37 Sep 8
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. I'm your host, Ellie Scarf, a senior executive coach with over 17 years experience coaching, which I now bring to my role as a mentor and business coach to executive coaches. When it comes to coaching business, I've done most of it. I have grown coaching businesses,, solo and in partnership.
I've been an in-house coach and I've been an associate coach. So when I talk about selling coaching to corporate clients, you know, I'm sharing from a place of experience and empathy. I work with coaches now through my group coaching program, the corporate to coach Accelerator, where executive and leadership coaches grow their businesses.
With more corporate clients. Listen into the podcast for lots of practical tips, inspiring stories and prompts to grow your business your way. Okay, so. I wanna share a story that I see quite a lot with coaches who are growing businesses. So imagine a coach [00:01:00] starts out in business and most likely they have delightfully supportive friends and family, like generally.
I see, , pretty supportive, there is encouragement. There is often a message coming to you as the coach that goes something like. Oh my goodness. You will be such a natural. This is a great fit for you and people are gonna come to you. Right. It will be great. And it's the best.
Right? It's so good to have that, , validation. And we need that. And so you hang out your shingle, and. I'm slightly sad that we don't have actual shingles these days, so we hang out our virtual shingle, and that might be our website or our LinkedIn update, , saying that we are in business and most likely you are going to get a lot of validation.
You'll get hundreds of likes of your post. , You'll probably get a lot of congratulation messages. Not entirely sure how many of those are not AI driven, but you will get a lot. , But. They often find that there aren't so many [00:02:00] actual requests to talk about work and your first client. Probably an individual, , that was sent to you by one of your network of supporters.
And you know, you can't charge much , given the context, but it's a paying client. , It's come by referral. And you know what that first paying client is? Gold dust. Amazing. And you might also find that there are some opportunities at the organization. You are leaving to consult back or to do some coaching, but.
, There may have been other opportunities that you thought were a sure thing, , but perhaps they've panned out to be a little less sure than you thought, right? So you aren't getting as many referrals as you thought, and you may start to feel a little bit anxious. And so you might've thought that the big lift was going into business, setting up a business, setting up your entity, announcing it to the world, and that the flow of clients would start from there.
And this is the [00:03:00] point at which a lot of coaches get a bit of a wake up call and they start to get worried, and I first wanna say, I have been there, right? I understand this feeling and I understand it very deeply. So I relied on referrals for a long time in my business. While it was really great when they happened, and I promise you they will happen more and more as your business grows a strong base of clients.
But it was also a very stressful place to be in, , . Because it's very other oriented in that space. You are very other oriented. You are waiting, you are reliant on other people thinking of you, of them joining the dots and sporting the opportunities. And frankly, when you are in that place, , you lose something of , your power and you are playing a game of chance of waiting, of hoping, really hoping that something will come to you, hoping that.
, something will [00:04:00] pan out now. I am not saying that referrals are bad, referrals are fabulous. , And they're likely what gets you started, but they are not what is going to keep you consistently bringing new corporate clients in the door and they're not what is going to keep you in business as a coach.
So, Ellie, you asked me if I'm not supposed to wait for referrals to roll in. Then what should I do? So I'm challenging you today to fundamentally shift your approach from passive to proactive. When it comes to client generation. It is time. Now, I might be talking to you, , before you start your business, in which case I want you to have this in mind as you take the leap.
Or I might be talking to you as you are. A few months, six months, a year, even longer into business. And you might recognize some of your stories in this, and you might be feeling a little bit of [00:05:00] anxiety, , because , if I'm telling you that you have to go from passive to proactive, well that's all good and well, , but the next logical question is,
does that actually involve? What do I actually need to do? So the first thing about being proactive about client generation is mindset, right? And of course, you know, and sometimes I say mindset and I feel concerned that people are going to tune out and say, that's not practical, that's not a chip, that's not something I can do.
But I'm hoping that as we are all coaches and we all understand the interaction between our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviors. You'll understand the significance of this. And the good news is I'm going to be very specific about the mindset because , as a coach in business, an executive coach in business who wants more corporate clients, you need to see client generation.
You could call it sales, you could call it marketing, call it whatever you prefer. You need to see that as your job. Just as much as doing the coaching. [00:06:00] So often there needs to be a bit of an identity shift around this and embracing of this role. And a challenging of the unhelpful beliefs that you may have about sales and selling and being a salesperson.
So if the first thing that comes to your mind when I say salesperson is Harry Wormwood from Matilda, or, you know, the eighties classic, , sales. Movie Glen Gary, Glen Ross. Then I'm talking to you. You need to reframe, you need to reorient your beliefs about sales and grow to love it, not because of the sales itself, but because you are serious about the impact you wanna have and.
You need to believe really deeply in the value of what you are doing, and you need to completely connect your ability to have the impact and do the meaningful work that you wanna do. You need to connect that with your ability to sell the work [00:07:00] and. That is a pretty powerful and exciting mindset actually.
It's a much more powerful place to come from because you have so much more control and , you have so much more ability to affect your outcomes than you might have if you are just waiting for referrals to come to you. So I want you to just take a moment, close your eyes and actually. Think about some embodiment, like what does it feel like in your body if you feel really good about selling and about owning that role and about saying, yeah, business development is what I do alongside coaching.
And so I want you to sit into that and I want you to feel the power of that mindset because it is actually pretty cool. , And it is. Connected with much greater outcomes than a more passive approach might be. , And mostly because when we are sitting in that place, the options around action and the likelihood of taking [00:08:00] strategic action grows exponentially.
Okay, so you've got your mindset in place. The other thing that you need to do is build a sales and marketing system to support you to bring it to life. Now, I firmly believe that there is no one size fits all approach to building your system. And that might sound controversial. Coming from someone with a program, it needs to work for you.
And so everything I teach inside my program is intended to be adapted and molded to your needs. And for you to get specific and tailored advice through our coaching sessions. But I say that so you know that , you are unique. Your approach will be unique, but there are some core strategic actions, , that I teach inside my program, the corporate to coach accelerator.
That I know will get you results within a reasonable expenditure and of time and energy, and one core capability that is at the center of this whole [00:09:00] system. And I call this system the Executive Coach Pipeline, , is your ability to connect with your network and your ability to generate conversations.
To get to the place where you are face to face or or screen to screen. Talking to a real human being about the challenges, the people challenges, the culture, challenges in their team or in their organization, and to get to a point where you can partner with them to help them solve those problems, and the key skill to getting to those conversations.
That is outreach and you need to get really good at outreach. And this is not just about LinkedIn, right? Although LinkedIn is a big part of it, your outreach could be too. Any of the warm people in your network. So people, , you know, you may have been to a networking event. You may have a community network.
You will have a professional network on LinkedIn. You will have friends and family. You will you'll have all sorts of places where outreach may come to play. , But outreach is about how do you connect with your network. [00:10:00] And I'm not talking about cold calling, I mean connecting with your warm network in order to have more real conversations.
Unfortunately, when we're faced with this task of outreach, if we don't have the right tools, if we don't have the right support, often we feel paralyzed, right? So we might see perfectionism, , popping up, right? So I just have to have the exact right message, and if I don't have the exact right message, I can't send it.
, We. Might find that we procrastinate because of that or, , because of our fear about how we're going to be perceived. We don't wanna be perceived as salesy. , And that really comes out to play when we are working on outreach. So what I wanna do is I wanna share with you a small piece of , the support and the structure that we have inside of the corporate to coach accelerator.
. To help you with your outreach. So if outreach is a priority for you in growing your business, and of course I think it [00:11:00] definitely should be, I'm sharing a bank of 30 outreach templates with you that you can customize, you can adapt for your network and the individuals you are reaching out to. So this template bank, , is categorized into a whole bunch of different scenarios.
So for example, how would you reach out to someone who liked your post on LinkedIn without feeling cringe, as the kids would say? Or what could you say when you want to reach out to someone who you worked with and liked and were really close to when you worked together? , But that was 10 years ago.
What about following up someone who you met at a networking event and you clicked with, or. What about someone who was an advocate in a previous role and you think could be a great source of referrals? So this template bank has got so many resources for most scenarios where you will be wanting to reach out to your warm network.
, It's a free resource. I wanna share it, , with you and everyone, and you can access that at ellie [00:12:00] scarf.com/templates. Please share it with any other executive or leadership or corporate coaches, you know, who have this same challenge, , who, you know, think about outreach and, and want to, , bury themselves in a hole in the ground.
, My goal with this resource. To get you taking action instead of overthinking and to save you time and stop you, , falling into, , perfectionism and avoiding procrastination. And if you can spend even as little as 10 to 15 minutes a day on outreach using these templates. And that's just one piece of the marketing ecosystem that we teach in the accelerator, but it's probably the most important.
But if you can do those 10 to 15 minutes a day. For a month consistently at the end of that month, you are going to have a very different business and you are going to be having so many more conversations. , And so again, head over to elliescarf.com. Forward slash templates to get that resource.
, Download the resource, we'll send it to you by email. And [00:13:00] as always, please connect with me and message me on LinkedIn, , to let me know what you think. I'll be back next week with more practical ideas for growing your coaching business.
