This is a guest post by my friend and colleague, Barb Wade, “The Coaches Coach”.

As most coaches know, the bridge between a potential new client’s interest and their actually signing on to coach with you is always some kind of a powerful exploratory conversation. There’s nothing that comes close to the intimacy that is created when you speak voice-to-voice with a potential client, exploring the tremendous cost of the problems they’re facing, and demonstrating that your guidance and expertise will solve their challenges and help them truly create the life or career that they dream of.

I call these sessions “Strategy Sessions” or “Discovery Sessions,” and again, they’re a first hand opportunity for your potential client to feel heard and understood, and to begin to have some hope that you can truly guide them to change their situation. This is why, after such an empowering conversation, coaches are often successful at enrolling their potential client into one of their paid coaching programs.

So naturally, generating these initial, exploratory conversations is crucial. Here are 5 ways to easily and naturally invite potential clients from your ideal target market into such a conversation.

Continue reading 5 Easy Ways To Start Enrolling New Clients NOW – by Barb Wade

Are you offering consults to prospective coaching clients? If not, I hope by the end of this post you will take my 90 day challenge and find out how the habit of giving consults can bring you clients right now. In fact, I double dog dare you to find anything better to enroll new clients into your high value programs!

It’s easy to pour your time into Internet marketing, thinking that social networking and blogging alone will get you all the clients you need. But those methods are best for building a leads list and bringing you future clients. If you want more coaching clients right now — real time connection is still the easiest, most direct and most effective way to engage new clients. And it’s fun!

Enrolling is a simple coaching skill that will do more than any other approach to get you high paying private clients. And you can easily adapt the enrollment process to preview teleclasses and public speaking, to enroll people into your group programs too.

Should I Give a Sample Session or Consult?

Most coaching schools recommend delivering a full blown coaching session as a sample to enroll clients. There’s nothing better for stretching your coaching skills as you’re first getting started. And, if you are vigilant about keeping your time boundaries, avoiding over-delivery, and acing the close; prospects will become your clients through sample sessions.

But, after a while, you might find that sample sessions are too time consuming. Coaches also tell me that in sample sessions they tend to focus more on their technique than engaging the client. From sample coaching, prospects often slip away from the full session feeling “done” rather than primed for long-term support.

A different approach is to set up a short, themed consult as a simple discovery process to enroll clients. You still get to use your coaching skills – asking powerful questions and listening – to quickly uncover where your prospect wants to go, where they are now, and the gap in between.

Then it’s easy to show them how you can help them bridge that GAP.

Continue reading Consults: The #1 Easiest Way to Enroll Coaching Clients