Kim Walsh Phillips
Making Conversations about Social Selling Count!
Kim Walsh Phillips works with entrepreneurs who have great businesses but are tired of relying on word of mouth and referrals to grow. She helps them take growth into their own hands through social media, even when the technology freaks them out. Kim practises what she teaches: she has grown a following of over a million people on Facebook from her own audience.
In this conversation, Kim and Wendy talk about why she never teaches a strategy she has not implemented successfully for at least 90 days, how her struggles, including bankruptcy, became her message, and why we fail when we keep chasing lots of little things instead of making one thing better. Kim also explains why you cannot compare your first chapter to someone else’s twentieth.
Kim’s conversation that counted came from an audiobook. Her company had hit a ceiling of 30 clients and she wanted to serve more people. Listening to Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets, she heard a simple strategy: run one webinar and keep improving it, rather than creating a new one every week. Sticking with it turned her into an expert in it.
“My mess was going to become my message.”
Kim Walsh Phillips, Making Conversations Count (January 2021)
Follow Kim on Facebook
Connect with Kim on LinkedIn
Visit the Powerful Professionals website
Kim’s book: Awareness Campaigns are Stupid: And Other Insider Secrets to Stop Being an Advertising Victim and Start Monetizing Your Marketing
Listen to this episode on your favourite platform
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Making Conversations Count – Episode 10
January 4th 2021
Wendy Harris & Kim Walsh-Phillips, Powerful Professionals
Timestamps
00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:33: Making your business grow
00:02:19: Shizzle
00:03:42: Mess becoming the message
00:04:37: Kim’s pivotal moment
00:06:59: Do it 119 times
00:08:18: Their passion feeds you.
00:10:10: Final thoughts
Wendy Harris: Welcome to making conversations count, the Podcast that brings you business leaders sharing their pivotal moments; a story and a conversation that has really been a turning point in their lives. Today, I have the very delicious Kim Walsh Phillips. Hello, Kim, thank you for joining us.
Kim Walsh Phillips: Thank you so much for having me, this is such a pleasure.
Wendy Harris: I was so excited when I got the confirmation that you went, “Yeah, I’d love to do this”. So, Kim, tell everybody what you do now and how you serve.
Kim Walsh Phillips: I work with entrepreneurs who have great businesses, but they are tired of relying upon word of mouth and referrals in order to grow and they want to take growth of their business into their own hands, but technology totally freaks them out. So, they know they need to use social media to get out there and get the word out, but they’re not quite sure how. I help show them exactly how they can do it so they can be empowered to do it themselves.
Wendy Harris: Well, that’s brilliant because certainly now more than ever, we can’t go and do the face-to-face meetings. Networking has gone online, hasn’t it? We’ve got to be able to reach people in new ways, more than ever before, whether we like it or not. So, it’s great that you do that. Is it course content; do they get you? How does it work for them to be able to learn that?
Kim Walsh Phillips: We have free content, we have courses, we have coaching programmes and we have virtual events, so it’s a variety. It goes all the way from learning completely on your own to us doing it with you. So, it’s a wide range of levels but typically people will come in, either from having read one of my books or heard me speak somewhere or clicking on one of my adds, and then they will get a free piece of content, and then will end up enrolling in a course. Then they go on to a coaching programme with us.
Wendy Harris: So, clearly the value is that the material that you’ve written in your books is kind of the starting point of them getting to know you and that you do know what you’re talking about, Kim, don’t you really. I didn’t know until after you’d agreed to come on the show and somebody said, “Ooh, Kim, she’s brilliant. Have you seen her on Facebook?” “I hang out on LinkedIn not on Facebook”. So, I was like, “This lady really does know how to do this shizzle”.
Kim Walsh Phillips: This is the one of the things about my coaching style. I will never teach something I haven’t implemented successfully for at least 90 days, because there are people who also do something successfully and it works for them for a week and they go and teach it, but we know a lot of strategies can work for a little tiny bit but then they dissolve. So, I never teach something that doesn’t work. One of the main things I teach people, especially when they’re first getting involved in social media, is how to quickly grow their audience. I have over a million followers on Facebook, that I have grown from my own audience, right. So, I show people how to do that, so I am living proof of how it works before I ever try to teach something.
Wendy Harris: Do you know what, Kim, I’m going to have to get myself on one of those courses, I think. I’ve been watching some of the videos that you do to your audience and you’re a really chatty lady, you tell it how it is, and you’ve been there. That’s clear that you’re not sort of sitting in this position of success and going, “Hey, look at me”. You’re like, “Come on guys, come and join me, it’s brilliant over here”, and that’s amazing to see that passion for other people to do well.
Kim Walsh Phillips: I’ve had a whisper from God for a very long time that I went through all that I went through with the struggles and trails and tribulations and bankruptcy to working all hours of the night for a reason. That was because my mess was going to become my message, not so that I could get paid hundreds of thousand dollars to speak on a stage of people who would do nothing with it, but so I could work with the action takers who could shortcut their map, their road to success and achieve what they have been created to do.
So, my soul purpose for living, besides being a mamma to my kids and a great wife to my husband, is to empower entrepreneurs so that they can fulfil the purpose of why they’re here on this Earth. So, thank you for saying that, because that’s truly why I share my story and my strategies out in the World.
Wendy Harris: That’s many that don’t want to give it away, so I’m glad that you do the work that you do. You touched on there a little bit on the trials and tribulations of your life, so I’m kind of now wondering if that’s leading up to the question that I ask everybody to come and share their pivotal moment and that conversation that created a turning point. So, Kim, tell us your story, please.
Kim Walsh Phillips: As any great entrepreneur will tell you, there have been many pivots, there’s not just one, but I’ll pick just one. I’ve owned my company for 20 years, so there’s been many, but one of the major turning points in our company was that I was looking to scale. We had 30 clients at a maximum and it was exhausting; we could never go past it and I felt this calling to serve more people, but I really didn’t know how. I was relying upon word of mouth and referrals to grow and so I knew I needed to do something different.
I’m someone who believes that you follow the Tony Robbins philosophy that you find people who have achieved the success you want, and you copy what they do, and you’ll have that same success. So, I was listening to an audio book, it was actually Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets, which is one of my favourite audio books ever listened to. So, those of who are looking to create your company, it’s a great one to listen to. All of a sudden, I heard him give this strategy and it was that when he was looking to grow his business, he did a webinar. Not a different webinar every week, which is what I’d been doing; we’ve been doing launches and webinars and pitches, but he had actually gotten a piece of pivotal advice in his world which was he was going to do the same webinar every single week for an entire year. It hit me like a bolt of lightning, like this is it. Instead of constantly recreating launches, we’re going to nail one perfect message that we can do over and over again instead of creating all this extra work to create things over and over again.
So, I committed that week that I was going to do my webinar every single week and I did it every single week for over two years. I did it 119 times, we generated over $1.7 million in revenue from that one webinar, within a year, and we were able to scale our business. When I sold my agency, those 30 clients, I knew right away where I was going to put all of the cash that I got in the sale of my business, which is what I did. I used all of it to buy traffic, to send people into my webinar, because we had uncovered how we could successfully take people from knowing nothing about us to becoming a raving fan customer within three clicks.
Wendy Harris: That’s awesome because you’ve done what everybody says, “niche”, rinse, repeat. Keep doing it until your fingers bleed and your throat’s hoarse and look at what happened.
Kim Walsh Phillips: It’s like not even crazy but we see that as crazy. Sticking with the same thing until you make it better, I think we’re also likely to do lots of little things hoping to achieve the results we want, instead of making the one thing we’re trying to do better. That’s where we fail, we don’t stick with it because we get bored or we want to do something different and, yes, I got bored and yes, I wanted to do something different, but it was the most profitable hour of my week, every single week. It allowed us to grow in such a big way and so I think when you’re looking to grow, especially from the beginning, the secret is not to do a hundred things.
I think one of the worst marketing messages that is out there, are the people who say, “You need to be everywhere”. That is terribly dangerous because then you’re going to be nowhere very strongly right, you need to pick two to three marketing strategies that you go super deep into before you do anything else in your business.
Wendy Harris: There is no point in reinventing the wheel all the time either, is there? As somebody’s who’s delivered sales and marketing workshops with the same content, over and over to hundreds of delegates, I know that every single time we delivered it, we uncovered a little tiny new piece to add to it. So, it got better and better every time that we delivered it. So, do it once and do it again, again and again until the point that you are on autopilot, but when you’ve got people that are listening to what you’re sharing, their passion feeds you, doesn’t it?
Kim Walsh Phillips: Yeah, it does and then this is the crazy thing, because we had perfected it, because I’ve gone so deep into it, I became an expert in it, which is what happens over time. No one named me the expert, I didn’t go and get a certification, none of that happened. By me doing it over and over again and each time findings ways to make it better, I became the expert, and now people pay us, we have a coaching programme. The whole purpose of it is to show people how to launch their first signature course, use a webinar to sell it and scale it to a seven-figure business. That is a coaching programme.
So, you can over time go from knowing nothing about how to do something, to literally becoming a leading expert, not by someone having a magic wand or fairy dust coming from the sky, but instead by staying consistent with what you’re doing.
Wendy Harris: The other point to pick up there was that you said you did it 119 times.
Kim Walsh Phillips: Yeah.
Wendy Harris: How many people will stick at it for that long?
Kim Walsh Phillips: Right.
Wendy Harris: There is no such thing as overnight success.
Kim Walsh Phillips: Exactly, there is no such thing. That’s one of my biggest things to our newbies especially, because I work with so many people trying to become coaches, you cannot compare my Chapter 20 to your introductory chapter. My introduction looked a lot different than what my life looks like right now. I only got here, because I did those other things. People have the hardest time with growing their own business; expect things to be at stage 20 on day 1. They want that moment of like, “Doesn’t this all work out? Where’s my people to do all my things?” Like, “No, no, no, you’ve got to put the work in, in the beginning”.
You get to live that other part of it after you’ve done that. For you to make this work you have to be willing to do the work.
Wendy Harris: That is just so true. Who was the special guest that just make an appearance? For those listeners we had a special guest then. You tune into WAG and we have a special WAG just turn up.
Kim Walsh Phillips: That’s my Daisy and she loves to hang out over here and see her reflection in the window of my cabinet and start barking at herself. So, the only way I can get her to stop is to pick her up, pet for a little bit, make her want to go run. So, that’s how that works.
Wendy Harris: It was lovely to see her, she looks like great company. Well, Kim, thank you so much for giving me your time today, and for the listeners and sharing your pivotal moment. I’m sure that that will encourage people to just press on, keep going if you’re an action taker, you’ll get there.
Kim Walsh Phillips: That’s exactly right.
Wendy Harris: If people want to pick up the conversation with you, Kim, they can find you hanging out on Facebook, can’t they?
Kim Walsh Phillips: They can, my name is Kim Walsh Phillips, I am the only one of them with that name so you can find me there and my website is www.powerfulprofessionals.com.
Wendy Harris: Fabulous, thank you so much for your time, Kim. To the listeners make sure you subscribe, tell us what you think in the comments. It’s been an absolute blast, thank you so much, Kim.
Kim Walsh Phillips: Thank you, Wendy.
