Welcome To Smart Gets Paid

Leah Neaderthal0:00

Hey there, and welcome to the Smart Gets Paid podcast, where women like you are learning how to land higher-paying clients in your B2B consulting or coaching business. I'm your host, Leah Neaderthal, founder of Smart Gets Paid. So, in this podcast, I want to invite you into my world. You're going to go behind the scenes with me and listen in on actual coaching sessions with my clients, where I'm solving some of their most pressing challenges and headaches: how to land clients, land clients more consistently, and get paid more for their consulting contracts. So, why should you care? Because I know what it's like to feel uncomfortable selling and to struggle to get clients. That's because I've never been a salesperson. So, how does someone who's never been in sales become a sales coach? Well, to answer that question, we have to go back to 2010. I spent my career in corporate marketing, and that year, in 2010, I quit my job to travel the world. While I was traveling, I started my first consulting company, a marketing and website design firm. My background is in marketing, so I figured, starting a marketing firm, how hard could that be? And I learned what you've probably learned too, which is that it's about a thousand times harder to sell your own stuff than it is to sell someone else's. And I struggled. I could not sell. It was frustrating, but more than that, it made me doubt whether I was even cut out to run my own business. In fact, I struggled so much that I went back and got a corporate job again. But I knew that I wanted to be in business for myself, and if I was going to do that, I had to learn how to sell. But not the way I'd seen sleazy salespeople sell to me. It had to feel comfortable and feel like me. I mean, I'm a total introvert. I'm not going to shake a thousand hands. So I taught myself. I read everything I could get my hands on, which turned into 65 books. I tested every strategy with my own clients. Anything that felt salesy, I ditched. But anything that felt comfortable, I kept. And over time, I developed a selling methodology that feels comfortable, and it works. Using that strategy, I have a 92% success rate and I've sold $3 million in work. Now I teach other women how to do the same thing in their consulting businesses. Because women entrepreneurs say that customer acquisition is the number one most challenging part of their business. And that's no surprise; you might feel that every day. But it doesn't have to be that way. And that's where this podcast comes in. This is about giving you a look at how women just like you are learning how to land higher-paying consulting and coaching clients. And my hope is that you see three important things. First, I want you to see that if you're struggling with the sales part of your business, that you're not alone. There are so many women out there who are just like you: smart, super sharp, and so good at the work you do, but the sales part feels like unfamiliar territory. The second thing I want you to see is that you're not "bad at sales." You've just never learned how to do it. And when you learn how, you can not only feel comfortable doing it, you can actually be really good at it. And third, I want you to see that there's help, and that's what you'll get here. You'll learn that even if you've never been a salesperson before, you can land higher-paying consulting clients. And you can do it in a way that isn't salesy, that's based on the tremendous value that you bring your clients and that leverages your unique strengths. And you can do it all in a way that feels comfortable, lets you be confident, and builds strong client relationships. I'm living proof, and as you'll hear in the conversations in this podcast, my clients are learning how to do this every single day. So here's what I promise you. I promise that this is the real deal, the unvarnished truth from conversations with my clients and me. I promise that you're going to learn real things I used in my consulting businesses and that I teach my clients. I promise that these strategies are specific to B2B consulting and coaching businesses and B2B consulting and coaching clients. There's a lot out there about how to sell online courses or low-cost products, or even that buzzword, "high-ticket clients." And those tactics just don't apply to selling high-value consulting or coaching programs into businesses. So what you're going to learn here is specific to you and the way your clients buy. I promise that there's not going to be any fluff or any, you know, "and then it just worked out and I made a million dollars" stuff that you find in the coaching industry. You'll learn real actionable steps that you can apply to your business. And along the way, I'm going to challenge some of the assumptions you might have about yourself, your clients, and your business, and help you unlearn some of the things that might be holding you back. So thanks for joining me and taking this time to invest in yourself and your business. Whether your consulting contracts are $2,000 or $200,000, if you want to work with more of the clients who you love, do more of the work you love, and get paid more than you ever imagined, then you're in the right place. Let's do this.