Marketing for Coaches: Should I use cold calling to promote my services?
Cold calling involves picking up the phone and calling a stranger to see if they want to do business with you. It is also known as tele-marketing.
Many companies use cold calling for lead generation purposes – usually to make appointments with key decision-makers.
Whether or not you decide to use cold calling to prospect for leads is entirely your choice and it may seem like the natural choice if you have a background in sales or business development.
Before jumping into cold calling or tele-marketing here are a few things you should consider:
Market
Cold calling is more commonly used by coaches within the business-to-business (B2B market). In fact many of the larger coaching consultancies or HR/Management consultancies already have slick operations in place to approach HR and Learning & Development departments to arrange appointments. They work from bought-in databases, leads from their staff, their own databases and following up with people on the delegates lists from industry events and conferences.
While cold calling can be well received – a well timed call to a Learning & Development manager just as they are about to start looking for coaching and/or training providers can really pay off – in some markets it would be frowned on or seen with suspicion. This particularly applies within the personal coaching market. People are rarely receptive to phone calls at home or on their mobile phone from a complete stranger asking if they would like to change their life!
Resources
As an independent coach you have a limited amount of resource available to make phone calls yourself. The busier and more popular you are as a coach the less time you will have available to make tele-marketing an on-going part of your business development and marketing strategy, unless you out-source the tele-marketing to an external company or a freelancer. This costs money. There are some companies who will charge by appointment booked, but the majority charge by the hour for the time they spend calling people on your behalf. Your time and money may be better utilised on marketing activities which get your prospects calling you.
Remember, the big companies use tele-marketing because they have the budget to do so and they can keep on top of follow-ups. Also because they have a team of experienced business developers to go out to sales appointments, write up proposals and work on pitches, they can afford the time to use this approach. Independent coaches have to consider how much time will be spent on non-billable hours (i.e. hours you can’t charge your client for) in business development meetings which may never come to anything. Also, if you rely mainly on cold calling for your leads, you are likely to suffer from ‘feast/famine syndrome’ where you’re either busier than you can handle or have nothing in the pipeline because when you’re busy delivering coaching sessions you’re not prospecting for new business.
Cold calling vs. Warm calling
True cold calling – where you’re calling a stranger unsolicited – is tough. It takes a certain kind of person who can easily deal with rejection, counter objections and is persistent enough to keep someone talking until they reach their objective (usually to arrange an appointment). With the best will in the world, the skills that make you a good coach don’t always make you the greatest cold calling expert. Of course your listening skills and rapport-building skills come into play, but keeping your motivation up when your income depends on you making X number of calls a day can be tricky even for the most determined and positive person – especially when you work on your own rather than part of a team.
You’ll get a much better conversion rate and feel much more motivated to make the calls if they are part of a bigger marketing effort and where the people on your list are familiar with you, what you’re offering and have requested a call from you, i.e. it’s a warm call. The outbound call from you is to respond to their information request, follow up after meeting at a networking event, to tell them more about the coaching programme they’re interested in or to take their booking.
There are other lead generation techniques out there which are better suited to the independent coach. Cold calling has its place which is usually once you have built a team of coaches and consultants who are working for you. Until then focus on activities such as networking, speaking and internet marketing to generate leads.
© Copyright Hannah McNamara
