You’ve done it. You booked your first financial coaching client! You’re jumping for joy! You’re excited! You texted your bestie right away because EEEEK this was too exciting to keep to yourself.
And it is. We’re over here celebrating with you.
Once that excitement fades though, you may be left with another, altogether less pleasant feeling: Dread.
Getting a client to book with you – whether they are paying or not – is part of the battle. But it’s only part.
Now comes the hard part. Now you have to actually provide a service. You have to show you’re worth someone else’s time and/or money. And that feeling – the one associated with proving your worth – is usually hovering somewhere between dread and fear with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome thrown in for good measure.
But your first client session doesn’t have to be this nerve-wracking. What if I told you the key to delivering a good financial coaching session lies in asking the client one very simple question. Just one. It’s this:
“What do you hope to gain from this session?”
When you send a client prep work for a financial coaching session, the best question you can ask is what they want to get out of the session. By asking, you know their expectations and their intentions. You know whether their goals are realistic heading into the session or if you’ll need to coach them through something that may take a lot more work (ahem, hello long-term coaching sales conversation). You know what they want, and once you know what they want, you can deliver on it.
That’s the key. You ask, and then deliver.
You do the thing that they want most during your session. And by doing that one thing, your service – whether you’ve been coaching for five days or five years – is useful. You have given your client something they wanted. You heard them, and you responded to their needs.
We often underestimate the power of that. We get caught up in trying to impress our clients and show our whole repertoire of knowledge and skills when, if we stopped to consider it, that might be overkill.
To really truly deliver good service and be a good coach – or any type of business owner for that matter – we need to ask our clients what they need and then make sure to deliver on that one thing. Everything else is secondary.
