Sell Corporate Clients and Fill Your Coaching and Consulting Offers

Let’s dive in a bit deeper.

Step 1: Understand what corporate clients buy

First, what do we mean by “corporate clients”?

• Small local businesses
• Medium businesses
• Large global brands
• Nonprofits and Associations

Let’s look at what corporate clients are already spending on training.

8 billion dollars is already budgeted for training, coaching, and consulting.
56% of training is delivered by outside vendors (people like you!).
57-80% of training is being delivered online.

You can see over half of a corporate company’s training dollars are spent with people like us. The fact that so much of this training is happening online means you can work with companies anywhere AND everywhere.

You might be surprised at how many types of experts sell to corporate clients in the form of coaching packages, consulting retainers, on-site training, online courses, training products, membership sites, and more.

Here are a just a few of the areas that coaches and consultants sell to corporate clients:

• Software Training
• Financial Planning
• Executive Coaching
• Sales Training
• Nutrition Workshops
• Team Building
• Health Services
• Business Writing
• Storytelling (yes, storytelling)

When you sell corporate clients, there is a huge opportunity for you to grow your coaching or consulting even if…

1. You have never sold to corporate.
2. You are having some success selling to corporate clients and you want to sell to more clients AND offer even bigger packages.

Step 2: Identify the type of corporate client you want to work with

What type of corporate client do you want to work with?

• Small local businesses
• Medium businesses
• Large global brands
• Nonprofits and Associations

It’s not just big businesses that are investing with experts like you. You might be surprised to hear that small businesses invest more in training each employee than large businesses. Small businesses account for millions of dollars per year and over the past year, their training and development budgets increased.

You have businesses right in your backyard with money allocated for training and they are looking for what you offer.

For example, a yoga teacher in our community that helps yoga studios incorporate children’s yoga programs made a list of all of the yoga studios in her area, and was immediately able to get appointments with many of them. She was surprised how easy it was to make the connections and get the meetings.

Step 3: Get the appointment…without an inside connection

There’s a common belief that you have to have an insider connection to get in the door with a corporate client. This is not the case.

The key is to craft an outreach strategy to get in front of the right person. This begins by identifying the type of results you can help a client achieve.

For example, Sam is a nutrition and weight loss coach in our community, and she wasn’t clear on how she could market her services to corporate clients.

If you are a nutrition and/or weight loss coach, then you can help corporate clients get results in many different areas. Sam chose one area: weight loss to improve Type 2 Diabetes (which results in higher health insurance utilization).

She then asked herself, who is the person in the organization responsible for creating this result? She identified that the Human Resources Director would be the person responsible, and crafted her outreach to this role.

This is the first step in creating a powerful outreach strategy and the secret to getting past the “gatekeeper” to the decision maker.

Step 4: Sell corporate clients by linking what you do to the results the company wants to create

Many experts try to approach the corporate market by talking about WHAT they do.

How often have you called a business and the expert started with something that sounds like, “Before we get started, let me just tell you about me and what it is that I do”?

When you talk about WHAT you do, you are much more likely to get responses that postpone moving forward and sound like, “We’ll let you know if…” or “Send us something to look at”.

The key to getting attention and landing the client is to intentionally lead the client conversation to discover the needs of the client. It is critical that you identify the gap between where they are now and what result they want to achieve.

Step 5: Package and price for a “YES”

Close to 90% of the 5-6 figure proposals I deliver to clients generate a “yes”. It was not always this way. I used to spend days creating proposals and then follow up for weeks/months with a small percentage generating a sale.

When I took charge of the conversation and focused solely on identifying the results the client wants to achieve and linking them to the results I can deliver, everything shifted.

The key is to guide the conversation such that you discover what they need.

I’ll be leading an upcoming webinar training walking through how to find corporate clients, what to say when they ask what you do, and how to lead a high converting conversation that leads to a sale. Click here to learn more and save your spot.