Q: How do I ask for coaching fee? How do I decide my coaching fee? How to convince the client and close the sale? Every time I deliver a good session, the client feels great and I feel happy and satisfied. Until the money part comes.. I don’t feel comfortable in asking for money.. I don’t want to sound like needy, but I am. I guess the clients also sense that and the coaching session abruptly ends there, sometimes we don’t even reach the monetary part itself.
We all want to be prosperous and lead a great life. Most of us, including myself, have got coach credentials after seeing or hearing about the outstanding amount of coaching fee being charged by many coaches.
We want coaching profession to fulfill our dreams which our regular professions, which surprisingly includes professions like entrepreneurs, business, engineers, doctors, lawyers etc could not fulfill all our dreams.
Though it is true that some of us, including myself, joined coaching because we wanted a fulfilling career which could bring about transformation in others’ lives… but consider a question: would you have got trained as a coach if coaching was only a fulfilling career and no financial rewards?
The answer would be NO in most of the cases.
The TRUTH is that the money is the deciding factor in getting coach credentials most of times…
However in my experience, it doesn’t work this way… in less than a year all the dreams are shattered. Most of the coaches shut their shops even without earning a single penny.
They do a lot of free sessions to their friends and proudly call themselves change agents, catalysts of transformation, <fancy title> coach etc…
And after one year most of these coaches give up, though some still carry the “<fancy title> coach” tag with them… and they tell different excuses to others and themselves to justify why they “stopped” coaching…
Thereafter they console themselves that they have at least learned a “new skill”… but that wasn’t the main objective, isn’t it… the main objective was to learn a new skill and use that to make enough money to fulfill those wild dreams and to do all this in a noble way…
Coaching is a profession which needs a patience, perspiration and persistence to build up.
One has to treat this as a business…
Learning technical skills (i.e how to coach) is only one part of the whole story.
You got to do marketing and sales as well in order to fulfill your main objective .. to earn sufficient money..
Whenever as a coach you come across a potential coachee, it is natural for a new coach to be stressed about coaching fee… questions like “how much to charge”, “whether they will be able to pay/afford” , “am I asking too high/less”, “what is the right place that this customer can afford” etc come into mind.
The transformation agent seems stressed when it comes to the question of asking money.
People, like myself, who don’t have prior experience in sales find it difficult to ask for money…
They go blank…
They don’t sound confident when they say their fee…
The complementary coaching session has gone well till the point… and then the question of money comes..
The coach tells his fee and the client says “I’ll get back to you”….. and thats it…
If above sounds familiar, then you are not alone… Many coaches go through this.
I too faced this issue…. I used to be uncomfortable in asking money… one of my goals in a course was “to be able to ask for money from a client and feel good about it”
And the course failed to deliver it… Even after the course I would be as uncomfortable asking for money as I was before attending the course… And the course included “speech patterns” and other NLP techniques which sales people consciously and unconsciously use..
It went on for quite sometime…
Until…
One day, I accidentally, found a more powerful way to help clients and ask money…
And the way was simple, devoid of any sales tactics…
No manipulation at all …
And the method is “Serve your coachee powerfully as if it is a paid session”
I was watching an online course from one failure turned great successful online instructor… The instructor narrated his story about how he got big loan for online business and nothing was happening.. he tried hard for several months and one day he thought of giving up…and somehow a thought came to his mind… why not to record the course for free and give it away… anyway there is no way to recover the expenses incurred..
and that was turning point.. the quality of his courses improved drastically and he was able to turn around the business… and it happened because he was able to take his mind off the money part.
I also thought to try this method… to take my mind away from monetary part.. and conduct the complementary coaching session as if it is a paid one.. and that turned things around for me.
Take you mind off the money part…
Treat the complementary session as normal session… a highly paid one.
Let them experience the transformation even if you have to risk that the coachee’s problem will be solved in a single session only…
Many potential clients whom I coached got the answers they were looking for in the single complementary coaching session… and it is part of the game in this method.
You can never guarantee 100% conversion rate.
However my conversation rate using this method has been very good… Right now I am converting 40-50% of my leads and the existing coachees are generating generous referrals.
When the coachee experiences the transformation then the actual question comes …Money…!!! The coachee himself will ask in most of the cases – how much do you charge?… and if the coachee is really ready he may negotiate a bit and then go for it.
Else the call ends at that point.
The entire conversation about money part including in successful cases takes about 5 minutes. thats all…
In any case I move on to next potential client, more fulfilled and feeling awesome… because my primary motive of the session is served… If enrolling the client were the primary motive then the feeling would have been different, and might have affected the next session as well.
So here is the summary … show up to serve the client… serve powerfully … treat every session like highly paid one and let things happen naturally.
