How To Attract The RIGHT Coaching Clients

Transcript:

You may have heard the advice that you should focus on bleeding neck problems and solving those problems in your coaching business. But you may have also heard that you should focus on working with clients who are going from good to great. Clients who are already successful and want to reach the next level. I've given both of these pieces of advice and they can seem like they're at odds and that they're in conflict with each other, but they're not necessarily in conflict with each other.

So in this video I want to talk about these distinctions and how you can use them to message to clients that you'll love working with in your coaching business. And when you get this right, you attract clients who pay you quickly. They do the work, they become great case studies, and they're a joy to be on calls with. When you don't get this right, you end up with muddled messaging or you're torn on what to do with your niche and you end up feeling stuck and the marketing that you do produce isn't as clear.

So let's first dive into this idea of a bleeding neck problem. This refers to the problem you solve with your coaching. The reality is, if someone doesn't have some sort of problem or some result they want something they want to improve, why would they pay you? Bleeding neck is important because it means it's something that's urgent. It needs attention right away. Typically that supports you in the sales process because the person isn’t saying, “Oh, I need to think about it. Let me get back to you.” They're saying, “No, I need help with this. As long as you're the right person, I'm ready to invest in it.” So the bigger the problem, the bigger the payout. You solve big problems, you're going to make a lot of money as a coach. If you solve smaller problems, it's harder to charge a lot for your coaching.

The second piece of this is good to great clients. I worked with a coach Charlie Gilkey a couple years ago and he made this distinction for me, which I love. There are clients who are going from nothing to something, so zero to one, they're just getting started. There are clients who are going from bad to good, they're struggling and they need support to turn it around. And there are clients that are going from good to great, they're already doing well. They want to reach the next level, and you can choose to work with any of these types of clients and you can have a good coaching business with any of these types of clients. For me, I like working with good to great clients because typically these people are motivated, they have a track record of success. It's not as risky to support them and say, “Oh, I'm going to help you get started from scratch.” You really don’t know if they have what it takes. For example, in my niche, I don't know if this person would make a good entrepreneur. They haven't proven to me that they can actually take action on things, get clients, build a business versus the good to great person, who’s probably going to succeed no matter what, but I can make it easier or faster for them.

So which do you choose? It seems like people who are good to great wouldn't have bleeding neck issues, but actually they do. Ideally, you want to work with winners, people who are going from good to great and you want to help them with their next big problem. See, every level of success opens up a new batch of problems. And I'll give you an example. One of the clients that I have loved working with, she's an executive coach for folks in healthcare, and she came to me when she was doing about $20k per month on average. She had a good business that was working multiple six figures, but it wasn't as predictable as she wanted. She was working more than she wanted, and there were big ups and downs in her income month to month. So what she wanted to do was smooth those out because it was stressing her out. That to me is a bleeding neck problem, but it's for someone already winning. They want to go from good to great.

I'll use another example because we've been watching the Olympics recently. Let's say you work with Olympic athletes. These folks are good to great, right? They want to win gold. Maybe they want to go from not medaling one year and to three years later they want to win gold. Let's say you could be a surgeon for that Olympic athlete. Well, that's a bleeding neck issue. If they tear their rotator cuff in training and they need to be ready for the Olympics, they're going to go and they're going to go get surgery on it, and they're finding the best surgeon they can and paying for it.

So that is an example of a bleeding neck problem with someone who's going from good to great. Now, we could move the different variables here. We could say, let's say you are surgeon, but not for Olympic athletes, just for the recreational athlete, kind of for anyone. Well, not all of those people who see you and talk to you are actually going to move forward with the surgery. They might say, well, this is expensive. Maybe I should try to let it heal on my own. The Olympic athlete doesn't have the luxury of doing that. If we flipped it around, let's say you're working with Olympic athletes, but you're not a surgeon, you're like a massage therapist, nothing wrong with that, you probably won't make as much supporting the Olympic athlete as the surgeon would because you're not dealing with a bleeding neck issue. You're maybe supporting their performance.

You might help with some soreness. They're definitely going to invest, but you're not going to be able to charge high prices. So it's great when you can work with someone who's already doing well and they just want to do a little bit better, and they don't really have urgency, but they're happy to pay for support. Those people are few and far between, though. I don't think that you should base your whole messaging strategy around those people because most of us, we only change, we only invest when there's actually a painful problem to solve, right? It's just part of human nature. If everything's going well, then why am I paying you a ton of money? Those people are great to work with, but let them come naturally. They're probably going to be 10% or less of your roster. So in conclusion, we want to coach winners on their next big problem.

So think about what are the big problems that people have who are already successful and want to become more successful? And you can never go wrong with speaking to a result. So let's let go of the whole idea of problems and pain for a second and just say, if you can articulate this specific tangible result or outcome that your ideal clients want, then you'll be able to actually speak to people across the spectrum, whether they're zero to one, they're bad to good, they're good to great, whatever it is, everyone kind of wants to solve that problem. So recently I launched a new membership program called Client Gym, and the outcome, the result it spoke to in all of the messaging and the emails was I want to help you build a predictable flow of clients. A lot of people are going to be attracted to that.

Even people who are gone from good to great who already have some clients, they have a business that works, but they just want a more predictable flow of clients. So you can really never go wrong with articulating that result. And once you want to get a little bit more specific, it helps to know the distinctions of good to great, but ultimately these things are not in conflict. You can target both of these because good to Great is about who you're serving, and the bleeding neck issue is about the problem you solve. Combine those and you have a really great niche.

One last thing is that your messaging can be on point and you can be speaking to the right person, but if you don't have the right package for them to enroll in that you can charge high prices for, you're not actually going to be able to convert that person. So I have a video about how to develop a $5,000 or more coaching package and the different components that go into that. That's the other half of this whole thing is developing that high end package that's right for that good to great client with the bleeding neck issue. So if you want to combine everything and take this to the next level, go watch this next video, and I think you'll get a lot out of it.