WHEN YOUR CALENDAR IS EMPTY – no clients, no sales calls.
AAARK! Right? So frustrating!
This is by far the biggest challenge for any new or new-ish health coach. The struggles is REAL AF.
It feel daunting. It feel frustrating.
You think, “I suck. I should give up.”
STOP.
You don’t suck.
When you have been in business for a few months or a few years and you haven’t been able to build up your client base – it might mean you are lacking a few very important things in your business.
In episode 53 of the Wealthy Coach Podcast, I’m discussing:
- If you are to attract clients, you need to make sure they know you can help them;
- Things you should never say in your IG bio;
- The things that no one will ever pay for – LIKE EVER;
- The disconnect that is driving clients away;
- What effective marketing is REALLY about;
- The problem with your offer that makes no one want to buy it.
Connect with me on Instagram: @kendraperryinc
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Niche Like a Boss in my 2-hour niching workshop. Find out more at: kendra-perry.com/niche-workshop
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3 Reasons You Aren’t Getting Clients
We’re going to talk about a topic that might be on your mind. I know that a lot of you out there, you have the best intentions with your business. You graduated health school or health coaching school, and you’re like, “I cannot wait to help people,” but it has been maybe a little bit harder than you thought, and maybe you are not getting the clients that you want. One of the most common questions that I am getting online is, “Why am I not getting clients?” I want to talk about three reasons, these are probably the most common reasons that you’re not getting clients. Before we get started, I want to try something a little bit new with these solo episodes that I do.
I want to talk about something that I am nerding out on, geeking out on super hard because you are always asking me different questions about my personal life. I want to make this a little bit more personal, and so if you do not give a crap about what I’m nerding out on, that’s cool. Just skip ahead. For those of you who are interested, it’s only going to take a few minutes. Something that I am obsessed with is my Oura Ring. I got an Oura Ring. It’s been on my wishlist for a little bit of time and I finally bit the bullet and got it. I am so happy I did. I am completely obsessed with that. I’m focusing primarily on sleep.
The Oura Ring, for those of you guys who don’t know, is a ring. You put it on your finger and it tracks your heart rate, your heart rate variability, steps, exercise, sleep. I love it because you don’t have to be connected to Bluetooth. I typically keep my phone off for a lot of the day unless I’m using it. I don’t like to have Bluetooth on. Even though I’m not connected to Bluetooth, it is storing all this crazy information in this tiny ring. It’s honestly hard to believe that it can do that, but it stores all this information and then, I connected to Bluetooth, update the information to my Oura Ring app and I geek out on statistics.
I’m focused on sleep because sleep has been something that I’ve never been great at most of my life. I can recall in high school, often having trouble falling asleep at night and I’ve always been a light sleeper. When I was in my late twenties, I went through about seven years of chronic insomnia and about 1.5 years of very intense chronic insomnia. In the past couple of years, I’ve gotten my sleep dialed but I still haven’t been feeling super energetic in the morning. It always takes me a little bit of time to wake up. I’ve long suspected that the quality of my sleep is not awesome.
I’ve been trying all these things, but I’m like, “It would help me move a lot faster with achieving my sleep goals if I had some way to track if what I was doing was working.” I’m someone who is very motivated by data. When I’m doing things and I don’t know if they’re helping, it’s hard for me to stay the course. When I’m getting feedback that something I’m doing is working, then I’m way more likely to stick with it. I thought that by getting the Oura Ring, I would be able to track what I was up to. That was the reason why I got it.
What I quickly learned when I got my Oura Ring is that I had an abundance of REM sleep, but I wasn’t very good at getting a lot of deep sleep. Typically, I think you’re supposed to get somewhere between 1 to 1.5 hours of deep sleep every night. I might be wrong on that number, but something along those lines. I was getting sometimes 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, but I was not getting anywhere near 1.5 hours. It’s interesting because I’m such a crazy dreamer. I dream very vividly. I often have lucid dreams when I’m dreaming. That makes sense because those dreams happened quite a bit in your REM sleep, but I was determined to get into a deeper sleep. A couple of things that have helped me is I’ve been doing ice baths. We have this tank on our deck that’s full of water and ice because it freezes over and I have to chop it off every day, which is so crazy.
I’ve been doing these ice baths before bed and just dropping your body temperature like that does help you get into a deeper sleep. That’s been helpful. The other thing that seems to contribute to me getting deeper sleep is Joe Dispenza. You might have heard of Dr. Joe Dispenza. If you haven’t, look him up, he’s amazing. He is very much into neuroplasticity, retraining the pathways in your brain so that you can have a different experience in your life. He was hit by a car, I believe his twenties. His whole spine got super messed up. He was able to rebuild his spine with his brain, with this neuroplasticity. It’s such a crazy story. If you haven’t had read his intro book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, I highly recommend it.
Anyways, I’ve been doing his meditations on and off. I decided to commit to doing these meditations before bed because one of the beliefs that I have personally is that I’m a bad sleeper. That’s the experience I have. I believe that when we constantly tell ourselves, that plays back into our experience. I have been doing this belief-busting meditation. The one I’m doing, I can’t remember the exact name of the meditation, but I’ll link to it. Doing these meditations before bed and trying to shift my perspective, and instead of saying, “I’m not a good sleeper, I’m a bad sleeper, I’m a light sleeper,” the shift I’ve been making is I sleep deeply.
I’m so grateful for the deep sleep that I get every night. I’ve been doing that for a couple of weeks now. When I do that, the morning after I look at my Oura app and I’m getting an hour and a half to an hour and 40 minutes of deep sleep. That has been incredibly powerful for me. Check it out. I’ll also link to Oura Ring because I just love mine. It’s given me really interesting information about myself. Enough about me. Let’s jump into the episode and talk about the three reasons that you aren’t getting clients.
People Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
Number one, it’s a big one, sometimes the biggest one. They don’t know that you can help them. How are you supposed to get clients if they don’t even know that you can help them? This is where you need to start. You need to understand whether people know that you are someone who can help them and really what this comes down to is niching and messaging. I know I talk about niching a lot. I’ve talked about it a lot on this show, on my YouTube channel, on Instagram. The reason for that though is because it is so incredibly important. You need to niche down so that you are targeting a specific person who has a specific problem.
When we determine our “niche statement,” we are thinking about three different things, person, problem, solution. Who is the person? What is the problem that they need solving and what is the solution that they ultimately want? With the person, it needs to be niched down somewhat. You don’t need to go crazy. You don’t need to say, “I help moms who had babies in 1984,” and get super crazy. You do need to define it somewhat because when you say people, you’re referring to anyone from the age of 18 to 118. The way in which I would speak with a senior is different from the way in which I would speak with a teenager or a young adult. We do need to narrow it down somewhat, and over time you might narrow it down further based on the experience you have, but you have to start somewhere. If all you start with is women or men, that’s a good place to start.
The next thing is figuring out what problem you solve. This is where people tend to get stuck. In health coaching school typically, we have this holistic approach to diet, wellness, health and lifestyle. We try to convince people to work with us by speaking to this holistic approach. When you talk this way, it is subjective. We do not want our niche statement to be subjective. We don’t want people to wonder about it or leave it open to interpretation. We want people to quickly know what we do and who we help, and whether we are for them or not.
When you come up with your niche statement, which is going to look like, “I help this type of person solve this problem so they can get this outcome.” That’s what it’s going to be like. You need to say that in words that they can understand and words that they use. When I’m saying “they,” I’m speaking to the people out there who did not go to health coaching school. The people out there who are currently living in the conventional medical paradigm, and they don’t understand that everything’s connected. They don’t understand what true health is. They believe that health is the absence of disease. Every time they go to their doctor and they get their blood work done, they say, “Everything’s normal. Everything’s fine.” That’s what they believe is normal.
I know that can feel infuriating because we’re here to shift the status quo when it comes to health. We were like, “That’s not right. That doesn’t mean you don’t have health issues,” but we have to meet them where they’re at. We have to use words that they understand and connect with them. We need to connect. Things that you should never have in your Instagram bio, on your Facebook business page, or in your website header would be things like, “I help you optimize your health. I teach you how to be healthy. I help you live a life. I help you live a healthy lifestyle. I help you take your health to the next level. I help you feel free in your body. I help you be the best version of yourself.” Think about all those that I just said, and feel free to go back.
The question I have for you is, are these specific, or are they general? They’re general. They can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. When you say something like “I help you optimize your health,” what does that mean? What does optimize health mean to you? What could it mean to someone else? “I teach you how to be healthy,” what does healthy mean? Healthy is a general, broad word that is open to a lot of interpretation. My definition of being healthy is probably going to be very different from someone else’s definition of being healthy. Same with a healthy lifestyle, “Take your health to the next level. Feel free in your body.” I honestly don’t even know what that means and, “Be the best version of yourself.”
The problem is a lot of people think they’re healthy because they don’t have sickness. When you say, “I can help you optimize your health,” they’re thinking, “My health is fine.” You do not want to be vague and you do not want what you tell people you do to be open to interpretation. You don’t want it to have multiple meanings. You want your niche statement to have one specific meaning. The problem that you solve needs to be specific. It needs to be a problem that they know they have. It needs to be a problem that is reducing the quality of their life so much that they no longer want to live like that anymore.
I’ve said this before, but people are only truly going to pay to get themselves out of pain or suffering because this is the world that we’ve all been raised in. We go to the doctor when something is wrong, we don’t go to the doctor to prevent future disease. We don’t go to the doctor to optimize health. That’s not what we do. We are taught, we are conditioned from an early age to only seek help when something is wrong. People truly are not going to pay to prevent future outcomes when it comes to health. They’re not going to pay to prevent future disease, at least it’s very rare. People are typically only going to pay when something is wrong and it’s gotten so bad that it is interfering with the quality of their life, and that is what is motivating them to want to solve it.
I have talked to thousands of people about their health. I went into business in 2013 as a health coach. I used to have 20, 30 sales calls a week. I have spoken to a lot of people about their health. Only one time in the five years that I spoke to many people about their health did I have someone come to me with virtually no symptoms, at least from their perspective, and tell me that they just wanted to get their health on track and optimize. What’s interesting is this woman ended up having a ton of issues. When we did the testing, all these things came up. By the time I finished working with her, I got the sense that she was just in denial and she was having a lot of these things, but she was too scared to admit them.
She was too scared to admit that she was weak, and she was completely disassociated from her body and disconnected. In the end, I think she wanted to solve problems. She was too afraid to admit it. People aren’t going to come to for that and if they do, they’re not going to pay you good money for it. We’re all here to make good money, what we do, what we offer, our time is valuable. We’re here to make good money. We are not here to be broke as fuck. The problem in which you decided you were going to solve has to be incredibly specific. Everyone is living in this conventional medical paradigm. The best problems to solve are related to symptoms, conditions, and diagnoses, anxiety, acne, joint pain, Hashimoto’s, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, psoriasis, eczema.
These are great problems that people know that they have and that they want to solve. Let’s say we use psoriasis as an example, maybe someone has some light psoriasis and it’s itchy but it’s not a big deal, and they can put on some cortisone cream or something like that. It just keeps it at bay and it doesn’t bother them. How likely is it that they’re going to reach out to you and be like, “I want to work with you so that I can prevent my psoriasis from becoming worse?” For a bunch of years they’ve kept it at bay, it’s slightly annoying but not a big deal. The doctor says there’s nothing they can do about it but give these creams.
What happens if at some point the psoriasis starts spreading, it gets incredibly itchy and they start becoming self-conscious of it? They don’t like wearing shorts because it’s on their knees and it looks terrible in their perspective. It’s also incredibly itchy and it keeps them up at night, and it’s irritating. At that point, are they going to reach out to you and ask for help? If you are someone who helps with psoriasis, you will absolutely. You’ve got to get people. We’ve got to connect with people when their problems are bad. Does it make your work harder? Absolutely.
It’s way easier to prevent a future outcome than it is to stop something chronic that’s diagnosed that has been going on forever. We know that but that’s when people are going to come to you. If we’re using psoriasis as an example, and let’s say at that point, the psoriasis is super irritating. It’s driving me crazy. I’m embarrassed by it. I feel self-conscious in shorts and it’s preventing me from feeling confident dating from wanting to wear short skirts, which I love to wear. It’s keeping me up at night because I’m waking up super itchy. I’m tired now, I feel fatigued because I’m not getting the sleep that I want to get. What am I going to be Googling? What am I going to be searching in search engines? Am I going to be searching how to optimize my health or am I going to be searching how to get rid of psoriasis? It’s going to be option two.
If people are going to find you, you have to be targeting or niching in terms that people are searching for. Nobody is searching for how to optimize my health. It just doesn’t happen. It’s so rare. It’s funny, I typed in “How to optimize my health,” into Google and the search volume is zero per month. When I say no one is searching it, literally no one is searching it, zero per month. If I put in “How to fix psoriasis,” 9,800,000 searches per month, 0 versus almost 10 million. That’s the difference. People aren’t searching for general health stuff.
If I’m that person and I’m searching and you are a coach who says, “I help women in their 30s get rid of their psoriasis so they can stop being itchy and self-conscious,” I’m on board. I am following this person. I am bingeing their website. I’m bingeing their social media because I’m like, “This person helps people like me.” If you’re the health coach out there who says, “I’m going to help you improve your lifestyle,” I’m not even going to pay attention. I won’t even see you because I’m super focused on the psoriasis. Even though you, as the health coach who says, “I can help you with their lifestyle,” can probably just as equally help me but I don’t know that. This is one of the biggest reasons is people don’t understand that they can help you because you’re not speaking to them. You will feel resistance with niching. That’s normal because we often feel that by niching down, we are excluding. We are excluding but that is a good thing. We cannot target all the five billion, whatever people who are on the internet. We just can’t. It’s really important that we talk to a specific person.
When it comes to determining your niche statement, get a general idea of the type of person you want to help, whether that’s women or men or moms or whatever but that problem that you’re solving, make it specific. The best way for you to go is to use a symptom, condition or diagnosis. The outcome is obviously what they want like what do people want instead of the problem? In terms of psoriasis, they want clear skin. Something important to consider is, am I speaking about what I do in a way that connects with people and the problems that they have?
People Don’t See What They Don’t See
Reason number two, your online presence and content aren’t connecting with your ideal client. If you want deeper information on content and how to make it work, refer to Episode 28, “How to make your content work.” It’s a good episode on creating content. We’re going to do a little mini-lesson on this here. When you show up online, whether it’s in video, whether it’s podcast form, a blog post, or maybe in a social media post or even an Instagram realm, you need to be curating the experience for your ideal client. It needs to connect with them, which means that it needs to be relevant to them. Effective marketing is all about getting into the head of your ideal client and figuring out what makes them tick. What are their pains? What are their struggles? What are they worrying about? What makes them excited? How are they spending their time? The content needs to connect.
When they go to your Instagram account or wherever you are online, they should instantly know that your content is for them. They should be impressed by the fact that you are constantly delivering relevant content to the problem that they have. If you don’t understand the inner workings of your client and you can’t ask the question, what makes them tick? What are their pains? What are their struggles? What are they worrying about? What are they excited about? What do they want? How are they spending your time? You just don’t understand them properly. What that means if you don’t understand who you’re talking to, then you won’t be creating the kind of content that they want to engage with.
If you wonder, if you follow me on Instagram and if you don’t, @KendraPerryInc, I highly recommend that you do because my content is very good. You will often see my content and you will feel like I am talking directly to you. If you are, of course, a health coach, who’s struggling to make money, struggling to build your business. Sometimes my words will cut you deep and that’s not trying to be mean but it’s because I understand you. I’ve spent not only have I personally been a health coach and I’ve been in your shoes, but I spent a lot of time connecting with my ideal client. I spend a lot of time on something called market research. I’m constantly paying attention to the questions I’m being asked and to the struggles that I see my students have and people inside my audience.
My content is always created around that. When you sit down to create content and this is what you want to ask yourself, “What does my ideal client need to hear today?” If you don’t know that, then you don’t understand them and you need to do more for market research. Get out there and interview your ideal client. Who is that? Start with the niche. Who do you help? Who is this person? What type of person? Let’s say, it’s women who are struggling with anxiety. You help women who are suffering with anxiety become calm and feel more confident or whatever. That’s a great starting place. You need to find women who struggle with anxiety and you need to invite them onto an interview with you. This isn’t a sales call. You don’t have ulterior motives. You’re not trying to sell them into anything. You were just wanting to ask them questions so that you can figure out the answers to these questions.
What makes them tick? What are their pains? What are their struggles? Great questions would be, “How do you experience your anxiety? How does anxiety interfere in your life? How long have you been struggling with your anxiety? What have you tried so far to fix it?” You’re going to find a lot of commonalities between the people you interview. If you can interview 10, 15, 20 people over the next few months, that’s amazing. You are going to learn so much. What you’re going to notice is that there’s going to be a lot in common with how people are experiencing their anxiety.
For example, you might learn that a lot of people who have anxiety have tried pharmaceuticals and they’ve been frustrated by them. There is a great thing to make content on why pharmaceuticals don’t always work and what to do instead. Staying within your scope and obviously, saying that sometimes people need medication but these are some alternatives. You might notice that a lot of your people who you talk to, don’t even want to leave their house because they have so much social anxiety. That’s another great thing to create content on. There needs to be a connection. All the content you create needs to be specific to the niche.
The way in which you will learn about your person, your human is really by talking to them and getting to know them. You want to interview them. If let’s say you don’t know anyone who has this specific problem in which you help solve, go onto Facebook, join Facebook groups. We’re talking about anxiety, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of groups on anxiety and just go in there and be a fly on the wall and see what people are talking about and struggling with and the questions they’re asking. You’ll probably find a lot of content inspiration inside those groups. Also, if you’re working with clients, if you have clients, listen to your clients. What questions are they asking you?
When I was working with health coaching clients, anytime they asked me a question, I would type it into a note and I would come back to it later when I was creating content. The online presence and your content need to connect to the person whom you were trying to help. This is where a lot of people get stuck because they’re thinking, “If I’m niching in anxiety, aren’t I going to run out of things to talk about if all I’m talking about is anxiety?” No, because we know that the body is holistic and it’s connected. Everything connects to everything. Anxiety is related to hormones, gut, immune system, brain function, it’s related to many different things. It doesn’t mean that you only talk about anxiety.
You can talk about estrogen dominance, but how does that relate to anxiety and you need to make it obvious to them. You need to speak to them like they’re twelve-year-olds so that they get it. If I go down your Instagram feed, I shouldn’t see, “Do you have estrogen dominance?” You would put something instead like, “How does estrogen dominance make you anxious?” What I’m doing there is I’m making it relevant. Online presence and content needs to connect. The only way that you’re going to be able to connect is by truly getting to know the person in which you are trying to serve.
People Don’t Want What They Don’t Want
The final step, number three reason why you’re not getting clients, your offer or your program isn’t attractive to your ideal client and there is a disconnect. It’s super important that your ideal client feels the program that you sell was created exactly for them to help them with the problem that they want solving. I see this all the time. Maybe the niche is clear, but the problem seems unrelated or the program seems unrelated or disconnected. For example, you help women with weight loss, but you sell a conscious eating program or you run a challenge about detoxing and then you try to sell them into a thyroid reset program. Maybe you help women with anxiety, but your program is called the sexy meditation method. It doesn’t connect.
We know if we’re using weight loss and conscious eating. We know that conscious eating is a way in which women can lose weight, but they don’t know that yet. The niche statement is front-facing and your program is front-facing. If they want to lose weight, they’re not going to understand why they should be consciously eating. You have to educate them about that within your program and within your content but that should not be the name of your program. The program should be named accordingly so that your client instantly knows that it’s about them and it’s for them. This is where coaches are getting tripped up.
For example, if we’re using the weight loss example, they help women with weight loss but they are afraid of being lumped in with traditional weight loss coaches. They don’t want to just talk about macros exercise and calorie counting, and that’s probably is outside their value system. What they want to talk about or what they believe women need to lose weight is mindful eating and healing the gut, just as an example. Because of that, they’re like, “What I do is I help women mindfully eat and heal their gut,” so they decided to call their program The Mindful Gut Program, but to women who want to lose weight, it doesn’t make sense. They’re like, “My gut is cool, and what the fuck is mindfully eating?” They’re like, “I want to lose 20 pounds.”
This doesn’t mean you need to change your method and to be clear, mindful eating and gut healing is the method in this example. It means you need to change how you talk about it and message. The name of your program needs to shift. You know that people need to eat mindfully and heal their gut to see long-lasting and sustainable weight loss but they don’t know that. If you try to sell them this mindful eating gut program, you’re going to lose them. You want the program to show them that it’s going to give them what they want. You have to give them what they want. If they want to lose weight, you have to give that to them.
There are a lot of different ways in which you can help them get there. If you don’t want to be a traditional weight loss coach who talks about macros, calories and exercise, that is 100% cool and is even great because it sets you apart but you still have to tell them and show them that you will help them lose the weight. People don’t often care how you get them from A to B or from sick to healthy. They want to know that you can get them there. For example, if I want to lose 20 pounds, I want to feel confident that I believe you could help me lose the 20 pounds. What we do to help me lose the 20 pounds. I care less about. You need to speak about your program in regards to how it’s going to help them get what they want.
What you know they need and what they want can be two different things, and you can’t convince people to want something that they don’t want. If your people want to lose weight, show them, “I can help you lose weight.” “I will help you lose the 20 pounds. This is what I do.” “If you follow my method and you stick to it, you will probably see some significant weight loss.” The mindful eating, the gut healing, that is the method. That’s what you teach them once they’re inside your program, but that cannot be the front-facing of your program because you will lose them.
Everything has to connect. This whole journey of from when people find you to ultimately become your client has to make sense. It has to be obvious and it has to be specific. If I am someone who’s trying to lose weight, I need to end up on your Instagram account and instantly know that you help women like me lose weight, because that will make me follow you. You need to keep me engaged by constantly sharing content with me that gives me tips on how to lose weight or reasons why I might not be losing weight. When I’m warmed up enough and ultimately, I’m interested in working for you, I need to see that you have this sexy weight loss program or whatever you’re going to call it and be extremely stoked because I’m like, “That’s exactly what I want.” It all needs to connect.
That is number three. Look at your offer. Make sure it’s attractive. Make sure that by saying the name of it, they instantly know that they can help you. To summarize the reasons why you’re not getting clients is number one, they don’t know you can help them and that’s where you need to work on your message and your niche. Number two, your online presence and content isn’t connecting. It needs to be relevant to the problem in which they have and you need to get inside their brain. If you’re not inside their brain, market research. Don’t skip this. Finally, the reason why you’re not getting clients is your offer isn’t attractive to your ideal client and there is a disconnect. It seems like the program that you’re offering them is made for someone else with a different problem. Make it connect, make it flow.
I hope you found this episode helpful. If you did find it helpful and you’re reading on your smartphone, take a quick screenshot, share it to your Instagram Stories and tag @KendraPerryInc. Let me know your biggest take-homes and I will say a personal hi inside the DM. I love connecting with you on Instagram. I love to know what you have found to be most helpful in the show. If you want to go one step further, you can leave me a five-star review on iTunes. If you’re wondering how to do that, because it’s not always obvious, I have a couple of tutorials. Thank you for reading. I will see you again where I help you become wealthy as fuck.
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Thank you so much for reading and I’m wondering, do you want to help me with my mission to end health coach poverty? If you do, I need all the help I can get. All I need is two minutes of your time if you could leave me a five-star review on iTunes, that would help so much. These reviews help get my shows in front of more people, which means that I can reach more health coaches and complete my mission. Thank you so much for your help. I can’t wait to talk to you in the next episode.
Important Links:
- Oura Ring
- Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself
- Episode 28 – Make Your Social Media Content Work
- @KendraPerryInc – Instagram
- iTunes – The Wealthy Coach
