How to Get More Leads and Clients For Your Coaching Business 3

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 that I was talking about in my videos specifically one of the hardest things I feel for most coaches consultants and freelancers to do 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 stepbystep 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 this might not be easy for everybody but hopefully at least it will 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 the 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 six 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 plus 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 the mechanics between supply and demand here we go i've gone straight into theory again but this is important 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 going to charge and what the 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 on online and just say "Hey I'm available as a coach or I'm available as a consultant or a freelancer," then what we've just signaled 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 five 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 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're at I would recommend starting a weight list there's a really fantastic call which I recommend called Score App 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 their 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 cuz 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 score app 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 a personalized report back at the end of it and your goal then is to go and find a hundred 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 cuz 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 long form five or 10 questions is plenty but then see if you can find creative ways to drive a 100 people who are in your niche to that form so they part with their information obviously give them something back of 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 weight list or something like that you are going to really struggle with your marketing generally overall and what I mean by that is cuz that sounds very negative i understand that what I mean by that is if you can't get somebody to part 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 add infin item 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 weight list you've got people there 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 weight list 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 got to 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 to 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 podcast 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 cuz I wanted to get a speaking gig booked next thing you know they're all asking me when the next Strownet 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 3540 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 comparing 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 weight list and what you could do is you could leverage the weight list to get people into your community i do this so if people request a free copy of the book couple of emails later they'll get invited into my Facebook group or to come and connect to me on LinkedIn or to come and subscribe to my YouTube channel so you've got to build this uh 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 school 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 a hundred 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 weight list 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 Strownet 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 two or three or four people coming to that event because other people were inviting them to it so I 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-in potentially they'll want to get your head shot 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 have had some fantastic opportunities from it not least the one which I always bang on about which is when I guested on Ali Abdal's deep dive podcast and generated 3,000 leads for 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 one 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 three tier four type podcasts hobbyist type podcast 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 three-step coaching framework to help you sleep better go and download my sevenstep 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 Pod Match pod Match is like a concier 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 you there's 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 Pod Match you can probably get yourself booked on to 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 three 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 inquiries 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 optimization overall so you may even get found organically this was a just a byproduct which I discovered about four or five years ago where as I guested on uh 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 guest it 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 going to 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 going to have around getting out there onto the speaking circuit but again I 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 you you're this immediate credible trusted person it's a bit like if um 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 might must 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 a thousand emails or posting out on social a thousand 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 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 the 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 two or three other networking meeting organizers who came to spy on the competition and then because they liked what I the talk which I delivered at 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 Gstershare and the Southwest um 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 three 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 the art of speaking is getting out there and practicing it and delivering 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 three stop 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 Inerson 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 it g 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 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 the asset whatever that is during your call to action the other way to get speaking engagements is to pay what I call paytoplay 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 learned 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 two 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 if id 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 for the long term to build a partnership with these guys has meant that this year when I'm speaking there's 1500 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 three times the size of audience that I would have spoke at had they actually given me that speaking gig two 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 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 people will 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 or 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 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 cuz 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 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 two weeks after that event has 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 three times out of four 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 at 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 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 organizers and uh 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 will create this magnetized sort of inbound influx of leads into that 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 got to 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 with in greatstead of being able to create fantastic opportunities for your yourself you're not going to 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 thousand leads going to come from where are my next 10,000 followers or subscribers going to come from if I only had a week to get a hundred people into a weight list 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 a,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 on mass 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