Your First Four Clients: Part 2 of 2 - Marketing

Katy changed my life.

Just one conversation with her at the end of a year-long Coach Development Programme made me realise everything I had built was a lie.

The year was 2012…

London Calling

Early in my coaching career I ran towards a Recession, leaving Australia in 2010 and moving to London amid the Global Financial Crisis.

Within a year I had leveraged my coaching experience and fresh energy to hit my commercial and personal goals, and I was eager to give back to the next generation of coaches.

People like Katy, who was part of a group I helped train and was now offering a personal mentoring session.

Katy was a year into her coaching career, and had zero live clients, but that wasn’t unusual at the time. What worried me was that she had no active leads and no targeted opportunities.

So I asked her, “How many phone calls have you made to tell people about your coaching business?” Her response floored me:

“None.”

Half of All Businesses Close Within 3 Years

Business ownership statistics are alarming, and I would suggest are even worse for new Coaches – many of whom will come to view their coaching business as a 12-month sabbatical between other paid employment.

So as an introvert, how have I survived in business for twenty years despite having started again in multiple countries and reinvented my whole business model to go fully remote?

Several key principles, and a commitment to lifelong practice.

4 Clients at a Time

One of my earliest mentors taught me this powerful reframe.

“Most coaches are looking for their FIRST client, or their NEXT client. As a result, they stay small, putting on clients one-at-a-time, often losing them after a few months, and never growing beyond a break-even client base.”

The key, he taught me, was to always think “Where are my next FOUR clients coming from?”

Check in with yourself. If I challenged you to find FOUR new clients, would you approach that differently to finding just ONE more client?

Always having the larger perspective has guided me to higher profile and more scalable marketing initiatives.

Inbound vs Outbound

The marketing dream is evergreen inbound content that sells commitment products and schedule sales meetings while you sleep. These are real, but they take time. Your first four clients are not going to come from a social media post to your 12 new followers.

Outbound marketing is much harder, but comes with two clear advantages:

1. You have Agency. You have zero control over the Google or LinkedIn algorithm, but full control over picking up the phone and calling your friends and professional networks to talk about your new business.
2. Testing your Product-Market Fit. I love coaching because you can make a phone call today and start with a new client tomorrow. Alternatively, through rejection you’ll receive valuable feedback about your Business Model and how it can evolve to get to ‘yes’.

My personal goal, as an introvert who started over multiple times, was to make just 5 phone calls a day. If you’re more popular than I am, or love talking to people, your journey will be much faster.

Just don’t think Email is a substitute for the Phone.

Research-Led Marketing

In my mentoring, the fastest way I have found for new coaches to find their first clients – indeed, fill their books entirely – is a process known as Research-Led Marketing.

Essentially, your Start-Up Phase business is out there researching the market, testing the hypothesis behind your Product. Why not spin that process into actual research, an approach which opens doors, creates introductions, and readily positions you as an expert!

Say your Brand Promise is “I help Working Mothers wake up Happy every day”, presumably because you know many of them wake up feeling something different. What are they currently feeling? Why might that be? What have they tried to address this? What are you proposing will help?

Now run that through a research project:

• Go and interview 10-20 of your ideal clients;
• Run a survey and get data from 100 more, inviting newsletter subscribers along the way;
• Source some partnerships who will share your survey with their audience;
• Collate the data, including general statistics;
• Write a short White Paper on the topic;
• Promote this through partnerships and all your social media;
• Run a webinar or, even better, a live seminar which is recorded

Critically, this must be genuine research. When you’re talking to those participants and partners, your key word is “Help” – specifically can they help you, not you trying to sell how to help them.

I’m yet to work with a business who ran this approach and didn’t succeed. Why don’t most coaches do it? Because it smells like hard work, and there’s someone on Instagram with a $20,000/mth marketing budget telling people that organic inbound is the easy way to five figure months.

One challenge when finding your first four clients is having a reputation which is different, because you have a network that knows you for something else. Research-Led Marketing makes it easy to reach out to all your networks and reposition yourself – not because you’re chasing clients, but because you’re doing research for your new career and you need their help.

Learn to Sell

Every business is a Sales business, and so my final recommendation is that you must learn how to Sell – even if you plan to be an employed Executive Coach, where you are ‘selling’ strategies, approaches, or specific programs.

Many of us grew up thinking that Sales was sleazy, and we all have memories of bad experiences “being sold to”.

If you’re a good coach, my opinion is that you have a moral imperative to be good at sales. If you can improve people’s lives then it’s actually cruel of you not to help them work with you.

That help? Is called Sales.

Selling is both a Science and an Art.

The Science comes from a Sales Meeting Process, the consistent way you run each sales meeting. I have one called the ‘Gratitude Sales Model’, and even today I review this immediately before a sales meeting, follow it as best I can, and then review it immediately after to see what I had done well and where I could improve next time.

The Art is something that we as coaches have been trained in: reading energy, and understanding how to question the internal motivation or obstacles of the person we are meeting with. Sales skills are Coaching skills – ask the right questions, and help the client see the change they need to make.

In this case, with a repeatable process and a price attached. Coaches know the difference between coaching and manipulating someone into an outcome; that distinction is the key to good sales and long-term client relationships.

Sales success come from practice. This was Katy’s mistake, but as one of her trainers it was my mistake more.

I had helped teach her coaching skills, business skills, and a repeated methodology to help her clients … but it had never occurred to me that she wasn’t making phone calls along the way.

The more opportunities you have to sell, the better you get at selling. The more you take responsibility for creating those opportunities, the faster you will create your first four coaching clients. Good luck!