Selling Your Expertise: Helping Women Confidently Sell Their Skills

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

"Just checking in" isn't a follow-up strategy; it's a sign you haven't figured out why the conversation should happen.

Renee Hribar continues her October Dynamite series with the story of Joanne, a seasoned business owner whose CRM had become a digital junk drawer of relationships she kept meaning to reopen. Every attempt to message a former contact named Susan ended in deleted drafts and a closed laptop, until Renee changed the question from "What should I say?" to "Why would it make sense for us to talk right now?" Renee shares how a longtime student used that same shift to close a $9,000 consulting deal with a former colleague, why proximity alone never creates a relationship, and why vague referral requests make your network do all the work.

Renee closes with three reflection questions to help you separate a genuine reason to reconnect from pipeline panic. When you stop requiring every conversation to become a sale, restarting relationships gets a whole lot easier.

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

"I need more leads" sounds like a business problem, but it's usually a "who" problem in disguise.

Renee Hribar tells the story of a client she calls Lisa, a highly credentialed consultant whose referrals dried up. Lisa did what most experts do. She refreshed her website, posted more, and added a newsletter, a webinar and a funnel to her list. By Thursday she had a pile of to-dos and felt worse than she had on Monday. When Renee asked her for five names she wanted to talk to that week, Lisa couldn't name one. Renee explains why chasing strangers "somewhere out there" keeps service providers stuck. Often the closest path to the next sale runs through people you already know: former clients, contacts from past events, other departments inside current accounts, and people who already engage with your work.

Renee closes with three self-reflection questions to help you find the opportunities already in your calendar, inbox and client list. Five real conversations will always be worth more than 5,000 theoretical leads.

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

Your sales call doesn't fall apart at the price; it falls apart the moment you stop listening.

Renee Hribar shares the story of a client she calls Lisa, a skilled consultant who ran great discovery conversations right up until it was time to make the offer. That's when she stopped listening, started reciting every package, call, and deliverable she had, and turned a warm conversation into a Cheesecake Factory menu of options. Renee explains why the fix isn't a better pitch, a lower price, or sharper objection handling. It's a simple bridge between listening and recommending: reflecting the client's situation back in their own words, then asking, "Is that the full picture, or is there more?"

Renee closes with three questions to help you spot where you check out of your own sales conversations. When a potential client feels fully heard, your recommendation stops sounding like a pitch and starts sounding like the solution they came for.

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

Your client doesn't need everything from you today; she needs to know what's next.

Renee Hribar breaks down why so many talented service providers and consultants freeze the moment they can see everything wrong in a client's business. She walks through a coaching story about a woman she calls Sarah, who kept expanding her scope every time she thought about what to offer a client with a messy, bottlenecked business, until the proposal stopped being an offer and started being an attempt to fix the entire company before anyone had paid a dollar. Renee reframes the real problem as trust, not scope or pricing: can you trust that a client can need everything and still only buy one clear next step? She introduces the idea that a proposal is a ring in a box, not the whole marriage, the deliverable that follows all the listening and discovery that came before it, and argues that piling on more options isn't generosity, it's confusion.

Renee closes with three questions listeners can ask themselves before building their next offer, without turning client work into a guessing game. The parts of your expertise that feel obvious to you are usually the exact next step your client is waiting for you to recommend.

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

If you've ever caught yourself saying "oh, I just gave them a quick template," you're already undercharging for what actually solves the problem.

Renee Hribar tells the story of a client she calls Kate, a member of her Permission to Sell program, who couldn't put a price on a resource she'd built because charging for it felt "inauthentic" — until Renee asked her one question that changed everything: does giving something away for free mean it has no value to the person receiving it? Renee unpacks why the expertise that feels effortless to service providers and consultants — the eight-second diagnosis, the instant read on a broken funnel, the pattern recognition built over years of real client work — is usually the most valuable thing they're not charging for at all. Using car dealership sticker pricing, a mechanic who solved her car trouble in eight seconds, and her own move from Michigan to Barcelona, she makes the case that price and value are not the same thing, and that undercharging quietly steals time, energy, and life from the people doing the work.

Renee closes with three questions listeners can sit with the next time they're building an offer, without turning it into a spreadsheet exercise. The parts of your work that feel easiest to you are usually the parts your clients would pay the most to have solved.

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

If your networking follow-up ends with a stack of business cards on your desk, you didn't network, you just collected humans.

Renee Hribar unpacks why most people measure a networking event by the wrong number: how many people they met, not how many real pathways they created. She tells the story of a web designer, whose referrals had dried up despite showing up to every breakfast, mixer, and chamber event she could find — stacks of business cards, personalized LinkedIn requests, and zero new clients to show for it. The shift came when the web designer stopped trying to work the entire room and started getting genuinely curious about the handful of people she actually connected with, using real conversation instead of an elevator pitch to learn what they needed next.

Renee walks through exactly how to turn a good conversation into a natural follow-up that doesn't feel salesy or forced, then lays out a simple challenge for turning one lingering business card into a real next step. It's a practical reset for anyone who keeps leaving events with a fistful of contacts and no idea what to do with them.

Mentioned in this episode:

Mind Grow Radio Storytellers Series: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mind-grow-radio-storyteller-series/id1568724555

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

Most referrals fall apart not because people don't like you, but because they have no idea what to actually send you.

Renee Hribar unpacks a private round table she hosted with a group of women business owners, where she asked two deceptively simple questions: where are your clients coming from, and what can somebody actually buy from you? Their answers revealed that inconsistent client flow rarely comes down to marketing tactics — it comes down to proximity and clarity. Renee breaks down the difference between existing trust and borrowed trust, showing how real relationships, not funnels or reels, create the conditions for referrals to happen naturally. She also introduces the idea of a "no-brainer offer," a specific, time-bound entry point that gives your network a handle to grab onto when they want to send you business, instead of trying to describe your entire skill set.

Renee closes with a simple five-person exercise listeners can use to test whether their own network actually understands what they do and who they help. It's a reminder that visibility and clarity, not more content, are usually what stand between a service provider and their next client.

Mentioned in this episode:

Grace - Organize with Grace: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/organize-with-grace-declutter-downsize-move/id1486586569

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

The biggest obstacle between you and your next client isn't your strategy, it's the four inches between your ears.

Renee Hribar unpacks why so many talented service providers and consultants convince themselves their sales strategy is broken when the real problem is how they're interpreting rejection. Drawing from a recent coaching conversation with a client who nearly quit her business despite just landing a new one-on-one client, Renee breaks down the difference between disappointment and data, and why one unanswered email or a thinly attended workshop doesn't mean your offer, your niche, or your business model is wrong. She revisits SW4, the sales rule she learned cold-calling in 1990s Manhattan, and explains how to tell the difference between discernment, testing intentionally and adjusting, and defensiveness, deciding something doesn't work because it felt uncomfortable. The conversation moves from networking rooms and referral fatigue into the real inner work of selling: building trust, starting conversations, and tolerating uncertainty long enough to find the room where your ideal clients are actually waiting.

Renee closes with a simple written exercise to help listeners identify the one sales activity they've been avoiding and the fear underneath it. It's a practical, no-fluff nudge toward doing the outer work of selling without letting inner resistance quietly run the show.

Mentioned in this episode:

Podcasting for Your Spiritual Business - Kim Parkinson: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/051-honor-the-season-your-podcast-is-in-and-grow/id1814692686?i=1000752864110

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

Most coffee chats end with a nice conversation and nothing else, and that's a sales problem hiding as a networking problem.

Renee Hribar breaks down why casual networking calls fail to convert into clients and introduces her four-part "Before the Call Trust Builder" framework: recon, relevant questions, examples, and deciding the next step. She walks through how a little research, one thoughtful question, and a quick example sent before the call changes the entire dynamic, illustrating it with a real story about a consultant named Rachel who landed a paid project simply by preparing differently for a single conversation.

The bigger lesson: people don't buy because they understand your title, they buy because they understand their own problem more clearly after talking with you. Renee closes with a simple weekly challenge. One person, fifteen minutes of recon, one thoughtful question, to put the framework into practice right away.

—>>https://www.askmecoach.com/

The fastest way to land your dream client might not be through the front door at all.

Renee Hribar breaks down the "side door" strategy she's used since her first sales job in Manhattan: instead of chasing an elusive decision maker with an outdated LinkedIn profile, reach out to the people whose job is literally to have conversations- the sales team, biz dev, and partnership managers who already know the organization inside and out. She shares how one dashboard designer used genuine curiosity, framed as research for an article, to open doors that months of cold outreach couldn't, and how a client added a thousand dollars in revenue from a single email once she helped her see an opportunity that was already sitting in her business.

Renee closes with a simple challenge: pick one dream company, skip the perfect contact, and start one real conversation this week. It's a reminder that intelligence in business isn't about knowing everything, but about knowing who to ask.