Professional Coaches » coaching strategies

Lower Your Cost Per Client

admin — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:04:52 +0000

Every client costs you money. When someone is seated in the chair across from you, it cost you money to put them in that seat. Of course, you hope that the money it cost you to put them there is less than what you are earning from them!

When I say that clients cost you money, I’m referring to how much time, effort, and money you had to put in to get them into that seat. Take a look at your marketing and your networking and your sales activities and figure out your overall costs and divide that by the number of customers you have. That is what it is costing you to put a client in the seat across from you. (Okay, it’s just a rough estimate and some MBA somewhere in the world will point out that there are other considerations as well, but let’s just stick with this number as a rough guideline).

Let’s use some really approximate numbers to give you an example of what we’re talking about. [LOUD AND CLEAR DISCLAIMER: Of course I know the following numbers don't represent real prices or rates, they're just an example to show you how I've calculated the cost per client].

Let’s say that you advertise in the phonebook for $1000/year and you advertise in a newspaper for $6000/year and you spend 48 hours of billable time (at $100/hour) in networking events every year. So: $1000 + $6000 + $4800 = $11800. Now, if you have 10 clients because of that effort, it cost you ($11800 divided by 10) $1180 per client to attract them to your business and turn them into clients.

So, if a coach wants to get 2 more clients, they could expect to pay an additional $2360 ($1180 x 2). But you don’t run a charity, you run a business, so profitability is a consideration. To that end, you need to think about ways of getting more clients into the chair across from you without spending that amount.

Here are some ideas:

Revisit your marketing expenses. Is that phonebook ad really working for you? Do you think it would impact your business by getting a smaller ad?
Ask your clients how they heard of you. What they tell you will give you a hint as to what marketing works for you and what doesn’t. (Note: they may have heard about you in several different ways and only mention one, so don’t act rashly. Ask everyone.)
Spend more on targeted marketing. Yes, spending more seems to run counter to the above tip but the right message to the right market in the right media will cost more but deliver more customers.
Ask for referrals. Referrals are an amazing way to generate more business because they cost nothing but a moment of your time to ask. Really really successful and profitable coaches who never need to advertise get their business this way. The more you ask for referrals, the less it will cost you per client.

Contemporary VA

@contemporaryva on Twitter. Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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Generate More Coaching Business

admin — Thu, 14 May 2009 03:18:58 +0000

Finding the right clients and getting them to hire you is the constant quest of every coach. Some do it really well and all coaches aspire to do better. After all, the more effective you are at finding clients, the less you have to focus on finding them and the more you can focus on helping them. After all, isn’t that what it’s all about?

There are plenty of techniques out there that coaches can use to reach out to potential clients and work with them to see if there is a fit for your services. We talk about many of those techniques right here in this blog.

One coaching expert has recently produced a powerful and compelling resource that can help to transform your coaching business and make your marketing far more effective. Her name is Hannah McNamara and her book Niche Marketing for Coaches will guide you through the process of discovering who your niche market is and why you want to work with them. At £14.99, it can earn you tens of thousands time it’s value.

No, I’m not kidding, it’s that good. If there was a school of coaching, this book would be the required textbook. If someone wanted to start up a coaching business from scratch, having never worked as a coach before, this is the only marketing book they’d need.

Bold claims, but you should see this book!

Hanna McNamara will help you choose your niche and then she’ll show you how to position your business so that the niche can’t help but respond. She’ll walk you through numerous marketing techniques that have been time-tested and proven practice-builders.

Hannah is well-qualified to be talking about this stuff. As a coach to coaches she applies her years of experience to answer the question "How can I get more clients?", which is a question that every coach asks all the time.

Hannah’s extremely useful book is a valuable addition to your coaching library. (I know because I’ve added it to my own library). Not only that, but for a limited time you also get thousands of dollars worth of highly practical, business-building bonuses. Twenty-one of them to be exact.

Now, I admit that I’m a little biased. After all, two of the bonuses are bonuses that Contemporary VA (the creators of this very blog) are offering to those who buy the book. You’ll find that there are TONS of other bonuses that are worth having, too – bonuses that people pay hundreds of dollars for. And what’s crazy about Hannah’s offer is that coaches get thousands of dollars of free bonuses for the price of the book.

So visit the site and check out the book. You’ll have a chance to review some sample content, look at the table of contents, and inspect each of the twenty-one bonuses to decide for yourself.

Contemporary VA

@contemporaryva on Twitter. Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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Why Niche Marketing Works

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:11:27 +0000

A niche is a small segment of the marketplace. Coaches that know what their niche is will spend less time, money, and effort on marketing with greater return. Not only that, their customers will be a better fit, they’ll be far happier, and they will be more likely to refer their friends to the coach.

Fledgling business owners who want to be successful quickly will try to avoid becoming stuck in a niche and will often claim that "everyone" is their customer. But this is inefficient and can become costly. After all, serving "everyone" is impossible.

Let’s look at an example of a (fictional) productivity coach who thinks that everyone is her customer: By only speaking English, she effectively eliminates billions of potential customers. By charging for her services, she effectively eliminates millions more who do not have the money to hire her. By being a productivity coach, she automatically excludes babies, children, and perhaps even retired people who have less of a need for enhanced productivity. By being located in New York, and by working face-to-face with clients, she eliminates potential clients who live outside of the area. So, in this short paragraph, her client base of "everyone" was narrowed down from billions to a few hundred thousand. And if we went on, you’d see that it gets narrowed down even more.

By identifying a niche and focusing on it, you are admitting that you cannot possibly serve everybody so you might as well serve a few people well. This helps you to become an expert in the specific needs and challenges of that niche. For example, perhaps our productivity consultant from above might consider focusing on C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies, whose problems and opportunities for productivity look very different than those of the middle manager or of C-level executives in small and mid-size companies. The amount that she could charge would be different, too.

And, by identifying a niche and focusing on it, your marketing can become more effective. Rather than marketing to "everybody", which requires an expensive broad reaching advertising plan, targeted advertising to the niche will help convert more prospects for less marketing investment. Our productivity coach, hoping to reach C-level executives, might skip certain marketing methods: scratch billboards, television, and radio from the list. She might consider advertising in Forbes and Inc. as two examples of targeted marketing.

By working with a niche, you’ll be able to address the specific needs and challenges of that niche which makes for a better coach/client fit. You’ll address your client’s needs and challenges more effectively. And, because people spend time with people just like themselves, your customers will be more likely to refer your services to their friends… who likely fit your niche. Our productivity coach from above can address the productivity challenges of C-level executives of Fortune 500 companies and can have the confidence that they are rubbing shoulders with other C-level executives of other Fortune 500 companies.

So, how do you determine your niche? Start by looking at your client list.

Who do you serve most frequently right now?
Who do you prefer to work with?
How quickly can you get up to speed on the niche-specific needs, opportunities, and challenges inherent in that niche?
Are there marketing opportunities that are apparent?
How do your rates compare with the niche’s payment expectations? (Hint: you’ll often be able to charge more by specializing).
Does your personality mesh well with your niche market?
How would you feel about working with that niche market for a decade or more?

Niche markets are the key to successful coaching practices. Find your niche and start reaping the rewards.

Contemporary VA

@contemporaryva on Twitter. Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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The Conundrum of Busyness

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:11:16 +0000

Every coach, consultant, and mentor wants to be busy. When you’re busy with paying clients, you are earning revenue. It feels good to have that full schedule! Unfortunately, this also creates a problem. In this post, we’ll talk about what the problem is and what to do about it.

Remember those thrilling days when you first started your practice? You were fresh and bold and excited about the future. You relentlessly marketed. What else could you do? There wasn’t anyone sitting across from you in the office to pay your bills so you went out and grew your practice by telling people what you offered.

Fast forward a couple of months or a couple of years. What’s happened? All of your marketing paid off and you became busy serving clients. Then suddenly – ZAP – everything disappeared. Your busy business faded. Things slowed down. Your schedule opened up.

With coaches, it’s often feast or famine. The reason is because marketing and serving clients are two elements that compete for your time, but, because serving clients generates revenue and marketing does not, guess what gets unintentionally deprioritized!

Think of it like a set of scales weighing clients on one side and prospects on the other. When there are a lot of prospects (because you’re out marketing) and there are no clients, the marketing side of the scale tips. But your marketing will slowly generate clients and the scales will begin to tip in favor of the revenue-generating client side. Soon, without realizing it, there is little or no marketing because your schedule is full of clients.

Many coaches would be all smiles when this happens because it seems to be the optimum use of time: 100% revenue generation. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The optimum use of time is less than 100% revenue generation, with some time spent on marketing. To revisit the illustration of the scales, you need to find the balance between serving clients and marketing. It won’t always be 50/50 (the exact balance depends on your business and your ability to market and your niche and a thousand other factors). You might need to spend 25% of your time marketing and 75% of your time serving customers.

The bottom line is that you can’t aim for 100% client service and ignore marketing because that will create the feast or famine situation that every coach should avoid. Instead, schedule time each day to market your business. If your balance between clients and marketing is 75/25 then schedule 6 hours of your day with clients and 2 hours of your 8 hour day on marketing. Once you’ve scheduled your marketing time in, treat it just as you would treat a client appointment and don’t let anything eat into that time.

You can also consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you with marketing, or even help with some of your other business tasks that don’t have to be tended to by you.

Being busy is good. But being business to the point where it sacrifices marketing time will be good for now and then will hurt you in a couple of weeks or months. Striking the right balance between marketing and client serving will eliminate the feast or famine problem and keep a steady stream of income in your practice.

Contemporary VA

@contemporaryva on Twitter. Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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Marketing With Seminars

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 22:59:07 +0000

Finding potential clients can be a challenge. And, once you find them, convincing them that you have the skill to help them can also be a challenge. Marketing through various channels often contributes to one or the other (lead generation or positioning) but rarely both, at least as far as coaches are concerned.

That’s what makes seminars such a good option for professional coaches. They can draw the right people and they can effectively position you as an expert. Seminars are a huge opportunity and if you don’t have plans for seminars this year, consider adding at least one to your schedule.

If you haven’t done a seminar before, don’t start too big. Keep it manageable! Advertise locally, hold it in a library or coffee shop. Give a few smaller talks in a more intimate setting to test your comfort level.

Make sure your subject matter is closely aligned with your area of expertise (of course!) and give people real solutions to their areas of concern.

Create a small hand-out, just a single page, for people to take notes on. Make sure it has your contact information and (if appropriate) some kind of promotional coupon. A free initial consultation might be a good promotion.

Starting small like this gives you a few advantages aside from easing you into a life of public speaking. It can also help you to hone your topic: Maybe you’ll find that a broad topic like "time management" doesn’t draw people in as much as something far more specific, like "eliminating procrastination". Starting small allows you to make mistakes without costing too much: If you accidentally advertise the wrong day, time, or location and no one shows up, you’ll lose less money (and credibility) if a dozen people get it wrong than if hundreds of people get it wrong. You’ll also learn about your own delivery style and preferences – do you need a whiteboard? Do you like to walk around? And lastly, starting small will help you to know the details before you step up into a larger venue. All presenters will remember to set up chairs but not everyone will remember to bring paper towels with their donuts and coffee.

Prepare a seminar plan just as you would prepare any marketing plan: Include goals, target audiences, and long term vision.

Have your seminars recorded and (with the permission of your audience who might appear in the footage) posted on your website.

Seminars might not be right for everyone, and they might not interest you, but by starting small and honing your seminar skills, you can generate clients and position yourself effectively as a problem solver. And if you enjoy the experience, you can join the thousands of others who supplement (or entirely replace) their coaching income by providing seminars and earning back-of-room revenue on books and resources.

Contemporary VA

@contemporaryva on Twitter. Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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Online Tools for Professional Coaches

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:30:38 +0000

In recent years, the need for coaches to meet clients face-to-face has largely diminished. There are still many coaches who prefer or even insist on meeting clients in person and in some coaching situations, that is the right choice. But today’s web has opened up the possibilities to allow coaches to work with clients online. We’re not just talking about the telephone, there’s so much more.

Skype. Face to face can still happen, even when separated by oceans. Skype is a web-based telephone service that works through your computer and allows you to talk, video conference, instant message, and share files. It’s an excellent communications hub enabling professional coaches with the ability to meet clients no matter where they are.

GoogleDocs. GoogleDocs is a free online word processing application. If you use Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs feels excatly the same. Files are stored online in your own secure account and you can access them from any computer. But GoogleDocs offers coaches two additional advantages: You can share documents with others so that both of you can work on the same document at the same time without overwriting the other person’s work. For example, that means that your client on the other side of the globe can sign into a document that you’ve shared with them and the two of you can work on their goals. Together, at the same time. And the other benefit to a coach: GoogleDocs allows you to create custom forms that can be posted on your website. New clients can fill out the form online, click submit, and all of their answers are entered into a GoogleDoc for you to review before their first session. Why not have one form for new clients and another form for your regular clients to fill out before each session?

Mindomo or Mindmeister. These are web-based mindmapping software that allows you to create mindmaps online. Like GoogleDocs, more than one person can edit a map at once, making it the perfect tool for you to work with your clients no matter where there are. (I’ve listed both of the ones that I’ve used here, and there are others, but I prefer Mindmeister).

Blogs. Blogs aren’t just for you to promote your business so that the world can see. Blogs can come with limited access for only certain people to view. A coach might have a client create a blog as a personal journal of their progress, and set the viewership permission so that the only people who can see blog are the client and the coach. This allows the client to keep the coach up to date, and the coach can add comments to encourage or direct where necessary.

These are just four tools that can empower coaches to meet with clients anywhere, and to collaborate with them in real time, all the time.

Contemporary VA

@contemporaryva on Twitter. Follow us to stay updated with our many resources that include business, accounting and bookkeeping, social media, and much more!

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A Place for Professional Coaches

admin — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:53:26 +0000

(Our "Welcome Mat", sticky post. You’ll always be welcomed here with this post when you visit!)

Professional-Coaches.com is a place for professional coaches to find and share tips, information, resources, strategies, and even just casual exchanges.

The business of professional coaching is a growing one and one that requires continuous learning, sharing and networking. We encourage coaches to stop by and see what’s new, share their thoughts and resources, and learn and discuss.

With the support and knowledge of others, we can all foster our goal of helping others reach their goals.

Do you often find yourself Googling to assist you in your coaching journey? Wouldn’t it be great to have one primary place to find many resources and thoughts for professional coaches? That’s precisely the goal of Professional-Coaches.com but we can’t do it alone.

Nuestro Casa es Su Casa (Our house is your house). We invite you to make yourself at home and share with other coaches. We would love for you to be our guest blogger, as well as comment with your thoughts and share your resources and strategies.

Welcome home. We look forward to your arrival each and every time.

Karen J. for Professional-Coaches.com

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