Gaining First 10 Customers as a Coach

When you decide to launch your coaching business, quitting and getting started is half the battle. It’s hard to quit your job and invest in something new, but it’s even harder to find the people you need to use your service or your product. You want to be the best of the best, and you can be, but you have to be realistic about finding those first ten customers as a coach. Many people go into their consulting business believing that they will be instantly successful! However, every single person who has started working for themselves begins with nothing: no customers, no client leads, zilch. If you are new to the coaching world, you need every tip and trick that you can get to ensure that you succeed. 

Getting that first customer is your first hurdle.

Once you capture the first one, you can slowly but surely start to build that all-important email list. It doesn’t have to be the hardest thing that you ever do, either. As long as you’re prepared, you can get the customers that you need for your brand to take off.

So, let’s get started with the best tips and tricks out there. You’ll soon have a long client list you can grow!

Ten Customers? It’s Doable

If there is one doable thing, it’s finding ten customers. Seth wrote First, Ten in 2009, and some of the advice here just doesn’t get old. It can be overwhelming to start with, but you can leverage your existing network and start getting things moving. It’s not a secret: your coaching business should be the loudest thing that you shout about. It would be best if you told people what you’re doing and your immediate network will be interested in supporting you. Sure, they may not be the right customers, but they will be able to recommend you to their networks, which means you have an instantly bigger pool of people who are listening to what you can do. If you start by researching your potential clients, you can learn the problems they experience and know if you are the solution to that problem. Once you do this, you have a jumping-off point to get started, and your first ten customers will start to become a reality.

Build A Connection

The next step is often the most overwhelming for newbies to their consulting business, but without good connections with customers, you won’t be able to build that email list you need. Building a connection with customers doesn’t have to be overly complicated: you can make it simple. The idea is to have patience here as you want to get the customers who are relevant to your business interested in the lead magnets you’ve created. Gaining customers with lead magnets isn’t the goal: gaining interest is. They don’t have to buy from you off the bat, but if you can get people to sign up to your email list, it means that they’re interested in what you have to say. Once you get people signing up to your email list, nurture that audience. Offer free calls for 20 minutes to give them a taste of what you can do. If a person is interested in your email list, they’re already interested in what you have to say. That 20-minute call could turn that interest into a paying customer. Also see these calls as a great way to get more insight from a potential customer. In their own words they will be sharing what their pain-points and problems are, along with their goals and desired solution. 

Create Buying Opportunities

You can’t call anyone a customer until there has been an exchange of money for services, which means you need to create opportunities for people to buy from you. You need to create an offer, so that people can buy from you. Consider offering  ‘power hours’ or a small block of further calls/sessions that can be purchased based on a particular issue they are having. Once you have these buying opportunities,  you can market them and get further customers and interest as a result. Allowing them to buy from you gets them the outcome they want, and it gets you new customers – win-win!

Share Your Plans

A big part of building those first ten customers as a coach is knowing who your potential customers are in the first place and then approaching them. Sharing your plans with the local community will get the locals interested first, and you can write to potential customers who already have that connection to your ideal clients. Once you do that, you can then join local and distant networking events/organisations to get your business noticed. After you get involved, you can meet local influences who can advertise your business and talk about you to a broader following. Word of mouth is so important for marketing a business, and you will get so much more interest this way.

Understand What You Offer

Before you can tell the world what you are offering, you need to understand the full package. You must be able to talk about your service with confidence! Know how to communicate what you offer, gain feedback and reviews and create case studies for clients, you’ll win more business. It’s nice to share the blog posts and lead magnets to bring customers to your door, but it’s better to understand the transformative service that you offer in the first place. Clients should be able to know precisely what you can do for them before they buy. 

Be Available Online

You already know that you need your website to be available to customers at all times, but what else could you do? All social media roads should lead to your website, which means that your social media profiles need to be active, attended to and reflective of what you do and how you can help people. It’s the smart way to work, and it will help your customers to feel confident in your abilities.

If you need to create a website this article Custom Web Design Vs Website Templates: Which One is Best For A Small Business? will give you some great advice. 

Need more support with starting your business, let’s talk through which approach is best for your business, book a call.