Jill Aburrow runs Heartfelt HR, an HR consultancy that helps businesses and startups of up to 100 employees with HR and employment matters. As an HR consultant, Jill helps her clients look after their people correctly while remaining compliant and protecting themselves. Jill established Heartfelt HR in 2018 and has published a book, ‘Redundancy with Love’, which helps employers manage redundancies fairly and compassionately.

Jill met Louise networking and had an in-person meeting in person in March 2020. As well as hitting it off, Jill liked that she and Louise shared a corporate background and spoke a common language. She recognised that Louise was confident in her small business coaching service and knew she would like to work with Louise when the time was right.

A clear objective – creating a predictable client pipeline

Fast-forward to 2022 – Jill decided she was ready to engage with Louise’s small business coaching services.

Although Heartfelt HR was becoming more established, Jill still experienced fluctuating work and income levels. She needed a more sustainable business with a predictable client pipeline, avoiding the peaks and troughs of income she had previously experienced.

Louise started working with Jill by carrying out a Business Development Review. This identified several areas to prioritise: defining a revenue goal, conducting a client analysis, finding an approach Jill could take to existing and former clients, and developing tactics to win new clients.

With this in hand, Jill committed to 12 hours of 90-minute Zoom calls focused on specific areas. Louise accompanied these small business coaching sessions with a summary of the call and the next steps for Jill to refer to.

Over the time they worked together, Louise helped Jill with several areas. Here are some of
the highlights:

Mindset & confidence

Jill was keen to obtain support to drive more sales, so Louise started by helping Jill with some mindset work. By her own admission, Jill saw sales as ‘a dark art’ and felt uncomfortable trying to win new clients.

To help address this, Louise showed Jill that sales isn’t about ‘pushing’ her services onto unwilling people. Instead, it’s about helping those needing her service to access her expertise – a very different approach! This understanding transformed Jill’s approach, and she started to reframe ‘selling’ as ‘serving
clients who needed what she offers Louise also shared the importance of understanding fear and how moving out of our comfort zone into the ‘fear zone’ can help us grow personally and professionally, something that Jill was quick to leverage.

Louise quickly identified that Jill was spending money but not seeing a return on investment from things she could do herself. Reducing this spending made sense, given that her sales income was not where she wanted it to be. For example, Jill paid a marketing agency £300 per month to create social media posts as she didn’t feel able to do this herself. Louise encouraged Jill to take on the marketing and showed Jill how she could do this, by sharing social media prompts and demonstrating how to plan content. Jill agreed to give it a go and was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Not only could she save a considerable amount of money, but her social media presence continued as strongly as before. If anything, her posts were more relevant to her work and better supported her business objectives. As well as improving internal project management, this tool is key in supporting their weekly team meeting, and has improved team communication and staff management . It means any issues are highlighted and escalated early on. Having established a solid process, Jason is evaluating the best project management software to support the business in the future with the same level of visibility at a minimum.

In a similar vein, Jill was paying a PR agency to promote her book. Louise suggested that PR was now less relevant as the book had been in the market for some time. Jill agreed and ended her PR contract, saving herself further money. She has since had the confidence to put herself forward for a podcast and has connected with a journalist as HR consultant commenter about redundancy, employee relations and broader HR issues – a great example of leaving the comfort zone! And again, this saved Jill more money. In total, these changes have saved Jill over £7,000 per year and reinforced her sense of self-belief.

Qualifying clients

Louise showed Jill various techniques that would provide a more consistent pipeline to her work as an HR consultant – one of Jill’s key objectives. Qualifying potential clients was key to this. Louise explained that all prospects needed to be qualified, regardless of where they came from, to avoid spending time on prospects who were not ready to proceed. – To aid this process, Louise shared a template for Jill to use, which Jill then adapted to her business and personality.

Louise showed Jill various techniques that would provide a more consistent pipeline to her work as an HR consultant – which was one of Jill’s key objectives. Qualifying potential clients was key to this. Louise explained that all prospects needed to be qualified, irrelevant of where they came fromregardless of where they came from, to avoid spending time on prospects whothat were not ready to proceed. To aid this process, Louise shared a template for Jill to use, which Jill then adapted to her business and personality.

Connecting with prospects

Effective sales is about building connections and relationships with others. As a relationship-focused person, Jill had a head-start, yet Louise was able to help Jill improve this even further. As part of their work together, Jill completed a DISC questionnaire, which Louise then showed her how to interpret. With this knowledge, Louise coached Jill on goals around development areas and building on her strengths. By learning to identify her prospects’ personality profile types, Jill could then adapt her communication style to an approach that would feel more natural to them. This would allow her to break down potential communication barriers and focus on whether she and her prospect were a good fit. 

Implementing processes

Processes were vital in giving Jill the confidence to change how she worked. In addition to providing Jill with qualification and content marketing processes, Louise supported her with processes for carrying out review calls with former and existing clients. This would allow her to start upselling her other services whilst obtaining feedback and helping her with market research. Many clients had approached Jill for help with one specific area, such as writing employment contracts or handling an employee disciplinary. By sharing details of her other services, Jill can now share the different ways she can help them. This fits Jill’s naturally supportive mentality and is a mile away from the pushy salesperson approach she was keen to avoid. 

Market research 

Louise has supported Jill in conducting market research to understand her existing clients better, how she can support them, and where to find more of them. The market research has involved calling her current and past clients to learn more about their needs. Jill would have been reluctant to do this in the past – yet another example of how much working with Louise has developed her confidence. Again, Louise gave Jill a template to help her conduct these calls in a way that felt comfortable for Jill’s personality and business.

A more confident business owner with a profitable business and a steady pipeline

With Louise’s support, Jill is delighted by her more consistent pipeline and improved profitability, saving over £7,000 in business costs each year. Not only has she achieved her objective of creating a more consistent, predictable flow of clients, but she has a new-found confidence in her ability to engage with prospects, secure clients, and run her business in a way that suits her. She’s also saving several hours each week – the equivalent of an extra day or two a month – thanks to the clear processes, templates and qualification methods she learned from Louise. Having worked with her for over a year, Jill has now chosen to join Louise’s Simplified Sales System membership, where she will continue to benefit from Louise’s small business coaching expertise and input in the company of like-minded business owners. 

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“I feel much more confident in my approach to potential new clients and have a better idea of how to bring in more work. Louise also showed me how to work more efficiently, which in turn allows me to deliver that extra work without feeling overwhelmed. Louise is patient and gives clear reasons for the exercises she suggests, which helps me to understand her approach. She is generous in sharing ideas, concepts, and templates as well as potential useful contacts. I am looking forward to continuing to work with Louise to use her expertise to improve my business.

I would recommend that other small business owners who have limited or no sales skills work with Louise to help them increase their knowledge and confidence.”

Jill