What should business coaches tell their prospects?

What business coaches should tell their prospects

In this 3 minute blog, you learn why small business owners need a business coach and what you should tell your prospects. 

Table of contents

As a business coach, your main toolset is communication. Combined with your expertise, you know when and how to ask the right coaching questions. But what about business owners? Do they ask themselves the right questions?

Do small business owners ask the right questions?

There are so many ways to develop a business. At times business owners can feel quite isolated. No one to talk to that understands the dynamics of their business and challenges. They can easily go in the wrong direction.

It can, therefore, be nerve-wracking for entrepreneurs. Trying to think of their best option, make the right decision, save time, conserve funds, or any other business-related matter that requires applied thinking. Or even worse: feeling forced to risk the next step.

It makes a huge difference if an experienced listener asks the right questions or when a firm owner, who is in the midst of problematic situations, asks these questions. That’s why business owners need coaching and mentoring. Moreover, successful entrepreneurs have a business coach. That’s what you should tell your prospects.

Selling prospects the unknown

For business owners, one of the best ways to get ahead is to ask those who have gone before to help to answer these questions. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t have a collection of mentors or a business coach. Trusted business advisors around them to ask them: ‘How would you …..?’

To make it even worse, they have never experienced it, either. What business coaching can do for them is unknown to the business owners. That makes it a whole lot more difficult to sell your services to them.

How to get the right answers?

Even if small business owners have mentors or business coaches at their disposal, they still need to learn to ask great questions. Especially to their prospects and customers. Asking open-ended questions is by far better than asking closed questions. For example, questions that always start with Why, What, Who, What for, When and last but not the least: How!

So, let’s assume entrepreneurs master the art of asking powerful questions. Will they get the true answers, when they are part of the problem? No, highly unlikely. Simply because even with asking open-ended questions, they won’t point themselves as a source of the problem.

There are lots of experienced business coaches who have just the right expertise and answers. However, to get the right answer, small business owners need someone who can offer something else to consider which wasn’t in their thoughts at first. Who can help to trigger a new direction, a different thinking, a different perception to form new and better habits. Different behavior results in business growth.

More balls

Some books pose and answer the right questions too. Lara Morgan’s book ‘More Balls Than Most: ‘Juggle your way to success with proven company shortcuts’, answers some vital questions aspiring entrepreneurs should ask themselves before starting.

Lara answers questions with a video response, demonstrating a quick response direct from her own experiences. Her main advice: “to grow your business, spend most of your early time only working on sales during the week and do admin on Saturdays and Sundays.”

Furthermore, she made sure she built up a buffer of flexibility that enabled her to invest and grow with others and accelerate her success.

You have to go in with your eyes open….cut out everything else except sales from Monday to Friday.

Lara Morgan

What you should tell your prospects

Despite the good advice, the problem with good books – as is with testimonials – is that the answers are not tailored to the situation of individual business owners. So, the best support is to get it from those who succeeded. Those who know exactly what it takes to achieve this goal and don’t hesitate to share it.

But is that enough to convince the business owner? Research in Harvard Business Review found that the biggest fear of small business owners is that the coach would not understand their business.

So, the lesson here for you is not to advise business owners what to do or how you would solve their problems, but start asking the right questions. Because, as you may know, for most good questions, people don’t have an answer yet. They end up saying: ‘That’s a good question!’ Leaving it unanswered. That’s why they need you as a business coach.

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