So, you have now graduated as a certified coach or trainer, and you are probably all stressed out wondering, how do I get my first clients? Don’t worry, and it is normal that by ending your formation you find yourself lost in a sea of doubts. Finding your first clients can be a little scary at first. What if you don’t find enough clients?
For all your doubts and fears to go away, today we want to teach you the strategies that will help you find your first coaching customers.
Before starting, there are four things you need to have ready before beginning to sell:
- A message that sets you apart: You need to know how to introduce yourself, knowing how to tell the world about the worth of what you do, that you are different to the rest of the personal development professionals, and why they should choose you.
- An attractive service to sell: With the needs of your clients well identified, you must design a service that helps them and makes their lives better.
- Making the sale: It is essential to know how and what to sell, and how to offer your services to potential clients, so they want to work with you and not someone else.
- Trusting yourself and your ability to help your clients: you are starting, you have no experience, and that makes you feel insecure and afraid of charging for your services. If this is your case, here is a plan for you: start by finding five clients that don’t have to pay you, but that can help you find your first references, so you can begin gaining confidence in yourself and your ability to help others. It is only fair if you want to feel calm and secure. If you have the luck of doing supervised practices in your formation, then you don’t need to do this.
Here are some strategies that we are sure will help you since the beginning if you don’t have customers.
Tell Your Friends and Family About Your New Venture
You have to break your barriers and start telling the world what it is that you do now: organize meetings with your friends, even with those you have lost contact with, post on your social media, etc. The point is to get all the people from your personal and professional surrounding know about your work because they’ll be able to recommend you even if they are not potential clients because they know you on a personal and professional level.
This might sound dumb to you, but, asking one or several relatives or friends to write on their Facebook: “Hey, did you know Juan now does…?” and with a short explanation, they can help you reach a wide number of people you might not know, but that might be interested in your services. We encourage you to try it.
Start Networking with Other Professionals
It can be an old teacher or classmate, but if you get in touch with them and they know your personal and professional value, they will probably end up sending you the clients they cannot take. Take this seriously, because it may become a constant flow of clients based on trust, which will make you get out there and be known quickly.
Offer Free Sessions
An evaluation session is not a session where you will solve all the problems of a person. That’s impossible to do in just one session. So, something that we recommend is to offer the first session for free, and this will work both for you and your potential client to enable a long-term relationship.
The goal of this “valuation session” is nothing else than to have a meeting where you can listen to your client, analyze their case, and then indicate them if you can help them and how you will do it.
This is a moment to see if you make a connection with the client and if it’s worth it to work together.
Therefore, we encourage you to make this free invitation to any potential client you may know so that they can recognize you and your work.
Offer Workshops on Your Specialty
You can do them in person anywhere, as long as you make them where your potential clients are or can assist, or you can also make them online through webinars.
Workshops can help you get visibility and have an “expert” mark. And, if you do them in person, this will help you register the event with pictures and content for your website or a personal blog, helping you show you are a relevant professional.
With these two modalities you will accomplish to move forward two steps at a time, also connecting with potential customers to whom you can show in these workshops, how you work and the energy you have.
And, don’t forget this workshop has a goal, and it is to find your first clients, so, for this reason, the Price should be something symbolic, because it is an investment for you, to make yourself visible, now, you have to remember to offer your services, and honestly explain the value of what you do. And, if this blocks you a bit, you can invite them to a personal valuation session to understand their cases and offer your services.
Create Shareable Content
What do we mean with this? This strategy consists in creating content that is related to your client’s problem, and start sharing it in your blog, website, Facebook group, and any other social media, both organically and with paid ads, so you can reach the more people.
You need to prepare a guide, video-class, live session, webinars, challenges, or the content you want about tools and exercises to help your clients solve their problems and move it to reach a more significant number of people. To do so, you can invest in advertising, share it on your Facebook groups, ask your friends to share it, etc.… That way, and you’ll start gaining visibility and make people from other circles know you, calling their attention and making them potential clients.
Now, remember: if you have no experience at all, you can find your first clients for free within your friends, contacts, volunteers you may ask for on your social media, and contests. Always keep this in mind: no more than five clients for free. This is just for you to be sure that you can do it, and to get your first references and recommendations.
As you see, there are plenty of formulas to your reach to get your first coaching customers. Now you are prepared to think in one more step, filling up your session schedule.
Getting Started
The Online Coaching Certification is your step-by-step blueprint to build a highly profitable online coaching business.
If you are passionate about helping people and living a fulfilling life, we can help you achieve your dreams right now. The Life Strategies Coaching Certification Course combines the latest advancements in human potential and neuroscience with proven methods of success used by the world’s most productive people.
Our programs are open to anyone with a desire to learn and help others. There are no prerequisites.
That’s it for now.
Take action!
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