Tag Archives: Coaching

How to Start and RAPIDLY Grow a Coaching Business – Coach, Are You EXCITING to Know?

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Are you EXCITING to be around, to know, to work with? Or are you dull?

I know that you don’t intend to be dull, but, frankly, most coaches are.

  • When talking to new prospects are constantly driving toward your end goal, on focus, but still not building excitement in the prospect?
  • When coaching, are you matter of fact, to the point, and even when coaching just plod along in the direction you are trying to lead your client?

Most coaches are.

When coaching other coaches on growing their business, I frequently point out that they’ve got a misconception about what they SHOULD be doing.

As coaches, we often believe that our job is to “lead the horse to water” but it isn’t.

It’s to make him thirsty.

Leading the horse to water can be dull. It’s plain old coaching the prospect to help him find his way to the water. When you meet someone for the first time it just plain seems logical to

  • Discover what he wants and needs
  • And lead him, coach him, to help him get that

It seems logical that when he finds his way to what he wants and needs that he’ll be grateful and may hire you, or he may just see how valuable you are and hire you.

WRONG!!!!

How Not to Get the Sale

Most of the time one of these things happen, and none of them are a coaching sale.

  • He’ll get what he wants so he’ll stop right there. He doesn’t need to hire you now.
  • Some will see what you are doing before you get them there, and plain tell you “that won’t work, already been there, done that”. And no matter whether that WAS the way or not, they have shut down.
  • You may show them the way, but they can’t seem to accomplish it after leaving that meeting, so they don’t see nay need to hire you.
  • Some will think, “that was easy, Gee, why would I have to hire him for THAT?”

In other words, these prospects will see this as either something that won’t work, or something that’s so easy to do that they either don’t need to hire you, or at least shouldn’t have to pay THAT MUCH for something this simple.

More people will use the session to “disqualify you” from the job than those that will discover how much they really need you.

But what would happen if, instead,  you left them with their mouths watering for you? So worked up and so excited that they’d do almost anything to have THAT?

How do you do that? SIMPLE.

How to Get TONS of Sales

Stop leading them to the water, but spend the time building an expectation of what will happen, or what could happen IF they ever worked for you.

Some ways of doing that,

Ask questions, explore with them on the value of achieving their goal 

  • Where do you want to be by when?
  • How valuable is that to you to be there? And how valuable is that to do it by that time?
  • What’s the cost to you right at this moment for not being there already?

Paint Word Pictures of What the Future Will Look Like WHEN they Get There

  • Stop and think for just a moment. Tell me what you’ll look like (or their business will look like, or their family, or their career) six months from today IF (or when) you accomplish XYZ (or break down the barriers caused by XYZ)
  • What will you be able to do (in your life, in your business) because of that
  • Tell me, just how valuable is that? What’s it REALLY Worth to you?
  • Expand on that, there’s more to this than dollars and cents, what else will you be able to do simply because you’ve reached that new plateau?

Notice something here?

This is all about discovering the value of “getting there.” It has nothing to do with “how to get there.”

It’s all still “coaching” but the difference is “where they end up.” The way most coaches do it is to coach them toward finding answers of how to get there, but these are finding answers fo how valuable it would be ot get there. The bottom line difference is that this will EXCITE your prospect about resolving his problems, causing him to act NOW.

He’s ready to Fix his problem right now. But the questions still not answered by your prospect is:

  • Can you help him?
  • Have you done this before?
  • How good are you at doing this?
  • Is what you do or what you have THE ONLY answer
  • What are the other options
  • Are you the most valuable of all of those options

Look at it this way, so far you’ve sold him that he’s really excited about fixing his situation. Now you have to convince him that you have the most valuable answer, and that you’ve even done it before.

How do you do that?

The best way is “to tell a story.” So, either as you talk about or ask a question and get an answer from your prospect, it’s pretty easy to say something like, “I understand how important that must be to you. I once had a client who felt that way as well, in fact that client _______________”

Build Even MORE Excitement by Telling an Exciting Story Excitingly

Tell a story about THE VALUE that client got. It might look something like, “one of my previous clients had exactly that same issue, not enough clients. This client, a Mary Kay rep, went from less than one new client a year to 72 within the next 2 weeks . . . 2 WEEKS can you imagine that? Would you like to see your business go up like that in just 2 WEEK?”

Be sure to BE EXCITED about those kinds of results. The more excited you become, the more excited your prospect will become.

Keep in mind that people buy emotionally, and THEN justify it logically. So, you get excited about the results you’ve provided, and your prospects will get excited about your results and the results they could get working with you.

Tha’s the key to increasing your coaching sales by 5-10 times at least.

Coaching Compared

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There are any number of ways in which we can help people at work perform better and solve problems; coaching is just one. Let’s consider the ways it may be similar or different to some of the other obvious techniques. Specifically, let’s look at:

Coaching and Teaching

Coaching and Training

Coaching and Mentoring

Coaching and Counselling

Coaching and Teaching

We know from our own experience at school that teaching tends to be delivered to groups, to a predetermined lesson plan, with people of mixed abilities developing their understanding as best they can.

Of course, teaching can be given on a one to one basis and there are countless people who have benefited from being taught or tutored in this way.

However, the dominant party in the teacher-pupil relationship is the teacher. The teacher’s role is to pass on knowledge, facts and wisdom. Our role, as pupils, is to do what we can to soak it all up.

We have little scope to set or follow our own agenda and we have to try to interpret what the teacher is saying and make sense of it against our own experience.

Coaching on the other hand is more often than not delivered one to one. It is the coachee (the person being coached) who is best placed to decide on the issues to be discussed and to set the agenda. As coaches, we are not there to provide input or advice or to tell the coachee how we would do things. Instead our role is to probe and encourage and help the coachee make sense of things for him or her self.

This can be a difficult concept to grasp, so let’s look at a comparison. We awake in the morning and stumble across the the bathroom to begin the first major task of the day: to look presentable.

For some this will mean dragging a razor across their face and a comb through their hair, whilst others will concentrate on applying make up and hair spray etc. All of this activity would be almost impossible without our trusty friend – the bathroom mirror.

But does the mirror say “Ooh I wouldn’t do it like that” or “that’s not how we usually shave here” or “you’ve never done your hair like that before”? Of course not! But the mirror does help us to make sense of what’s going on and to achieve our aim – in this case, to look presentable.

When we are coaching we are trying to perform the same function. The best coaches will hold up a ‘mirror’ so that people can develop a deep sense of self-awareness. When people are highly self-aware they have more choices about how to move issues forward.

Coaching and Training

With this in mind we can see that coaching is different to training. Training is concerned with helping people to perform in their roles of course, but again it is centred on the trainer and the subject matter, not the individual.

Coaching and Mentoring

Coaching and mentoring share many of the same skills and abilities but are usually delivered by different people. Mentors, typically, are senior people drawn from outside the line management relationship who take us aside and enable us to benefit from their experience.

If it is coaching we want however, we are probably best advised not to seek a more experienced person who may be overly tempted to persuade us to ‘do it their way’.

Given that we can now see that coaching is wholly concerned with drawing out and not putting in, we can also see how it is possible for anyone with the right skills to coach us – their position in the organization is irrelevant.

Coaching and Counselling

When we consider how coaching compares with counselling we need to think about the limitations of coaching. Coaching in organizations is concerned with helping people with performing well in their jobs, not in dealing with deep-rooted problems from the past.

It may be that as we coach we do uncover some painful or personal issues, but we need to know when to bring in the appropriate expertise. Many effective coaches have never trained as counsellors or therapists, but can still deliver excellent coaching support.

Arguably this exercise in comparison is academic. Do we really need to worry what method is used to develop people as long as they are being developed?

The short answer is no, but we do need to understand the unique qualities of coaching so that we can use it with choice and with greater care.

In reality good coaches draw on all of these different approaches as they work with individuals and will not be concerned with whether they are coaching or teaching at any one point in time. However, they will be wholly concerned with using the right approach based on the needs of the individual and the demands of the situation.