One of the biggest mistakes I made when having initial conversations with prospective clients was, that I was always talking about my coaching.
I was describing what my coaching does for people, how its different to other modalities of coaching and I would talk about how it works. I didn’t realise that I was solely giving them logistical information, but I wasn’t coaching them.
Steve Chandler told me several times that I needed to coach people in my enrollment calls and not simply talk about coaching them. Eventually in 2016, whilst recording a video together to promote a two day event for coaches, it finally sank in:
People would hire me after I had coached them and they’d had a good experience of being coached.
Why did it sink in that day? I have no idea. I do know that overnight I shifted all of my enrollment conversations to focus on actually coaching the potential client, on a topic they were interested in, or a challenge they were struggling with. This in turn, lead to calls being far more impactful and led to more people hiring me.
This is a small shift in how I approached enrollment calls, but a really important one. I could forget trying to make small talk. I didn’t need to get into an awkward sales pitch. I could simply get stuck into working on a challenge or goal just like I do with my existing clients.
It really puts your coaching skills to the test if you are coaching people on an initial call. You may not like to read this but if you are actually coaching people on initial calls and they aren’t signing up, then you likely need to up your ability to impact people through your coaching.
If that is the case, I would encourage you to get some coaching supervision or speak to someone about improving your coaching skills. I personally recommend people like Dr Mark Howard and Cathy Casey who are brilliant in their initial conversations with potential clients to really get to the heart of an issue and are therefore some of the best enrollers in the world.
If you want to get deeper into this subject, a few years ago I had a conversation with Dominic Scaffidi about the details of how to make an initial meeting with potential business clients as sustainably as possible. Please watch this and give it your full attention, but only if you want to be more prosperous as a coach:
With love and appreciation,
Ankush Jain
Coach and Author of Sweet Sharing – Rediscovering the REAL You
