For most aspiring business coaches, client acquisition is the most challenging part of the journey and the toughest aspect of becoming a business coach.
Thankfully, there are some quality business coaching tools for hiring great sales reps and leveraging them to make your client acquisition task much easier.
Mastering these business coaching tools for hiring and leveraging great sales reps can add rocket fuel to your business coaching career and totally eliminate the “feast and famine” cycles that afflict far too many business coaches. Done well, the client acquisition process can become downright enjoyable!
First, a word of caution regarding these business coaching tools for hiring great sales reps…
Too many business coaches believe they should be able to hire a sales rep on base-plus-commission, give them a cold list, and end up with 3-5 new business coaching clients a month or two later with virtually NO contact with the client until AFTER the sale. Nothing could be further from the truth. Business coaching is different than most other products and services in that the client is buying a personal relationship with you, the business coach. Because you’ll be such a vital part of delivering the service, contact with you in the sales process is vital. Don’t let anyone fool you — you must be a part of the sale.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve seen many people try to outsource the business coaching sale lock, stock, and barrel, and it has never worked. Even if you were to hire a business coaching sales rep that COULD pull off the sale of such an intensely personal and emotional sale, business coaching services don’t have enough margin to make it worth both your time AND a full-time salesperson’s time. Thus, stints with full-time sales reps tasked with managing 100% of the sales process have been very short lived.
The secret, then, is to use sales reps as appointment setters who do the time-consuming work of sifting through low-quality prospects to find the hottest leads who are interested in meeting with you now. Then, YOU can close them using (1) a 30-minute Silver Bullet call and (2) a Complimentary Coaching Session.
Here are 3 great business coaching tools for hiring great sales reps:
1) Hire a firm like Client Acquisition Partners to make cold calls to businesses in your target market.
Cold calling is discouraging and frustrating for most people, so I recommend that you outsource it to people who actually enjoy it. Outsourced telemarketing companies like Client Acquisition Partners employ such people and will call business owners, make the pitch and book them into a FREE phone appointment with you. You, in turn, show up to the phone appointment and then sell them into a FREE face-to-face meeting. You’ll pay either per-appointment or by the hour. It’s a great way to leverage the talents of third-party sales professionals in your business without the expense and pressure of hiring a full-time sales rep.
2) Generate leads online and have your appointment setter make the calls.
If you’re not generating leads online (eMarketing), you’re missing out. Begin by creating a FREE report or ebook. Then put together a squeeze page using Lead Pages, where prospects enter their first name and email address to gain access to your free material. Use an autoresponder system to deliver the report followed by a series of automatic, content-rich, rapport-building email messages. If you do it right, some of your prospects will contact you directly as a result of your follow-up email messages — no sales rep or appointment setter effort required! However, the prospects that don’t contact you directly should be called directly by your appointment setters and booked into a phone appointment. If your content is great, this will yield tremendous results over time!
3) Cultivate a clean database of contacts.
One of the smartest disciplines you can undertake is to cultivate your existing database or list. Many business coaches are sloppy in their data management with this vital business information living in a disparate collection of Excel spreadsheets, Outlook contacts, business cards, and online accounts with data services such as SalesGenie, and the like. Most business coaches have hundreds — if not thousands — of names at their immediate disposal that need to be imported into a single digital marketing automation platform for ease of communication. Start by pulling together all of your data into a single marketing automation platform, such as InfusionSoft. The better you do at keeping in touch via postcards, emails, greeting cards, newsletters, etc., the more responsive your list will be. Have your appointment setter go through your database a couple of times a year. You’ll be amazed at what comes out of the woodwork. In my business coaching firm, we derived more than $1,000,000 USD in annual revenue from a list of just 10,000 records — and this has continued unabated for more than 10 years, from 2005 to the present!
To discover other great ways of acquiring fantastic business coaching clients, check out my FREE book, Secrets of a Business Coaching Rock Star. You can download it here at no cost. It covers my top 7 lead acquisition strategies in great detail (in addition to explaining EXACTLY what I did to go from $0-$1 Million as a business coach in just 4 short years)…so don’t miss out!
