Are you a new coach or consultant and have been wondering how to get coaching clients? Today, it is not uncommon to see bloggers shouting about their 7-figure empires and luxurious lifestyles. And they do not stop there! They go ahead and narrate about their awesome coaching packages and the long list of waiting clients. These coaches create a burning desire and scare the hell out of you. Why? Because your business is new or current strategies are ineffective, you are way down the road from where they are.
The top coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs out there have modeled their brands and built raving clients. Now, all they need is to release an email to their sea of subscribers, and their bowl of awaiting clients will start overflowing. So what is the best way of getting paying coaching clients?
In this post, we will tell you the best tried and tested methods on how to get coaching clients fast. We have listed the best nine strategies used by top coaches to win clients and become the best.
The Secrets of How to Get Coaching Clients
While the road to the top might look rocky, it’s absolutely possible for you to get there. Most of these strategies are indeed affordable and easy to execute. Let’s get down to it: it is time to take your coaching business to the next level.
1: Getting Started on the Stage to Win Paying Clients Fast
When you take a closer look at the top coaches, their first steps involved telling people, “Here I am!” Therefore, you also need to get people to recognize the expertise you are offering. At this point, it does not matter how much experience you have amassed. The moment you step in front of people, whether as a presenter or host, you position yourself as an expert. People start looking at you as a person they would want to learn from. You will look attractive from that moment, especially if you share useful info about issues they want to solve.
And you know what? Setting a live event is simpler than you think. You simply need to choose a topic, identify a venue, and spread the word about it. Are you worried about the budget for such events? You could consider using free resources such as Eventbrite and Meetup or become a speaker in already prepared events.
To get started and make everything start working for you, here are some steps to go about it:
- Make a decision about the nature of the talk that you want to give. Make sure that it is something that can be changed into a package for clients that needs more assistance.
- Pick a good venue. The best venue to use for an event is a place where your targeted audience can easily attend. If you are an online business coach, how to get coaching clients is even easier. You simply need to ask them to sign up and avail themselves of the comfort of their homes or offices. If you will use an already prepared event, you only need to fit in the schedule.
- Aggressively promote your event. Here, do not spare any effort to promote your event. Consider using social media and every available platform to reach more potential clients and tell them about the event.
- Use a clear call to action. One of the mistakes that coaches make when they hold meetings is assuming that clients understand what they want. Therefore, you should make clear the message that clients should schedule coaching sessions with you.
2: How to Get Coaching Clients Fast by Targeting Relevant Events
Before your first step to talk to a targeted audience at an event, take a breath and pause. Then, think of this. If you get into the right networking event, playing it well means winning dozens of clients or high-quality leads. This strategy is one of the best options on how to get coaching clients fast. And you might ask, why?
In coaching and consultancy, people prefer to work with personalities they trust. When visiting targeted events, it becomes easy to build trust because you meet face-to-face, share, and demonstrate your expertise. Here are some great steps to help you get more clients using this strategy.
- Start by identifying the targeted customers. Even before starting to make your presentation, it is prudent to understand who the target audience is. And this is not all. You should go ahead and establish the problem facing the target audience and highlight how you can solve them. This will make your targeted clients come running to you.
- Carefully assess the conferences in your region. The aim is to ensure you only target those that have the right clients. Here, you need to appreciate that not all networking events are created equal. Therefore, carefully assess the available events and only participate in those that will generate good returns.
- Make sure that the message is clear in advance. This is crucial in preparing your audience for the event. If the message is well thought out, you will be surprised to see more clients coming to the meeting.
- Ensure that you have prepared for success prior to going out. In coaching and consulting niches, getting paying coaching clients requires you to look ahead. Therefore, you should be prepared to seize every available opportunity. This means that your coaching programs should be well prepared by the time you start attending events.
3: Win Over High-Value Clients with Your Phone
When working on the best ways to win clients faster, another highly effective method is using your phone. Notably, those interested in your services will rarely sign the first contract after meeting in a seminar. Even in an online coaching business, the target clients will first test how articulate you are in addressing their problems. What is your style? How does it feel working with you? How effective are you? These are some of the things they want to assess.
To utilize your phone to win these clients, consider using discovery calls. These calls are, in many cases, free and easy to setup. Here is a demonstration of how you can use them to create new coaching clients every day:
- Start by setting a conferencing service for your coaching. With advances in technology today, this is relatively simple. You could use services such as Zoom or Skype.
- Utilize scheduling services to manage appointments. These services are very useful because the target clients can easily follow your schedule based on availability. With software like Calendly or Acuity Scheduling, you could even set up a page on your website that allows clients to book discovery calls.
- Close the conversation with a call to action. The main goal of the call is converting the potential client (caller) into a real client. Therefore, you need to explain to the client why they should join your paid coaching program.
4: How to Get Coaching Clients by Tapping into Business Network
The same way you have built numbers in personal circles, the chances are you have also grown an impressive business network. From the experts to affiliates you have worked with, these people understand your model of operation. Therefore, it becomes easier to use them to tell your target audience about your business.
To use your business network, the first step is to prepare your coaching package. If your contacts were happy with your services, they will be ready to recommend them to others in their networks. Note that you should not limit yourself only to the contacts in your network. Look for extended connections, especially in professional platforms such as LinkedIn.
After identifying the potential contacts in your business circles, you are now ready to commence the life coaching process. However, you need to personalize the emails to avoid looking like mass emails. After reaching the targeted clients, ensure to follow them back in about seven days if they have not contacted you.
5: Use Your Business Mailing List to get Paying Coaching Clients
Email marketing is one of the best digital marketing tactics today. The people on your mailing list are potential coaching clients and can also spread the word about the services you offer. No matter how small the mailing list is, make sure to leverage it. If the mailing list is longer, the chances of getting more paying coaching clients will be even higher.
To win more paying clients, repeat the process you used with a business network. The secret is being as personal as possible. To increase the chances of winning more clients, consider connecting with the subscribers individually. Here are additional tips to help you win more clients using the mailing list.
- Hit your subscribers with the “biggest pain” email. This is an email sent to people in your mailing list asking them about their biggest challenge in your niche. To encourage clients to respond, ensure to keep the email short, precise, and sweet.
- Request your subscribers for a call. Once your subscribers respond to the “biggest pain” email, tell them that you would want to know more about the challenge. To do this, you can talk on the phone, Skype, or meet over a cup of coffee. Here, you get the best opportunity to showcase your ability to fix the issue.
- Present an offer. After taking time with the client listening to the problem at hand, do not assume that they will seek help. The best method is telling the client that you can help. Give the client an offer based on the information they have presented. To sweeten the offer, make it as clear as possible. Explain the outcome, the process, and price.
NOTE: Even if a client doesn’t accept right away, the chances are they will reach you soon for help. Therefore, don’t be afraid to make the presentation as appealing as possible.
6: Use Facebook Groups to Demonstrate Expertise
Social media platforms have become a big thing when working on how to get coaching clients fast. Facebook Groups are particularly effective because people across the globe freely share their problems and seek answers to them. Therefore, this is a perfect chance to jump into the discussion and offer the ultimate solution. When you become consistent in providing reliable, workable, and consistent solutions, you become the go-to person. Here is a demonstration of how to get coaching clients that pay fast on social media groups.
- Start by doing some research on Facebook to identify the relevant groups. These should be the groups that fall in your area of expertise. Also, consider narrowing to groups with many members.
- Identify a specific time when you want to participate. You can consider participating every day or weekly for about 15 to 30 minutes. This is important to ensure you do not spend the entire day on Facebook.
- Be consistent in helping the groups. The ultimate goal of using Facebook groups is to demonstrate that you have valuable information that is worth paying for. Therefore, you should be active, proactive, and generous to assist the selected groups in achieving their goals.
- Look for every opportunity to navigate the conversation away from the Facebook group. The focus is on making the members believe that in addition to the information you gave on Facebook, there is more, i.e. a discovery call or private messages.
7: Write the Best Guide to Win Coaching Clients
One of the secrets that top professionals use to win coaching clients is presenting themselves as experts. The only way to make clients pay you as a coach is if they see the expertise in you. One of the best methods of demonstrating this expertise is writing ultimate guides. The main goal of publishing the guides is showcasing your mastery of a certain subject. Be as comprehensive as possible to ensure that potential clients will be convinced, “this post is the best.”
The ultimate guide can help to position you like the best coach in the eyes of potential clients. They’ll want to reach you to get more assistance than addresses their issues. Here is a demonstration of how to craft winning guides to win coaching clients that pay.
- Take time to study the target audience to understand a common pain point. You can do this by interacting with the targeted audience on different platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. You could also read through their feedback after offering various services.
- Research the topic comprehensively. After understanding the pain point, research it using the latest resources and develop a comprehensive write-up offering the best solution. Make sure to use multiple content formats, including text, videos, and infographics.
- Create a promotional strategy. In digital marketing, it’s always important to be strategic. The main goal is targeting the people who would benefit more from the content you have created. Then, publish the post on your site, high-traffic sites, social media groups, or guest sites.
- Make sure the content is user-friendly. To make your content more attractive, it’s important to make it look nice and well-designed. Note that this appeal should be maintained throughout the guide so that readers can scroll to the end. Throughout the content, make sure to carefully position calls to action for the reader. For example, you can ask readers to opt-in or make a discovery call.
8: Use Videos to Market Your Coaching Services
Today, digital marketing is strongly inclined towards videos. Most search engines and social media networks have adjusted their algorithms in favor of videos. This means when you post videos on your social media and other platforms, they will drive high-value traffic. And it’s not just one platform where videos are thriving; Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all strongly encouraging users to share videos on their feeds.
You should also post the videos on YouTube because it attracts a lot of traffic every day. Most people following videos on social media are interested in learning how to solve problems facing them, which means you have a great opportunity to address their challenges and present yourself as an expert. Here are the steps to follow:
- Start by researching issues or challenges in your area of specialization. Then, create high-quality videos that address the challenges facing the targeted audience. Note that you can easily create videos using smartphones or digital cameras. You can also work with video producers for more attractive and high-value videos all the time.
- Be clear about the goal of the videos. The aim of the videos, in this case, is guiding the target audience to your coaching program. Therefore, make sure to have a clear call to action. Also, provide an outline of what you want to tell the audience. Ensure to cover all the points of the topic under consideration.
- Be consistent in posting video content. When working on how to get coaching clients, a single video is not enough. Even if you create a high-quality single video and wait for a couple of months, it won’t work. Repeat clients will walk away when they visit next time and find the same old content. The best strategy is posting videos about three times every week to keep potential clients glued to your pages.
9: Provide Freebies to the Target Clients
One notable thing about people, including coaching clients, is that they like freebies—or as I like to call them, irresistible offers. Whether you have posted a video or how-to guides, special offers can increase the interest in the services. Here is a demonstration of how to use irresistible offers.
- Focus the offer on the goal. Here, the primary aim is changing the targeted reader into a paying client. That means it’s important to make sure the reader believes they will have their problem solved.
- If you are offering free sessions, make sure to limit them. Notably, there is a limit to the number of sessions that you can offer for free sustainably. Besides, limiting the free sessions will ensure most of your efforts will not go to activities that do not pay.
- Attach the offers on the most valuable content. In digital marketing, irresistible offers are not attached to all forms of content released to the targeted audience. The secret is only releasing offers on the most valuable posts.
- Tell your target clients what they need to qualify for the free offer. When releasing freebies, you don’t need to be modest. For people to trust what you are offering, they should be comfortable with how you are running the show. Therefore, you should ask them for something, such as their email address.
One more thing: Once you select a specific strategy or strategies, it is crucial to test them regularly. Is the method of bringing in the results you want? This review, when working on how to get coaching clients fast, is important to establish when changes are necessary. Consider running a progressive review of your strategies through customer feedback. But because some strategies might take time to generate results, a good timeframe should be six to twelve months.
Now, Go Ahead and Net Your Coaching Clients
The above nine strategies have been proven to be highly effective in netting coaching clients. The good thing is that you do not need any expertise to start using them. Once you settle on a specific area of interest, you only need to pick one or several strategies.
Note that when you start using the above strategies, it is also crucial to be patient. For example, when you post marketing videos, it might take time for people to discover the content.
When you start gaining momentum with coaching clients, build on the confidence. Then, try to maintain your clients in your network to grow a highly satisfying brand. This is a sure way to sustain a high flow of paying coaching clients.
Do not wait anymore: the time to start netting paying coaching clients is now!