actually people paying attention. Number three, I need to nurture my audience. I need to have a relationship with them. If I have clarity on an offer, if I have an audience but they don’t like me, they don’t know me, they don’t trust me and they don’t see that I’m an expert, they’re not going to buy it.
And then number four, I need to start making invitations. I need to have some kind of strategy to start hearing yes. Whether it’s yes to something for free and get on my list or whether it’s yes to something that’s paid. And the last thing, I need to learn how to inspire my audience to say yes. I’m good at sales, whether it’s a sales page or a sales conversation, I need a way to actually make the sale. I need to be good at the sales process. And so I just divided up, okay, these are five categories and if I just stick to these five things, I don’t see how I can’t get clients if I really just put my head down. Talk about the right offer, start getting people to pay attention, build relationships, then make invitations and be good at sales.
If I did those five things, I focus on them every day, then I can stop with all the other bullshit things and stop acting like a virtual assistant and actually hear yes. In March, I had my first $20,000 month. May I made zero. June I did 31,000, July 41, August 68, September I had 25 one on one clients at a $15,000 price point and I was like, I can’t take more one on one clients. I wasn’t going to launch a group program till 2016. I guess I have to do it in September. And I did about 147,000 then, which was group program clients combined with some other one on ones. And by December I’d increased my one on one to 20,000. And then the next year I launched that program three times and I hit seven figures. It worked.
Sigrun:
And it worked because you actually were at rock bottom, you were frustrated and you had to figure it out.
Melissa Pharr:
I had to figure it out. I think why it worked, I like to believe that not everybody has to go to rock bottom. I see clients all the time who don’t need to hit rock bottom. Why? Because they have two things that I had to figure out. Number one, I needed to learn how to manage myself on a personal level. It’s hard to take action when you’re in your own way constantly because you’re so afraid. And that’s just who I was. Sometimes it’s still who I am. That’s life. And I had to realize what life is like. And the second thing is this, I needed a strategy because what I knew is that when I’ve gotten to fear or doubt and anxiety, my brain was not really thinking straight all the time.
My fear center was turned on and what developing those five different areas did for me is it made me say, “Okay, this is how I feel, but this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to choose one thing about getting clarity today if I don’t already have it. I’m going to choose one thing to attract even one person into my audience. I’m going to do one thing to nurture whoever’s paying attention. I’m going to make one invitation and if I need any practice on my sales, I’m going to do that too.”
And I was like, I’m not going to deal with anything else. I’m just going to stick to what our money making client attracting tasks because I think what happens with many entrepreneurs is when they get scared, they don’t even realize they’re sabotaging. They’re hiding behind trying to learn lead pages, trying to be a Facebook ad expert, trying to build a website and it’s hiding. That’s what it is. You don’t need to be perfect to make money. All you need is a phone or a PayPal link. That’s how you can get a client along with focusing on these strategies. And it’s just a lot of excuses we make for ourselves because we don’t know if people will say no. And sometimes rejection when you don’t have confidence, feels like it’s going to break you if you’re that scared.
Sigrun:
Why do you think women are so scared of sales?
Melissa Pharr:
It’s a great question. It’s a loaded question too. Oh my Lord, I think there’s a million reasons. But if I had to say, after running my signature program for five years, eight times we had about 500 women go through now. And what it always seems to come down to is this fear that what they have to offer is not going to be valued. And I think that reflects a deep fear that they are not valuable humans or they don’t have something valuable to offer. If you’re into psychology, it always comes down to some basic human needs. And I think this is a big trigger. If you look at women throughout history, they haven’t been land owners. There’s exceptions, of course, there’s women who have been queens and royalty and things like that. But for the most part, women have been second class citizens as long as you can look back in history in most cultures.
It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 in the United States until a woman could get a credit card without her husband’s signature. That’s 1974. That blows my mind. It was before I was born, but it still makes me feel like you’ve got to be kidding me. And women’s suffrage. We got the vote in 1921, but there’s still places in the world where women can’t even drive, let alone vote. And I just think we worked so hard to get so many rights for women and still executives are only, women are only 9% of executives. Women need two degrees to get the same pay as a man who has one degree and women make about 66% of revenue compared to men in the same job. That’s today.
And so if you think about it, what message does that send to women about what we offer having equal value? It does affect and I don’t care what anybody says, the fact is there’s a very clear message and it doesn’t need to be said out loud to be understood as a very young girl or as a grown woman. I think sometimes we don’t realize that whatever is normal and has been normal for a long time, has absolutely shaped the way we think about ourselves in our environment. Now, I don’t think that the most empowering thing to do is to look at these stats and say, “Well, this is why I can’t,” and make yourself a victim. I think it needs to be fuel. And that’s a choice that’s on me and it’s on you and it’s on any woman who listens to this and any man who listens to this to say, “Okay, just because this is the way things have been, doesn’t mean it’s the way things have to be.”
And we all have our own responsibility in whether we decide to buy into that or make a change, which is why I love talking about sales and saying that a sales conversation should feel like one of the most connected conversations you’ve ever had in your life. And it should feel like you’re inspiring someone and really pretty much inviting them in this almost in the very empowering, almost demanding way to say, “Do you want to play at a new level? Or do you want to stay here?” And if someone inherently questions their own worth, it’s really hard to do that unless you start to see more examples or you start to realize there’s a different way.
Sigrun:
Yeah. What would be the first step? Besides these five things you said one should focus on for attracting more clients, what if someone is like, I’m scared of sales. I feel sales are sleazy. What is the first thing they should do?
Melissa Pharr:
I think that practice makes perfect or practice makes almost perfect. I struggled with this too. And when I first started learning a sales process that felt good to me, I reached out to some women I knew who are entrepreneurs and I said, “Can I practice with you?” And for three practice calls a week, about three hours a week, I went through the call and I said, “Okay, this call, I’m going to stop at nothing. I’m going to be pushy.” And then afterward I would say, “How did that feel to you? That feel really pushy?” And they said, “Actually, it didn’t. I felt that you really cared and I think you could have gone even further.” And I was like, “Oh wow, that’s fascinating.” And then other times I kind of held back and they thought like, “I didn’t feel like you were strong enough to handle me.”
And I was like, fascinating. I’m not a mentor who can be a rock because I didn’t really ask you the questions that you need to be asked to let your desire to change be bigger than your fear. And so I learned important things and I really went in saying, “By the time one month is over, I’m going to be exceptional at having a connected conversation. And whether they say no or they say yes, we are both going to leave that call completely clear if it would benefit both of us to move forward.” And then I was like, well, that’s what sales is. It’s a honest conversation between two humans who are both getting clarity about whether or not both of them are going to feel like this is a win. And when you don’t make it so much about squeezing yes out of someone who should be a no, you get to lean back and be that cool as a cucumber person who just is an expert and gets to say, “Okay, well if this isn’t for you, that’s okay.”
But it’s fascinating that when you lean back, it gives space for someone else to want to see that they’re speaking to someone who isn’t going to take anything less than transformation. I think as an actionable step, it might be that you set up some practice conversations and you test this out a little bit. And one other tip I would say is, I think a lot of times in the industry, we’re always talking about charging more, charging more and that can be really great. I can get behind that as long as what you’re offering really merits the price point.
But I also think it’s about allowing yourself to build a confidence and momentum. You can raise your prices faster if you don’t put out a bullshit price that you don’t believe in and it scares you so much that you don’t have the brass ovaries to make the offer. I would say when I started my business, I told people what I was going to charge and they said, “Oh, that’s way too much.” Or, “That’s not enough.” I heard people condemn my price no matter what. And I said, “You know what? I don’t care because it feels right me.” And that’s what I needed to get started.
I would rather that you price at whatever you can believe in and you can feel good at, then rushing because everybody else in the industry is doing whatever. If you think about in 2015 charging in March, 5,000 and by the end, December charging 20,000, the package didn’t change that much, I did. And if I would’ve tried to charge 27 out of the gate, it never would’ve happened. Charge the right price and practice. And practice being pushy and see how much people are like, you are tiptoeing all around me like a scaredy cat and there’s no way you can handle me like a mentor and you will learn something.
Sigrun:
I love that one. It’s basically practicing being pushy and realizing it isn’t pushy.
Melissa Pharr:
There are ways to be pushy. There are questions that are not as helpful for both of you to ask. But I think a lot of women that I work with are surprised a lot of the time that asking an honest question, as long as the motivation is because you’re trying to help instead of because you’re trying to push someone into a sale. And humans, even if it’s not in the conscious level, can very much tell the difference instantly. And what happens for them is they just start to feel uncomfortable and they don’t know why. But you would be shocked at the questions you can ask someone and they will open right up to you if they’re like, wow, this person actually gives two about who I am.
Sigrun:
Yeah, and it really feels like you do, Melissa. It’s been a wonderful conversation and I would love to share with my audience how they can find you online.
Melissa Pharr:
Sure. Well, you can go to my website, it’s melissapharr.com and even Instagram, Melissa_Pharr, where you can just hear more about my five different systems that I always focus in on in all my different programs.
Sigrun:
We’ll put that all in the show notes so that’s going to be easy for people to find. Melissa, thank you for coming on the show. It was a pleasure.
Melissa Pharr:
You’re so welcome. Thank you for having me. I’m really honored.
Sigrun:
Go to the show notes at sigrun.com/406, where you can find the link to sign up for the upcoming Live Bootcamp, where you create a recession proof offer in less than 48 hours and then you can go out and start to sell this offer right away, because it’s going to be exactly the right offer that your ideal clients want to buy. In the show notes you’ll also find all the links to Melissa Pharr. Thank you for listening to the Sigrun Show. Did you enjoy this episode? Let me know that you listened by tagging me in your Instastory or Instagram posts using my account sigruncom and the #sigrunshow. See you in the next episode.