Getting your first corporate client as a coach, consultant or trainer is simpler than most people expect. The process does not require a huge profile, a glossy website, or years of B2B experience. It requires knowing who to approach, how to have the right conversation, and what to do when someone says yes.
This guide covers the exact steps to take to land your first corporate contract, whether you are an executive coach, a specialist consultant, a trainer, or a done-for-you service provider making the switch from individual clients to organisational work.
Why corporate clients are worth pursuing in the first place
Before we get into the how, it helps to be clear on the why.
Working with corporate clients (selling your services to companies rather than individuals) is a fundamentally different business model to B2C work (selling to private individuals). And for the right kind of expert, it is a significantly better one.
Here is what changes when you move into the corporate market:
Higher transaction values: A corporate contract for coaching, training or consultancy is typically worth three to five times more than the equivalent work sold to an individual. In fact, the average B2B sale in the UK is currently worth £10,000 whereas the average B2C sale is currently worth £1500.
Companies have budgets. Individuals experience various fluctuations with their disposable income that significantly impact their spending.
Faster close times: Counterintuitive but true: if you are talking to the right person inside an organisation and solving a genuine business problem, corporate sales can move quickly. The average corporate deal (from targeting a cold prospect through to making a sale with that contact) takes 90 days for a deal worth under £100K and 120 days on average for a deal worth over £100K.
A first contract within 90 days of starting a focused and proven outreach process is a realistic expectation.
Longer client relationships: Corporates who see results keep coming back. A single well-delivered engagement can lead to a retainer, a team rollout, or a referral to another department or organisation entirely. This ensures that coaches / consultants are able to build long-term working relationships with corporate clients and significantly maximise both their own revenue and the transformation that the client goes on to achieve.
Lower technology overheads: Selling to companies does not require a complex funnel, a large social following, or an expensive marketing stack. The sales process is conversation-led and does not require lots of technology / technical expertise. (Which means it’s totally fine not to have a website if you haven’t got time / energy or the ability to build one!)
None of this means corporate sales is effortless. But it does mean that the barriers most service providers assume exist are largely untrue.
The three mistakes that stop coaches and consultants getting corporate clients
Most service providers who struggle to get corporate clients are making one (or all three) of the following mistakes before they have even started.
Mistake 1: Waiting until everything is “ready.” The website needs updating. The proposal template is not finished. The case studies are not written up yet. Corporate clients don’t buy based on a polished website. They buy based on a conversation with a credible expert who understands their problem and who can articulate the right solution that has the ability to achieve the transformation required. That conversation doesn’t need to wait until a website is ready..!
Mistake 2: Targeting the wrong person. Many coaches and consultants default to approaching a CEO or Managing Director, assuming they are the most important person in the room. In reality, the decision to hire an external coach, trainer or consultant is most commonly made by an HR Director, a Head of L&D (Learning and Development), or a departmental leader with a specific problem and a budget to solve it.
Approaching the wrong decision-maker wastes a significant amount of time and erodes your own confidence in your outreach process and sales ability too.
Mistake 3: Describing the service rather than the outcome. “I offer a twelve-week executive coaching programme” is feature led but doesn’t really tell the decision-maker anything useful. “I work with newly promoted senior leaders to reduce the time it takes them to step into their role effectively, which reduces the risk of costly underperformance in the first year” tells them exactly why they should care. Companies are paying external suppliers to create specific outcomes and transformation… so that needs to be reflected right from the beginning.
How to Get Your First Corporate Client: The Process
Step 1: Get specific about who you want to work with
Before you approach anyone, you need to decide: what kind of company, and what kind of problem?
You’ll need to think about the type(s) of organisations that would be best served by your area of expertise… and you also need to be able to describe the business problem(s) you solve in language that a corporate buyer would use in their own internal conversations.
Put simply, as an inexperienced salesperson, you need to focus on:
- Targeting one specific industry with a proven sales strategy for 90 days so that you can make clear headway and allocate the right time and resources to business development that will help you land corporate clients.
- Targeting a clear outcome / problem that you know organisations want to solve or will be able to see symptoms of (so that they can build a business case to spend money solving it!)
And if you’re thinking, ‘But all organisations and employees could benefit from the work that I do in [AREA]…’ then this is a) normal thinking and b) quite likely to be the issue that is stopping your existing sales process from scaling up.
It’s much harder to try and sell to ‘everyone’ because it’s significantly harder to prioritise the right type of lead generation and business development to work with a number of different industries… and it also informs potential clients that you are not a specialist in their industry which makes it much more difficult to generate new business and get referrals moving forward.
Instead, be as specific as you can about the problem you’re solving and the industry you’re approaching so that you can book more sales calls, have better conversations and get traction more quickly.
This doesn’t mean that you’ll never sell all of your services / that you’ll ‘run out’ of leads… instead, it means that you’ll have clearer sales calls that lead to more sales (and more upsells / re-sells too!)
Think about what your specific entry point will be; for example, if you’re an executive coach then a specific problem you might work on could be ‘this new leader is technically excellent but struggling with the transition to managing their former peer group which means that projects don’t have adequate team buy-in and aren’t getting delivered on time’
Remember, being specific will always win you more business than being general / vague in your approach. And you’ll get traction much more quickly.
Step 2: Identify the right buyer
For most coaches, consultants and trainers, the right first buyer inside a corporate organisation is one of three people:
The HR Director (or HR Business Partner in larger organisations) is the most common buyer for coaching and leadership development work. In the US, this role is often called the CHRO or VP of HR. They hold the budget for people development and they are measured on talent retention, engagement scores, and leadership effectiveness.
The Head of L&D (Learning and Development) or the Learning and Development Manager is the most common buyer for training and development work. They are the person responsible for understanding the needs inside the organisation for employees to upskill and assessing external provision.
The departmental leader (a Marketing / Communications Director for example) is often the buyer when the problem is specific to their team. They have budget autonomy and they move faster than central functions because they own the problem directly.
Identifying the right type of buyer is key for getting fast traction and booking sales calls consistently. After all, if you’re approaching the wrong decision-makers – even with the best message in the world – you’ll be ignored or challenged.
Step 3: Have an impactful sales conversation
Sales conversations are often dreaded by coaches and consultants who are looking for their first corporate client. They worry about how they’ll ‘convince’ a corporate buyer that they’re the best resource… or whether they’ll be perceived as ‘pushy’ for challenging an objection.
The reality is though, that the goal for your sales conversation is not to pitch.
It’s to diagnose a clear problem and understand why that problem matters to the decision-maker.
You’re trying to find out:
- Does this organisation have a problem that I can solve?
- Is this person the right decision-maker?
- Is there a clear budget for this work and a business case for solving this problem?
The goal for your sales conversation is to understand whether there’s a clear need for your work and – if there is – to suggest a solution that will help the organisation solve that exact problem.
Good sales calls (run well) often end in the decision-maker asking you how they can pay you to help them… so if your existing sales calls are ending in versions of ‘can you just pop me your website / a one-pager on this / your CV and I’ll make sure it goes on file’ then your calls aren’t being run effectively.
Step 4: Create effective solutions
Most coaches / consultants focus on ‘offer creation’ before they start their sales process… which ends up causing disruption in their sales calls when they’re trying to tailor all of their questions to fit one specific solution that the client doesn’t need.
Instead, your role is to create effective solutions based on supporting the organisation to achieve the transformation that they really want, rather than shoe-horning them into a pre-created solution simply because you’ve already designed and priced it.
This means creating a solution that meets the genuine need after diagnosing the problem.
Most coaches / consultants will think ‘But then I’m going to create brand-new offers each time’ and that’s not the case either. Instead, you’ll end up having a genuine understanding of the common issues that organisations face and creating offers that sell… rather than pre-creating offers that never end up being sold because they don’t meet any commercial need.
Step 5: Deliver brilliantly, then ask for the next thing
Your first corporate contract is not the destination. It is the beginning of a relationship.
After a successful engagement, the most natural next step is a direct conversation: “What are you working on next?’ Corporate clients who see results refer internally and externally which means that a single well-delivered contract with one team can lead to company-wide work within twelve months.
Showing up and delivering a fantastic client experience is one of the easiest and most effective ways to maximise your revenue – and it’s the bit that most coaches and consultants enjoy doing most too!
How long does it take to get your first corporate client?
Using a proven sales process, most coaches, consultants and trainers can land their first corporate contract within 90 days. However – this assumes that:
- You’re running a proven outreach process to generate qualified leads (the right decision-makers)
- You’re running sales calls effectively to diagnose commercial problems and suggest best-fit solutions
- You’re able to describe what you do in terms of commercial outcomes, rather than features.
- You’re creating and proposing offers that clearly demonstrate how they can solve specific problems / achieve specific commercial goals.
- You deliver to a good standard and are able to handle upsell / re-sell sales calls.
The people who take longer are usually:
- Waiting for something to be ‘ready’ (like their website / logo or offer stack) before they start their outreach / sales process
- Focusing their time on content creation to generate leads, rather than proven proactive outreach methods that they can actively measure and troubleshoot.
- Providing free consultancy / coaching services on their sales calls (often disguised as free advice) rather than clearly and effectively diagnosing commercial problems and consultatively suggesting paid solutions.
What to do next?
If you are starting from scratch with corporate sales, the most important first step is clarity: on the problem you solve, for whom, and in language your buyers actually use. Everything else follows on from there (and means that all other stages in the sales process depend on you having that clarity to be successful.)
Cracking the corporate marketing isn’t as difficult to access as most coaches / consultants assume but it is very different from selling to individuals and requires a clear sales process that is measurable and metrics driven. If you’ve previously sold to individuals (or not sold your own services at all) then selling to organisations will require a new mindset and sales approach so it’s important to learn and implement best-practice B2B specific sales techniques from the beginning.
It’s the perfect self-paced course for any coach / consultant or trainer who wants to learn:
- How to choose their corporate niche so that they’re able to become specialists in their space (and land corporate clients quickly)
- How to identify the right decision-makers for their area of specialism so that they can can target qualified leads immediately instead of wasting time talking to junior employees without any autonomy over budgets.
- How to approach cold leads using cold outreach so that they’re consistently booking sales calls with qualified decision-makers (and not sounding sleazy / spammy or being ignored!)
- How to handle sales calls effectively so that they’re diagnosing specific commercial needs, having transparent conversations around budgets and getting buy-in from the decision-maker so that over 70% of sales calls turn into qualified proposals.
- How to create and price corporate offerings as a coach / consultant or trainer so that they demonstrate exactly how they can meet the commercial needs (and that command premium price points)
- How to create a high-conversion proposal so that they’re articulating their offer in a commercially viable way (and converting more corporate clients!)
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Jess Lorimer is the founder of Selling to Corporate® and has helped over 20,000 coaches, consultants, speakers, trainers and service providers across 17 countries win corporate contracts. She is a TEDx speaker and the host of the Selling to Corporate® podcast