Who Do You Have To Be To Build A Coaching Business?

Coaches Don’t Like Selling

It’s a thing. Coaches don’t like selling. They really don’t like even the idea of selling. Actually, to be specific, they don’t like what they think selling is.

I’ve discovered something quite astonishing and it’s all to do with this old chestnut of coaches and selling.

What Is Selling?

Selling is a process. It’s a transfer of knowledge, from the seller to the client, that results in the client having enough knowledge, confidence and trust in a product or service to make a decision about buying it. Or not.

What Selling Isn’t

Selling isn’t ‘bombarding’, or spamming, or generally getting in people’s way, or on their nerves. Those things are not selling, they are bombarding or spamming or getting on people’s nerves and that is why they have their own word(s).

So What’s The Issue With Coaches and Selling?

Coaches like people. They particularly like the way people work, psychologically. Most of us are very interested in how we work ourselves too – and change is something that we are great at, both professionally and personally.

This is where it gets weird.

Coaches would rather look at selling as a ‘who do I need to become in order to grow a coaching business’ than to understand and accept that business development is a process which simply needs to be adhered to, and repeated. Weird huh? To put it another way, coaches would rather think of business development as who they need to become than what they need to do.

Selling Is A Process

Let me give you some examples:

You want to open a MacDonalds? You can.

You can buy a franchise and they will tell you, step-by-step what you need to do to grow that empty store into a thriving fast-food joint. They have a process, they’ve refined it and it works. Yes, they’ve changed some bits to fit in with different cultures and tastes, but it’s a process and it works. What you absolutely don’t have to do to become a successful MacDonalds’ franchisee is become someone else. If they decide you fit, that’s because you are enough, just as you are. MacDonalds don’t need you to go on a soul-searching, personal development journey to see what personal changes you need to undergo to sell burgers.

You want to sell legal services? You can.

You can go to lawyer school and become a lawyer. Then you can set up a law firm and practise law. You can grow your client-base, by networking, by referral, by repeat business…. basically, by selling legal services. What you don’t have to do is go on a soul-searching journey to discover who you need to be in order to attract clients. You don’t have to undergo a personal change in order to sell legal services.

If you’re an introvert, you don’t have to be an extrovert to have a great fast-food joint, or law firm. You can be an introverted business-owner. If you’re an extrovert, you can be an extroverted business-owner. Both are ok and both can be successful, providing that you stick to the business-development process that has either been defined for you (in the case of MacDonalds) or that you have developed for yourself (in the case of the law firm).

What Does This Have To Do With Coaching?

Coaches don’t have to become someone else to develop a coaching business. It’s a fact. They don’t have to transform themselves into a client-attracting magnet, mostly because there is no such thing. (I wrote a different article about that here: Heart-Centred Selling? Don’t Make Me Laugh!)

What coaches need to do is understand the process that must be followed to develop a coaching business and then follow it.

That’s where we come in. The Coaching Revolution has a very simple 3-step process for creating a coaching business and it works. We now have so many success stories that we can be totally confident in saying that our process works. If you are a mentee of ours and you take the action, you will gain paying clients.

This is the process:

1. Work out who is most likely to benefit from working with you (tip – if you start by saying ‘anyone who…..’ you haven’t yet got anywhere near enough detail)
2. Figure out what they need to hear in order to understand how they will benefit from working with you (tip – if you try to define coaching, or mention the word ‘goal’, you’re on the wrong track)
3. You need to be where these potential clients are in order that they can actually hear you

That’s is.

Everyone Is Different And Needs Different Support

How we support you in this is that you get your own mentor. You work with them on a 1:1 basis in order to refine the above steps until you have a unique, perfectly-honed process for getting paying clients whenever you want to.

The reason we don’t promote a ‘proven system’ is because there is no one-size-fits-all. Your client will be different from anyone else’s. Your message will be unique to you and where you need to be will depend entirely on the first 2 steps.

You are already exactly who you need to be to grow a profitable coaching business.

Want to talk to Sarah about becoming a mentee? Here’s a link to her diary.