Dominate Your Coaching Sales

You Have My Attention (For Now)—Reach Out to New Leads in 90 Seconds

Speed wins. When someone fills out your form or downloads a resource, they’re thinking about you. But only for a moment. Don’t wait for them to forget they downloaded your free course or leave them hanging until the discovery call.

Instead: reach out while you’re on their mind. Immediately, if you can.

Ideally, within 90 seconds of submitting their info, leads should get a text or call from one of your setters to book a meeting. That time frame guarantees that coaching is still a priority for them before they move on to their next meeting or task.

“I would rather someone text or call me immediately and talk for five minutes to determine if there’s alignment and move on,” says coach Blake Harber. “The first to respond would likely increase their chance of winning my business by 5x. They can guide the entire frame of thought as I evaluate other solutions. He who controls the narrative controls the buying process.” 

Maintaining that speed can be challenging if your coaching business is growing quickly.

Close Customer Success Manager Forrest Dwyer describes the problem many coaches had before using Close to solve it: “The company is starting to scale faster than they were expecting. They don’t feel like they’re managing and keeping up with their leads well right now, so the speed to lead becomes their main focus because it’s what they start to feel they are losing.” 

Sound familiar? Here’s how you optimize your outreach for speed to contact.

How to Set Yourself Up to Reach Out Fast

To build up speed, get rid of what’s slowing you down. Take time to evaluate and benchmark how long it takes your setter to reach out and follow up: 

• When a new lead comes in, how quickly is it routed to a spot for sales? 
• Does your sales team have an automatically updated lead list, or do they need to refresh a lead list? 
• What about tool switching? Can your rep see the inquiry, see where it came from, make a call, and ask inquiries all in one spot? 

Once you’ve reached out, it’s time to quickly qualify (or disqualify) prospects. More on that in the next chapter.

Tighten Your Process—and Quickly Disqualify New Leads

A poor-fit client can be worse than no client at all. Some prospects won’t commit or grind you on pricing. You don’t need that energy—disqualify them, fast.  

“The second your rep clicks to call that lead, they should have the power to disqualify quickly, especially in coaching, whether it’s on that first call or through researching the lead,” Forrest explains.

It’s not easy to say “no” to potential business—but clear qualification criteria and a stringent approach to how and when you qualify someone for the next call will help you in two ways:

1. By asking critical, context-setting questions upfront, you’ll avoid wasting your team’s time on unqualified prospects.
2. You’ll ensure that your setters and closers are on the same page regarding qualification criteria. 

Disqualification lets you keep the wrong clients off your roster and move them to the right next step in a nurture sequence—while they may not be a great fit now, that doesn’t mean they’ll never be a client.

Here’s how you can qualify (and disqualify) fast.

Are We a Match? 6 Steps to Qualification

Lead qualification is like dating. You should know your red flags and deal-breakers ahead of time to save yourself and your clients from a miserable relationship. Explore most or all of these categories to weed out the wrong clients early.

Goals: What they expect to achieve

If a lead’s needs are misaligned with your offering, you’re the wrong coach for them. Make sure you’re on the same page about the results they anticipate.

To qualify, ask questions like:

• What’s the biggest blocker to growing your business right now?
• Can you describe what you’d like your business (or life) to look like in 12 months?
• What would happen if you didn’t achieve that goal?
• What could be different if you do achieve that goal?

Budget: How much they can afford

A potential client might “buy” what you’re saying—they’re qualified in every other sense—but can they buy what you’re selling? 

Start walking them through the numbers. Instead of leading with your pricing or asking what their budget is, bring it back to the cost of the problem.

To qualify, ask questions like:

• How much money are you currently losing with the problem you described before?
• What is the cost of inaction if you don’t fix this problem soon?
• How much money could you save if we fixed this problem now or improve your outcomes over the next 6-12 months?

Timing: Readiness to get started

Clients need to be ready for coaching in the right season of their life or business. For instance, a new Airbnb owner might research coaching on day 1 of their business but not be ready to work with a coach until day 50. This step isn’t about disqualifying them for good, necessarily, but about putting them in the right place for nurture.

“Build urgency by aligning with buyers on specific timelines, and don’t be afraid to have very direct conversations about those timelines,” advises Blake. “If buyers are afraid to loop in other colleagues for buy-in or establish clear next steps with other stakeholders, it's worth having a conversation attempting to disqualify prospects out of the pipeline.”

Ask questions like:

• When do you want to start solving your problem? 
• Is there anything coming up on the calendar that makes this a tough time to start coaching?

“Without a doubt, the best disqualifying step is to ask the question, ‘Why now? What’s prompting you to solve these problems right now?’”

— Leah Neaderthal, Coach, Smart Gets Paid

Vertical: Fit with your typical customer profile

Your most successful clients probably have a lot in common: similar goals and demographics like age, location, team size, or role. That’s your ICP (ideal customer profile). Not all clients need to look identical, but if a lead is a complete outlier, it can be a sign that they aren’t qualified.

Ask questions like:

• Individuals: What are your goals for our coaching relationship and in this area of your life? What motivates you, and what are your core values? (Internally, research demographic factors to see if they match defined ICP characteristics.)
• Businesses: What business outcomes do you hope or expect to achieve from coaching? How many people and which roles are on the team that you’re seeking coaching for?

Commitment: Willingness to do the work

Coaching requires a change in behavior from the buyer, so your ideal clients should be ready to invest time and energy. They’re willing to operate in a new way if they're qualified.

Ask questions like:

• How much time, energy, and attention are you willing to put into solving this problem?
• How much is making this change worth to you and your team?

Activity-based: Engagement and responsiveness

A motivated lead probably won’t disappear when you reach out to them throughout the sales process. They’ll stay engaged, even if they’re in a nurture sequence and especially when you send proposals and other documents for feedback. A lack of response can indicate they may need to be disqualified for now. 

Ask internal questions like:

• Is the lead taking action when asked? 
• Are they indicating interest through continued responses to direct outreach? 
• Are they still engaging with our content or free offerings?

What to Do When a Potential Client Isn’t Qualified

Goals. Budget. Timing. Vertical. Commitment. Engagement. When a lead is disqualified based on one or more of these categories, they’re probably the wrong fit for now. Ultimately, disqualifying an individual or business who’s the wrong fit for your services is a win—and maybe a bullet dodged.

Take a closer look to determine the next steps:

👉 Did you disqualify someone because they had misaligned goals or weren’t in your vertical? These factors aren’t likely to change anytime soon, so they might be the wrong fit for your services. 

👉 Were the disqualifiers changeable factors like timing or budget? Those things could change even a month from now as their circumstances or budget shifts. Don’t write off these leads for good. Instead, note why they’re disqualified for now and put them into a nurture sequence that keeps you on their radar until they are ready. 

Ready to learn more about how to nurture at scale? That’s where we’re heading next.

Nurture Leads with Automation and a Personal Touch

Keeping track of leads is like herding cats without clear processes and efficient tools. A strong lead nurturing strategy lets you stay on a prospect’s radar even if they aren’t ready yet.

Love it, hate it, or fear it, automation is one of your best tools for lead nurture at scale. It doesn’t replace the work of salespeople, either; human interaction is still crucial. Let’s unpack how to balance automation-driven efficiency with the power of personalization.

Lead Nurture: How to Make Sure Potential Clients Never Fall Through the Cracks

Lead nurture is a long game. To make sure you don’t lose anyone, you need to start with tools and workflows that let you see all your open opportunities in one place. From there, you can begin to automate.

Your top priority for nurture automation isn’t automated outreach—it’s automated lead routing and record sharing for better conversations. As coach Leah advises: 

“The best way to use automation in the sales process is to automate reminding the seller to follow up or to take action. Then, the seller can spend their most valuable time building the relationship.”

Once you simplify the process of designating lead stages and qualifications so that the team knows who to contact, you can create ongoing nurture campaigns. 

For example, in Close, you can use Smart Views to identify interested and qualified leads who never closed.

Make it easy for closers to indicate a no-show with a single tag or for setters to label a prospect with the relevant disqualifying factors. With a CRM to stay organized, you can tag leads, designate them for nurture workflows, and queue an automated drip campaign.

Nurture campaigns: Make it helpful and personal

As a coaching business, you likely already have the resources and in-depth, interesting content to nurture leads well.

Here are a couple of examples: 

• Create campaigns that point to potential clients’ pain points or desired end states and remind them why they’re interested in the first place. 
• Break down your methodology into a four-email campaign that teaches them something tangible or tells the story of a coaching client across multiple outreaches. Client success stories and relevant metrics are the most important and impactful content you can share.

Your automation needs to incorporate the human touch wherever possible, especially for leads later in the decision-making process. “The bar for thoughtful follow-up increases—which means your ability to lean into automation decreases—the further down the funnel you go and the higher value your contract is,” explains Nate Nasralla, sales expert and founder of Fluint.

Formulate thoughtful messages incorporating human creativity and share what you know about your audience to make them feel seen.

Automated Messages: Sound Like a Human, Not a Robot

The best nurturing campaigns automate without losing the human touch—but it’s not enough to fake rapport or credibility, says Blake.

“Many reps think that a simple callout of my title would elicit a response, but this doesn’t work anymore. I don’t care that someone reads my LinkedIn and regurgitates something they found on it.” 

Use these tips for meaningful personalization, even as you automate.

1. Automate outreach to the smallest viable segment

Automated outreach to five people doesn’t make sense—you might as well just write them all similar emails. But you shouldn’t automate the same mass email to 5,000 leads, either. There’s no way to make that feel personal.

Nate recommends creating mid-size groups using multiple signals (a specific job title that also changed roles in the last 90 days, for instance). When you layer filters, you might reach a segment of 50 people. That group’s too large to write to one-on-one, but small enough that you can personalize your automated outreach to them. 

Nate asks this question:

"What is the smallest viable segment that still meets your definition of scale and makes sense to scale with automation?"

2. Help leads experience your coaching through outreach

Anyone can send a “Just checking in” or “Still interested?” nurture email. But as a coach, your sales and nurture process should give potential clients a sneak preview of what it’s like to work with you. Send nurture campaigns that surface insights or specific pieces of research that pique their interest or make them feel understood. 

With the right filters, you can identify lead segments that would benefit from knowledge or consultative questions you can share. Each nurture message should make your leads think, “They get me.”

3. Segment based on disqualifiers

Lean on the qualification process to personalize and automate messages to your leads. When you track why a lead was disqualified (and went into a nurture workflow), you can build personalized journeys to match. 

If someone doesn’t have the right budget now, keep sharing free resources. If they hesitated about commitment, send results-focused messages or motivational content. Acknowledge where your prospects are coming from—and do it at scale by automating nurtures with a rules-based approach to maintain relevance to the blockers they’re facing.

Minimize No-Shows and Re-engage Effectively

How do you avoid getting ghosted by a promising prospect? Lower your risk of no-shows with the right prep beforehand and be adept to bounce back quickly when they happen.

Get More People to Show Up by Automating Your Pre-Meeting Flow

The status quo is a single automated reminder email that the booked meeting with a closer is coming up. With the help of workflows, you can set up a more robust combination of outreaches to prevent no-shows. 

But don’t stop short with the status quo. Instead, make sure your messaging lands. For coaching sales calls, you want something with a bit more intention. 

Nate suggests preventing no-shows by inviting multiple contacts (especially for business clients) into the sales process early on. “If those other contacts start to see and get messaging around how you do things differently and how you guide teams to make change, that’s going to set you up well,” he explains. 

Jonathan Hinshaw, Sales Director at UGURUS, emphasizes that the why is more important than the what. “A lot of companies struggle because they set the appointment without building the fear of missing out,” he shares. Want to encourage leads to actually show up? “Help leads understand what they’re going to get, what the appointment is about, and why they’re doing it.” Create FOMO, in other words, by clearly saying, “You’re going to get clarity on this challenge we know you’ve been running into.” 

With your messaging proven out, then you can optimize your tools. 

Automate SMS and email messages before the meeting that ask the lead to confirm they’ll be there. If neither message is answered, the workflow prompts a setter to call beforehand. Instead of a single, easily missed email, leads receive multiple contact points to increase the chances they show up.

How to Handle No-Shows

Despite your best prevention efforts, no-shows will happen, and usually for two reasons:

1. The lead is still interested and will want to schedule a later meeting. 
2. The lead changed their mind about meeting.

How do you bounce back? 

Again, start with speed: have your closer follow up immediately. Maybe it was an accidental no-show, and they can get the lead rescheduled ASAP. 

Typically, we recommend five to 10 follow-ups by phone, text, and email. To be clear, this greatly varies by team, industry, and the specific prospect. 

If the lead still doesn’t respond, move them back to the setter team to try and get in touch. 

There isn’t a hard and fast rule for the number of follow-ups because every team is different. We recognize this looks different for everyone—some coaching teams have an ethos to never give up, for instance. However, if you hit the 20-30 call mark, your time is better spent moving on.

If the lead still doesn’t respond after that, they’re likely not interested, or the timing isn’t right.

You need to decide when to give up on a no-show. After a certain number of additional contact attempts or periods in the nurture workflow, it’s time to move that lead to a “Lost” status or move them into a drip nurture sequence. (You can automate this in your workflow, too.)

When “more follow-up” is the wrong answer

No-show follow-ups are a no-brainer. But don't keep muscling through if you’re noticing high numbers of canceled meetings. Take a closer look at your process:

• Revisit qualifications to make sure your setters are asking the right questions about timing or commitment.
• Examine your nurture sequence to make sure you’re sharing the right message. Are you helping prospects and showing them what it would be like to work with you?

“Most people over-index and over-optimize their sales activities,” Nate explains. “Instead, think about each stage as a specific buying behavior that they can test to see if the deal is actually moving forward.” 

Look for signals and responses at each stage of the process—confirming a booked meeting and responding positively to a nurture campaign are some of those signals. If you don’t see those (and you do see no-shows), revisit your message to make sure it helps your coaching business shine.