Blog Post: Two Big Strategies for Getting Clients

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If you’re going to be coaching for a living (or for some income), you need clients.  That may be axiomatic, but it still needs to be said because I know far too many good coaches who have too few clients.  As coaches, we have to develop our ability to coach, but we also have to develop our ability to have someone to coach.  In other words, to be any good at coaching, you have to be good at getting clients.

In my experience, I’ve recognized there are two broad strategies for getting clients.  I call these strategies “retail” and “wholesale.”  Outside of coaching, you could sell fruit or mattresses or management training directly to the individual end-user of that good or service (retail) and/or you could sell to a middle person who would broker those goods or services to the individual end-user (wholesale).  This same dynamic is at play in coaching.  Let’s look at each of these strategies, and as we do, think about how each one could fit you and your target market.

Retail – Coaches who market and sell directly to their clients are engaged in retail coaching.  These coaches appeal to the potential client in hopes of transitioning them into an actual client.  Most of the marketing advice I’ve ever given or received embraces this strategy.  I find that many coaches can be pretty good at this strategy because it employs a one-on-one dynamic similar to the coaching relationship.  They’re also good at this because they care deeply about their clients and value speaking directly to them in their marketing.  One downside of the retail strategy is that it sells coaching to one client at a time.  Coaches who employ this strategy need to marketing and selling constantly to keep a steady book of business.

Wholesale – Coaches who market and sell to someone other than the end-user and do so in order to gain many clients at once are engaged in wholesale coaching.  (BTW, if you were a business major in college, don’t spaz out because this strategy is not technically wholesale – there’s no reselling or distribution the way a typical wholesale model works, but I’m going to use this word anyway.)  These coaches appeal to a manager in an organization or someone else who wants to provide coaching to several people within their scope of influence.  In wholesale coaching, the coach has to help the sponsor make the decision that hiring the coach is good for the sponsor, the organization, and (hopefully) the people who will actually receive the coaching.  Some downside of the wholesale strategy is that it takes more work to secure sizable contracts and there is more to manage.

Since wholesale coaching is not as pervasive, let me share a few simple examples:

  • In my role at Western Seminary, I contract each year with a coach who provides 10 hours of coaching to 10 seminary students.
  • A coach could contract with the Chief Technology Officer of a business to provide coaching for their Cloud Services Team, which has eight members. By contracting for this business, the coach has essentially gained 9 new clients: the team as a whole, as well as each of the eight people on the team.
  • A coach could contract with a large church to provide one day a week of coaching services to church members in need of coaching.
  • I once served as the staff leadership coach for a large church. They hired me to provide one-on-one coaching to the 7 or 8 top-level staff persons as well as provide some development training to the rest of the staff.

A coach could employ both strategies.  For example, a health and wellness coach could market and sell to individuals who need the support of coach.  Meanwhile, he could also contract with a large accounting firm to provide her services to employees within the company.  But notice that in this scenario the coach would need to talk about the value of coaching differently depending on the retail/wholesale approach.  In the retail strategy she’d need to appeal to the wants and needs of the client: feel better, look better, etc.  In the wholesale strategy, she’d need to appeal to the wants and needs of the company: better employee health would reduce sick time, more energy and focus at work, lower health insurance premiums, greater employee engagement, etc.  In the wholesale strategy she’d also need to do some retail work in order to get the employees to engage the coaching, after all, the employee wants to know “What’s in it for me?”

So let’s now come back to how you go about getting clients.  When determining which strategy (or strategies) to employ, consider the following questions:

  • What are your strengths and personality preferences and which strategy is best supported them?
  • If you know your High Performance Pattern, which strategy would make the most of your pattern?
  • Who are your ideal clients and which strategy could best reach them?
  • Play out a scenario of each strategy. Which one is clearer to you?  Which one seems more natural for you to imagine?
  • Depending on which strategy you think would work best for you, try imagining small tweaks to how you approach coaching that could open up the other strategy. What seems possible?

Whichever strategy you employ, keep this in mind: a not-so-perfect strategy that gets executed is far, far superior to a close-to-perfect strategy that remains unexecuted.  In other words, whichever strategy you choose, get to work leveraging it in order to get more clients!  Good luck!!

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