I was speaking with a client today, who was struggling with getting paying clients for his fitness business (as most coaches do) when getting them on a call.

Most coaches call these ‘Discovery Sessions’ or ‘Strategy Sessions’ Which is when you get a prospect on the phone, qualify them to see if you can help with their needs and then close them.

Simple right?

Only problem was that when speaking with the prospects, the client was finding that these guys didn’t see the need for his service.

After some more probing, what we found was that there was not enough ‘trust’ being built before the call as well as after.

Now, this client decided that setting up a simple blog, posting some videos and some articles to position himself as the expert would fix this issue. So, he simply did just that and 2 weeks later, he tried again.

The result? Exactly the same. Only now, he felt he had constantly publish more content and videos because of course, more is better.

On top of all this, he decided that he would revamp his funnel to tailor it to getting more committed clients.

After another 3 weeks, he tried again and the results? After doing all of this, he only got 1 new client. Not 20, not 10 but 1.

This time, he decided to invest in facebook ads and drive more traffic to his webinar. After spending approximately $300 on ads, he did not get a single client. 

Altogether, he had spent $1500 doing all these changes to get one $500 client who would only work with him for one month.

What was the problem? He thought he had everything set up, why wasn’t it working?

You see, most coaches struggle with this issue. 

99% of coaches actually do what was described in the scenario above. They believe that a superior service or the best funnel or more content will solve all of their problems.

The issue is that if it was that easy, wouldn’t every single coaching business be successful?

What actually separates the top 1% of coaches who succeed from the other 99% of coaches who fail to barely make enough to quit their jobs?

One word. Differentiation.

The reason why the top 1% of coaches succeed is because they took the time to step back and really think about who they want to serve. 

What demographic are they in,

What are their core pains, 

What are their values, 

What problems can they solve, 

How can they solve their problems,

Why should I solve their issues,

Why are these problems even happening in the first place.

Done correctly, this can really differentiate you from the competition. In fact, I would go as far as saying that when you start getting into this mindset, competition becomes irrelevant.

It all goes back to the story of the Red Ocean Strategy vs a Blue Ocean Strategy.

In a red ocean, you have sharks everywhere. Everyone is doing the exact same thing (calling themselves a life coach, a fitness coach, a wellness coach, a spiritual coach etc) and newbie coaches come in doing the exact same thing. They’re small fishes in a huge, oversaturated pond. And what ultimately happens? The big sharks take up the majority of the water meaning the small fishes are left chasing scraps.

However in a Blue Ocean, there’s no sharks because the water hasn’t been discovered and it is highly unlikely to be saturated because you’re now the big fish in a small pond. You dominate and own that niche better than anyone and you’re able to help them the best.

An example of this would be the taxi business which has been around for decades. Along came Uber, which is now a global business which disrupted the whole taxi business and put a lot of people out of work. They started very small and then scaled up.

This is the power of having a niche, you can start small and always scale up.