Do Your Next Coaching Clients Want What You’re Offering Them?

I know you know what your current coaching clients want. But do you know what your prospects want? There’s a difference. Discovering exactly what prospects want from you is the key to enrolling lots of clients easily.

So many coaches miss this, because they already know what they’re selling – their coaching services. It’s a natural way to think, but it’s also a classic marketing mistake. They try to sell coaching as the solution before they’ve even asked what the prospect sees as the problem.

You have a profound appreciation of the power of coaching, and that’s essential. But if it leads you to try to sell coaching, you may be setting yourself up for poor results. The basic law of the marketplace is supply and demand. You can supply all you want of something you think has value, but if there is no demand for it, it won’t sell.

That’s why established businesses do research before they launch a new product. I realize “market research” sounds pretty off-putting – technical, boring, expensive. But at its core, it’s just listening to people to find out what they want. What could be more coach-like than that?

I call this “listening to your market” – and you have everything you need to start doing it. To prove it, try these steps:

1. Find 10 people in your coaching market, and ask them for a brief informational interview. Be clear that you’re not selling anything, but you want their help to understand what matters to people in your niche market.
2. Ask questions that draw out specific, practical information about what people in your market want most – their highest priority goals, the problems they are most motivated to solve.
3. Pay close attention to the language they use to describe these goals and problems.

If you do this, it will change how you think about enrolling new clients. You’ll understand what I mean when I say that marketing your coaching business is not about you. It’s about your prospects – what they want to achieve, and what is getting in their way. Marketers refer to what stands between a prospect and their goal as the “Gap”.

Understand what the Gap is for people in your niche market, weave that into everything you communicate about your coaching business, and you’ll get more effective at enrolling new clients.

Whenever I encounter a coach who’s having trouble enrolling a steady stream of ideal clients, these are the first questions I ask them:

Do you have a viable coaching market?
Do you know what they most want?

The answers to those two questions are the keys to attracting ideal clients and being in high demand as a coach. Nothing else will give you more leverage.

Want support to get those answers for your coaching business? I have a process that could save you years of heartache and tons of money putting out marketing messages that you don’t know whether your prospects will buy. I’ve streamlined it into an 8-week hands-on workshop where you come away with:

• your ideal niche market,
• an understanding of what they most want,
• a marketing message they will resonate with, and
• titles for a suite of coaching programs they will be motivated to buy.

Find out more about the Champion Your Ideal Coaching Market workshop here.