How to master messaging & delivery for coaches 🚀
If you work in the knowledge business, you know how important it is to balance being a good coach with a good business person. It can be stressful and overwhelming. You need to know how to connect with your audience and resonate with their needs while also making a business plan and running the operations. We invited Rachel Jenkins as The Coach Tribe podcast guest to share her secrets on mastering messaging and delivery. She'll help you identify why your business is not performing as well as you’d hoped, plan your business processes, and tell you what to do if you lack clarity or are afraid of success.
Rachel helps coaches and consultants integrate structure, process, and flow into their business. They fuel it with a bulletproof mindset and energetics to have the business of their dreams without overwhelming or overwork.
Tune in here and keep reading if you want the same thing!
Clarity in your message will help you avoid feeling confused or overwhelmed
If you ever felt confused as you didn't know where you fit in the coaching industry or were overwhelmed by the work and business knowledge required to run and grow your coaching business, don't worry. You're not alone.
The coaching industry evolved, and while the desire to help others has remained a constant, the volume of coaches and methods to do so has dramatically increased. Nowadays, a coach is not only somebody who enables you to find new angles to look at things and does the mindset work to aid you in taking action but anybody who teaches: anything from marketing to spirituality. And while it is valuable to find somebody who can give you the secrets to market yourself better and drive sales up, Rachel believes today we tend to lack the mindset work. In a world with a plethora of coaches, it is tough for people to find the help they need. And from the coaches' side, it isn't easy to feel your place in the industry.
And because of this diversity, you must be very clear when you communicate how you help people, your process, methods, and the steps needed to succeed.
After clearly defining your message, you must consider the business aspects of creating a successful coaching enterprise. Many people get overwhelmed by the fact that they need to know marketing, operations, logistics, admin, and so on because they don't understand how it all fits together.
Pro tip: Break your business into all the different layers you have, and it will be easier to understand. Consider your business idea, your resources, the strategy & plan, the execution, your audience & their needs. Tune in here to hear Rachel give a fantastic example and simplify all of this for you.
How do I know which business area is causing a problem?
It can be tough to realize where the problem lies when you only have an insider's view of the business. However, there are a few main areas you can simplify your business into, which can tell you where the problem lies.
Follow along and do this exercise.
Think about your business by analyzing the following five areas:
1. The elevator pitch
2. The offer:
👉 Where - the place you work with your clients (e.g. Zoom)
👉 When - the time you work with your clients
👉 How much - how much you want to charge for your services
3. Value for non-clients
4. Leads – quality and quantity
5. You, as a coach
Now score each area from 1 to 10. Ten means you have clarity on that topic, are comfortable with it and think you're doing a great job there. One means that you still have work to do and you don't master this area yet.
If you score less than 10 in any of the first two categories, you're not clear on what and how you're offering to people. And if this confusion appears in your head, your clients will also get confused. For more clarity check out this fantastic blog article on how to price, package and position your high-ticket coaching offer.
Scoring less than 10 on any of the last three categories means you have a problem with your business processes. For example, if you score 10 in the third category (value for non-clients) and less than 10 in your lead box, you have a problem with your marketing process and can benefit from a marketing consultant. If you score 10 in this area but lower than 10 in the next one (You, as a coach), you either have a mindset or a training issue. You're uncomfortable with your clients, struggle to show up for them daily, or you need to improve your coaching skills.
This exercise shows a simplified flow your business should follow: you need to have a clear message, and then you need to move people from being a prospect to being a client through the value you can add.
How to design your strategy to accelerate your business
You should have a long-term plan and a strategy to execute it - how are you going to make your business idea a reality. Let's take, for example, launching and marketing your coaching business. First, explore your options: you can use LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Then ask yourself if they fit into your business goals and whether or not it is wise to start with all of them. Which one of these will add the most value to yourself and your business? And then, you choose one to focus on and optimize it before you work on the other two. Part of your strategy should be to keep things simple until you can grow and add on.
After deciding which social media platform to use, you need to track performance to accelerate your business. Check out this amazing database with 100 social media analytics tools.
Now your plan should come into place: deciding which activities to do by when. For example, on Monday, you should create your profile and bio; Tuesday, you should make your first post, and so on. Strategic planning aims to break down your big goal into smaller chunks to ensure your activities align with your long-term strategy. For this, follow these steps:
1. Start from your yearly goal: think about what you want to achieve in a year
2. Break the yearly goal into four quarters – what do you need to achieve every three months for your annual goal to become a reality?
3. Break down your quarters into months and plan the goals for each month
4. Break each month into weeks
This way of working helps you focus on the task at hand, ensures the remaining essential tasks are in your backlog, so you do not forget about them, and keeps you in check so you don't stray away from your ultimate goal.
Need help planning? Use this fantastic template to help you schedule your marketing content.
Pro tip: It is better to under-commit than over-commit. This will ensure you have time to deal with unforeseen events; if they do not arise, you can always start a task sooner if you have the capacity.
Tips to combat lack of clarity and fear of success
If you ever find yourself in a position where it is difficult to show up for yourself and do the task you committed to, you may be facing one of the most common issues coaches face. The first one is lack of clarity: often, we think we know how to do a task, and when we try to do it, we stop because we realize we don't know all the details. We lack clarity. The second common issue is fear of success: people are scared about the consequences their success will have on their life: "What will my friends and family think?" "How will my relationship change?"
To tackle these, Rachel gives two tips:
- Think about your work in terms of little steps: what small steps do I need to take to finish this task? And often, procrastination will go away as you gain clarity.
- Listen to and trust your intuition: go out, relax, and breathe fresh air. This will relax your nervous system and trust whatever image or feeling comes to your conscious brain. It can be the answer you're seeking. If you’re curious to hear more about how important of a resource your mentality is, check out this blog article that will prepare you to enter the coaching business world.
Well done! Now you should know where to start to improve your coaching business. Go knock it out of the park!
This is just a summary of our discussion with Rachel. To hear all the tips and strategies shared, check out the entire conversation on your favorite podcast app or YouTube!
