This Is The Best Sales Strategy For Online Coaches

So the chances are that you've had clients either not show up to calls after they've booked them, or maybe they've ghosted you after you've had the initial call with them, or perhaps they've even made it onto a call with you. However, you're sat there wondering, why on earth am I speaking to this person? Perhaps even feeling like, God, is this even a good use of my time? And you're worrying about how you actually let that person down because they might be interested in your coaching. Well, this isn't too uncommon when it comes to the coaching industry. I know that a lot of coaches have struggled with this at some point in their coaching career. And one of the things I'm going to do on this video is unpack how you can avoid those sorts of situations. And this is why it's the number one sales strategy which most online coaches still don't use even in 2024. Part of the reason why we end up in those situations is because as coaches, generally we're not very good at stimulating in like tons of demand for the coaching spots which we have on our programs. And so when somebody comes into our world and they're very excited about the prospect of working with us, we get really excited with them. And what tends to happen is we'll then skip a few steps, we'll get them onto a coaching consultation, and at that point we then start to have the realization that, ooh, maybe actually I've gone into this too quickly and haven't qualified this prospect well enough. What am I actually doing here speaking to this person? 'Cause they're really not best fit for my program. So the first thing that I would recommend you do is really slow down the process. You almost wanna make it really, hard for prospects to buy from you, which I know sounds counterintuitive, but at the end of the day, when you start working with a coaching client, there's going to be things which are going to challenge them as clients and potentially challenge you as a coach. There's going to be tasks which maybe they've got to do either during the coaching or in between coaching sessions, so there's going to be some certain degree of accountability. So if you rush into things, you're not testing the client to see whether They're coachable, whether they're good at getting things done and following basic instructions. So, I'm gonna give you a couple of tips as to things that you can do to start to slow the process down and better qualify prospects before you jump onto a sales call with them. First of all, what you want to do is implement some form of application process. Now, what this looks like is just a simple application form which asks maybe 5 to 10 pointy questions. You've got the usual suspects like name, email address, and hopefully you're gathering people's telephone numbers as well, 'cause it's always helpful to be able to call them in an emergency the technology's not working or something like that. But then you also want to start to probe why are they actually looking to get to work with a coach in the first place. A sense of urgency— how soon would they like to start working with a coach? I have this as a question on my form, and about a quarter of the respondents will say they're kind of only window shopping, and then they're happy to wait 3 to 6 months to work with a coach. Well, what that tells me is maybe now's not the right time, and there might be some work they've got to do between now and when they're ready to actually work with a coach. I tend to not like to work with window shoppers because it's just not best use of not just my time but also their time as well. I'm sure they might be interested in the coaching process, but I'd rather cross that bridge when we get to it and lean in when they're ready to start to dip into the coaching process. You might also ask a question about what's their expected or anticipated budget for working with a coach, and I normally like to put several ranges in there from— yes, and believe it or not, I have this on my form. In fact, you can even click it and go and have a look at my application process. But you might have one field which says, nothing, I'm just after as much free stuff as I can get. $1,000 entry level, just getting started, or this is my, my, I've only got a low budget, $5,000 or $10,000. So you can put various different bandings for their budget in there. And again, that just gives you— we wouldn't qualify necessarily or disqualify based on that because I always look at all of the different questions in context when I'm reviewing my applications from prospects. But it's in its own right, it does start to give you an idea about what their, what their expectations are in terms of the value they're going to get versus the how much they're willing to invest into something like coaching. You might ask them about what are the What are their goals? What are they hoping to achieve from coaching, or why did they reach out to you as a coach? What obstacles do they feel are standing in their way from achieving their goals? So you just want to ask 5 to 10 pointy questions, and really, like I said, you're taking a holistic look at all of their answers in context of each other rather than just pinpointing one and saying, well, I'm not going to work with them based on that one. So for example, if they really— if you can see they've rushed the form and haven't really put in much effort, that's typically a red flag to me. If they're perhaps I tend to work a lot with either existing coaches or very well-established coaches who are looking to scale. And so in that instance, if literally they've kind of only just thought, oh, I want to be a coach, they're not really a best fit for me because they're just too soon in the process. But what I can do at that point is I can send them away with some homework to get them started. I can send them a free copy of my book, Take Your Shot, and a few other resources so that they've actually got some homework to do. to prepare themselves for starting out on their coaching journey. So get that application form put in there. That's really, really important. Now, I'm gonna share with you one of the dumb mistakes which I made in my coaching practice, and bearing in mind, I consider myself to be quite an experienced, not just coach, but also business person. When I first started out, I had a separate application form which every client would fill out, and it was 20 questions which looked at their business plan, how confident they were in their products, their level of confidence generally, their mindset, their marketing, various other questions and asking to grade it on a scale of 1 to 10. And then depending on where they were at, I would then invite them onto a consultation. So they were 2 separate things. Now I don't know how or why this happened, but at some point these— both of these processes, the scheduling tool and my application form, got smushed together. And so I was allowing people to book into my diary at the same time as then they would be served the application form. And at this very awkward point, and I suppose maybe this is a good thing, I don't know, maybe it's a bad thing. I'm the sort of person that finds it very hard if somebody books in my diary to then say, oh no, sorry, this isn't a good fit, can we cancel it? I, I'll be fair to myself, I have got much better at that now. So I went through this phase of just sitting these calls with all of these prospects. I'm just thinking, oh, they're just not best fit, like how have they ended up booking onto this call? And it was because I'd ended up in— I use Acuity scheduling, or there's Calendly, or these other, um, diary booking tools. I'd ended up adding my application form into my diary booking tool, into Acuity, and so it did both of the things together. So, and I learned this, a very valuable lesson. So last year I was very fortunate to be a guest on Ali Abdaal's Deep Dive podcast, and it's generated me somewhere in the order of 3,000 leads for my business. And you can imagine how many inquiries then I've had for coaching off the back of that— hundreds. And, um, it was at this point when I just started to have a bit of a meltdown because I just had too many people booking into my diary who really weren't the best fit. Great, amazing people, fantastic businesses and business ideas, but they just weren't at the right time to work with Fearless Business. So what I did in the end was I just broke it. I just took every— I took everything down and started to figure out how I needed to rebuild it. And it was at that point where I realized, well, the application form is in my diary booking tool. I need to separate them back out again. So now there is a very clearly defined customer journey where people have to fill out the application form first From there, I will review it and I'll either— if they're not a best fit, I'll send them away with some resources or perhaps a referral to another coach who might be a better fit for them. If I think they're a good fit, then they'll get the invitation then via email to then with a link to go and book a diagnostic call. So it's a 2-stage process and that is the key thing. And there's a couple of other bits of really hopefully valuable information which I'm going to give around sort of that consultation call process which will really improve your online coaching business and hopefully get you better qualified clients through the process as well. Not just better qualified, but also more educated clients, more sophisticated buyers, because there's ways to get them to do things before they actually sit that call with you, which really increases the chance of having a great, powerful coaching conversation with them when they jump onto it. So I broke everything, I rebuilt it so it's application only first, and then they get invited to book a call. And the nice thing about that is that I think when people apply for something, you don't necessarily expect to get an immediate response back as to whether your application has been successful or not. Sometimes I see people, I'm like, yep, fantastic fit, let's bump them onto a call, I send the invite out, you know. But if I'm reading their application form and there's maybe one or two red flags— and this might be a clue if you do apply to work with me at Fearless Business— but if it takes me a couple of days, 2, 3, 4 days to come back, it's because there's a couple of things there which I'm just not sure about, whether it's best fit or not, or maybe there's one or two red flags in there. If it's an outright no, generally I'm quite quick as well about coming back to people, but it's normally if I'm on the fence about whether they're best fit. And I'm, I'm not here thinking about whether best fit in terms of can I sell them some coaching. For me, the thing which always sits front and centre of my mind is can I get this person remarkable results if we were to work together? And that's what I'm thinking when I'm reading those applications. forms. And so generally, if I'm on the fence, it's kind of a bit like, oh, maybe I'm not sure about whether I can get them those results or not. And by results, typically what I'm looking at with clients is, can I generate a 10x return on their investment from coaching? And typically what that means for most businesses when they work with me, that could be like a $50,000 to $100,000 a year ROI based on their investment with my coaching programs. So it's a big decision which I'm making really here, and I wanna be really damn sure that they're going to have a great experience were we to go on to work together. So we've got the application form, we've got the separate diary booking form, and here's again what a lot of other online coaches don't do is that they'll just book as many calls as they possibly can do and they get ghosted, they get no-shows on those calls, and it's the no-shows which— what I'm about to share with you where this really helps. Or, you know, people just won't show up for those calls, or, you know, or they're just low-quality calls. What I like to do is I send out some pre-call homework. So once somebody's booked their slot to have a consultation with me, they'll get a short list of, um, things which they need to do in advance. So the first one is the scorecard. I use a tool called ScoreApp. If you're interested, it's well worth searching out, which again is just about gathering a bit of extra data about their business. And with the scorecard, there's no right or wrong answers. In actual fact, I'm more interested to see whether they just do the pre-call work or not. Um, but ScoreApp is fantastic at being able to just analyze somebody's business or background in a much deeper level. There's 2 videos which I invite prospects to watch before they sit on that call with me. And then the third thing is there's also a Facebook post which I created in my group, and there's, there's a reason why it's in my Facebook group, which I'll share in a moment. But there's a post in there which is about the value of investing in coaching, and I go into a lot of detail to talk about how much coaching costs and the types of results you can expect and various things like that. It's more like a frequently asked questions, but it does also start to qualify people in or out. And I've even had some people who've read that and gone, Actually, I don't think this is for me. And I've gone, yeah, actually, I'd probably agree with you on that. And we don't sit the call. So having that pre-call homework in there is really important to be able to make sure that the quality of the people that you're getting onto your calls are really high quality. And also in doing the pre-call work, it increases the chances that they're going to show up to that sales consultation. And the reason for that is because if they've watched a couple of videos, done a scorecard, joined a Facebook group and read a post, they're already now quite invested in your brand because you've introduced various bits of engagement and various touchpoints into the customer journey, which just builds trust. And so it means that there's less fear or less resistance around that person jumping onto a call with you. And you're going to also have a much better experience because if they've spent a couple of hours engaging with your content, maybe read your book or things like that, there's a much greater chance that they're going to feel like they already know you when they jump onto that consultation. And you're going to be able to have a much more open and honest conversation with them. What, you know, as you go through your standard coaching process, whatever that looks like on that consultation, But when it then comes down to the pointy end of the call to start to talk about whether they're going to buy into your coaching programs or not, all of the friction's gone because you've done the hard work of educating them through your pre-call homework. That's really, really important. The other thing as well is getting somebody to join your Facebook group means they're also now a part of a community of other like-minded individuals. So over the last 8 years, I think now I've got about 2,300 people who've gone through my application process. Obviously not all of them have sat the consultation calls, not all of them have become clients, but I've got this great community of people who've all been interested in what Fearless Business is all about. So again, it's another way to add value. There's a lot of free resources in that Facebook group, for example. So, and it means that they're also engaging with my content in other ways. And I'm never looking at it as though when somebody first puts in their application that I have to close them within like 7 days. I've got clients where it's taken 2, maybe even 3 years Before they— we've got to a point where we agree it's a good time for them to start working with Fearless Business. Most online coaches these days just simply don't have the patience or the tenacity to wait that length of time before they enroll clients. And the thing is, I get great clients as a result of that, because I am patient, because I'm tenacious. I only take on clients when it's best fit and I know I can get a return on investment for them. So I'm happy to wait. If all you're focused on as a coach is paying for your mortgage or rent and putting food on your table, you're making this all about you and you'll be rushing into sales. And ultimately what I've discovered is whenever I've rushed into a sale or taken on a client because they're there with their money in front of me, generally that is reflected in the coaching relationship further down the line where they don't get value, they don't get the results because maybe you missed a step or two in the process. It's happened to me. It's very awkward when it— when that happens because if if you don't handle it correctly, either the client or you as the coach, there's some resentment which builds up there. You may end up even, worst case scenario, getting a refund request from a client, which feels utterly awful. And yes, I've had a few of those, some justified, some not justified, I might add, because there are unfortunately always some people who, who will always try it on. However, if you've got a really regimented step-by-step customer journey laid out where you're educating your clients, you're only going to be able to enroll the best possible clients for your coaching practice. A couple of little, uh, tips and tricks in terms of improving this customer journey as well, which I think are really helpful, and I've certainly found that it's added some value to clients. So one which I learned more recently, Daniel Priestley always goes on about having not just a one-to-one sales consultation with a client, but also having workshops available, because some people like to just learn about you, your brand, what you're about, how you work in various things like that, they don't necessarily want to be sold to. So I've started to experiment and introduce workshops into Fearless Business as a way to kind of bring people together, a bit of sense of community, but not also feel like they're under pressure that they're being sold something. So having another step when people apply, maybe a personalized invitation onto a workshop where you can add a bit of extra value, for example, is a great way just to again educate your prospects and build up a bit more trust. And then from there you can say, okay, Now you've experienced that, is now a good time for us to have a consultation and to talk about whether coaching is the best fit for you. So workshops are a great way to add value, build an intermediary step as well. What I've discovered though, so remember those applications where I was like, oh, I'm not sure, it's a bit— I'm a bit on the fence over it. They're really good prospects to go into workshops because it's a great chance for you to get to know one another. Also, during August, I typically tend to close down my coaching practice. I don't tend to enroll any clients or do sales consultations. I'll wait until September before I take on my next cohort of clients, mostly because I'm away on holiday. I've got a family and a life, so I like to take the summer months, you know, a few weeks over August just to kind of reset and have a bit of a break myself. So the workshop's quite a good way of— I'll run a workshop in the middle of August so that I can bundle 10, 20 people onto a workshop so I don't have to sit all of those calls individually. So it's a great way as well just to manage your lead flow, keep an extra touchpoint in there whilst people are waiting for you to open your doors up again, you know, come September or whenever it is in your sort of coaching season, however you structure your seasonality around how you run your business. Another thing which I found as well is when I'm inviting people onto either a workshop or in some cases a consultation, depending on the length of time, how soon I can book it and various things like that, or maybe if I've got some questions about their application, I'll record a short video on Loom just to— one, because I think it's a really nice thing to do. I feel it's really personalized. You can get to know the energy and the vibe of that person. What I've come to realize is that, you know, whilst I've got books and videos and podcasts and speaking gigs and all these things, I do get inquiries from people who kind of know very little about me, and so they don't know what I'm like in terms of like from an energetic perspective or knowledge perspective or things like that. So that video, I think, is quite important. A personalized, you know, 3 to 5 minute long Loom video saying, hi Dave, thanks so much for your application. I really appreciate you taking the time to put all the details in there. Oh, by the way, I've got a couple of questions about this, and maybe here's an idea of something which you could do just to fix this. So it just gives people a bit of a personalized first experience of working with you. And at the end of it as well, it's really hard when somebody invites you to do something And it's face-to-face, it's really hard to decline it. So at the end of that, if I'm then— I said, Dave, you know, just excited to tell you I've got this workshop coming up, it's next Wednesday on whatever date. I'd really love it if you could make it because we can sit down and we can go through X, Y, and Z that I saw in your thing. It's actually really hard for people to kind of feel like they can turn that down. It's because it's a really high-value offer. Not only are they getting it in a personalized video, but they're also kind of getting it face-to-face. They can see you. So it just increases the chances of somebody wanting to take that next step with you. And all this is, I think a lot of people have this very binary approach when it comes to sales, especially in coaching world. Yes or no, they're in or they're out, they're a good prospect or bad prospect. Like, it's very binary. I like to think that we have this bandwidth which we operate within coaches, and it doesn't matter whether it's through your marketing or sales or customer journey or whatever stage that your prospects are at. That every touchpoint you introduce into your business that just increases the odds ever so slightly by 1 or 2 or 3%, and you do that multiple times through every experience which they have with you, just increases the odds of you having a really great relationship with that prospect, potentially that client. So, it's really worthwhile making sure that we're introducing all these little personalized touchpoints all the way along the way to make sure. And yet, it does slow the process down. It makes it really hard for clients to buy from you because you have got all of of these steps in there. But what ultimately happens is at the end of it is you get better quality clients who are willing to spend more on the coaching experience which you generate for them. And then they're also much more engaged when they enroll as a client. They just really value all of that extra upfront work which— and value which you've delivered with them. So in my view, it's worthwhile spending that extra time. All of these scaling coaches who are doing like cold DMs and like email outreach and all this stuff, like trying to really accelerate the process of scaling to 7 figures and beyond. I think unfortunately it's a lot of bullshit. I'm gonna call it out because I get a lot of people who come to me having been through those type of coaches who are only interested in taking their money, and they've had awful experiences, and they're really, really reluctant to part ways with their cash— understandably so— to work with good quality coaches because they've had these poor experiences. So in my eyes, Anything which you can do to elicit as much trust with prospective clients as you possibly can do is well worth it, in my opinion. And what that means, unfortunately— and if you're watching this and if you want a scaling million-dollar-plus, like, 7, 8-figure coaching practice, I'm not the guy for you. I believe in mighty small coaching practices where you work with 20 to 40 really amazing clients each year and you get remarkable results for them. It might mean you earn slightly less money. But trust me, you'll have a lot more fun in the process. You won't get burnt out. You'll work with great clients. You'll get far fewer refund requests and things like that happening. It's just, all in all, it's just that much better. The final thing which I'll say as well is it's really helpful if clients have had some way of engaging with you over a really elongated period of time. So one of the most common ways to do that is in-person events. If you're only working with the local market and you can encourage prospective buyers to come to you and spend a day working with you in some kind of, you know, one-day intensive or maybe even a retreat. Not necessarily super high-ticket, a lower entry-level cost. That's a great way of eliciting trust. Google did a fantastic white paper which was called Zero Moments of Truth. Not gonna lie, it's a little bit boring. They have jazzed it up a little bit in the online version now. But one of the things which they established was that it takes 7 hours of somebody's time engaging with your brand before they're willing to part ways with their money. So workshops are a really great way to build up, you know, a 1-day intensive, well, that's pretty much 7 or 8 hours, so you're gonna have ticked off a huge chunk of engagement if you can slow the buying process down and deliver some great value to somebody by way of, for example, a workshop or intensive or retreat or something like that. Equally, if you have some kind of online course which is either low cost or maybe even free, again, so that they can experience and spend some time with you and learn about all of the things which you coach around, your frameworks. They can listen to some case studies or testimonials from clients that you've worked with and had great success with. That's also a great way to build up engagement. The best way I've found to build up engagement is actually through the medium of books. And yes, people still do read books. More people probably listen to audiobooks than they do necessarily read books these days. And what's quite interesting, my audiobooks for Take Your Shot in Online Business Startup far outsell the Kindle and paperback versions, although slightly contrarily, the paperback and Kindle make more money. It's just the nature of the beast when it comes to books. You get greater royalties through the physical copies of the book when you sell them. I actually, on the other hand, like to give books away, and I found that it's a great way again to build big chunks of engagement time with people and for them to really experience the frameworks around your coaching model. Now let's face it, Writing a book is no mean feat. It takes quite a lot of effort. It takes anywhere between 8 to 12 months, or maybe even longer, to write a book and get it published and designed and listed on Amazon and places like that, and actually ready to get print versions of it done. They don't have to be long. Take Your Shot is only 100 pages. It's probably only a 2 to 3 hour read. It's got 5 very simple business frameworks in it, which are kind of the fundamentals that we teach within Fearless Business. But my goal is to give away 3,000 copies of those books a year. When I first started out and I published it, it was to give away 500 a year. I've gradually, as my marketing sort of ramped up a little bit, the flywheel spinning, I've been able to find creative ways to offload more books to more people, which obviously benefits me in the long term in terms of raising my personal brand. But any way that you can find to engage people for longer through, you know, marketing assets or through your customer journey, through that pre-call homework, it's all going to stand your coaching practice in good stead, and you're gonna get great clients on board who you'll get fantastic results with. And that is a bonus, because what do they do when they get great results? They go and tell all their friends about it. So then you start to build up a community and referrals, which is even better. So there we go. How do you feel about introducing some of those strategies into your customer journey? How do you feel about slowing the process down when it comes to sales, making it hard for potential clients to part ways with their money and work with you, if on the other hand it means you get better quality clients. I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments below. Please do let me know how much of that you've got integrated into your business already in the comments, or if you have any questions about that process that you would like me to rationalize and go into a bit more detail about.