Life & wellness coaching can be a really hard thing to sell. It takes a certain type of rare ambitious person to even be interested in hiring a life/wellness coach, and then convincing that person to work with you is a whole different game.
How To Sell Life Coaching Services
In this Brian Tracy video, Tracy shares the three qualities of the most successful sales professionals. If you haven’t heard of him, Tracy’s a classic motivational speaker and the author of many best-selling self-development books.
If you’re reading this, you’re a life or wellness coach, not a sales professional (well maybe you are in a way), but there’s a lot of insights in this video that can help you sell your coaching services.
Let’s examine what these three qualities can teach us about selling coaching services, starting with his number one quality of successful sales professionals:
1. Ambition
Tracy describes ambition as “an intense desire to be successful.” In the context of sales, this means you must strive to be the best, and model your actions off the very best people.
People want the best. Just think about your own experience on a day to day level. When you’re picking a movie to watch, you’ll likely start by searching for best movies certain year. You probably aren’t searching for any random movie.
Can you confidently say that you’re working towards being the number one expert in your niche?
If you feel like you’re not on the path to becoming the number one expert in your niche, your business may require a shift in strategy. Your niche may be too general and broad.
It’s a lot easier to be the expert in something extremely specific than it is to be the expert in something general. It’s hard to be the number one expert in productivity, but a lot easier to be the number one expert in productivity for aspiring novelists. And the latter would make for a far more interesting business.
What is unique about you as a person and what you can offer?
It can be really hard to identify your unique strengths & interests on your own, so I encourage you to ask other coaching friends to help you out with this. If you’re struggling with niche finding, you’re certainly not alone. It’s in fact the number one challenge my clients, who are wellness entrepreneurs, have.
2. The Ability to Overcome Fears
The top sales professionals, learn how to overcome fears in the context of sales.
According to Tracy, millions of people today are trying to “sell behind a keyboard” because they are afraid of rejection, the number one fear in sales. He instead advocates making sales through physical conversations — whether through phone, Skype, or face-to-face.
The power of physical conversations in selling is a really interesting point to consider and especially relevant in the coaching industry. It’s extremely hard to sell coaching through words alone, because the value of coaching is that you’re working with people in a hand-on personalized way. Your sales process should reflect that.
You shouldn’t rely 100 percent on social media, your email list, or your website to sell. As a coach, all of your online channels should funnel into a phone, Skype, or in-person conversation, because real, genuine conversations lead to coaching sales.
On your website, social media, and email list, you can simulate face-to-face presence as much as possible by adding videos explaining what you do and showing off your personality. Videos will help people who are browsing your website and pages establish a much deeper connection with you than if they just saw words alone. That being said, make sure your videos lead to free phone/Skype consultations because people need to experience your coaching first hand if they’re gonna buy from you. You can learn how to sell coaching online by simulating offline intimacy as much as possible.
3. Being 100 Percent Committed
Successful sales professional are totally committed to achieving their goals, and don’t have fall back options. Unsuccessful people, according to Tracy, have “one foot in the door” in terms of their commitment to goals. Perhaps they get sidetracked or just never fully give their full attention to something because they are afraid of failure.
Are you totally committed to your coaching business? Is the fear of failure secretly holding you back from achieving your goals? Fear of failure can be sneaky. For instance, at one point I wasn’t writing as much as I really wanted to be. I made writing a side habit that I’d be lucky to get 30 minutes a day in, when I knew deep down that I wanted to be writing more.
After taking a hard look at my goals, I realized fear was holding me back from framing more of my day around writing.
You don’t need to be thinking about your coaching business 24/7, but during work hours you should be totally focused on achieving your coaching business goals.
Are you guilty of “selling through your keyboard”? How can you add real face to face and Skype conversations to marketing system?