How do you feel about marketing yourself to prospective coaching clients?

Comfortable? Assured? Positive? Confident?

Or are you (even a little) nervous, uneasy, hesitant, uncertain…?

Whether it’s a 1-to-1 pitch, a Zoom call, or recording persuasive content to camera, if you’re feeling any of the latter emotions, you have company. Most people don’t like the idea of putting themselves, or their business, out there. It often feels daunting to explain or justify what you do… especially in front of a camera!

If you feel in need of more confidence when selling and marketing yourself, read on for three practical steps…

A fundamental marketing question (for coaching or any other business) is: are you selling what your market is buying?

Yes, you’re selling your coaching services. And yes, your clients are buying them. But what exactly causes them to say yes? What aspect of what you offer clinches the deal? You may think you know but beware of assumptions…

If you’re not sure, you need to be

When a prospective client is looking to work with a coach they are looking to buy one thing: certainty.

They have an outcome in mind (a new skill, a promotion, a career change…) and they want someone who can guide them to…

Do you enjoy selling?

Most business owners would say not. In fact, most business owners and coaches will manage to find anything else to do other than sales. It might be absolutely essential to your business but that doesn’t mean you like it. Why not?

The reasons are various and common:

• You don’t want to get a ‘no’ (nobody enjoys rejection).
• You’re anxious about whether you can deliver (imposter syndrome).
• You feel under pressure to get a ‘yes’, which makes you feel like you’re pressuring them to buy

And let’s face it, if you’re running your own coaching business, you…

As a business, you probably feel like you need to grow a huge online audience — the bigger, the better. This means you spend a lot of time and energy chasing more and more likes and followers. It’s exhausting.

Have you stopped to think about how you turn these followers into customers? Or how many you really need? It’s not as many as you might think.

You don’t need a huge audience to make your coaching business work

In 2008, Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “1,000 True Fans”. The idea is that creatives don’t need to be super-famous, they just need enough super fans and they can make a…

We’re often told to say ‘no’ more often — from life coaches to productivity experts, there’s no shortage of people telling us that ‘no’ is a good answer to give. But it’s not always a good answer to get… not when you and your business are looking for a ‘yes’.

If you’re a coach (or any other business for that matter) marketing your services to potential clients, however, you’re pitching your offer, you’re basically asking, “Do you want this?”

And the default answer is often, “No.” Especially (perversely, even) if they need it.

This can be disheartening. After all, you’re…

Taking a scattergun approach to reaching your market is a strategy that rarely works well. After all, if you’re aiming at nothing specific, then ‘nothing’ is likely what you’ll hit. If you’re a coach, better to have a specific target in mind and aim accordingly. Which brings us to the question, how to niche your coaching business?

However, trying to niche your coaching business, or any business for that matter, can feel daunting. Often, the assumption is that you’re narrowing your market, limiting your business. But in fact, niching isn’t about restriction, it’s about focus. To use an analogy: when…

As the UK’s lockdown begins to ease, you have a great opportunity to build a better coaching business.

Why? Because the world is different and whatever business you’re in, customer behaviour and expectations have shifted. As a coach, you’ll know that the widespread switch to remote and home working means that people are looking for different services and different ways to access them.

The world has changed. The question is, are you changing with it?

Not a face-to-face world anymore…

The idea that you need to be physically present to deliver some kind of value has been dealt a deathblow in the last year. Recent…

For business owners, the goal of achieving work-life balance is a myth.

This idyllic state of having time to do everything is always just around the corner. Many work a few extra hours now thinking it will get them closer to the work-life balance dream. Then they do the same next week, and the next, and the next.

The problem is that balance is not something you achieve, it’s what you are always doing. When thought of as a fixed goal it represents a state of equilibrium that is simply not possible. …