Coaching and Mentoring
I specialise in helping speakers, trainers and independent professionals who are experts in their field to build healthy businesses. I help with the practical aspects of being in business for yourself; getting clients, making sales and building the content and materials to attract them to want to do business with you – and of course being someone on YOUR team that you can trust to bounce ideas off when you aren’t sure of the best way forward. All of my mentees have come from being in senior positions in a professional industry, university or business school and have sought help to set up or to grow their professional practice.
Practical Help for Mentees
There’s so much more to do that most people realise; you need to create a unique position in your market place, craft your proposition to give it sales appeal, build relationships that are beneficial for your business, then write speeches, training materials, develop your unique intellectual property, make sales calls (yes, no matter how high up the ladder you are or you want to be you will have to sell!), write proposals and then navigate purchasing teams and get paid for what you do. You need systems to keep your client and prospect activity organised as well. Without these things, you will have lots of ideas but not be closing the number of deals for your business to thrive.
What’s Different About Having Sophie as a Mentor?
There are lots of people training others to speak, write and build your brand; but hardly anyone helping with the nitty gritty of winning the business that puts money in your bank account. I often start by helping people to write a book or take their talk to a new level – experts love working on the fun stuff! But I find that quickly the reasons that people aren’t being as successful financially as they deserve to be isn’t their material – it’s their sales processes. For example, lots of speakers are on the books of agencies and bureaus but still don’t get the bookings they need and wonder what to do next.
If that resonates with you then book a call with me to see if I might be the right person to mentor and support you. You can access my diary directly using this link, don’t be shy. Book a call with me and let’s chat through what support you might need.
https://calendly.com/sophiebennett/30mins
There’s no obligation when you call; we will just an open conversation about your goals and challenges to see if there might be a fit to work as a team.
Click this link to download the mentoring brochure – Mentoring Service with Sophie Bennett
Case Studies – Recent Client Successes from Mentoring
- Set key goals for the year, and outline activities needed to achieve them. Getting clear about how to double the business without doubling the workload
- Help to outline (and proof-read!) an important proposal – provided a winning proposal of my own as a template (she won the business…..)
- Plan an approach to a new prospect to convert a free talk into paid talk for the same client – moved client from free to £2000 with 2 emails and one phone call
- Making the most out of LinkedIn – including optimising profile, help to plan appropriate articles and video posts – attracted a conference organiser to book a paid talk within one month of focused activity on LinkedIn
- Helped one mentee to turn a £150 talk into a retainer with a university which led to being a paid consultant for several months to create content for a new degree course and created paid bookings with 5 more universities
- Worked with mentee to turn a face to face workshop into an online course and get it launched on 2 paid course platforms
- Helped a mentee to structure and script a for bespoke video messages – resulted in 40% of message recipients booking paid sessions after a cold approach on LinkedIn.
- Helped a mentee to find and use new software to deliver virtual talks. The client loved it – and rebooked further sessions within 24 hours
- Set up a prospect database to keep track of contacts and opportunities to make sure no potential business ‘fell through the cracks’. Many supposedly cold contacts weren’t cold! 3 bookings within a month of properly organising contacts and keeping track of conversations and leads
- Halved the time it took one mentee to prepare new material by using a couple of simple online tools
- Worked with a speaker to create a new media pack that included speaker sheet, menu of talks and content video so prospective clients could clearly see the added value of booking. The professionalism of what she could send to clients massively increased her confidence to approach people and pick up the phone to potential clients
- Worked with a mentee to write their first business book, set up their mastermind group, record their podcast and connect with CEO’s in their target market
- Helped a mentee to transition from working on to one to creating a program for corporate clients that resulted in an immediate £32,000 booking
- Helped a mentee to take a VERY complicated idea, turn the speech into a book (became his ghost writer), find a publisher and launch his international speaking career. So far, the speaker has spoken in 15 countries and the book has been downloaded over 250,000 times
Executive Developmental Coaching for Corporate Clients – Designed for leaders and executives working inside larger organisations who are building their skills and/or have been identified as having leadership talent. Your development program can be co-designed with Sophie and Dr. Jacquie Drake (Cranfield Business School/Mannheim Business School) and delivered by one of our agreed partners at Cool Leadership.