Energías Limpias

This chapter covers everything a coach setting up a professional practice might wish to do. Many of the points covered are essential for in-house coaches too, such as how to get the idea of coaching across to potential coachees and the sections on professionalism and ethics. HR directors may find the sections on what coaches charge across the industry interesting too!

MARKETING

If you want to work as a coach inside the organization you work for, you may still have to sell your services to potential coachees, although not for money.

This section is about marketing the idea of coaching, and many of the tech-niques that professional coaches use to sell their services may also work for internal coaches.

Marketing a coaching business can be fun, although coaches are often frus-trated by the amount of time they have to spend doing it. In the early stages, professional coaches spend at least as much of their time on marketing as they do on coaching. Later, a successful coach will build up word of mouth referrals and a contact list wide enough to generate leads without intervention.

One of the advantages of becoming a coach is that it requires only a small finan-cial outlay to start building a business. Initially, the essentials are a business card, a telephone, a headset (if you plan to coach over the telephone) and an ability to create rapport. If you are going to turn your leads into coachees, you will also need some training and expertise in the various methods, techniques and tools available to coaches, and these topics are covered in other chapters of this book.

You can start a coaching business without giving up your day job, gradually building up a list of clients until you are confident enough to take the plunge.

You may even be able to turn your job into a coaching position at work, by train-ing as a coach and offertrain-ing your services in-house. Many organizations are spending money on training in-house coaches, and if you can put a coaching qualification on your CV it may help you get the job in the first place. If you have not completed any formal training, ask the HR department if it will pay the cost of sending you on a course. Many of the coaches I have trained have funded their training in this way.

On the whole, we find that paid advertising does not work for coaches, although one ploy that might pay dividends is to stick up a notice at the gym, where you are likely to find a target market of self-improvement coachees.

Hiring a coach is a personal thing, and the most common way that coaches attract personal

coachees is simply by meeting people and talking to them about the profession.

I have found that 20 to 30 per cent of people I meet have heard about coaching and are interested. There is no need to force your services onto those who aren’t – wait until you find someone who shows interest by asking questions about what you do. Answer those questions and – bingo! – you have delivered a sales pitch without either of you noticing it.

Do not shy away from people who make cynical remarks about what you do. I have often found that

they are precisely the ones who ring up a few days later wanting to find out more. Their cynicism often hides some denial inside, perhaps a feeling of being trapped in repeating emotional patterns, and their aggressive approach may be simply a way of asking for help. They sometimes become the most rewarding coachees of all.

If meeting people is the way to attract coachees, it follows that building a coaching practice involves

plenty of networking. Many people cringe at the idea of networking for business, but you can take the stress out of it by remembering that everyone’s attention is centred upon what impression they themselves are making, and quite likely whether they can sell you their own services. The key is to ask them questions about themselves until they run dry, then they will be ready to hear about you.

A conversation is like a ball-game – sooner or later, there will come a point where the ball has to be handed back. That is the time to tell people about coach-ing and what it can achieve; try this any earlier and you will not have their full attention. Selling without selling is a relief to everyone, taking the pressure off those who are being sold to and those who have a product or service to offer.

The conversation must be led by the other person, not you, and you should never give more information than people ask for. The amount of information Networking v advertising

Dealing with cynics

Selling without selling

you impart can expand with every question they ask. For instance, say you have spent 10 minutes asking a new contact at a networking event about her profes-sion, and she finally says to you, ‘And what do you do?’

I’m a performance coach (or a business coach, life coach, etc).

Notice how short the reply is. At this point either she will show interest and ask another question, or you will see her attention shut down. If that happens, either change the subject or find someone else to talk to, unless you are interested in the services of a website builder or whatever else she might be offering. If she does ask a question, you can give more detailed information:

What does that involve then?

I help people get clarity about what they want to achieve and support them in getting there.

And how do you manage that?

I am trained in a technique of asking questions which will help people see things more clearly. For instance, if I have a complex issue to deal with and say to myself, ‘I must sit down and think this plan through,’ I find that five minutes later I’m thinking about something completely different. As a coach I help people focus their minds on the matter in hand, so that they can get a breakthrough and move forward.

It is important to say something that you feel comfortable delivering and which is based on your own experience. It does not matter if you are a new coach and have no success stories to tell. The truth carries its own resonance, and if you speak from the heart, you will come across as congruent and authentic. That is why people talk about ‘the ring of truth’.

An important element is the rhythm of the conversation: notice how it is not until the third question in the example above that the coach goes into any detail. You must be absolutely sure that the person is ready to receive your story before you tell it. If you go into too much detail too soon, people feel pressured and back away. Have you ever walked into a shop and been pounced on by an over-eager assistant? Most people run a mile from that kind of pres-sure. The key to this is to sell without selling: wait for people to ask for infor-mation and supply it.

This advice applies equally to meeting individuals and having meetings with potential buyers at their offices.

Describing what a coach does