Blog Post: How to Avoid Having Only a Few, Low Paying Clients

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How to Avoid Having Only a Few, Low Paying Clients

Do your advertisements for coaching look like this?

I love coaching. You will too.

If you have any issue in any situation, I can help.

I won’t tell you what to do but as we talk, your inner expert will come out.

Here’s the ugly truth: No one will buy this.

I started by coaching my friends, but I’ve experienced some problems.

  • You don’t have enough friends to give you a full client list.
  • Friends won’t pay full price even after experiencing great coaching.

The first problem is you need more friends. Look at this bell curve. There are plenty of potential clients in the bulgy middle, but you have been coaching mostly in the slim picking blue on the left.

Bell Curve

You’ve coached the Innovators (mainly your friends) and cracked into the Early Adopters, but now you have driven your coaching car right up to “The Chasm,” the great divide that would take you into the land of clients aplenty. That gap is so wide and deep that your stomach tightens up into a knot. You begin to question if you really are a good enough coach. We secretly believe that a good enough coach would fly right over that chasm.

The real secret is that being a great coach factors very little into having lots of good paying clients. You need a well-defined coaching niche. It will become your ramp to make this much needed leap.

An ancient proverb says:

A man who leads with no followers is only taking a walk.

A CAM proverb says:

A coach with no clients is only talking to himself.

People Don’t Buy Coaching. They Buy Results.

Bill Copper, Executive Director of Coach Approach Ministries, told me something I can’t get out of my head.

People don’t buy coaching. They buy results.

As coaches, we tend to try to sell people our options, but we need to start by connecting our services to a problem the client needs fixed. When you start fixing problems, lots of people start paying.

I’m going to outline four steps that will help your potential clients make that connection.

Four Steps to More Clients

1. Put one word before the title “coach” that instantly describes what you do.

Think about athletics for a moment. Athletes don’t hire an “athletic” coach. They hire a fitness coach, a strength coach, a shooting coach, a mindset coach, and a free throw coach (here are some examples of players who need one). I skipped right over basketball, football, and golf coach. The sport isn’t the problem. Mastering specific skills is the problem. Only Little Leaguers have one coach.

The one word (or two) narrows down your niche by instantly allowing potential clients to sort into two groups. One group says I have absolutely no need for this coaching. The other group says this may be something I want to look into.

Don’t shoot for creativity. Shoot for clarity.

The one word could describe the person, the problem, or the skill needed to solve the problem.

You could be an executive coach, a leadership coach, a relationship coach, a family dynamics coach, an organizational coach, a discipleship coach, a motivational coach, or a transitions coach, to name a few.

2. Describe the problem your potential client needs solved.

My partner Chad Hall described a leadership problem like this:

The leader wants to run faster than the organization will allow.

Imagine a potential client reading this statement. The potential client immediately chooses one of two positions – This is talking about me, or this is not talking about me. It is a binary decision. It is either on or off.

On or off is a good start but let’s take it a step further. Imagine a 1000 people in an auditorium. You are on the stage asking people to self-identify.

You ask, “How many of you are pastors?” It is a pastoral crowd so about 700 of them raise their hand. And notice how they raise their hand. They raise their right hand about even with their face, just high enough so the person in front can see it.

Then you ask, “How many of you pastor churches that have a Sunday morning attendance between 200 and 400?” The number of hands is significantly smaller. Let’s say only 35 raise their hands. And again notice how high they raise their hands. The tips of their fingers are now barely over their head.

You ask, “How many of you are frustrated with the slow pace of your leadership team?” This time 500 hands go up, but these hands are raised fully extended. Some of the previous group have put their hands down, but many of the others in the crowd, including several non-pastors, have raised their hands very high.

Finally you ask, how many of you would pay $5,000 this year if you could drastically increase the pace of your team without sacrificing their health? Not as many hands, but 35 hands are raised, and these hands are stretched as high as they will go.

These are your motivated buyers. They would pay good money if someone could help them solve this problem. They won’t pay $5,000 for coaching, but they will pay $5,000 to solve their painful problem.

Are these the only people you could help through coaching? No.

Are you the world’s leading expert on increasing the pace of leadership teams? No.

Are you a patient teacher with access to resources on this issue? Yes.

Are you a trained coach who can help the leader apply these resources to her team? Yes!

By coaching several people with similar problems, will you create some synergy that will benefit them all? Yes!

3. Describe the outcomes your client can expect by hiring you.

First and foremost, don’t over promise.

  • If you work with me, I will replace your slow leadership team with top of the line sentient robots who never need to eat or sleep.

Instead, you could promise:

  • You will have the right leaders in the right positions.
  • Each leader will know their strengths and how to leverage them.
  • Your team will be tighter and more motivated.
  • Your team will react quicker from your leadership style.

As I read through these promises, I’m thinking the first promise might be too strong. It’s doubtful this will be perfected. The rest of the promises feel very strong to me since I know there are team resources that can make all of these promises reality.

This will be a partnership. I’ll help the client to take the best thinking on developing teams into their own context. The client is absolutely the expert of his context. I am the expert at helping the client gain full awareness of the context and how to take action in order to bring improvement.

4. Offer a package to deliver these outcomes to your niche.

What I would suggest is to package your coaching with two or three other deliverable events. Soak up the best practices you can find in the field and prepare a book report.

If your niche is leadership, then you should soak yourself in a few team building concepts, leadership styles, and change management. Your client doesn’t need the leading expert on the planet. I’ve found the leading expert has no idea how to do implement the expertise in varying situations. The leading expert only knows what seems to work in most places.

Your client needs a coach to partner with them on applying these practices to their unique situation.

There are many ways you could deliver this expertise to your clients.

  • Teaching in person or online
  • A video course
  • Write a book
  • Write several E-books
  • A mastermind
  • A private Facebook group

I would suggest you pick a few of these options and combine them with monthly coaching sessions.

Remember what Bill Copper said:

People don’t buy coaching. They buy results.

Conclusion

This article doesn’t tell you how to get in front of the thousand people so they can self-identify whether you are who they need or not. Getting in front of people is an entirely different article. But what this article does is helps you know exactly how to describe yourself when you do get in front of those thousand people.

The thousand people may be in an auditorium or on an email list or in a pre-existing network or wherever you can find them. But showing up in front of the thousand with the offer to help them with your coaching skills won’t get you any clients either.

Let’s start with the one word that comes before your title of coach. I use Leadership. What do you use?

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