How to start conversations with qualified coaching leads.

Why outreach messaging is the best way to generate qualified leads?

If you are a coach that wants to start growing your coaching business in 2023, you might be asking yourself which is the best and cheapest way to generate qualified leads through Social Media.

Well, let me give it to you straight…

Messaging with leads in the chat, no doubt!

If you haven’t done this before, you might be thinking…

“Reaching out and chatting to people on social media? That is too salesy, I am going to annoy everyone”?

Or

“There are many other ways like growing my network first or just posting for a while”?

Indeed, growing your Social Media audience and posting are both great ideas, and they will eventually impact your client creation.

BUT, if you are starting out, you might not have a big social media audience and the one that you have will probably just be friends, family, and colleagues. Although they are a great group to start prospecting with, eventually you will have to expand your network.

Building an audience that matches your target client takes time, and if you are like me, when launching your business you might need to find a client as soon as possible to be able to keep going.

Starting conversations through chat with possible leads will accelerate the client creation process.

And if you are still thinking that you will annoy everyone by doing this, let me tell you, not at all if you do it right.

After several years of messaging prospects, I can tell you that it has been one of our most profitable lead-generation methods.?

The rise in prices of Ads also makes it really competitive as a lead generation source for coaches that are starting out.?

You will be able to start a conversation with a potential lead and get valuable information from the lead that will help you with future searches without the hassle of knowing how to create the copy, the visuals, and the tech details that require putting an Ad online.?

Starting a conversation with potential leads is fundamental to a coaching business. Why? Because what you need at the beginning of your business is information about your Niche. Information such as:

What is their main problem?

What are their goals?

What do they really want to achieve?

What is stopping them from achieving it?

This collected information will guide your future prospect searches, and your content strategy and even will help you optimize your coaching program to your niche’s needs.

Your chats must be part of an Ecosystem

Don’t just jump into your chats just yet, hold your horses!!

Messaging is an important piece of the puzzle but is not the whole puzzle. In fact, it’s not even the first piece of the puzzle.?

The first piece of the puzzle is to optimize your own Social Media profile. Let’s take Linkedin as an example. Whenever you chat with a lead, there is a high probability that the lead will go to your profile to check you out. If you want to know more about how to optimize your own LinkedIn profile, one of our founders, Adrian, has an excellent free training session on this here.

Now that you have your profile optimized, you can start reaching out. I strongly recommend though, that you also begin to pump out content too. Consistent and valuable content will attract more leads to your profile and will engage your leads outside of the chats too.

The third piece of the puzzle would be engaging with the content of your niche. You can consider your comments in your niche’s posts as part of your content strategy too. Thoughtful and valuable content on your niche’s posts will start conversations that you can then take to the chat.

There are other pieces to this puzzle, but if you start with these three and messaging, you will build a great environment for conversations, which will bring you clients.

OK, I started several chats with leads, now what?

Once chats start popping out like 5-star resort mojitos on a hot summer day, there is a chance you get lost in so much conversation. Maybe, some of your conversations end up with no direction or with no clear next step.

You want to avoid this as much as possible. You don’t want to end up talking about the weather with your potential clients just because you are a bit lost and don’t know where to take the conversation. On the other side, you don’t want to be pushing and pitching since minute one as that would be rude and out of touch.

This structure will guide you through the storms of messaging conversation: Engage, Challenge, Invite.?

Engage

At the beginning of the conversation, it′s all about engaging your lead into chatting with you. Think about this. People get a ton of messages on LinkedIn nowadays from people trying to pitch them something. You have to capture their attention in order for them not to ignore you at first.?

Also, there is a mindset around this. The best thing you can do when you meet someone is to get curious about them and learn who they are and what they do. Just how you would do it at a party or when you are dating. Chatting with leads is very much like dating.

If you were dating, you wouldn’t sit down on your first date and start waffling about how incredible you are and not ask a single question about the other person for a single hour right? If you are doing this, please stop. This is the reason why you are not having any dating wins.

What you would do is ask questions about the other person, and get curious about who they are and what they do. Same thing in the chat.

The best way to start a conversation is to refer to something from the lead's profile, posts, or comments. Something that resonated and you genuinely want to know more about.

Once you get the conversation rolling through some questions and answers either way, it’s time to get the conversation to the next stage.?

Challenge

Once you are both engaged in conversation, it’s time for you to shift the conversation into knowing more about the current challenge or problem you can help the lead with.

A good way to do this is to ask the lead about a specific goal in your area of expertise. For example, if you are a weight loss coach, you can ask something like:

“So, tell me, how is your fitness doing?”?

Or

“Are you happy with your fitness level currently?”

After the lead answers this question you can go into:

“What are your fitness and health goals for 2023?”

Or

“What weight would you love to have by the end of 2023?”

These questions will lead to the lead talking about his or her fitness goals for 2023 which is a brilliant segway for the next question:

“What is stopping you from achieving that goal currently?”

Now, this is a key part of the conversation, as you will have an insight into what is the main problem that the lead is having right now. Time to jump into the next stage of the conversation.?

Invite

It’s time to make an invitation. At this point, the lead is engaged in genuine conversation with you and has expressed the main challenge he or she is facing.

This is the time for you to jump in with “I can help!”

The best way to engage the lead into your help is to offer a low commitment high-value free resource.

If you are just launching your business, this can be a 20-minute call with the lead to talk go deeper into the challenge and offer some resources that will help. This is the one that I recommend the most as you will have some face-to-face time with the lead and will discover even more valuable information about your niche in a 20-minute call.

Here are other options you can use as a low commitment high value resource:

1. A free workshop or webinar.

2. A free scorecard.

3. A free 15 min training session in your area of expertise.

4. A free guide on how to solve a problem of your niche.

Although all these resource work really well, I always recommend booking a 15-20 minute with the lead to get to know their challenge better, and then recommend one of the other free resources.

Now you have an overview of how to create a stream of flowing conversation with leads on your LinkedIn chats. Go and connect!

Whenever you're ready there are 3 ways that we can help you with your coaching business:?

1. A 2-hour Free Workshop focused on client creation for Coaches. First up... it's not recorded! It's LIVE. INTERACTIVE. And it will be everything you need to kickstart your coaching business. Check our Free Workshop Calendar here:

2. A 15-min Business building session with me. In this session, we will look at your main challenge in the business, and then I’ll offer you some free resources that will help you with it. If you would like to book your session check the available sessions here: