The Real Client Acquisition Strategy Coaches Don't Talk About

So someone accused me of being far too airy-fairy and theoretical, uh, with the content in my videos. And what they really wanted was for me to give them the practical tactical breakdown of the things I was talking about in my videos. Specifically, one of the hardest things I feel for most coaches, consultants, and freelancers to do, which is how to get more leads and clients for their business. So I'm going to try and break this down as much as I possibly can do into a step-by-step process, so it's less theory and more practical, so that you can just get off your backside and hopefully go and find more clients, generate more leads for your business. And it's going to be easy, right? Well, no, that's probably a misnomer. It might not be easy for everybody, but hopefully at least it'll give you some practical things to work on and you can get better at the process of finding leads and attracting clients and enrolling them into your coaching business or your freelancing business or whatever it is than maybe you were doing before. And if I can achieve that by the end of it, I'd love it if you could share your feedback into the comments and let me know if this was a better format for the video or you preferred the old way that I was doing it where I went a little bit more theoretical with it. I guess I've been quite fortunate. When I started my coaching practice, I kind of fell into it because I naturally was able to stimulate demand. I was doing some informal mentoring. Turns out I was quite good at it. People then referred me to their friends. Off the back of that, I then founded Fearless Business and I had a natural momentum which I'd built up. And so from that point, getting clients to me felt easy. What I did though was I found creative ways to accelerate the process of generating leads and getting clients enrolled into my coaching practice. For me, they just felt like they were natural. It felt like I wasn't really putting in tons of effort or being overly creative. I just set about doing the work. And I distinctly remember on a coaching session, somebody once said to me, well, Robin, I, you know, I think I'm a better coach than you, but I don't understand why you're more successful than me. And I rattled off this whole story. In fact, I think I mentioned it in one of my other videos. This story about how I, you know, did so many podcasts and went out and set up my own networking event, and I went and spoke at 48 different events and things like that. And this is where this comment came from. They were like, well, it's all well and good for you, Robin, but what about for somebody like me just starting out? Like, you clearly had marketing experience and you were able to just launch your coaching business and it was a, you know, moderate success and you made 6 figures doing that. And actually, it's a fair point. The steps are quite often obvious to me. I've been in business now for 20+ years. And maybe to a certain extent, I do oversimplify it. So I'm hopeful that maybe by the end of this, I will have broken down some of those steps and actionable steps that you can then take forward into your business, get some clients. So here we go. One of the things is, and I talk a lot about pricing, and I know this is about lead gen and clients, but I talk a lot about pricing, is about understanding the mechanics between supply and demand. Here we go, I've gone straight into theory again, but this is important and relevant to this video, and then we'll get into the tactical stuff. So on the supply side of the business, you've got your capacity, how many clients you need, how much money you're gonna charge, and what the basic business model is behind your business. But where a lot of people get really stuck is the demand side. They really struggle to stimulate enough demand for their products or services. And what they typically tend to find then is they'll reduce their price virtually to nothing. And we do this in a way that if we signal to the market, if we just go out into the ether online and just say, hey, I'm available as a coach, or I'm available as a consultant, or a freelancer, then what we just signal to the market is that we are— we have infinite supply, and therefore nobody is really interested in that because we haven't established ourselves as a scarce resource. It's far easier to create more demand for your services when you are a scarce resource. If you've only got 10 coaching spots, or you can only take on 5 freelancing clients on contracts, you're going to find it far easier to get clients because when your books are full, they're full, and then you don't have to do any more marketing. So I kind of get it, but I guess I've had my books full for quite some period of time and I don't really necessarily have to go out and market. I choose to do marketing because I find it fun, I find it interesting, I like making videos, I like guesting on podcasts, I like doing all of the stuff that I tell people to do. But for me, I'm in a fortunate, fortunate position where kind of there's no real jeopardy. If I do those things, it doesn't really matter. If I don't do those things, it doesn't really matter. I still seem to attract clients. And I guess that's what prompted this person to leave that comment. And it's absolutely fine. I think it's fair. I think it's true. And I actually love getting feedback, positive or negative, or just, just feedback. Let's not make it positive or negative because it means that I can make this content better. So what can you do? How can you stimulate more demand for whatever your product or service is hopefully generate more leads and also get some clients for your business. One of the first things I would encourage you to do, and it doesn't matter what stage of business you are at, I would recommend starting a waitlist. There's a really fantastic tool which I recommend called ScoreApp where you can ask a few pertinent questions once you understand who your ideal client is. And before the person fills out and answers those questions, you can ask them for their name, email address, and telephone number. And I always recommend taking that person's telephone number because if they mistype the email address, you can always get on the phone and ask them to say, hey, your email bounced, can I grab your email address from you? Oh, by the way, can I tell you about some of the other cool stuff that we do? So always, always, always, always, whenever you do a lead capture form, make sure you take the name, email address, and telephone number because you can get on the phone and you can sell to them, or you can get them into WhatsApp and have a chat with them, or leave them a voice note or things like that. But in ScoreApp, name, email address, telephone number, and then they can go through and start filling out your scorecard. So that could be an application form. It could be some kind of quiz or questionnaire where they get a personalised report back at the end of it. And your goal then is to go and find 100 people to complete your scorecards. We're not talking about sales. We're not talking about capturing even really leads at this point. All we're testing for is do you have the ability to be able to go out into the ether, whether it's in in-person networking meetings or whether it's on social media, or through any other form of marketing, can you actually stimulate any kind of demand for your brand, for your product or service, and get people to put their name and email address into a form and send it to you? And that's it. It's, it's a really simple process. Building out a scorecard is nice and easy because it has a whole AI interface and it can help you. It takes you through this AI tutorial to kind of build up your scorecard and your form. And it doesn't need to be a long form. 5 or 10 questions is is plenty. But then see if you can find creative ways to drive 100 people who are in your niche to that form so they part with their information. Obviously give them something back of value, whatever, a lead magnet or report or something like that, a freebie of some kind. And I would honestly say if you can't get 100 people to fill out a scorecard or join a waitlist or something like that, you are gonna really struggle with your marketing generally overall. And what I mean by that is, because that sounds very negative, I understand that, what I mean by that is if you can't get somebody to ways with their name and email address, you're going to struggle to get them to part ways with their money. Most people's approach to marketing is buy my stuff, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, whereas what we're doing here is, as Dan Priestley says, market for signals, not sales. We're trying to just reach people without any kind of attachment to an outcome or sale and get them to part ways with their information, i.e., signal their interest in whatever it is that you do. So go and build a scorecard, go and get 100 people to fill it out. Don't get attached to any kind of outcomes. And my invitation to you is figure it out. Figure out how for you, you're going to get 100 people to fill out a scorecard. Because if you can get 100 people to fill out a scorecard in maybe 30 days or 3 months or however long it takes you to do that, however, however you feel you're going to do it, then you can do that ad infinitum and slowly build up a network of people in your email list via your scorecard or your waiting list that you can then reach out to and offer your services to. There's a fantastic marketing, internet marketeer out there, a guy called Frank Kern, and what he always talks about is business owners fail because they forget to put their offers out there. And he doesn't mean like buy one get one free or any of those sorts of things, or like, you know, fast action discounts or anything. He's talking about just taking the next step in your process. So it might even be that you have leads and inquiries coming in, you have people connecting with you on LinkedIn or reaching out to you from your YouTube channel, It's just you're not doing anything with them. You're assuming that person knows what the next step is that they're going to have to take. So the idea is if you build a waitlist, you've got people who've signaled, they've gone, hey Robin, I'm really interested in what you do. So it's now your job, your responsibility to connect with them, reach out to them and say, thanks so much for your inquiry. Why did you reach out to us in the first place? Why did you want to jump on our waitlist? Oh, by the way, did you know that I've got this book available or I've got this event coming up or that I offer this free consultation. You've gotta tell people about what the next step is, and that's what Frank Kern means by tell people about your offer. What is the next step in your customer journey? The next way to generate leads is by remembering that people buy from people. And if you look outside your house, your office, or your studio, wherever you're sat right now, and into your wider community, you will see that there are pockets of people, similar people, who congregate and hang out together. And this is one of the fastest and easiest ways to generate leads, is to build your own group or your own community and lead it. So this is something which I did, and I think this is where maybe I missed the mark before when I was trying to explain this. I couldn't get booked as a speaker when I first started my coaching practice, and I knew that a lot of the people in my space speak at events and guest on podcasts and write books and all these things, but I couldn't get booked. So what did I do? I went and set up my own local networking event and invited 50 local business owners along, and then I booked myself to speak at that event. Now, I'm not suggesting you do that, but all of a sudden I had this amazing community which I designed and built by accident because I wanted to get a speaking gig booked. Next thing you know, they're all asking me when the next StroudNet is going to happen. So that was the name of my networking event, and I said, next one. I didn't have a plan for it to be a thing, and ultimately I ended up running 35, 40 of these events over the course of the next 4 and a half years. And I think we in turn, in total, brought about 1,200 people into the community. And because I was front and center in organizing those events and compairing them on the day and welcoming people to the event, that positioned me in this natural place of authority and leadership. You only have to look at things like your local Scouts group or your school or your local community working group where they go, you know, whatever that might be, you know, gardening club or dance classes or gyms. There are these pockets of communities of like-minded people that hang out together. So I would recommend what you need to do, again similar to the waitlist, and what you could do is you could leverage the waitlist to get people into your community. I do this, so if people request a free copy of the book, a couple of emails later they'll get invited into my Facebook group or to come and connect with me on LinkedIn or to come and subscribe to my YouTube channel. So you've got to build this ecosystem of places where people can engage with you. So why don't you make it a goal to set up a community? So let's say you are an SEO, search engine optimization expert. Why don't you set up the SEO Learners Guild? I don't know, or the SEO for Coaches as a Facebook group or on Skool or something like that. So pick a topic which is in alignment with whatever it is that you do, you deliver, and see if you can get 100 people to come and join that community and start to ask you ask questions of the community and make sure you're in there answering those questions and being helpful and things like that. Once those people get to know you and the trust is built, again, they are more likely to interact with you. So this is a thing where it probably takes a little bit more time to get those people into your waitlist or get people into your community, but once they're in there, and if you lead with value, put videos in there and little voice notes, and maybe reach out to each of them individually periodically and say, hey, how's it going? Is there anything I can help you with, you'll start to find that you will get clients from that. And it's a very organic process. It doesn't— there's no like trying to be pushy or persuasive or trying to sell people stuff. If you do things from a genuine, authentic place where you just want to add value to their lives, they will be more inclined to then approach you and ask for help. And that's the point when you can start to then move them on through your customer journey again. One of the added bonuses of having a community is that if people get value from it, they're more likely then to refer their friends to come and join that community. So You can also build it organically. One of the things we used to do with Stroudnet, for example, was that if you brought a friend, you would get a discounted ticket for that friend. And so we used to find that we'd never just get one person coming to that event. We'd get 2 or 3 or 4 people coming to that event because other people were inviting them to it. So it had this very organic feel around how it was growing. The next thing I've got for you is podcast guesting. This is so underrated. It is a bit of a heavy lift because typically every podcast requires maybe 30 to 60 minutes to record. Often it's a lot longer, and also there'll be a pre-interview potentially. They'll want to get your headshots and your speaker one-sheet from you and various other assets. So it's never just the time it takes to record, there's also the admin around it as well. However, I've guested on over 200 podcasts and I've had some fantastic opportunities from it, not least the one which I always bang on about, which is when I guested on Ali Abdaal's Deep Dive podcast and generated 3,000 leads from my business. You only need one big opportunity like that in order to really accelerate the growth around leads and clients for your small business. And I think a lot of people, they kind of want to jump 11 steps ahead and go straight to that, being on that sort of tier 1 podcast, whereas you have to earn your stripes. And part of the process of earning your stripes on things like podcasts is guesting on some of those tier 3, tier 4 type podcasts, hobbyist type podcasts, or business owners who are using it to build up their own personal brand or profile. And things like that. You don't have to guest on 200. I've seen people guest on 10 to 20, and that's been enough to accelerate the growth of inbound leads and inquiries into their business. And I've seen people get clients from just a handful of podcasts. You have to be very intentional. You have to have a very clear story or framework which you want to share on that podcast. So again, we're leading with value. You also have to have a very clear call to action. So at the end of that podcast, when the host says, how can people reach out to you, don't just say I'll go and connect with you on LinkedIn, or here's my website. Make sure you have something which is, go and download my 3-step coaching framework to help you sleep better. Go and download my 7-step weight loss guide. Go and download my SEO website launch checklist. You know, whatever that might be. So have something of significant value that is relevant to the listener so that it gives them a reason to want to come and engage with you. And again, gate that behind some kind of application form. So you gather their name and email address, and you can put that into your email list. Make sure as well then that you follow up with those. Again, I see people who go and, you know, have these massive lists, but they're not doing any kind of follow-up. They're not actually reaching out to and connecting with these people and getting on the phone with them. Again, they're just waiting for people to come to them. It doesn't work like that. So you've got to get on the podcast, have a clear call to action, and then chase it up. That's massively important. There's some amazing tools out there if you do want to go down the podcasting route. So my favorite tool is Podmatch. Podmatch is like a concierge service which— or dating service which matches up podcast hosts and podcast guests. It's only $29 a month at the moment, and it's just a really easy and effortless way of finding podcast hosts who want to have interesting guests on there. You don't have to have been on like hundreds of podcasts before. There's plenty of different types of podcasts on there for you to dig into, and those podcast hosts will be more than happy to have you on there as a guest, but be intentional around it. Make sure there's alignment with your audiences and your message and your call to action as well. But with Podmatch, you can probably get yourself booked onto maybe 5 to 10 podcasts per month if you have enough time to. And all the while as well, you're creating other assets and resources. So one of the things I like to do is I will sometimes record my podcast interviews, and then I'll repurpose that content, which I can then use in my blog or on my YouTube channel or on Shorts or things like that. Part of the challenge is, a lot of the time I have 3 stock talks which I deliver on podcasts, so I'm regurgitating the same message. So I've kind of stopped, I've got out of that habit now of doing that. It does force me to create new and interesting content as well. But podcasting is a great way not just to build your personal brand, generate leads and enquiries with that strong call to action, but also it's great for building really highly qualified backlinks back to your website, which helps with your search engine optimisation overall. So you may even get found organically. This was just a byproduct which I discovered about 4 or 5 years ago, where as I guested on, in one period of time, about 20 or 30 podcasts within a month, I noticed that my SEO rankings shot up all of a sudden. And it was because all of these different platforms were then linking back to my site, either from the host website or from things like iTunes and Stitcher and SoundCloud and all those different sort of platforms. So podcasting is a really great way to get leads and inquiries into your business. It's a bit more slow burn because you've got to go through a process of getting booked on, record the interview, that then being edited, pushed live, and then seeing the impact of that. But podcasting is a really great way to leave a lasting digital asset out there on the ether, which can— I, I guested on the Google Partners Podcast something like 8 years ago, and I still get inquiries coming through from that one podcast, which is absolutely nuts. So podcasting is a great way to generate leads for your business. The final way that I've got for you in terms of generating leads and clients for your, your small business, your coaching practice, whatever it may be, would be to go out and get onto the speaker circuit. Everybody is capable of going out and speaking from the stage, doing virtual lunch and learns, doing online events and online conferences. There's plenty of virtual summits which I get invitations to quite frequently, so I'm sure you can find plenty of events online and offline that you may well be able to speak at. And I know a lot of people's natural sort of fear is around the fact that they think that, well, who's gonna listen to me? Why am I any different? Why would they want to book me? Can I get paid for speaking? So there's all these usual sorts of questions which you're gonna have around getting out there onto the speaking circuit. But again, I like to think that things like speaking, it's like when they say a picture paints a thousand words, well, speaking from the stage means that you're this immediate credible trusted person. It's a bit like if, If I invite somebody to come and speak at my event, you would have instant rapport and trust with them because it's my event and I put that speaker on the stage. So therefore I must trust them, and therefore you should trust them too. So if you can get out on the stage, that's like as strong as, you know, sending somebody 1,000 emails or posting out on social 1,000 times. If you can stand on stage for 30 minutes and do a talk in front of somebody, it's a little bit like the interaction here. You know, on these YouTube videos, you get to kind of see the personality behind the person who's delivering that content, and even more so if it's an in-person conference or event. My route to doing that was, like I said, first of all I booked myself, I set up my own event and spoke at that and then filmed it, and it just so happened that there were 2 or 3 other networking meeting organisers who came to spy on the competition, and then because they liked what I— the talk which I delivered at my own event, They then booked me to talk at their networking meetings. So I ended up going on this massive speaker tour all across Gloucestershire and the Southwest, these various different networking events. And in my first year, I think I got booked to do 44 or something like that different events. From small to big, there was like one event where I remember there was like 3 people there, another event I did where there was close to 200 people there. The size didn't matter. One of the art of speaking, or getting good at the art of speaking, is getting out there and practicing it and delivering it and getting over that fear of public speaking and that fear of, you know, being judged by others and worrying about what you're going to say. And also, if you— I've developed 3 stock talks over the years now which I've honed and practiced because I've delivered it so many times on podcast interviews and speaking at events and just generally talking to people. So in order to get better at speaking, you just need to get the practice. So It's almost like the audience size doesn't matter. Like, just go and get booked wherever you can to speak, and you'll be surprised at the opportunities which generally then roll on after that. And especially if you're speaking at in-person events, people will want to come up and speak to you afterwards because they perceive you to be that authority figure. And you will— and again, provided you're intentional and you make sure you have some kind of a call to action when you deliver your talk, you know, again, I'm fortunate over the years I've written books, I've got podcasts, I've got a YouTube channel, I've got all of these assets. So I've got lots of calls to action for people to engage with me. But it might be that if you don't have some kind of a marketing asset that you can then promote at an event you're speaking at, like, that's an excuse. It's a reason that you should build one. Go and build a marketing asset that you can then give away at an event. It doesn't have to be a massive book. It could just be a short little brochure or something like that. But just build an asset that you can then give away. And tell people to go and grab the asset, whatever that is. During your call to action. The other way to get speaking engagements is to pay, what I call pay to play. So sometimes there are these big events which I'm probably not one of the natural sort of people that they would turn to to book as a speaker. And one of the things which I've learnt over the years, that if you pay some money, it doesn't necessarily have to be I'm paying money to speak, although there are business events where you can do that. Normally things like trade shows, you can Buy an exhibition stand and then you can upgrade and get a speaker slot. They're not necessarily always the best speaker slots, but I know some people have had great success doing that year after year because they find the right event, they connect to their audience with the right talk, and the rest is kind of history. They get lots of leads from it. Another way to do it, and I've done this with an event— I'm not going to mention who the event is— however, 2 years ago I sponsored the event when they were kind of just in the early stages coming back to doing the event after COVID and lockdowns when they had 500 people at that event. It was really successful. I absolutely loved the event. I immediately committed to sponsoring it in the next, you know, next year. So that was last year. And as a result of that, it opened up the door to have a conversation with the people who founded the event. I'm now coaching on one of their programs. They gave me the event sponsorship last year for free as a part of that agreement, as being part of their team. And then finally This year in June, I'm actually speaking at that event. And this is the thing a lot of people don't— they don't play this long-term game. They're very much thinking about quick wins. Like, I— if I'd— if I'd just focused on speaking at the event in 2023 instead of sponsoring it and working my way up, earning my stripes and building trust with the guys who run it, um, I'd have been left bitterly disappointed, and I probably wouldn't have gone back last year and this year, and I'd have missed out on the opportunity I've got. It just so happens that committing the long term to build a partnership with these guys has meant that this year when I'm speaking, there's 1,500 people now who are going to be attending that event, and plus more online. So because of my patience, I'm going to get the opportunity to speak in front of 3 times the size of audience that I would have spoke at had they actually given me that speaking gig 2 years ago. So if you play the long game, you can get some really tremendous results out of it. And again, I'm doing the same with a couple of other events. I've spoken sponsored them this year with a view that maybe that'll open the door up to discussions about whether I get to speak at those events in future years. And I know that if I get to speak at an event, there's a strong opportunity there for me to gather leads from that event and also the potential to get clients from it. And but mostly it's around building that personal brand up and building trust up with those organizers, because generally the organizers of events are influential people, and generally they also know other influential people. So when you start to speak at bigger events, you start to get noticed, and other influential then book you to speak at their events as well. So this is all part of that process of paying to play and being patient and slowly working your way up, not being— thinking you have the God-given right to get whatever opportunities are being laid out in front of you. You've got to earn your stripes. And so I'm building those partnerships with event organizers to broaden my network and my appeal to other event organizers who will then reach other event organizers and so on. One of the other things I would say is if you can't speak, if you can't sponsor and pay to play play, at least go and attend those events. But again, be intentional. Make sure that you are networking with other speakers at those events. Make sure that you are networking with the event organizers. Go up and say hi, pat them on the back, and tell them what a great job they've done with the event. If you've got a book, hand them a copy of the book signed and ask them if there's anything you can do to help. Sometimes just being at an event and networking again opens up opportunities, because when somebody is running an event, they will already be thinking about their next event and who they might like to speak at that event. And actually, this leads me on to my final point about events. One of the best ways I've found to get booked onto events is I go on to Eventbrite and look at conferences, annual conferences that happen each and every year, and I wait until those annual conferences roll around and they've just finished. Leave it a couple of weeks because obviously the event organizers probably need a bit of downtime and holiday, and then I reach out to them like 2 weeks after that event is finished and I say, hey, I saw your event, the photos looked absolutely epic. Out of curiosity, what criteria are you looking for in your speakers for next year's event? And more often than not, 3 times out of 4, I've received an email back and said, oh my God, thank you so much for your message. We were just starting to think about this. We've seen your profile. We would love to talk to you about potentially speaking or getting involved with the event next year. And because it makes their life easy if they don't have to think about booking their speakers for the next year ahead. And then they can just focus on marketing the event. You've actually solved a massive problem for them. So going on to things like Eventbrite and Meetup, and there's plenty of other events-based apps out there, LinkedIn Events, Facebook has an events module as well, I don't know how good it is. Go and look at what other events are out there and then start reaching out to people. You'll find that you will start to build connections with those networking and event organisers, and it just opens up the door to the conversation to potentially be able to, you know, get the opportunity to speak at those events. So ultimately what it comes down to is putting yourself out there. I think a lot of business owners, the reason why they really struggle to get leads and clients for their business is because they assume that they'll put some stuff on social and it'll create this magnetized sort of inbound influx of leads, you know, attracted into their business and to their brand. It just doesn't work like that. You have to put yourself out there. You've gotta make sure that you are asking for what you want to get out of this and making sure that if, You know, being intentional and being patient, playing the long game, stands you in great stead of being able to create fantastic opportunities for yourself. You're not gonna get leads and clients for your business if you have short-term thinking and you're desperate just to get the next client over the line. You need to be thinking, how can I, where are my next 1,000 leads gonna come from? Where are my next 10,000 followers or subscribers gonna come from? If I only had a week to get 100 people into a waitlist, what would I do? And in just answering that question, you may come to the realization that how you would go about getting 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 leads for your business is very different to the activity, marketing activity, which you're doing currently. And so my question is, why are you doing that when you should be doing this? What is stopping you from doing that stuff over there that is going to get you leads en masse? What are you afraid of? What is the fear that is holding you back? From reaching out and creating these opportunities for yourself. It's one of the things which I talk about in my book, Take Your Shot. I've got some free signed copies available, so if you don't already have a copy of that, we'll pop a link down into the description. But you can also go to fearless.biz/TYS, and you'll learn about Russ's journey growing his business, getting high-paying clients, and how he turned his business around and created the business and life that he wanted to create with the help of a business coach as well. Reach out to me, fill out that form, and we'll get a signed copy sent out to you ASAP. And then again, I'm looking for feedback. If you enjoyed this video, just drop me a comment below and just let me know what you liked about the video. If there was an insight which you can take away and apply to your business, tell me about it. If there's anything else which you would like to see me talk about, also pop that in the comments too.