How To Turn Your Corporate Skills into a Powerful Membership Site with Catherine Watkin

Shelli: Catherine Watkin, welcome to It’s A TRIBE Thing, my friend. It’s so good to have you. How are you doing?

Catherine: I’m really good and thank you for having me, Shelli. I’m really excited to be here.

Shelli: Oh, it’s our absolute pleasure. So, I had the amazing opportunity to be in some of Stu’s programs with you and have the chance to really go deep on who you are and what you’re doing in the world and I’m really excited to share with all of our TRIBErs and the world at large what you’re doing in the business world, the impact that you get to leave, and also how you’ve woven in a membership site and serve your people. So, I’m wondering if you would mind start just telling us who you are, who you serve, and what your membership site is and does.

Catherine: Okay. So, who am I? So, I call myself the UK’s leading expert in authentic and heart-centered sales. What I do is I work with business owners who are gifted and passionate about what they do but struggling business because they feel so awkward when it comes to selling their services, and through online courses, but now also my membership community. I teach these business owners who feel really icky and uncomfortable about sales and marketing, how to attract, and enroll those clients in a way that feels genuinely authentic but also in alignment with their values so there’s no feeling of, “I’ve got to grow this business,” but everything I’m being told to do feels really out of integrity. And that’s where I come in, really helping people to grow their business but in a way that feels in alignment with their values. That’s what I’m all about.

Shelli: That’s amazing. How did you come to be that person? Because I’m always interested in people’s backstories and how when somebody has a skill or a gift or something that they share with the world, I’m always interested in finding like what was the root of that for you. Before you did what you did, how did you find it and come to this?

Catherine: I think, well, I’ve had a career in sales. So, I’ve been in sales from 23 years of age right through to the point where I decided to give up my corporate sales career to go and find something more meaningful and more fulfilling and I left my job and I was really lost for a few years. I did all sorts of retraining. I retrained as a yoga teacher. I studied acupuncture. I trained in NLP, hypnotherapy, coaching, reiki, you name it. I started a business in a number of those different things, but my heart wasn’t in any of them. And friends kept saying to me, “But you’re so good at sales. Why don’t you go and be a sales trainer?” And I didn’t want to do it because I was still, even myself, I was still associating sales with being target-driven, pushy, not really something I wanted to get into teaching because a lot of this, the way that sales is taught never really resonated with me and my values. And then I started to realize, “Well, hang on a minute.” Yes, I used to get sent on these courses, but I never used to do the stuff I was taught because it felt so icky. I just used to come back to my desk and do what felt true for me and I was the top salesperson, either the top four and the top three of salespeople for the three companies that I worked with, so it worked. And I realized that that was actually my gift, this ability to sell but do it in a way that feels very authentic.

And actually, it’s not just the authenticity. It’s about selling in a way that puts the best interest of the client at the center of the interaction, rather than the best interests of you and your business in your bank account. And it also grew from there but when I started, I was not a marketing expert. I now do consider myself to be a marketing expert and I teach marketing but at the beginning, I was a sales expert and I learned the marketing piece myself as I got my business off the ground.

Shelli: That’s incredible. So, when you started though, you didn’t start with the membership site. We were talking, and you started with courses and mentoring programs and master classes, and how did you come to transition from that business model and if you can also share with us what you loved about that business model and then how you came to move to a membership site and how that affected your business going forward.

Catherine: Okay. So, I started really with online courses. I didn’t even do, you know, I teach my – I often teach my clients to start with one-to-one clients in order to really get to understand the clients, how to sell and market to them but I went very quickly straight into online courses. So, I have an online course called “Get More Client Saying Yes”. I’ve launched it every year for the last seven years. It’s an eight-week program. It gets amazing results and then what I had done was based on the advice of the business mentors that I’d invested with, I was told that the only way to make a business where you work profitable is to have a high-end offering. So, I had been added on this high-end offering where it was between in dollars between $6,000 and $12,000 a year to work with me in this 12-month program and I would take 20 people a year. And it worked financially, and it was a brilliant business model. I would launch once a year. I would launch the program in September. I would do a live event in November. I would fill the mentoring for the year and my whole income was done for the whole year and in two months flat and I love that model. What I love because I love the online program and I love the fact that I had people from all over the world and it’s a genuinely global program where I could help a lot of people that the higher end mentoring program started to feel quite heavy.

But just because of the numbers were limited and I have this ambition to scale it and I put in a lot of time and effort to get it to the point where it was genuinely scalable, like taking on coaches, to help me deliver it and I was ready to take up to 100 people and I wanted to have like the leading mentoring group of that type for women in the UK but even the idea of limiting it to 100 just felt heavy and I didn’t see it at first but it was actually because I feel very, very cool to work with and impact much, much, large numbers of people and there was something about restricting it to whether it was 20 or 100. It just felt limiting for me. It felt heavy and the whole thing started to feel heavy. And so, in the end, I made a decision and I’ve just stopped running it. I just got to the end of a year one year and I run my live event where I normally stand at the front of the room and offer that program, I didn’t. I offered something else instead, but I basically broke my own business model with nothing to transition to.

Shelli: That’s amazing. Well, you know the thing that I love about you also is you are very in tune with what feels good and what feels right to you with you and for your business and you know even going back to the story you were telling about when you are in the corporate world and when you were in sales, disregarding what you felt inauthentic to go with what was true for you. And so, what I’m hearing is this business model that you have is starting to feel heavy and is starting to feel like not quite congruent. And also too, I just want to commend you for your bravery in following that because when you don’t know exactly what your next step is going to be but still committing to the fact but it’s not this.

Catherine: Yeah. And actually, I did sort of think I knew what it was because I thought that I wanted to focus on really getting in the online program out in a really big way and so I had not offered this high-end program at my event in November and then was really busy, took a holiday in December, was lying on the beach and go or lying by the pool and go and I suddenly had this like really strong sense of knowing like, “Oh my gosh, it’s not the online program,” and then it was, “Oh no, what have I done? If it’s not the online program, what is it? Maybe I’m not meant to be in business. Maybe my passion for my business has run its course,” and I just didn’t know, and it was three whole months before I could see what that next step was, which was a membership site, but I haven’t even considered it.

Shelli: That’s incredible. I want to find out how you learned about the membership site, but I also want to touch on where were you emotionally for those three months? Because for many of our listeners, many of them are going through those kinds of challenges and transitions and when you’re in it, sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get better. So, would you be able to also speak into like what did that look like for you during those three months, and also then how you came to realize membership was going to be your jam?

Catherine: Okay. It felt very uncomfortable. There was a lot of doubt. I frequently started questioning whether this was the end for me and my business if I couldn’t quite get that passion back. I was having lots of readings. This is what I do when I get a bit lost. I’ll book lots of intuitive readings and psychic readings and astrology readings. I had I think that was one week where I had four different readings with four different people in one week. I started looking outside for the answers because it was like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t see where I’m going with this. I mean, if it’s the end, what am I going to do next?” all of that sort of thing. There was a lot of doubt and a lot of confusion. And then one day I was sitting in the car. I was driving up to visit my parents somewhere and I remember the exact corner of the exact road where I was, and I was listening to a podcast. It was one of Amy Porterfield’s podcasts and she was interviewing Jill Stanton about her membership site and Jill was describing the reasons why they had started a membership site and it was like all the lights went on at once. It was like, “Oh my gosh, community. This is exactly what I’m all about, community, and I’ve always struggled to keep my community together because once they finish their program, they’re gone.” And it’s about working with lots and lots and lots and lots of people. I don’t have to work with just 20 or just 100. It’s as many people and no one never has to stop working with me if they don’t want to because as long as I keep it affordable, people can have my support for as many years as they want, and no one ever needs to leave. And it was like all the lights went on at once and they mentioned, they both recommended Stu so I went straight home, googled him, got on his mailing list, and within a week of that, he launched TRIBE and I bought. I was one of the people say and I think, “Come on. Stop with all these promotion stuff. Get me a sales page. I’ve got my card out.”

Shelli: What’s funny, the thing I love about Stu is obviously he’s an amazing human being, but many people have come to know him by listening to other people talk about their incredible experience with him. That was the same way I came to him as well. It was just, you know, I remember I was listening to Michael Hyatt and he mentioned Stu McLaren and then I had to look him up and learn about him, but it’s like everybody on the outside raves about him and for absolute good reason. So, you started your membership site. What did that look like from the onset?

Catherine: Okay. So, what I decided today was of course in some respects I was still following the same old model because I still love my online program and I fall back in love with it now that I’ve got that with the membership. I haven’t really fallen out of love with it. It wasn’t enough on its own. So, I still have my live event in November. Last service is November a year ago and I decided, okay, instead of doing like a six-figure offer, doing my offer for my high-end and walking out with my six figures, I’m going to launch my membership service and I nearly didn’t do it because I didn’t think that the membership was ready. And so, what I decided to do was everybody in that room had done my other program previous. So, I knew there was a lot of trust. I knew that they knew what they were going to get from me and I stood there at the front of that room and I teach sales. So, this is one of my skills is being able to sell from the front of the room. I can make offers. I could get sales, so I stood there, and I made this, I painted this huge vision for this incredible membership site. And then after I painted the whole vision, I just stood there, and I said, “And none of that exists yet.”

Shelli: That’s amazing.

Catherine: None of it exist yet and I’d love for you to join and help me to create it. And I gave them two Q&A calls a month plus access to an old membership site I had that was full of content, but with a complete jumble. There was no success path. There was no – it was something that I used when I was mentoring clients and I was working with them a lot more closely, so I could individually direct them to the resources they needed. And 114 people bought on the basis of come in and be my founding members and I also made them join for six months in the beginning. It wasn’t month-by-month, and I said it was because I couldn’t have them join month-for-month because I needed them to stick with me long enough to see me make it great, that if they came in month-by-month they might be disappointed and wanted to leave actually just a couple of months. I needed them to stick around long enough to help me turn into something worth staying in.

Shelli: That’s incredible. So, I just wanted to circle back on something you said because I know this is something that I hear entrepreneurs saying all the time. You said you didn’t think it was ready and I’m curious what at that time you thought ready look like.

Catherine: So, for me, and it was actually Stu that changed my mindset about this on one of our coaching calls. For me, ready was I need to have created my success pathway and I need to re-record all of my training so that they’re more digestible and more bite size and I need to have the member’s area built into this pathway. I need to know what’s in there, what they’re having. Is it hot seat? Is it Q&A? Is there a membership directory? I thought I needed all of that planned out and actually what I found was Stu was absolutely right. I started with the bare bones just two Q&A calls per month and I surveyed, and I polled my members and we experiment to do different things and everything in my membership right now was actually voted in by the members.

Shelli: That’s incredible. So, you mentioned earlier you were talking about community and building a community because after when you were doing the courses, they would take your course and then they were gone from your ecosystem. So, now you’re in a position where not only are you getting to build relationships with these people and help them and transform going forward on a more long-term basis, but they actually get to co-create with you. What was your feedback on that from your members?

Catherine: They loved it and I think the founding members, so the people who joined now said that that those founding members bought from me in November. We started the thing in January and then I did my first actual launch of it at the end of May. So, the people who came at the end of May, early June, they came into something that already existed. Had a beautiful sales page and it said it got this, this, and this and there was a structure and there’s a monthly routine and everything but those founding members who came and help me build it, I think they feel particularly connected to it because they were part of it.

Shelli: I love that. It’s so interesting too because when you have the opportunity to “sit at the feet of the master” like you have been in sales and doing sales authentically and organically and in a way that felt congruent to you for so long, but I find that when people have a skill set like you do, sometimes you don’t even realize how much you know and then you’re put in a position where so you pull your members and it’s like, “Hey, guys, do you want to learn about this, this, this or this or other?” And then all of a sudden, people are like they get to know you, they get to know your skills, your experience, your backstory and then all of a sudden, they get to tell you what they need. And it’s interesting to me because oftentimes the things they’re asking for are not even things that you considered were a thing because they’re so innate to who you are and then people start saying, “Hey, you know, do you think you could go deeper on this or do you think you could teach us about that?” but you would never know had you not have the ability to have the membership site build relationships with these people and give them the opportunity to cope really with you.

Catherine: Yeah. And when we polled people for what they wanted, and we didn’t just poll them. It wasn’t like we came up with a list of choices. We said, “Here are some ideas we’ve got. Has anyone got any else?” We put everybody’s ideas in the poll. One of the things I had on the backburner for one day maybe in the future was a member’s directory, but it was one of the top four things that I voted for. So, we thought, “Right, we’re just going to implement the top four things that people have voted for,” and that was one of them. The other thing I should just flag as well is that my online course because this is quite interesting. My online course is called Get More Client Saying Yes and it’s all about how to enroll clients through one-to-one sales conversations, but my next level mentoring was called Business from the Heart and it was actually broader. It was marketing business models, launching if people wanted to launch. It’s the much broader business piece and the membership serves that purpose. It’s the same. It’s got the same name. It’s called Business from the Heart. So, now as people come to me initially to learn how to have those sales conversations and to sell authentically. Of course, the next question then is, well, now I know how to have a sales conversation that’s affected, but where were the people coming from to have the conversation with? And what is it I’m selling them and how do I want my business to look and feel? And so, the membership gives them that next step but instead of charging $6,000 for it, now I’m charging a lot less.

Shelli: I love that and I love too that you’re in a position to sell them what they want and then give them what they need because you have such a rich tapestry of experience that you are able to pull from and then you can shore them up in areas that they need help with, they need support with as well.

Catherine: Yeah.

Shelli: One of the things we are talking about before this call was one of the challenges you had once you launch your membership site around retention and what you thought that meant and the solution you sort of found with respect to retaining members and walking through that journey. Would you be willing to share that with us?

Catherine: Yeah. Because actually, it was so difficult because actually the launching of the membership itself actually went really, really well. I had 114 founding members. When I launched again, I got another 120. I think because I’ve been selling quite high for price programs up until then, there was quite a lot of sort of pent-up demand from my wider community for something that was more affordable. So, in many ways, the beginnings of it all went really smoothly. Where it started to get really horrible and didn’t feel good for me at all was once people started leaving because, of course, with a low-cost monthly membership, people can come in and join but they can leave any month they want. And when somebody signing up to a 12-month program for $6,000 they’re very, very committed. They’re not leaving like they show up to everything and every single month people would counsel and every month I would completely freak out and go, “Oh my gosh, this isn’t working. People are leaving. What am I doing wrong?” I was obsessed with retention. My team is a very small team, but I would say to my team all the time, it was like “Retention, retention, retention. We’ve got to do more. We’ve got to think about more.” I found it. I took it quite personally. I was very upset by it. I was thinking I didn’t realize it was going to feel so awful having people leave. There was a real drama about retention for about three months because everybody was leaving.

Anyway, what I then finally did was I did what Stu says to do and I actually started to track my stats. And do you know what I discovered? I discovered that I actually have a 97% retention rate month on month on month and every now and then it gets to 96% which is really, really, really high and it was like, “Oh I see. This is actually working and all I have to learn to be okay with people leaving because it’s the very nature of a membership that people will leave, and I have to learn to be okay with that. Plus, obviously, take their feedback on board when they do leave.” But that was huge for me. It’s like do the stats. The stats tell the truth and I was running on emotion just because I’m not used to people leaving my program and so the stats had a totally different message.

Shelli: Well, that’s so fascinating because we all are wired to have an emotional reaction to what we perceive as rejection, but you’re right like to your very point, that is the nature of the membership site and it’s so interesting that when you ran the numbers, you were doing outstanding so that’s incredible. Do you have any parting advice for anybody who is considering starting a membership site either from scratch or transitioning from a previous business model like you did?

Catherine: You know, I think the thing about a membership… It may be somebody’s thinking of transitioning from a membership to a high-end business model like I had. I think the important thing and it was something that wasn’t taught to me and wasn’t spelled out clearly to me in my earlier days in business was that there is no one business model that is like, “This is the one that’s going to work,” because I was told very, very clearly by a couple of my early mentors that the only way to have a successful business was to have this high-end offering and it’s so not true. I think it’s about really, really tapping into what feels really good and juicy for you. What would you love to – what can you feel really excited about waking up to do every single day, not just tomorrow but next year and the year after and five years later and ten years later? And the business I was running before, I was teaching the exact same stuff to the exact same client group and it didn’t feel good and now I love my business. I’m so excited by it and I think is because for me personally, it fulfills some of the things that are so important to me being able to help lots and lots of people. I love the recurring revenue too that’s been much – I didn’t get drawn into the membership site because of the recurring revenue that wasn’t a particularly big pull for me but actually to experience it is like, “Oh wow, if I’d known it would feel like this,” because what I did before is I used to bring in my business was this all healthy consistent six-figure plus business every year but I used to do all of that in just two months of the year every year.

And what I hadn’t realized was just how stressful it was to do that because every little part of that launch, all the way through had to work perfectly for me to come out with those numbers and all the eggs were in one basket and it’s just an amazing feeling to know that, okay, even if a handful of people leave, even if 10% of people leave, even if 15% of people leave next month, I’m still going to have the revenue to run. I still know what’s coming in. Then actually by tracking my stats and knowing what my retention rate is, I can actually pretty accurately forecast what’s coming in and it feels really good. So, recurring revenue feels good, people.

Shelli: That’s amazing. Well, listen, if anybody’s looking for you online, where can they find you?

Catherine: So, my online home is over at SellingFromTheHeart.com and there’s a couple of freebies people can sign up to there so I’ve got a Seven Steps To Yes process for authentic sales conversations. It’s a very short video series teaching my authentic sales system and I’ve also got a quiz. So, if anyone is not sure when it comes to sales or marketing, why it is that they might be finding things difficult or it doesn’t feel quite in alignment, I’ve got a quiz that helps people identify what their authentic sale style is and what they can start doing to make the wholesales and marketing journey feel a lot easier.

Shelli: Brilliant. Well, Catherine, thank you so much for spending the time sharing your story and as always, being part of the amazing TRIBE community.

Catherine: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.