Georgia Business Coaches Show Transcript of Mariette Edwards and Kim Gay Interview
A few weeks ago BevAnn Bonds interviewed Mariette Edwards with StarMaker Coaching and Kim Gay with Match Healthcare on her Georgia Business Coaches show. This show gives you a lot of insight into the coach client relationship. Once again, a big thank you to Karen Galambos with Right Type Pro for this transcription.
GEORGIA BUSINESS COACHES SHOW
ON BUSINESS RADIOX
with
BevAnn Bonds
and
Lee Kantor
Guests
Mariette Edwards - Star Maker Coaching
Kim Gay - MATCH Healthcare
June 9, 2009
BevAnn Bonds: Good Morning. Welcome to the Georgia Business Coaches Show. I am
BevAnn Bonds and I am joined in the studio with my co-host, Lee Kantor. Good Morning, Lee.
Lee Kantor: Good Morning, BevAnn. How’re you doing?
BevAnn Bonds: I am doing great! It is a glorious day out today and we have two fantastic guests. I am really excited about this.
Lee Kantor: I know, this is going to be a good show.
BevAnn Bonds: It is. We are joined in the studio today with Mariette Edwards of Star Maker Enterprises and Star Maker Coaching and with Kim Gay of MATCH Healthcare consulting. Good morning, ladies.
Mariette Edwards: Good Morning.
Kim Gay: Good Morning.
BevAnn Bonds: We are really excited to jump into everything but we have to do a couple of things before we really get into it. Each week on the Georgia Business Coaches Show we feature top businesses which provide our listeners with the opportunity to learn more about coaching, how it can help their business and the tools that coaches may use. Today, we will be finding out about Mariette and how she works with clients and a little bit about what Kim’s business is and how her relationship has been with Mariette. That’s going to be great. Before we do that, we have to thank our sponsors.
Lee Kantor: Today’s show is brought to you by Business Support Solutions, the virtual assistant organization providing administrative bookkeeping and marketing support to small business and, of course, Business RadioX, the radio marketing weapon.
BevAnn Bonds: Thanks again to our sponsors, Business RadioX and Business Support Solutions.
Mariette, you have a very dynamic background. You work as an executive coach, you have a real insider’s perspective on how businesses can really make decisions involving people. Part of that ties to your background, so can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?
Mariette Edwards: I originally am from New York. I spent 20 years in human resources management, in executive roles here and in New York City. I left that corporate world back in 1989 and since then I have done a variety of things. I was president of a radar test and threat simulation business, I worked in a variety of different industries while I was trying to find out what I wanted to do next in my career. I landed in coaching quite by accident, actually, in 1996 and that is when I started my coaching practice.
BevAnn Bonds: That is definitely at some of the forefront for coaches - changes. I know that you’ve seen a lot over the past years.
Mariette Edwards: Absolutely. There were only three coaches in Georgia when I launched my coaching practice.
BevAnn Bonds: You are one of the founding members of the Coach Federation?
Mariette Edwards: The Georgia Chapter of the International Coach Federation. I co-founded it with my coach at the time. I am not involved with the organization any longer, but I was right at the very beginning.
BevAnn Bonds: That’s great. You have a lot to give your clients, between the changes that you’ve seen in industry and during these times that is going to be really great and very helpful for them.
Lee Kantor: Mariette, how do you see coaching changing over the years from when you started to the people who are getting into coaching now?
Mariette Edwards: It is interesting because coaching is ranked as one of the hot careers to choose. When I started there was very little in the way of training opportunities. I worked with a Master Certified coach when I made the decision to go into this kind of business. At that time the only opportunity for learning was Coach University which had been started by Thomas Leonard, who has now passed on. Now you can learn coaching in universities, they have programs for it. You can become certified in special certification programs that are offered by different colleges and universities. There are also full academic programs that prepare you for that. I think it is more in terms of corporate coaching, which is not where I focus my particular practice. It has changed quite a bit and it has become much more organized, more formal than when coaching first started.
BevAnn Bonds: Mariette, can you tell us a little bit about your coaching practice and what your specialties are?
Mariette Edwards: I specialize in three practice areas. The first is Career Packaging. The second is Executive Evolution and the third is Communication Coaching which includes pitching, presentation and all types of communication in high stakes situations.
Clients hire me, for example, in Career Packaging when they are in the job market or want to move up in their organization. We work on strategies to help them stand out. Executive Evolutionary clients are like Kim, who is with us today. Clients who want to achieve more in their business, perhaps move into a different kind of business, change careers altogether. Finally, in Communication Coaching what I focus on with those clients are pitch strategies primarily. Those pitch strategies might be anything from selling a new piece of business to changing the way the company sees the role that you play within that organization.
BevAnn Bonds: Where do clients, for these three areas, come from?
Mariette Edwards: Generally, my clients come from two places. One is from referrals, from other clients. Of course it takes a while to build up a practice where you get client referrals. Secondly, when people hear me speak…I get a lot of business that way.
BevAnn Bonds: Is there a typical way that they engage with you when someone is working with you?
Mariette Edwards: First of all, what surprises a lot of people is that I don’t actually meet with my clients. Most of my coaching clients are clients who are in Atlanta, New York, they are in LA or sometimes in Europe or Australia. It is all done over the phone. I generally have never met the person that I work with, but that is really not relevant to producing the results that we co-create.
Lee Kantor: Can you walk us through what one of those sessions looks like?
Mariette Edwards: For example, I just had a new client contact me two weeks ago. He works for one of the big entertainment companies in New York City. He had made a mistake, an error in judgment; he went to his boss last year and said, “You know, I’d really like to do more. I am not happy with what I am doing now. Please help me.” What ended up happening is that his boss thought about that and felt that if he wasn’t happy, he didn’t want him there. That isn’t what his goal was. Honestly, if we had been working together he would have handled that completely differently. He is on a very short string right now, he is going to be out of a job on July 1st.
He hired me to help him position himself better within the organization to find a job for himself. He had an opportunity, this speaks to your question Lee, he had an opportunity for one of the departments in his company to create a job for him. He couldn’t convince the guy that he was somebody that should have a job created for him. So, I said, “You know, we need to pitch it. We need to pitch him on what that job might be and what you could do for him.” We created a whole pitch around five clients that he could bring in as a sales organization. Five clients that they had never approached or been successful in bringing in before using all the tools available to them in this very high profile entertainment company. Absolutely, blew the guy away. It was an amazing experience. He came out of that meeting and couldn’t believe it. Everything that we had intended to do is exactly what had happened.
We did it all on the phone, reviewing his Power Point which he sent me. We practiced. We tweaked the pitch. We had a lot of follow up on strategies for what to do at the end of the meeting and so forth.
Lee Kantor: How do you immerse yourself in his business so you really understand to help him achieve his goals?
Mariette Edwards: That interesting, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. I understand how business works, especially in entertainment; but, it is really the same. Entertainment is particularly relationship driven. But, I have been in almost every business that you can imagine.
Lee Kantor: And the same rules apply?
Mariette Edwards: The same rules apply. It’s all rules around people. It all has to do with what people want and how to appeal to their interest versus their intellect.
BevAnn Bonds: That is really great, because you can see where someone thought they were out of a job and that they are providing extra value which is incredibly pertinent at this day and time with the economic state the way that it is.
I do have some more questions for you, Mariette, but before we get too far into everything I would like to take the time to introduce Kim Gay who is a healthcare industry expert. She has more than 20 years experience as a successful entrepreneur, business owner and supplier to the healthcare community. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, Kim?
Kim Gay: My background has been primarily with a manufacturer of specialty equipment for wounds. I worked in that company for seven years and then started my own company where I bought from the manufacturer that I worked with and just developed a company that hit a market in long term care and we really didn’t have a lot of competition. After growing that company, after 14 years, I sold it to a national company that did the same thing that APS, my former company, did and I worked with them for several months. Then I started something entirely different. That’s where I engaged Mariette to help me in the development of my new company, MATCH Healthcare Consulting. It has been very interesting. I am doing something totally different now and it is a lot of fun, but I am learning a lot too.
Lee Kantor: What’s different about what you are doing now?
Kim Gay: Well, my former company, APS, had a tangible product. We provided equipment and devices for people who had wounds, we rented that. Now, with MATCH we are in the facilities and in the corporate offices of my former clients and we are training them.
Lee Kantor: Training them to do what?
Kim Gay: Training them in business development. There are a lot of changes going on right now in the healthcare market. We are trying to develop them to help them change, especially with people… their people involved. In long term care there has been a lack of development as far as leadership training and change management, that is the niche we are trying to develop with them.
BevAnn Bonds: With having a successful business before and being able to sell it, which is a great thing, why would you bring on someone like Mariette? Did you not think you had enough of your own experience to develop the business?
Kim Gay: Initially, I hired Mariette because I am writing a book. I met her through a friend of mine and we started talking about my book. As we got into the development of my book I realized that Mariette has so much expertise in the areas that I was going in to with my consulting that she could be able to help me with the development of my new business.
I was used to running a company that had employees and we were delivering product, we were selling a tangible product out to a customer to help heal a patient. Now, we are selling consulting. It was totally different and I needed Mariette to just guide me through the process.
Lee Kantor: Had you had a coach before?
Kim Gay: I had not.
Lee Kantor: She is your first coach?
Kim Gay: She is my first.
Lee Kantor: So, how is it going?
Kim Gay: It is great! She is wonderful! She always has the answer.
Lee Kantor: That’s always good. (laughing)
Kim Gay: (laughing) She does!
BevAnn Bonds: What are some of the challenges that you face from selling a business to creating a new one?
Kim Gay: Selling a business that I started and ran for 14 years and developed, it was my baby. So, when I sold the business it was very traumatic. It took me a little while to wrap my head around that I didn’t have that company anymore. It took another company for me to get excited about something else. I needed that to help my grieving process of getting through my other company.
Lee Kantor: When you had your company and you sold it, was it something you were looking to sell or did they approach you and say, “I’d like to buy it.”?
Kim Gay: They approached me.
Lee Kantor: That’s a different mindset.
Kim Gay: Yes, totally. Years earlier someone approached me and we went through the whole due diligence process and it didn’t happen. So, after that I kind of put it out of my head and never thought about it again. Then this company approached me in 2007 and it happened pretty quickly.
BevAnn Bonds: That’s fantastic. Mariette, I have a question for you…I know that you started working with Kim because she was writing a book. How has your relationship evolved? It sounds like it is different now.
Mariette Edwards: It is very different now. Let me give you a little plug for what Kim is working on…She is working on a book on Ethics and it is quite interesting. We started with outlining what the book was going to be about and then getting her interviews with high profile individuals who had taken an ethical nosedive. That, in itself, was a difficult process because these people aren’t necessarily going to talk to everyone. We were very successful in getting these individuals to meet with Kim so that she could interview them. In fact, she is creating a program right now about that which goes beyond the book.
So, working together, there is a lot of strategy involved and there was a lot of communication involved. Things would come up during the coaching process about the book that would tap in to some of the other background that I have. Little by little, Kim came to ask me more, “Well, I have this idea for a business. What do you think about this…?” and we would talk about that and how we were going to structure the business and what was that business going to look like. We’ve done a lot of brainstorming sessions and then strategies about positioning the business and so forth. It has just grown and grown and grown. I am involved with all of the pitches that Kim makes now. Everything about how she talks about the business has evolved.
We started in one direction and it has grown into a new direction. We started initially just for training and now MATCH really focuses on change management training and project management. But, what we are really in and what we are really excited about is that MATCH is really in the profitability business. We are in the business of helping our clients become more profitable in what they do, through how they manage their people.
BevAnn Bonds: One of the things I want to tie back to is that you were mentioning helping her with pitches. I know one of the things that you talk to other groups about is pitching for buy-in. People typically think of a salesperson making a pitch, but you say it is way more than that.
Mariette Edwards: Oh, Yeah! You don’t want to be somebody that sells, you want to be someone that people buy from. All of the coaching and programs I do on pitching have to do with being attractive to opportunity and putting yourself in a secondary position when you are talking about whatever it is that you are pitching. When I talk about ‘pitch’ and I talk about “Life’s A Pitch”, that’s just about everything is an opportunity for you to meet someone else at their map of the road. When you are willing to do that then you become more attractive to that individual and you become more visible to them. I think that is what really happened with Kim. I am really interested in seeing her be successful, I am not interested in promoting my services with her. I could have said, “Hey, I can do this…then I could that for you…”, I don’t do that. I’m really just motivated by wanting to see her successful; as I am for all my clients.
Everything I know is spilling out when I am talking to her and other people that I work with. Some people kind of naturally go, “Oh, maybe that is somebody I’d like to work with.” That is the same way I coach my clients, because it is much more important that you be attractive to opportunity by paying attention to the people you are dealing with.
Again, getting back to pitching, it is really a multitude of situations, it is not just going in and selling a proposal. It could be that you want to get buy-in for an idea, or in the case of that client who was pitching an idea about re-creating a whole new department for himself and changing the whole direction the way a multi-billion dollar corporation does business, we created a pitch that actually landed that for her and had nothing to do with selling a service.
Lee Kantor: So you are presenting an opportunity where your client is part of the solution?
Mariette Edwards: The client is part of the solution, yes. But the solution is tied to what that client’s interest is.
Lee Kantor: Right, the ultimate…whatever the opportunity is.
Mariette Edwards: I want to take this a step further, I gave you the example earlier about the fellow in New York who called me and has until July 1st, one of the ways we did this and one of the things I always do with a client is to tell me about who you are pitching to, who is this guy we are trying to enroll in this idea of creating a job. He profiled him. He is a sales guy, he has always been in sales. I asked him a few questions about how he sees the world. I said, “You know what, this guy’s a star. When you go into that pitch, he is the star you are just in the background. So everything we are going to be talking about in that pitch has to be around how what you are proposing is going to make him a bigger deal in his company because that is what is driving him.” I am always looking for the driver, what that need is and what that opportunity is for my client to stand out.
BevAnn Bonds: How would you work with someone, and this may be the case for you Kim, that doesn’t exactly say, “I have this sales manager that I am presenting to or that I’m pitching to a group of people and I think these are the demographics.”
Mariette Edwards: That is interesting because there are generally four ways that people see the world. If we include those four ways in the pitch then we will have hit everybody in the room. So there will be somebody in there that is a detail person and there is going to be a top end just give me the facts person. That is Kim’s style, she is a sensor style, she doesn’t want a lot of stuff she just needs to know what she needs to know to make a decision. There are also going to be people in there that are people people and there are going to be high creativity people with big ideas. So, when you are dealing with a group like that you want to go in and hit the sensor style first which is to give them a summary so that the sensor can walk out of the room when they’ve heard enough, they don’t have to stay for the whole pitch. You have to have enough data and detail. I always recommend to bring a lot of books and bring a lot of paper, never refer to it…it just looks good.
Lee Kantor: Like a prop?
Mariette Edwards: I tried this a couple of times and it was very successful because people think that there is a profound amount of knowledge behind whatever it is that you are saying, it is all perception.
You need enough detail for those analytics and then you make sure that you are personable so that the feelers in the room are dealt with. Then you do a lot of “what if-ing' and blue sky stuff for the intuitive.
BevAnn Bonds: It is a lot like when you are writing an article or doing anything else, you tell people what you are going to say, you say it, then you summarize again for anyone that came back into the room that might be a sensor.
Mariette Edwards: Yeah, but you want to make sure that you get the big deal decision maker in the room, you want to hit that person hard with whatever it is that you want to say. Then, everything else is for all the other people in the room. As long as you know who the decision maker is in the room you can tailor your pitch for that.
Lee Kantor: The knowledge that you are imparting now, is that stuff that you learned from your HR background?
Mariette Edwards: That’s a very good question, because I can’t point to anything that taught me any of this. I just kind of came in wired this way. I came in wired to be a coach. Coaching is what I do. Coaching is who I am. As far as communication goes, I just know. I had the experience in the corporate world, I understand it. I have been in all kinds of interesting situations, which we don’t have time to talk about but believe me they are pretty amazing. I also have a highly developed intuitive side and I just know when we are on and when we are off.
When I am dealing with a client I am listening so hard to what that person’s telling me and in my mind the wheels are turning, “We have to go this way… we have to that way…okay, this is the word we have to use…we have to hit this…we have to go this way…”
It was interesting because my client came out of that meeting and he called me and he said, “That’s exactly what you said was going to happen. It was exactly like that.” I can’t tell you that you can go to X University and learn how to do this or read Y book and learn how to do it. Some people are really just good at that. That’s what I’m good at.
Lee Kantor: Kim, as part of your evolution from having a business with employees to now being kind of ‘eat what you kill’, you are on your own and dealing with people individually; how has that changed from your personality standpoint? Are you enjoying that as much?
Kim Gay: I am enjoying it. I’m a lifelong leaner. I am in something that is totally different and I had to take it from Kindergarten all the way up. I think I’m in high school now! (laughing) I want to get my PhD some day.
Lee Kantor: Have you started getting clients in this new venture?
Kim Gay: Yes, I have several clients right now and people that have approached me. I am not at the level yet where I am going out and trying to create new clients or going after new clients. The clients that I have right now have approached me, that has been a good development.
Lee Kantor: So you are feeling confident? You are feeling this is the right path for you right now?
Kim Gay: I do. If I ever get off the track a little bit, I have my coach over here…
Lee Kantor: How often do you meet with your coach? Is it monthly?
Kim Gay: Initially it was once a week and we would talk for about an hour. Now, our relationship has developed so that if I have a question or I need help, which I am in a process right now, I need a lot of help, she is a phone call away.
Mariette Edwards: We went from weekly sessions to speed dial!
Kim Gay: Next week is our healthcare association convention and I am doing the CU program on Ethics and it is pretty much based on the book I am writing. This is where I really need a coach, if you haven’t done anything like that before.
BevAnn Bonds: It is great to know that you have that resource available to you at all times. Right now with the economy is on the top of everyone’s mind starting a new business can be a little bit scary. Can you tell us about some of the challenges or advantages or the disadvantages that you find with starting a business at this time?
Kim Gay: Thank goodness I am in healthcare, because the economy absolutely hurts healthcare too; but, I am in a business that we are all going to need healthcare and we are going to need people that are good at what they do and hopefully I will be able to help them. But, it has been scary. It absolutely has because one year after I sold my business is when the stock market crashed and when you think you are set, you’re not really set.
I think that people who are starting a new business right now with this economy, it may take them a little bit longer. It may take them a lot more effort to get that client and build a good base of clients. But, also there are tons of opportunities out there right now.
Lee Kantor: Do you think it is good time to invest in yourself rather than the stock market?
Kim Gay: Absolutely! I do. I have done that. I have not let the economy make me fearful of spending a dime to go get a certification or have a coach. If you can do anything to grow yourself through using a coach or getting a certification you are then going to be one or two steps ahead of somebody else that is out there that is afraid to spend a dime to develop themselves.
BevAnn Bonds: I am curious, Mariette was talking about ‘pitching’ before. I know that you said you have not been actively going out and doing cold calls, but you definitely have clients. So that speaks to some of your work with Mariette. I am just wondering how she helped with some of your messaging and your pitch?
Kim Gay: She did it. I’m going to give her all the credit here. I’m a salesperson, that is what I was born to do. But, I’m selling a different product now. Before I had something, a product to sell, so that was a little bit easier. Now I am selling myself and my services to help my client grow. I absolutely needed Mariette to help me with my messaging and show me how you sell this product versus selling a different product.
Lee Kantor: What is the time frame it takes you to get through that process? Do you get that in an hour or is it a month, six months?
Kim Gay: It’s ongoing.
Mariette Edwards: It is ongoing. I want to make a differentiation here because Kim moved from selling a tangible to an intangible. In my background I have worked in brokerage, finance, banking, manufacturing…you name it…hardware, software, intellectual properties - tangibles and intangibles. An intangible sale is very different. You have to create an emotional connection with the intangible. That is what we are working on with her messaging. It is ongoing.
I think because many people see coaching as an hour a week or an hour…I have a client who is a coach and she does an hour a month with her clients. That is not how I work. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it is the way I work with Kim, which is that I am on-call, like a 911 call.
Lee Kantor: I don’t want to get into how you bill, but is it a retainer or is it an hourly rate?
Mariette Edwards: For some clients it is a retainer and for some it is an hourly rate. I have an introductory package when I start with someone that is four sessions. Some coaches work with a year-long program or six month program, they have a contract. I don’t believe in that for myself. People hire me for a very specific reason. There is a very specific target they want to hit. It is not life coaching where it may go on for a very long time. Often the client gets in and gets out. I then have other clients like Kim that go on for a years. Those clients become retainer clients.
BevAnn Bonds: When you are talking about working with Kim having been a process and things have evolved, it is sounding like when you are talking about creating a message or pitching, it is not just making the sale…
Mariette Edwards: No, you can’t make the sale until you know what you are selling. We were basically dealing with an old phrase we used to use back in my technology days which is “Vaporware”, it doesn’t exist. It is just an idea and you have to take that vapor and turn it into something that is three dimensional. Make it compelling for someone to want to buy. It has taken us awhile to move from the training idea, Kim is passionate about leadership and training and people, to move from simply offering a training solution to offering a profitability solution through change management, project management and training. That has been part of our messaging. It is very new, this being in the profitability business on behalf of our clients. That’s a new message that we’ve just recently created.
BevAnn Bonds: What are some of the challenges that you and Kim have had to overcome to help her achieve her objectives?
Mariette Edwards: One of the big challenges in achieving Kim’s objectives is that Kim is brilliant and she is passionate and she is excited about what she does. She is a life-long learner. Sometimes she will run down a path to learning that might take her mind and her eye off the prize. So, we have to crack the whip a little bit.
Lee Kantor: How do you keep a person compliant like that? You know it is easy to get distracted, there are shiny objects everywhere. How do you get them back on track? Kim, how do you get back on track?
Kim Gay: She keeps me focused. What she just said is so true. I see a direction, an opportunity, and a little ADD comes in and I want to do this, want to do that. She just reels me back in and says, “Stay focused.” It’s her own messaging, I think to me. She has her own internal messaging that keeps our clients reeled back in and focused. I don’t really know how to answer that question.
Mariette Edward: I have to say that I think that is my New Yorker…I remember interviewing for a job on once and I had to go through a whole psychology, you know a battery of psychological tests. It came back and said “Lacks tact”. I have to be careful. But when Kim goes down one of those roads, I just say, “Whoa, Hello! We’re not going that way. Our target is this…That’s great and you can do that later but let’s go here right now because that’s the target you are trying to hit.”
BevAnn Bonds: Kim, would you agree that when someone is starting a business at this day and time that having someone help them stay more focused is a better use of their time and resources so that they don’t get off on those tangents? You could spend three months researching what you think is a great idea and then finding out, “Gosh, I should have been back over here following path A.”
Kim Gay: I think everybody needs a sounding board. It is hard to start a business on your own and be very, very productive if you don’t have somebody that is going to reel you in and keep you focused and be a sounding board. You can’t do it on your own.
Lee Kantor: Is that the value that you are providing for your clients? Are you helping them and coaching them in a way?
Kim Gay: Yeah, I guess I am coaching them a little bit. I think mine is more business development and I have a process that I go through.
Lee Kantor: And you’re sharing that process?
Kim Gay: I am sharing that process.
Lee Kantor: Don’t you have to hold them accountable and teach them?
Kim Gay: Absolutely. A lot of that I have gotten from Mariette.
BevAnn Bonds: Mariette, if someone is doing their pitch and it goes wrong, is there anyway midstream to correct that or are they just out of luck?
Mariette Edwards: Well, if you are in the moment and you see that you are going down the wrong road there are ways to do that, but generally that has to be someone who is pretty experienced in those situations to be able to recover. We might have a strategy for that going in. If you see people, if you see you are losing them you can do this or that. But, mainly what happens is that people come out of a pitch and they are just devastated because they know they did something awful or it didn’t go the way they wanted it to. The first thing I would tell a client who is in a situation like that is that you have to grieve the loss that you just had. You have to acknowledge…it is not like you can just get back up on the horse right away, you have to really just feel bad. You feel really bad, eat a lot of ice cream, call a lot of your friends, go through a couple boxes of Kleenex…then we can talk about how you can recover. Often, you can recover better than if the pitch had gone right the first time.
This same fellow that I was talking about in New York, had an interview last week with another part of that organization where there is an actual job. We did a whole kind of strategy and the goal was to go into the pitch and get the second interview. That was the whole goal. So he went in and got the second interview but he did not feel good about how he had answered a question about his vision for the organization that was interviewing him. So what we did was we came up with a way to go back to that person and resolve that unresolved issue. It is actually going to position him much better than if he had answered the question right at the moment it was asked. So, you have to get back on the horse but you have to allow enough time to feel bad about it.
BevAnn Bonds: So I guess you are just telling our listeners that it is okay to feel bad. Go ahead and take the time because you are going to learn from it.
Mariette Edwards: Yeah, yeah. Look at what went wrong. If I asked you on a scale of 1-10 how did your pitch go and you tell me an eight. I would then ask, “What would have made it a ten?” Then you would say, “I wish I would have said…(X)?” Well if the same person says it is a two, you always know why it is. Why is it so low? “Well, I was totally unprepared…I didn’t practice…I didn’t have good intention when I walked in the room…The guy that I wanted to be there wasn’t there and I didn’t know how to cover for that.” There are a lot of things that could go wrong in a pitch.
Lee Kantor: So it is important to do this kind of autopsy?
Mariette Edwards: Absolutely, you have to, even if you don’t want to.
BevAnn Bonds: Kim, you’ve mentioned that working on your messaging and just staying on task or on target and writing your book…are there other ways that you are working together with Mariette?
Kim Gay: I have one employee and she and Mariette are working great together. I think that that has helped Andrea learn and develop. Mariette has helped Andrea develop and go beyond what I thought she could do. It has been very helpful in managing my employee.
BevAnn Bonds: Alright, that’s great to know. So if somebody wants to find a little bit more about getting the right pitch or to help manage their employees to get over the people thing, how would they go about finding out more about you or contacting you, Mariette?
Mariette Edwards: The best way to find out more about me is to visit my website at www.starmakercoaching.com. You will find contact information for me. You can download the brochures about my three practice specialties. You can read client case studies. You can see examples of clients that I’ve worked with. There are a number of free articles that I make available from my own archive of articles that I have written. I also have a podcast that I do for Business to Business magazine and you can listen to that.
BevAnn Bonds: Kim, I wanted to say it has been great hearing some of the changes you have had go on between selling your business and creating a new one and how well that is going and your relationship with Mariette. If somebody wanted to find out more about MATCH Healthcare Consulting, how would they go about finding out more about you?
Kim Gay: Our website is www.matchhc.com.
BevAnn Bonds: I want to thank both of you for being here. This has been great. It is great to find out about how, in today’s economy and in any economy, you need to have a pitch and not think of just selling and that you have to target your message to people. It is fantastic to find out how someone’s applying Mariette’s work and working together with her. I want to thank both of you all for being on today.
Lee, we had another great show!
Lee Kantor: Great guests make a great show.
BevAnn Bonds: They do, every time. We’d like to thank our sponsors, Business Support Solutions and Business RadioX. Until next week, I am BevAnn Bonds and for my co-host Lee Kantor we’d like to thank you for listening to the Georgia Business Coaches Show. Be sure to tune in each week on Tuesday’s at 11:30 and to listen live. If you are not able to do that, you can go to our website www.georgiabusinesscoaches.com and listen at your convenience.
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