Can someone please tell me WHERE do I find clients so I can build a thriving coaching business?

When I first sign a client, they have lots of questions on building their coaching business correctly. In this blog post, I will answer some of the most common questions and give you some tips to help you move the needle in the right direction when it comes to creating your thriving coaching business.

1. Where can I find my first clients?

Be in love with your offer
When you’re brand new, you have a tight budget and no network, no clients from friends or family connections. What do you do when that is happening? Especially if you’re brand new, right? The first thing is, you have to be in love with your offer before you even start looking for clients. The number one thing is you have to know what you’re selling and you have to be in love with it, because if you don’t know what you’re selling, if you have lack of clarity on what you’re selling or you’re not in love with it, or you’re insecure about it, you’re not confident, you’re not going to be able to sell it. So figure out your zone of genius and fall in love with the offer that you’re offering.

Start building an audience
If you have a tight budget, which means that you can’t afford ads, you’re going to have to leverage other people’s audiences. How do you that? Facebook groups are not what they used to be four years ago, where you can go in and get a bunch of clients. Facebook groups still work, but it’s a lot of work. I would recommend creating a very simple funnel (an optin lead magnet) with a nurture sequence, and then try to get on some podcasts and guest blogging with your influencers who already have your same type of audience. This is exactly what I would do if I had no network and no budget for ads.

Go live on Facebook
Utilize your facebook lives. Start doing facebook lives on your personal profile. The only reason why I would recommend for you to do it on your business profile is if you are going to run ads to it to increase your reach. But if you don’t have money to pay for ads and run traffic to your lives, do it on your personal profile for free, just don’t be spammy about it and make it relatable and personable.

Look for people in facebook groups and ask them questions around your specialization and provide value, become friends with those people. That way when you do go live on your personal profile, the audience will be there. There’ll be a slow growth, but you sell one $5,000 package, you take $3,000 of that and you spend it on ads and in the end this will make things much easier for you.

Leverage Facebook ads when you have your first sale
Let’s be clear on something, to get the machine rolling you don’t even need to spend $2,000 for ads. You can take $1,000 from that $5,000 package you just sold and spend it on ads so that you can start to grow your audience. The important part of business is to continuously be building an audience of people that will potentially buy from you and you do this by creating an offer that you’re in love with and making sure you price it fairly to yourself and to the market. You know, for a coach, $3000 to $5,000 for a program is an intro price. There’s no reason why you should not be charging $3000 to $5,000 for your offer. Just make sure you’re in love with it, that you’re confident that you can deliver the results that you are promising and just start to sell it.

2. What makes me unique from others and how can I position myself to be different?

This is the part where your story matters. Plain and simple. There are so many business coaches out there, but my audience is attracted to me because of my personality and how practical I am. I’m very big into systems, automations and marketing funnels. I’m very strategic and practical and how I build businesses and how I run my business and that’s what I teach others to do. So the more that I have been myself, the more money I’ve made. In the end, it’s still about being you and owning your story, not running from your story. To be honest, in the beginning I ran from my story and all the experience that I had in digital marketing in the beginning and even on how practical I was. Then I saw and learned that in the coaching business, everyone wants what I have to offer. That’s when I stopped running and I stopped being that warm fuzzy feeling person (or cheerleader) to my audience that I thought I had to be. I was trying to be someone that just wasn’t me and it didn’t work.

I’m very to the point and very direct. The more that I became myself and really owned my story, the better my message came across and it made it very easy for me to stand out from other business coaches. Believe it or not, growing a coaching business is just as hard as building any other business. Everyone thinks that it’s easy being a business coach and that you just make money. That’s not true. If you’re not standing out, if you’re not in love with your offer, if you don’t know what you’re selling, if you are not confident in getting results for your client, you’re not gonna be able to sell anything just like anyone else. In the end, holding on to your story and using it in your business is what’s going to make you stand out. You have to tell your story over and over and over and over again. Talk about how you serve people over and over and over again. The more you tell your story and the more you tell different facets of it, you’ll see what people resonate with more. You will find that you become more polarizing and you will stand out more.

Remember that you still have to put yourself out there. You will not stand out if you are not visible. That’s when you put into play facebook lives, ads, and leveraging other people’s audiences. You can’t create your message in a vacuum. You have to put yourself out there, see what people are resonating with, and then move on from there.

3. Is there a way to access clients without relying on leads? You need to be consistently bringing in qualified leads into your business in order for your business to thrive. There is no getting around that no matter what niche you’re in. People do sell email lists, but I don’t recommend it. Back when I used to work for agencies, we would buy email lists and then clean them up. The problem was that they were not good quality lists. The open rates are horrible and not good quality because these were people that never asked to hear from you. The best way to have quality leads in your business is to build your own marketing funnels and have people sign up to hear from you. You know, they want to hear from you and you will be able to deliver the right content for them to receive.

You know, you have to market yourself. You have to be your biggest advocate, and you have to follow the right strategies so that you are generating leads. If you are not aggressively pursuing clients and leads in your business on a consistent basis, your business is dying.

4. What are the three most powerful marketing techniques, lives, testimonials, etc?
The most powerful is Facebook lives and sharing your story. Everything has to be story based. You have to be shifting belief systems in your marketing. If you feel that you’re getting crickets, if no one’s resonating with your messaging, it’s because you’re probably talking in technical jargon. All they know is that they have a problem. They don’t have the language that you have as the expert. So be very mindful how you tell your story and how you talk about the problems that you want to solve.

For example, I specialize in automation and marketing funnels and making people a ton of money. But what I sell is freedom. For a new person coming into my funnels and my community, they’re attracted to me because my message is about freedom and how my techniques allowed me to build a multi six figure business working 10 hours or less a week, to have the freedom to travel, to move overseas so that I could marry my husband. I didn’t need a job. I was able to create my business and make money. I taught myself to do that and I worked hard for it. If my messaging was talking about automation and marketing funnels no one would resonate with that because they don’t even know what those things are. All my people know is that they want time freedom. They need to make some money. They want to provide for their families. They want to spoil their kids. They want to take four vacations a year. That’s what my people care about. That’s the problems they’re having. They’re completely clueless about the solution to that and I have the knowledge and skills to help them do it.

The other thing that you must learn is how to leverage are testimonials. Testimonials are super powerful case studies. People want to know, will this work for me? Because everyone thinks everything is BS. That’s one of the things that you have to address in your marketing. Will this work for me? Testimonials, case studies, sharing the buyer’s journey of your people will help you make them believe, wow, this works for her. It could work for me too.

5. What do you say to the people that say they don’t want to buy right now and just want to read your status posts and learn from your lives in the meantime?
You have to keep nurturing them, make sure they are there and in your funnel. Make sure you have something free to give them so they could consume immediately and they can grow their know, like, and trust with you. If you are getting the I don’t want to buy right now, check your sales process. Your sales calls may need to really dig into the urgency.

You also have to stand up to your clients and say I respect what you’re going through and then dig into a pain point a little bit and uncover the urgency. What’s going to happen if you don’t figure out your business in the next three to six months? What, what is going to happen if your health isn’t fixed in the next three to six months? Why do you want to heal your health? Figure out what that urgency is and hit on it. It’s not urgent if you don’t uncover that urgency for them. They’re going to give you that excuse because it’s scary to invest. That’s the truth, right?! It’s scary to invest and spend thousands of dollars or whatever the price of your program is. It’s scary at whatever level whether they’re spending $500 or $5,000 or $15,000 or $30,000. You have to be caring to their fear, but also help walk them through that fear so that they aren’t blocked from what their true desires and goals are.

6. How do I build my email list the best way if I don’t have a big audience?
The best way to build your own list is to set up a marketing funnel and spend money on ads. The other option is podcasting. Create an amazing offer, a lead magnet that they can promote for you. When you get on a podcast with an influencer in your industry that has a massive audience, you can get thousands of leads a month that way alone. I highly recommend it. There’s also guest blogging which would work the same way as podcasts, but I prefer podcasts. Then of course, building out your own funnels and spending money on ads. That’s the best way. And if you want to sell coaching or courses, you need to be building your email list consistently. You can also write a book and publish it on Amazon, that is a ton of free traffic at your disposal. You can also blog on medium.com, which gets more traffic than you could buy to your own blog. If there is a will, there is a way.

7. Where and how can I get a steady influx of clients?
To get a steady influx of clients you need a marketing funnel. If you’re selling high ticket coaching, I highly recommend either a four part video series or a Webinar. If you set up a funnel like that, you will never run out of clients ever. You spend more money on ads, you get more clients and more leads. It is the same thing if you are selling courses. Have a funnel that is getting leads into your business and begin to nurture those leads. Develop an automated launch sequence that sells your course or create a quarterly live launch selling your course (or every eight weeks). It goes back to visibility, you need to be in front of your people. They need to be getting to know, like, and trust you. You also need to be pitching because they need to know what it is that you do. If your product is more than $2,000, you’re going to need to get people on to a call. People will not pay for high ticket items without first talking to the person and understanding what they are buying.