How To Get Coaching Clients

Most people think that the hardest part of their coaching business is getting coaching clients. By the time you complete reading this article, you will see that getting clients should always be the effect of your cause. To understand this in greater detail, I am going to walk you through a system that works and is based on thousands of hours of experience.

You are about to learn my four parts methodology to getting coaching clients. This information is really critical for you to understand because my goal for you is to learn what it takes to create a successful online coaching business that results in a 6-figure+ coaching or consulting business.

The first part of this methodology is your personal brand architecture, the second part is systemization, the third part is digitalization, and the fourth part is commercialization. What is interesting to me is that most people who start a coaching or a consulting business actually start at the commercialization part, which is very dangerous. Why? Because when you come from a space of commercialization, you’re coming from a place of pushing and reaction, and more important, you don’t have a strategic and deliberate system in place to get you one step closer to your goal.

What you need is a system that can give you predictability and the ability to provide your prospects an ecstatic brand experience, so you are converting prospects and clients into brand advocates.

Let’s start.

PART 1

Every client I have ever worked with starts with the personal branding architecture. When you look at your personal branding architecture, it’s not about creating a personal brand that’s going to make you famous. It’s about understanding who you are as a business because you’re a human who’s running your business and coaching clients are buying YOU. When you create a coaching or consulting business, what people are buying is your wisdom. And that wisdom is made up of your learned knowledge and skillset that is experience. We have to start with the personal branding because there are many attributes that make up who you are, not just as a business, but how you want the outside world to perceive you.

You need to understand what you stand for, what your core brand truth is, what your brand essence is. What’s the story behind the reason you are doing what you are doing? What are your brand values? What is your brand proposition, and what is your brand promise? Once you can identify these attributes, you can build a very solid foundation. You are going to create your messaging so that it’s congruent with all of the communication touch points in your business – your content strategy, your solution, your digital strategy, and of course your lead-generation strategy. Within your personal brand architecture, you are also defining your core customer and your core target audience, and matching those with your core promise.

You have to know what your brand can promise. You can’t create a solution without understanding who needs that solution and what your solution can promise. So your personal brand essentially is the foundation before you start building your house, and it will help you immensely with all of your messaging on and off social. It means that when you create your content strategy for other platforms, such as social media, your messaging is very clear and it’s very succinct. It’s strategic. It’s deliberate.

PART 2

The next part of this methodology is understanding your system. One of the biggest issues that a lot of my clients have when they come to me is organizing their information made up of their knowledge, wisdom, and skills, so they can create a program that solves a complex problem and makes sense to the end user (their client). Let me digress for a moment, because I want to make sure that you understand that there is a vast difference between building a course and building a program.

The program is transformational; the course is educational. They’re very different. The logic is very different. The data points are very different. The way you organize the information is also very different. It’s a big mistake that I see lot of coaches and consultants make when they transition into a one-to-many model, which essentially is an online model.

So, looking at the systemization part of this methodology, you’re going to see the internal inventory which is you, meaning what is it that you can do for sure? What is it that you can do with ease and grace? What are your core competencies that you can bring to the table and convert into a solution that delivers on your promise? Remember that when you are creating your program, you are creating a solution to a complex problem.

And not only that, but you are also creating the “how” to solve that problem. Your goal is to take away as much pain as you can from your clients, and your solution must be able to deliver on that. There’s no point creating a solution that pushes content that your client consumes. This is probably going to shock you, but your clients don’t want to consume content; they want to solve a problem as quickly as possible. So when you create a coaching program that commands premium pricing, you are creating a system. You are probably asking yourself “What does a system have?” The short answer is that a system has input and output, and it must allow for a feedback loop. You almost have to think like an engineer.

The next part is your coaching model. What is your model going to look like? My advice is that a good, better, best model would be a great place to start. How are you going to deliver your coaching program? What does that model actually look like? What does the audience look like? How does the audience want to consume your program? What is the pricing? A lot of people make up their pricing, and you don’t want to make up your pricing. You want be true to your core value. On the one hand, you have to  honor your self-worth, but on the other hand, understand what the market is prepared to pay for that solution.

PART 3

The third part of the methodology is the digitalization. And this for me is really important. The digitalization part of your business is where the “ecstatic customer experience” actually resides, and everything in your public facing needs to provide your prospects with an ecstatic brand experience. And everything on the paid client side, which essentially is your coaching program, also needs to deliver an ecstatic brand experience, because that is how you create brand advocates. And that just makes your life a lot easier. But under digitalization, we are looking at some very fundamental moving parts. One is building a website that flows and tells a story. Your website has a lot of moving parts that allow for an ecstatic customer experience. But also, there’s some level of automation that also needs to happen so you can deliver on your brand experience all the time.

Lead magnets are a critical part of your client-acquisition process. You have to think this through and create a sales funnel that takes the prospect on a journey. Therefore, you must ask yourself how you going to give your prospects a taste of who you are. How are you going to lead them down your funnel? What do they need to experience for them to click the call-to-action link? There is only one way to make a sale, and that is to start a conversation. I always suggest you have more than one lead magnet to ensure that you cater to all the different type of prospects that land on your website. This is why it is so crucial to understand your target audience with precision. Right now, do you know what your prospects are looking for? Do they want to be nurtured? Do they want be sold to? You need to know this with precision. Once you know this, you will be able to create a funnel that will meet the needs of a prospect who wants to be nurtured and a prospect who wants to be sold to.

The final part of digitalization, the sales strategy, is probably my favorite. How are you going to get coaching clients? What does that strategy look like? What do you have in place, so that you are never ever selling and never pushing? How do you create a sales strategy that’s fully digitized that allows your prospect to self-realize that they need your services, or where they actually see that they have gaps in their current model? How do they see your solution as the ONLY solution?

PART 4

The final part is the commercialization. This is the effect of all that I’ve just spoken about. When you get those three parts of your system in place, getting coaching clients is predictable.

When it comes to commercialization, you need to understand where your clients hang out and how they want to consume your content. To get coaching clients, you need to have a layered lead-generation strategy, so you can be omnipresent in the eyes of your target audience. What a lot of coaches and consultants do is try to reach everybody. Instead, all you need to do is reach the people you specifically want to start a conversation with. That’s it. In the eyes of those people, you will be seen as omnipresent, because you are hanging out in the places where they hang out. So a layered lead-generation strategy is absolutely critical. You also need to choose the appropriate social media platforms that match your target audience, so you are building your social media currency.

Your social currency is superficial metrics but critical. It’s actually a benchmark for people like event managers. For example, event managers will check out your LinkedIn profile, check out how many followers you have, and make a decision based on that; so will a podcast host. Therefore, a strong social media presence is fundamental, and you need to decide where you want to hang out because social media platforms require a content strategy specific for your target audience. Always remember that social media has two sides to a coin – one is the content and the other is connections. You have to make sure that both of those meet in the middle.

Finally, all of these steps lead to your authority. How do you actually become an authority in a short period of time? You have to set benchmarks. For example, when I’m working with people, I set 90-day benchmarks. These are specific data points that we must achieve in that time. I know, based on working with hundreds of clients, that it takes 90 days to be recognized as an authority in an area of specialization. And to do that requires consistency, congruency, and commitment.

When this methodology is implemented in this order, it works. This is how all of my clients have built their businesses, built their social currency, their audience, and their following, and have gotten  coaching clients.

CONCLUSION

I hope that you found this really useful. What I would love for you to do is look at this methodology again and ask yourself, “Where are my gaps? Where are my true gaps?” Because when you can ask yourself those types of pragmatic questions, you start to get real answers.

And that’s where you need to be. We can’t believe that we know everything because that methodology that I developed is based on 40,000 hours of my hard-earned corporate, professional, and entrepreneurial experience, and my wisdom. There’s so much packed in there.

The key is that if something’s not working for you, it’s because something is missing. If you found this article helpful but you feel like this will take you forever to learn and implement, I would like you to book a FREE 45-minute coaching call with me. I will provide you a gap analysis based on this methodology. We can have a look at where your gaps actually are, and how I can help you or how we can work together.

If you don’t know where your gaps are, you may be stuck at the start line for the next 10 years. The only way you can find out is to book a free 45-minute coaching call with me. Click HERE to book a time in my schedule, and let me help you get to your destination in the shortest time possible.

NEXT STEP

I have helped hundreds of people implement my system with a support second to none. I want to help you achieve your dream so you can have freedom and create the life you want. If you are committed to your growth and have the courage to discover your potential, I invite you to schedule a free 45-minute coaching call with me so we can dive deeper and see if we are a good fit for each other.

I’m ready when you are.

Mary