Understanding Your Business, Rapport Building, Client Consults and Setting Up Your

First Session

Introduction To This PDF

This is not the sexiest PDF you will ever read from Coach the Life Coach, but that doesn’t make it any less important and I truly hope you will take the time to understand everything in this PDF.

Since I started the Coach The Life Coach newsletter I have been sending out weekly posts offering free information on how to run a successful Life Coaching Practice.

My open rate usually hovers around 45%, until that is, I write a pot on any business aspect of coaching such as marketing, sales or SEO. Then the open rate drops to about 25%.

I find this puzzling because in my experience it’s the business and client attraction side that most coaches are struggling with, yet many seem to want to bury their head in the sand and continue to treat their business as a hobby, or just presume that clients will find them if they just keep plugging away.

That’s absolutely fine if it is a hobby, you don’t want to be bothered by paying clients or you can throw thousands of dollars at somebody to do it all for you. Otherwise it’s a recipe for being an ex-Life Coach very quickly.

In this PDF I’m going to take a look at some things you want to be doing prior to starting coaching (don’t worry if you already have, you can still back-track and implement this) so you totally understand how many clients you need to attract to fulfill your needs and how many inquiries you need to get those paying clients.

I’ll talk about the forms I use for a client induction and the rationale behind each one. We’re also going to take a look at building rapport on a consult call, how to close a consult and make sure the person want to hire you. Then finally how to do about setting up the first client session so that things run smoothly and your client has a reasonable expectation of what is likely to happen.

As I say, none of this is as sexy as learning how to do a rapid intervention and remove a fear from your client she has been stuck with for 20 years. However, if you don't get the basics right you don’t get to work with clients, so it is quite important stuff!

Understanding What You Need To Get What You Want

In building your coaching practice getting the phone to ring or an e-mail to drop in your inbox is only half the battle. Inquiries are worthless unless you can convert those inquiries into paying clients.

To maintain things as they are I want to work with 3 clients per day. Usually (but by no means always) I only see clients 5 days per week. That means if I have clients on Saturday (which I often do and even on Sundays occasionally) then I take a day off in the week. Actually I say I take a day off, I probably don’t, it’s more likely to mean I’m writing or marketing and I love doing both, so it never feels like work.

And that by the way is what you need to grow your practice, if not a love of writing and marketing, at least not a resistance to it because it is fundamental to your success. I won’t get into too much detail with those now, but here is how I look at it and how it becomes fun to me. At least most of the time.

We’re deep into reframing territory now and I know if you’re not already, then you will become a world-class reframer in the weeks and months to come, as this is probably one of the most important tools we have at our disposal which is why we talk about it in-depth on the course.

I see writing this way:

• It’s an opportunity for me to think through ideas that may be somewhat nebulous until I put them on to virtual paper. Because I know thousands of people are going to be reading what I write, I have to make sure it’s coherent and makes sense (mostly anyway). If it isn’t, or it doesn’t, I’m going to see a higher rate of unsubscribes if it’s a newsletter, and negative comments if it’s a blog post.

• Every blog post is an opportunity to, by using long-tailed keywords (more about those later in the course), be found by prospective clients. I frequently get inquiries from people who have read a post that was published months and even years ago.

• Similarly, every post is a massive opportunity for me boost my SEO and SERP’s. Don’t worry if you don’t know what those mean yet because all it really means is raise my profile and authority with Google and we will get into it in more detail later in the course.

• A blog post is a chance to build and expand conversation. Every now and then I’ll publish a post where the comments section is far more interesting than the post itself. This tends to happen the most with more controversial posts as people are more likely to comment and offer an opinion. There have been some really cool debates and I have learned a lot from my readers. I have no issue with anybody questioning and challenging me because that means one of two thing. It means I’m either wrong or I didn’t explain myself properly. A point of note. I NEVER delete blog comments unless they are either spam or abusive toward another commenter.

• Every time I write I have an opportunity to build my authority with readers and (hopefully) look like an expert. There are two types of authority you want to be building. First it’s with your potential clients and then there is the authority the search engines give you because you have page views, inbound links and quality content.

• I can vent. I probably vent less often than it would seem, but every now and then I’ll get pissed off by some aspect of self development or some people who work in our sphere. Rather than bottle it up, I let it out and often feel great for doing so. I think this is highly personal and there is a fine line between looking like I’m having fun, being honest and writing for my readers benefit. And looking like I’m a miserable malcontent just trying to stir the pot for the sake of gaining blog traffic. I could easily write a post exposing some less than authentic people in the self development industry. It would gain a LOT of traffic and would have a very high chance of going viral. It would also be dumb and pointless unless I just want to spend the next week or so fire-fighting and managing the comment section and potential social media backlash.

I see marketing this way:

• I have services (coaching and coach training) and products (books) to offer and I know there are people out there who can benefit from both. When I was in sales I saw every meeting as an opportunity to help another company be more successful. I didn’t feel like I was selling I felt like I was solving other businesses problems, even if they didn’t even know they existed previously. I felt like I had duty of care to do my best to help a customer understand how they could benefit from the service or product I was selling. That’s the reason why I’ve never sold anything I didn’t believe in myself. And incidentally, that’s why now I turn down 19 out of 20 joint venture opportunities. If you try and get me to be an affiliate for your product based on how much money I can make, you have just blown the deal. I’m only interested in knowing how it can help my readers or clients. The money I can make is a byproduct of helping others, albeit a very nice byproduct.

• It’s a game, a challenge if you like. Hopefully you believe in your own ability to coach and help people (if you don’t by the way, worry not because I intend to make sure you do by the end of the course!). As such, and once you know who your ideal client is, you then have to figure out how to get your message in front of them so they can appreciate your undoubted brilliance and hire you. If you see it as a chore and feel like you are hassling people then it will become a chore and you will hassle people. But as I say, if you see it as a challenge and an opportunity for you to learn and grown and help even more people as you do so, then win/win!

• We are in the B2C (business to consumer) business and as such we van take a more personal approach to marketing than a B2B companies can. Therefore marketing is very much about connecting with others, and you probably know as a coach that connection is a global value hard-wired into us at birth. My first year as a coach was a slog and the worst part was I feel so alone a lot of the time. Previously I’d spent 20 years working in teams and interacting with others face-to-face on a daily basis. I’m an extrovert and very social (I know who’d have guessed!) and suddenly that was taken away from me. Social networking saved my sanity and is something I really enjoy. I know that if I want to strike up a conversation because I’m tired

of talking to myself there is a multitude of different opportunities to do so 24 hours a day if I’m so inclined.

Let’s Do Some Math (no groaning)

Detour over, let’s get back to tracking and converting inquiries. In a moment we are going to take a look at the different types of inquiry because when working out your conversion rates of inquiries to clients it’s important to separate them.

For the sake of this exercise I’m going to presume you also want to see 15 clients per week (or more accurately, conduct 15 client sessions because on occasions you may see a client more than once in a week), that you want to build in 2 weeks vacation time a year, and that you want to earn $50k per annum purely from coaching.

I’m also going to presume that you keep a client for an average of 10 sessions. Personally I don’t even get close to that and an average client rarely stays more than 6 sessions with me. I do some long term coaching, but it probably makes up less than 10% of my client sessions. I like working fast with clients and getting them in and out before I have become bored and they have run out of cash.

However, I am not the norm and there is nothing whatsoever in wanting to build longer-term relationships with your clients, presuming it’s adding value to them of course. It also means that I am under a lot more pressure than most coaches to create a steady stream of inquiries. If my average is 5 sessions and yours is 10, I have to generate twice as many clients as you and that is no mean task.

15 sessions per week equals 750 per annum and that would mean you only need to charge $67 per hour to hit your goal. That should be easy, right? I’m pretty sure that if I dropped by rates to $67 per session I’d be flooded with work. However, I’d probably be flooded with the wrong type of work. The last client I want is one who has hired me just because I’m the cheapest. Wal-Mart can get away with being the cheapest, coaches not so much.

Pitching your price too low can be worse than pitching it too high because your perceived value to your potential clients plummets. They would be asking themselves “How good can he or she be if they are prepared to work for this amount of money?”

It seems like I have contradicted myself there by saying I’d be inundated if I dropped my prices and then to suggest people don’t necessarily want to buy the cheapest when it comes to coaching. However, I already have a subscriber base of over 10,000 and whenever I run a reduced pricing offer it sells out in 48 hours or sometimes sooner. In other words, I’m already established and I’m guessing if you’re on the course or working one-on-one with me, you’re not…...yet.

At the moment we’re slap bang in the middle of an ideal world and you know as well as I do we don’t coach in an ideal world.

One of my concerns with some training companies is they don’t prepare coaches for real world clients. Rarely do I get a phone call from a prospective client who knows exactly what they want and they just want to hire me to give them that extra help. More often than not people have no clue as to what they really want. It’s our job to help them figure that out.

Anyway, back to the math lesson and the real world!

That $67 rate doesn’t take into account clients cancelling or quiet times of the year. 2012 was the first year that I was full pretty much all the time. Prior to that I’d always struggled to maintain things in the height of the summer and also through the holiday season. And that is when I’d run my offers to stay full.

It also doesn’t take into account you getting sick and being unable to work, or any technical glitches that may grind you to a halt. I had a 5 day mini-nightmare in September 2013 when my Mac failed on me and it took 5 days to rectify the problem. The new Mac cost me about $2,500, the lost client sessions probably cost a similar amount.

When working out your rates you have to take into account these things otherwise by the end of the year you will be staring at a huge gap between what you wanted to earn and what you have earned.

It’s going to vary from coach to coach, but if you build in about 50% wastage to be on the safe side then you should be good to go. That takes the figure to about $100 per session which seems to be from my experience close to the ‘going rate’. I put the term ‘going rate’ in apostrophes because I just don’t like it.

I once got into a thread in a coaches group about pricing and the majority of coaches seemed more intent on charging a rate similar to other people rather than what they thought they were worth, or what they needed to earn. One guy even went as far as to say the most important thing for new coaches to do is to spend a couple of days researching other Life Coaches. In short and I apologize if this seems arrogant, he’s an idiot and doomed to failure.

Don’t get into the comparison game it will divert your focus. Your only job is to help people understand you are worth what you are charging and then delivering on that by giving massive value. In such a competitive market place you have to separate yourself from the competition, not merge into the pack and just be another Life Coach.

Now you know if you are wanting to earn $50k (and by the way it’s ok to aim for whatever you want as long as you know how you’re going to get there and what you have to do) you will have to be charging about $100 per hour and also stay, for the large part, full with 3 clients per day.

Breaking that down even further that also means that if you base it on working with a client for 10 sessions that means you need 50 clients per annum to hit your target. If you think 10 sessions is going to be tough, then use whatever figure you think is achievable.

Note: I know if you haven’t started coaching yet you don’t have any figures to go on and you may have no clue at to how long clients will stay with you. However, as I said I’m unusual at 5 or 6 sessions, so aiming for at least 8 should be reasonable and 10 is not at all unusual.

50 paying clients per year obviously means you have to sign up one client per week. That doesn’t sound a lot, but it’s probably harder than you imagine, especially to begin with. Also you now need to understand how many inquiries you need to generate to obtain 50 clients because without that information it’s very hit and miss with your marketing.

There are tree distinct types of inquiry and they are broken down like this:

Cold Inquiries

These are when people who don’t know you from Adam or Eve contact you. Primarily for me these are people who have done a Google or Bing search and stumbled across my website with no previous knowledge of me.

These are the hardest to convert because they usually tend to be shopping around and talking to multiple coaches. Also, even though my prices are easy to find on my website a lot of people won’t check (I get this a lot from overseas inquiries for some reason I haven’t figured out) and they are often expecting to hire me for a lot less than I charge.

When they ask me how much I charge I always refer them to my website because I know that my chance of them hiring me just went from about 50% to 10% or less. I really don’t want to get into talking prices on the phone. However, you may be ok with that and that’s fine because in my early days when I wasn’t as busy as I am now I didn’t used to let them go so easily!

Note: Whether you put your rates on your website is very much a personal thing and there are good arguments for either option. Doing so makes everything transparent and it certainly stops some time wasters from calling you in the first place expecting it to be about $20 an hour - and yes I have had that conversation very recently with a woman who thought that’s what I charged.

Leaving your costs off your site allows you to build up your value on the consult so that they are already looking to hire you before they know how much you charge. However, it requires that you have better selling skills than the other approach. Even though I spent 20 years in sales and hopefully still have the skills, I just don’t want to be bothered with using them (more on why later).

Cold inquiries can also be spur of the moment decisions. If I get an inquiry from somebody at midnight their time on Saturday my expectation of them becoming a client goes from 50% to about 5%.

I know this may sound like a huge generalization, because it is, but in my experience such inquiries are frequently argument and/or alcohol fueled, and by the following day the person in

question has either sobered up and got ‘buyers remorse’, or calmed down and decided that they don’t really need help.

About a quarter or maybe a tad more of my inquiries are cold inquiries and as I have already mentioned I expect to convert between 40 and 50% into paid clients. Unless you are a very skilled sales person I would not recommend you think you can close more than that, in fact a third would be more reasonable and quite good to begin with.

Warm Inquiries

A warm inquiry is from somebody who already knows you. They may not know you personally but follow you on Social Media, read your blog or newsletter or even have seen/heard an interview you have given, and they like the cut of your gib!

Warm inquiries make up over half of all my inquiries and these are a lot easier to generate into clients than cold inquiries for new coaches. The latter requires you being visible either on Google or in some form of directory or advertising that actually works (most don’t and if you can find any Life Coach who has generated a client from Yelp or even Craig’s List please let me know).

And being visible on Google means you need lots of content, lots of inbound links and an understanding of SEO. It also takes time and that’s why you want to be focussing your efforts primarily toward writing (blog and then newsletter) and social networking. That can run concurrently with a longer term strategy implemented for optimizing your website so Google can’t wait to send you a stream of inquiries.

My conversion rate with warm inquiries is closer to 70% because these people ‘know’ me to begin with. They aren’t likely to be offended or surprised if I swear (although I actually never do in front of a client unless they do first, but I do in my blog - a lot) and they probably realize I have a very British sense of humor.

Note: If you are considering advertising on Google Pay Per Click or even Facebook get help! Both require you know exactly what you’re doing and that you understand split testing and have the time to monitor them closely. Otherwise you can spend a lot of money and see little return.

Referrals

These are the greatest type on inquiry and my close rate with these is up over 90% and yours should be too. If somebody contacts you because a friend raved about your amazing coaching abilities, then they are a client waiting to happen and not somebody who is likely to mess you around.

However, referrals are not as plentiful as many coaches think they will be. There is an assumption that if you have done a great job people will be rushing to tell their family and friends. This is not so for a number of reasons.

• They may be embarrassed they worked with a coach - seriously it happens• They may be the kind of person who doesn’t like to advise others• They may not know anybody who they think needs a coach• They may just forget or not even think to pass your name on

With the last point you can of course remind them. One thing I always did in sales after I closed a good deal was to ask the person I was dealing with if they knew anybody else who could benefit from the service I was selling.

This is an approach I would advise because the worst thing that can happen is they say ‘no’. You may not want to ask them on the call for fear of putting them on the spot (although if you have a high level of rapport and frame it correctly then that shouldn’t be a problem) so you can always follow up via e-mail.

An option I have used a few times with some success is to tell them that if one of their referrals signs up for 4 or more sessions I’ll give them (the referrer) a free session by way of thanks or even an Amazon gift certificate for $100

Note: Even if you don’t like asking for referrals you definitely do want to ask for testimonials to begin with. Not using testimonials on your site is almost as bad as not having your telephone number on your site (at least half my inquiries come from phone calls and I see many coaches who don’t even have their number available).

Having said that, do not put testimonials up before you have at least 4 or 5 as that sends the message that you are new at coaching or have been doing it a while and not very good.

If you have done the math and you are being fairly cautious you’ll now know that you need about 2 inquires for each person who becomes a paying client. As such, and using the figures from earlier on, that means you have to generate about 2 inquiries per week. Not easy, but very doable with the right approach.

None of what we have talked about up to now is super sexy or exciting, but as with any business there are aspects like that. Understanding how many clients you want to work with per day, how many inquiries you need to generate that amount, and what to charge to meet your goals is critical. It’s also not something you’ll be doing on a regular basis because once you set it up it’s done until you decide you want to earn more or take more time off!

When The Phone Rings Or The E-mail Lands

Presuming you are up and running and doing all the basics properly you will start to see inquiries come in, even if it’s only a trickle to begin with. It doesn’t matter if they are via e-mail or phone because at some stage talking is involved. I almost never take a client on who I haven’t spoken to first. There have been a few occasions when I have done for a variety of reasons, but even then I reserve the right to cancel and refund their money if I don’t think we’re a good fit when we kick off.

The reason I want to talk to clients before diving into coaching is for 2 reasons.

1. Do I want to work with them? Like most coaches I have taken on clients in the past even when my gut feeling was telling me not to. It can be tough walking away from a few hundred dollars when you aren’t even sure why, but it’s crucial to do that. I can only think of one occasion when I said yes to a client who I’d got a negative vibe from to begin with and it went on to be fun. But I can think of a number who I sensed weren’t right for me and that sense was proved correct and I regretted it.

2. Do I think I can help them? If somebody comes to me wanting help with time management or productivity then I’m not the right coach for them. Such issues bore me and if I’m being honest I’m not very good at them. Similarly, if somebody wants help changing careers then they really need a career coach and I don’t do that kind of work. You have a duty of care to your clients and that means not taking money off them if in your heart of hearts you don’t think you can help them achieve the results they are looking for.

Building Rapport - The Basics

The starting point with dealing with a prospective client is building rapport. If you can’t do that then they aren’t going to hire you PERIOD. It doesn’t matter how good a coach you are, how much you demonstrate value they will NOT hire you if you are out of rapport.

Very recently I got a call from a lady who had a San Francisco phone number and was looking to hire a Life Coach. After a brief hello I told her that San Francisco is my favorite city in the world and I have been there many times (which is entirely true but totally irrelevant to anything other than rapport building).

That created immediate rapport especially as she was born there and still loves the place even though she now lives close to the Oregon border. I went on to say (in a jokey voice) that I visited to watch my beloved St Louis Rams take on the 49ers, but I hoped she wouldn’t hold that against me.

Why do you think I mentioned that? What do you think the benefit was likely to be? Give it a moments thought before moving on.

I’ll tell you why I mentioned it, because I wasn’t thinking, that’s why, It was a rookie mistake. I was already in a good level of rapport so I didn’t really need to take it any further. Now admittedly if she happened to love football it could possibly have deepened the rapport, or it could have broken it if she hated the Rams.

She didn’t hate the Rams, but she did hate all organized sport and the disdain in her voice was palpable. I had broken rapport as effectively as if I’d started laughing at her problems and told her she need a psychiatrist, some vodka and a bag of anti-depressants not a Life Coach.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I then went on to say when she mentioned that she was an ‘expert’ at the Law of Attraction that I was ok with some woo-woo stuff (and I am by the way, I have no issue with a client believing in the Law of Attraction even if I don’t because I may be able to use that belief to help them at some stage).

Boom! I may has well have told her I clubbed baby seals in my spare time, and liked nothing better than to get drunk and run naked down Haight Street on a Saturday evening singing Danny Boy. That call was over very soon after that because she told me that she was offended by the term woo-woo. I wanted to ask her if she was an expert at manifesting why the hell did she manifest a call with me, but I refrained!

In this instance I don’t mind that I broke rapport because I was already wondering if we’d be a good fit after her rather over the top attack on sports and her taking offense over something so benign. So there may have been an element of me doing this intentionally and at an unconscious level. Then again I may be giving myself too much credit and maybe I was just not on the ball.

Everybody has an innate ability to build rapport to a greater or lesser degree. We do it on a daily basis with family, friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances, it’s how we communicate. To build rapport simply means to generate a relationship with another person that usually involves mutual trust and affinity.

An important part of this to understand is people like people who are like themselves. So we tend to gravitate to people that think like us, speak like us, act like us, even look like us. People are, rather remarkably, four times more likely to marry another person with the same name as themselves than any other random name. Therefore, when trying to build rapport quickly it is important to make the other person believe that you are like them.

It’s possible that you read that last sentence and felt a twinge of anxiety because you’re not in the game of conning people or pretending you are something you’re not, right? Good, because neither I am. This isn’t about manipulating, deceiving, or even outright lying to people, it’s about putting yourself into a situation where you have an opportunity to help somebody.

It can be tricky to do this with somebody who phones you out of the blue because you cannot see them, you know nothing about them and you have little information to go on.

Tricky, but not impossible. When I saw the San Francisco number I knew I had a massive opportunity even though I never thought that consciously. I looked at the number and thought, “cool an inquiry from the Bay Area, I love to talk about the Bay Area”, not, “cool I have a chance to build rapid rapport and take somebody’s cool hard cash off them”.

When I was in sales the first time I would go and meet a prospect for the first time I would always scan their office for something that we had in common that I could bring up or ask them about. I would NEVER lie or pretend I was interested in something I wasn’t, but there would often be something to break the ice with and build rapport.

For the most part people like to talk about themselves and the things they hold dear. This isn’t always the case, but with rapport building we’re playing a numbers game. If the lady from San Francisco had been a guy there would have been more chance my football comment would have strengthened rapport because the fact of the matter is, a lot more guys follow football than women. The reality is she wasn’t a guy and she didn’t like football, or me for that matter.

As I say, rapport building from a phone call can be tricky, but it can still be done if you practice it and have long enough on the call. One of the first questions I ask when a prospect calls me goes something like this:

“Do you mind me asking how you found me? The reason I ask is I don’t want to ramble on about me and what I do if you have been reading my blog or newsletter for 5 years and know more about me than I do!”

There are a number of benefits of asking this and they are:

• I want to know what type of inquiry they are, referral, warm or cold

• If they are a referral I want to be able to thank the referrer

• If they found me on Google or just through a random search I want to know what search term they used so I know what is and isn’t working with my SEO (search engine optimization)

• If they are a blog or newsletter reader I genuinely don’t want to feed them a load of information that is redundant and makes me sound all self-indulgent

• It can help build rapport. Depending on what their answer is I may be able to use that to find some common ground

If they are a warm lead and have read my books or blog then building rapport is easy. One of the reasons I write like I talk and make no attempt to be somebody I’m not is because I want to people who read my material to get a sense of who I am. Then I can just be myself and make a joke if I want, and I frequently do.

I recently had an inquiry from somebody called Luci. Unfortunately I hadn’t noticed it was spelled with an i as opposed to a y when I e-mailed her back. We set up a consult and she said in the final e-mail before we spoke that it was, “Luci with an i”. So when I called her and she answered I said, “Is that Luci with an i?”

Ok so that’s not going to make anybody’s book of great jokes, in fact it’s not really a joke, but she laughed and it helped build rapport and remove any awkwardness that I may have felt for getting something so basic wrong.

You maybe thinking that this is all well and good, but if you have no information and their phone number is blocked, or the area doesn’t show when the call comes in (the last part is the case if you are in the UK and you get a code you’re not familiar with), then you have no chance to make rapid rapport.

But that isn’t necessarily the case and you can still do it to a certain extent, or at least in part until the call reveals more information to get your teeth into.

Building Rapport - Pacing

As I said at the beginning of this section, people like people who are like them and this extends to people who talk like we do and have similar body language.

I have a tendency to talk very quickly and the fact I also have a northern English accent can make it tricky for some people to understand what I’m saying. Especially if they tend to take more time when talking and interject pauses whilst they think. Just by getting all enthusiastic and chattering away at 100mph I can actually break rapport or fail to build it in the first place.

You would think most people would be excited by talking to somebody who is enthusiastic and bursting with energy, but alas that isn’t the case and we need to pace the prospect as much as possible.

When we pace somebody we closely match the intensity, speed of delivery and tonality of their voice to make them feel like we are on the same page. This doesn’t mean you should try and mimic their accent or any particular speech peculiarities that they may have, it just means just get as close as you can whilst remaining consistent with how you normally sound.

That may sound contradictory but everybody varies their speech style somewhat depending on how excited, relaxed, anxious etc they are, so it’s nothing like as obvious as you may think. Real experts can also pace somebody else's breathing although that’s not something I’d recommend on a consult call.

Note: You may be familiar with pacing and leading because the two often go hand in hand as we pace a conversation so that we can then lead it and take it in the direction we want it to go. For the purposes of rapport building on a client call though, pacing is sufficient.

Building Rapport - Listening and Feeding Back

Actively listening is a skill that requires practice and patience. Most people have a natural inclination to dive in whenever they have a point to make. Holding back even when you have a piece of world-shatteringly important information takes a great deal of discipline, but the results can make it very worthwhile.

One other thing that you can do when listening is to feed snippets of the conversation back. This may only mean repeating one salient part of the sentence. If somebody says, “I really hate my job, my boss doesn’t like me and the money is terrible” you can respond with something along the lines of, “Really, your boss doesn’t like you?”

This has two effects, firstly it shows you are paying attention because you cannot repeat what they said if you were miles away, and secondly by using an upwards inflection on the end of the sentence it invites the other person to expand on what they were saying as you made the statement into a question.

Whether you want to us this approach on consults is down to personal opinion and to some extents your level of confidence. It can definitely help build rapport, but you also risk the call dragging on longer than necessary and getting into coaching on the consult, which is a no-no in my opinion.

Many new coaches are (understandably) so keen to demonstrate value on the consult that they end up coaching rather than consulting. The dangers of this are twofold:

1. Once you set off down that path it’s very tricky to step off without getting to some form of conclusion. As I say, this can make the call unnecessarily long, but it can also leave the client feeling disappointed if you start this process and then realize that there is no way you can offer something of real value without really going into great detail.

2. I have had a couple of occasions in my very early days when I actually solved the clients issues for them on the consult. Both people sent me e-mails thanking me for getting them up and running and then adding that they no longer feel they need a coach. Win/lose!

Do’s and Don’t Of A Consult Close (Phone and Skype)

• Do look to build rapport with common ground

• Don’t pretend you have an interest in something you don’t just to build rapport

• Do match the speed and intensity of their speech (at least to begin with)

• Don’t fake an accent or any other speech pattern

• Do dig down on their issues

• Don’t coach

• Do ask questions

• Don’t presume

• Do look to close on the call

• Don’t force people to sign up there and then with high pressure sales tactics

Closing A Consult

My approach to closing a consult is very, very relaxed and it’s not an approach I would train sales people to adopt for reasons I’ll explain in a moment. It goes something like this:

“I’d be delighted to work with you if you want to go forward. However, it doesn’t matter what I want and it has to be a great fit for you too. If you would like to speak to people I’ve previously worked with, that’s fine and I can arrange that. if you want time to think about it and maybe talk to other coaches and see what they can offer, that’s fine too. My only advice is to go with your gut instinct. If you have any doubts about hiring me, then don’t because I only want to work with people who are really up for it. On the other hand if you’re as pumped as I am and your gut is saying ‘yes’ then let’s do it.”

Then I shut up until they speak.

The upside to this approach is that it demonstrates confidence. I’m not pressuring them, or even expecting them to give them an answer now if they need to think about. People hate being sold to, but they love to buy and I’m giving them the opportunity to buy.

There is a large downside though from a sales standpoint and that is I’m taking an eggs in one basket approach rather than following the sales process. I would not adopt this method if I was sat in a boardroom talking to a CEO of a large business hoping he’ll hand me a check for $5m.

The professional approach (from a sales standpoint) would go something like this:

“Ok Bob, so you said that you hate your job and you’re paid less than you think you’re worth for your level of experience and expertise, is that correct? Ok, and you have said it’s crucially important that you advance your career my moving to another business where you are fairly remunerated and your skill set is appreciated, right? Cool, and at the same time you want to lose 50lbs and quit smoking, is that correct? Fantastic, so when you achieve all of those you will be delighted you chose me to be your coach, right? Excellent, so let’s see when we can get you slotted in”

I’m not going into great detail here because whereas having basic sales skills is very valuable, you don’t need to learn sales inside out.

Each piece of information I fed back to Bob, was exactly as he’d said it to me because I’d made notes on the call. I didn’t paraphrase I parrot-phrased to coin a sales term, so that there was no margin for error and no opportunity for misunderstandings.

By asking him questions I knew the answer too I was demonstrating that I’d been paying attention, but more importantly I’m building up the value of hiring me by stringing everything together. I also build up something called a ‘yes set’ because when somebody has just said yes to you 4 or 5 times on the trot, there is a much higher probability they will say yes when you ask for the order.

It can be even more powerful (and presuming it’s true) if you can say something like, “And you want to quit smoking because, as you said, both your parents died from lung cancer and you have two kids who you want to see grow up and get married”

A consult is about exploring and understanding a customers pain, highlighting it and then showing them a solution to remove that pain. That may sound very clinical, but every single sale from a Snickers bar to a Boeing 747 follows the same process.

With the final sum up I use a future pace and a presupposition. We’ll touch on these more in the course when we get into the language side of things, but I have effectively told him it’s a done done deal. In sales this is also known as an assumed close.

Let me make one thing perfectly clear. There is NOTHING wrong with the latter approach as long as you’re honest, respectful and don’t get all pouty if the potential client wants time to think.

I personally prefer the former approach for three reasons:

1. It’s almost like reverse psychology and the fact that I back off frequently has people wanting to say ‘yes’ there and then. Having said that, if they don’t I don’t then change tack and go all high pressure. You have to stick to one approach or the other.

2. I do a lot of consults when I’m walking the dogs or out and about. To adopt the latter approach you HAVE to take notes of salient points so that you can deliver them back at the end of the call verbatim. Unless that is you have a photographic memory, which I most certainly don’t.

3. I spent 20 years in sales and quite honestly I have had enough of that kind of approach even though I know it works.

The choice is of course yours and about the only thing I’d say in terms of offering advice as to which method you adopt is to do what feels right. In any case you want to be practicing closing calls with other coaches on the course or who are happy to help in the Coach The Life Coach G+ Community.

The Client IntakeHopefully by now you have a great understanding of how many inquiries you need to generate to earn the money you need to earn in order to make your coaching practice a sustainable business, and not a bit of a hobby.

You also know how to build rapport, that you shouldn’t get into coaching on a consult (unless you give a free coaching call away as your consult - although I wouldn’t recommend that, you will convert a lot less people than you think into paying clients. Not only that, but you will also spend a lot of time coaching for free, people who want coaching for free) and you are starting to see clients.

If you have had training elsewhere you may very well have your own intake forms and be happy with them. If that’s the case and you think they work, then cool, stick with them. If not, you can download the PDF of the forms I use with clients from the members area. You are free to rebrand them, edit them or do whatever you want with them, but here’s a run down of what I use and why.

Client Details

This is where I capture all personal and contact information. Some of the questions I ask are of a very personal nature, especially when it comes to wanting to know about medications, recreational drug use, date of birth etc. That is why I make it obvious that the information is highly confidential.

Very occasionally a client will resist offering some of the information, but I won’t let it slide. And the reason I won’t is because as I explain to them, “We are forming a partnership and if you don’t trust me enough to think I will protect your data the same way as I would protect my own, then you shouldn’t be hiring me”.

I have been coaching full time since July 2005 and in that time I have lost 1 client because of a refusal to fill the forms in. He demanded that I fill in the forms too and send my details back to him to make it fair. I have no idea how he goes on when he needs medical or dental assistance or has to send personal information to the IRS, but needless to say I declined and canceled the session we had booked.

One of the reasons I want a list of medications a client may be on is because I’m looking for a certain type of drug or very large doses that would indicate the clients physician, psychiatrist or therapist maybe struggling to get things under control.

MAOI’s (Monoamine oxidase inhibitor) are usually used as last ditch attempt medication for depression when everything else has failed. And the reason is because they have a lot of potential harmful interactions with things as benign as cheese, yoghurt and cough medicine, as well as alcohol.

I have a book in my desk drawer that lists every medication available in the United States, (although that’s not needed these days as you can search any drug in seconds on Google) and if I see one I’m unsure of I will look it up.

Spotting a drug like this isn’t necessarily a reason to drop a client, but I would definitely want to do a lot more digging. I have had two instances when I spotted these on a clients list of medications when they had made no mention of depression on the consult. If I tell you that one of the clients burst into tears when I mentioned them you can get an idea that Life Coaching wasn’t what she needed.

It can be tough saying that, very tough. We do this job because (hopefully) we like to help people. But sometimes the best help we can offer is to understand that we probably cannot help. Seeing a client get upset as you also see a few hundred dollars walk away isn’t what we signed up for, however, it’s doing the right thing.

It isn’t a problem for us to deal with somebody who has depression as longs as:

1. It’s managed and under control

2. We ask them to advise their therapist or counselor (if they have one) as a matter of professional courtesy

3. We don’t offer therapeutic advise or start working directly on their depression

4. We make sure the client knows we are not prepared to work on the depression

The rest of the information on the details form is self explanatory. I want more than one contact method whenever possible in case of technical glitches and I want close family names just so I can talk about them and not be saying your wife/husband or your kids etc.

Client Intake

This is all pretty standard stuff even if I have tweaked mine quite a lot since I started coaching. I ask about so many areas of their life because I want to get an holistic picture. Do NOT fall into the trap of thinking what your clients says they want to work on is necessarily what will help them get the best results.

By that I don’t mean they lie, just that they may not realize what it is that’s really influencing their behavior and causing their issues. For example, a client may think she wants to change jobs when in reality it’s a negative situation at home that is causing her to be stressed and hate her job.

As a species we are far worse at compartmentalizing than we think we are and sometimes clients totally misunderstand the influence one area of their life can have on another. They have hired us to help them make changes because often they can not see what needs to be done.

Coaching works because we come in with an open-mind and without any preconceptions*. Therefore, we don’t have the blind spots that the client has and we can see things they can’t. If we couldn’t, then there wouldn’t be much point in hiring us.

* This is the reason I won’t read things like psychometric tests or strength finder surveys before I am well into the process with a client. I just don’t want to form preconceptions and thus potentially restrictions, on what I think he or she can and cannot achieve. It’s literally impossible not to if I read their tests and surveys.

You’ll see that one of the questions asks whether the client has read ‘How To Be Rich and Happy’. This obviously isn’t relevant to you, but you may want to ask if they have done values work. Then again you may not, because I really don’t care if a client has done values work before because I’m still going to insist we do it again.

The question I ask about what motivates and demotivates the client can be very important, especially when you get answers like; “I hate being told what to do with knowing why” or “I get motivated when I have deadlines to hit”.

This stuff will tend to come out as you work through, but it can sometimes come after you have made an error of judgment in how you manage a client. This can save you a lot of time and make yours and the clients lives a lot easier.

Terms Of Service

I’m pretty sure most clients either don’t read the Terms of Service or at best scan it, however it’s still crucially important and I will not work with a client who hasn’t signed it.

My cancellation policy is that if a client cancels within 48 hours or no-shows on me they lose that session, they also are supposed to either ring me or at least make sure they have confirmation.

The problem with this is sometimes the e-mail hits my spam folder, or it gets lost in cyber space or I’m not online when it comes in. This can be the case with clients in the Southern Hemisphere. They may think they’re giving me 48 hours notice when they send me an e-mail at 11.00pm my time, but I may not see that until mid-morning the following day.

It gets even more problematic because even if a client cancels 3 or 4 days beforehand I can still struggle to fill it. People aren’t usually looking for emergency coaching.

Not only that, but what about a last minute cancelation for highly understandable reasons such as illness, a death in the family, being called into a work meeting etc. Are you going to tell them they just lost a session?

It can be tough so here is my real policy that I don’t put on my ‘Terms of Service’ because it would encourage people into thinking they have one free pass

If a client cancels inside 48 hours I take the session off them and I then give it them back as a bonus. Why do that you may be wondering? This way if I finish early with them I don’t have to refund that session. It avoids playing hardball with a client who may have done their best and been unable to attend through circumstances beyond their control. The second time though I do play hardball and the session is taken away.

Your cancellation fees are personal so I would advise you go with what you feel comfortable with to begin with. Sometimes I confess to being a tad too relaxed, but that easy going approach evaporates if I think a client doesn’t value my time or isn’t taking this seriously.

I also link from my Terms of Service through to a page on my website that explains my refund policy. If I have somebody hire me for 6 sessions and only use 2 I am not going to refund them 33% of the money.

The simple fact is, if they’d booked for me for 2 sessions then they'd have had to pay more than my 6 session rate. This rarely comes into play as I barely get more than one client per annum ask for a refund, but it has happened.

Tracking Sheet

Another basic form I use to make sure I know where I am with clients. I regularly have clients think they have had one less session or even one more than they really have. I could track back through my notes or my calendar, but I prefer this because it’s easy to read and lets me know exactly where I am.

All of this may be completely redundant to you if you use, or intend to use, an online client management system. My opinion of those is that they can be very helpful and if I was starting up now I would think very seriously about implementing such a system.

They can help maintain your records in one place and not have to have scores of paper files like I have. I shred client files after two years of not working with them otherwise I’d soon run out of filling space, so there’s definitely an upside to having virtual files.

They also allow your clients to log in and check on any messages, work assignments etc you may have tasked them with rather than relying on e-mails and file transfer programs for larger files. And you can save yourself time by copying and pasting relevant information from one client to another. After all, once you have explained how to set an anchor (more later on in the course) there’s no need to do it again and again.

There are 3 reasons I haven’t changed and in all honesty, probably won’t.

1) Laziness - I have no idea how many ‘live’ clients I have (and by live I mean clients with open sessions or clients I expect to work with again), but it’s a lot and entering all that information into a database does not thrill me

2) The learning curve - At the moment learning new software when what I have works and the time that would take is something I can do with out

3) Cost - For what I’d like to be able to do it would probably be pretty expensive and as I say I’m not sure the return on investment is likely to be there

The First Client Session

At least 90% of my clients have never worked with a Life Coach previously. The reason for this is probably because if someone hires a coach who sucks they either think Life Coaching per se suck, or that they are uncoachable. Neither of those are good unfortunately. The flip side is they hire a great coach and then quite rightfully go back to the same person.

Therefore, it’s important you set up the first session correctly so they know what to expect and you don’t get sucked into chit-chat that isn’t really what they are paying for. Here is what I will say on a typical client session and feel free to use or edit and use for your own purposes.

Before we kick off I just want you to know what to expect from working with me, if that’s ok?

The sessions are typically an hour. However, I’m not a clock watcher so if we get to an hour and we are in the middle of a process I’ll keep going rather than end things there and then because the hour is up. So if you are ever on a tight time constraint when we start a session please let me know and I’ll keep things on track to finish at the appointed time

Everything we talk about is no less confidential than if you were talking with your doctor or accountant. As such don’t worry about giving me too much information, I can filter out what’s not needed, but I’d rather you told me something you weren’t sure was relevant and it wasn’t, than not tell me and leave out something that can help the process.

I will be paying very close attention to your language and as such I may dive in mid-sentence to stop you. This isn’t because I can’t listen. Far from it, I’m more than happy to let clients talk for 15 or 20 minutes if it’s relevant and helpful.

If I asked you what were you thinking about an hour ago you may very well have a rough idea. However, even though you may know the topic you probably wouldn’t be able to reconstruct the thought accurately. It’s the construction that makes the difference and if I let you keep going it will lose its impact. So I kind of apologize if I do dive in, but equally I don’t really!

Similarly, if at any point you need to stop me, do so. There’s no need to wait, this is your time and I only have one agenda and that is your agenda, so just dive in, I’l pick up the thread again. Also, if you don’t agree with something I said please say so. I don’t want nodding dog clients and if you think I’m wrong it means one of two things:

Either I am wrong in which case we need to delve a bit deeper. Or I didn’t explain myself clearly enough, in which case we need to revisit things. Either way, I WANT you to let me know. If you have any questions before I dive into things please ask away now, otherwise we can get going.

And that is all what is really needed to set things up. You may want to explain your terms of service too, and that’s not a problem at all if it makes you feel more comfortable. I was trained to say something like, “we have 60 minutes together today” as a way of setting up expectations for

the time limit, and that’s fine is you want to do that. It’s just that a more relaxed approach feels better for me. If you do follow my lead, just make sure clients don’t abuse it. if you start getting sessions run to 90 minutes or more then you need to tighten things up a tad.

This PDF has covered a lot of ground, but this stuff is the basics that you will want to get right. If you have any questions please ask away in the Google Community, on the next module or in person and I’ll do my best to help.