144 - Marketing for Life Coaches Part 3: Talk to More People

Do you hate networking because you stumble over what to say when you meet someone? If this is you, you’re in good company, nearly everyone I talk to feels the same way.

In today's episode of the Life Coach Business Building podcast, my goal is to inspire you into action by talking about the importance of talking to (more) people and telling them (everyone) about your coaching business. In the first two parts of this marketing series, I discussed how to understand your niche, identify their problems, and create an effective marketing message. Now, in the third part of the series, I'm sharing the details of how you can communicate your marketing message and talk to people with more ease. 

Talking to people can be one of the most intimidating things to do, especially when it comes to you explaining the benefits of coaching in a compelling way. You have to be confident and clear in your message to be able to get your point across in an effective way. Building a coaching business takes guts and determination and will require more of you than just talking to people. It’s just one more piece of the marketing puzzle.

In this episode, I’ll answer questions about what to say, who to talk to, and where to find people who might need your coaching. I’ll also talk about the way you can practice to build your confidence until you are convinced that what you're saying is actually good and impactful. 

If talking to people is the missing piece to your life coach business's marketing strategy, tune in to learn all of this and more!

Watch on YouTube! https://youtu.be/ZdZ8uAjIUFQ

Transcript

I want you to ask yourself today, is this your problem? Are you hiding? Are you making excuses that you don't have everything perfect? Like maybe your website's not great. Whatever that is, I want you to get to the bottom of that. I want you to go get whatever mindset coaching you need to have. Then I want you to get the business coaching that you need so that you can figure out the strategy for your business so that you know, like get your marketing message written. Make sure you know what is happening with your niche and then just start talking to people. That's your challenge, you guys. Talk to as many people as possible.

Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

Welcome to today's podcast. Today we're gonna talk about talking to people. This is part three of the marketing series. Now, in part one and part two, I talked with you guys about really understanding your niche, knowing their problems, and then developing a marketing message. Now, I know that I say every step is important, but that marketing message, once you develop that, that's gonna help you be able to talk to people comfortably.

I want you to be able to have a comfortable conversation. Talking to people is simple, and yet for most of you, what I find is that it's one of the hardest things that you do. I think that it's difficult because oftentimes people don't know what to say when they meet somebody. You know, saying that you're a life coach is just not enough.

I know that many of you have introduced yourself as life coaches or coaches or nutritionists, weight loss coaches, or whatever it might be. Too many people, and yet I suspect most of them think that you kind of have this little hobby. And we know how impactful coaching is. So I want you to start talking about your coaching company. That's the first shift. You're not just a coach. When somebody says to you, Hey, what do you do? You say I have a coaching company. Do you understand the difference in that? Then I want you to get really practiced at this message to get clear on it, and I actually want you to practice it. I want you to walk around. Literally, I walked around my neighborhood. I would go on walks and I would say this message out loud. I would talk about who I helped, what their problems were, and what the solution or the transformation was from my coaching, and I practiced it over and over.

When you meet somebody and you stumble over your words, it immediately does not give a good impression about what you're doing. When you say your message confidently because you know it, it changes what people perceive about what you've just said. So you wanna practice your message until you can confidently say it to someone, until you are convinced that what you're saying is so good and so impactful.

Part of the work that you need to do is to really spend time believing in coaching. Because when you believe in coaching and when you believe in the work that you do, then you'll be able to say to somebody what your coaching is about with much more conviction.

Once you get comfortable with your introduction, then I want you to start telling people, which means you have to get out of your comfort zone. This is, again, the hard part because the next question you're gonna have is, whom am I gonna tell? And I wanna tell you, the first people that you need to tell are the people right around you.

So that's your friends. Get your friends clear on what it is you do. Get your family clear on what you do. For many years, when I had my wedding magazine, people kept thinking I was a wedding planner. No, I wasn't a wedding planner. I was a magazine publisher who sold advertising, but it was called Wedding Ideas.

And everybody would say, how's your wedding business? So even there, I had to keep re-explaining it. And this is the same thing that's gonna happen with you in your coaching business. You're going to want to re-explain. You're gonna wanna talk about your company, about the clients that you serve. By the way, clients can be free clients, they can be consultations, or they can be paid clients, they can be peers that you've coached.

Those are all people that you've helped with coaching that you could label as a client. And when you talk about clients, again, it sounds like you have a business. So you wanna be talking to the people immediately around you. You wanna tell everybody what you do, your hairdresser, the nail shop, and you wanna tell people like your doctor, the bank teller.

So interesting. I had a client who told her doctor, and as that turned out, her doctor said, oh my gosh. I really need to hear more about this because maybe I could refer you to clients. They were literally just having a quick conversation or what are you up to? She'd left her corporate career and she was now coaching, and the doctor was like, wow, I could tell people about you.

Yes. That's how networking works. So when you meet somebody, you're gonna tell them what you do. You're gonna talk to him about how amazing coaching is. You're gonna share your belief that everybody needs a coach. If you are a coach and you've had coaching, I know it's impactful. That's why you're doing coaching yourself, and I do believe everybody needs a coach.

I think once we all have a coach, we keep hiring coaches because we see the value in it. So I want you to tell people about your clients. I want you to tell about who you help. I have a client that just recently graduated from my program and we had an exit interview to kind of make sure that she knew her next steps and kind of vision for where her business was going.

She's an empowerment coach. She was going to local networking events when we first started working together, and she was doing a lot of them, I mean, more than anybody else was doing. What's interesting though, is her conversation was just small talk. She was networking and she was able to say, I'm networking all the time, but it wasn't getting her anywhere because she was not really sharing how impactful coaching was.

She wasn't really taking the conversation far enough when she was explaining what she did. You guys have to know what your pain points are. You have to know what the solution looks like. You have to be able to describe the outcome of your coaching, and all of that happens when you're talking to people.

So if you're just making small talk like, hi, I coach women, I'm an empowerment coach. People have no idea what that means. When you help women with your empowerment coaching, what is it that people do? What are the results that people get? So you wanna be able to share examples like, wow, I coached this woman who had this corporate career and everybody else was getting paid more than she was, and yet she was taking the brunt of the work.

And through our coaching, she was able to really show up in a different way and eventually get a raise, and eventually get a promotion. That's a conversation that you want to have about empowerment coaching. You wanna be able to say, from there. Then like, I even help women feel more empowered in relationships so they can reach the level of intimacy that they want. So you go through all the examples that you have about what empowerment coaching looks like.

When this woman shifted her conversation and her energy around that, at her networking events, then she began to get results. She continued to say like, look, we gotta have a free conversation. I love to give people coaching sessions and I wanna give you one. Just come and experience coaching. No strings attached.

This is one of the things I tell the women I work with all the time. If you have time on your schedule, if you're not fully booked, you should fill it with coaching hours and just give your coaching away. You just tell people, I wanna offer you the experience of coaching. It's my gift to you. And you do it with no strings attached.

You do it without selling them coaching. You trust that the transformation that they experienced during your coaching is so significant that they will ask you, wow, I had no idea. What does this look like for us to work together? So fill your time with complimentary coaching sessions. So the next time you meet somebody, you offer them a coaching session.

Give them, you know, the link to your calendar and say, Hey, let's get together. I really mean it. I wanna give you a session. I want you to know what it's like. If it's not for you, maybe it's for somebody else that you know. When you start doing that, you will then be able to have conversations with other people about your clients.

That, wow I was coaching this woman the other day who was considering divorce and through the work that we did, she's restored her marriage and she feels so much better about things. Whatever that is, you wanna be able to tell stories about what it is you do. This really actually helps people believe that you are in business, and I can tell you for sure it's a win for everyone because the person that gets the coaching, gets to understand coaching, and I want everybody to know the value of coaching.

They get the opportunity to tell somebody else. You have an opportunity to practice and now you get to talk about the clients that you have. So when you have clients, free or paid, it changes your belief, which also changes your confidence and you know how that works. The more confident you are, the better you will show up when you are talking to people about your business. 

Alright. The same client was really stuck early in our work about where do I find people to talk to. And I know that's something that you're saying also. And sometimes you need somebody else to tell you where to find people.

So I said, look, what is your work career? What's your history of work? Turns out she worked for this very, very large company. I'm not gonna say the name of it, but it was a huge worldwide company that is who she had worked for previously. I said, my gosh, why are you not reaching out to those people? Her first thought was, that means I have to reach out to my old boss and I need to tell my old boss what it is I do, because that sounds terrible.

In her mind, she was thinking that she was going to reach out to her boss and say like, do you wanna get coaching for the female team members that you have? I also help my clients do workshops. That's one of the ways that they market their business. And she was thinking maybe I could do a workshop like she could get her people together.

I could offer a workshop, she could pay me. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. We're not worried about talking to your boss, although, great, talk to your boss about what you do. But when I thought about this company, I thought about all the employees that there were, all the coworkers that she had, and all the people that she had met, this was a consulting agency.

All the people that she had met in her consulting worldwide over the 15 years that she worked for this company. Once I explained that she was like, wow. I'm like, we're not worried about convincing your boss to hire you to help you empower the employees. We just wanna connect with the other women that you've worked with in the past and then begin to build relationships.

This is not like a first date where you ask somebody to get married. You reconnect with people, you let people know what you do. You begin to, build a bridge. And then once you've got the bridge built, you can walk across it and tell them what you do. You can begin to find out what's happening in their life and start to share stories about what you're doing.

It actually will be so easy. Because when you reconnect with a past coworker and they know you left the company and they're like, Hey, tell me what you've been doing. It's an open door for you to share about the incredible work that you're doing through your coaching. So once that happened, this client was like, wow, you are so right. I actually do know a lot of people. She immediately went over to LinkedIn and started connecting with people. Then she could have conversations with them. 

The same client said to me during our exit interview, you know I've been thinking about the men that I used to work with. Now she only coaches women. She said, I'm trying to figure out how I'm gonna get with these men, because obviously these men are either married or they have girlfriends, or they know women that could maybe use my coaching. And in her mind, she'd spent a bunch of time thinking about how this was gonna be like, I need to craft this email where I introduce what I do and I'm like, no, no, no. You're making this too hard. By the way, this is why we all need a coach, because I make things hard too, and my coach gets me straightened out. But I said this is easy. If you really have relationships with these guys, if they were coworkers that you were close with, just reach out to one of them and say, Hey, can we have a quick coffee chat or a Zoom meetup?

I'd love to catch up with what you're doing. Also, I wanna ask you a favor. And just ask the guy, Hey, this is what I'm doing. I wanna be able to connect with some of my former coworkers, you know, with the guys that I used to work with. And I wanna be able to tell them, because maybe their wives, their girlfriends, right?

Maybe they're gonna be interested, so just have a conversation. She was like, oh. So sometimes we make things too hard and this client is not different than anyone else. Everybody that I work with gets stuck on these things again, which is why sometimes you need somebody to tell you, Hey, from the outside looking in, this is much easier than what you think.

So I'm curious, can you see how easy this is? Once you know your marketing message, once you've practiced it, once you've talked to all the people in your world, once you've been doing some free coaching, eventually it's gonna start to unfold. 

I'm thinking about another client that I had that was really involved in her sorority in college and she was part of an organization all through the years, she's in her mid-fifties now. All the years since she graduated, she has stayed in an alumni organization with this sorority.

When she started telling me about the monthly meetings she was having with these women from this sorority, I said, wait a minute. Do they know what you do? She's a habit coach. She helps women in midlife, empty nesters really develop the habits that they've wanted to develop for so long. She helps them figure out kind of what their next chapter is. I'm like, every one of those women in your alumni group wants to do what you're talking about. They're all in their fifties and they're all saying, what's next for me? Do they know what you do? And she was like, no. So I suspect that there really are people everywhere in your world that have no idea what you do.

Go through your email contacts and look at your oldest email contacts. Go on your LinkedIn, on your Facebook, and start to think about where are there associations and where are there groups or things that you were a part of in the past. Again, university alumni, you know, reunion people.

Just think of all the people that you might know. And then here's the deal, you guys. You have to decide that you have the guts and determination to build a business because I can talk to you about how to talk to people. You can work on your marketing message, and you can understand your niche, but now it's up to you.

You have to talk to people. And when we look at the people who successfully built coaching businesses, there's no magic there. Those people talked to a lot of people. They were willing to talk to the guy at the coffee shop. They were willing to talk to the person at the airport. They were willing to talk to the person on the plane, at the seat next to them, instead of reading their book the whole time.

That is what you have to be willing to doat the beginning of your business. I would say, at least for the first year, and at least until you reach a hundred thousand dollars, you want to be talking to people over and over and over. This is going to be the difference between you being a successful well-paid coach that has lots of clients and one that's just really struggling.

So I want you to ask yourself today, is this your problem? Are you hiding? Are you making excuses that you don't have everything perfect? Like maybe your website's not great. Whatever that is, I want you to get to the bottom of that. I want you to go get whatever mindset coaching you need to have. Then I want you to get the business coaching that you need so that you can figure out the strategy for your business so that you know, like get your marketing message written. Make sure you know what is happening with your niche and then just start talking to people.

That's your challenge, you guys. Talk to as many people as possible. One last thing I wanna say, this is gonna get easier, but in the beginning, you might have to talk to 40 people to get one consultation. Now that right there might blow your mind because you're thinking that you've talked to one person and nobody bought coaching, or you've talked to seven or eight people and nobody bought coaching.

I want you to be thinking about talking to 40 people and really telling them, not just meeting them at a networking event, but really telling them what you do and hoping then that you get one consultation because it's a numbers game. Building a business is. Then you'll have one consultation, and what I wanna ask you is how many consultations you have to have.

Maybe you have to have 10 before one person says yes. I don't say this to discourage you. I say this to inform you. This is what you need to do. I want you to get over the fact that you've talked to just a few people and just know you have to talk to a lot of people. And it gets easier the more you do this. You'll be talking to fewer and fewer people as you go along.

So you know right now if you have to talk to 40 people to get one consultation, it'll get to where you just talk to a few people and get a consultation. It will get to where you have a consultation and nearly everybody will buy. This is just the process of growing a business and there is no way to jump past this.

This part is really part of building a business. You're gonna have to talk to people. You're gonna have to get comfortable with your message. You're gonna have to get comfortable asking people to connect with you. You have to ask people to refer you. If you are coaching women on how to get through divorce and get to creating the new life that they want, you gotta make sure there are enough people that know about it. So when their friend gets divorced, they'll refer you.

All right. Have I made my point? I hope that you guys, take this step you think about talking to as many people as possible. Again, just look at your email contacts, look on LinkedIn, look on Facebook, and make a list of people that you can talk to, and then really figure out what you're gonna say to them.

Okay, next week I'm gonna be talking about the way an introvert can network. So if this is not your deal, and I want it to be your deal, it needs to be everybody's deal. I will tell you if you're shy in business, I want you to join me next week when I talk about part four, which is email opt-in and email marketing, that's the introvert's way to stay in communication with somebody once you meet them.

All right. I hope this was helpful. Go meet lots of people and tell them about your coaching, and then let me know what's happening. Shoot me an email, and connect with me on Instagram. I can't wait to hear what your results are. All right. Have an amazing week. Until next time. Bye-bye.

Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.

I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.