How To Get Health Coaching Clients
You've done the training. You have the credentials. You're charged up with a passion for health, and now... you have to find clients?!
No one said this would be easy.
The good news is that there are a lot of different approaches you can take. If you are ambitious and persistent, you'll have clients in no time.
Get your foot in the door / Just start.
I highly recommend starting locally. I know this is awkward for some health coaches because we have some anxiety from when they started closing down gyms. That's when a health-coaching boom began, and I started moving things online for myself.
You might want to coach for free initially if you really have to. Then, at least you can get some experience and potential paid clients if all goes well.
Advertise.
Ads are one way to get eyeballs on your website. But it would help if you were well-positioned before you take this approach. It can be fun to experiment with ads if that's your thing, but you won't have much success unless your messaging is crystal clear. "What's Your Message?*" is an excellent book on that topic. (*affiliate link)
I also discuss having a niche and clarifying your messaging in this other article that you should definitely check out. Having a niche helps a lot if you're advertising. For example, if you coach women to overcome their struggles with menopause, you probably don't want to target men with your ads.
You have to define what your services are clearly for your ads to work!
Constant Self-education.
You need to know about sales because that's how your clients sell your services. So many health coaches get into the field because they love health, talking about health, thinking about health, and helping people with their health. So then it comes time to be an entrepreneur, and they crumble.
Don’t hesitate to reach out and get help with this!
So that's definitely something you must work on the same way you worked on your listening skills to be a good health coach. If you want to have clients to help, you need to be able to sell your services.
Be wary of YouTube sales gurus who want to sell you courses for hundreds of dollars for the same information you can get in a few books for much less. Be sure to subscribe so you can see any upcoming articles where I discuss books that can help with health coaching and business.
Purchase a Wacky Waving Inflatable Tube Guy.
If you have a physical location, place one of these on the curb outside of your office.
(Just kidding)
Have a plan.
You might be familiar with the idea of a "sales funnel." It's essentially a well-thought-out plan for a sale from beginning to end. How are people going to find you? Where does your type of client spend time? What do you know about your type of client?
The more information you have, the easier it will be to formulate a solid plan. Of course, it's not going to happen overnight, but I recommend starting as soon as possible so that you can adapt as you grow.
Keep track of your sales methods, especially what works! I use Evernote to track just about everything. If you start reaching out to people for cold calls or emails, save your sales scripts and have a system for keeping the messages you send out and the responses you get. You want to look for patterns that will help to develop sales protocols.
As a health coach, the last point should be obvious but is sometimes easy to overlook. Set SMART goals!! Imagine you're coaching yourself on this. What might you say? You'd probably work towards building some small and reasonable goal that moves you in the direction you're trying to go.
Can you sign one client in 1-2 weeks? Can we make that goal more specific? How confident are you on a scale of 1-10 that you can go after this goal? Think like a coach. 😉