OK, So Now I have to Get These Folks Signed Up for Caoching
This speaking thing is great! I get in front of a lot of people, I get to be the center of attention, I have a great time, I get to tell people what they can do, and best of all I get to use a microphone!!!!! COOL!!! That is all good but I have to pay the rent on my office so I have to figure out how to turn the folks in the audience into paying clients or this whole speaking rock start thing only benefits my poor little ego. Coaching is getting more familiar to people yet there are still many who are not exactly sure what coaching is or how it can help them. I discovered that if I make an offer of 10-15 "FREE Life Balance Coaching Sessions" to be drawn randomly from the forms I collect at the end of the workshop…I get a lot of free sessions and a lot of information for my contact list. You should know that my contact list is growing rapidly now but it began with about ten names of friends.
What do I do In a Free Session. I Don't Want to Give Away Coaching Because that Makes it Hard to Pay the Office Rent.
I had several free session where I was determined to WOW the clients with my amazing coaching skill knowing that after they saw how great I was they would surely want more! In fact, I helped a couple of them so well they resolved their issue and never came back. At least that is what I choose to believe. Anyway, after this happened a few times I decided that the FREE session should have a specific purpose to get people to see how coaching can help them. I want the person to get value from the session and I want them to know that coaching will help them achieve their goals and improve their life. I developed a specific format for this session that leads the client to discover what they want to change, how they will benefit when they change, what is preventing them from making these changes, how they will feel when they make these changes, and to understand the it is all possible. WOW, has that made a difference! I would say that 70 percent of the people I see decide that coaching with me will help them and they sign up.
Sign 'em up and take the payment
This is the perfect time to go over the coaching agreement and collect their credit card information. I collect the credit card information and put them on a recurring billing system through my merchant account. The recurring billing is great because it keeps the clients from having to pull out a wallet every month so the don't feel that pain and it keeps me from having to keep track of who has paid and who has not. Wonderful, it all happens automatically!
What I Learned
1) Offer a free session at the end of each speaking opportunity and collect contact information.
2) Use the free session as a way to sign up new clients and make sure their is benefit for the client in the session too.
3) Get the coaching contract signed, set the next appointment, and collect payment. Nobody can benfit from coaching until they start coaching.
September 22, 2008
This Speaking Thing Rocks!
So I joined BNI and one of the members asked me to speak for 30 minutes at the Women's Council of Realtors. I said absolutely, I would love to I have the perfect thing to talk about! AAAAHHHHH, what the heck am I going to talk about? No problem, just calm down and think about the Realtors you know and what they have in common…oh yes, they all run around crazy busy and on their cell phones constantly. They have no set hours so they work all the time including nights and weekends. Problem solved, I will talk to them about life balance! Now all I have to do is write a thirty minute talk about life balance. I wrote and decided that the best idea would be a workshop rather than a speech because this is a large group of type A women and being one of those myself, I know you have to keep me busy to keep my attention. I was amazed when two weeks after delivering the workshop I saw the front page story in the local Real Estate trade magazine was about ME and MY WORKSHOP! How cool is that?
What About this Shopping Cart Stuff?
I started to seek out resources on building a coaching practice and found minimal information but I read or listened to every word I could. Each of the "experts" that I found had their own website and several items you could buy to help you get your coaching business off the ground so buy I did. Then I noticed that after I purchased something, I would get an automatic email from the vendor and then several follow up emails. Hummmm, how do they do that? The answer is a shopping cart system. What is a shopping cart system, where do you get one, what is the best one, and will I know what to do with it? Investigate I did and I soon realized that these things do much more than help you allow people to check out on your website. They let you send these follow up emails called auto-responders. They allow you to collect email addresses in a data base and organize it, they help you compose and send out newsletters, broadcasts, and much more. I gotta have one! Now all I need to do is figure out which one. 1Shopping Cart is the one you want so if you are thinking about getting a shopping cart system click this link Shopping Cart System and you can sign up. This will help you collect payment, do auto-responders, ezines, mailing list, and everything you need to run your business.
What About All these Questions People Ask…How do I Answer Them?
Now I am in a networking group and doing speaking engagements and all these people are asking me hard to answer questions like…
What is a Life Coach? How long have you been a life coach? What kind of education do you have to have to become a Life Coach? How many clients do you have?
Here is what I have figured out about these questions…What I think people really want to know is…can I help them and am I any good. So that is what I answer when I say "That is an interesting question. Why do you ask". Sure enough I have gotten clients by not answering their question but asking them what they need.
What I Have Learned
1) The more I speak the more clients I get and the more my name gets out.
2) A good workshop can get you a lot of clients, build your email list, and give you expert status.
3) If you want to have an Internet presence you must have a shopping cart system. Shopping Cart System
4) Don't answer questions about the facts of your coaching business, answer by telling people how coaching with you can help them.
September 19, 2008
