Why i'll never suggest cold calling to grow your coaching business

Welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarfe, a senior executive Coach with over 17 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as a mentor and business coach to other executive coaches. When it comes to coaching and the business of coaching, I have done it all. So I've grown coaching businesses solo and in partnership. I've been an in house coach and I've been an associate coach. And so when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know, I'm sharing from a place of a huge amount of experience, a lot of empathy, and having walked the walk, I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the Corporate to Coach accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their business with more corporate clients. Listen in for lots of practical tips, inspiring stories and prompts to grow your business your way. Okay, so I just want to recap the last few episodes and the episode today have been a bit of a series on outreach, which is a hugely important part of your business development strategy. In the last episode I was talking about how the fear of being salesy gets in the way of our warm outreach and some strategies to overcome that. And in the episode before that, so two weeks ago I really talked about why warm outreach is so important and how it's the missing element in many coaching business development strategies. Today we're going to talk about why I will never be a business coach who tells you to do cold outreach. I'm going to talk about cold outreach things like cold calling, cold LinkedIn, DMs, mass cold emails and why it rarely works and what I want you to do instead. And also partly just to reassure you that if we were to work together, I will not be getting you to take this approach. So for many reasons which I'm going to cover today. So firstly, what is cold outreach? What is warm outreach? Cold outreach is contacting someone that you have no prior relationship, context or trust with, whereas warm outreach is reaching out to someone who already knows of you, shares a mutual context with you, and has in some way consented to communication with you. Right. So they've you're either connected or you have their contact details, you know, so you are in a communication orbit with that person. So why don't I recommend cold outreach? Mostly because I don't think it works and it doesn't work for a few reasons and I'm particularly talking about in the context of selling executive coaching to organizational clients. So the first reason why cold outreach doesn't work very well in this context is that there is no I Guess trust, baseline to anchor in. And so what that means is that the leap that you're trying to make to go from zero to client is just exponentially higher. Because not only do you have to go in and actually build your credibility as a coach or facilitator or consultant, depending on the flavor of your offers, you also have to even get back to zero to overcome skepticism and suspicion and lack of context. And so it can feel very transactional from the start. And you know, to put it in a less refined way, it can feel like pushing shit uphill because you don't have that found foundational level of trust, of shared understanding. So even to get back to that place of neutrality, you've got work to do to overcome that. And in many cases I believe that is insurmountable. Another reason why cold outreach doesn't really work is that there's a very low response rate. So the reason why people do cold calling is because when you do it at scale, you can get outcomes, right, you can get results. But the volume required to counter the low response rate that you will have is going to be so high that you're going to need to be looking at mass engagement strategies, right? That usually involves automations, bots, or, you know, really, that's it. Or spending all of your time doing this. Because like, if, let's say for warm outreach, we could expect a response rate of between 20 and 40%, depending on the warmth of your connections. For cold outreach, we would expect between, you know, maybe 1 to 3% would be more normal. So you can see that the volume that is required is so much more that, you know, you have to weigh up whether it's worth it. And in this, on the same vein, it's really pretty inefficient because the amount of time you're investing versus the payoff. I don't think that maths adds up when we're looking at the organizational client, that context, I just don't think it stacks up. Another reason why it doesn't work is because of the inner experience that you as a coach will have and that internal resistance that you may experience. And what I mean by that is that there is a fairly high emotional cost associated with cold outreach, and that is the emotional cost of primarily like the level of rejection, which is much higher. Now I think I mentioned last week that actually when we're doing outreach of any sort, and I'm including warm outreach, which is what I recommend, you are going to find that most people are not going to respond to you. But let's say the difference is, you know, if we are getting a 30% response rate, 70% people just don't reply. With our warm outreach, right. There is still like, you know, that means that 3 out of 10 people are responding. So there's something to hang your hat on. With cold outreach though, if we're getting like, you know, 1 to 3% response rate, that means that out of every 100 messages you send, you're going to get maybe one, maybe two, maybe three replies. And so that is, you know, that level of response is so much lower and it is often less reinforcing. And so it will be harder to sustain consistency because you won't be getting back the reinforcement that you need to keep going. And related to that is that, you know, from an internal resistance perspective is that it can feel like it is not very aligned with our values as coaches. Right. So it is not relationship oriented. There is no existence of trust or pre existing trust in the way that there is when we're doing warm outreach. So that sense of feeling a disconnect with our values can be much higher. So if cold outreach isn't the answer, of course, what I'm saying is that warm outreach is the way to go. And the reasons for that is that, you know, we're going to get higher response rates, we're going to have higher conversion rates, it's going to be more sustainable and it's going to give you more motivation right through this reinforcement and response that you get. Also, warm outreach really has this sort of ripple effect of building momentum, which is, you know, not the immediate response, not the immediate reactions of the people that you're talking with, but as you are reconnecting with more people, they are more likely to see your posts, their network are more likely to see your posts and more folks in your audience become warmer as a result of engaging with the content. So you can start to see the interaction between our outreach strategy and our content strategy. And so our warm outreach is this sort of, this has this ripple effect or this virtuous cycle that is created. But I'm also not saying that you should ignore people outside of your warm network because if we are never growing with cold, you know, new leads, let's call them, then we're going to run out of our network. And you know, if we're going to need to be doing warm outreach consistently over time, then there's going to become a point where we need to be bringing more and more people into our warm network. So that is an interesting point, which is well how do I bring people into my, you know, my network, my audience, so that they can become warm connections for the purpose of my outreach. And so, you know, really my advice and what I teach inside the accelerator is that we need to be focused on two things. So firstly, growing our audience of these cold connections. And usually we do this through sort of trusted intermediaries, I guess, right? So LinkedIn, where we have shared connections, or it might be networking events where we have a shared purpose that we're in the room, it might be speaking engagements, where we have this sort of credibility that is loaned to us through the body for whom we are doing the speaking or primal presentation, for example. And so we focus on the growing with the colder audiences. And then our job is not to sell to those people, it is to make them warmer parts of our network. And the way that we do that is through our content, our posts on LinkedIn, for example, and being sure that they are talking to these people, right? That they are talking about the challenges these folks that we're bringing in are experiencing, the industries that they're in, the challenges that they're having. So we're talking to them. That is going to warm them up because they're going to be in a position to give you some data about that, right? So either replying in messages, engaging with comments, or liking posts. Now, don't hold out too much for huge volumes of liking and commenting because particularly with organizational clients, there is a bit of a tendency to lurk until, you know, they. They start a conversation with you. So don't necessarily expect that, but that is the opportunity for them. You also have the opportunity for the colder folks to share resources and value through either events that you offer or resources you share in your posts, things that they can download or engage with and, you know, really just showing them in a variety of ways who you are. Let them get to know you through posts, through videos, through imagery, using I know everyone hates it, but the selfie, which lets people feel like they know you because it's this getting to know you, who you are, how you operate, that is going to create this new set of warm people in your network. So, so overall, cold outreach is not something that I will ever ask my clients to do because it doesn't work. And inst. We need to be focusing on reaching out to our warm network and warming up those new layers of connections and, and leads that we make through our LinkedIn, through our networking events, etc. And I know that even when we have these warm leads, outreach can still feel very daunting, and I talked about that over the last few episodes, and the way I want to help is that this is why I've created my tool, the 30 client generating outreach templates for executive coaches. And this is 30 message examples that you can adapt for your own network and your own context so that you never have to be staring at a blank screen wondering how to start. If that would be helpful for you, you can head over to grab your copy at Elliscarf Templates. It's completely free, and it'll give you practical, cool ideas that you can adapt for your own warm outreach. So do check out the show notes, or again, head over to elliscarf.com templates and I'll be back next week with more practical ideas for growing your coaching business.