Why Life Coaches Should Stop Taking Free Consultations… Part 2

The reason why no one is calling you is because…

Life Coaching is extremely competitive

Coaching schools are pumping out hundreds of life coaches every day. These life coaches are flooding the market with their newfound certificates.

They are blogging, YouTubing, Facebooking, Twittering, Instagramming, and offering everything free under the sun just to get a little attention.

And you are probably doing the same. It can be exhausting.

Now, with the “New Normal” and people out of work, more and more people want to get into the life coaching business. It’s getting awfully crowded!

It will be a long time before many of these newly minted life coaches will be washed out, and the demand for life coaching will catch up with the supply. But that is many years down the road. Do you have that kind of time?

In this new normal, it takes more and more resources to get your potential clients to call you. This adds up to more exhaustive hours in your day and more money draining from your bank account. How long can you keep this up?

Offering free calls is not the answer.

Life Coaching is extremely competitive

The problem with the Free Consultations

The problem with the Free Consultations is that your prospect must be pre-sold on your higher-level coaching services before they even think about calling you.

Do you see how that is?

Your high-value clients know that the Free Consultation is just a sales pitch. Why else would you offer it? Giving valuable information on a free call is not a good use of your time or your resources, right?

Whether you realize it or not, you are really selling your more expensive packages before they take you up on your free call.

Your prospect must be sold on or convinced that they will be pitched a higher-level package on the call; therefore, they wouldn’t call for a free consultation.

The question is: How well is your sales funnel doing in selling your higher-level packages to premium clients?

If it’s rock-solid, then stop right here. You won’t learn anything new that will help you.

Losing trust

Everything on your website must convince these premium clients to invest in higher-level coaching with you. That’s essentially what you are selling. The Free Consultation is just a formality.

When people see “free call” (or any other wording of it), they immediately have their guard up. Their Bullshit Detector goes off with lights, bells, and whistles.

They know that the person on the other end is going to try and sell them on a higher-level package. They know that you couldn’t possibly run a business by giving away your time.

You’ve LOST trust even before you started the relationship! Is that how you really want to present yourself to the world?

The problem is that most life coaches think they only need to sell the Free Consultation. Once they get the prospect on the phone, they can sell their higher-level services. How good are you at selling premium services to people who just want free information?

This approach simply doesn’t work for most life coaches. This leads to frustration and the ongoing fear of not having your business survive—especially in these chaotic times.

Do you believe in what you are doing? Do you stand behind your product and services? You owe it to your clients to stop wasting their time on Free Consultations.

“You have to believe in what you do in order to get what you want.” 

– Larry Ellison

Lack of confidence

When you offer a Free Consultation, you are on a “try before you buy” basis. Essentially, you are telling your prospect, “I’m not sure I can deliver the goods, so maybe you should just try me out for free. I lack total confidence in myself.”

This is a bad vibe to send out if you’re struggling to fill your calendar with real paying clients.

How can you afford to promote free stuff?

When you have Free Consultation as your lead generator, how can you spend money on advertising or other forms of promotion?

You can’t!

No one arrived on your website because you didn’t spend time or money on marketing. Whether you make videos, blogs, speaking, or direct advertising, you are spending money and your time promoting your services.

This is a lot of resources to spend on a Free Consultation that only attracts people with no money… or people who must be pre-sold on your more expensive services before they think about calling you.

This simply doesn’t work.

Your blogging efforts and free introductory calls are only attracting people with plenty of time and NO money. You want clients who value their time and have money to get their problems solved, right?

Sales funnels are way too complicated

One of the more popular ways to attract high-paying clients is with a convoluted sales funnel to generate leads. Have you tried this?

The problem is that these sales funnels are extremely complex and hard to set up. You need the services of a sales funnel professional. The cost of this is out of the range of most life coaches struggling to get their business off the ground.

Here’s what’s involved…

If you are using a webinar to attract leads, you need to pay a monthly fee for webinar hosting… then you need a call-appointment system… then you need an email autoresponder… then you need to spend money on advertising to set the whole thing in motion. Finally, you need to hire a bunch of professionals to help you put together this whole sales funnel.

You could spend several hundred dollars—or even thousands—on a clumsy sales funnel.

For what?

To get a bunch of tire kickers who want a FREE “strategy call”?

That’s not any way to jump-start your life coaching business—or resuscitate it from near death, is it?

The problem with this approach is you attract mostly people who are looking for more free information. They’ve watched your webinar because it was free. They signed up for your free strategy call because they have a lot of time on their hands.

But they are unlikely to buy.

People who have (and earn) real money don’t have hours to waste watching free webinars. These are professionals who want their problems solved quickly. They will seek out someone (you, for instance) who can add tremendous value right away—even if it costs money!

The webinar or any other complicated sales funnels only slows down the process for those who have money to pay for your $2,500 / month coaching packages.

Why put up roadblocks?

Running a complicated sales funnel with lead magnets, webinars, emails, follow-ups is like juggling a dozen balls in the air. You drop one, and the whole thing falls apart!

Yes, these sales funnels do work… but only for a few people who have the time, the resources, and the commitment to follow through. For the rest of us, it’s just too much work and too much money.

Do you have respect for your time?

High paying clients who have money to pay for your services have high regard for their time. If you don’t value your time, they won’t put a high value on your coaching services.

Giving away Free Consultations shows that you don’t value your time.

You need to show that you have respect for your time and that you respect the time of your prospects. This is the great premium client attractor that so few people understand.

Chasing down clients is the worst!

When you offer Free Consultations, you are forced to chase down leads with a complicated email follow-up system.

According to most online marketing experts, if you don’t keep up with your leads at least three to five times a week in the first six months, you can kiss that lead goodbye.

Writing three emails a week for six months takes a lot of work. Do you have that kind of time? Do you have a reliable system set up for that?

If you are not going to have a robust email follow-up system where you are following up with at least one email a day, don’t bother. All the leads you got from your free lead magnet will move on to other things if they don’t hear from you regularly.

What a waste!

How do you handle a Free Consultation anyway?

When you have a free call with a prospect, you have the dilemma of how much value you should offer:

• If you offer too much value to your prospects, they will wonder why they should pay a premium for the same value you just gave them for free.
  
• If you hold back on the value you give, your prospect won’t believe that you have anything better to offer. They will move on to someone else.

This is a no-win situation. There is no such thing as offering a lot of value for free. You can’t sustain it. This can lead to frustration and feeling like you failed as an entrepreneur.

You need a simple system that provides a steady stream of clients and a steady stream of income. On the next page, that system is revealed. Click below to continue.

Click continue to read the next part of this article!