Happy Holidays from All of Us at The Coaches’ Coach

Happy Holidays from All of Us at The Coaches’ Coach

At this important time of year, we want to wish all our Coaches’ Coach family and friends a safe and happy holiday season. It’s an honor being involved in your lives, as you build stronger coaching practices and help your clients build great businesses! Thank you for letting us be a part of your journey; it’s an honor we never take for granted.

May blessings of peace, hope, and prosperity be yours now and in the new year!

Marketing Over the Holidays for Business Coaches Part 2: Add More Value

Marketing Over the Holidays for Business Coaches Part 2: Add More Value

In my last post on marketing over the holidays for business coaches, I taught you that the first thing you can do to retain coaching clients is to respect your contracts and maintain your positioning as a coach (not a consultant).

Today, I want to introduce you to the very best defense against holiday drop-offs:

Add more value.

Of course, providing maximum value is precisely how you attract and retain high-paying, loyal clients year-round. But over the holidays, it helps to add some extra oomph!

When you do, you make your clients want to stick around even through the busy season because they know they’ll miss out on major opportunities if they don’t!

How to Add Value Over the Holidays

I have two favorite ways of doing it:

  1. Create a special training event for your clients and their teams. Make this a fantastic, high-value event that clients can attend FREE. And then invite your entire database! Charge $197 or $297 for prospects to sit in. This accomplishes two things: first, it makes your clients feel special because they’re getting something for free that others have paid for. Second, your existing clients actually “sell” the value of having a coach to your prospects! Talk about a win-win-win!
  2. Conduct a special “strategic planning session as part of your regular meetings. Make a big deal about how the end-of-the-year strategic planning session is one of the most important coaching sessions of the year. Revisit the basics of visioneering, budgeting, and forecasting. When you help your clients catch a glimpse of what next year is going to be like under your guidance, you’ll have them pining for more!

When you help your clients catch a glimpse of what next year is going to be like under your guidance, you'll have them pining for more!

Remember: the holidays can be a highly-profitable period of time for business coach marketing if you do it right. So get proactive with these two suggestions immediately. You’ve got no time to lose on the two items above!

Next time, I’ll bust one of the biggest myths about holiday prospecting. Until then, if you haven’t checked out my ebook, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star, why don’t you do so now? Treat yourself to a little holiday gift … a step-by-step guide that details exactly how I went from $0-$1 Million in just 4 years as a business coach!

Understand the Personality Profile of Your Coaching Clients

Understand the Personality Profile of Your Coaching Clients

Who are your business coaching clients?

I mean really?

Business coaching, perhaps more than other professions, depends on the strength of the client-coach relationship.

If you don’t have a solid understanding of the way your coaching clients think, feel, act, and are motivated you won’t be a very effective coach.

Likewise, if your coaching clients don’t understand your thinking, goals, and tactics, they’ll be wary of your advice.

Think about it this way: imagine that you’re a limo driver in Brazil. It’s your job to ferry important people from one appointment to the next. Maybe they’re movie stars, diplomats, or worldwide business leaders. You’ve got a great limo with a good engine and a comfortable interior, and you’re well-prepared with all the alternate routes and tricks to get your clients where they need to go as quickly as possible. The only problem? You only speak Portuguese and all your clients speak different languages.

How effective are you going to be as their driver if you can’t understand where they’re coming from and where they’re trying to get?

Your client-coach relationship is the same way. You might be both speaking the same language, but if you don’t understand each other’s emotional styles, modes of thinking, and motivations you might as well be speaking different languages.

You might be both speaking the same language, but if you don’t understand each other’s emotional styles, modes of thinking, and motivations you might as well be speaking different languages.

Speak the Same Language as Your Coaching Clients

You can solve that problem, though, by gathering information about your clients’ personalities. Try one (or several) of these methods to increase understanding:

1) DISC Profile. The DISC profile rates traits of dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. It is especially useful because it can help you determine exactly how you should approach your coaching sessions with your client. For example, a high dominance client will want a fast process while a high conscientiousness client is more task-oriented and will thrive at a slower pace. There are free DISC inventories online, although it’s often useful to spring for the official, comprehensive tool and incorporate it into your coaching process.

2)  Myers-Briggs.  Myers-Briggs is another popular personality tool that rates people on four different personality traits like extroversion versus introversion and intuition versus judgment oriented. Like the DISC, there are free online options for this, but you might want to consider purchasing rights to a test yourself.

3) Observe, observe, observe. Observe how your client reacts to suggestions and interactions. Look at their body language. Listen to the type of rhetoric they use. Look for patterns and then gently and respectfully point out how those patterns are or are not working for them. No one can be perfectly defined by a personality profile. Often the deepest and most effective approach is based on your own observations.

Personality, like variety, is the spice of life—but it can also be the biggest hurdle you have to leap as a business coach.  Understand your clients to optimize your success.

Learn how Eric Dombach went from $0-$1 Million as a business coach in just 4 short years.  Download his FREE ebook, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star

Hard Work: The Secret to Business Coaching Success

Hard Work: The Secret to Business Coaching Success

I’m going to let you in on the secret to business coaching success…

No, it’s probably not what you think it is.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the email or piece of sales copy you just saw that begins…

“You’ve been lied to…”

or “It’s not your fault…”

Chances are that email or sales letter will then go on to tell you that the reason you’re not as dazzlingly successful as the author is not for want of hard work. Nor is it that you’re not smart enough.

Nope. The “real” reason is that you just don’t know the “secrets” that they do. The magic shortcuts to whatever wonders they’re promising you.

Of course, it sounds ludicrous when I put it like that. Who would fall for that?

But of course, we all do.

Hard Work: the Best-Kept Secret in Business Coaching

We all wish there was some simple way we could achieve our wildest dreams without hard work, without having to be brilliant or learn a difficult skill.

So when someone tells us the reason we’re not doing as well as we’d like is simply because there’s a secret we’re not privy to, and that knowing the secret could unlock something we truly desire without taking a ton of hard work, we’re typically all ears.

We shouldn’t be. We should run as far from them as possible.

I don’t know anyone who’s built a successful business that hasn’t had to work hard at it. Even the guys I know who’ve built big businesses “in their pajamas” on the web have worked (and studied) incredibly hard.

Now I’m not saying shortcuts don’t exist. They absolutely do.

But shortcuts make things easier, not easy.

Now I'm not saying shortcuts don't exist. They absolutely do. But shortcuts make things easier, not easy.

I wish I could say that the “you’ve been lied to…” and “it’s not your fault…” peddlers aren’t successful in the long run but sadly many are.

They make their money by targeting the weak and needy. The people who desperately want to hear the message that it’ll be easy once they know the secrets. All they need to do is fork over their cash to learn them.

We’re all weak and needy sometimes. So make sure you immunize yourself and don’t fall for these lines.

And of course, make sure you don’t use them yourself.

Becoming a business coach takes a lot of hard work, but one fantastic shortcut is our FREE resource for beginning business coaches, How to Become a Business Coach.

Marketing Over the Holidays for Business Coaches, Part 1: Position Yourself Properly

Marketing Over the Holidays for Business Coaches, Part 1: Position Yourself Properly

Marketing over the holidays is never easy, particularly in business coaching.

I was thinking recently about my first few holiday seasons as a business coach, remembering how difficult it was to attract and retain coaching clients through all the hustle and bustle. In the years since then, I’ve learned how to make the holiday months highly profitable!

So, over the next few weeks, I’ll share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned on how to make marketing over the holidays more profitable and less painful!

I’ll be revealing some simple ways to add and retain coaching clients during what is historically a “slow” period of time for many business coaches and the most frustrating time for business coach marketing.

And here’s the first:

Position yourself properly and respect your contracts.

Remember, you’re a coach, not a consultant. Consultants get paid for time or deliverables. Coaches get paid a set amount each month based on VALUE PROVIDED–not the number of times you meet in a month or the amount of time you invest in their business.

Billing based on time and/or deliverables is “industrial age” thinking. Information-age thinking means that whether it takes you five minutes or five hours to come up with a nugget of wisdom that changes a client’s business, you deserve to be paid the same!

When you position yourself properly, your clients understand that principle and respect it (and pay you all the more because of it).

Still, every once in a while you’ll get a client who tries to squirm out of his or her coaching agreement over the holiday months because you’ll be “meeting less,” even though your agreement specifies otherwise. (By the way, if your agreement doesn’t have at least a 30-day cancellation proviso, as well as some additional protections to prevent this sort of thing from happening, add them now! If you’re not sure how to do that, try the FREE 30 Day Trial of our system and have a look at our sales agreements.)

Not getting paid for a month is simply NOT an option unless you let it be. Don’t give in. If you don’t respect the integrity of your agreements, how can you expect anyone else to? Take yourself seriously. When you do, it will translate to success in all other areas of your business.

If you don't respect the integrity of your agreements, how can you expect anyone else to? Take yourself seriously. When you do, it will translate to success in all other areas of your business.

Next time, I’ll teach you how to avoid this problem from even arising in the first place–by adding extra value around the holidays (with LESS time commitment)! Until then, if you haven’t checked out a FREE 30-day trial of our system, why don’t you do so now? Treat yourself to a little holiday gift…including a complimentary coaching session on us!