by Eric Dombach | How to Become a Business Coach
Whether you’re a new business coach just starting out or an old veteran, pretty much every coach wants to know how to attract better business coaching clients.
I’ve got some bad news for you: 90% of the time your ideal potential clients aren’t interested in hearing how great you are because they’re not currently looking to hire anyone.
Now for the good news: pretty much all the time they are open to new ideas and insights that will help their business or life.
That’s why there are so many business magazines, blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels out there. It’s probably why you follow this blog, even if you haven’t bought anything yet.
So if we focus on sharing and promoting our valuable ideas, our potential clients will be much more likely to pay attention and take action.
But it’s not a matter of just “sharing good stuff” and expecting clients to come knocking on your door. That simply doesn’t work.
What DOES work to attract better business coaching clients?
Probably the most commonly used philosophy of content marketing is that if we “deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.”
Really?
I don’t know about you, but I don’t “reward” people with my business. I give my business to the people I think will do the best job for me. Like everyone else, I look at what’s in it for me.
Now sure, if I’ve got good content from someone it’s going to make me see them in a positive light. It’ll influence my decision a bit, no doubt. But I’m not going to blindly reward them with my business just because they’ve shared valuable information with me.
That’s like asking your best friend to extract your painful tooth, just because you like him. Not gonna happen.
If you want your ideas to sell for you then you need to be way more strategic about which ideas and content you use. You need to make sure that they’re both valuable and influence the buying decisions of your potential clients in your favor.
If you want your ideas to sell for you then you need to make sure they’re both valuable and influence the buying decisions of your potential clients in your favor.
So what kind of ideas work to influence buying decisions?
Well, ultimately, the factors that influence your specific client’s decision-making are unique to you. So if you sit down with a pen and paper and get focused on the clients you know best, you can come up with a shortlist of things they need to “know and feel” to be ready to work with you.
For example, if knowing that you had relevant industry experience was a critical decision-making factor for your clients then you’d want to make sure that some of the ideas you shared were rich with those industry insights.
Generally speaking though, there are three big criteria you need to make sure your biggest, most prominent ideas meet.
Firstly (and I hope this goes without saying) they need to be valuable to your ideal clients. And that value needs to be immediately obvious.
This is what’s going to get them to pay attention when you speak, write or otherwise share your ideas.
Secondly, your ideas need to be unique.
Far too much content on the web is simply a rehashing of the same old material your clients have already seen time and time again. If your ideas seem to be the same ones that all your competitors are sharing too – why would a client want to pay attention and ultimately work with you instead of them?
It doesn’t matter how great or valuable your ideas are, if they aren’t unique then they won’t influence your clients to hire you.
Now your ideas don’t necessarily have to be unique to the world. They just have to be unique in the eyes of your client. They have to stand out from the other things they see and hear (eg from your competitors). That’s a slightly less daunting task.
So, for example, you could take an emerging idea from a different business sector or discipline and adapt it and tailor it for your clients. Or you could combine multiple ideas from other fields into your own model.
The third criterion is that your ideas need to be disruptive.
If all your ideas are simply minor improvements on what your clients are already doing then they’ll nod their heads in agreement with you, but they won’t hire you.
They’ll like you and tell you you’re doing great work. But if they’re already doing 80% of what you recommend, they won’t go to the time and expense of hiring an external person to help them improve. They’ll try to get better incrementally.
So out of all the ideas swirling around in your head and all the information you could share with potential clients, focus on the ones that are the most:
- Valuable to your clients
- Unique and different to everything else they’re hearing
- Disruptive and challenging to their status quo
By sharing those ideas, rather than just adding to the overload of “meh” content out there in the world you’ll be doing your clients a great service, and you’ll be influencing them so that they’re much more likely to hire you.
Win – win.
Ready to become a business coach? Our FREE ebook takes you through it step by step. Download now.
by Eric Dombach | Business Coach Training
Today’s post comes courtesy of legendary copywriter and marketing expert, Bob Bly.
Want to know the secret of successful content marketing for business coaches? Here’s something that happened to me recently–that’s just as applicable for business coaches as it is for copywriters like me.
MS recently downloaded a copy of one of my free special reports.
I offer it free to folks interested in my copywriting services, books, and courses — and MS took advantage of it.
After MS downloaded the free report, he sent this quick email to me in response:
“Hi. Thanks. This is an awesome report — much better than some I’ve paid for.”
And therein lies a simple but powerful marketing lesson:
The content you give away for free should be as good as, or preferably better than, the content you sell.
This may seem counterintuitive.
You think, “Well, the person is not paying. So it doesn’t have to be that good. For free, so-so should be good enough.”
But the purpose of giving away a free report is to either (a) strengthen your reputation as a subject matter expert or (b) upsell prospects to your paid products or services.
So riddle me this: If I get a report from you, and it’s a yawn, then why would I bother to give you money for more of the same level of thinking, expertise, or advice?
And don’t tell me, “Well, people know the free stuff is just a taste, but for the steak dinner, they gotta pay the full price.”
Because actually, they don’t see it that way: If the free sample sucks, you’ll almost surely fail to whet their appetite for doing business with you on a paid basis.
That’s why the content you give away for free should be as good as, or preferably better than, the content you sell!
The content you give away for free should be as good as, or preferably better than, the content you sell.
But … just because the free has to be as good or better than the paid, it doesn’t have to be the SAME as the paid.
Here’s a useful rule of thumb from my colleague WM: The free content tells people WHAT to do.
Paid content, or business coaching, tells them HOW to do it.
See the difference?
One more time:
Free content is “what to do” … paid content, or business coaching, is “how to do it.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the secret to successful content marketing for business coaches–and anyone else.
P.S. Back in the day, we called these free reports “bait pieces,” the idea being we used them to go fishing for leads.
Today these free content offers are called “lead magnets,” because they are used to attract potential customers.
Also back in the day, we didn’t call it “content marketing.” We called it “giving away free information.”
Want more tips to become a business coaching rock star? Check out our FREE ebook, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star.
by Eric Dombach | Business Coaching Tools
Have you ever had a totally broke business owner come to you begging for help? How can you solve business coaching clients’ cash flow problems?
This happened to us at Advantage Business Coach a few months ago. We had a desperate business owner come to us who had no cash flow, was in debt up to his eyeballs, and was about 60 days from having to close his doors.
Our business owner (we’ll call him Joe) wanted to save his business (we’ll call it Joe’s Shop of Everything because he didn’t know how to do anything else with his life!).
Even though he could hardly pay us, we rolled the dice with Joe, and ran a Benchmark Boss Comprehensive Analysis to see where the issues were.
Joe’s obvious issue was his lack of cash. Joe was in a negative balance in his bank accounts about every three days. But the underlying problems were a mystery to him.
Solving Business Coaching Clients’ Cash Flow Problems
So how do you get cash into a business that is burning through it faster than they can make it?
Of the six Cash Gap Plan Strategies–longer terms with vendors, shorter terms with customers, fast collection system, bonus accounts receivable staff, outsourcing accounts receivable, and reducing inventory–we decided to focus on Outsourcing Accounts Receivable because his ratios showed this would be the most effective.
Joe knew of a factoring company near him that would only charge a 5% fee for their service. Great for a company that needs cash. Here’s how it works:
- Joe sells his Accounts Receivable to the factoring company
- The factoring company pays Joe 80% of the total Accounts Receivable
- The factoring company keeps 5% of the Accounts Receivable for collection fee
- Once factoring company collects the Accounts Receivable from Joe’s customer, the remaining 15% is put into a reserve account to be paid to Joe twice a month.
After only three weeks of working with us, Joe was able to sell his Accounts Receivables and walk out with a check for $9,000. In the following 90 days, the factoring company paid Joe another $2,000 after they collected on the debts Joe had sold them. Joe kept doing this, basically outsourcing his AR so he could focus on higher value activity than collections.
Over the last three months, Joe has begun factoring his receivables one to two times per week. This created a consistent cash flow.
In the month of May, Joe had $6,000 left in his bank account and all of his bills were paid. Ending the month with money in the bank was a first for Joe.
Want to hear more about Joe’s Shop of Everything and learn more about how we used the Cash Gap Plan to save Joe’s business? Check out our free 30 minute video training HERE.
Advantage Business Coach was founded by Bill Green. Bill is a Certified Fraud Examiner and Forensic Auditor. In his career working with Fortune 500 companies, he hunted down more than $7 million in accounting fraud. After his career in big business, Bill leveraged his skills and entered the business and executive coaching industry.
by Eric Dombach | How to Become a Business Coach
Whether you’re looking to become a business coach or already have a thriving practice, I believe firmly that you should market your business coaching practice without hype. In fact, I wrote an article to that effect a little while ago.
The article made the staggeringly obvious but often overlooked point that if you don’t feel comfortable using hype or exaggeration in your marketing (and you shouldn’t), then the best way to avoid it is to target clients who don’t respond to it.
Because, let’s be honest, some people do respond to hype. They fall for exaggerated claims and get rich overnight stories.
You’ll drive yourself mad trying to win those sort of people as clients. You’ll either do honest, realistic marketing and they’ll go elsewhere to others prepared to promise them riches.
Or you’ll swallow your principles, make ridiculous claims, then feel bad about it when they don’t do as well as you’d promised.
It’s a lose-lose situation. But there’s no way around it with those sorts of clients.
You Get the Clients Your Marketing Deserves
Best to target experienced, realistic clients. Ones who can spot hype and unrealistic claims.
The same goes for other things you’re looking for in your clients.
Want clients who care about more than money? Then talk about more than money in your marketing. Be brave enough to say what you believe in and turn away those who don’t share your values. Do your marketing well enough and there’ll be plenty who do.
Obvious really: you get the clients your marketing deserves.
But it’s often tricky to drag yourself away from copycat marketing. Marketing the same way your competitors do because you think they’re doing better than you.
Marketing the way the “gurus” tell you to market because, well, they’re the “gurus.”
But their clients aren’t your clients. You need to market in a way that will work for your clients, not theirs. And the best way to do that is to market your business coaching practice without hype.
You’ll find some of those methods in Momentum Club. Others you can discover by trying something different and seeing whether it works. Or seeing what marketing from other fields works with your ideal clients.
But don’t just copy hypey marketing because it seems to be working for others. Most likely it’ll fail for you.
Worst case: it’ll work and bring you absolutely the wrong sort of clients.
by Eric Dombach | Business Coach Training
When it comes to understanding the importance of KPI’s for business coaching clients, it’s a little like cooking…
Have you ever tried experimenting in the kitchen without a recipe? Maybe inspiration strikes and you hop into the pantry to grab ingredients that you think will taste good together. And voila! It does taste good! You share your invention with your friends and family, and they like it too! A few days later, they ask you to prepare the same dish. There’s only one problem: you forgot how much salt you included. Was it a pinch? A spoonful? Did you use olive oil? Or was it coconut oil? You trust your gut and unfortunately, you just aren’t able to deliver the same quality.
That’s why we write down portions when we cook, that’s why cookbooks offer you measurements. Because they serve as your guide to achieve the same quality every time or come up with something better when you already mastered it.
In business, these units of measurement are called Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). And they make all the difference for your business coaching clients.
The Importance of KPI’s for Business Coaching Clients
In business, every move is critical; every decision is important; every performance creates ripples affecting operations, finance, etc. That’s why we should make everything measurable to the extent it’s possible.
In an organization, departments work together and people collaborate, creating domino effects for everyone. What better way to ensure that processes and functions are working the way they should than by setting up KPIs? KPIs show you the performance quality and even help forecast what will happen next.
It’s like the human body. Each vital organ is a KPI. When each of them functions well, you have a healthy, working body. But if one organ fails to deliver, you experience sickness, disease, and discomfort. Each KPI is different, but together, they make sure you have a sound organization. Sales department might have new revenue, new leads, closed deals as KPI’s while the operations team might have customer satisfaction, attendance, and attention to details. They have different ways to gather data but all will assist in creating a smooth-running, effective organization.
Over time, KPI’s may change to alter results. Each KPI should be carefully selected to be in line with critical organizational goals. KPI’s that are not wisely chosen may yield undesired or confusing results.
A Case Study in KPI Success
Some time ago I coached the owner of an accounting firm. In our first one-to-one session, I asked how much he billed an hour. He told me that all his work was billed at £50 per hour. I asked him what his most significant problem was. He replied that he was not making enough money! How was this possible if he was billing what he needed? I asked him if he was over-delivering to his clients – he did not know. We looked at each client and calculated the hours he and his team were actually working against the billed amount. It showed that their billable rate for work was an average of just £17 per hour. They were massively over-delivering across all clients out of fear of losing any of them. We set a KPI to obtain a billable rate in in excess of £50 per hour by becoming more efficient at client delivery–and in the process, turned this around in just 6 months.
Key Takeaways for Creating KPI’s with Your Clients
In a nutshell…this is why you should set KPI’s with your business coaching clients:
- Visions are converted to measurable goals, making it easier to identify and target.
- The goals say a lot about an organization’s performance. KPI’s help identify the drivers of the organization’s velocity in reaching their goals.
- It allows you to assess current performance and forecast possible opportunities and threats.
So how do you implement KPI’s with your clients?
- Consider the 3-5 KPI’s that your clients could measure that would have the most impact on their business.
- Set monthly targets for each KPI.
- Get the person who is responsible for each area to measure and report on these KPI’s in their coaching sessions.
- Talk through the KPI’s in each session you have with your clients.
The importance of KPI’s for business coaching clients can’t be overstated–it’s one of the most effective ways to ensure their success, and your ability to retain your clients long-term. For more great business coaching tips and resources, check out our ebook, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star!
