I think there’s a key difference between selling products and selling your services as a coach, trainer or consultant and that is you have to build a strong, direct personal relationship with someone and win their trust before they will work with you as a coach. How do you do this? Well one way is by using referral partnerships.
Now what I’m NOT talking about here is joint ventures. To be clear a joint venture will usually mean jointly promoting an event, or cross promoting a specific product or programe. A referral partnership is when you develop a relationship with someone who refers you business (suprisingly!), and very often referral partnerships are reciprocal but not necessarily, in fact often referral partnerships will be about directing business from one party to another.
So what’s the first step to finding a referral partner for your business? Well firstly you need to know what kind of business you’re in; who you’re target market are, and who your clients really are. Forget trying to market to anyone who’ll listen, really stop and work out the answers to these questions clearly. Once you know the answers to these questions, then you can start to look at who might be in a position to be encountering your ideal clients all the time.
Let me give you an example: if you’re a life coach and you’re working with women who have recently had children for example, you might find that gym instructors, dieticians or day-care center workers, are going to be coming into contact with the same clients that you might want to be working with.
Take a look around you: who could you choose to be a referral partner for you?
