Most coaches, consultants or freelancers are involved in the hungry, needy, merry-go-round of meetings, networking, social networking to secure what they believe are quality prospects for possible lucrative coaching contracts.

However, it may pay you well to DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what the general marketplace is doing.

In fact, the grandfather of personal development and self-help, Earl Nightingale said that if you can’t find a good role model for doing what you want to do, look around at what the majority are doing, and don’t do it – do the opposite! Because the majority means mediocrity. We think Earl was on to something!

For most coaches, the ultimate brochure, business card, advertisement, promotional document, they could ever own, is – to BE their BEST CLIENT! And then, to deliver their unique style of coaching at every opportune moment.

Let’s take these two ideas and turn them into practical, workable tools you can take into the marketplace, instantly.

Being Your Own Best Client

You’ve probably noticed the big worldwide shift towards, Life Coaching, Life Balance and Coaching in all its forms. In fact, you may already know that the profession itself is one of the fastest-moving professions in the world.

However, many of the very people who promote and stomp their feet about life change are themselves in a chaotic and disorganised mess! Not all. Many.

But look, whether they are in a mess or not, the whole idea of life balance should strike a powerful chord for you – especially if you’re looking to bag yourself a good number of fee-paying clients.

Here’s why.

There are a high number of coaches, consultants and mentors who are focused on the ‘I’ve got to MAKE THIS BUSINESS WORK, COME HELL OR HIGH WATER’ that, they’ve missed the boat entirely.

Whilst they’re busy buying into the idea that sacrificing all else in order to pursue their most cherished want, they’re leaving a trail of chaos for all to see, especially their prospective clients!

• What kind of catastrophic trail are we talking about?
• A body so out-of-shape that a person will soon really detest themselves…
• So neck-deep in personal and business debt, with no attempt to come out and cure it.
• Involved in loveless personal relationships which are heading down the sewer with no way out…
• Mental disharmony because the mind being strewn all over the place like a berserk orangutan…

Engaging in lifeless, lethargic language and communication making social interaction a chore and bore for others…

Do you feel you’re heading towards your own version of the above?

Well, if you’re looking for a goodly number of fee paying clients, here’s the big secret: FIX YOURSELF FIRST!

You see, very rarely does an award or qualification bring you success.

You have to DO something in order to bring it to life. Being your own good example of living a life in balance is the biggest testimonial, the biggest message of value you can send out in to the marketplace.

For, not only will you have that inner confidence and steely conviction, you’ll have a practical, experiential voice to speak from. There’s nothing worse than spluttering and faking it inside about wanting to help others when we ourselves are in the driving seat of our own lunatic life.

On the other hand, there’s a magic that happens when the pieces of our own life start falling into place for others to see. It’s best to lead by example and doing, rather than theory and mere words.

So, what should you be committed to in order to turn your own life into a role model?

Well, we’d suggest that there are seven commitments you should guard and treasure with your life. And, if you follow them and make them part of your daily regime, your daily curriculum of living, you can’t help but draw to you those type of clients who’ll love to have you coach them to fabulous success.

Make it a daily practice to be committed to:

1. your mind

2. action

3. responsibility

4. energy

5. friends and family

6. career and business goals

7. wealth

If you truly make it daily practice to absorb these seven commitments into your life, you’ll create a life that’s example-led. And, you’ll be so on-track, so focussed, so dedicated to your own life and your own work that people can’t help be drawn to you and what you stand for.

And that’s a beautiful moment when it happens. For then you’ll know that there’s no need for all that demoralising, convincing, persuading and selling of your services. It’ll happen because of who you are and what you do.

Yes, effective marketing material is important. However, you’ll find that you won’t be doing it the same way everyone else does. There won’t be that dry-mouth desperation for business. You see, you’ll be creating a distinction. That is a compelling advantage that’ll set you apart in the marketplace based on what you are doing in your own life.

It’s a refreshing way to go about promoting your services; by taking full and complete ownership and responsibility of your life. And it can happen for you in an instant.

The problem happens when we think about things for too long. We let our own head dissipate the power of our intentions. It’s the timeframe we give ourselves to change, that’s where the problem is.

You see, when we really think about it, the decision to do anything, happens in a split second – it’s the thinking time which is what causes the agony.

Go ahead and take those seven commitments to heart and let them weave their magic. For in a few weeks time you won’t believe what it will do to you and how you’ll see yourself.

Plus you’ll get a different feel and vibration from the marketplace towards you and what you can do to help them. I think you’ll find it exciting.

Moment-By-Moment Coaching

And once you HAVE mastered your own life, or are taking great strides to do so, you’ll see a natural, attractive force taking shape. The FORCE of YOU!

Your own confidence in your life starts to exude a spark of electricity with everyone you come into contact with, in every email you write, in every conversation you have. In those daily ‘conversations’, you’ll see that the natural way to make others feel at ease, is to ask warm, non-threatening though bold, fearless and direct questions.

Those questions are NOT to be about you, your practice, your skills, your abilities – your job is to serve others. To listen with intent like you’ve never listened before.

If through your simple, non-threatening dialogue, you just GIVE, SERVE and SHARE in helping others with what’s important in THEIR lives, people will be drawn to you even more.

You’ll find that there’s an irresistible nature to you and what you stand for. People can’t but help be involved in a conversation with you. And, because coaching is such a personal profession, don’t feel that things need to happen there and then in terms of securing a business or personal coaching client.

However, through an ongoing dialogue, a continuing conversation, you’ll see that through this process., and the ‘be your own client’ outlined above, you’ll be drawing prospective, fee paying clients in to your life like never before.

We all know that we need to ask our clients question in order to get to the real core problem or desired solution. But what questions are they?

How can YOU ‘coach’ your clients? Here’s a quick and easy way to remember what to ask: S.C.O.R.E.

Symptoms
Causes
Outcome
Resources
Effects

Select which questions feels most appropriate for the situation:

Symptoms

• What’s not working?
• What do you want to change?
• What is the problem that you would like to solve?
• When so you notice this problem?
• What are the signs that there is a problem?

Causes

• What do you believe are the causes of the problem?
• What triggers it off?
• What events or contexts cause the problem to happen?
• What stops you from fixing this?
• Who or what is benefiting from you not fixing this?

Outcome

• What do you want instead of this problem?
• What outcome do you seek?
• Where do you want to get to?
• How would you know if you had solved this problem?

Resources

• What resources (skills/money/equipment/contacts) do you have that you can use to solve this problem?
• Have you solved similar problems in the past?
• What resources do you already have that you can use to solve this problem?
• Do you know anyone else who has these resources or has overcome this similar challenge?

Effects

• What will it do for you/your team/your organisation for you to attain this solution?
• What will be affected by your solving this problem?
• Who else will be affected when you have your outcome?
• What else is possible?
• How will reaching your outcome change things?
• How will you manage the changes?
• What will you learn from it?

These question will help you understand your client and to build rapport and trust – Key requirements in any successful relationship.

Happy Selling!

by Debbie Robinson

Your time has financial worth as well as a professional value

No matter how much you want to help your clients, you need to remember that your time really is money, which means managing your coaching time carefully.

Many coaches over-commit their time and under-charge for their services – but you are running a business and so you need to think commercially to protect the future of your practice.

Ask yourself:

• ‘How much do I want and need to earn each year?’
• ‘What is the market rate, and what is my scale of charges?’
• ‘How many clients do I want and /or need to make this work – per year, per month, per week?’ (Taking account of seasonal variations.)
• ‘What is my customer profile?’
• ‘How am I going to find them?’

It is wise to agree a scale of times and charges up-front, otherwise you may find yourself working twice as long for half your fee. Consider offering a series of sessions and encourage pre-payment, rather than charging by the hour.

There would be little point in anyone having a single one-hour session with a personal trainer and the same applies to coaching. Instead, focus on selling a course of sessions.

After a short telephone consultation of about 15 minutes, you will be able to assess how many sessions a client is likely to need. You can then say something like, “I would estimate that we will work together for about six weeks. During that time you will have (for example) four face-to-face (or telephone) appointments with email or telephone support between sessions to share your success. The price for a six-week course is £X.’’

The majority of people are happy to pay upfront for a course as a symbol of their commitment to the process – and it gets the money bit out of the way. Not only does it increase client commitment in some cases, it also means that if someone cancels at the last minute, or if you go over time, you can charge accordingly.

Note: Never offer a free trial session. The 15-minute consultation is to find out what they would like to achieve and for you to show them how you can help.

• If you position yourself as an expert, you more likely to be sought after and people will be prepared to pay more for your help. Remember generalists seek clients; and clients seek specialists.
• Consider creating a web presence; attend events and locations where potential clients will be; focus on building relationships not just selling.
• Wherever possible, find a way to make personal contact with prospective business clients. You will win more business that way. Remember – people buy from people – and relationships are important.
• If you receive an initial email that asks, ‘How much will it cost me?’ don’t email a financial quote in reply. Invite them to call you for an informal chat to assess your needs. This is the ideal time to make a personal impression and create a communication bridge.
• In the modern world of tweeting and emailing it is easy to overlook the power of the voice or face-to-face communication. Give your prospects a chance to speak to you or meet you, and to ask questions. You are more likely to win more business that way.

Remember: you are not just charging for your time, you are charging for your expertise and the years of training and experience that have gone in to gaining that expertise. If you believe in your own worth and offer a service that reflects your value, your clients recognise it and willingly pay for it too.

Bev James

About Bev

Bev is CEO of The Academy Group which includes The Entrepreneurs’ Business Academy (EBA) & EBA for Coaches which are both joint ventures with James Caan. Her book “Do It! or Ditch It” has already been listed as a bestselling business title and she is ready to pass on her success to your organisation.

Connect with Bev on Google+

Are good sales people born or made? This age old question is being pondered by many business owners and managers as they strive to increase their turnover and profitability.

Training budgets may have been cut back to the bone to preserve cash flow in these challenging economic times, so we cross our fingers and hope that good sales people are born and all we need to do is find them and recruit them!

One major obstacle is that often good sales people tend to stay loyal to their employer and rarely come on to the open market. If they do move, they tend to via the unadvertised market through referral and word of mouth. So it seems logical to ‘make’ or develop good sales people ourselves.

There seems to be is a lot of confusion regarding the terms ‘hunters and farmers’. Unfortunately it means different thing to different people. So what is a ‘hunter’ sales person? A broad definition is a sales person that thrives on generating new business in new clients. The problem is that on the whole ‘hunters’ lack motivation to nurture ongoing relationships and manage the associated administration of maintaining an existing client relationship. ‘Hunters’ can neglect clients as they search for the next big deal and the ‘buzz’ of cracking yet another new account.

This can of course be remedied by transferring the client over to a ‘farmer’ who excels in maintaining and developing relationships with existing clients. Each sales style is crucial in any organisations however, it can be cost prohibitive to have both styles covered by different people and a balance needs to be found.

Just recruiting ‘hunters’ can be a real problem as it can leave your existing clients neglected and frustrated and prone to seeking out alternative partners, your competition!

It is well know that it costs considerably more to attract and win new clients than maintain and care for existing clients. Whilst it is vital to have a fresh crop of clients developing at any one time it is important to ensure that the balance is right. Conversely just recruiting farmers can leave you exposed and reliant on too few clients and a dwindling pipeline of opportunity.

Ensuring that your sales team is united in its goal and have a shared and clear vision of what they are required to achieve is vital. Unfortunately, this is rarely communicated succinctly by management teams and whilst sales teams can appear productive and busy they may not truly be in alignment with the company’s strategic and tactical objectives.

What messages are you giving to your team? Are your remuneration and incentive schemes driving the desired behaviour and motivation? How do you reward success and failure?

Many factors will affect sales teams’ performance. The following questions and suggestions may provide an insight in how to improve your sales team’s success.

How can I increase sales performance?

Work on developing confidence and reframing negative experiences to promote a positive attitude and the opportunity to improve and develop.

Weed out limiting beliefs that may be holding back personal or team performance. This can open up hidden strengths and abilities that will enable the sales person or team to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ that they have unconsciously set themselves.

How can I ensure that my hunters and farmer’s are as productive as possible?

Make sure you have the right sales person in the right role or work on developing motivation by understanding what their key drivers are and introduce these into the less stimulating and motivating tasks.

How can I build confidence and consistency in my team?

Understanding how we each perceive the world and what our beliefs are can increase our awareness and consequently our choices and our resulting behaviour.

Once we know what skills we have and what additional ones we need we can develop our resource-fullness. We have all the resources we need to succeed!

How can we engage with our clients more effectively?

Building rapport is vital, but how many of your sales team has been taught how to do this effectively and why it is so important? Teach them!

Ensure that your sales teams, having built rapport, fully understand the client’s challenges before they prescribe a solution or product.

In order to engage with decision makers your team needs to have the confidence that they can communicate at all levels. This needs focus to ensure your pipe line is not full of poorly qualified opportunities that never come to fruition.

How can we close more business?

Take sales team development seriously. Invest in increasing awareness and developing options and choices which builds confidence which in turn will drive motivation to achieve targets and personal goals.

Build rapport with your clients. Make it a key sales skill. When sales teams truly ‘click’ with clients they can achieve great things. This should be a premeditated and subtle focus of every sales team and is easy to learn and incredible powerful!

by Debbie Robinson

My discovery of coaching started when we involved a business coach as part of a management development programme I was working on within a large property services plc. I was running part of the training day when the coach explained how her questioning techniques would help managers deal with conflicts better, aid team participation, motivation and employee development.

I was impressed and immediately saw how useful it could be in a vast range of situations. To explore it more, and as part of my own personal development, I requested to work directly with a coach. That was the real turning point.

I decided training as a coach was my way forward but it was a busy time. I was in the midst of buying a new house, half way through a Masters Degree in HRM, under threat of redundancy and found out I was pregnant! I took my maternity leave early to pursue the idea and went on the Certificate Weekend with The Coaching Academy. Then I was totally hooked on learning to become a great coach and to work for myself.

I did my research carefully and made an informed decision who to train with, taking into account my situation, learning style and the practicalities of studying. For me, The Coaching Academy was the right choice. Their reputation and thorough training courses included lots of participation, practical exercises, interactive training days as well as using methodology suited me. I saw the benefit in being examined in all these areas as part of the diplomas. Weekend training days and studying at my own pace through the other learning materials meant less pressure for me. I had no idea how motherhood would affect me.

I thoroughly enjoyed my training with The Coaching Academy, especially the training days because of the buzz of excitement and self-development that goes on there. It took me two years and I qualified with a distinction in the Personal Performance Coaching Diploma.

When I launched my business I took on board the marketing information and support to get started as a coach provided. I understood the benefit of having a niche, though, because of my HR and previous recruitment background wasn’t sure what my niche would be.

After I’d been coaching paying clients for a while, I looked at who I had been working with and what on. I have a discounted rate for trainee coaches and really enjoy spurring them on to overcome their fears, leap into business and start marketing themselves. All the people I’d coached who wanted careers or confidence coaching were actually small businesses, people wanting to work for themselves or start their own business.

Small Business and Start-up Business Coaching has become my niche. I mainly work with those who are working alone on their business.

I took a step back and looked at what this meant. As a new small business myself I needed to build credibility in this area. So, I dedicated myself to learning about what will help small businesses start and grow. I constantly improve my skills and knowledge in both coaching and for small business marketing, communication, planning and so on. I’ve embraced social media and in a very short space of time have an established great presence on LinkedIn, a Facebook page and have over 1000 targeted followers on Twitter.

I set up a coaching circle locally and now use coaching, networking, co-working and even my accountant and Twitter so that I don’t feel isolated working on my own.

I’ve always been very good at planning and organising, so that forms quite a large part of how I’ve done so much myself and how I help the people who work with me. What I’ve found for me and my small business clients is that we all want it now! When you’re ready, it is frustrating waiting for things to happen and keeping up motivation whilst getting going can be tough. You can start marketing and planning activities even before you launch. With well thought out plans, a mentor or coach and other support, you really can achieve much more than you could imagine. I’m proof of that!

In less than a year, I’ve organised two events for local businesses, learnt and applied knowledge of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). My website, at the time of writing, is number one on Google for ‘Small Business Assistance’ and on page one for other searches I’ve been working on in my area – Croydon and Surrey. I’ve had articles published in papers and magazines. The first news story written about me was in the Croydon Advertiser on 7 January and included my small business workshops. I’ve also been asked to speak, write articles and about blogging for third parties too.

One of my favourite coaching questions is, ‘What would be fantastic to achieve, if you dared to imagine you could?’ I don’t think I dared imagine this much success, activity and interest in me, even just six months ago!

I absolutely love coaching, being a coach and mostly how the possibilities of it’s usefulness are endless. It’s the most fulfilling role I’ve ever had and made me the happiest I’ve ever been, and I was quite happy before! I say, ‘My success is only in your success’, to my clients, and that’s very satisfying and I think it is a wonderful position to be in.

If you’re looking at pursuing coaching to enhance your career, make a change or just resolve some issues, I’d suggest, (as I would never give advice!) that you carefully research how you can do this in the best way that will suit you and then to go for it!

If you’re in training, started using coaching in your work or set up on your own, I’d encourage you to take all opportunities to be coached, get over any fears and anxieties you have and continue to use coaching to move you forward. This means you can reap the benefits and show others how much it can do for them, as it does for you. Take advice and support from wherever you can get it and follow those who inspire you. Sign up to their newsletters, blogs and follow them on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep you motivated, always positive and growing.

Did I mention, I had a beautiful baby girl and I love being a mum so much I decided to work only part-time on my business?!

It was worth going through with a coach how my business would fit in with my life, and it’s enabled me to maintain a great work-life balance. I have limited childcare so it’s worked really well for me, and those I work with, having sessions by phone and over the internet in the evenings.

The best bits about becoming a coach, for me, is that it is amazing doing something you love, helping others to achieve what they want too and that it really doesn’t feel like ‘work’!

by Wendy Ager