How to Find Life Coaching Clients in 2023 – What Worked for Us

Before we begin, you should know we’re not going to discuss the basic strategies that every other article writes about.

No social media posts, no networking, no waiting on referrals, none of that. Though those work, it’s not what moves the needle and you need clients to grow. We all do. 

If you follow step-by-step, you will be able to start conversations with qualified prospects, generate connections, and close some new clients. 

I understand you may not be the most technical person out there, but if you follow this step-by-step, you will have a full grasp on how to do this. 

Craft Your Life Coach Offering

You’ve heard this a billion times, I know, but this is really important to have clear for when you’re writing your messages to these potential clients. Think of a reason why someone needs your service, why they would reply, the problem you’re solving for them and how they benefit from that problem being solved.

A book I highly recommend is $100M offers by Alex Hormozi. The whole book is about how to craft an offering and position your messaging to make someone feel so stupid for saying no to what you have to offer.

Here are a few examples of offerings: 

• Helping executives free up time in their personal lives thus resulting in a more work-life balance. 
• Helping C-Suite executives become better communicators thus resulting in a more engaged and productive team. 
• Helping executives manage stress, develop healthy coping strategies, and create a more balanced lifestyle. 

These are just a few examples of what a life coach can help prospective clients with. But you have to have this nailed down, otherwise your pitch, your messaging, the reason why you’re reaching out to them will not be clear. 

The Cold Email Strategy

What we’re going to do to find clients is cold email your ideal customer persona at scale. I’m sure you already have a sense of what that is, but if you don't, below is a sample list of titles we want to go after. 

• Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
• Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO)
• Chief Operations Officer (COO)
• Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
• Vice President of Talent Development
• Human Resources Business Partner
• Learning and Development Manager
• Organizational Development Manager
• Employee Engagement Manager
• Talent Acquisition Manager/Recruiter

Why cold email? It’s because it’s the most cost effective strategy to connect directly with decision makers outside of having a network to look to for referrals. 

A very well written email can grab the decision maker immediately and book a meeting on your calendar all within 5 minutes. 

Paid ads - you’re spending thousands and testing so many different ad creatives and most of the time you still end up reaching out to them. 

SEO - takes forever, at least 8 months. 

Networking - 90% chance your ideal client isn’t spending time at networking events. 

Cold email is the best chance you have at acquiring clients for your life coaching business. 

The Tools You Will Need

Here is the list of tools you will need to execute on this strategy. These are battle tested tools that I personally recommend and that will get the job done. 

• Instantly
• Apollo.io
• Google Domains

These are the tools you need to go from having no cold email experience to getting your first client via this method. 

1) Purchasing Google Domains

This will seem foreign to you, but let's step back a little bit. The goal is to send hundreds of emails a month to potential clients. At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game. The more people you connect with, the higher the chance you have of closing clients. 

Why purchase google domains?

Imagine that thousands of emails are being sent from your personal email address. What do you think would happen? A large percentage of those emails would land in spam folders. This is simply because Email Service Providers (ESPs) would detect that an influx of identical emails is being sent from one account, and they would consequently flag it as spam. This can essentially 'burn' your email address, meaning that any future emails sent from this address will likely be directed to spam folders.

Now to avoid that, we’ll be using tools like Instantly to rotate the email addresses, but for now we need to purchase a few domains. 

Take your normal domain. Let’s say your normal domain is “jonathancoaching.com”. We’ll want to purchase a few domains 

• Jonathandoescoaching.net
• Jonathanlovescoaching.org
• Coachingwithjonathan.com

The goal is to purchase domains similar to your regular domain. You don’t want to purchase something that is completely different. And try to only go for .com, .net, or .org domains. These domains, or top level domains, will give you the highest chance of email deliverability. 

Once you purchase the domains, you’re going to want to set up DMARC, MX and SPF records. Follow these guides I linked to for the exact steps. These records are needed, they’re basically the license and Passport for your new domains that you just purchased. It tells the person on the other end that you’re an actual human sending emails. 

2) Setup Instantly to send the emails

Remember how I mentioned we have to “rotate” email addresses? Well that’s what we’re going to do with this software. Instantly.ai is where we’re going to “warm up” our domains, write our sequences, and generate replies from prospects. If you want to learn more about how Instantly works, we've put together a complete review here.

Once you sign up for the platform, you’re going to click “Add New” in the top right corner and go through the motion of adding all of your new email domains. 

Now you’re going to start warming up your emails. You can refer to this guide here on how to do so. 

3) Finding their Contact Information

Now it’s time to find a list of contacts to reach out to. 

You’re going to create an account on Apollo.io if you don’t already have one. This is where we can find the email address of basically everyone on the globe. 

I’m assuming you’re going for job titles within organizations of at least 50 people. Remember the job titles I mentioned? 

• Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
• Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO)
• Chief Operations Officer (COO)
• Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
• Vice President of Talent Development
• Human Resources Business Partner
• Learning and Development Manager
• Organizational Development Manager
• Employee Engagement Manager
• Talent Acquisition Manager/Recruiter

Let’s look for these in Apollo. 

Now, let's make sure we’re targeting the United States, or if you have another country, then target that one. 

Now, we have our list of potential contacts that we will be emailing. In this guide, you can see how to upload your lead lists and launch your first campaign on Instantly. 

That's It

By using this strategy, this will allow you to connect directly with new prospects and allow you to grow your clientele as a coach. 

By crafting a compelling offer, the power of cold emails, and utilizing tools like Instantly, Apollo.io, and Google Domains, you can reach your ideal customer persona efficiently and cost-effectively. 

This 100%  might seem technical at first, but following this guide step-by-step will allow you to go from having no understanding to maybe 50%. That’s all you need to have in order to launch your first campaign! 

Be sure to let us know your results in the comments section below!