What does a sales coach actually do for a consulting business?
A sales coach for a consulting business does three things a course can't, and none of them is handing you information.
She tells you which option is right for you
There are usually ten reasonable ways to handle a stalled opportunity, and nine of them are wrong for your business, your client, and this particular moment. Choosing between them is judgment.
She works your live deals with you
The real engagement sitting in front of you, with the person who's gone quiet, the budget cycle you didn't know about, and the internal politics nobody wrote down.
She notices
When you say you'll send five follow-ups and send one, somebody knows. When you drop your price before anyone pushed back, somebody names it. That's the part you can't buy in a document.
I get coached too. There's a bonus episode where I'm the one in the chair ("Bonus Episode: Leah gets coached"), and I put it out on purpose, because the idea that you graduate out of needing help is one I'd like to retire.
Can I learn to get clients from free content?
You can learn a great deal about getting clients from free content, and I'd rather you did than sat still. My podcast is free. This page is free.
Here's where free content stops. It hands you pieces, from a dozen people who each believe something slightly different. Then you assemble them yourself, and what you get is parts that don't quite line up: gears whose teeth don't mesh. You can't tell which piece is the problem.
You have some of the ingredients. You're just missing the recipe.
And that's structural. MIT and Harvard studied six years of their own free online courses, 565 of them, and found completion rates stayed low the whole time, with most learners never coming back after the first year ("The MOOC Pivot," Science, 2019).
The other thing free content can't do is tell you it isn't working. It has no idea what you tried, what you dropped, or what you're avoiding. It answers the question you thought to ask, which is a real limitation when you don't yet know what you don't know.
Get more out of the free material you're already reading:
- Pick one source and go deep for a quarter instead of sampling ten. Conflicting advice is what produces the mismatched pieces.
- Write down the one thing you'll try after each episode, with a date. Reaching out to people who already know your work is a good first one.
- Keep a running list of what didn't work. That list is the most valuable thing you'll bring to a coach later.
How long does it take to figure out sales on my own?
Figuring out sales on your own takes longer than the time you'd spend learning it, because most of it isn't learning. It's trying something, waiting three to eighteen months to find out whether it worked, then not being sure whether the result came from the thing you changed or something else.
That feedback loop is the problem. A B2B consulting sale is slow by nature, so a mistake takes a year to show up and looks like bad luck when it does.
| Working it out alone | Working with someone who's done it |
|---|
| How you find out something's wrong | The deal doesn't happen, months later | Someone tells you on the call |
| How many cycles you get | A handful in a decade | Theirs, not just yours |
| What a mistake costs | A year, and you may misread the cause | A conversation |
| What you carry meanwhile | The self-doubt about whether you're doing it right | Somebody else's certainty until yours arrives |
The honest version: you'll be fine either way. Plenty of women have built good businesses the slow way. What I'd want you to weigh is that what you're spending is a year of wondering whether you were doing it right.
Why do I feel like I should be able to figure out sales myself?
You feel that way because figuring things out yourself is who you have always been, and it has worked every single time until now.
You were the person who figured things out. In your corporate career you were either left to work it out alone or praised for it, probably both, and self-reliance stopped being a strategy and became part of your identity. So asking for help feels like evidence about you.
That's the trap, and I want to name it plainly. Nobody taught you to sell. It wasn't on the syllabus, it wasn't in your job, and there was no reason it should have been. You're meeting the first thing your usual method doesn't crack.
Smart women hire help for things outside their expertise constantly, without a flicker of shame. This is the same category.
Two things that help more than deciding to feel differently:
- Write down what figuring it out alone has cost so far. Months, opportunities you didn't pursue, the price you didn't ask for. Put real numbers on it.
- Name one thing you already outsource without shame (your accountant, your lawyer, your web developer) and say out loud what makes this different. Usually the honest answer is nothing.
How do I know if I'm ready to work with a sales coach?
You're ready to work with a sales coach when you have a real business and a specific problem, not when you feel qualified.
Concretely, the floor I hold:
- Two or more years running your consulting business.
- $120,000 or more in revenue last year.
- Clients who are happy with your work. Results are not the question, and what the help costs is a separate one.
That floor exists because coaching multiplies something. If the underlying work isn't strong yet, there's nothing to multiply.
The other signal is behavioral, and it's the one I'd weigh most: if you're postponing decisions you have every fact you need to make, the gap is confidence. That's what coaching is for.
If you're earlier than that, don't hire anyone yet. Go get the reps, and keep the list of what didn't work.
Leah's take
Real talk: I'm not going to tell you that you can't do this yourself. You probably can. You've done harder things, and plenty of women have.
Here's what I'd ask you to look at instead. Figuring it out yourself feels good. There's a real satisfaction in having scraped it together, and I did it that way myself. But at what cost? How long did it take? And how much self-doubt did you carry the whole way about whether you were even doing it right? That second cost is the one nobody counts.
Your time is the one thing you can't get more of. So when someone says she'd rather work it out alone to save money, what I hear is that she's about to spend the more expensive currency to protect the cheaper one. The women I work with say it almost the same way every time: I'll be fine, I just won't get to where I want to go as fast as I want to get there.
You're allowed to take the shortcut. That's the part I most want you to hear.
The Academy is where I teach both systems, with a room of women doing the same work.
