Networking for coaching business is one of the most important marketing avenues that you connect with both current and potential clients.
Whether you are looking to seek out new opportunities or connect with potential clients, networking is a great way to increase the awareness of your coaching practice. Networking should be a prominent feature on your marketing plan if don’t have it at work already in your business.
As a coach, here are some key networking tips that you can use to connect with people and doing it effectively enhance your networking for coaching business the growth of your business
5 Key Tips for Networking Your Coaching Business
Tip #1: Make Your Messages Brief and Concise
Make it a habit to say what you do concisely in just a couple of sentences. Emphasize the benefits your coaching offers, rather than the fact you are a coach.
Immediately go straight to the point with your message about what you have to offer to your clients. Unless they indicate a real interest in specific messages, you will bore or make them lose interest in you. Keep it brief and concise and express it in a way that invites questions for them to want to know more about you.
Tip #2: Share Your Story
Every coach has his/her own unique beginning story. Sharing your personal journey into coaching is a great way to connect with people most especially those having a hard time in making a decision on what to do and might want to go into coaching.
This story is just as much as part of your brand as the rest of your marketing communication and is useful in helping others. It also helps in making you relatable and approachable, and makes you appear authentic and sincere, in the eyes of your prospects.
Every single person on this planet is a coach within their own right, it’s only when we’ve overcome personal struggle do we realize this. Empower and encourage others all the way with your story, for you are your unique selling point, so practice presenting it well.
Basically your story helps spark an interest in the minds of your audience, towards you. It should be kept short most especially when speaking.
Tip #3: Follow Up
Without follow up actions, your networking effort is as good as dead. Take notes of people you with whom you exchanged contact information by entering their information into your database or contact management system so you can keep in touch with them. You can do this by creating an email list for them.
You can make a Follow up on conversations you have had with a card or email. When doing this refer to them by their name and Mention something you remember about them and/or their challenges this gives a kind of interpersonal connect with your clients. You could also mention about a speaker or an event that you organized.
Tip #4: Know Your Ideal Clients
Again and again, know your ideal clients. These people constitute the audience for which reason you are in business; to solve their problems. If you want to improve your networking for your coaching program, you need to generate leads from networking events, know where and how you can connect with your target audience.
As a coach try to make it easy for people to know who they can refer to you by not working on a broad range of clients. This helps you stay prominent in the minds of those people you connect with, so they connect with you or easily make referrals to your ideal clients, if they come across them.
To generate leads you need to know your audience from a marketing perspective. Such as their demographics and psychographics information, What business problems they face? What solutions have they already tried? How can you offer them something new?
Or When in doubt, you can describe the persons who benefited from your services the most in order for you to know your main audience
Tip #5: Set Achievable Goals
For a networking event, you could aim to talk to almost everyone in attendance for three to five minutes, or you could attempt to meet at least seven new people.
The key to generate leads from networking is to make your goals measurable: Do you plan to meet new prospects?
You can do this by clearly defining how you plan to meet up with them. Make a clear description on how you plan on getting your business card out and also ensure you come equipped with enough of them when you go out.
Other Important Tips for Networking for Coaching Business:
- How you are dressed, the way you speak and so on can often lead to a lot of assumptions which could either make you miss out on a valuable connection or help you generate more leads. PrimerMagazine showcases great ways to dress for your networking events. Here are some great styles for ladies.
- Your ability to Establish rapport When you meet somebody new is very important .you could try to find something to genuinely compliment them on or share something that you have in common.
- Today most conversations with clients are done online across various social media and online platforms You want your business to appear active, so ensure you’re social media outlets are recently engaged you can do this through regular tweet, post, share, blog, and comment
- You can also join various groups with a shared interest to build contacts and get and give referral
- Talk about your recent accomplishments when talking about your business but make sure their significance is evergreen and keep the conversation about the business to recent and current pursuits.
- Tell your potential clients where and how you met them or i you could as well ask them to remind you where you met.
- Add links to your website: you can include relevant links to your page in any comment you make, where it is appropriate.