How to Sell Coaching Without Feeling Pushy or Awkward
If selling coaching feels pushy or awkward, you may be trying to get your potential client to make too many decisions at once.
Instead of making the sales call one big decision — “Are you going to buy my coaching?” — separate it into two decisions.
First: Are they actually ready to stop doing what isn’t working?
Second: Is your coaching the right solution for them right now?
That shift changes the conversation. You get to coach first, help them understand the problem more clearly, and determine whether they are actually ready for change. Then, if there is a fit, you can explain how your coaching helps.
That feels a whole lot less like pushing and much more like coaching.
Listen to the Episode
If you’re a coach who hates feeling like you have to “sell” someone on working with you, this episode is for you.
A lot of coaches are comfortable coaching but get uncomfortable the second the conversation becomes a sales conversation. Suddenly you’re supposed to explain your offer, overcome objections, talk about pricing, and somehow convince the other person to say yes.
Laura offers a different way to think about the whole thing.
Instead of treating a sales call as one big decision, she breaks it into two. First, help the person decide whether they are actually ready to leave behind the thing that isn’t working. That means asking questions, getting underneath the problem, and figuring out whether they have reached the tipping point where they’re ready for something different.
Only then do you move to the second decision: whether your coaching is the right solution.
The practical takeaway is simple: coach before you sell. Let the first part of the conversation help both of you determine whether change is actually needed and whether the person is ready for it. Then you can talk about your offer without forcing the conversation.
What You’ll Learn
Why selling feels uncomfortable when you treat the sales call as one big decision
The two decisions a potential coaching client actually needs to make
How to use coaching questions during a sales conversation
How to recognize when someone isn’t ready for your offer
When to transition from coaching the person to explaining your program
Questions This Episode Answers
How do I sell coaching without feeling pushy?
Stop making the entire conversation about getting someone to buy your coaching.
The first job of the sales conversation is to help the person understand whether they are actually ready to change what they have been doing.
Ask questions. What have they already tried? Why hasn’t it worked? What is the real problem underneath the surface problem? Why do they want the result they say they want?
You’re helping them determine whether the old way still works for them or whether they’ve reached the point where they’re ready to do something different.
That means you aren’t spending the first half of the call trying to convince someone that your program is wonderful. You’re doing something you already know how to do: coaching.
What should I ask on a coaching sales call?
Ask questions that help you understand the problem, how serious it is, what the person has already tried, and whether they are actually ready to make a change.
If you were a weight loss coach, for example, you might ask what diets or workouts they’ve tried before, why those approaches didn’t create lasting results, and what they think is really happening underneath the pattern.
You can also go deeper into motivation. Why do they want the result? What would actually change if they reached the goal?
The point isn’t to interrogate them or manufacture pain. You’re helping them understand their situation more clearly while you determine whether they have reached the tipping point where they are ready to leave their current approach behind.
How do I know if someone is actually ready to buy coaching?
Someone having a problem does not automatically mean they are ready for coaching.
They might still want to try solving it themselves. They may have another course they want to finish. They might think they need a completely different service than the one you provide.
That’s useful information.
The first part of the conversation helps you figure out whether they are actually ready to stop doing what they’ve been doing.
Sometimes the answer will be no.
Sometimes they need another provider. Sometimes they need something smaller than your full program. And sometimes they really are ready to go deeper and make a larger change.
Your job isn’t to force every person toward your offer. Your job is to discern what they actually need.
When should I explain my coaching offer on a sales call?
Explain your offer after you have determined two things: the person is ready for change, and there seems to be a good fit between the two of you.
At that point, Laura’s transition is simple. She lets the person know that she sees where they are, checks that they see it too, and then asks permission to explain what working together could look like.
Now you aren’t randomly presenting a program.
You can connect your coaching directly to the problems they already told you about. You can explain what you would work on together and answer their questions about the program, the process, the price, or you as the coach.
The sales portion becomes information instead of pressure.
What Endotype Changes About This
This episode isn’t teaching an Endotype-specific sales method, and Laura doesn’t break the sales process down by individual Endotypes here.
The useful connection is that your sales process does not need to turn you into a completely different person.
You’re a coach. So coach.
Use the conversation to understand the person in front of you, help them see their situation more clearly, and determine whether working together actually makes sense.
What Might Be Getting in the Way
A lot of the discomfort around sales comes from believing that your job is to make the other person buy.
That creates pressure fast.
You start thinking you need the perfect pitch, the right objection response, or some magic sequence of words that gets them to say yes.
But not everyone who gets on a call with you should become your client.
Some people aren’t ready. Some need another solution. Some need a smaller offer. Some may be a great fit, just not yet.
When you allow the conversation to reveal the answer instead of trying to control the answer, selling can feel a whole lot less awkward.
Your Next Action Step
Take 30 minutes and write down five questions you can ask before talking about your coaching offer.
Your questions should help you understand:
What the person has already tried
Why it hasn’t worked
What they really want to change
Why that change matters
Whether they are actually ready to stop doing what they’ve been doing
Keep those questions beside you during your next sales conversation.
Your goal is not to get better at pitching.
Your goal is to get better at discerning.
Want Help Taking the Next Step?
If you have one specific part of your coaching business that feels stuck, Laura’s CSI Call — Clarity, Strategy, Impact may be the right next step.
It’s a 90-minute session focused on one specific thing you need help working through, rather than putting you into a larger program you may not need.
You can also take the Endotype Formula Quiz to better understand how you naturally operate and build your business:
Listen Next
Why Coaches Lose Clients Before the Sales Call Even Starts
About Laura Hulleman
Laura Hulleman is the founder and creator of the Endotype Formula and host of Getting Coaches Paid. She helps coaches understand themselves, their clients, and the way they naturally build their businesses so they can create an income and impact they are proud of.
Episode Transcript
Hi, friend. On today’s episode of the podcast, we’re going to talk about sales. We’re going to talk about not only effective but easier ways to sell your clients your coaching.
So when you get them on that sales call — you can call it a discovery call, you can call it an investigation call, you can call it whatever you want — when you get them on that sales call, what’s your framework that helps you sell but makes you feel not slimy?
Isn’t that important?
I hear from a lot of people, “Oh, I’m not comfortable with sales. I don’t know how to do sales. Sales is difficult for me.”
And I understand that you might think you’ve never done sales before, but have you ever raised kids?
Raising kids is a lot like selling.
You’re selling them on your way of doing things. You’re selling them on your values. You’re selling them on, “Here’s how to be an adult.”
You can apply it in a lot of different places with other relationships, customer service, and different jobs.
So you have sold before, but I think what we need to do is break it down.
Let’s think about parenting as the example here.
When I’m trying to sell a little kid on my way of doing things, I’m usually starting because they’re doing it wrong to begin with, right?
I could come in and say, “That’s the wrong way to do it. Do it this way.”
And maybe they will.
I approached parenting a little bit differently.
I approached it with enrolling them in the process and enrolling them in the understanding of what we were both trying to accomplish. That was going to be a better way to get them to become compliant.
If they get what they want and I get what I want in a way that protects their safety, great.
So think about that.
Here’s how that might look.
You walk into a room. I’ve raised two boys, by the way.
You walk into a room and your four-year-old child is standing on the back of the couch, reaching for something on one of the top shelves of your living room.
Okay. Very dangerous.
Hate this for us.
Not at all appropriate, right?
My approach would be, “Oh, okay. Can you get down from there for a minute? Great. I just want to have a conversation.”
This is your sales call.
“What are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to do up there?”
“Well, I wanted to see the picture up on that shelf because it reminded me of that time that Dad took me to the park.”
Okay, great.
“Do you think that climbing on the back of the couch was safe?”
“No.”
“Could you reach that picture on the shelf?”
“No.”
“There are a lot of other things on the shelf. What would happen if they fell on you?”
“Oh, I’d get hurt.”
“Yeah. And if you fell off the back of the couch, you’d also get hurt. You could get hurt to the point that you could break a bone and we’d have to go to the hospital.”
“Yeah.”
“So how could we do that differently? If you want to see that picture book, what could we do differently?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you could ask me and I could get it down for you. But if you want to see that picture book on a regular basis, the other thing we could do is instead of keeping it on that top shelf, we could keep it down lower as long as you put it back in the same spot and you promise not to rip the pages out of the book.”
“Okay.”
Sold.
New way of doing things. I get what I want. They get what they want.
But it’s a two-step process.
I watched a video not too long ago that inspired this podcast. She works now as a coach, but previously she worked in enrollment for a special charter school, especially for kids who maybe were on the spectrum or had some additional challenges. They weren’t thriving in the schools they were at.
She was meeting with the parents, and she said, “I changed the sales call into two different decisions.”
One was the decision that they needed to leave the school they were currently at.
Two was deciding whether or not the school she represented was correct.
This really opened my brain because this is how I oftentimes do sales calls and have for a long time.
Are you ready for the change that you say you want?
That’s where we’re going to use a lot of questions.
Think about your clients right now.
What’s the change they say they want when they come to you?
What are the questions you ask to discern how great their pain is, how great the problem is, to define the problem, to really help them go deeper, deeper, deeper into:
Have you tried this already?
Have you tried that already?
Where are you at in this tipping point?
That’s what another one of my coach friends called it.
She said, “I like people that are right close to the tipping point.”
That’s the decision.
That old way doesn’t work anymore.
And she said in her sales process, she brings them a little closer to the tipping point.
That’s what we do in decision number one.
Are you ready to stop all of what’s not worked for you?
If you’re a weight loss coach, that might be:
What diets have you tried?
What workouts have you tried?
Why do you think those haven’t worked before?
Because obviously if you follow the diet and you follow the exercise routine, for most people, that’s going to create weight loss.
But yet you’re here talking with me.
Why didn’t it work?
What’s under that?
What have you realized already?
And we start pushing.
Why do you want these results?
What’s your goal?
No, not what’s the size goal.
What’s the deep inner motivation?
We get it closer and closer and closer.
We bring them forward in that emotional experience, and we get them to decide about everything they’ve tried before.
And maybe in the process, they don’t decide that they’re ready to leave.
I talk with a lot of people when I am doing a sales call who are not ready yet to stop trying to do marketing on their own.
See, a lot of you coaches, that’s who I work with, right?
A lot of you coaches, you’re doing marketing on your own and you’re trying this and you’re trying that.
“I have this program, and I got this course that I’m looking at, and I have this one more thing, and I’m going to give it one more try over here.”
And you’re just not ready.
You’re not to the tipping point yet of deciding that you’re done trying to do it on your own, trying to learn from other marketers.
Or maybe — and this happens, right? — we get into the conversation and I find out, “Oh, okay, so you’re not ready to actually work on the whole foundation of your marketing. You’re looking for a website designer.”
I don’t do that.
They’re ready to leave behind their old website. They’re ready to leave things behind, but they have a picture in their head of what they already want.
Bam.
Maybe they only need a little tweak.
They don’t need a full program with me.
There are just a couple little things.
And so I can ask them some questions. I can help them.
Maybe it’s one of my CSI calls — Clarity, Strategy, Impact — that are only $499.
We spend 90 minutes together. We work on that one thing.
They don’t need a full program with me.
Great.
So sometimes they’re not ready to leave.
Sometimes they need somebody else in their life, not me.
Sometimes they need not my full program but a small program.
Sometimes they’re ready to change it all.
They’re ready to go deep into who they are, into what they uniquely do, into who their clients are.
They understand how I work.
They’re ready to leave it behind.
That’s decision number one.
Are you ready to leave it behind?
That’s what you have to help your clients get to first.
Now, isn’t that what we do as coaches all day, every day?
This is why, for a long time, as I’ve been talking about — I’ve done other episodes on this about the discovery call — I say your discovery call, which is a name that I hate because it’s unclear marketing.
What are they going to discover? And do they want to actually discover something?
But on your discovery call, you should be acting as a coach first before you tell them anything about your coaching.
Give them a taste of it.
See where these two things are coming together?
This conversation that I’ve had with you before about giving them a taste of it and this connection to leaving and discerning what tipping point they’re at.
Are they ready to make the choice to leave behind the things that don’t work?
That’s where you’re in there as a coach giving them a taste of your coaching.
Now, if they’re ready to leave it and they’ve been responding well to your coaching, now maybe it’s time to move on to choice number two.
Is my coaching the right thing for you right now?
And that’s where, for me, the conversation sounds a little bit different.
I would say, “Okay. I see where you are. I think you see where you are. If we were to work together, is it okay if I tell you what it would look like for us to work together, what that would look like, and what we would work on?”
And the person says, “Yeah, okay.”
Because I don’t ask that question until I know that they’re ready to leave the thing behind and we have a little bit of chemistry going.
Yeah? Okay. Great.
Now I can tell them a bit about how my program would solve those problems they already just mentioned.
Maybe some problems they haven’t even thought of that are coming up that I can see — the next thing that’s going to come up and the next thing you’re going to run into.
Then I can sell them my program.
I can give them the information.
“What questions do you have for me about my program, about me as a coach, that maybe I can answer for you at this point?”
It’s two separate decisions.
Does that make sense, friend?
The first decision you help them make, that’s free.
Free coaching.
You’re helping them make the decision to stop doing the things that aren’t working, to leave those things behind, and to discern whether or not they’re really ready for that yet.
And in the process, discern whether your solution is going to work for them or whether you need to hand them off to somebody else who could serve them better.
If they’re ready, which you discerned through coaching, and there’s synergy, which you discerned through coaching, we just give them information about what our solution looks like.
And then ask them, “In addition to what I’ve already told you, what else do you need to know?”
They might ask for price.
They might ask, “How long is your coaching program? What does that look like? Can you send me some info?”
Absolutely.
I think if you take this and start applying it in your coaching, it’s really going to change the nature of your sales conversations.
It’s going to change the nature, and you suddenly don’t feel slimy because you’ve given them something amazing in step number one.
And then you ask them, “Can I tell you how my solution works?”
“Yeah.”
Fantastic.
They’re asking you to give them that information.
All right, friends. I hope this helps.
I hope this makes sales make sense.
Let me know: How does this feel different for you? Is this already what you’re doing? Is this different than what you’re doing?
And does it feel different when you think of it in terms of two separate decisions instead of one, “I’ve got to sell them my coaching”?
Talk to you soon.
