If you are a true coach, you are probably familiar with the next scenario:
- You’re new to coaching or you have your own private practice
- You have skills and knowledge that really help people
- You love your job and are ready to devote more and more time to it
- And everything would be fine, but there is one problem that keeps you up at night
Where can I get new clients?
How to build a pipeline of people that want to work with you?
I’m sure you’ve all been there when you are already about to finish the training with your current client, and the thoughts “What do I do now? How do I find new clients?
You start hysterically looking for solutions online. Search something about coaching sales, something about how to get coaching clients. But often you don’t find anything concrete, and if you do, it’s something too expensive or simply out of reach.
All of a sudden you start remembering all the tips you’ve heard and read about when it comes to attracting new clients and immediately start applying them all at once. But now, you’ve got a new problem – the overload in your head. You’ve spent so much time and energy looking for the perfect solution, and you have so many great (and maybe not so great) ideas that organization because impossible and you lose the sense of how to go about it and organize your strategy.
The thing is, when you don’t have a functioning customer conversion strategy, you don’t really have a choice. You work with what you get. And sometimes working with bad clients is worse than working less or even not working at all, emotionally speaking.
Obviously, it is the worst when completely run out of jobs, and all the clients are running away from you. It is easy to become less active and slowly fall into depression during times like these. Especially since coaching is becoming more and more competitive and the prices for coaching sessions keep on dropping.
So how can you actually bring more clients, despite all the things that I said above?
1. Don’t chase money from day 1
Coaching is not a niche anymore, as everybody can become a coach for anything these days. Hell, if you love cats, you can even become a coach for cats! Just like these guys. My point is, the competition is too intense right now for you to get picky and look for the money right off the bat. You should focus on establishing a name for yourself, and do that by offering your services for a price relatively cheap for the marketing (for free is even better!). Then once you’ve built yourself the reputation as a legitimate and reliable coach then you can go for the big bucks.
2. Use Videos
Videos are an extremely effective tool to attract new clients. And it doesn’t have to be super costly and complicated. Start by posting a video that shows your potential clients what value they can get from you as a coach, stressing on the high results they will achieve because of your help and mentorship.
3. Talk to other coaches
Don’t be afraid of your competition. Besides, coaching is such a broad industry, that many of the coaches you’ll end up talking to are not even your true competitors. By talking to coaches you can get many tips and insights from more experienced people, and form connections that could help you in the future. Who knows? Maybe the other coaches you meet will end up referring to clients that are out of their wheelhouse to you.
4. Know who your target is
Again, coaching deals with so many different concepts and industries, that sometimes it’s hard for you to find the niche that fits you the most. You should put a lot of effort and research to understand what type of clients you are looking for, set up a price strategy, and learn more about them to form the right approach to convert them to your clients. Once you have that figured out, the rest of the way is going to be much easier for you.
5. Learn to say no
This sort of connects to the previous one. If you want a healthy customer management strategy, you have to learn to decline leads that are not right for you. I know it’s tempting, especially at the beginning when you are desperately looking for clients, but you will need to learn to say no to the wrong people so that you’ll have the time and energy for the right people. And trust me, they will show up.
