Your First Four Clients: Part 1 of 2 - Product

Marketing is not the most important step to winning those difficult first few coaching clients.

You have to start with your Product. What is it that your clients will actually buy?

In 20 years as a practicing business coach I’ve trained and mentored more than 100 new coaches. An inability to answer that question is the most common reason those coaches fail to win their critical first four clients.

So how do you build a great coaching product? And how do you market and sell it?

The3 Skills Great Coaches Need

Whichever coaching discipline you wish to pursue – Life, Business, Health, Sports, and so on – it’s critical to understand that “Coaching Skills” may be necessary, but that are not sufficient.

By themselves, no matter how well practiced you may be, they do not consistently achieve client outcomes.

The 3 skills I view as being essential are:

1. Coaching skills
2. Business skills
3. A Consistent Methodology

Coaching Skills

I lament that most Coach Training providers focused on Coaching Skills, and do not successfully address all three. Because this leaves new coaches feeling sufficiently prepared to grow a business, without realising they are not.

Business Skills

You are, ultimately, a business owner. The work you deliver – coaching – cannot exist without you applying your business skills.

I’ve yet to meet a sustainably successful coach who hasn’t developed skills in Marketing, Sales, Branding, Capacity Planning, and Cash Flow management.

A Consistent Methodology

The third skill is the one I want to address to help you before your marketing plan or next sales meeting.

Being specific and clear about what you do will win you clients – even if you begin by selling only a fraction of the value you will ultimately offer.

Your Business Model

Long before Lead Generation and Sales, the flow of revenue in a coaching business starts with the decisions you make about Vision, Business Model, and Brand Promise.

Unlike your Vision (which beyond the scope of this article, and hopefully something you have undertaken in your skills development so far) your Business Model will prove fluid. The key in the early phases of your coaching business is not “nailed it”, but rather an understanding of the questions you ask and the thinking undertaken … so that you can review and update accordingly when you begin your Marketing and Sales activity.

The four aspects of your Business Model are Product, Market, Volume, and Margin. Answer these questions, and the pathway to your Commercial and Personal vision becomes clear.

Product + Market Fit

You may be familiar with the concept of “Product Market Fit”, ensuring you have a Product which is of significant value to your target Market. Long before Marketing comes the thought process: “Who do I want to work with, and how do I want to help them?”

So who do you want to work with? Coaching – whether Life, Executive, Trauma-Informed, or Cashflow(!) – is a testing and emotional career. You want to work with people you like helping, because the exhaustion of the wrong audience (even if lucrative) will rapidly cut short your coaching career.

Your Product then is how you help them, specifically captured in a repeatable process. You may be able to help them in “Lots of ways”, but as a client I can’t buy “Lots of ways”.

I can buy “I release cash flow”, I can buy “I help you wake up happy every day”, I can buy “I add a million dollars to your personal balance sheet every year”. Can you see the specific difference?

And if that’s the outcome you sell, what is your repeatable method that delivers that result?

• A Fixed Term Program. This may be a minimum engagement length, it may be more structured and less responsive, or it could be a taster commitment product that helps the client understand your value.
• A Retainer. This has been the bulk of my coaching career, ongoing coaching towards set goals, offering security of future income with a mutually agreeable notice period.
• Projects. These can be the most profitable, but also demanding especially when Fixed Fee. One risk with coaching is being pulled into projects that absorb all your available capacity, leaving you no time for marketing and sales for when the Project ends.
• Ad hoc coaching may also form part of your Product suite, especially for good alumni clients. But it’s not advisable when finding your first clients – you may think it’s easier to buy “coaching whenever”, but it confuses your clients about what specifically they are purchasing and why.

If you find yourself lost with Product Market Fit, a useful framework is “Two Islands”. Your ideal client (you know who they are) is stranded on Island A and wants to be on Island B.

• What are they feeling on Island A? List their top 3 pain points or motivators.
• What will they be feeling when they arrive on Island B? This is usually 3 emotions linked to solving that pain.
• What is your method for building a bride between Island A and Island B? You don’t need to be too technical here, but a specific Product the client can purchase is critical – this is why so many coaches have “Bootcamps” or “12 Week Challenges”.

Brand Promise

Your Brand Promise, the step before Marketing, is how you encapsulate your Business Model into an appealing commitment to your target market.

Quite simple, this is “I will Do X for Y via Z”.

• I help working mothers wake up Happy every day using my ‘6 Life Pillars’ approach. It’s a 6-week group program and costs $297; or
• I transform female-led law firms commercially, culturally, and personally by working with the WHOLE person, the WHOLE business, and the WHOLE team. It’s a 3 month intensive and your investment is just $30,000 plus tax.

Volume x Margin

Price your product based on maximum client value, and then test it against the Volume (Number of Active Clients) and Margin (Gross Profit per Client) you want to achieve.

These two elements are often inversely related, which is to say that the smaller the number of clients you want the higher the prices you need to charge.

You may be a “Whale Hunter” with a small number of high price services. You may find it easier or more fun “Chasing Squirrels”, lower priced engagements that are faster and easier to deliver. I consider myself a Deer Hunter, but this has evolved over time.

You may also start small … or at least cheap … to win the first few clients, case studies, and referrers. Just avoid the trap of starting cheap and staying cheap: make reviewing and updating all 4 parts of your Business Model (Product, Market, Volume, Margin) part of your regular strategy time.

Because Coaching is a Risk

Being clear about your process, about the repeatability of your methods to create a client outcome, is essential for winning your first clients through the sales process.

You may not appreciate this – aware, as you are, of how great coaching is in general and you are specifically – but engaging a coach is a risk for every client.

If the risk is too great, with only a vague product and promise, then clients won’t buy. Which is why it’s imperative to answer these questions before reading Part 2.