I think I know what you’re feeling right now. You’re sick of being a slave to digital marketing with nothing to show for it. 

Does this sound familiar? 

You’ve always had a heart for helping others and decided you’d like to start a coaching business. You follow several popular coaching “gurus” on social media. Every day they bring you wisdom and advice about what to do if you want to be a successful coach. 

It’s not long before you click on one of their many ads or emails. A training here, some software there. Now you have some fancy expensive digital marketing tools, but you’re not sure how best to use them. The few leads you have gotten don’t pan out. 

You’re right back where you started, except you’re a few more thousand dollars in the hole and still don’t have a paying client on your roster. 

Is it time to call it quits and chalk this one up to one of life’s hard lessons? 

No! 

It’s not too late. You can still have a successful coaching business, just as you had intended. You just need to retrace your steps and return to what made you want to be a coach in the first place. 

Today’s coaching gurus are liars

The main problem with today’s coaching “gurus” is that they’re lying to you. 

That’s right. I just called bullshit on everything you’ve learned from every big name out there. 

They know that focusing on the more glamorous aspects of the job can be enticing, so they teach all about running your business without explaining how to set things up properly in the beginning.

Instead, they treat you like a coach with an existing six-figure business, and promise a fast-scale business model that generates your ideal clients in your sleep by simply implementing their “proven system.” 

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because IT IS. 

What they fail to mention is that it requires an incredible amount of effort, money, and training to build and optimize a coaching funnel that will actually work the way the guru describes. 

In addition, let’s say a brand new coach has created an online consultation funnel, which has filled their calendar with complimentary calls. Sounds great, right? Not exactly. 

While it’s fine and dandy to have a bunch of prospective leads booked into your calendar, these coaches have never SOLD to anyone before! Selling can be challenging enough as it is, and selling to a cold lead that you have acquired online is ten times harder. 

Selling is a skill set of its own, and selling high-ticket coaching programs, in particular, has its unique challenges and protocols. Because coaching is an intangible product, it can be hard to sell even if you are a great salesperson. 

And here’s the thing about most coaches—and don’t take this as an insult—but we typically aren’t great salespeople. In fact, by our very heart-centered nature, coaching uses the complete opposite skill set when it comes to sales! 

This is where the coach begins to struggle in their course or program. And it’s really no surprise. Because after all, you set out to be a coach, NOT a digital marketer. 

Do you see how this sets up new coaches for failure? 

So what do you do next? If you’re like many coaches, you end up spinning your wheels and searching for another course that’ll swoop in and save the day, only to end up in what I’d like to call, Learning Purgatory.

Welcome to Learning Purgatory

This is what I call the stage where many new coaches get stuck because they’re caught in a never-ending cycle of buying new courses and learning new things but never actually putting them to work.

What happens next is that they get addicted to education, to being a student and staying in that safe, passive phase instead of taking that scary leap of faith into the active coaching phase. 

But if you want to coach, and really do it, at some point you HAVE to make the leap.

So where should you market as a coach?

Here’s my advice. If you’re a new coach, the best thing you can do is to meet people in real life. 

I’m telling you the exact OPPOSITE of everything all the coaching gurus are saying: 

Get offline!

I know. I know. It sounds completely counterintuitive from everything you’ve seen and heard, but you have to trust me here. It works. 

How do I know? Because I did this myself and made six figures in my first year as a new coach, all COMPLETELY OFFLINE. 

So stop building funnels, branding your Instagram account, doing Facebook Lives, and tweaking your website.

All of that will come later once you’ve had more experience. 

What you need is a client, and you need one TODAY. So go out and get one! 

As a coach, your natural strength is coaching, and connecting with others, and your purpose is to help and serve people. So get out and meet the people you want to work with and shake their hands. Tell them what you do and how you can help them. It’s really that simple. 

If you tell someone how you can help them face-to-face, you’ll likely close a complimentary session. And if you meet them in person for the consult and even mess up the entire sales part, they’re still ten times more likely to hire you. Why? 

Because people want to work with someone, they know, like and trust. And to build that kind of trusting relationship, they need to get to know you. And face-to-face is the least expensive not to mention fastest way to build that rapport.