Ep 221 - Top Business Questions Coaches Ask Me

What is your number one business question? Does it have something to do with pricing, niching down, marketing, or all of the above?

In today's episode, I am going to dive into the top five business questions that coaches frequently ask. I’ll cover the best social media platforms for marketing, the intricacies of finding and defining a niche, setting the right price for your services, crafting a compelling offer, and addressing the critical question of why your strategies might not be working.

I bet one of these is your number one business question! So be sure to join me in this conversation and get some practical and actionable advice to enhance your coaching business and overcome these common hurdles.

Welcome to the Life Coach Business Building Podcast! Join me as I teach you simple (organic) strategies to gain more paid clients in your life coaching business. Plus, I’ll share strategies for designing your offer, pricing your coaching, and selling your coaching offers, I have it all covered. My goal is to inspire you to take simple, consistent action to grow your coaching business. So, if you're ready to be a well-respected life coach with paid clients, this podcast is for you!

Episode details:

00:08 Choosing the Best Social Media Platform

03:24 Understanding and Defining Your Niche

07:12 Setting the Right Price for Your Coaching

10:27 Crafting an Effective Offer

12:55 Troubleshooting: Why Your Business Isn't Working

👉 Join our LIVE FREE Open Coaching session every Monday at 2 pm Central Time, where we will answer any questions you may have in any areas of your business that are keeping you stuck. Save your seat at debbieshadid.com/opencoaching.

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Chapters

• 0:08 Choosing the Best Social Media Platform
• 3:24 Understanding and Defining Your Niche
• 7:12 Setting the Right Price for Your Coaching
• 10:27 Crafting an Effective Offer
• 12:55 Troubleshooting: Why Your Business Isn't Working

Transcript

 I know you have so many questions that are keeping you stuck. In today's podcast, I'm going to share the top five questions. So let's get started. 

Question number one. What social media platform is best for my marketing? Now, let me tell you in the Business Building Boutique, what we talk about is the best platform for you to be on social media is the one that you pick. If you love Facebook and that's where you're most comfortable, I'm going to tell you to be on Facebook.

If you are, you know, a LinkedIn kind of girl and you could see yourself over there. And by the way, if you're also scrolling over there already, then LinkedIn is a place for you. Most of our clients are on Instagram. Now that's just because that is actually where they hang out. And do you need to be on social media?

You do. How many times a week is. too often to post. Well, I don't think there can be too often anymore. Honestly. Now with our clients, we actually help them figure out how many times they could actually post and maintain posting consistently. So I'm not going to tell you that posting on social media five times a day is the best thing for you.

Now, I would like you to post once a day. I would, because again, why would you not want to be there? Um, With the algorithm the way it is, you actually want to be there as much as possible. Again, consistency is the most important piece, but you want to be there as much as possible because we never know when the algorithm is going to show your post to me or my post to you.

You guys know that you can be following somebody And it's like, I haven't seen anything from that person in a long time. When you go look at their profile, it turns out they have been posting regularly and yet you were not shown those posts. So what platform is best for you? The answer is the platform that you feel most comfortable with.

The question that follows that then is how often should you post and again, that's gonna be up to you But I would say a bare minimum of one time a day Now ideally you would be working on video and you you know, you have to get comfortable with that I know but video is what people are most interested in Now, you're going to have to add captions so that they don't have to listen to it with the audio on because like me, I'm scrolling when I'm laying in bed and I have to be quiet.

You know, I can't wake up my husband, so I need to see captions instead of having just audio. But, I want you to do what you are most comfortable with and I want you to start where you are. One of the reasons why you're not on social media is you still have a lot of questions of what to do and how to do things. So you need to get clear on how to do the posting. Go get some answers on that. Those are questions that we answer all the time in our coaching and they are not silly questions. I understand.

Many times it was like, wait, I don't know how to post a story or I don't know how to post a reel. a lot of times you're concerned about recording something because what if it gets out there into the world? And I just want to tell you. Even if you post something, you can still delete it. So the power is in your hands with social media.

If you post something and you don't like it, just delete it. But what you should know is that you can record things and you don't actually have to post it. You can watch it back and then delete it and record again. So yes, you should be on social media. Yes, you should be posting as often as possible. 

The next question I get literally every single time I talk to somebody on a consultation call or in every workshop or every open coaching session we have is something about niche.

And I bet you have questions about your niche too. So the question normally is, do you think my niche is good? Now, I have some basic questions and you guys have heard me talk about this before. You have to have a niche that is clearly understood and that there are other people who are interested in it.

Not just you, not just because you thought it was great. There has to be, I believe, some pain points associated with it. They need to be wanting to solve something and you have to be able to clearly communicate that. Now, the only way you make your niche good is by marketing. That's how you become really good and solid with your niche, is the amount of talking about your niche that you do.

From a market research point of view, when you go and you ask people questions about it, that will help you get clarity on if you are communicating clearly with your niche. Also, if you attend in person networking events and you're talking about your niche, who you help and how you help them. You're going to get clarity right then too if people look like they're interested or not interested, right?

If it goes right over their head and they're like, oh interesting, but if they engage in a conversation with you Then you know that you are right on track Now here's a couple more pointers for you. You have to be speaking about a niche to a person That can independently decide for themselves that they would want to buy coaching from you I don't recommend that you talk to somebody who has to go sell somebody else on the idea of their coaching.

We have a lot of people who want to coach teens, and that's beautiful, and I want you to coach teens also. But just know, you're not selling a teens coaching. Your niche client is actually the parent. So you kind of have two people you have to sell. You have to sell the parent who's going to pay for it.

Then you have to be cool enough to sell the teen who says, yes, I would actually work with this person. So look at your niche and figure out, is this too hard to sell? Some of you guys are career coaches and you have to sell a corporation to pay for coaching for a client. that's too long. That's too hard.

Sell to somebody who can say yes. And then the main criteria you guys is to sell to people who have money. Now, I will tell you that you increase the value of your coaching by being able to communicate about it clearly when you're able to communicate the gap that you feel. So it's like, here's the pain point.

And here's the reality of everything you're missing out on, on what your life could look like. After you work with me, if you can paint a beautiful picture, you can charge more money. And even people who say they don't have money are more inclined to say yes to you. I also want to point out at this moment, people often say they don't have money.

So you might be thinking that's about pricing, which we'll talk about in a moment, but I suspect it's about your marketing. So you're not being clear enough about the transformation that you provide or about what the pain point what the problem is and what's really costing them. So you want to think about all the ways that this one problem impacts their life, okay?

If you are selling something that is what I call fluffy, kind of empty nester thing about designing your most amazing next life, okay, if you're not pointing out the pain points of where they are now or what they have sacrificed to get to this point, you're You're going to have a hard time making your niche good.

Any questions? Let me know what those are. And I will continue to talk to you guys on the podcast about niching. All right. 

The next question that comes up is about pricing. People say, is my price good? I'm like, I have no idea if it's good or not. You tell me if it's good. The first thing that I want to mention about pricing is you first have to decide if you think the price is good.

When you know the price is good and you know your value is good and what you offer is good, you can sell it at anything you want. You guys know that there are coaches in my exact niche for sure that will sell coaching the exact same coaching that I offer. They might tell 10 times more what I charge for my coaching.

In your niche, it's the same thing and then there's people who will sell the exact same thing that I do for a fraction of the price that I do. The only difference is, I've decided what the best price is for my coaching. I believe in it so strongly that I can sell it. So if I thought, hey, I know my price of my coaching should be ten times this, And I had a belief about that, that I thought I feel in full integrity selling it at this price, I would be able to sell it.

So, pricing first is up to you. Do not look to what others are selling their coaching at to decide on your price. So, if somebody told me, hey, your coaching is worth 10, 000. And I decided to sell it for 10, 000. And I really didn't think that was the best price. You know, I would not sell the coaching you guys.

So don't look to see what others are doing. Oftentimes. coaches will say, well, yeah, but people are selling like six months coaching for 5, 000. What do you think? I'm like, no, no, no. What do you think? Right? Again, pricing comes down to you. The other thing I want to mention, again, you're going to get tired of hearing about marketing, but it's all about marketing.

You guys, the way you market and position yourself. determines what people will pay you. When we talk about you creating your professional coach brand identity, which is your branding, it's how you position yourself, it's how you're seen, it's how, quality your marketing materials look, it's the appearance of your business.

It's what they see on the Zoom screen. All of that adds up, maybe not consciously, but unconsciously, it's telling the brain something to the value that they see in your coaching. Again, I'll give an example. Somebody else could take my exact program and not have the brand presence that I do, which I created through branding and colors and fonts and messaging and photos.

I've created that brand presence that way. Somebody else could try to do my exact thing with even a different set of colors, a different font selection and a different style. And they might only be able to sell my coaching for a fraction of the price. So all of those things add up to, is your price good?

It really doesn't have to do with what the person is willing to pay. It has to do with your belief and your positioning of yourself in the market. So you need to do the mindset work around pricing and then get to a place where you can present it. Comfortably and confidently. Then you can charge anything you want.

All right. Another question is about the offer. People say, is my offer good? Well, you guys know, here's what I'm going to say about that. I don't know. Is your offer good? Now, when we work with people in the business building boutique, we talk about your offer as in the number of weeks that it takes to deliver the result that you told the client about in your marketing message.

So how many weeks does it take to help somebody who is, obsessed with anxiety and overcome and can't do this, this and this? How many weeks would it take for you to coach somebody through that process and to get a behavior change to where they are no longer like overcome by anxiety? How many weeks would that take?

That's up to you as the expert to tell me how many weeks that would take. Now, that's how we know if your offer is the right number of weeks. Don't look around to see, should it be six weeks for this price? Remember, pricing is separate from the amount of weeks of your offer. The amount of weeks of your offer is the amount of weeks it takes.

to solve the problem that you tell them you're going to solve in your marketing message. So our VIP program is six months. It's not just six months cause that sounded good. It's six months because I mapped out how many weeks it takes for clients to, you know, go from this point to this point and from this point to this point so that during the six months that we work together, People establish their brand identity.

They learn the technology, they start making offers. A lot of times they've launched a group program, which means they've designed their program, they've designed the content, you know, they're basically have a beta group already going through it. So lots of things happen in six months. But it is mapped out according to the time that people need.

So it wasn't just six months because I picked that number. So what is the number of weeks that your offer should be based on the amount of coaching time that you need for your clients? I also want to make sure that you include time in that coaching for people to have confusion. We know for sure that our clients are going to Pick their niche.

We're going to do their branding. We're going to write their website copy. We're going to get them marketing. We're going to start, in the position of selling coaching. And I know for sure somebody's going to say, I have a question about my niche. And that means we're going to kind of have to go back, revisit niche a little bit before we can go forward.

Make sure you allow time for that. All right. 

The last most common question I get is why isn't it working now? Listen, y'all that's a big loaded question there. Why isn't it working? I mean there could be so many things the first question that I would say back to you if you ask me that in a coaching setting is well, why aren't you working?

What is it that you're not doing that isn't working? let's be honest. Most of the time it's not working because you're not taking the right actions. You might actually be working seven days a week. You might actually be working ridiculous hours to get your coaching business built, but if you're not taking the right actions, you're going to get nowhere.

So those right actions would be actually talking to people. We actually making true offers and an offer is not just a post on social media that says, Hey, schedule a time for a consultation. That is an offer, but that's a soft offer, but that is a soft offer. So you want to make sure that your offer is direct, that you've really connected with somebody and you're saying, this is what I do.

This is how I help people. I want to help you. Are you interested in having a conversation? Okay. The answer is yes or no. So if your business is not working, the first thing you have to ask yourself and be completely honest is, are you doing the work?

All right. The second thing is, if it's not working, we want to look at your marketing message. I can tell you for sure after helping hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people with our marketing message. the number one thing that I find from our coaching clients is they don't actually know what to say about their coaching.

Now, if I had a 10 minute conversation with you, I'll bet you could tell me all about it, but you don't have 10 minutes to talk to people. You need to be able to tell about your coaching in one sentence, one sentence. That's the way you're able to get people's attention. So I suspect that your marketing message or how you communicate about your coaching probably is the problem of why your marketing isn't working.

So you want to get clear again on what I'll call your I help statement, who you help, kind of what their problem is and how you're going to solve them. When you do your marketing, whether it be on social media, email marketing, workshops, networking, whatever it is. You want to make sure that you can, what we call, poke at the pain.

You want to be able to talk about the transformations. You want to be able to talk about the authority that you have to be the solution to it. So maybe your business isn't working because your marketing isn't clear. You guys know you really have to learn how to be a marketer. Now, this isn't going to be something you have to continue to learn forever, but you have to give yourself a fair opportunity to learn how to be the marketer, the advertising agency for your business.

Even if you had the funds to hire an agency, they're going to ask you questions. They can't do it without you having clarity on it. All right. The final thing that I'll say about why it isn't working is chances are you haven't given it enough time. I want you to think about other businesses that you know. And for most of us that's going to be a business in your local market. Think about a brick and mortar business, or a restaurant, or whatever it is. Right? It takes a lot of marketing. It takes a lot of time. Like a dentist, let's say. For him to have a full schedule, it takes a lot of time.

And he. sets up his practice. He builds his building, right? He does a grand opening. He starts advertising locally. He has a sign out front, people are driving by and you know, one person comes and he says, Hey, can you, you know, is there anybody you can refer to me? Another person comes, you guys see what I'm saying?

We're not giving our businesses enough time and space to grow. Now we have an unfair advantage because we could double down and triple down on our marketing. And I recommend that you do. I recommend that you go what I call into hustle mode and you go after it. You keep talking about your business until you are fully booked.

And then by the way, you don't quit. So even once you're fully booked, a lot of times people slow down on their marketing and they're like, I don't know what just happened, but I don't have any clients. It's like, yeah, you slowed down on your marketing. So why it isn't working is because your marketing message might not be right.

It's because you're not taking true action and it's because you're not giving it enough time. That's it, guys. Those are probably the questions that you have going on right now. Okay, so I've answered about your platform, social media. I've answered about how many times to post. about your niche, about your pricing, your offer and why it's not working.

Now I want you to look at what is happening for you and I want you to decide what it is you need to do to make your business work and then take action until it works. I'll see you guys next week. Have an amazing week. Until next time. Bye bye.