High Value Coaching

Wouldn’t it be great if clients could just sense how valuable you and your coaching services were – and every new client offered you top dollar to have you coach them?

Few coaches enjoy that reality. Why is there often such a wide chasm between the genuine value a coach provides – and the fees they can charge?

“Success in coaching” is a very personal measure. What’s yours? Just for the sake of establishing a baseline for our discussion, let’s say a successful coaching practice is one that allows you the freedom or flexibility to choose the clients you work with, the kinds of coaching you do, and how you structure your life.

And often the most direct path to that kind of freedom is created through our coaching income.

So let’s talk about coaching income as one measure of the value you provide your clients.

How to Become One of the 9% of Sucessful Coaches

Less than 10% of coaches ever reach a six- figure income. But even of those who are so fortunate to achieve their financial goals, 99% create a business they begin to dread after a while, and have no idea where they’ve gone wrong in building their coaching practice.

One of the biggest reasons for so many challenges in our industry is that everyone is too busy trying to define what coaching is. In fact, they completely ignore the most important thing to focus on – looking for more ways to create value and results for clients. As more coaches and “non-coaches” (people who coach without any formal training) are entering the field, competition is heating up.

Do you Provide a Service or Unique Value?

Coaching is not really a service industry, like so many people believe. Coaching is actually a value creation industry. Those coaches who really get this concept and apply it to their businesses, will be able to reach and coach the most people, become very wealthy in the process, and live their ultimate lifestyle.

There are hundreds of organizations dedicated to maintaining the status of coaching as a profession. Yet, most of their members are broke or earning well under $45,000 a year. The saddest thing is that many coaches settle for what their peers tell them they can make. Six or seven figures become unattainable in their minds, because they don’t know anyone who makes that much in coaching, so they make their peace with whatever they can get. Everyone is excited about the idea of coaching and its amazing potential, but the majority of coaches can’t seem to break into the next level of income.

You Can Only Sell the Value of Coaching!

Coaching by itself doesn’t have a high-perceived value to potential clients, and it is not something that can be sold. When you try to explain what coaching is and how it is done, you only confuse your prospect. You can use your coaching skills and techniques to help your clients, but those coaches who attempt to explain the coaching process to prospects too soon may never have an opportunity to work with them.

What is value? In very plain terms, creating value is creating content. Most successful coaches and other business owners understand and apply this on a daily basis. If you’re not creating content, you’re not building real value in your business. I’ve found that coaches have a big advantage when it comes to creating content! We can produce hundreds of pages of information simply by recording and transcribing a coaching program, series of teleseminars, and live coaching events.

Take a look inside your email “Sent” folder…all those e- mails you send out daily contain hundreds of nuggets of your wisdom. As you can see, you already have all the content and all the value. The question is, are you using it to market your business? Are you creating special reports, articles, and audio excerpts and distributing them to tell people about your unique solutions?

Build value beyond clients. Imagine if all your clients left you tomorrow – would your business have any value? If the answer is “no,” the way you build value is through creating content. Content that produces revenue even if you’re not there. I am not just talking about creating information products, although it is an important part of it. The biggest value you can possibly create is by documenting your coaching methodology, your process, and your special ways of helping your clients succeed. In other words, your coaching system.

You might already have some pieces of it, like teleseminars, questionnaires, forms, e-mails, articles, e-books, CDs and other tools.

Here’s another way to think about it: What would it take for you to create a system out of everything you’ve got, that anyone else could use to coach your clients? That’s the ultimate question you want to answer for yourself.

If you’re brand new to coaching, this question might seem strange to you. “Why would I want anyone else to coach my clients?”  That’s true; you can absolutely keep coaching clients for as long as you wish. And, you can document your coaching process so that, even if you no longer want to – or can – coach, your business still has value. That’s the mind shift I am encouraging you to make. Otherwise, all the efforts you’re putting into building your business will only have a short-term gain. “Bearing water by the sieve”–little to show after all the years of hard work and creating results for others, you will have created nothing for yourself.

Create Your One-of-a-Kind Value Message

A big challenge I see with most coaching practices is how coaches approach marketing themselves. Not only do they focus on coaching itself—and not the value their coaching provides—but if they do have a value message, many coaches put forth a generic message, or a weak and timid message. For a coach to break through to the next level, you simply must have an opinion. You have to go to the edge of what you believe in. That’s why I spent an entire morning at my last Coaching Millions Super Summit helping people define their biggest core message. It drives your entire business, your products, your programs, your clients and your partners.

A strong message is something you really believe in. It can go against everything you hear in your field or your industry, but if you have powerful reasons to believe in it, put it out there. You’ll be surprised how many people are quietly thinking the same things, but are afraid to come out and say it. These are the people who will be attracted to you and your coaching programs.

Every coach has a newsletter. However, if you have defined your strong core message (your biggest belief and your biggest promise to your client), your newsletter will be read and recommended as the most valuable resource in your industry.

Make a decision now that your business plays two roles – coaching and marketing. Many coaches are too passive, waiting for referrals, acting as practitioners. Remember that people go to lawyers and doctors because they have to; they go to coaches because they want to. This means that you need to educate people with your content (products and events), and attract people who want to improve and grow and achieve big goals. You never want to lead with coaching – lead with an information product discussing the biggest problem your target market faces. Then you can have your product point to your coaching program on the “back-end,” enrolling only the clients who are willing and ready to take action now.