3 Ways to Grow Your Coaching Biz Without Products

Seems like I get at least ten emails a day offering to show me how to create coaching products. There’s certainly no shortage of help on the topic! But what if you don’t want to create products, for whatever reason?

The obvious answer is to let someone else create the products; just become their affiliate. But what if you don’t even want to do that — is it possible to offer only coaching services?

Three  ways to grow your biz without products:

1) Become a master of self promotion. Show up and capture attention. You’ll need a very targeted mailing list (probably at least a couple thousand people) and you’ll need to keep in close contact with them by consistently delivering helpful, relevant content focused on the solution to their top coachable issues. Then promote your coaching packages over and over; keep pointing people towards your services. The key is to get and maintain really high visibility/credibility within a specific target market, perhaps through public speaking or by blogging/publishing lots of great free content online. Just be prepared for some backlash from subscribers who don’t like aggressive self-promotion.

2) Become a master of sales. Get really, really good at nurturing leads and closing sales. Without products, your prospects are faced with a huge gap between the free stuff (public speaking/publishing/whatever you do to keep in touch) and your premium coaching services. You’re going to need to become a master at facilitating the sales process so you can help them over that gap quickly and efficiently. The longer it takes them to become a customer, the less profitable you are. So you’ll need to figure out how to significantly improve your conversion rate. If you normally close one out of every ten leads now, what would you need to do to close one in five or one in three?

3) Hitch your cart to some one else’s marketing horse. If creating products, promoting your business and closing sales just isn’t your cup of tea, you might want to look for a position as an ‘in-house’ coach, perhaps within a larger organization that offers coaching to it’s employees. Or align yourself with a business such as Compass Coaching and let them handle the marketing end of things in exchange for referral fees or a membership fee. You’ll want to ask yourself  how much control you’re willing to give up in the process, and/or how much you’re willing to pay to have someone else market on your behalf.

You CAN have a successful coaching practice without offering products; it just means you’ll need to be really good at other marketing and sales skills and strategies or work with/for someone else who is.