Breaking into Corporate B2B Coaching: A Conversation with Colleen-Joy Page
Securing corporate clients can be a challenging but rewarding process. In this first part of our two-part series, we explore key insights from Colleen-Joy and Murielle on building successful corporate relationships.
Murielle: "Hi everyone, and welcome to this month's Q&A, all about how to break into corporate B2B as a coach. I’m extremely happy to have the incredible and delightful Colleen-Joy Page with us today.
Colleen is, besides being one of the best coaching trainers that I know, one of my dearest mentors and friends and also an advisory board member of Nuumani, someone with extensive experience as a coach, a business professional with more than 30 years of helping others to change and become their best selves. Colleen has worked in 60-plus countries. She has given numerous talks. She has given workshops and trained everybody from C-suite professionals to entrepreneurs to everything in between. She's also an incredible creative. She paints. That's one of the things I know about Colleen. She writes books, and she does that very well. She is excellent at discovering new thoughts and coaching tools and articulating them so others can understand them. One of them that I love the most is the apple tree.
She also has one of the best coaching schools around, and I probably do a disservice to it by calling it a coaching school. I apologize, Colleen, but it's the school where, after I had been working for a few years as a coach, and I really felt like I knew how I was doing what I was doing, and I was sort of getting bored a little bit, and I wanted new tools, and I wanted to be challenged and, you know, to be, like, pushed outside of my comfort zone. That's how I met Colleen because I enrolled in her master coach training, and it absolutely delivered. It was the best training I ever had, and I had many, and I still learn from it today because it was so potent and valuable that every day I coach, there's still something I can get out of that. But anyway, that is so much about Colleen already, so if you want to know more, we can add more to the membership site. Colleen, thank you so much for being here."
Colleen: "It's a pleasure. And yes, if it's not so obvious, we have a mutual admiration going on with
Murielle. You've been far too kind. Thank you, it's lovely to be here."
The B2B Landscape - Murielle:
"What does that look like today? Where are the opportunities? What are the challenges? And maybe also, what are the myths? And I think the biggest one for me, at least, is this idea that as an individual coach, it is really hard to get into corporate B2B contracts."
Colleen: "I understand the resistance, fear, concern, reluctance, and allure of B2B work. When a coach has had some kind of corporate experience, it's much easier because they know the language and understand what corporate culture even feels like. But for coaches who have never really worked in a corporate environment, they especially feel barred and excluded and barricaded from the work. And that's certainly not true... More than ever, because of the demand for coaches, what people are seeing is that there is an increase and growth in not only the coaching industry but also at work and even the internal coaching inside of organizations... One of them, just to give you a little heads up, is actually when coaching is pitched and used for performance management, it can actually backfire... But luckily, these days, people are also recognizing coaching as a reward for talent... Where coaches step in and make a big difference in the leadership development space, personal development space, and literally as a reward for C-suite and senior managers... So what corporations see is that when they assign coaches to their leaders... Those leaders do perform better... Their work-life balance improves, and their leadership improves. And it's like a bonus. It's like a 'You're doing so well, you've been promoted, and you get a coach.'"
Red Flags - Murielle:
"In my first conversation with the CEO of a company looking for team coaching, the CEO said, 'Look, I want them to get better, but I do not want them to leave. So I do not want you to coach them to leave,' which, of course, was absolutely impossible to promise... So that was something I had to explain to the CEO... And so they are coming from a place that is, if you consider a business an entity, like a very egocentric place, right? The second thing in hiring a coach is not to hire out of your responsibility towards the people who work for you or the work you must do as a manager or a leader. It's more of a systemic, organizational problem. And again, the coach cannot be made responsible for that."
Colleen: "Are you serving the corporation? Are you serving the individual in front of you, or both? And can you do both? And what does that look like?... The buy-in has to speak to the benefit of the leader in front of you and the corporation at large. And it has to speak the language of their objectives. You've got to make space in those conversations so that it's very clear that you're going to look after the person you coach, the team, or the individual... I always tell the decision maker in front of me that because I'm coaching at a senior level, the client is not going to get a cookie cut, forced off-the-shelf, or product from me. I will treat them as a senior, as a partner in the journey, and I will accommodate their needs as they arise... In terms of reporting expectations, the way I've solved that for myself is that we produce a lot of coaching worksheets for our coaches… You bring out the worksheet and then tell the person you're coaching... 'I'm going to be taking some notes, but you get to sign off on them before I hand them over as a record of our session.'... There's actual proof that something was done."
Crafting a B2B Coaching Proposal and Measuring Success - Murielle:
"This made me think of what needs to be included when you put together a B2B coaching proposal... like having an outline of your process, a timeline, deliverables... and some measurable elements, even if they're not as tangible as an Excel sheet… Okay, so you're putting together this proposal. You have an interested organization, but how can you measure if you're only going to be there for a short period of time, and then maybe the question becomes, well, maybe you have to sell a longer-term contract because you cannot fulfill the promise of achieving certain results in a very short time frame. I'd love to know what you think about that, Colleen."
Colleen: "Okay, so there's two good things here... One of the big questions in the room will be, how do you sell this in the first place? And then, of course, how do you upsell into a longer term? So I'm going to throw something into the space that, of all the conversations I've had with coaches over the years, this one is weirdly surprising unless I'm talking to a very, very successful coach, amazingly. But when coaches are new to the game, if they're new to, let's say, the B2B space, or new to any space, there is this tendency to think that what I've got to do is sit at home, create, and design a program and then go somehow knock on doors and cold sell, cold call, and pitch and pitch and pitch until somebody buys... And that is a nightmare, a soul-sapping, and a horrible way to do this. I personally have seen, and I'm going to give an example, because case studies and examples, I think, bring things to life. So I've seen, time and time again, the opposite works really well. And what does the opposite look like? So obviously, you've got to create opportunities to have conversations with potential clients first. And I always say, start small, start with the people you know, and put yourself in rooms where these potential conversations can happen. And putting yourself in rooms means being available to have an ordinary human conversation.
This wraps up the first part of our two-part series on securing corporate clients. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll dive deeper into advanced strategies!
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