Hannah McNamara

The decision to invest time and money into the services of an executive coach, life coach or business coach is often a huge one.

For many people, it can be a serious blow to the budget and the only reason that they even consider hiring us is because they expect to see some serious results and benefits after we're done working with them.

In other words, they want to see it as an investment rather than an expenditure.

How many of us have dealt with clients before who seemed really excited about everything we had to offer, but always seemed reluctant to close the deal and really get down to business? Those clients who just seemed to need a little push over the line to get them to commit? How many of those clients ended up walking away because we lacked the knowledge of just what touch was needed to bring them over to our way of thinking? Probably more than we care to admit.

The fact is, more clients want to say "yes" to us. They want to give coaching a shot and see if it really can help them the way we claim it can. However, because it's such a huge investment, there's a lot of burden on us as coaches to make it easy for them to say yes to us!

Think about it.

If you were choosing to make some small purchase, say groceries for the week, would you choose to go to the store where you go in, select the items you want, get a firm price, pay it, and walk out satisfied? Or would you choose to go to the store that makes you sign a contract to come back several more times before they'll agree to sell you food? Or one that asked you to fill out a ton of paperwork for each and every item you put in your shopping basket?

Customers in any industry tend to choose the path of least resistance. That's why it's so important that we as coaches take all the steps that we can to streamline our business practices to make it easy for clients to say yes to us. We need to find ways around all the necessary but frustrating policies like tons of paperwork, lack of upfront pricing, and long-term contracts. Though they might be seen as necessary in some instances, these are things that no one likes to deal with, so we can't reasonably expect our clients to want to suffer through them.

Take the time to look over your practice and see where you can make your operations more user friendly. We guarantee that making those changes will have a profound impact upon your clients and how satisfied they are with your services.

© Copyright Hannah McNamara

Hannah McNamara is the author of 'Niche Marketing for Coaches'

"Essential reading for anyone who's serious about running a life coaching, executive coaching or business coaching practice" Jonathan Jay, The Coaching Academy

Hannah McNamara and her team of experienced coaches offer one-to-one mentoring on setting up and building your own coaching practice. Find out more.