To get coaching clients, get clear on exactly who you help, show up consistently where they already spend time, start real conversations, and make a simple, specific offer. Most new coaches get their first clients from people who already know them, so start with your network before you try to build an audience. These 10 steps are the core of a {link → marketing strategy for service providers}.
I signed 13 people into my first beta program with two Facebook posts, and had my first 5-figure month with an audience of about 300 people. You don’t need a big following. You need the right conversations.
I was a marketing professional for over 8 years before I finally quit my full time job and branched off on my own. As a marketing professional, much of my career was spent helping 7-figure and 8-figure companies and individuals grow, while struggling to grow my own income.
I felt proud of my career – but the only significant raises I received involved leaving one job for another. And even then, anything more than a 10% raise, even when changing jobs for a better opportunity, was a big reach.
Right before I quit my full time job and replaced my income entirely with my coaching business, I hired a business coach that helped me flip some switches in my brain.
One of those? Was putting myself out there on social and making sure people knew exactly how I help them.
And as uncomfortable as this made me…
It turns out that there was a long list of people who had been waiting for me to do this for years. I signed 13 people into my first beta launch with only 2 posts on Facebook. And a couple months later with an audience of only 300 people, I had my first 5-figure month.
(But some clients using my strategies are having 5-figure months within weeks…)
The Key To My First 5 Figure Launch
You don’t need a huge email list to have a successful launch.
You also don’t need:
- A ton of Facebook groups
- A lot of traffic
- A large email list
- A huge advertising budget
The key was extreme focus, which I’ll get into in a minute.
Before I dive into the specifics of getting clients… Let’s cover some keys as to what we are looking for with fast coaching sales, and why my launch was so successful with such a small list.
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Creating Visibility & Awareness
If you asked your friend what you did for a living, would they be able to tell you?
If the network that already exists in your life does not know what you do or what you have to offer, they cannot use your services. And they certainly can’t recommend you.
One of the things that helped me was that I had a practice of sharing what I do online. When I learn something, I like to teach it to others. And over time, this created visibility and awareness about my marketing expertise.
I know it can be uncomfortable to put yourself out there, but if you want to know how to get coaching clients fast you need to start telling people who you are NOW.
It does not have to be weird or salesy or pushy. Celebrate your successes with a Facebook post. Post a photo of your business cards that just came in.
Start practicing being open about what you do. This way people will know who to come to for help when they need you.
Build Trust With Your Audience
When I launched, a lot of people were buying the product that I was selling. It was really valuable and helped kickstart a ton of people’s online businesses.
But a lot of those people that purchased during my first launch to my coaching business audience weren’t buying what I was selling.
They were buying me.
They were investing in my skills because they trusted my abilities. Did they trust me because I have worked with them before? No. They trusted me because of what they have seen over a period of time of how I present myself, my personality, my branding.
Everything you do, whether you see it or not, is ultimately building your brand.
Though my coaching was new, my online presence was not. And I had successfully established the know-like-trust factor with my audience so that as soon as I was selling they were ready to buy.
This doesn’t mean you need to brand yourself for years – it simply means that if you’re new, you need to build that know-like-trust factor quickly using some of the tips below.
Offer Legitimate Help & Genuine Interest
If your aim is to learn how to get coaching clients fast but you are not passionate about your client, your business will not be sustainable.
To have a valuable, profitable, lasting business you need to have a clear message with depth and weight that addresses your audience’s pain points in a personal way.
Ultimately people do not want the thing, whatever the thing is. They want what the thing does for them. What transformation and change do they experience?
So as coaches we are not selling goods and services, but results. People are interested in the transformation, not fluff and filler.
- Legitimate help: Like a doctor diagnosing an illness, you want to ask questions and make sure that the solution you provide is both relevant and helpful. There are people you’re more suited to help than others, and there are people best served elsewhere, and that’s ok.
- Genuine interest: If you post online only for a sale, or start a conversation and chat about your services before someone asks – you’ll lose the ability to help someone. Not only that, but you may deter someone who can benefit from your work later. Make sure your conversations always start with a genuine interest in someone. This sets a solid foundation.
10 Steps On How To Get Coaching Clients Fast
My experience after pivoting my niche and having my first $14k month taught me a lot.
Before then, I spent years paying thousands in ads, selling something I didn’t care about but just knew about. So I thought it was the way to go.
But the route I was going before I quit my very first coaching business was never going to work. Because I was not passionate about what I was doing.
When I pivoted, I began focusing more on people who were like me: content creators, marketers and creative experts who might have made some money, but struggled to get really meaningful traction. Other driven people who bought other courses and programs that provided insight – but no real help regarding implementation. This seems common, and felt like a huge frustration for me. And I easily found others with the same struggle.
I was not only deeply aware of how my new niche suffered, but I was uniquely qualified to get them out of the rut fast.
So, these are my top 10 tips on how to get coaching clients fast:
Establish Authority
You’ve heard it before: in order to sell your offer, you have to build authority. But what does that mean?
You don’t necessarily have to have years of experience to build authority. Personal success and success in your career both lend themselves to building authority. But other authority builders involve: confidence, a unique position, clear messaging and more.
The next few items provide more guidance on building authority quickly:
1. Build Know-Like-Trust
You can start doing this immediately by simply showing up. While you want to be personable and help others get to know you, building the know-like-trust factor mainly involves a deep connection to your potential customer.
Having conversations is always important in your coaching business, but early on, I would have as many as possible so you can get to know your avatar.
The content you post online should focus on storytelling in a few key areas:
- Inspiration: Inspire your audience
- Education: Educate your audience
- Aspiration: Help your audience envision the future
Inspiration: Coaching always begins the moment you have your first exchange with your avatar. Even before they pay you, your job is to convince them that they can succeed, and that what they want is possible for them. That is why inspiration is so important.
Education: The exact instructions of your methods are always gated behind a paywall. But before someone buys from you, there are plenty of things you can teach that are genuinely valuable, but don’t give away the details of the HOW. Educating people is a huge authority builder.
Aspiration: Use stories from both yourself and clients (or case studies from others if you have nothing personal to draw from) to show your avatar where they could be if they took action.
Your Lived Experience Counts
Your ideal client is often a past version of you. If you’ve walked the path they’re on now, you know their fears, their mistakes and what finally worked.
That’s a real qualification. You don’t need a decade of credentials to help someone take the next step you’ve already taken.
2. Niche Down
In blogging, business and coaching you will hear this over and over again. But the best thing you can do for yourself is to niche down your business focus. It may seem counter intuitive to narrow your audience when you are trying to learn how to get coaching clients fast.
But when you niche down, you are specialized.
This means a few things.
- Your services are more premium and higher quality because they are specialized and specific
- You will be more memorable and useful to potential clients when they need your specific services
- You have less competition because your offer isn’t for everyone, it’s for a specific person that is under-served
For example:
You can say you’re a copywriter – but what does that mean? What kind of copy do you write, and for who?
Instead, what if you were a social media copywriter for accounting, banking & finance companies? Every company should use social media, and this way you can specialize your expertise by also becoming a known expert in a specific space.
Your niche should also solve a “bleeding neck” problem. The “bleeding neck” principle described by John Paul Mendocha is a dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved. Right. Now. People pay fastest for a problem that feels urgent.
Here’s how vague and specific taglines compare:
Vague: “I help women practice self care.”
There are a few problems here. First, we need to address a problem that is important enough that people will pay for it. Most people know they need self care, but probably wouldn’t pay high ticket for it. And “women” is pretty broad. What kind of women? How old are they? What do they do? Where do they hang out?
Specific: “I help working moms recover from burnout by building resilience so they can be present for their family and themselves.”
This second version paints a picture, and describes a problem that needs to be solved more urgently. Burnout is often an urgent issue in and of itself. But for working moms, being present for your family is too.
3. Be Intimately Aware Of How Your Customer Struggles
You should not just know a lot about your industry.
You have to be passionate about the people in it.
It will change the way that you work, the way you see your avatar, your motivations and how you handle your business.
I was intimately aware of how my potential coaching clients suffered because I spent years in that pain, as well, trying to make this work. Taking all the right courses, following directions and still feeling like a failure.
Part of why my first coaching business struggled is that even though I was a real estate expert, I wasn’t an agent or investor myself and didn’t have a passion for it. I built a program my avatar NEEDED (and I knew they needed it, because I knew the industry), but it wasn’t what they WANTED.
Run market research calls. The fastest way to learn what your clients want is to ask them. Aim to talk to 10-30 people that loosely fit who you think your ideal client is. You can position these as no-pitch market research calls, or gather this data on your normal sales calls.
Your goals with market research:
- Make sure you understand the actual challenges and desires
- Write down the actual words people use – this is your marketing
- Validate that your offer is something people will pay for
On market research calls, ask:
- What challenges do you face?
- What are your goals, fears, and desires?
- What solutions have you tried that didn’t work?
- What is life like now?
- What do you want it to be like?
- How would that feel?
- How important is this to you?
4. Have A Powerful Solution
People don’t really care what you are selling. They do not care about the physical thing or the list of bonus materials. What they really care about is a real transformation. They want what you are selling to change or improve their lives.
Bonus materials are great and all, but they need to be rich and valuable and not just used to make something appear more valuable. Knowing how to get coaching clients fast relies on you being able to provide what your client needs to improve their life.
Establish Visibility
If your audience cannot find you, they cannot buy from you. So if you want to know how to get coaching clients fast, the first thing you need to do is make sure people know how to find you.
Your website should be on your social media profile, you should have share links on your blog and you should be showing up consistently online to remind people “Here I am!”
5. Consistently Nurture Your Audience
While you are showing up online, don’t forget about that oh so precious email list you have. Algorithms change, but your email list will always be yours. This ownership makes your list your most valuable tool. Your email list is your forever. If you don’t have one yet, start with one of these lead magnet ideas.
Do not neglect them. Come up with a schedule, a plan or regular campaigns that you can schedule. People get a million emails a day. If you want to be seen in their inbox, you need to show up a lot and consistently. Get them used to seeing your name and waiting to see what you have to say.
If you have a Facebook group, make sure you are consistently nurturing your audience there as well. We will talk more about social media in a second.
Give Clients Quick Wins
An early result keeps a new client motivated. It also gives you testimonials sooner, which helps you sign the next client.
One of the best testimonials I have is not even from a one on one coaching client. It was one coaching call. One hour of solid, specific feedback. She took the advice I gave her. All of it. And it changed her life. Fast.
Offer quick win tips on sales calls, in comments on social media and in day to day conversation when people ask for your input.
6. Go Where Your Clients Are
If you have identified your niche, then you know where they hang out. Don’t just bring people to you. Go to where you know they are and meet your clients there.
If your clients are more professional, you’re going to be on LinkedIn. If your business has a visual component, Instagram might be where your potential clients are skimming for photos of what you do. Get on Quora and answer questions that you have knowledge on, and join Facebook groups where your niche is.
7. Show Up On Social Media
Ok, back to social media. You do not have to show up and put your brand out there on every platform. Pick one or two social media platforms that suit your brand best to show up and be consistent on.
Right now as a blogging coach I get most of my clients from Facebook outreach and my Facebook group. It’s a small but tight knit group with regular engagement and members who feel like they are truly getting something out of being involved and present. {check: is this still true?}
Getting Clients From Instagram
- Put a keyword in your bio’s name field. This text is searchable, so add a very brief description of what you sell next to your name. Mine says: Alison Reeves | Marketing & Coaching.
- Use one link for one call to action. Instead of a page of links, send people to the one thing you want them to do right now: a free offer opt-in, a strategy call or a sales page.
- Mix 5 content types: educational (teach something), inspirational (mindset posts), transformational (client stories and before-and-afters), engaging (just for fun) and enticing (free offers, sales pages and calls to book a call).
Know Your Brand
Knowing who you are and staying true to yourself is going to make your business more valuable. I know you want to know how to get coaching clients fast, but if you just get a bunch of terrible clients you’re going to hate your life.
You want clients fast, but you also want a successful business, repeat customers and those kinds of things.
8. Convey Your Brand And Be Consistent
You want your brand to be identifiable. Be consistent, and not just with colors and fonts, but with your messaging. What kind of person are you, and what kind of people does your audience consist of? What do they care about?
Think about the way you speak and write, the language that you use and the values that you and your audience share to guide you in your messaging and what you choose to share online.
9. Who Is Your Ideal Client?
Some people are difficult to work with. As a coach you get to make these decisions. But I have made the choice of working with people outside of who my ideal client is many times, and it usually ends up in some frustration, extra work and dreaded deadlines.
Stick to the person you are passionate about, first of all. You already identified this person earlier. They are kind of like a past version of yourself before you experienced your transformation story.
Now sit down and write out the traits your ideal client has. You can list things like, “pays invoices on time, is kind, is flexible” or stick to professional or personality traits. But know who your ideal client is so you can make the best, most profitable decisions for yourself.
10. Turn People Down
In a blog about how to get coaching clients fast, this probably seems insane. But if you take on the not-ideal client you might have to turn down the one that really suited you better. Someone you could have helped more effectively, in better timing and taken on another client.
Learning how to be successful and how to get coaching clients fast sometimes involves being able to say no to do what is best for your business.
Do not miss the ideal client for the one you were afraid to lose that wasn’t meant for you.
Clients who are a great fit will pay more. Here’s how to build a luxury coaching brand.
More Ways To Get Coaching Clients
Networking and referral partnerships. Other coaches are not your competition; they’re your best referral source. Build relationships with coaches who serve the same people in a different way, and send each other clients who are a better fit.
Free challenges. A 3- to 5-day free challenge gives people a quick result and a taste of how you coach. End it with a clear invitation to your paid offer.
Live video. Going live lets people see your personality and get their questions answered in real time. It builds know-like-trust faster than almost any other content.
About the author: Alison Reeves is a holistic business coach with more than 15 years in marketing and nearly a decade coaching entrepreneurs. She’s trained in somatic and trauma-informed coaching and is the author of Embodied Abundance. Work with Alison
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to get your first coaching client?
If you start with people who already know you, it can take a few weeks. Tell your network what you do, have real conversations, and make a clear offer. Building an audience from scratch usually takes several months before it brings in steady clients.
How do I get coaching clients with no audience?
Start with direct conversations: your existing network, referrals, and online communities where your ideal clients ask questions. Help first, then invite people to a call. A small audience that trusts you will convert better than a large one that doesn’t.
Where do coaches find clients?
Most coaches find clients through referrals, social media, online communities, networking with other coaches, speaking, and search (blog posts and SEO). The best place is wherever your ideal clients already spend time and ask for help.
Should I offer free coaching sessions?
A free consult call is a good way to see if you’re a fit and to invite people into your paid offer. Free full sessions can work for testimonials when you’re new, but limit them, and always end with a clear next step.
NEED MORE SUPPORT?
If you’d like some help growing your business, let’s chat.
More Marketing Help For Service Providers
- Marketing strategy for service providers {link}
- Coaching website examples and best practices
- Social selling with a small audience
- 20 lead magnet ideas
- How to build a luxury coaching brand
Want help with your marketing? Book a marketing strategy call.
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