How to Build a Coaching Business That Sells Itself
How to Build a Coaching Business That Sells Itself
If you have ever wished that your coaching business could just run smoothly without you constantly selling, posting, chasing, or persuading, you are not alone. One of the most common desires I hear from coaches is simple. They want a business that feels aligned, sustainable, and client attracting without requiring them to operate like a full-time marketer. They want a business that practically sells itself.
And here is the truth. That is not only possible. It is predictable when you build the right foundations.
You did not become a coach to spend your days pitching people or drowning in a million marketing tactics. You became a coach because you love transformation. You love helping people. You love watching someone rise into the next version of themselves. But if you want your coaching to be your career and not just a hobby, you need a business structure that makes your work visible, valued, and compelling.
In this article, I am going to break down the three essential moves that help your coaching business become something people lean into, not something you have to push. These are the same moves I used to grow my business and the same ones I teach my clients every day. When you build these pieces intentionally, you create clarity, confidence, and an engine that brings the right people to your door.
Let us get into it.
Move One: Define a Value Proposition That Makes You the Only Choice
So many coaches believe that selling is hard because they are not the best yet. They think if they get one more certification or learn one more modality, people will magically want to work with them. But that is not how this works.
Clients do not choose you because you are the best coach. They choose you because you are the only coach who feels right for them. They choose you because they understand exactly who you are, who you help, and why you matter.
This is what a real value proposition does. It communicates your difference so clearly that people understand you in seconds. It gives them the clarity they need to make an empowered decision about working with you.
Your value proposition is not about being impressive. It is about being understood.
And here is the big truth. You cannot stand out if you are trying to be everything to everyone. When you try to speak to everyone, your message becomes watered down and vague. But when you decide exactly who you serve and exactly what they struggle with, you transform your business into a market of one. You become a category king. You become the obvious choice.
Start by defining:
Who is your niche, as real humans, not vague ideas
What they want most
What they struggle with most
What makes your approach different
When people understand who you are to them, everything changes.
Move Two: Build a Magnetic Online Presence That Works While You Rest
Your online presence is not about going viral or posting constantly. It is about creating a digital ecosystem that works for you whether you are online or offline. It is your 24 hour salesperson. It is your credibility builder. It is your trust amplifier.
And the truth is most coaches are doing far too much. They are trying every tactic they see online, patching together ideas from a hundred different mentors, and burning themselves out in the process. I get it. I was that coach too.
But once you understand your niche and your value proposition, your content becomes simple. It becomes focused. It becomes strategic. And with the support of AI tools, you can streamline your content creation in ways that were not possible five years ago.
The key to building a magnetic online presence is consistency, not perfection. It is about showing up in a way that reflects your values, your thinking, your frameworks, and your personality. It is about helping people understand how you approach transformation and how you solve the challenges they care about.
Your content does not need to be fancy. It needs to be real. It needs to be clear. And it needs to be connected to the person reading it.
If you want to build a presence that sells for you, focus on:
Sharing your process
Sharing your principles
Sharing your priorities
Sharing your perspective
When people see your mind at work, they see the value of working with you.
Move Three: Create a Seamless Client Journey That Makes Sales Natural
One of the biggest breakthroughs in my business came when I realized that selling is not an event. It is a journey. And when you create a clear journey, people know exactly what to do next.
A seamless client journey has multiple stages:
How people discover you
How they learn about your work
How they decide whether you are the right fit
How they start working with you
How you support them
How they continue or refer others
When your client journey is smooth, supportive, and well designed, you do not have to pressure anyone into saying yes. People simply move forward because the next step makes sense. They extend because the relationship is working. They refer because the experience is consistent and meaningful.
This is how you create a coaching business that sells itself. Not by pushing harder, but by architecting an experience that guides people with clarity and confidence.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
You did not become a coach to spend your life hustling. You became a coach to help people. And when you build the right structures, you get to do exactly that.
Define your value proposition so people understand why you are the only choice.
Build an online presence that works for you around the clock.
Design a client journey that guides people naturally into deeper work with you.
When these three pieces are in place, your business stops feeling heavy and starts feeling aligned. You stop chasing and start attracting. And your coaching becomes what it was always meant to be. Powerful. Purposeful. And profitable.
Now is the time to work a little smarter so you no longer have to work quite so hard.
Chapter List:.
00:00 Why Coaching Feels Harder Than It Should
01:10 The Truth About Selling Without Feeling Salesy
02:45 Three Moves That Make Clients Come to You
04:22 How a Clear Value Proposition Changes Everything
06:49 The Power of Choosing a Real Niche
09:14 Standing Out as the Only Coach for Your Market
12:03 How to Craft a Message That Actually Works
14:20 Using AI and Content to Stay Consistent
17:40 Building a Magnetic Online Presence
21:30 Why Your Website and SEO Still Matter
24:04 Designing a Seamless Client Journey
27:10 The Secret Behind Retention and Referrals
29:55 How Coaches Work Smarter Instead of Harder
Full Transcript:
Amanda Kaufman (00:00)
Coaching would be so much easier if you didn't have to worry about the part where, you know, you could get clients. My name is Amanda Kaufman and today we are going to be going through how can you set up your business so that your coaching basically sells itself. If we haven't met before, I'm the founder of the Coaches Plaza and I help coaches to build a business that they love just as much as they love their coaching. And one of the things that I hear the most is,
Amanda, I don't want to have to sell. I don't want to have to post like a maniac to social media. I'm busy. I just want to coach people. And I get it. That's how I started my business too. I just wanted to coach people because after all, that was like the whole point of starting a coaching business. But I did have to learn how to sell and how to promote. And on the way, I learned a lot of things that actually were a heap of work and didn't work at all.
Now this is where coaches get super confused because, and I was the same way, because there's just so many options. Like you can learn how to do Instagram ads, you can learn how to sell through YouTube, you can learn how to do funnels, you can learn how to do webinars, challenges, video sales letters, long form sales letters, low ticket to high ticket. Honestly, the options are endless. So what do you do if the options are endless? You see, the big thing, the first thing that you really must take care of,
is just moving past this idea that there's one perfect way. So what I'm gonna do in this video is I'm gonna really break down three big things that you could do that you could get it down to the level of your calendar where you're taking care of a particular project, getting that done, dusted. I always tell my clients one until done, one project until it's done, and that project is going to set you up to have people just ask you for coaching.
Like what happened for me this past week, just a random Tuesday in Q4, I get like $17,000 worth of business with them knocking on the door asking for it. I didn't have to beg for it. I didn't have to pitch anything. I didn't have to have urgency and scarcity and crazy guarantees. But that only happens when you have these three things set up. So the three big moves that change everything are
as follows. And you've maybe heard this before, but it's worth repeating. You know, I always say the fun is in the fundamentals. And so fundamentally, if you're defining your unique value proposition, that goes a very long way because then people understand who you are, that you're for them or not for them, what you do for them. Like it's unique and you stand out from the sea of sameness that is small business ownership.
The second thing we are going to do is we're going to build a magnetic online presence. So it creates this digital presence that 24 seven, like whether you're working or not, it's working for you. Like this very video is an example of curating my social presence online. It's going to do a heck of a lot more work than I'm going to do apart from actually, you know, the filming and the editing and the uploading. And, you know, when you build a really good system around this stuff,
Your online presence doesn't have to be icky or hard. Most coaches are honestly doing far too much themselves, especially in a day and age of AI and artificial intelligence. It can help you so, so much with having a very consistent presence that supports your goals as a coach. And the final thing and the reason why sales can happen without you feeling like you're always selling,
is this thing called the client journey. So when we create a seamless client journey, it's really smooth. People just escalate from one thing to the next thing to the next thing. You can have retention offers, which is like where somebody is gonna work with you over the long term. And it's awesome. So you just basically stack your successes one at a time that you don't have to go beg for business. Honestly, the hardest time is getting your first five clients.
Once you've got those first five clients in the door, it's a lot easier from there. So let's talk a little more about this first move where you're defining your unique value proposition. So here's the truth that most coaches won't tell you or they'll tell you and then there's gonna be a lot of confusing people out there that are telling you something opposite. And look, I have the experience of having done a lot of different experiments in my business over the last nine years and I definitely tried going,
you know, anti-avatar, you know, without having to focus on a particular niche. And that was so hard because when I was communicating to other people about who I was and what I did and how it was different from other people, it was just word soup. There was just no streamlined experience around it. So people didn't really understand what it was that I actually did. And so if you're marketing to everyone, you end up really truly selling
to know one. When people understand exactly who you are to them, then they are empowered to make really great decisions about interacting with you further and hiring you and doing all of that good stuff. You know, it's not about being the best coach. I used to really stress about this, you know, it's about being the only coach for a specific group of people that have particular challenges and you solve it in your particular way. So the idea is that you're a market
of one, like you're a category king, you're taking care of that particular segment of the market and no one can do it better than you. All right, so three elements of an irresistible value proposition. The first thing is to identify your niche. Now, I will say this until I am blue in the face. Your niche is not your coaching modality. It's not your specialty. Your niche isn't necessarily even the transformation that you offer.
It's not actually about you. A niche is a group of people out there that have something in common. So they probably all do want the same change, but they probably are similar in their demographics, like their age, possibly their gender, possibly like whether they live in a city or whether they're more rural, whether they're married with kids, whether they're single, like all of those kinds of things.
as well as how they think. like, what is it that they value? What do they prioritize? What do they get frustrated by? What are their ambitions? What to them means a life well lived? What to them means like, not a life well lived? And when you have those, that clarity, which is again, not about you, it's about finding them. That's how you can build a business using something called niche marketing. Okay.
So once you understand who you are serving, what they are like specifically, not with a bunch of vague language, but really specifically, then you can do something called clarifying your USP, your unique selling position. So what makes you truly different? You can look at competitors, and I love this little prompt, unlike blank, unlike so-and-so, unlike the others who do this thing.
I do that thing instead. So, you know, for me, there's a lot of people who coach coaches and I would say following that similar formula, unlike other coaches that keep you stuck worrying that there's something wrong with you reliving past childhood traumas and rooting around for some sort of a explanation for why you are where you are. I'm a business coach that helps you marry forward thinking mindset with
Math so that it's really clear in black and white What are you doing in your business and is it working? Is it not working and keeping you in an emotionally happy place without having to dredge up the past so I I do that very differently than a lot of business coaches do I I think that it's really important you take a look around at the competitors that are all around you and Really just embrace your weird
You know something my husband Chris and I always say, he works with me in the business too, we always say let your weird light shine and let your other fellow weirdos find you. If you don't give anybody anything to work with for what's the weird thing that y'all have in common, then that's why you end up kind of lonely on these internet streets. Okay, the last thing is to craft your compelling message.
My word, how many people have I talked to just this week that are telling me, it's going great, Amanda. I'm just working on my message. And I'm like, no, you don't work on your message quietly behind the scenes and wait for this grand artistic reveal. You launch that puppy. You launch your message and you get it out there. So I really encourage people to get posting on social media, start doing videos, start just like.
speaking into the camera and seeing where it takes you and as you get better and better you can get more more formal about it. And look, we're living in an age of AI so I think like people can feel pretty insecure about whether they are using AI as cheating. It's not cheating. It's not cheating. Use it as a thought partner to come up with ideas, use it to help research what are some of the topics that work the very best in your niche.
Use it to draft out your script. Use it to draft out your outline. I speak extemporaneously at this point and I think that that is way more efficient, but I'm always studying. always like coming up with new frameworks and reading different books and listening to other experts. And, you know, I'm constantly growing in that regard. Excuse me. I'm like, you know, this is a little bit more of a live than it is a pre-recorded super curated thing. But all of that to say.
What matters is your presence. And your message is not going to be figured out in a box. It's going to be figured out in front of people. OK, so the next thing is to build that magnetic online presence. know, people will watch you from a distance for a long time before they actually engage with you.
Some people will choose not to engage with you because they saw your online presence and they were like, you know, I don't think we're going to be a good fit. So yes, you're getting judged, but you're also getting judged as like, ooh, I like this person. I think this person is cool. I love what this person has to say. No matter what you do, you're being judged. So use it as a powerful tool. You want to have...
your digital presence being like this 24-7 salesperson who's advocating for your brand and advocating for how you help people. of course, also I think one thing I really love about it is it allows you to help people who maybe can't afford your services. So rather than depressing your price, you can keep your price exactly where it is and you can be...
very generous in the online world with instructions and how to's and educational content that'll help them move the needle forward. And one day they may be ready to work with you. But in the meantime, people who really want the added touch of working with a coach, they're going to use your content as an evaluation to say, to say like, hmm, is this somebody who thinks the way that I would hope that my coach thinks? Is this, is this somebody who's going to have something to add to the conversation or is this somebody who is going to waste my time?
And so I think that that's another big thing. The last thing that I would say on this big move is that you wanna definitely in this day and age have a website and pro it up. No ugly websites, right? It doesn't have to be this crazy expensive thing because honestly the templates and the starting points that you get nowadays are so damn good. It's really about the care that you take to do the thing. Social media.
And social content is super huge, but the other thing is also the visibility through search engine optimization, now some people are calling it like artificial intelligence engine optimization. Really you're looking for terms and words and phrases and questions that people already are asking in your market and building content that answers exactly those questions. Okay, so.
Make sure that you are optimizing that website. Make sure you are leveraging your social media strategically and make sure that you understand at least the fundamentals of SEO. You don't have to go and hire a crazy expert. You don't have to build a crazy big blog from the early 2000s. You just need to understand that people are searching for what it is that you offer. And so then when you meet people in person or organically or through your network and they go and look you up, there's a congruence. That's really what you're after.
Big move number three, and this is how I have my big sales days without running a sale, is I have a seamless client journey. People can extend with me, people can renew with me, people can buy packages in advance and get an incentive when they do that, and they know that. And they know that because I designed the experience and I tell people, like, this is what it looks like to keep working with me, this is what happens when you stop working with me, what you get to keep, what you don't.
All of that has been prepackaged and designed. So, couple of things to help make sure that you're getting a lot of referrals and a lot of retention. Number one, great onboarding. Set expectations with your clients and then exceed them. Adopt a very client-centric approach. The biggest adjustment that a new coach has to make is that it really isn't about you. It's not about you being special or fancy or perfect. It's about your...
getting to their goals much faster because you helped. And then finally, use automation to help drive that engagement. especially nowadays with AI, there's really no good excuse for letting your leads fall through the cracks and letting your clients fall through the floor. So this month, make sure you are nailing your value proposition.
audit your online presence and start just making one big move every week. One new move of how you're going to show up even stronger, stronger, stronger, and let those strengths stack. And then make sure that you're also taking a look at your client journey. The main thing is that like none of us became a coach because we wanted to spend all our time selling and marketing. And I've really found that when you work a little smarter, you don't have to work quite so hard.
Thanks for joining me. Be sure to grab the goodies in the show notes and we will see you in another episode.
