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Beginners’ Guide: Getting Clients for Your Training Business

Are you a new independent trainer wondering how to get clients? You’ve come to the right place. Here’s a beginners’ guide to getting clients for your training business.

First of all: congratulations on your decision to make it as a trainer! You’ve got a wonderful time ahead. You’ll meet a lot of new people and get to make interesting and important decisions.

Focus on a niche

One of the most important decisions is: what will your focus be? I know you want to take on as many assignments as you possibly can. And that’s okay – in the very beginning. Here’s a tip: call established training or consulting firms and see if they have any gaps where you can fill in as a freelance trainer.

So, taking on as many assignments as you can is okay. But on the other hand you must also try to specialize as early as possible. Pick a niche and stick to it. This makes your marketing efforts infinitely easier.

As an example, let’s talk about Mike, the CEO of a medium sized construction business. Mike has to deliver some pretty bad news: the construction market is in tatters, and revenues have fallen again, this year – the shareholders won’t be happy. Mike is looking for a presentation trainer to help him prepare for the annual shareholders’ meeting. You see, he’s got a brilliant rescue plan, but his presentation has got to be flawless to convince the shareholders.

So, he goes to google.com and starts looking for a great trainer. The trainer is going to have to help him out on delivering that presentation. He types in: presentation trainer. Did you just see that? He didn’t type in: “trainer”. He’s looking for a very specific kind of trainer: a presentation trainer.

Now, if you were a presentation trainer, competing with John the trainer – ‘for all types of training’, who do you think Mike would turn to? He would hire you for the job because you are the expert. In other words: it’s vitally important that you find a niche and totally focus on it because it helps you get customers.

Spot an Emerging Trend

Of course, if the niche is profitable it will already be filled with other trainers who are very specialized and much more experienced than you are. That’s why you need to find an emerging trend. Look out for a niche that has only just appeared. This may happen because of new compliance rules (new legislation) or new technology.

For instance, many companies are taking a keen interest in establishing a social media presence. Suppose you are a starting trainer who’s interested in social media and knows a lot about Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. Then you might consider targeting companies who work with personnel distributed all over the planet. Think along the lines of “keeping off shore personnel updated and motivated through social media”.

Entering an emerging niche market ensures that you have the opportunity to grow along with the market.

Validate the Market

Once you think you have spotted a promising niche, you still need to validate the market for you specialty. This simply means: check to see if there’s actual demand for what you’re offering.

Just get on the phone and talk to a lot of potential customers. Would they be interested in hiring you for delivering a training in your field of expertise? Even if there’s no interest at all, you may pick up another emerging trend during your conversations. Or you may find out that your specialty evokes interest in another segment of the market.

To follow the example above (the social media expert), maybe companies with a geographically distributed workforce are not interested in social media (they may already be experts themselves). But you find out that small companies with a lot of personnel on the road are indeed very interested, because more than 50% of the twenty companies you’ve talked to wants to hire you right away. In other words, you have validated “small businesses with personnel on the road” as a profitable niche for your social media training.

Start Marketing

Once you have found a profitable niche, start marketing. This is not just selling, but also creating awareness of your existence. More accurately, marketing is about positioning your training business as the solution to a problem your customers experience.

Now, as a trainer, you will be delivering training most of the time. That means you don’t have time to make phone calls or write emails all day long (which is called direct marketing). Instead, you need to rely on reactive or responsive marketing. This means: you react to the customer making inquiries about your services.

While this may sound like “wait for the customer to call me”, there’s actually real hard work involved here. The difference with direct marketing is that you decide when you put in that hard work – which is perfect if you don’t know in advance what your training schedule will look like next month.

Here are a number of responsive marketing methods. Keep in mind that you don’t have to use them all, certainly not from the start – that would be too much work. Pick a few methods that you’re already familiar with and use these intensively.

• Website with seo: this means a website which has been optimized for search engines (seo stands for search engine optimization). Whenever people type in the keywords for your specialty, or the problems they experience for which you have the solution, your website should show up high in the search results.
• Automated mailing list: your website should have a signup form for a mailing list. Everybody who signs up, automatically receives an email newsletter, or an email mini-training on a topic of your expertise. You prepare the emails far in advance.
• Deliver a talk at a conference: this establishes your credibility as an expert. Make sure the talk is recorded, so you can put it on your website and Youtube afterwards.
• Speaking of Youtube, post a snippet of your training, or an introduction or demo, on Youtube as well.
• Social media: establish a presence on LinkedIn (profile) and Facebook (even if you are not actually a social media trainer). Participate in groups and communities, post insightful comments.

Great Expectations

For every new business, a training firm included, it’s important to set your expectations right. Don’t expect a roaring success by the end of year 1. That hardly ever happens if you’re really new to the industry. In fact, just surviving for the first year is a success. Instead, aim for 3 years to create a profitable company.

Of course, if you don’t see any growth during the first year at all, you may have to re-evaluate your strategy. Maybe your niche is not so profitable after all. Maybe there is a demand for your expertise, but not in the target market you have selected.

You should expect one thing though: to have fun. There will be times when the going gets tough. There are menial tasks to be performed. You may have to deliver a training for a boring company, to make ends meet. But by and large, you should be having fun!