David Steele

Luis and Kamala, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

David Steele

There are several key elements on how to start a coaching business.

David Steele

You need to have training. You need to be good at what you do. You need to able to get results for your clients.

It all starts with having a marketable service. That might sound like a no-brainer but some coaches call themselves coaches without any training at all and they think that. It’s because they know something about a topic that they’re qualified to charge people for helping them in that area.

It’s pretty messy out there because anybody can call themselves a coach.

That’s first when learning how to start a coaching business. You need to have some training. You need to have the practice and be able to show you can results for your clients.

David Steele

Have something to sell and is worth being paid which is an element on how to start a coaching business.

Once you have that, it helps to have a particular audience in mind or what we call a “niche”. A niche is an identifiable group of people.

There’s a reason why you entered this profession. You have a mission of some kind. You want to help people in a certain way whether you help singles find the love of their life or couples live happily ever after or executives or small business owners.

David Steele

Your mission is how you want to help people, what you want to help them accomplish and your niche is who you want to help. It’s important to be clear about both of those.

When it comes to marketing and building your business, if you don’t know who you’re marketing to and if you try to market to the whole wide world, you’re going to fail.

David Steele

So once you have a particular target audience and you have something you want to market to them and you have a mission, you have a way that you want to help them, it also helps to have a message when you’re trying to learn how to start a coaching business.

Let’s say you want to help singles find the love of their life. What is the main message you have for singles? It will resonate with your ideal clients hopefully. You want to craft your message to speak to your ideal clients and that will really help your market.

Let’s say your ideal clients are singles who are discouraged, frustrated, and have given up. They still want to find love but they’re frustrated and discouraged that they don’t think it’s possible. So your message might be a want of hope for them and it needs to resonate for them to say “Don’t give up. It can still happen. It only takes one.” Once you have those pieces in place, then you can start marketing.

David Steele

What the heck is marketing and how important is it when trying to learn how to start a coaching business?

Marketing is simply communicating what you do. What a lot of folks don’t understand about marketing is by itself, it does not get you clients. The primary outcome of marketing is to generate prospects.

You might have a website or do blogging or be active on social media. The purpose of all those things would be simply to generate prospects.

David Steele

There’s a two-sided equation to get clients.

1. Marketing.
2. Enrollment.

David Steele

With enrollment, you need to be able to engage prospective clients in a way that results in them hiring you. It’s similar to sales but it’s not the same as sales because we’re not selling anything. We’re having a conversation that may or may not result in getting hired and we only want to take on a client if it’s a good fit. We’re not really trying to sell them our coaching, we’re trying to determine if this is a good fit or not.

One of the important things about enrollment that very few people understand is that it’s not selling. Are you the right fit for this client? Can this client benefit from what you have to offer? The purpose of enrolment is to answer these questions, yes or no.

David Steele

So when you have an enrollment conversation, the most important outcome is for your prospective client to make a decision.

When you think about it that way, you can be a coach and you are coaching this prospective client towards a decision “Is this a good fit for you?” Yes or no. Therefore it’s not selling,. It’s actually coaching. We’re doing what we do best.

David Steele

Let’s say you have all that down. You have your mission, your message, your niche and your marketing strategies that generate prospects for you and then you have your enrollment strategies that generate clients for you. Congratulations! You are now able to make a living as a coach.

David Steele

Right. But then again, that doesn’t automatically translate to who you going to help with that problem. We can’t help everybody.

Let’s say I’m a relationship coach for singles. I cannot possibly help all the singles in the world. I am probably not even the right coach to help all the singles in the word. There is a certain segment of the population I can help.

For example, I am passionate about marriage. I love marriage. I’ve tried it three times now! The third time to try that I’m happy to report.

David Steele

My wife and I just came out a book last year called “Radical Marriage.” It’s about the next evolution of marriage and it’s for people that value marriage and are passionate about marriage and want more than boring. They don’t just want to be comfortable and secured. They want to live their life as an adventure together. That’s a bit about radical marriage. I’m totally passionate about that. And that’s the kind of conversation I want to have with people.

If you are a single person, you say “You know what? I’m done with the marriage thing. I don’t want to be married. I just want to live with somebody or I just want somebody to hang-out with.” And then “You know what? I am not the right coach for you because I am passionate about marriage and that’s my mission. That’s what I want to help people do.”

David Steele

It is perfectly okay if you’re not into that. It just means we’re not a fit and it just means I can’t help everybody and it is a good thing for me to acknowledge that. Then I can focus on the people that resonate within who really want the result that I can deliver.

David Steele

There are plenty of other coaches out there for the singles that want to solve a particular problem or achieve a particular goal that does not involve marriage.

David Steele

Yes, absolutely.

Good marketing is communicating what you do in a way that strongly resonates with the people you want to help.

David Steele

That’s why I called the book Radical Marriage because I want to reach people that want more than just to be married. And want more than a smart, an okay, or enhanced marriage. They want something radical! They want to live life to the fullest!

Speaking about a niche, I would like to mention that I have a free audio program on my website at relationshipcoachinginstitute.com. You click on Blog, search back a little bit and you’ll find one on “How to choose a niche”. This is a program that I did outlining 11 strategies for choosing a niche.

David Steele

I guarantee you, if you go through all 11 strategies, you would have more niches than you know what to do with. The program was meant to support the members of Relationship Coaching Institute that were struggling and they know they needed a niche but they didn’t know how choose one.
Well, here are 11 strategies. So then, you can use those strategies to narrow it down to the niche that you’re most passionate about, that you have the most offer.

You can have more than one niche by the way.

When you’re starting out and you’re building your business, it’s best to focus on the one that is most likely to be successful for you and then you can expand from there.

David Steele

Exactly!

David Steele

I even like to challenge the folks at my practice building programs that you know you’re there when you can do an internet search on your specialty and you show up in the first page of results.

You’re not going to that with some very general thing like “wellness coaching.” It’s going to be something very specific like “Wellness coaching for paraplegic men.” It’s going to be specific that you type that in, they can’t help but you find yourself in the first page of results. Then you know you have a niche and a specialty.

David Steele

I would like to further define what those terms mean at least to me and this might be semantics. But what I noticed is a lot of folks get them confused. Here’s my little spill about that.

You have your profession and your profession might be a relationship coach. That’s what you might put on the line where you’re asked what your occupation is.

In my case, for decades I was a marriage and family therapist, so I would put marriage and family therapist in there. However, I identified myself more as a relationship coach because I fell in love with coaching in 1996 and have transitioned my practice to coaching 100%. I haven’t done therapy in 18 years. So when I put in occupation, it’s relationship coach.

Your specialty is the area focus within that profession.

As a relationship coach, there are a lot of possibilities. You can be a relationship coach for corporations, nations, couples, singles, or families. There are a lot of specialties. There’s a lot of focuses that you could have in your profession.

I know coaches that specialized in working with people with ADHD. That is a specialty. You’re helping people in a particular way, in a specialized way most others in the profession don’t.

David Steele

Your profession, your specialty, and your niche is who you help.

Let’s say you’re an ADHD coach. That’s your specialty. Who are you helping? Are you more focused locally? Are you in the schools focusing on kids? Are you focused on adults or on professionals and executives with ADHD?

Your niche is the specialized group of people who you help. It’s identifiable. The way you know an identifiable niche is you know where to find them. And this helps you for marketing.

David Steele

It helps to have a conversation with someone like you Luis, who mentors a coach to develop their identity as a coach and narrow down who their niche is.

David Steele

Oh, yeah. Cool.

David Steele

Before we end the discussion of marketing I would like to share with you my client creation machine, which is a particular model of marketing and getting clients. That’s my favorite model.

David Steele

Three primary forms of marketing:

1. Speaking
2. Writing
3. Networking

There are three primary ways you can communicate what you do.

David Steele

You can speak. We’re speaking right now.You guys do podcast. That’s a form of marketing for you and you’re marketing by providing value.

As coaches, we have many opportunities to speak. We can speak locally in front of groups. We can speak on teleseminars and webinars. We can do interviews. There are many ways you can speak to get your message out there and to reach more people.

Writing, whether they’re articles, blog posts, social media, blocks, or it’s a column in the newspaper. There are many ways to write to get your message out there and to reach the people that you want to reach.

David Steele

By the way, I’ve published a bunch of books. It was never my intention to write a book ever at all. Years ago, I had a rather negative attitude about books and say “I’m a coach. I want to help people be successful in their lives and I don’t want people to pick up and read a book thinking that they can get it from a book.”

Now, some years later, I written a bunch of books and you might want to know why. Well, I finally got it.

Books are a way of getting your message out there and reaching the people who can benefit from working with you. They’re like a big brochure.

Very few of us make any significant money from our books.

David Steele

Books open doors and it helps you reach people that you wouldn’t ordinarily reach.

It is helpful to publish a book and nowadays you can do very easily just by publishing something for the Kindle. It doesn’t have to be a whole book.

David Steele

It worked! I hooked you in!

David Steele

There is another strategy which a very cool one available nowadays. It might seem intimidating to write a whole book, figure out how to publish it, get a publisher, see if you can get into bookstores and all that. Nowadays, you can publish on almost anything on the Kindle and you don’t even need an ISBN.

Couple of years ago, I did a high value webinar from my network and the name of it is “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” It was my best effort at providing a lot of information, a very balanced view on “If you’re struggling now with your relationship, how do you address this decision? How do you decide if you should stay or you should go?”

If you know me as a relationship guy and as a coach, I’m not going to tell people what they should do but I’m going to provide decision making strategies and a lot of information that will help them make the best decision possible. It was an outstanding webinar.

David Steele

One of the best I’ve ever done and what I did is I transcribed the webinar. I just formatted the transcription a little bit and then added a cover and I published it on the Kindle.

Now, it is available on Amazon. It is helping me reach all the people out there struggling with their relationships. Now they are finding a resource that helps them address their biggest most important question they would ever encounter in their life.

For some people, it’s like “Should I get a divorce or not?” “Should I throw away 25 years and three kids with this person or not?” It’s a huge decision. It’s allowing me to be of service to people who ordinarily wouldn’t even know about me. Any of us can do this.

David Steele

Put together your best content. Conduct a webinar or tell a seminar and get it transcribed. Just format a little bit and get a graphic artist or use an online cover creator tool and publish it in the Kindle.

David Steele

Right! And you put that information right in there in the back of the book, all about you and what you have to offer. In your calls to action, send them to your website to download something free so you are using it as a lead generator.

David Steele

You can’t help it because what you’re doing is you’re in the creative energy of “I want to help this person,” and you’re applying all of who you are. You will have moments of brilliance. It’s just wonderful when they happen.

You can’t just sit down at your desk and say “Okay, I’m going to have a moment of brilliance and I’m going to have an idea for a book.” It doesn’t work like that.

When you’re in the flow working with your clients, you will have moments of brilliance. Capture and leverage those.

That can be your next book project, your next webinar, your next article, or one of your best go-to intervention as you design for your clients.

David Steele

Networking is a couple of things.

Networking includes building relationships with people and you can reach out to people that reach the audience you want to reach. You can reach out to potential clients and network with them.

Social media makes that very easy now, especially to identify and target them. LinkedIn has many targeting tools. You can target the exact kind of potential clients you’re looking for.

Networking involves people but it also involves co-marketing and joint ventures.

David Steele

Networking with other coaches or complementary professionals.

Let’s say networking with a therapist. The therapist can do their clinical work with somebody and you can do the coaching work for somebody.

There are all sorts of complementing professionals that serve the same audience as you do and you are more powerful together collaborating, co-marketing and joint venturing, then you could be on your own.

Speaking, writing, and networking are the three primary forms marketing and you only need one.

David Steele

Yeah! Okay. We talked about enrollment. The primary purpose of marketing is to create a lead or a prospect.

The primary purpose of enrollment is to have a conversation that results in your prospect making a decision Yes or No. Is this a fit for me or not? And that’s basically it.

David Steele

A lot of coaches will offer a sample session. A lot of coaching schools are recommending that you should provide a sample session. Let people experience coaching and that will help you get clients.

I don’t like it. I disagree with giving away free sessions. The reason is you are giving away a service that you want to be paid for and why should people pay for it if they’re getting it for free.

David Steele

That’s sort of the way people’s minds work even though it’s only one session. It’s not an entire coaching that’s going to deliver results for you. But that’s not the way the mind works. So I prefer to call it something different. Call it a chat or my favorite is call it a strategy session.

Invite a prospective client to make an appointment with you for a strategy session and let them know what a strategy session is.

The purpose of a strategy session is to get to know each other and for you to be of service to help them strategize how they can solve this problem or achieve their goal. So it’s not free coaching. It’s even better. It’s actually a deliverable.

You’re going to have an actionable strategy. You’re going to be clear about how you can accomplish his goal or solve his problem that has value. And so my favorite model for the enrollment conversation is to have a strategy session.

David Steele

In your strategy session, what are you going to do?

One of the first things you might do is talk to this prospective client about what they want, what they’re desire is and ask good questions. Have them speak to their vision, their desire, and what it is they want until you can see they’re getting excited and are emotionally engaged.

David Steele

Right.

David Steele

The very first step of enrollment would be talking with this prospective client about what they want and getting them excited. Have them talk specifically about what it looks like and how they’re life would be different. You want them emotionally excited and engaged.

The next step would to ask them what’s been getting in the way. What’s been challenging for you about this? And then, they’re speaking to their pain and frustration.

It’s almost like a yoyo. You’ve gotten them emotionally engaged positively, and now they’re getting emotionally engaged in touch with their pain and frustration.

David Steele

By that time, you have a strong sense of who they are, what you’re dealing with, what they want, whether or not you can help them. You are in a position to say “You know what? I have a program that’s perfect for people just like you who want this or who have been challenged with this. Would you like to hear about it?”

If it’s not a fit, then you respond with “You know what? I don’t think you’re a fit for my program but I like to make a referral to somebody who I think could help you.”

If it’s a fit, you share with them why you think it’s a fit and then you ask them if they want to hear about your program.
I’m using the word “program” very consciously because my motto is “Sell programs, not sessions.”

Sell programs, not sessions.

David Steele

Exactly! And the conversation about coaching is a loser. You say “Well, you know what? I think I could help you as a coach and here’s what coaching is and here’s how coaching helps and here’s what coaching is not. Coaching is different from therapy. You want some coaching, don’t you?” It’s just a loser of a conversation.

David Steele

You can be a coach and you can have a full practice of coaching clients and not use the word coach at all in your marketing or in your enrollment.

People don’t care about coaching. They don’t need to understand coaching. They have a goal. They have a problem. You can help them with it. They want results. That’s all that matters.

When you speak to what it is they want and help them get the result, it doesn’t matter what you call it.