by Eric Dombach | Business Coach Training, Business Coaching Tools
Here are some powerful business coaching tools that can help you get a leg up on your competition, whether you’re a veteran or beginner. They include help on marketing and sales to get business coaching clients and how to coach your new clients so they stay, pay, and refer their friends to you. This is a must read list if your goal is to earn a steady, 6-figure income as a business coach!
1) Books for Business Coaches. These are the books that changed my life when I first began to think about becoming a business coach. Be sure to read them and put them on YOUR bookshelf!
E-Myth by Michael Gerber, Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish, and Instant Cash Flow by Brad Sugars.
2) The Business Coaching Franchise Buyer’s Guide. For existing business coaching franchisees or people considering buying a business coaching franchise, The Business Coaching Franchise Buyer’s Guide (http://www.businesscoachingfranchisebuyersguide.com) is a powerful resource. Go behind the scenes and learn exactly who should buy a business coaching franchise — and who should go independent. Learn the clever techniques sales representatives use when selling you a business coaching franchise so that you’re ready to handle them and move at your own pace through the due diligence process. Finally, discover which are the most reputable business coaching franchises, and how to negotiate the most favorable terms possible!
3) Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star. Want to supercharge your existing business coaching practice? This industry favorite, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star (http://www.businesscoachingrockstar.com) is your ticket. You’ll learn EXACTLY what I did to make my first million as a business coach after just 4 years in business as a business coach. Learn all the sales and marketing techniques I used, as well as my secrets to making sure my coaching clients became raving fans!
4) Business Coaching Success Predictor. Have you ever wished there was a scientific way to predict your level of success as a business coach? Well, there is! Check out this free report, Do You Have What It Takes to Be a Successful Business Coach, (http://www.succeedinbusinesscoaching.com/) a powerful diagnostic tool for aspiring or existing business coaches. Based on a 2006 study of more than 40 of the world’s most successful business coaches, this profile will help you determine if YOU have the 8 behavioral traits with a proven statistical correlation to success in the world of business coaching.
5) Business Coaching Riches. Are you thinking of becoming a business coach? Then check out Business Coaching Riches (http://www.businesscoachingriches.com), the beginner’s guide to getting it right from the get-go! This book covers everything you need to know to be successful out of the gates, from setting up your corporation, to landing your first clients quickly, to coaching them successfully.
6) FREE Tools for Business Coaches. Here’s a great place to start your journey in business coaching, absolutely FREE. Check out these FREE tools that will start your practice out on solid footing! (https://mycoachescoach.com/downloads)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: When Master Business Coach (and former pastor) Eric Dombach bought his business coaching franchise, he had NO contacts, NO professional experience, and NO marketing or sales skills. Through hard work, dedication, and lots of trial and error, he grew his business coaching practice from $0 to $1 Million in 4 short years. Learn everything he knows about becoming a business coach. Check out Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star for a deep dive into his journey!
by Eric Dombach | Business Coach Marketing
Business coach marketing strategies are the OXYGEN of your business coaching practice. Obviously, without a continual flow of fresh, warm business coaching leads, you’ll become dizzy in the head and soon be dead on the floor, metaphorically speaking. (-:
BUT, how many marketing strategies and exactly which one should YOU use? This question frustrates countless business executives learning how to become a business coach.
At the Coaches’ Coach we recommend that you consider just ONE to, at most, THREE of the 7 Business Coaching Marketing Strategies. Here they are and our recommendations on which ones are right for you:
- E-Marketing: Blogging, Emails & Webinars – is an essential strategy if you’re marketing beyond the boundaries of your geography and focused on a vertical niche. To build an e-marketing pipeline you’ll need to focus heavily on publishing amazing, educational content to attract people to you. SO, choose this one if you love writing excellent content, enjoy getting on the video camera, and have a pretty strong technical background. You can spend a fortune on this if you’re not careful, so having some technical chops is really super helpful. The goal is to nurture people with value until they’re ready to buy.
- Networking Events & Tradeshows – is still a rock solid approach to lead generation if one of your strengths is face to face persuasion and relationship building. Countless thousands of coaches around the world are still making a killing using BNI and similar events to build relationships in a specific geographic market. Trade shows are an amazing way to reach your decision-makers if focused on a specific vertical market. Set a goal of 25 to 50 business cards per networking event and 100 to 250 business cards per day of tradeshow attendance. Follow up your leads within 24 hours and conduct your “Silver Bullet Call” to book your sales meeting. Also, this combines nicely with the E-marketing pipeline strategy so that you can nurture your leads once you’ve got them.
- Door to Door Bold Walking – is about making face to face visits in person by going door to door. This can actually be a refreshingly effective strategy, as fewer and fewer coaches do business in person anymore. This one is for you if you’ve identified your target market as a group of 50 to 250 geographically local business, usually in a specific vertical, such as technology, or manufacturing, or real-estate services. Dropping by repeatedly and getting to know the front-office staff over time is an amazingly effective way to get into the C-suite of your target prospects.
- Direct Mail Letters & Postcards – still work like magic, though it is one of the more expensive strategies on the list. Direct mail works best when highly focused on a specific target group that will respond to a highly targeted message. (If you’re not speaking directly and specifically to me, I’m not listening to you.) This strategy works extremely well when followed up with an outsourced telemarketing campaign. This is for you if you’ve got a bit of a war chest to start your business with and have some pretty good marketing copywriting chops.
- Telemarketing & Cold Calling – is a strategy that many people now regard as “old-fashioned” but still continues to work like magic all around the world! This strategy is for you if you can invest a couple thousand dollars per month with a reputable call center that has experience doing business coach marketing calls. For every $2000 you invest, you should get at least 10 leads and close at least one new client. This was exactly how I started my business and I still recommend it to this day. Combine this with either direct mail or E-marketing and the results can snowball into some seriously amazing momentum! Your job is to take the handful of warm leads you’re getting and book the face to face sales meeting to go close the business. Fun!
- Referrals & Word of Mouth – remains the holy grail of marketing, of course. So, make sure you earn your clients’ respect and professional enthusiasm. BUT, do more than just wait passively for them to spread the word. Automate the process of getting referrals and testimonials using a page like THIS. Then send your social proof to your prospects to decrease their sales resistance.
- Strategic Partners & Joint Ventures – is all about aligning yourself with non-competitive companies that serve your same client base. Think printers, attorneys, accountants, office furniture retailers, and the like. Then contact them and arrange a way to promote your business and get referrals that is mutually beneficial. You can trade services or give the other company a referral fee when a referral calls in. Work together and you will both make more money. My best strategic partner ever was an accountant who brought me more than $500,000 in new client revenue in a single year! All you need is one or 2 of those and you’re set! This is a great long-term strategy, but probably not the one to focus on if you’re below break-even.
SO, those are the 7 business coach marketing strategies we recommend and how to know which ones are right for you.
If you’ll just choose 1 to 3 of these to focus on and stick with them until you master them, you’ll soon be breathing a sigh of relief as the leads come rushing in!
Enjoy!
P.S. How’s your sales conversion rate on leads? You can learn how to double your conversion rates in 30 days or less using our Rock Star Selling System.
by Eric Dombach | Business Coach Training
Whenever I ask a room full of business coaches to take a guess at the #1 thing required to succeed as a business coach, I get a mixed bag of answers. Everyone has a different opinion, it seems.
Thankfully, there’s some solid, scholarly research that can shed some light on the subject. In the 1990’s, a group of Harvard University researches developed a theory and business model called the “Service Profit Chain,” which I discussed in my Amazon-category-best-seller called The Million Dollar Business Coaching Firm.
Building on this excellent theory, the premise of chapter 11 in my book is that your long term success as a business coach relies on just one thing: Personal Coaching Success. In other words, get the business coach training you need to become a business building legend. Notice that I said long term success. Great marketing and sales can get you clients, but to have a sustainable coaching business, you’ve gotta get great at keeping your clients by make them enormously successful.
For most privately-held businesses, the path to success is paved with incremental cash flow. Your job as a coach is to deliver the cash. For even the best business coach, this requires lots of training.
One great way to do this is to develop a “Perceived Value Bundling” strategy. This strategy can be salvation for your clients that are constantly getting beat up on price. Bundling involves taking the client’s original product or service and you adding other products or services to it so you end up with an entirely new package, which does a couple things:
1) It creates an apples to oranges comparison between your client and their competition.
2) It completely eliminates price competition.
The key to making this strategy work effectively for your client is to identify additional products or services that 1) perfectly compliment the original one, 2) have little to no cost to your client, and 3) have a high value to the prospect.
To invoke the well-worn axiom: prospects DON’T truly buy based on price. They buy based on VALUE. Any prospect will gladly pay twice the price if they can expect to receive ten times the value. Bundling creates a higher level value,and it makes buying from your client the only logical purchase decision for prospects to make.
Here’s another case study.
A certain restaurant offers you a 25% discount coupon to get you in the door for your favorite meal that costs $40. Our bundling-savvy restaurant client next door has your same favorite meal at the exact same price of $40 but includes with the meal a $25 bottle of wine and a $6 dessert for free. Which restaurant would you do business with? The vast majority of people select the restaurant offering the wine and dessert. After all, it’s the best deal isn’t it?
Let’s take a look at the bundling math.
The restaurant offering you the 25% off your $40 meal is saving you $10. But at the second restaurant, the bottle of wine is listed on the menu for $25 and the dessert is $6. Therefore you perceive that you’re saving $31 instead of $10. That’s quite a deal!
So, you ask, how can our client restauranteur afford to make such a lucrative offer? They can do it because they know their costs. That $25 bottle of wine only costs them just $8 wholesale. And the $6 dessert cost them $1 wholesale. The first restaurant by offering a discount physically loses $10 in hard cash. Our client spent just $9 and yet created the perception that their customer was receiving much more value for their money. In this example, both the restaurant and the customer come away as winners and our client dominates his market.
And this is just one of many fast-cash-flow strategies that you can learn to deliver as a business coach IF you give yourself to studying the subject with the right business coach training. To learn more, click HERE for our free ebook Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star and enjoy!
by Eric Dombach | Business Coach Training
Hey, coach! You’re in the money-selling business.
What do I mean?
You’re receiving money from your clients and helping them get more money in return.
Every business coaching client you sign up wants just one thing from you: a fast return on their cash so they can buy the things that really matter – peace of mind, good quality employees, more time off, etc. It’s your job to get the business coach training you need to become REALLY good at turning their money into more money — and FAST. If you build your business coaching business around this premise, you’ll be wildly successful as a business coach and you’ll rarely have to worry about where to get the next client to replace the one that just left you.
One great way to help your coaching clients generate FAST cash flow is to use “Informational” offers instead of “Incentive” offers.
Here’s a real-life business coaching case study…
When we started coaching this particular chiropractor a couple years ago, he was using “Incentive” offers rather than “Informational” offers, just like every other chiropractor. Now, everyone knows that to generate leads, you have to make an offer. BUT, look at the offers you see today in almost ANY type of marketing. They’re all “incentive” offers. They’re either:
1) “Here’s my phone number. Please call me and buy what I sell,” or
2) “Here’s a discount when you buy my product or service.”
The key word here is “buy.” Incentive offers like this appeal ONLY to “NOW” buyers. And “NOW” buyers make up less than 1% of prospects who may be considering a purchase. The remaining 99% of prospects are FUTURE buyers and they’re looking for… Information! They’re trying to understand which product or service offers them the most value, and they want information in order to make that decision. And yet, NO one is offering them that kind of information! The business owners that you teach to do this will dominate their competition. PERIOD.
When we started coaching this chiropractor all of his marketing ended with his phone number and a complimentary health exam. This lousey offer was generating just 4 leads per month and 1 new patient every other month, for a total cost of $2,000 per month. This marketing campaign was killing him!
We convinced the doctor to change his offer to an Informational report targeting fibromyalgia sufferers. Of course, the doctor thought we were nutso since there are such a miniscule number of fibromyalgia sufferers in the general population. But we finally convinced him to test the offer. In just 4 days, his new marketing generated 137 highly qualified leads and resulted in 37 new patients paying the doctor $2,500 each for treatment. The total cost of his marketing campaign was $1,300 and the total revenue generated $92,500.
Now THAT’S the difference “Informational” offers can make versus “Incentive” offers!
And this is just one of many fast-cash-flow strategies that you can learn to deliver as a business coach IF you give yourself to studying the subject with the right business coach training. To learn more, click HERE for our free ebook Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star and enjoy!
by Eric Dombach | How to Become a Business Coach
Over the years coaching business coaches, I’ve been approached by literally hundreds of business coaches asking me to share how I “really” built my business coaching firm.
I tell them it all boils down to a simple formula for how to become a business coach.
Do the RIGHT THINGS in SMALL AMOUNTS over a LONG PERIOD OF TIME.
That’s it.
It sounds self-explanatory and easy enough to do, but sometimes it’s not so obvious.
I’ve watched dozens of business coaches struggle to put food on the table because they just don’t understand (or, more accurately, won’t apply) this core principle to their daily lives.
So take a moment with me and analyze what this ISN’T saying.
1. It’s not saying to do the WRONG THINGS.
That means you have to be willing to admit a mistake and learn from it — cut your losses as soon as you realize a strategy or approach you’re testing is a no-go.
But be careful.
You have to be sure you’ve diagnosed the CORE PROBLEM in order to determine what the “right” and “wrong” things are.
Here’s an example.
Some people test a given marketing medium — we’ll say telemarketing for now, but it could be just about anything — and because they don’t get immediate success, decide that telemarketing itself just “doesn’t work.”
Well, it could be that telemarketing doesn’t work — but it’s probably more likely that your approach to telemarketing is what’s at fault, NOT the medium itself.
So how can you tell the difference?
Look at those who are successful. Model what they’re doing. If they’re using a medium with great success, and you’re struggling, realize it’s probably not the medium… it’s YOU.
Sure, you might have to swallow some pride and admit you did it wrong, but oh well. I’m willing to swallow a little pride to make a million bucks… aren’t you?
2. It’s not saying to do TOO MUCH.
Note that my advice is to do the right things in SMALL AMOUNTS.
One of the biggest mistakes I see business coaches make is running recklessly, ferociously, and in every direction for a few weeks or months and then, because they simply can’t sustain the effort (and because they’ve planned so poorly), they go down in flames.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t be fiercely focused on your efforts to become a business coach by growing your business, because you absolutely should.
But you need to direct some of that energy and capital toward proper planning and careful execution if you’re going to be successful.
3. It’s not saying to move in SHORT BURSTS.
Most of us are familiar with the “feast or famine” syndrome that seems to plague independent business professionals everywhere. Quick bursts here and there will NOT fuel long-term growth.
The trick is to perform consistently over time, always improving as you go.
Do the RIGHT THINGS in SMALL AMOUNTS over a LONG PERIOD OF TIME.
Commit my formula to memory. Put it on a big sign in your home office. Let it be the foundation of absolutely everything you do and it will make millions for you, just as it has for me.
Please leave your comments in the comment box below. I’d love to hear from you. What are some of your secrets to success? What has been working for you and what hasn’t?
Are you ready to move on to even juicy stuff?
In my free ebook, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rockstar, I get into all the nitty-gritty details about the EXACT steps and strategies I used to grow my business from $0-$1 Million in 4 years. If you’re ready to take that next step to success, you can download it here –> Secrets of a Business Coaching Rockstar
