Wendy McCallum (01:35)
Hey, coach, welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm your host, Wendy McCallum. I am gonna talk a little bit today about what I think is probably the most powerful question you can ask AI. Now, we haven't talked a ton about AI on this podcast yet, but it is something that is on my radar for the coming months because it is a tool that we cannot get away from.
It is affecting the playing field out there for small business owners. And I think it's something that everybody has to understand in order to stay afloat as a small business owner. So we have been talking about AI more and more often inside the BBB. I have been creating programming that helps my coaches use AI in a way that feels good to them and is also helpful to them in their coaching business. I recognize this is a super complicated topic. We're just gonna talk about one...
thing today, one question. And this is the one question that if I could only ask AI one thing around growing my business that I would want to be able to ask. And so I really encourage you to take what you learned from this episode away and actually do this exercise yourself because it is a game changer. Now, I have done this many times over the course of building my business, but I just did it again recently and I was really
surprised in some ways by the results and also really heartened by the results. I felt really great at what AI told me and what I learned from that exercise. So here's the problem. Most of us are guessing about what our clients want instead of using the data that is actually right at our fingertips to know for sure what they want. So I regularly am coaching clients inside the BBB, which is my business building membership program for coaches.
We're talking about their offer suite. We're talking about some content that they're hoping to create or some kind of a lead magnet that they wanna generate. And I ask them, well, what are your clients actually looking for? And they say, well, I think they're looking for this. if I had to guess, I'd say this. And I'm always saying, stop, don't do that. Don't guess, you don't need to guess. There's actually a really easy way to find out exactly what it is they want.
And that is by asking this question, and you can do this inside whatever AI platform you use. There are so many different options here. It might be ChatGPT, it might be Claude, it might be some other AI database that you use. But the question that you want to ask is what are the top most searched questions my ideal coaching clients are asking online right now? Okay, so.
What are the top questions that they are searching? What are they asking online? Now, you're gonna have to have a little bit of information around who your ideal coaching client is, your avatar client, before you do this. If you're somebody who's been using AI in your business for a while and you use one of the platforms that actually has a memory and remembers the various searches that you've done and what you have created, then...
you're probably gonna be able to do this fairly easily. So I tend to use ChatGPT and it remembers everything I've ever asked and everything I've ever developed inside of it. And so it has a really good handle on who my coaching clients are, who my avatar clients are. So you do need to know a little bit about that first, but assuming you know that, assuming you've gone and done that work with which most of you probably have, and if you haven't, that's okay. That's a good place to start, really starting to get clear on who your dream client is.
and what characteristics they share, that client shares with other similar clients and how that client thinks, then you can go and ask AI this question. What are the 20, let's say, it could be like 20 to 30 top searched questions of my ideal coaching client? What I'm gonna do today is I'm going to share with you what I found when I did this exercise most recently. Now, again, this is an exercise that's worth repeating over time, but I hadn't done it for a while and I did it recently and I...
I found some really cool things out as a result of doing it. I'm also going to take you through the top five questions from my Avatar client. So what basically what you guys are searching for most often, because you, if you're listening to this podcast are within my Avatar client framework. And then I'm gonna show you how those five most common questions.
have been tied into my existing offers, both my free resources and lead magnets, my low ticket offers, and also some of my higher ticket, offers that I have. gonna do this because I wanna show you how you can do the same thing in your business.
how you can tie the answers to this question into your offer suite and also
your content strategy and marketing strategy. Okay, so why does this question matter? Why is this like the key one to be asking? Because as I said, most coaches are actually creating content based on what they think people need, but not on what those people are actually searching for. So what the questions those people are actually asking right now in real time online, trying to find the answers to. So when your language, your content and your offers align with what your clients are already looking for,
then you have to stop trying to convince anybody, right? They recognize themselves immediately in the content that you're putting out there in the offers that you are marketing. So this question helps you to clarify your messaging, spot the bits that might be missing in your offer suite. Now remember your offer suite in a perfect world includes a variety of free lead magnets. So free resources or offers for people that...
they get in exchange for giving you their email list or their email address and joining your newsletter list. Low ticket offers, so those are the less expensive things, might be like a little workshop or a masterclass, your medium priced ticket offer, whatever that might be for a lot of you, that might be like your regular one-on-one coaching package, or maybe you have a group coach program that you take people through, and then your VIP or higher ticket offer, which again, varies depending on the type of coaching business. So,
Asking this question can help you to spot where there are pieces missing in your offer suite. If you're not answering the top questions that your clients have somewhere in your offer suite, then you're missing something. There's a gap there that you can fill. And it also helps you to create content that will instantly resonate, that will instantly land with people. So again, for all of those reasons, if you have not asked this question yet, or you haven't asked it recently, get out there and ask.
your preferred AI platform, what are the top most searched questions my ideal coaching clients are asking right now? What are those? Okay, here's what I found when I asked these questions that was really fascinating to me. I ran this prompt recently from my audience, which in a nutshell is coaches in the first one to five active years of building their business. So some of the coaches that I work with have
been out of certification for longer than five years, but they spent a couple of years, you know, maybe they were working in another job and just sort of building their coaching business as a hobby practice or whatever. Or they just really, you know, weren't focused on building their business until more recently. But really, my avatar client, the coach that I love to work with is a coach in the first five years of actively building their business. And these are solo printer coaches. They're not really looking to go work for someone else. They want to build a business that provides them with
the revenue that they need and the balance that they're craving in their life so that they don't burn out. I discovered the answer to that question when I asked it most
I asked it for 20 questions and the 20 questions that popped up were really interesting to me because when I went through that list, what I realized was, I already know all of these and these are all gaps that I have.
either dealt with in some form of a resource, whether that's free or low ticket that I offer or in podcast episodes or in my marketing elsewhere or in lessons and resources that are included in some of my paid programming offers. So that was really great. That was like really great insight for me. Oh, look, look what I've been able to accomplish. I've actually gotten to a place in this business coaching piece of my business where I have
the solutions, I have filled the gap in all of these kind of top areas of confusion or concern for my avatar client. So I'm gonna walk you through the top five because the MyChat GPT search organized these by the ones that were the most asked the most frequently. And then it also took those and made some subcategories out of them. So some of them were like, you the most
emotional kind of questions that had sort of an emotion at their root, which were great topics to be addressing in, for example, like more of a storytelling way. So in a podcast episode, and then it identified the ones that were just most searched period and so on. So I'm just going to do, I'm going to deal with the top five because that felt like a reasonable thing to try to cover in this podcast episode.
So I'm hoping that you get some good information here from me because you probably have asked these questions yourself or are asking these questions right now. But I also want you to be paying attention to how I have addressed each of these questions already, frankly, in my offer suite and in my content and marketing. Because when you ask ChatGPT this question or whatever your AI platform of choice is, you're going to get these 20 questions. And I want you to look at those questions and ask yourself, have you addressed those yet?
And if so, how and then there's more. there more that you can do with this? Because this is such a direct way to get right into your dream clients brain so.
One thing that I want to talk about before I get into those five questions is I want to quickly answer something that coaches in the BBB ask me all the time when I start talking about using AI and that is like, is it a problem if you go too general with AI? So for example, this question of what are the top 20 questions that My Dream clients are searching for right now? Is that too broad a question? Is there a way to refine that and get more useful information? And the answer is kind of no and yes, really.
So I think to start a general question like that is fantastic. And that's what I want you guys to start with today if you haven't done this exercise. But you absolutely can refine and I encourage all of my coaches to get really good at pushing AI and refining questions and using their own intuition and knowledge and experience as coaches to refine the questions that you ask and they ask so that you get even more detailed answers. So for example,
If you were to start with that general question of what the sort top most searched questions are by your avatar client, that's gonna give you like a big picture snapshot of what your audience cares about. But you could also take those questions and go deeper by asking platform specific questions. So you could say, what are my people Googling about this particular topic that I coach on? What are the top searches on YouTube?
For example, if you use YouTube as a platform and you have a YouTube channel, like what are the top searches that my avatar client is inputting in YouTube? Or for example, what are people asking about in Reddit threads on this topic? Or in other social media groups on this topic? Whatever your social media platforms of choice are, you can narrow this question down and get even more specific. And that can be really helpful.
when it comes to creating specific content for a particular platform. You might get different language and phrasing that is more resonant to your clients on those clients who are using that particular platform. yes, general sometimes is great, but also once you've asked the general question, it can be really helpful as you continue to work in this area to ask more refined and specific questions of AI.
But for today, just start with that general question that I offered. Okay, so when I asked AI that question again, just last week, now this podcast is being recorded in early, early, early fall. So this was probably several months ago now when this podcast is airing. But when I asked the question, here is what it turned up as the top five most searched questions by you guys, from you. So as I'm saying these like,
you can actually be my check and balance on this. Are these questions that you have actually Googled before as a coach in the first five years or so of active business building? The first one, how much should I charge for my coaching? Doesn't surprise me at all. Pricing causes so much anxiety for new coaches. It is one of the things we talk the most about in the BBB, especially when somebody has just joined and they're just setting up their offers. So,
I always talk about how your rate is not about the amount of time you spend with somebody. It's not just a pure exchange of the value of the time for the money. It's about the value that you provide, the transformation that you help to affect, what the client gets out of the time that they spend with you or the resources that you provide for them, and also the structure of your offer. So it's much more complicated than that. And what was really cool,
is that I realized as this question came up as the top question, this is one of the first things that I addressed in my free and low ticket offer suite that I have for coaches. So I have a huge collection of either free or very low cost resources that I created for newer coaches in the first five years of business. And if you haven't accessed them, hopefully after this podcast, you'll go and grab some of them. But one of the first things I did,
was a pricing masterclass for one-on-one coaching. So this is for coaches who are trying to figure out what to charge for their one-on-one private coaching services. And that is now a $27 pricing masterclass. So it is a very inexpensive masterclass that you can purchase. It's one of my most popular low ticket items. Coaches absolutely love it and I get great feedback from it every time somebody goes through it.
I get a little note from them saying, this was gold. This really impacted the way I think about how I've been setting my pricing. So I think that that's really cool that I already had that in place. That masterclass really deals with the most important business advice that nobody ever told me about pricing. And I wish I had known it a lot earlier. We talk about what other coaches are actually charging. So the actual market price right now for coaching. We also talk about...
three different pricing model options, so three different ways to price and the pros and cons of each so you can go through those and figure out which one's the right fit for you. We talk about a couple of really key pricing considerations that nobody ever talks about except me. I go on ad nauseum about these, but I had never heard anyone talk about these before. And then really the answer to that key question that as this chat GPT search proved,
is a question that coaches are asking constantly, which is how much should I charge for my coaching? So again, that has been, that gap's been covered off by this masterclass that I have. So when you do your search, what's the first top most searched question? Do you have a resource that covers that? Now, you don't need to go into all the details and provide every single piece of support strategy solution that you might have for that for a client.
If you're going to do that, it's probably better served for your paid offer, right? To fit somewhere in a paid offer, which of course is the case with pricing. mean, pricing, the masterclass gets you started. You start thinking about this, but we are constantly talking about price refinements inside the BBB. We are constantly talking about the nuances of how to set prices for new programs that my coaches are offering, or, you know, they're thinking like, maybe it's time for me to bump my prices up in my one-on-one. So I'm just giving you the beginning, you know, the core.
learning information and strategy that you need to know in this low ticket resource
Okay, the second question that came up as most the second most searched question by my kind of key dream clients is how to find coaching clients without social media, which made me laugh because you have probably by now heard me talking about my free masterclass, which is called 10 ways to get coaching clients now without a following like social media following or an email list.
I have already covered off this gap as well, which made me really happy. So why is that question being searched so often? Because coaches come into this business of coaching, most of them from some other profession. They do not have a huge social media following for the most part. Or if they do have a social media following, it's in some other area that is maybe sort of related to what they want to do as a coach, but not really related. Maybe they've been an influencer or they've been doing something else in the past.
But that is rarely how they land the first few clients. Like most of the coaches that I work with do not get their first paying clients through social media. It comes through other avenues. And I really, in this masterclass, talk about the importance of focusing on existing relationships, existing networks and referrals, and really getting out there into the real world and letting people know what you do. And what I mean by real world is like not online per se.
but into your own community and tapping into the networks that you already have to get yourself some paying clients so that you can make some money as soon as possible. And again, that free masterclass, and I'm gonna put the links to all these resources in the show notes for you guys, but that free masterclass is so popular and that walks you through basically the 10 simple proven strategies that work even if you don't have a single social media follower yet.
So I have solved that problem in that free offer, which was cool to see when these questions came up. The third apparently most searched thing by you guys is lead magnet ideas for life coaches. So lead magnet ideas for coaches. And that matters of course, because a great lead magnet or free resource that you offer people in exchange for their email address.
solves one small urgent problem, not everything all at once. I've got lots of other podcast episodes where I talk about free resources, lead magnets, freebies. So I'm not gonna get into a ton of detail here. You can go listen to those podcast episodes, which are all examples of how I have already recognized that this is a common area of challenge for new coaches in the first five years of business, something you guys are looking for support around. And I have dealt with it in a couple of different podcast episodes, but I have also
created resources for that specific resources. So for example, in the month that I am recording this podcast, I have a low ticket workshop happening called the Lead Magnet Lab. So if you're listening to this, you know, in December, whenever this airs that Lead Magnet Lab has already happened. I suspect that by this point, I will have...
something available for you to download as either a free or low ticket resource around lead magnets. And again, I'll include that in the show notes, but my point is I have already identified this as a gap, as a common question, as a common challenge, and I am working to meet that.
The fourth question that was most asked by you guys is how to have a discovery call that converts. So how to actually sell on a discovery call, which...
matters a lot because those discovery calls, those introduction calls that you do with your clients or sales calls as some people call them can feel so uncomfortable for people. And I recognize this, this is something again that comes up time and time again inside the BBB. And the goal here is to start the conversation, it's to connect, it's to clarify, it's to help figure out whether you are a good fit with this person. And if so,
to describe to them how you can help them in a way that's clear and to make an offer, to make the offer. And that can just feel so overwhelming for people and a lot of people find that process really salesy and uncomfortable. And so that is a question that gets asked all the time. This is also something that I have dealt with in my free resource vault for coaches. So I have a free discovery called Cheat Sheet, which...
is called get clients with confidence. And that is a step-by-step discovery call script. Like literally each of the questions and each of the things that you want to deal with in let's say a 30 to 45 minute discovery call. And guidance on how to talk about your price, make the offer with real confidence. So it doesn't feel awkward to you.
And this is really like the perfect tool if you're somebody who dreads discovery calls, this template is going to change that for you. And I have filled that gap. So that's the fourth question that gets asked regularly. And then the fifth question, most commonly asked question by you apparently is how to get my first coaching clients.
And again, of course this matters because those first few clients are everything. They're how you build your confidence and your belief and your momentum. They're how you gather some testimonials so that you can do some more marketing. And they're how you make money so you can keep going as a coach. So that is a key question for a reason. And I am always trying to support coaches around getting, obviously that's really what the BBB is all about. It's about helping coaches build their business, get the systems in place and the clients in place.
so that they can actually breathe when it comes to this whole business building thing, which is really overwhelming and involves a lot of different moving parts. So I'm always talking about keeping it simple, making really clear offers, constantly making the offer. So not being afraid to say, hey, I have this thing, which so many of my coaches really shy away from. So we do a lot of coaching around that, consistent outreach, starting conversations all the time and...
really working on building a community and building your own brand, building that like no trust by getting out there and showing up in an authentic and genuine and trustworthy way. So have I addressed this already? Yes, I have. I've already talked about how I've addressed it. I've addressed it in that free masterclass, the 10 ways to get coaching clients now. That is obviously designed to answer this particular question. How do I get my first like five coaching clients? Let's say I have addressed that in that free masterclass, the links in the show notes.
But also, as I said, this is really what my bigger program, the Business Building Bootcamp, which is my one-year membership community for coaches where I do weekly coaching live. And we also have loads and loads and loads of really specific targeted resources and systems that you can take and basically just pull into your own business model so that you can get yourself set up and streamlined much more efficiently than you would if you were trying to create all of this stuff on your own. That Business Building Bootcamp is designed to get you those
paying clients as quickly as possible so that you can make back your investment in the BBB, first of all, and start turning a profit while you are in that one year of membership in the business building bootcamp. So if you're asking that question, how do I get my coaching clients, maybe you've already watched the 10 ways to get coaching clients now masterclass, I really encourage you to think about the BBB. Come out to the next open house or give me a, send me a.
email or DM on Instagram and let's get together for a call and see if it's the right next step for you. Because that is really the place where we do some serious business building and we create a roadmap for you and your business and you have a community there to support you and you have me to help you there as well. So that gets you there a whole lot faster. So what was interesting about this exercise is that I already had these things in place, which was really cool. Now it also, though, highlights for me. OK, you're on the right track. What more can you do?
Do you have enough podcast episodes on these various topics? Are there subtopics in these podcast episodes that you might want to address? Do you have actually a free resource on all of these things? Or is there just maybe a lower ticket or higher ticket offer that covers some of these? So it got me really thinking about my own offer suite in a much more critical way, but I was pretty pleased with how it all turned out. Now, again, when you do this, it's probably not gonna be like that. You'll probably find there are more gaps. Remember, I've done this exercise many times.
But with the advent of AI, this suddenly becomes a lot quicker and a lot easier to do. Before I would have to go and look at Google searches and see what people were also searching for. And there was a lot of manual work that had to happen. AI makes this a lot quicker. So how can you use this exercise yourself? Ask your AI platform, what are the top maybe 20 to 30 most common questions people in my niche? And you'll have to clarify your niche.
are Googling or searching for online right now. Encourage your AI platform, whatever it is, to really look for your specific avatars questions. And the way you do that obviously is by inputting a little information in advance. Maybe you already have a dream client avatar statement done up that you can just input into this question, but make sure you include that there. Now, I'm going to suggest that you
look through those questions and identify which ones you've already addressed in your offers or in your content. Look for the gaps as always. Where's there a gap? And could that become your next like lead magnet? Could that become a blog post for you with some really great SEO embedded in it? Could that become a really good mini course or mini offer? Or is that something that you need to add to maybe an existing online course that you have or you haven't addressed that and that's just not part of the current content? Like where are the gaps and how can you fill them?
Use those insights to simplify and strengthen your marketing strategy as well. I actually went back to the person that I work with on copy, on general copy writing. then after I did this exercise that I said, look, let's just like keep these in mind. I know we already have these as the backbone really of the free resource offers that I have in place, but.
Let's keep these in mind as we go forward and create more marketing and more content strategy. And definitely as we're talking about, you know, what we want to be focusing on in the podcast or in future programming. Let's keep this in mind.
All of this work just confirmed that my own business ecosystem was really aligned and I think it's going to help you do the same thing. So.
Going forward, takeaways here. I really think that it's important to go and ask yourself, ask AI, guess, this question. So to actually go and ask this question of AI. And that is gonna help give you a roadmap for future content, also your offers and your messaging. Just a reminder that all of the five top search questions that you guys have.
as coaches in the first five years of actively building your business, I already have a ready-made resource for each of them. I have a pricing masterclass for your one-on-one pricing. That is where you should start probably if you've got a one-on-one offer, but you are nervous about the price or you find yourself stumbling around the price when you're on a discovery call. This is going to help you nail your one-on-one pricing and feel really confident and good about it so you don't second guess it anymore, which means you can talk about it with confidence, which means it's going to sell a lot better.
So that pricing masterclass is just $27. I have a free masterclass called 10 Ways to Get Coaching Clients Now without a social media following or big email list. That is also a no-brainer. Go and grab that. I have the Lead Magnet Lab that I just ran in November, as I said, and I have lots of podcast episodes around how to create great lead magnets, how to create great freebies. You can go and search for those in the Coaching Edge archives.
And like I said, if I do by the time of this podcast airs have a resource that specifically addresses this that you can download. I will include that link as well in the show notes. I have a free discovery call cheat sheet. It is a script for sales calls. The most awkward thing for most new coaches. This takes you through exactly how I do it. And there's lots of room for flexibility. It works for coaches in all different niches and fields.
but it will probably highlight for you some things that you are not doing that might be really helpful to do. So again, that is a great free resource. And then of course, my business building bootcamp, which is my signature offer that is designed to help with all of these things. And it definitely fills all of these gaps and the other 15 questions, frankly, that were in that list of the top 20 searched questions by my sort of avatar client. So ask the question yourself.
I would love it if you would let me know what you found out. So if you do this exercise and you realize, shoot, there's a couple of gaps here and this is gonna be really helpful to me in creating that new free resource that I was hoping to create, or it's gonna help me figure out what my first online self-guided program should be about. Send me a note, let me know. I love to hear from you guys. I hope that this episode resonated. I hope it sparked something in you. Go and try this. This is so much fun. There are lots of things I hate about AI and that's for another episode.
But one of the things I do love about it is how helpful it is when it comes to getting out there and making much more efficient some of these things that used to take forever for me to do in terms of research around my clients and what my clients are all, you know, actually thinking about asking them and asking online. So get out there and give this a try. Just remember, you do not ever need to guess what your audience wants.
You just need to ask smarter questions and using AI to do this is so, so, helpful. And then you need to pay attention to what you find. Get radically honest. Am I actually dealing with these things or are there gaps here that I can start to fill? Anyway, hope you found this episode helpful. Go grab some of those free resources. If you haven't got them all, go grab them all. I'd love for all the coaches out there to have all of them because they are all incredibly helpful. And if you're looking to...
Go deeper if you're looking for more support. If this is the year that you want to actually start turning a reliable profit in your business and you want to stop spinning your wheels and feeling like you're spending every spare minute thinking about or working on your small business, then please, please, please consider joining us in the BBB. I would love to meet you. I would love to support you next year in your coaching business. You can come to the next open house or if the open house is a little ways off,
Register for that and then send me a note send me an email at wendy at wendymichellum.com or send me a DM through my social media channels on Instagram I'm at wendymichellumcoach and let me know that you would like to get together and I would love to get on a call with you and get to know a little more about your business Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time on the coaching edge
