How I Got My First Sale – Terri Levine

Terri Levine is a Platinum Author on EvanCarmichael.com – to view her articles click here. We asked her how she made her first sale – here’s what she said:

I wasn’t always a coach, obviously. I chose speech-language pathology as my major in college because I felt it would connect me with people and allow me to make a positive impact on their lives.  However, during my graduate studies, I began to realize that the patients were not going to make major improvements and I saw their hopes and their families’ dreams not being realized.  I tried to make this career choice work.  I even started my own clinic, but while this  work was gratifying, I realized that assisting people in communication was only a piece of what I really wanted to do. Something was missing.

Cutting a long story short, I ended up working in marketing and later administration for health care companies and got sucked further and further into the “fancy titles” and the “big money” in high-flying corporate America. We are supposed to be exultant when we reach those dizzying heights of success, but for the first time in my career, I was unhappy.

It was when one of my closest friends and colleagues died at the tender age of forty, just a week after my own mother had passed away from emphysema, that I decided life was way too short and precious to waste any longer. I wanted to help people be happy, enjoy life and feel fulfilled now, because none of us knows how long we have.  The thing is I wasn’t sure how I would achieve that until one day, on a plane of all places, I met a Coach, and my life changed forever.

I’d like to boast a similar story about my very first coaching client finding me in some exotic location or unusual and unexpected venue, but it wasn’t like that. After I qualified as a professional coach, I put my marketing experience and skills to good use, and among other things, I set up a website.  Of course, in those early days I didn’t expect any miracles from my website, believing that other more traditional marketing methods would attract my first client.  I was wrong.  No sooner had I set up my website, then my first client found me. I’ll call her Trish to protect her identity. She had simply done a web search and it was my good fortune that she landed on my web page, rang me, liked what she heard and we set up her first coaching session.

Trish often came to her coaching sessions to talk about what she was deciding in her relationship with her parents and her boyfriend and often asked me about my relationship and my parents and where and how I was raised.  I recalled my own coach always said I shouldn’t go there with the client and the client was stalling and wasting time. But I believed my client wanted to use her coaching time to express herself, to be heard, to be accepted, to think aloud, and to also hear my perspective.  So, we coached in this fashion, ignoring the “traditional” advice my own Coach was giving me.  It worked.

My client moved forward fast deciding how she would connect best with her parents and chose to move to the mid-west with her boyfriend.  She thanked me for being there for her and for helping her form her own opinions and make her own decisions about how she was going to live in the world.

As time went on, I came to coach a great many clients who had much more serious life and business challenges than Trish, but she will always stand out in my memory, not only because she was my very first client, but because she is testimony to the fact that coaching works for myriad life situations and that it doesn’t have to be an earth shattering problem for coaching to work its magic in people’s lives and businesses.

About Terri Levine:

Business mentor Terri Levine specializes in helping entrepreneur-owned businesses achieve record-breaking growth. Based in Philadelphia, Terri is founder and CEO of Comprehensive Coaching U, Inc., The Professional’s Coach Training Program. She has been featured on ABC, NBC, CNBC and MSNBC, and in more than 1,500 publications. She is a sought after public speaker and the best-selling author of Sell Without Selling, Coaching Is for Everyone and Stop Managing Start Coaching. Learn more athttp://www.TerriLevine.com.