Is paying for coaching worth it?

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There are several business coaches in the space I work in, aiming at businesses like mine. They obviously say things like “you can’t afford coaching, but can you afford NOT to get coaching?”

I can’t afford it, but I’m not a natural salesperson, I get embarrassed about asking for money, I’m inconsistent on social media. Would it be worth it for me? I have a small (100-150) mailing list and some really loyal regular clients, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to get more clients and move into a slightly different space which I’m trained for and is more lucrative, but costs more so potentially a harder sell.

I think you need to do a LOT of due diligence. Speaking from the experience of having seen a couple of friends get sucked in, a lot of coaches are ex-MLM sellers whose pyramid schemes stopped working for them. And a lot of coaches run their coaching to completely rinse you. Mastermind sessions for £££, the course they recommend you to take for £££, the monthly membership to their group for £££, the actual coaching for £££... a lot of them are total scammers. Then these bad ones recommend their "friends" (who they get a commission from) for other services/coaching to rinse you even more.

There are definitely good coaches out there, but you really need to do a lot of research to check who's who.

No. Most of them are useless.

I’ve just gone on U-turn and typed in “how to become a better sales person” and up has popped hundreds of videos. All of which are available to you for free. I would start by watching some of these.

I also went on google and typed the same thing and found loads of articles about how to be better at sales.

Quite a lot of these are probably rubbish. But at least they are free rubbish. And it will soon become clear to you which are and are not useful.

I am a former business coach and I would say that coaching can make a massive difference to a business but you have to be prepared to take the advice.

Do your research though, you may be better off joining a mastermind group, you may prefer to do a coaching programme that a lot of people do at the same time rather than one to one or you may find a really good one to one coach that suits your needs.

I think if you find the right coach or you find your people it can be a massive help to your business, helping you to learn and to keep you accountable.

Good luck.

Your local authority may have business advisors

I don't know if you need a coach, but I'd give a shout at being more sales-y.

The type of stuff I think to get into the right mindset (I have just started a new position in b2b sales, I am cold calling prospects next week):

Sales come with a fixed % of rejection, nothing personal at all, happens to any salesperson on earth, not all people want to buy all things at all time, that's just how it is.

Every time you get out of your comfort zone, your comfort zone grows.

You gotta do what you gotta do, it would be a pity to fail because of unfounded fear and emotions.

And I say unfounded, because the sky won't open to scream at you "How dare you get more sales-y, you know that's not you, you fake failure", the world won't care or notice much about you so to speak, they will care about the product, the price, and if you want to buy it or not. The seller itself as a person does not matter, only their sales skills, and that is very learnable.

Hope it helps.