How to Pre-Sell Your Coaching Programs Without Getting on a Single Sales Call
By Blake Wisz via Unsplash If you run a coaching and/or online service based business, you have one end goal: to enroll prospects into coaching calls and convert them to paying clients. However, this isn’t always the case. Lead generation for coaching businesses can be the most frustrating thing […]
If you run a coaching and/or online service based business, you have one end goal: to enroll prospects into coaching calls and convert them to paying clients. However, this isn’t always the case.
Lead generation for coaching businesses can be the most frustrating thing ever. One expert says “just be yourself” while another expert tells you to “focus on your numbers.” Some are straddling the line between being intuitive and business savvy while others just want you to fly by the seam of your pants. There is too much to learn in such little time and all this contradictory advice is exhausting.
Then there is the more popular option; try as much as possible to promote your free strategy calls to people. Help people for free. Coach, coach, and coach!
There is nothing wrong with the approaches listed above. In fact, they may work for some people. There are several entrepreneurs making lots of money doing these things. But if you are someone like me, it hasn’t worked in your favor. Even after all the courses and coaching programs you’ve invested in.
The problem with free coaching calls, just “being yourself,” and focusing entirely on numbers.
Giving away free coaching all day long assumes that you have a traffic source, people already know who you are and what coaching is, are ready to invest in your offers, and are willing to pay your stated amount. It assumes that you have an audience willing to jump on your calendar to speak with you.
“Being yourself” assumes so many things as well. First, there is the assumption that you are extremely self-aware and this is where your marketing stems from. Then, there is the assumption that you have done the mental or identity work needed so you can stop sabotaging yourself. If this is the case for you, excellent! But for coaches who lack the insight to discover their identity, or coaches who don’t even know where to focus their marketing efforts to get booked for complimentary calls, “being yourself” is a recipe for confusion.
Focusing entirely on numbers is another mistake. There is the assumption that you are confident in your traffic source, your process, your delivery method, and have secured paying clients using this strategy.
But focusing entirely on numbers can be harmful – you slowly begin to forget why you started your business in the first place. You get lost in a world of Google analytics, SEO tools, measuring what your competitor is doing, and tracking unnecessary metrics instead of focusing on the main thing: attracting and serving awesome clients.
With everything said, it’s clear that all these approaches have left lots of coaches feeling left out, as if there is a secret world of coaching clients no one is talking about.
But what if you could pre-sell your coaching programs without getting clients on a sales call? What if you finally get them on the sales call with them 100 percent convinced?
Pre-selling your coaching programs means your prospects already believe in you and your promises before paying a single cent. They already know your program outcomes and process. They know they need to work hard. All they’re waiting on is for you to decide that you want to work with them.
The answer lies in creating a content marketing strategy that starts an enrollment conversation.
Call them blog posts, marketing funnels, or nurture sequences. Your content marketing strategy should be simplified and focused solely on your dream clients. Contrary to what you might think, this strategy is so bare bones that you might find it lacking. But because of its simplicity and if executed well, it may be everything you need to attract high paying clients. You also may not need a pretty website to do your selling.
Your very first step is to create a content strategy that answers these four questions:
- What problems are my ideal clients currently facing?
- What beliefs do they currently have about ________?
- How are these beliefs affecting their _________?
- What beliefs do I want them to have, instead?
I call this the belief transformation framework, and I will walk you through this in the next few paragraphs.
Step 1: Figure out what problems your ideal clients are currently experiencing.
The success of any coaching program depends on your ability to be specific about the problems your audience are currently experiencing and are willing to solve.
To pre-sell your offers, you need to figure out the exact problems that are threatening to halt your clients’ wellness, finances, or relationships. If this pain is not big enough to have enormous consequences, you will spend a lot of time convincing clients to see the benefits of what you offer. This isn’t to say that all other problems aren’t worth solving. My goal for you is to pick problems that your ideal clients can’t afford to postpone…problems they want to solve right NOW.
For example, while your ideal clients may be grumbling about having to tie their shoe laces every morning, they may not be interested in an online course on how to tie their shoes. They could easily swap out shoes with laces for shoes with velcro on them.
The lesson is simple: don’t just stop at doing some market research. Know exactly what problems your audience wants to solve right now.
Step 2: Know what beliefs they currently have about their problems
Every story starts with a primary set of beliefs that guide your audience’s behavior.
To pre-sell your coaching programs using content, you need to know exactly what these beliefs are. Your content is only powerful when you know what these beliefs are, how long they’ve had them, and where they got them from.
The mistake I see lots of experts make is trying to sell their process and results without understanding why their clients aren’t getting any results in the first place. They pack their content and sales calls full of conversations around results instead of staying curious about what first got them in their current situation.
Remember this: if your client hasn’t explicitly said he or she wants to work with you, your job isn’t to force them to believe in your transformation. Your job is to use your content to guide them to their beliefs and then ethically reveal how detrimental these beliefs are. Only then will they realize that to stop being stuck, a mental shift needs to happen.
Step 3: Know how these beliefs are affecting their lives.
It’s not enough to know what these beliefs are. You need to know how these beliefs are affecting how they function in life personally and professionally.
Let’s take the example of a new coach. If a new coach believes that her lack of pretty social media images is responsible for her lack of leads, she may feel insecure about showing up to her audience. She may begin to shrink, question her skills, refrain from selling her offers, revert to some bad habits to protect herself from rejection and failure.
What she is probably not telling you is that she didn’t sign on any client last month and the month before. She feels like her business is an expensive hobby and wants to give up. Her anxiety has gotten worse, and because she’s not making any money from her business, she likely can’t afford her software subscription payments this month.
As her coach, don’t jump into creating content that talks about “10 tips to get leads via social media.” While these tips may work for a while, she will eventually sabotage herself because she STILL believes that she needs a pretty Instagram feed to be worthy as a coach.
Your content here should show her how her beliefs have negatively impacted her goals, then move to replace them with new and non-toxic beliefs.
Step 4: Replace old beliefs with new ones.
Once you know what the previous beliefs are and how they make your ideal clients feel, work on replacing these beliefs with new ones.
Let’s go back to the example of the new coach. If she believes that she needs pretty social media images––something that is inadvertently causing her to have mental breakdowns, your marketing should address a new way of thinking.
Your content should focus on future-pacing, trying to get her to believe differently about her situation, and presenting the new model.
Here, you can introduce your framework or methodology to visualize the transformational journey that you take your clients on. Introduce the exact work it takes to go from point A to point B. Create content that inspires accountability to herself and her goals. Address some of the remaining objections she might have when considering signing up for your programs. When you have done this, invite her to have a conversation about working with you.
This is the simple and effective way to start a client enrollment conversation that pre-sells your coaching programs.
In conclusion
Having free coaching calls, just being yourself, or other marketing tactics will not work until you start your client enrollment conversations before they hop on a call with you. By creating content that addresses four unique questions about your ideal clients, you have answered some unspoken questions and preselected clients who are the best fit for your coaching programs.
