Focus, planning and patience are the keys to growing your coaching business, and being prepared to meet prospective clients face-to-face
In a previous article we discussed the benefit of being clear on the strategic focus of your coaching business/practice in terms of the intersection of your target client market with the range of service/product offerings.
For our own business, we focused on the niche market sector of finance and professional services and on offering a relatively narrow range of services underpinned by leadership development for individuals and teams.
This has allowed us to build our reputation over time in the sector, which in turn has helped drive new business opportunities. We’ve done this by concentrating on building relationships with key decision makers and influencers – managing directors, partners, CEOs and HR directors.
We took that focus further. Within each sector, we’ve concentrated on building relationships with organisations that occupy what we call the ‘marzipan’ layer (those in the icing layer are the very large multinationals who tend to have well-established coaching suppliers and, as such, are more difficult to gain assignments from). Having said that, we do have clients in that tier who have come from deep, long-term relationships with a key influencer(s) in the organisation.
Developing such relationships takes time and effort but we’re receiving an increasing number of enquiries. It’s been a hard but enjoyable graft. Our conversations with prospects, even if they don’t lead to an assignment, are stimulating and there’s always something to learn.
We’ve found that meeting people face-to-face is the most effective way of developing a meaningful relationship, so we’re prepared to travel to connect with prospects. For us, that means frequent visits to the main financial centres in the UK (London, Edinburgh, Leeds and Glasgow) and, given that some of our clients operate globally, to overseas destinations such as New York. Of course, once the relationship has been established, we can keep in touch by ’phone or video-conference.
We’ll still seek to meet our clients and prospects regularly though. In fact, we can trace almost every client back to an initial face-to-face conversation or meeting at a seminar or conference.
Generating face-to-face contacts underpins our new business strategy as follows:
- We run our own seminars for clients and prospects. Initially, these could be quite modest (around 10-20 attendees) but have increased over time towards the 40-50 mark (we limit numbers as it proves difficult to connect with too many)
- We partner with professional bodies aligned to our target market, such as the Law Society of Scotland, Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, ICAS and ICAEW, in providing courses and/or seminars to their members. This has taken time to develop
- We’ve taken up opportunities to speak at seminars/conferences for those who work in the finance/professional services sector.
In addition, we also build our sector profile by:
- Contributing to publications/books focused on the finance/professional services sectors
- Undertaking research, with our associate, Jane Welsh, on the characteristics of leadership in the finance and professional services arena
- Posting blogs on LinkedIn.
None of this is ‘rocket science’. It’s the interplay of focus, planning and patience (and learning from mistakes). For your own coaching business, think about the key relationships in your target market that would be worth rekindling or developing, and review your plan for engaging with them. Relationships can take time to develop, so don’t be put off. With enough strong relationships your pipeline of work should start to increase.
- Thomas Chalmers is a co-founder with Russell Borland of Leading Figures. Thomas is a chartered banker whose previous careers span 10 years in commercial banking followed by 14 years as owner/partner of a seafood business. Russell was previously at Hymans Robertson where he held a number of senior leadership positions including firm-wide managing partner.
- www.leadingfigures.com