Last week I got a text from my friend Marci Shimoff. Marci is one of the most successful non-fiction authors, with over 16 million books sold.
She wrote to congratulate me on my new book, $100K Clients. Then she told me that something I’d said to her over a decade ago was part of the origin story of her most successful program. And she’d just been sharing that with her executive team.
So there was a meeting happening in California that I knew nothing about, where my name came up.
Here’s why I’m telling you.
You are having effects you will never be told about. Conversations you had years ago are still working. People are talking about you to others when you’re not there.
In fact, those conversations are happening right now and you have no idea.
And that’s the problem, because most coaches make decisions based on the feedback they can see. Opens, replies, likes, a client who renews.
When things go quiet, they assume nothing is happening and they change what they’re doing. I need a new offer. I need to change my branding. I need a new content strategy.
But you’ve already made your impact. You just never got told.
This is what a word-of-mouth business actually feels like from the inside. It feels like silence. And for a long time it is indistinguishable from failure.
The Prosperous Coach has sold over 125,000 copies. I have never run an ad for it. And it sold just 20 copies in its first month.
Michael Bungay Stanier wrote to me about my new book last week too. Michael is the author of the most successful coaching book in history, The Coaching Habit. He sent me this on a Monday morning:
$100K Clients is out now. I’m really proud of it, because it isn’t a book about finding more clients. It’s about the courage to have a different kind of conversation, with a different calibre of person – and to charge what that conversation is worth.
Love. Rich