How to grow your coaching business

Many professional coaches are looking for ways to stand out and find new clients. Our shop contains all the resources you need to succeed as a professional coach, but this blog contains all of our key ideas to help you grow your coaching business and correctly position it so you can attract your ideal clients, win new opportunities and maximize your profits.

1 – Check your calendar and start talking

You really need to put the hours in and make time to find all of that potential work. Depending on the channels you normally use to find new clients, check how many sales calls you are having.

As with any business, this is a numbers game, but coaching is normally the result of a conversation. So you need to focus on finding new people to talk to and convert that conversation into a sale.

2 – Generate new leads

Many coaches use social media to share insights into their coaching style, however the best approach is to talk about the results you will help deliver, instead of the process you normally follow or number of sessions you like to take.

As a professional coach, you help people go from where they are now, to where they want to be. So your role in generating new leads and converting them into a sale, is for them to believe you are the coach that can help them do exactly that.

Some ideas to generate new leads:

Build your network of decision-makers so you can attract more opportunities
Proactively promote your services on social media to build reputation and influence
Get interview ready so you can talk confidently about your work and achievements
Create a range of case studies to showcase your skills and experience

3 – Be specific about what you do and who you help

We all like to think we offer a specific coaching service, but do you use a generic title like ‘Life Coach’ when talking about what you do. If you want to maximize the opportunities, you need to target a number of small niche markets and talk about what you do and how you help.

Maybe you focus on talking to working parents who find it difficult to prioritize their week. We know they are time poor and you can help them identify the less important tasks that do not need their immediate attention. The benefit you deliver is helping them to focus on the real priorities, so they get valuable time back to spend with their children.

You can give examples of the tools or steps you go through, but focus on the results you help deliver and talk to individuals who need that very specific service. To grow your coaching business, focus on the outcome, be the very best at what you do and deliver real value.

4 – Recommendations will help showcase your work

We have all heard how an unhappy customer will tell everybody how bad their experience is, yet a happy customer may not normally tell anybody, so you need to confidently ask for feedback and act on what you hear.

It may result in you changing who you work with or the type of coaching you deliver, but if you focus on the people or organizations you want to work with, you will help them get the very best results. This should generate recommendations and positive feedback you can use to showcase your work.

Ideally you want to generate a pipeline of incoming enquiries, but always put the time in to searching for new clients and make those sales calls.

5 – What will finding the solution cost?

If your new client has a critical problem, talk to them about when it needs to be solved. This helps you work out how much time you need to allocate to supporting them to take a step back and review the current situation or work through different options or ideas.

However, you need to know your value and confidently price yourself based on the results you help achieve. Avoid bargain hunters and move away from the price per session model, because if a solution is found quickly and future sessions are not needed, you will not receive the amount you had expected.

6 – Move at the right speed

In our desire to showcase how we can help, we sometimes overwhelm our clients and share everything at once. A much better approach is to think about what they need now, and what more they will need to get them to the next stage in the process.

Talk about what is coming next, but get them to focus on what they must deliver before they can move on. Set some initial targets that are easy to achieve, so they stay engaged in the process and feel rewarded, but make future steps a little more difficult. Encourage them to put the work in if they really want to deliver real lasting change.

And remember…

Somebody you know may be working on a project right now that would benefit from your coaching skills, but may not contact you because it’s unclear if you are actively seeking new opportunities.

So one simple task is to reach out to your existing contacts and keep your employment status up to date on professional sites like LinkedIn.

How to grow your coaching business