selling by giving 1 robert middleton interviews brian whettenactionplan.com/pdf/bwhetten_11.pdf ·...

SELLING BY GIVING 1 Robert Middleton Interviews Brian Whetten

Copyright ©2010 Robert Middleton, Action Plan Marketing - www.actionplan.com

Robert: Hi, everyone. This is Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing and the Action Plan Marketing Club. Today, I’m interviewing Brian Whetten.

Let me give you a very short bio of Brian that’s rather impressive. By 30, Brian had received a Ph.D., raised $20 million for two high-tech startups and burnt out twice. I hadn’t even started my business until I was 35, Brian, so that’s why it got my attention.

Brian: Slacker!

Robert: Today, he’s the founder of Selling by Giving. He teaches people how to do business in a new, different and more caring way.

I met Brian at Bill Baren’s Conscious Business Summit. I had a couple of good conversations with him and really liked him. I loved his energy. He’s ridiculously enthusiastic about helping small business owners be more successful.

How would you categorize those businesses, Brian?

Brian: Well, my particular niche is what I call “purpose-driven practice builders,” so people who are coaches, counselors, healers or consultants. They’re people who are helping individuals and organizations do some type of deep change work.

I learned this much the hard way. That’ll be one of the things we’ll hopefully talk about today. Most of what we learn about how business is normally done doesn’t work for that niche.



For people who are trying to enroll people in services and make a fundamental lasting difference in their life, it turns out that most of what we know we have to throw out the window and do in a completely different way.

Robert: Especially marketing, right?

Brian: Exactly. Sales and marketing is the key thing we have to just totally reinvent.

Robert: Of course, this is something I talk about to people all the time from 27 different angles, but we really want to get your take on it. Why don’t we actually start with that? What’s wrong with the ordinary business model, and marketing model if you are that kind of business, if you’re a self-employed consultant or coach out there trying to make a difference and a contribution?

Brian: Beautiful. I have one thing, and I think you’re sharing the same thing. It’s probably just a different take on it than I have.

If I could just transmit one piece of information to every purpose-driven business owner or practice builder I know, it’s that traditional business doesn’t work for a purpose-driven practice builder. It doesn’t work practically, and it doesn’t work energetically, and there are four core reasons why.

The first one is that our services are not an impersonal commodity. Traditional business is based on Walmart selling cheap plastic toys. It’s based on selling everything to everyone, the same thing to everyone at the lowest possible price.



What we do is based on the opposite of that. It’s much closer to heart surgery. It’s based on intimacy. Imagine if you were to get a Bed Bath & Beyond 10% off coupon in the mail for heart surgery.

Robert: I’ll take you up. I want the cheapest heart surgeon I can possibly get!

Brian: Please, absolutely. In fact there’s a guy down in Tijuana. I hear he has a special going. He’s actually a vet. He’s not technically a surgeon, but he does great work.

Robert: What the heck!

Brian: It’s a complete 180-degree difference. If you’re the CEO of Walmart, you’re doing everything you can to not create intimacy but to create separation between you and your customers because you can’t afford to be intimate with them.

If you’re doing transformative work and deep personal change with people, it’s all based on intimacy, so it’s a completely and utterly different mind shift.

The second reason is that our value is not based on offering the lowest prices. This is one thing I work with a lot. People tend to think that our expertise is the most valuable thing we have to offer.

There’s this question of where exceptional value comes from if you’re a coach, counselor, healer or consultant. Well, 10% of your value comes from your expertise, what you know and who you are in terms of all the tools you bring to the table.

Robert: Only 10%, you think?



Brian: Only 10%.

Robert: That’s interesting.

Brian: Thirty percent comes from who you are in the relationship. It’s your being-state, your presence and how you are able to sit with people in a way that you hear them very deeply. You’re often able to hear them deeper than they hear themselves. You radiate integrity and connection, and you create a safe and trusting place for them.

The third piece is far and away the biggest piece. This is the one that most people completely overlook and ignore. Sixty percent of the potential value comes from client commitment.

Robert: Your commitment to the client.

Brian: No, your client’s commitment to themselves. If your client is 100% committed to getting value out of your relationship, you could read the phone book to them, and they would change.

Robert: I know what you mean. One of my other friends says that as a coach, you don’t get to play. It’s the client that gets to play. If they’re not playing and they’re not out there 60% or more, it’s not going to work.

Brian: In our culture, one of the biggest ways we commit ourselves is with money. One of the biggest things I say is that commitment creates value, and one of the biggest ways to commit people is with money. It’s easy to do this out of integrity, but if you do this in integrity as part of a



commitment to providing exceptional value, higher prices creates more value.

Again, this is the opposite of a commoditized race to free, which by the way is what’s going on in so much of the information side of the self-help business right now. People aren’t paying for information. What they’re paying for is transformation, and transformation requires commitment. Commitment requires high prices.

Robert: Because it takes time.

Brian: It takes time, and it takes energy. It takes willingness. It takes the willingness to say, “I’m scared to step outside my comfort zone, but I’m going to do it because I have $10,000 on the line.”

For myself, I had an experience a few years ago where I stepped up and worked with my coach, Steve Chandler, as his first apprentice. It was $50,000 up front in advance he wanted from me to work with him for a year.

Robert: Really?

Brian: Yes. I really got to experience what it means to commit full on into that relationship, and my practice tripled in the space of 12 months.

Robert: One of the things you’re saying is, if they’re paying a high fee, it forces the client to commit. Maybe that’s something we can touch on more. It’s one of my biggest, most important and interesting topics, I think.

Isn’t there a downfall in that on another side? Sometimes I feel that people charge so much that the client expects miracles from the consultant or coach. After all, they paid



a heck of a lot for it. “Yes, I made a commitment, but for $60,000, they’d better be doing something.”

Brian: Absolutely. There are two different points there. One is the integrity of us, the coach or the consultant. There are a lot of people out there in our space who have platinum programs where you pay $100,000, and you get two hours of their time in a year. I’m exaggerating a little bit but not much.

Robert: That’s what I’m going to offer. Actually, mine will be a $1 million program, and you only get half an hour a year.

Brian: Exactly. There we go!

Robert: I’ve had this conversation before. At a certain point, it seems to break down and seem a little bit silly and kind of manipulative. Somewhere there’s some sanity there, I hope.

Brian: That’s why I say that all these principles have to start with an ironclad commitment to providing exceptional value on the part of the coach and the client. This is where everything starts, and it’s where the separation is from the boys and the men or the girls from the women in our field.

When you have an opportunity to charge them more than maybe you really could or should, are you really holding to your commitment to providing exceptional value, or do you fall into that place of greed, scarcity and, “Let me just get as much as I can really quickly”?

Robert: Well, it can all kind of be a shell game. These numbers are somewhat arbitrary in a certain sense. Who knows what the exact amount is?



I think that’s an important piece of it, though. You have people charging a lot that really don’t know what they’re doing, so they can’t give the greatest advice.

I see some shallowness in this, people that are offering ridiculously expensive programs. What do they know how to do? They get other people to charge ridiculous amounts for programs. It starts to be a bit like a Ponzi scheme, which I am not in favor of. I believe in balance in this.

Back to the basic concept, it’s your information, what you know and your expertise. Then the next is who you are in the relationship. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. What do you mean by who you are in the relationship? I agree that’s very valuable.

Brian: There are different depths we can talk about this at. Let’s just go right to the deepest cut. There’s a construct I use a lot called the “ladder of consciousness,” and it shows up everywhere. It shows up in Ken Wilber’s works in Spiral Dynamics. It’s at the heart of all the major religions in different forms. David Hawkins does great work on it.

Basically, it says the lowest consciousness is that of war, fear, shame and pain. It’s like Israel versus Palestine where they just fight and fight.

Robert: Kill them all off, and then it will work someday for somebody.

Brian: Unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more of that in our politics right now. We were talking about that earlier.

Robert: Winner takes all.



Brian: The other side is the demons. They’re evil. No matter what happens, we have to beat the other side even if that means running the country into the ground. That’s the lowest level of consciousness, and it creates pain for everybody concerned.

The highest level of consciousness is Buddha. It’s Jesus Christ. It’s the Dalai Lama. I have a huge respect for Byron Katie. For anybody who has a chance to go see her in person, she has incredibly high consciousness.

Robert: Yes, I agree.

Brian: My coach’s coach, Steve Hardison, has an incredible presence. They’re people that we look up to. You’re just in a room with them, and you feel better. You feel yourself lifting just by being around these people.

Robert: I can’t speak to Buddha and Jesus Christ. I haven’t met the guys. They’re very inclusive, not judgmental and very expansive. They see a much bigger picture. They hold possibilities as being unlimited and that kind of thing.

Brian: They take ownership for their emotional responses rather than projecting them on other people. They’re never playing the victim, but they’re also never abusing other people. They really see the world from a place of win-win or no deal.

Every relationship we create is one that’s going to be a win for you and a win for me, or we’re going to agree it’s not a fit. That’s a very different place to come from and where most capitalism is, which is a very win-lose energy.



Robert: To be realistic about it, I might aspire to that highest level. I actually certainly do aspire to that, but let’s talk reality for the average coach. Do you know what I’m saying?

I have a client that I’m working with. What is it that they’re responding to me that is worth that money, time and commitment to work with me? What is it that is attractive, enrolling or compelling in a very human kind of way that makes people feel, “Yes, this is someone that can help me. I feel I can have a relationship with this person. I’m not going to have a lot of bullshit”?

Brian: This could be a 10-hour long conversation.

Robert: This will be in installments, Brian. We’ll just keep going.

Brian: Let me give you two different thoughts on that from my experience. This is my experience as whatever level of master coaching I’m providing right now and also from my highest role models of coaches.

There are two core things I would offer that are integral to a true master coach’s experience. The first one is, there’s a relationship between what I’ll call the “toolbox” and the spiritual connection. Over all the years I’ve been developing my competencies, I have been going out and learning different tools, and I put them in the toolbox.

Then when I show up in session, it’s not that I’m thinking, “Oh, I wonder what tool I should use today.” To me, that’s cookbook coaching. That’s following a formula. That’s where coaching starts, but it’s not master coaching.

Master coaching is when I show up, and I am so clean, empty and present with the client that I’m able to hear



them deeper sometimes than they hear themselves, and I just open my hand, and a tool is placed in my hand. It’s not me even doing the work.

We think, “I have to be important or brilliant, or I have to be me, me, me.” Well yes, you have to have that expertise in the toolbox as the foundation. That’s the 10%. You have to have that as the first piece. You have to get the 10% before you can work on the 30% and 60% to really make them work.

Robert: Yes, absolutely, the foundation.

Brian: That’s one thing. Another example would be the ability to confront clients in a truly clean and loving way. A lot of the coaching programs stress, “Don’t give advice. Don’t tell them they’re wrong. Don’t be judgmental.” Absolutely, I 100% agree with that.

One of the highest-level master skills that I dance with on occasion is the ability to tell our clients where they’re off in a way that doesn’t trigger them. They're able to hear it deeply instead of saying, “You idiot! I can’t believe what a fool you’ve been all these years” or “Good grief. Would you just stop doing this and do this instead?” That’s advice giving. That’s not coaching.

Just sitting and doing reflective listening for 20 days straight doesn’t do a lot either. Instead, I’ve noticed that at times, I get to a place where I open my hand the tool is placed in, and the tool is a whack. I will whack a client, and I do it cleanly and lovingly, hopefully. That has been my experience most of the time.



I don’t have judgment on them. I’ve done enough of my work to not be against my client in any way. The places where I am frustrated with them, I do my work on that so I’m clean and able to just love, appreciate and be totally for my client.

Then in that space, I’m able to tell them hard truths that are so clean and that have so little judgmental energy on them that people are able to hear them. It’s not the words that they get triggered by. It’s the energy the words come in on.

Robert: This interview really isn’t all the techniques in how to do that because that is maybe beyond the scope of what we want to talk about today. I know what you’re talking about.

I had an experience last week in speaking with a client and asking him what he wanted. I was trying to see where he was stuck. He said, “Well, I want this result and this result. I want my business like this and this.”

I said, “I’m not sure that’s what we’re really looking for. Do you want to have fun in your business?” It was like that whack up the side of the head. He said, “Yes! That’s what I want!”

Brian: I love that.

Robert: I said, “Well, if you have fun, you’ll be able to create that, but you’re having so much not having fun that you’re so serious about things that you’re completely stuck.”

Then we got to the belief, which was, “I can’t have fun in my business.” Then we actually did Byron Katie’s work on



the four questions about that particular belief, and he had a big breakthrough.

Brian: I love that.

Robert: Often what we think we want is not what we want, as if some external can make us happy. That was just a particular instance.

I don’t mean to interrupt this whole thing, but it’s making me think. I realize that sometimes what we need to hear is not the common kind of wisdom. For instance, you’re familiar with creating good marketing messages, right?

Brian: I would hope.

Robert: Good marketing messages are a very important tool. Yet I’ve seen on forums, “Here is my marketing message. How do I improve it?” Then people rework the marketing message 50,000 ways. Then I come in, and I say, “I want to point out that it’s not about getting it perfect. It’s practicing what you have, so go and use this with 20 people and see what the response is.” That’s kind of a wakeup call.

It’s getting out of your head and actually going into action in a way that you can find the truth. That’s what I try to do with people to help them see that there’s not always an intellectual answer to all this stuff. I’m sure you do that kind of stuff as well.

Brian: That comes out of who you’re being. You’ve done so much work, and you have such a beautiful presence. I know from my connection with you. Intuition comes through. New ideas come through.



You’re guided on what would serve the client best, and it comes through you rather than being something like, “Oh, well, I’m a little stuck here. I wonder which of these three approaches would be best. Let me think a bunch on that. Can I just pause this conversation here? I need to go read a couple of my textbooks and come back to you.”

Robert: Well, sometimes you do get stuck. You don’t quite know what to do.

Let’s take this into a different realm here, Brian. Let’s say I am a consultant or coach that has skills, ability, can be present with people, understands that the client needs to commit and understands at a very deep level that they’re not buying a commodity.

They’re buying a certain kind of almost transcendent support over time that can change their behavior, help them in their business, help them contribute and all that. You have all that.

This is what I see with a lot of people. The people in my mastery program, for instance, are all really good people that do great work and really help people a lot, but they came into the program basically not getting the concept of marketing.

People have been trained very thoroughly in their coaching and training, and they have years of experience. Then most of them got clients by word-of-mouth.

If you’re getting business by word-of-mouth, that’s a good thing. It means you’re obviously doing something right. I like people that have gotten word-of-mouth, but they have no concept of really marketing or selling.



You have some really interesting insights into this that I’d like to talk to you about. You have an interesting model called The Seven Stages of Practice Building.

Brian: Before we go there, can I actually push back on one thing you said?

Robert: Yes.

Brian: It’s one of the most common misconceptions that I’ve had, and I’m just waking up and realizing this for myself. It’s this notion that we’re working with people who don’t have enough training in business, sales and marketing.

I have found that actually it’s the opposite of that. People come in. It’s not explicit training. It’s not that they have an MBA, but by being in our culture, they have been immersed in sales and marketing since they were born.

People are conditioned so deeply about what they think sales and marketing is supposed to be. They learn so deeply what traditional business feels like, which is based on impersonal commodities at the lowest prices.

A third piece of this is that traditional business is based on helping people hide from their issues. In our culture, if you’re feeling bad, traditional business says you should consume something. Pop a pill. Have a drink. Eat something. Go get entertainment. Buy a couch.

Robert: Yes, that buy a couch thing really works.

Brian: We’re doing the opposite of that. We’re helping people go into their issues, so again, 180-degree turn.



The fourth point is that traditional business is based on scarcity and stress. It’s based on that win-lose competitive energy, which is the opposite energy that we want to serve from.

I actually think that people know much about sales and marketing. The problem is that I find most of what I have to do is help people unlearn all the things they think sales and marketing is supposed to look like because it keeps them from getting in the game. It keeps them from taking action because they’re scared. It feels off at a deep level to them.

Robert: Well, they’re professionals. They’re good people. They don’t want to be seen as a used-car salesperson. That’s the old paradigm. Basically, they avoid doing anything at all, which is what I see a lot. They don’t really have a plan. They don’t have a strategy. They just don’t know how to put the old paradigm to make it work for them.

The truth is, it doesn’t work for them. They kind of muddle their way through it. I couldn’t go to work for somebody else, and I had to do it myself. I read a lot of stuff, and I figured out, “Oh, it’s all about relationship. It’s all about clear communication. It’s all about value and ten million other things of course.” I found a way to do it in a way that was respectful and not manipulative.

When people discover that the way to market and sell yourself is by being with people naturally and still giving them systems for this, they are relieved that they don’t have to sell their soul to sell and market themselves.

Just the word “selling” is a dirty word for most people. It means manipulation and tricking people. You can’t trick



people into having a great relationship with you. It’s just crazy. There’s a different dynamic that has to happen. That’s what we’re going to talk about.

Brian: That’s spot-on. It’s helping people unlearn what they think sales is supposed to be. “Oh, sales is being a used-car salesman.” They’ve been trained in that, so how do we help people unlearn that?

By the way, that procrastination you mentioned, that muddling, just about every client I’ve ever worked with, and about every client you’ve ever worked with, I find has procrastination issues when it comes to selling and marketing their services.

I have found the reason for why we all procrastinate. Would that be valuable?

Robert: Yes.

Brian: My experience is procrastination is always a sign of an inner conflict. It comes because one voice is saying, “Oh, I need this. I should have this. I should do this. I want to do this,” as one voice saying go forward. Then there’s another voice that says, “I don’t want to”

Robert: “I’m afraid to,” right?

Brian: Exactly.

Robert: “I could be rejected. I could look bad.” Simple, silly things. “I could be rejected. People won’t be interested. I’ll be bothering people.” All that crap.

Brian: If one piece of us deeply believes that sales means rejection or selling out in some way like, “I’ve got to be a



used car salesman to be successful,” and the other piece of this is 100% committed to being of service in the world, making a difference, being in integrity and feeling good about our work, as long as that conflict sits inside, then people have basically three choices.

They can be poor but pure, which is what most people do.

Robert: Yes, the poor but pure. That’s funny.

Brian: They avoid sales and marketing.

Robert: In other words, “I’m above it. I’m better than that. I am a spiritual being, and to persuade anybody, well, that’s just below me.”

Brian: Yes, that’s the most common choice. The second choice is to sell out. “Well, screw my principles. I’m going to do whatever it takes.” Most people don’t do that one.

Robert: Basically, “I’ll exaggerate and lie about what people will get from my services, so they’ll be so excited and do it. How I ultimately deliver it, well, we’ll worry about that when we get to it.”

Brian: There are lots of people in our market, James Ray being the most criminal example of that where he actually killed people with that approach.

Robert: If people aren’t familiar with the sweat lodge thing, it was just not done safely.

Brian: The third approach is to put off the decision. “It doesn’t work for me to be poor but pure. It doesn’t work for me to sell out, so I’ll just decide tomorrow. Oh, I can’t sell, but I can’t not sell. I’m going to just waste time. I’m going to



put it off. I’m going to go get another degree. That would be worthwhile. If I have five more certifications, then surely someday clients will beat a path to my door.”

Robert: After all, if you have a business out of your house, you can indulge in the three distractions. Take a nap, have something to eat or watch TV.

Brian: You can consume something. You can be enabled.

Robert: You can go unconscious.

Brian: Take a nap, yes. That’s also a great one, too.

Robert: We can both speak about this because we’ve gone through them, right? You probably went through them a little faster than I did, I think.

Brian: I might have gone through them more forcefully. I tend to be very all or nothing. When I hit a wall, I hit it full force.

Robert: A certain day, you wake up and realize, “Well, if I’m going to have my business be successful, and I don’t want to be poor and pure or sell out, maybe there’s another way.” That’s what I’ve really been preaching for a very long time.

Brian: I love that. That’s one of our shared passions. It’s helping people learn that there’s a different way of doing sales and marketing.

Beautiful. Now, where were we going to go? I wanted to just finish that thought.

Robert: The Seven Stages of Practice Building. Let us say sane and conscious practice building.



Brian: This can apply specifically to coaches, counselors, healers, consultants or people who sell a service to people typically in an individualized fashion.

In training people in the space of the last five years or so, I’ve realized that there were a lot of frustrations happening where people didn’t have realistic expectations for what their path was going to look like.

They jumped into coaching and said, “All right, within 12 months, I’m going to be making $100,000 a year, and I’m going to do a cliff dive. I’m burning my bridges with my old profession. I’m never going to take another job again. I have $20,000 of savings, and I’m going to burn through all of it. I’m going to be successful or die trying.”

Many of them die trying because they don’t recognize what the path to success really looks like.

Robert: Unfortunately, the path to success for coaches and a lot of independent professionals is, I think, something like 80% don’t make more than $20,000 a year.

Brian: Yep, and it’s less than that for coaches. Less than 80% of coaches make $20,000, exactly what you said.

Robert: You can’t live on that.

Brian: You can’t. The average therapist in the United States makes $55,000 a year. That’s after an insane amount of training, an internship and thousands of hours that they have to get to get licensed.

Robert: They’re the most anti-marketing of all. They’re definitely the pure and poor model.



Brian: Yes, coaches are even worse in terms of financial results. It’s a huge problem. I’ve put this model of Seven Stages together to show people what the natural path looks like.

I modeled it after two things. I modeled it after the seven chakras, so the colors of the rainbow, and then also the martial arts belts where you earn different belts. We’re probably the only group that offers indigo belts. You can earn an indigo belt.

The first stage is student. The core goal of student is that you develop trust in what you’ve learned. You’ve graduated from a coaching program or a therapy. You’ve developed some of those core skills, that 10%, the expertise. You’ve walked away, “Okay, I have these tools.”

That’s the easy piece because that’s the one that’s most commonly focused on, and there are lots of training programs for that, but it’s only the first stage out of seven stages.

The second stage is intern. I like to say that this involves finding your first five unpaid, or paid—it doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t have to be paid—regular repeat individual clients where you work with them over time, and you see the results.

The key here is to develop trust in your ability to provide exceptional value. You say, “Wow, I’ve gone in there, and what was theory, these theoretical tools I’ve learned, I’m actually in the world and creating real value with them.”

Most people make it through those stages successfully. In my experience, probably 70% of people get at least through those two stages.



The third stage is apprentice. This is where you get your first five paid regular repeat individual clients. People are going to pay you thousands of dollars each in order to work with them over time in some capacity.

Here you’re developing trust in your ability to actually get people to pay you. You don’t necessarily know how many, but you can at least get a handful of people who will pay you and then say, “Wow, I really got exceptional value from the process.”

Traditional programs for coaching where most coaches, counselors and healers go, they’re usually able to get through that. At least 60% of people who start out get through the apprentice stage.

Where everything falls apart is at practitioner and master practitioner, Stages 4 and 5. The practitioner stage is where you’re covering your monthly expenses. You're making at least typically $3,000 to $4,000 a month, so you can afford to make your calling your full-time career.

One of the biggest problems I find is this cliff-dive notion. I did it. I jumped off a cliff and said, “I’m going to be successful.” Luckily I had a bunch of money saved up from my high-tech startup days, so I actually could do that, but most people don’t have the type of resources I did. If I had known how big the cliff was for me in particular, I don’t know if I would have jumped.

Robert: My cliff was very high. I was in the air for several years.

Brian: That’s not uncommon. Particularly if people aren’t willing to invest in cutting-edge training programs like you and I



offer, then this is often a five-year process to get to the place where they just cover their monthly expenses.

Robert: That’s a good thing to underline. Unfortunately a lot of people that need the training most can afford it the least and are least likely to do it, so the poorer you are, the poorer you are.

Brian: If I could offer people in that situation one thing, it would be, please get a job. I was going back and watching “The Karate Kid.” Mr. Miyagi says, “If you stand on left side of road, you fine. If you stand on right side of road, you’re fine. You stand in middle of road, you get squished just like grape.”

Being a self-employed, purpose-driven professional is not an easy thing. It requires serious time, energy and money that you invest in the process. Decide it’s a hobby and that you're going to do it for fun and support yourself and family by getting a traditional job, which is fine, or really figure out how you’re going to come up with the money to do this right.

Robert: Or the time. I’m very good at teaching myself things. I bought a book in HTML, learned it in a week and had a website in two weeks.

Brian: You’re a freak.

Robert: I am a freak in some ways, but I have over 300 books on marketing as well, and I’ve read them all. If you’re working with a coach, taking a course or something like that, usually that accelerates the process because they cut out all the fat, hopefully, and get to the essential things,



“This is what you really need to work on.” I got myself a great foundation, but it’s kind of a slow build.

Brian: The key thing I’m hearing is commitment. You were 100% committed to invest the time, energy and money needed, and you read 300 books on marketing. That’s what we’re talking about.

Robert: Not overnight.

Brian: It’s a multi-year process. I don’t know of hardly any case studies, and I study. I look for everyone I can think of who’s successful, particularly in the coaching profession. Of all my role models, I don’t know of anybody who got to $100,000 a year in less than three years except for one possible exception.

Robert: I know somebody. Actually Elyse Killoran, who I just interviewed, took some very powerful material and just went for it. Sometimes you’re in a place. You have the intelligence. You have the maturity. You have a certain store of life experience that enables you to start at a higher level than some other people.

I was kind of an ignoramus when I started. I learned the hard way because I thought I knew everything, which made it twice as long.

Brian: Only twice?

By the way, that’s a really important point. It’s that willingness to be coachable. I had the same thing. I was stubborn and then finally said, “Okay, let me go work with Steve Chandler. Yes, it’s a bunch of money and



commitment, but let me do it the easy way.” It made a huge difference for me.

Robert: Of course finding the right coach, right course and right thing for you is a very important decision because some people can really steer you wrong, give you not very useful information and not be that helpful, and you’re stuck there in the road thinking, “I’m still not sure what to do.”

Brian: That actually brings us back to these seven stages because that’s really key. With all the best intentions, a lot of the coaching and training out there, particularly in the internet marketing space, is trying to convince people that they need to invest in programs that are appropriate for Stage 6 and Stage 7 but have very little chance of being successful before then.

If people don’t know what stage they’re at or what stage the training is most appropriate for, they can waste bazillions of dollars, hours and days and go exactly the wrong way. That’s a great point.

Master practitioner is where you have a full and abundant practice with a waiting list. You’re typically making around $100,000 a year, from $80,000 to $150,000 typically.

The goal is this trust that you can bring in new clients at will. You’ve learned how to go to the client store. When you want milk, you go to the milk store. When you want shoes, you go to the shoe store. When you want clients, you go to the client store. You know what to do.

Robert: You’ve cracked the code on that.



Brian: It’s just a skill. It’s, “It’s time for me to go get a client. I know that it’s going to take me about 10 hours of my time.” For me specifically, my average client is going to invest $25,000 to $40,000 with me. They’re doing one-on-one coaching. It takes me 10 to maybe 20 hours of time to get one of those clients.

I know that if I schedule a week of time to just do stuff, I know how to do it. I know how to go get a client. That’s the magic. That’s the goal for most people. “If I could just learn how to get new clients at will that will pay me a great rate, that’s success.”

Very few people get there. Where I figure about 40% of people over the course of five years will get to practitioner, maybe 5% of people ever get to master practitioner in their life. There’s this huge chasm between apprentice practitioner and master practitioner.

Robert: It took me about 15 years.

Brian: Wow.

Robert: It took me a long time.

Brian: It took me four years and about $100,000 of business coaching.

Robert: That’s interesting because I definitely didn’t spend $100,000. That shows you that you can accelerate the time with a larger investment with the right help. That’s very interesting because I did it mostly on my own. I figured it out on my own, and as a result, I’m really solid in my knowledge because I had done everything wrong as well as right.



Brian: You really know.

Robert: I can really know that that doesn’t work, and here’s why. It could work for you. I know ten million different variations because I’ve tried them all. That makes me very confident and also still pretty humble to realize that it takes that time.

Brian: I love it. I want to come back to the point. Let’s just finish these last two stages. There’s something really interesting you just said that I want to go back to if I can remember it.

The sixth stage is teacher where you’re now doing group work. The majority of your income is coming from group classes, information products, things like masterminds and things like that.

The key here is that most people try to jump to Stage 6. They try to do group-based work before they’re ready. It is much harder to be successful at doing group work than it is individual work, at least at first.

I call this the “fundamental pricing mistake.” People who are scared about selling or marketing their services assume, “Oh, well, it would be much easier to be successful if I just put out a product for $99, and then I get on the internet, and the world will just beat a path to my door. Then I’ll make a bunch of money that way.”

It’s actually much easier to be successful selling $5,000 packages than $100 info products.

Robert: Yes, everybody wants that. I succeeded at that as well about 10 years ago with my manual. What can I tell you?



Part of it is luck, too. There are so many moving parts to it.

I’d never even taught anybody that stuff. I think it’s so complex, I don’t even know how to teach that stuff. It’s really complicated. It’s easier to sell actually individual clients at $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 than it is to make a lot of money online with individual products in my opinion.

Brian: Every data point I have backs that up. If you think about it, people who aren’t good at sales and marketing get a job. Let’s say that I get a job for $70,000 a year for 10 years. What I just did was make a sale for $700,000.

Robert: To your employer.

Brian: I sold myself for $700,000 for 10 years. It’s much easier to do one big sale because then you have six months you can screw up the whole process. You can be really bad at selling yourself and waste six months trying to figure the thing out, and then you just finally, luckily hit one time where you’re successful, but you sold for so much that it works.

If you’re selling something for $99, you have to be world class at marketing and sales because you don’t have any freedom to screw it up. It has to be automatic.

Then the last stage is leader where you build an organization. Again, the biggest point I would take away is that each of these stages has their own specific training that’s appropriate for that stage.



A lot of the work I do is with people who are working as apprentice practitioner and working on master practitioner. There’s a very specific set of trainings for those people, and we get incredible results as long as we know who the right people are to be in the room that have the right level of commitment. They get tremendous results.

If people are really working on practitioner, even if they’ve gotten over the hump of not wanting to be coached, but then as you say, they invest in coaching, but they get the wrong coach or training because they sign up with somebody who says, “We’re going to teach you the whole info product empire thing,” they can waste tens of thousands of dollars and years of their life because they’re working on the wrong stage.

Robert: It’s too bad. Some of these systems definitely work, but it’s like you’re not ready for them. You don’t have the foundation. You don’t have the skills. There are a lot of skills to all these things, not the least of which is you have to be a decent writer. You have to be able to communicate in print and write a lot of stuff. Most people aren’t that good at that, so that takes a lot of time.

Brian: You don’t have to be just a good writer. You have to be a good writer at marketing copy, which is one of the hardest skills on earth to do cleanly. It’s incredible.

Those are the seven stages. I don’t know if we put that document online, but if people go to www.SellingByGiving.net and register for the free Practice Building Kit, you’ll get on the list. You can also send me an email, and I’ll send you The Seven Stages of Practice

http://www.sellingbygiving.net/idevaffiliate/main.php?id=140



Building documents. It has all this in more detail. I’m going to put it up online shortly.

Everybody, go to www.SellingByGiving.net. Register for the free gift, and then we’ll get you a copy of this.

Robert: We’ll include that link.

Brian: Perfect. If I just give you the document, can you send that to people?

Robert: Yes.

Brian: Perfect. We’ll just do that then.

Robert: I made it to Level 6. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it to Level 7, Building an Organization. This is not about me, but that’s a whole other leap, isn’t it?

Brian: It is.

Robert: Some people make that leap a lot faster. For whatever reason, they’re able to delegate more easily, give stuff away and train people that way.

Brian: Also, you had something really wise you said, which is that some people just get lucky. I coach a number of organizations who are working on that leader stage who are doing seven figures a year in income.

Two in particular basically just hit a market need. They had something where there was just this big, wide open need, and there was no competition, so they just threw it out there. All of a sudden, the world did beat a path to their door.




Then they built this business, and they built it completely wrong in a completely unsustainable way. It was based on not having to do anything for sales and marketing of, “Wow, I put it out there, and the world did beat a path to my door. It went viral.” They threw something out there, and it went viral. That is the lottery approach to building a business.

Robert: That can be a bad thing that happens early in your career because you think, “Oh, this should be easy,” and then you try to replicate that for years, and you never can.

Brian: Eventually the viral transmission stops. Working with two of these companies, that’s where they’re stuck, and their revenue keeps going down. We turned one around now. The other one hasn’t been as coachable.

They just get into worse trouble because they’ve built their whole business and all their expectations, like you’re saying, based on the assumption that it’s that easy. Yes, it’s a very difficult challenge.

Robert: With that, is there sort of a summary to all this?

Brian: The seven stages are just a path. It’s to know what the different stages look like and what the milestones are. Probably the single biggest and painful mistake I see people making over and over again, particularly as coaches, is trying to move too fast in these stages.

Robert: Or skipping stages. Just to give a little pitch for my Marketing Club that everybody’s in, I tell people that the very first thing is they have to complete all the seven steps and exercises in the fast-track program within the club.



People want to get into marketing plans quickly, “What do I need to do?” before they’ve developed their message, understand the game of marketing or have well-written materials and a good website. They just want to get out there and do something, but it’s like going to battle without any armor or sword. They will get killed basically because they don’t have that foundation.

Whatever the program is, do it completely. Whether it’s my program, Brian’s program or anybody’s program, do the exercises, take the work, and take the time to do the work, or it just isn’t going to work. It won’t happen for you.

Brian: I know you do this incredible one-year program. Which of those stages would you say you mostly help people with?

Robert: I’m already with people that are between 4 and 5, people that are already making $75,000 to $100,000 a year. Often they got there by hard work and dedication. They’re well trained in what they do.

They’re still not great in marketing and selling, but because they’re really good at what they do, they’ve gotten a lot of referral business, and they’ve grown their business up to $75,000 or more. Then we show them how to take it to $100,000 and past that by creating marketing systems, packaging their services differently and taking it to the next level.

Brian: Beautiful. For everybody listening, that’s a great thing to know. It’s, “Okay, when I’m in that place and I’ve gotten to that stage, Robert has an incredible program for me. Whereas, if I’m working on apprentice, he’s probably not the right fit for that.”



Robert: The Marketing Club is the fit for that. Study the stuff in the Marketing Club.

I would recommend that people also get a coach as well, not even necessarily a marketing coach. You have all the content. The thing is to get someone to help, support, urge and inspire you to take the action you need to take.

All the information is there. All this information is in books. It’s not a great big secret. It’s the fact that it goes in one ear and out the other, and we don’t practice. We don’t take the steps. We don’t exercise what we need to exercise in order for us to really gain the skills, ability and understanding.

Brian: I’m going to push back on that one because I actually think there are some deeper cuts to why people don’t do that. I think the information by itself isn’t enough.

If you’re supporting people in doing transformational work, the only way you can be successful with that is if you invest in your own transformational work. Information alone will not do it. It’s a piece of the puzzle. You have to invest in different levels of transformational work, ideally on the business side as well as your life side, in order to get where you want to be.

This actually brings me back to that thought I had from earlier, the point you raised, which is around how we can accelerate things with coaching.

I’m playing with an idea called the “rule of five.” I’d love your thoughts on this. This is absolutely cutting-edge stuff.



Robert: Great.

Brian: I’ve been sitting with this question. One of my passions is this question of what it takes to be successful in our field. How do we help people be successful? What does the journey of success look like? The seven stages is a piece of that.

I have a big comprehensive online assessment I’m working on that I’m going to roll out hopefully in the next few months that will give people an automated scorecard on stuff. It will also allow me to track a lot of this information. I can do some number crunching and actually get hard data on some of this stuff.

Robert: Very interesting.

Brian: I’m very excited. In preparation for that, I’ve been thinking, “Who are my role models for success?” I’ve been running down a list of people I know who have somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million a year in income as a coach or related purpose-driven practice builder.

I have probably about 10 different role models I’ve been thinking about. I made a list of what makes them successful. There was one counter example I found out of all 10 of them, but I don’t think his success was stable. I think he actually got a burst, and then it has been falling down since then. I need to follow up with him to find out.

All the stable cases I was aware of, basically as far as I can tell, on average invested at least 20% of the income they wanted to be making in business coaching. It was very



specific business coaching. It was very targeted to what they needed.

For example, one person I know is doing $1 million a year. He invested about $500,000, so he actually did 50%, much more than that.

One person I know is doing about $500,000 a year. He invested probably about $300,000 or $400,000. I know of two or three people who are doing $250,000 a year who invested between $100,000 and $150,000.

One of my clients I’ve worked with as an organization is a little different because they had a lower margin and stuff, so if you look at what their gross margin is rather than total income, they’re doing $300,000 or $400,000, and they’ve invested $60,000.

Robert: Are you saying that investing $29 a month might not be enough?

Brian: Right, not even close!

Robert: The Marketing Club is a foundation of materials that is very useful, but you have to invest more, not necessarily with me, but you have to invest something.

Brian: I want your thoughts on this if you agree. It seems to me that the 80% of coaches, counselors and healers that are making so little money and never make it past practitioner stage, in fact usually never finish practitioner stage, think of the world in terms of, “How much money am I making today, and how do I invest a percentage of that? If I’m making $1,000 a month, oh my goodness, if I was to invest $200 a month, that’s a lot of money.”



The successful people say, “Where am I going? If I’m going to make $1 million by doing $100,000 ten years in a row, let me take one year of that. Divide $100,000 by five. I know I need to find the right business coaching training, and I’m going to invest at least $20,000 if not more, to get me where I want to go as fast as I can.” Notice if you do that for 10 years in a row, that’s a $1 million return on investment, your $1 million goal you’re going after.

Those people tend to be successful in the space of two to four years getting to where they want to be. The other people who invest based on how much money they’ve made so far never get where they want to go.

Robert: Very interesting.

Brian: Does that resonate with your experience?

Robert: Yes, it does. The exact percentages are going to vary, but yes, definitely.

One of my issues to begin with was I didn’t have the money to invest and was afraid to invest. I invested in myself. I studied and worked hard, but I think that definitely held me back.

One of the big breakthroughs I had several years ago was I hired a coach, and in that year I more than doubled my income. I thought, “Hmm, maybe there’s something to this.” It really helped. It lit a fire under me.

Brian: It shows you the path to success. You have somebody who knows the path to success. They can help you see when you start going the wrong direction and bring you back on path.



I had the same experience for myself. My clients have the same experience, not all of them because different people have different levels of commitment. I can’t make people be successful.

Robert: Now, you said you have five traits here.

Brian: No, I said the Rule of Five, which is take the amount of money that you want to make. Let’s say you want to be making $100,000 a year and divide that five. You should stair step that. Let’s say you want to start with $50,000. “Let me start by investing $10,000 to get to $50,000 a year, and then from there I’m going to up it to the next level. I’m going to go to $200,000 a year, so let me invest $40,000.”

Robert: Great. I’ve got it. That really is great food for thought.

We don’t have a huge amount of time left in this interview. Could we focus on a couple of other things specifically around practice building that I think people will really find useful?

Brian: Sure.

Robert: You have a great thing here. It’s the Six Questions that Will Cause Clients to Enroll Themselves in Your Programs. Now, to teach this thoroughly would take more time, but I think we can touch on these basic things. Can we broach that topic?

Brian: Sure, I would love to. As a setup for that, the key mind shift here behind these questions is that we’ve talked about how traditional marketing and sales are immersion. Traditional marketing and sales conditions us to think a



certain way about sales and marketing. We think that sales and marketing needs to be used-car salesmen.

If you look at almost all the standard sales and marketing advice and almost all the standard ways that naïve but well-meaning people jump in and start doing sales and marketing, it’s all about talking.

“What’s my message? What’s my brand? How do I talk about the value of my services? Let me list out the 27 modalities in my healing practice. Let me talk about my testimonials and how great I am. I want the testimonials to say, ‘Brian’s great..’” That’s nice.

Robert: In other words, it’s me, me, me.

Brian: It’s talking, talking and talking. The funny thing is most of the people that we’re working with are so anti-that. They’re all about service and helping other people. They’re all about focusing on the other people, but then they think, “Oh, when it comes to sales, I have to get rid of that, and I have to somehow make it about me, me, me.”

This is the opposite of what works in our business once you learn how to make it work because our business works on very different principles than everything else you’ve been exposed to.

Traditional business is about talking, pushing and convincing. “Buy the purple pill. It might make your arms fall off, but buy the purple pill!”

Robert: I love those pharmaceutical ads where the disclaimer is longer than the benefits.

Brian: It’s unbelievable!



Robert: It’s scary, especially the ones that have, “Blah, blah, blah, which could cause death.” It’s something to get rid of a pimple, but there are 15 potentials for causing death.

Brian: “Ask your doctor about the purple pill.”

Robert: Back to this.

Brian: In integrity and loving enrollment of people, it is about listening to them. It’s about asking specific questions, but it’s not just open-ended listening. It has to be directed questioning. It’s the right questions and the right ways to ask the questions.

There are six questions of value-based enrollment. We’re going to do two sets of three. The first three are, “Where are you at? Where do you want to be? What’s in the way?”

A simple way of thinking about that is to draw just a simple picture. The left side of the page is now, the right side of the page is future, and the middle of the page is blocks. You just want people to fill in that picture. Where are you today? What’s the now? Where do you want to be? What’s the future you’re moving toward? What’s in the way?

Robert: Perfect. I agree.

Brian: This sounds really simple. It sounds obvious, but almost no one does it well. In fact almost nobody does it at all, let alone does it well.

Robert: We just skip to telling you about what we do.



Brian: We prescribe before we diagnose. Start by slowing things way down. There’s a key distinction here between the acknowledged need and the deep need.

People come in with a symptom, “I want more money,” “I want my relationship with my wife to be better,” “I want my pimples to go away,” or whatever it is. They have symptoms that are those blocks. Part of the art of this is to help them deepen into what they really want. What’s the deeper need they have? What do they really care about?

“Well, I want more money.” “Why do you want more money?” “Well, I want to have fun.” It’s like that guy who said, “I can have fun at work? Well, that’s what I really want.”

Instead of helping people get what they think they should want, help them get what they really want. Much of the art of the enrollment process is separating out those two. What do people think they want versus what they really want, and then what do people think is the block versus what’s the deeper block that’s usually really holding them back? That process is the first half.

An example of that was, I had a client come in a year ago, and he wanted to build a multi-million dollar business. He had a great idea for a startup company. I said, “Great. Let’s talk about it.”

Every time he talked about this business, the energy he had on it was just eh. I finally pushed back and said, “I’m not buying it. I don’t believe that you really want to build this business. I’m not getting it. What do you really want? Why do you want this?”



I just kept pushing back and pushing back. He finally admitted, and I don’t think he had ever admitted this to anybody else in his life, that what he really wanted was to be married with kids, but he was so insecure about certain areas of his life that he had given up hope. He didn’t believe it was possible, so he was settling for this goal instead.

Robert: Interesting. He was having a conversation exploring to use your services?

Brian: Yes, for business coaching.

Robert: That’s interesting. There was Brian almost talking the guy out of working with him because you didn’t just settle for what he said. You questioned into. You went deeper until it really rang true for you.

That’s brilliant because what you’re doing in this process is actually coaching in the “selling process.” It doesn’t look anything like selling. It looks like coaching.

Brian: Basically, what I teach is how to use structured forms of coaching to enroll your clients. It feels just as good as coaching. At first there are fears, insecurities and conflicts, but eventually I love selling now because I get to do some of my best coaching work ever in those enrollment conversations.

Robert: Very interesting. If only we could find a different word than selling. What are the three others?

Brian: The other three questions are after you have those first three down. Most people jump right past those. The



fourth question is, “What’s the best solution for your needs?”

This is where we tend to spend all our time. Me, me, me, let me talk about me. Instead, let’s get the diagnosis first, and then we can offer an honest prescription based on our services and the other people we can think of. Let’s give them an honest prescription for what would be the best package that would work for them.

Instead of saying, “Let’s just try a session, and then you just let me know when you want another session,” say, “I’m really getting that either Package A or Package B would be the best solution for your needs.”

Questions 5 is, “Why would you want to invest in the solution? Let’s help find the yes that they have for this.” Then Question 6 is, “Why wouldn’t you?” This is the most important question in many ways because there’s a fundamental dynamic about what we do that, again, is totally different than traditional business.

In traditional business, the more value you offer, the cheaper the prices, the bigger the sale and all that, the more people will run screaming and beating a path to your door like the hoards of people lined up around Walmart Thanksgiving Day or the day after for the sale. That does work in traditional business.

If we’re offering deep change, helping people transform, address their deep issues and become better people at a deep level, there is automatically and unavoidably inside every person fear and resistance to deep change.



The paradox is that the more value we offer to people, the bigger a yes we’re going to hear from them. “Oh, yes, I love that solution. Yes, I want to do it. Yes, I want to invest in that solution.” Simultaneously, the bigger the no there’s going to be in them.

What this means is paradoxically in our industry, the more value you offer and the better you are at coaching, counseling, consulting and helping people change, the better you have to be at sales and enrollment in order to get clients. That’s utterly counterintuitive.

Everybody assumes, “If I just get more degrees and certifications, build it, and they will come.” That’s the opposite. Oftentimes it’s easier for a half-baked coach to get a client because they don’t scare them.

Robert: Let’s put this into the context of a conversation because this is brilliant stuff, especially this last one. The second one of why you would want to invest, I sort of say that’s to get them to sell you on why they want to do it, right?

Brian: Sure.

Robert: “Here’s the program. If you did the program, what would you get out of it?” would be a question you could ask or, “Why would you want to do this? Tell me why you’d want to do this.”

People going into this conversation usually have some information about the program. They’ve read some stuff. They’re not completely ignorant about it.

Then how would you coach this last one?



Brian: The last one is one of the master skills. I’m not going to be able to give you a 30-second answer to this one.

Robert: Give me a two-minute answer because this is really brilliant, and it’s something that I’m not sure I use very well. All the other ones I use, so this is great.

Brian: This is the master skill or one of the master skills of all of them. It’s one of the things we train people on in our six-month Selling by Giving Academy. Again, I’m going to give you the two-minute answer with many caveats that this isn’t necessarily a simple thing.

It comes down to what I call the “three voices.” Inside every person there are many voices. It’s a whole symphony in there rather than a single me. Three of the most important voices to pay attention to are the voice of fear, the voice of reason and the voice of intuition, in other words, body, mind and spirit.

Everyone has a connection to each of those voices, but we usually don’t notice which voice is speaking when. We usually treat fear the same way we treat inspiration.

In working with people’s resistance to help them move through their resistance to change, the key is to help them separate what the voice of fear says about this question, what the voice of reason says about this question and what the voice of intuition says about this question.

Basically, I’ll ask diagnostic questions with people until I have both my voice of reason and my voice of intuition recommending the same thing. I’ve done enough work inside that I can very consistently tell which of those



voices is speaking when. That’s a lot of the deep work we teach coaches.

I want to be clear. I’m not just trying to offer the same thing to everybody, but specifically for this person, I’ve done enough questioning. Like my client in that one example, my voice of reason was saying, “Well, yes, just sign them up. Business coaching. This makes sense.” My voice of intuition said, “Something’s off.” I kept asking questions until my intuition was satisfied.

That’s basically what those first four questions are about, asking those questions until your voice of reason and intuition say, “Yes, I know what would work best here.”

Then the questions go to the client. Ideally you want to have the client be able to connect their intuition. If the intuition says yes, it would be a really good thing. Then they connect with the reason, so they can financially ground it in real-world physical reality because spirit doesn’t necessarily care that much about money. It’s not anti-money, but it doesn’t care that much. Let’s ground it rationally.

Their voice of reason says yes. The voice of intuition says yes. Then this is the key. Ideally the voice of fear for them says, “Freaking hell no, run away now!”

Robert: Often we get to this point where we know this program would be valuable for somebody. We know they could benefit. They’re saying yes reasonably, but then they don’t return your phone calls.



Brian: That happens because we didn’t take the time to go in and find the no and then help them understand is that a rational no or a fear-based no.

Robert: A rational no is, “I don’t think I have the money right now.”

Brian: No, actually, usually, “I don’t have the money right now,” is a fear-based no. That’s one of the big mistakes here. When people say, “I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money,” that’s actually the first line of defense of fear. It could be true. It could be reason. Most of the time, it’s fear-based.

The art form is helping our clients. This is master coaching we’re doing with them. It’s helping them get clear, “Well, is that fear speaking, or is that truth?” If it’s their truth, we honor it. If it’s fear, we help them work with the fear.

Many people I bet on the call have exactly what you said. You work with a client. They’re excited in the initial consultation. They say, “I’ll give you a call. I just need to think about one or two things.” Then you never hear from them again.

One of the biggest reasons is because you didn’t work with a no. You didn’t go find the no because we’re afraid of the no. No is evil. The no has its own value. It has its own reasons.

Fear is not an evil, wrong thing. We just need to find it. We need to appreciate it. We need to listen to it, honor it and then also help our clients see, “Do you really want to be living by your fears?”



Probably the single best on-course indicator I’m aware of is when intuition says go forward, reason says go forward, and fear says run away. When all three of those present, just go. That’s 100%. You almost can’t screw that one up if you go forward.

Most people get into a conflict situation where half of them or two-thirds of them are saying yes and a piece of them is saying no, and so they procrastinate.

Robert: When you’re asking people this question, how long are you usually spending on this last bit?

Brian: If I’m enrolling a client that’s going to be a $25,000 to $40,000 client, I will spend a minimum of 90 minutes with them. Usually I’ll do three hours or more over two sessions.

If I want to slow things down, I could spend a half day with someone if I think that they’re a really good fit for a long-term relationship.

Robert: We want to do sales in half an hour over the phone, so we try to speed it up. “I only have half an hour. Just tell me what’s involved,” and so we give them all the benefits, and they say, “I’ll think about it,” and we’ve handled one of these questions basically.

Brian: That’s why higher price point packages are far and away the easiest thing to do. Find a way where you're charging $5,000 to $20,000 or more with the high-end clients you’re working with, and then create the freedom to really slow things way down.



Robert: You're really connecting with people. They’re trusting you. You’re getting to know them. You’re developing a relationship.

Brian: It’s like dating. You’ve used the relationship thing. Sales and dating to me are almost the same thing. They’re very similar. Most people’s approach to sales is “I’m never going to ask for commitments. I’m just going to flirt and hint and see if they’ll propose to me,” or they propose on the first date.

“Here are my benefits. You like my tits. You like my ass. I’ll put out if you give me the ring,” or I guess it’s the other way around. “Here’s my bank account, and here are my qualifications as a husband. Here’s the ring. Are you ready?”

Robert: “It looks all good, but let me think about it forever.” Very interesting. Somewhere in that conversation, you might say, “Let me ask you what might stop you from moving ahead with this. We know you want to do it. You know you like it, blah, blah, blah. What would stop you?” Then try to elicit as honest an answer as you can and dig deep into those and explore.

Again, we’d really have to spend an hour or two to get into this more. It’s sort of like, “Hmm, I’d like to corner Brian and find out even more about this.” We always need to leave people a little bit hungry at the end of these interviews, Brian. This should leave you hungry enough to check out Brain on the web. Where do they go?

Brian: Go to www.SellingByGiving.net. Simple front page. There are some fun animated videos there. If you just put your email in, you’ll get on the newsletter with the tips I send




out, and you’ll get a $197 free Practice Building Kit, a tremendous amount of resources.

Robert’s going to give you The Seven Stages of Practice Building document online, so lots of things for you to use as free resources to start building a relationship with me.

I make almost all my money working with a relatively small number of clients, anything from $3,000 right now for our Practice Building Academy up to a $6,000 Gold program I’m doing with Max Simon right now to my high-end coaching.

I don’t care about making money in the low price points. I want to give away. I want to build relationships. I’m looking for people who really resonate with this stuff where we can make long-term, life-changing value for you, which is Robert’s model as well, and I love that.

Robert: I’m probably not going to put out this recording until after I’ve filled my Mastery Program!

Brian: I don’t have any programs open right now. They can’t actually work with me for another six months. I’m full.

Robert: Scarcity is real in this case.

This has really been fun, Brian. I definitely endorse your worldview about business, marketing and selling. A lot of the techniques, ideas and strategies are similar. I know you’ve really delved deeply into this.

The fact that you’ve done it as fast as you can is very impressive. It’s a good example of someone who got a lot of training. Even doing your Ph.D., obviously, took a lot of time and effort as well. It was sort of the fast route, but



you put ridiculous amounts of time, effort and work into this, obviously.

Thank you. Is there anything you want to leave people in the club with, sort of the one idea of what to think of first or something like that?

Brian: I would say two things as a way of summarizing what we’ve done today. If I had one wish for everybody that was listening on this call, it would be for you to really sit down and do your homework to figure out what the path of success really looks like because it’s very different than what most people think. In some ways, it’s a lot harder. In some ways, it’s a lot easier. It’s just radically different than what almost every single person thinks.

Figure out what the path of success really is going to look like for you.

Robert: Do you mean what it would like when I’m there?

Brian: What’s the journey to get there? What are the key things that are going to matter? “Instead of just buying into the traditional sales and marketing nonsense that I’ve been raised in, let me go find some mentors who have built the type of $100,000 or $200,000 a year practice and learn what were the most important things for them.”

Look at Robert’s stuff. Look at my stuff. Find people who have a proven track record of helping people be successful, and find out, “You have lots of experience in this space. What does it take?”

Most people go exactly the opposite direction. I have one client I’m working with now. She spent $35,000 on small-



business consulting in order to build her coaching business. She got zero clients because he took her exactly the wrong way. He did the opposite of value for her.

She was fairly frustrated with that. She came to work with me. She just enrolled a $5,000 client last week. Chunk, chunk, chunk.

That’s the first point. Really find out what it takes. What does the path of success look like? It’s different than what you think.

Then the second piece is decide, really decide, “Is this something I want to do?” Get out of the middle of the road. Get out of that place of conflict where one-half of you says yes, and one-half of you says no.

Get over on the right side of the road and say, “I’m going for it,” or get on the left side of the road and say, “I’m going to make it a hobby,” but don’t stay in the middle of the road because that’s where most people are, and it hurts.

I work with so many people who have been 15 or 20 years struggling month by month. They’ve gone through their entire savings, their inheritance and their house. They’ve run up their credit cards, and they finally get to this desperate place where because they never really learned how to build their business and never really got fully on the right side of the road. They’re burnt out, and they have to quit because they don’t have any energy left.

Robert: It’s a tragedy, and it happens to a lot of people. I don’t like to think of that, but the truth is the road to success is



littered with a lot of failures unfortunately. It didn’t have to be that way.

Brian: It doesn’t. That’s my mission. The reason why I came into this wasn’t, “Oh, I think this would be fun and sexy to do this.” It was that in my new community of coaches, counselors, healers, friends and my closest loved ones, the people I was going to for coaching and support, were having this problem over and over again.

Some of the best people I’ve ever worked with were struggling on the edge of bankruptcy after 15 years of full-time work. It’s an epidemic. It’s the rule rather than the exception.

My whole passion is how I help you not do that and instead really give your gifts in a way that this planet could use so badly right now. How can we help you really deliver on the value you have to offer to the world?

Robert: Great. With that, Brian, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview. It was great ideas. It really was stimulating to me as well.

Brian: Beautiful. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation. I would love to sit down and do this again with you sometime.

Robert: I would as well. Thank you.

Brian: Beautiful. Take care.

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