Many of my clients want to learn to write a great sales letter because they want to motivate people to buy their services or product. After all, we are in the coaching business to help other and to motivate them to make the changes they desire. The word motivate is critical to writing good sales letters so it is essential that we understands what motivates people.

What Motivates People

People are motivated to take action when they want to avoid pain or seek pleasure. Most of us are more motivated by avoiding pain than seeking pleasure.

In his book “Think and Grow Rich” Napoleon Hill lists the seven greatest positive emotions that influence humans. I would like to take a look at a couple of those and how they can be used in a positive way to motivate your clients to take action

Desire

Quite simply desire must be present before a person will take action or make a decision to purchase. To attract clients you must motivate them by increasing their desire for change or their desire for the result they are looking for. Remember that humans are motivated to avoid pain and to seek pleasure so to increase desire you must motivate a person to seek pleasure or avoid pain.

Increase desire by painting a picture and amplifying the pain that result from not taking action. Alternately, you can increase desire by pointing to the sense of joy that accomplishing a goal will bring and using language to make that joy almost tangible.

Faith

Faith that a desired outcome is possible must be present before a person will take action. As a coach you must increase your client’s faith that if the proper steps and actions are taken then the desired outcome is possible. You can do this by demonstrating how this has worked for yourself and others. Testimonials help people have faith that if it worked for another then it is possible for them.

Use your own experience and the experience of others to demonstrate how your coaching or products have helped others overcome their challenges and reach their goals. Use time or quantity when possible to offer proof of results. The testimonial offers social proof which gives your potential clients the faith that others can do it they can do it too.

Think about how powerful the combination of desire and faith are as motivators! Combining the two turbo charged emotions is certain to get a positive result.

Use the emotion of desire to ingnite the clients imagination to see all of the possibilities available and to push forward the idea of change. You can do this painting a verbal picture of what the possibilities are and how they will look and feel emotionally.

Then support the faith that these possibilities can become reality by utilizing testimonials from clients who have had similar goals and achieved them. Our greatest accomplishment and our greatest challenge as coaches is to help our clients make the changes they desire and to motivate that change.

To have a successful life coaching business, you must answer the question "what motivates people to begin coaching"? Why do potential clients make the decision to purchase your coaching or your products? Is it because you appeal to their sense of logic? No, not a chance, the fact is people buy based on emotion.  They buy because they want something that they believe will benefit them.

If you make a strong emotional appeal to their needs then potential clients will buy your coaching. The question is how do you do that, when do you make that appeal, and where do you make that emotional connection?

Answer the question "What does your coaching client want or need"?
You must have defined and know your target coaching niche before you can think about determining their wants or needs.  Once you have defined your target coaching niche, ask yourself and your clients or potential clients what their problems and challenges are. If you have not defined your target coaching niche then get "Coaching Business Blast Off" home study program and use the niche evaluator to clearly define your target coaching niche and describe them. You have some idea if you have researched your target but the best way is to speak directly to your market and get their answers. Survey you target coaching niche and determine the ten greatest challenges, needs and desires. Then determine all the smaller problems that result from the larger more basic challenges.

Why do coaches think that the desire to have a thriving coaching business is enough to make it happen? Sure I agree with the law of attraction and I believe that positive mind set and thoughts are integral parts of achievement but many coaches are missing the most important element to successfully achieving their own goals!

Action is Everything!

Absolutely nothing happens in business until someone takes action. All action begins with thought but the thought is only a thought until you do something. If you sense some frustration in my attitude here you are correct. See, want so much for each coach to succeed and to carry the benefits of coaching to the world but I get frustrated when I can't

It is easy to attract new coaching clients when you offer something of value to your audience.

Choose a topic that solves a painful problem for your niche.

Clients need to see you as the coach that really understands their challenges, needs, problems and desires.  The best way to determine a topic that strikes a chord with your niche is to survey them to find out what some of their greatest concerns and challenges are.  You can conduct a survey by simply talking to many people in your niche, sending out a simple survey to your niche through email, or using internet tools such as survey monkey.  Many times groups such as trade organizations will allow you to survey their members through the group’s newsletter.

Develop a workshop that helps your audience define their challenge.

People often feel anxious or frustrated but cannot clearly define what their challenge is.  In order for your audience to solve their problems or overcome their challenges, they must clearly define what those challenges are.  People can often tell you what the results of their challenges are but they cannot define what is causing the outcomes they do not desire.  If you are a coach that does not have enough clients to make thing income you desire you feel frustrated by the fact that you love coaching but are not making enough money.  Not making enough money is

Coaching is Selling and I don't Like Selling!

I know many coaches think as highly of marketing as they do used car salespeople, my apologies to anyone who may be a car salesperson.  I really don't know why that is but I started my career in advertising and marketing so I will confess that I am a little biased.  Let me ask a question…

Teach Others with Your Marketing

Do you think coaching is valuable and do you think people should improve their lives through coaching?  If you think that coaching is a powerful force for change and you believe in your ability to help others improve their lives then you should be excited to tell them about it so they can try it.  Use your marketing as a means of teaching and coaching.  Create marketing materials that help, teach and serve others.  That doesn't mean that these marketing materials cannot also serve

I need to focus on the things that will get my business started and clients in the door or on the phone.

I find myself feeling like there is always something more I need to do before I can really get started coaching in a BIG way.  I could take one more course, listen to one more guru, do something else on the Internet…..  Recognizing this to be an unproductive cycle, I have made a commitment to my self to stay focused on the phase my business is actually in and not worry about other possibilities.  I am going to focus on things that get me clients, help me gain expert status, get me speaking opportunities, and get my name out.

Networking In My Community

I have joined BNI and it has been OK, not great just OK.  I see that there are a lot of other groups around that network such as the women executive groups, solo-business groups, entrepreneur groups, and many more.  I have decided to visit many of those groups mostly to investigate speaking for them.  I have developed a way of gather names and contact information when I speak and it has helped me increase my client base and database.  At the end of a presentation I offer

Yeah a shopping cart, that's what I need to build my list!

Yikes! This shopping cart thing is easy to sign up for but that is all that is easy about it!  All I can say is holy crap this makes little or no sense and I'm not sure I will ever be able to learn this and there is so much to learn.  All I can do is start the tutorials but I'm not sure if this is stuff is over my head.  Well, I will give it a try and see what happens.  If worse comes to worse, I will hire one of the tech people they say they have for $40 an hour.  At least they can get me started.  This stuff isn't cheap either so I better get to work getting more clients.

Networking around town

So, I joined BNI and have been going to those meetings and they have been Ok but not super great.  I think I need to find other networking groups to go to as well.  It seems that I do better networking for speaking opportunities that networking for referrals.  Each time I am able to do a workshop, I pick up a client or two so I think I will go with it.  I have had great luck speaking at groups that are into new ways of thinking about spirituality.  The local Unity church has been a great place to meet people that I enjoy and to lead workshops.  I have also found that women are more open to Life Coaching than men.  No, that is not exactly correct…women are  more open to

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.

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.

Got Clients, Got Office, Need Payment!  Doesn't anyone use cash anymore?

Alright, got an office and clients are coming in for coaching.  So here we sit at the end of a coaching session and it is time to pay.  How weird can that get?  No one carries cash anymore and I have clients paying by the session so what do we do?  They scramble to get cash to pay me each time or they dig out a checkbook from some deep storage area and use the antiquated means of payment know as a check.  How shall I put this…PAIN IN THE ASS!!!!!  Plus every time they have to pay it becomes an opportunity to think about how much it costs and if they should continue.  Amazingly, I get the idea this is not optimal!

Now it is time to tell my clients that we are about to have a change.  After a great deal of thought, I decided that I should ask clients to coach for 6 months as a minimum and that I should be able to accept credit cards.  I would like to set up a monthly credit card charge that automatically bills their credit card once a month.  I figure that way I don't have to play bookkeeper.  Great thinking Suzan…now how the hell do I do that?

How cool is the Internet?  I explore to discover that there are companies, who for a small fee, will allow me to do everything I want and more!  I found a couple of these Kick Start Cart and Practice Pay Solutions.  The first step is to get a separate bank account for my business.  Then I can open a merchant account with one of these companies.  This process was pretty easy and painless.  Now I can get my client's credit card information and have them on recurring billing!  That means every month their credit card is automatically charged my monthly fee and I don't have to do anything!

Now all I need is more clients.

I know…I should join ICF locally!  They want an annual fee and a meeting fee to join so I will go to a few meetings first and decide if I want to do that.  So I go to a few ICF meetings and figure out that I am only going to meet other coaches and this is not going to help me get clients.  Next move.  One of my clients tell me about BNI a national referral group or as some call it networking group.  That sounds better because it is comprised of people in different business categories who help each other with referrals.  I think I will go to a meeting.  Gotta love the Internet again…I go and find that there are about 25 groups of BNI in my city.  How do I pick one?  I know I will just go to a meeting and see how I like the group.  I go and this seems like a good thing and it seems like I could get some business this way.  I try several groups and pick the one that is most comfortable to me and join it.  Not real cheap but I figure two clients will more than cover the cost.

Someone suggests I start doing speaking events to get clients.   Aaaahhhh!  Public Speaking?

After the initial flood of fear…I realized that new clients are not just going to come knock on my door so I decide to think about this idea a bit more.  I could speak but that leads me to the question of what the heck am I going to talk about?  I start to think about what my clients talk most about because I figure if there is something they all have as a common issue then many other people would have the same issue.  Gosh, I am a smart one!!! 

It seems that everyone of my clients is too busy and feels overwhelmed in life.  Great topic for a workshop or presentation, Life Balance.  Now it is time to start writing and thinking about how I can help people during my presentation and still make them want to become my clients as well.  I have to give them some value and get across a sales pitch at the same time.  I was in advertising for many years so I should be able to handle this.

What Have I Learned?

1)  It has to be easy for your clients to pay you

2)  Clients should know that they will be working with you for several months.

3)  You have to market and network to get clients.

4)  One great way to get new clients is through public speaking.

5)  Workshops and seminars have to provide people with some value and learning rather than being one big fat sales pitch for coaching.

6)  Here is a way to start a merchant account so you can take credit cards.

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