A few years back, I interviewed C.J. Hayden in regards to her book, Get Clients Now!, and her business coaching business. I was really intrigued with the idea of business coaching as it seemed to be popping up everywhere and I wanted to know what made a good business coach and what businesses-especially small businesses-could take away from a business coach. C.J. was very accommodating with the interview and I learned a lot of valuable information. 

I'm sure you will, too. Enjoy!

How long have you been a Certified Professional and Personal Coach?

I've been working as a business and career coach since 1992. In 1995, I was one of the first people to graduate as a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach from The Coaches Training Institute www.thecoaches.com . Then in 1999, I was one of the first coaches to earn the credential Master Certified Coach from the International Coach Federation http://www.coachfederation.org/

What drew you to this profession?

I was looking for a way to help people succeed that wasn't just about giving them advice or completing a project for them and then leaving. I wanted to partner with my clients in an ongoing relationship where they did the work on their own behalf, but I gave them continuous guidance and support along the way.

Did you have any specialized training and if so, what kind? (i.e. college degree, courses, etc.)

Before I became a coach, I had worked in management for almost 20 years- in several different industries. I had a background in human resources, training, and marketing. There wasn't any specialized training available in coaching when I started out, and most of us doing it came from other backgrounds in business or counseling. I enrolled in The Coaches Training Institute not long after they opened their doors and later became a trainer for them.

As a coach, do you find taking continuing education courses beneficial to your career?

Absolutely. I take classes every year in coaching skills, marketing topics, and new technology. I think it's essential to keep learning in order to be good at what you do.

What type of skills do you feel a person needs to be a successful, qualified coach?

The most important skill is listening. You need to be able to get underneath the surface and understand what your clients really want for themselves. Second, you must be able to ask powerful questions and encourage your clients to think deeply in order to find the right answers. Very often, my clients already know much of what I could tell them, but they need help in choosing the correct path to take them where they want to go. A good coach also must be able to let go of her ego and let the client be the star. Coaching is a partnership between peers, not a guru-disciple relationship.

What is the difference between a professional coach and a personal coach?

All coaching is ultimately personal coaching, but many coaches distinguish the type of coaching they do by labeling it professional, business, career, or life coaching. Typically, the label indicates the set of issues that particular coach is most interested in working with. I usually call myself a business coach because my preferred clients are business owners and they choose to work with me because of my expertise in business management. But we often deal with personal issues as well. Coaching addresses each individual as a whole person, and what's going on in your personal life has a lot of impact on how well your business is doing.

What types of things can a personal coach help an individual with?

The issues most coaches deal with all the time are achieving goals, managing time, improving communication, organizing projects, and finding a more fulfilling life path. Helping our clients in those areas can take the form of working on their career, finances, business, relationships, personal growth, and much, much, more.

How is coaching different than going to a psychologist or therapist?

There are many similarities between coaching and therapy, but the primary difference is that coaching is focused on achievement rather than healing. Coaching's roots are in sports and business rather than in medicine. The starting place of the healing professions is often to ask what is wrong. The starting place in coaching is typically to ask what the client wants to accomplish. The focus of coaching is very much on taking action in the present and plans for the future, with not much attention to the past. Traditional therapy tends to look more at what happened in the past and your thoughts and feelings in the present, with not as much attention on the future. With a therapist, you might often find yourself asking "why" questions, and with a coach, you more often ask "how" questions.

Do you focus more on professional coaching?

My own practice is focused more on the professional side, especially in the beginning of a coaching relationship. Over time, my clients often include more issues from the personal

side in our sessions, especially as trust build between us.

Does professional coaching ever involve a bit of personal coaching?

Coaching always involves addressing the client as a complete human being. There's no point in working with someone on making more money if they are miserable because their relationship isn't working. Usually the way personal issues come into coaching that started out with a career or business issue is when the client tries to get things done and finds too many obstacles in the way. For example, the client doesn't get to an important meeting he had planned and tells the coach it's because he had a fight with his wife. The coach asks if that happens often, and when it 

turns out that's the case, the coaching starts to get personal.

When coaching small businesses, what do you find to be the most challenging task and how do you combat it?

The most difficult challenge small business owners face is marketing themselves. Most people did not go into business to sell; their expertise is in a different area. So they feel out of their depth in sales and marketing, and also experience a great deal of fear and resistance about it. In coaching, I typically attack that on three fronts at once:

•·         knowledge and skill-building, so they feel more like they know what they are doing; 

•·         building confidence and self-esteem, so they can get past their fears of failure and rejection; and 

•·         motivation, so they can succeed at an activity they don't necessarily enjoy.

In your book, Get Clients Now!, you teach service-related businesses to market their businesses. What is the difference between marketing and public relations?

Marketing is everything you do to get people to buy from you, beginning with designing a great product and ending with asking for the order. It includes a wide variety of strategies, of which public relations is only one. Marketing uses many different techniques such as cold calling, networking, or advertising. Public relations is limited to only those specific tactics that put your business in the public eye via interviews, news reports, or personal appearances.

One marketing technique you strongly suggest service-bases businesses use is "the follow-up process"-which can take 2-6 months of keeping in touch with a prospect, before the deal is closed.  What technique do you suggest your clients use when they find the follow-up process to be an "intrusion" on their prospective client's time?

Perceiving your own marketing calls or letters to a client as intrusions is one of the mental barriers.  It's important for business owners to overcome this barrier in order to be successful at marketing. Try thinking of yourself as being of service to prospective clients from the very first contact, long before they ever do business with you. Be helpful, be a resource, let the client know you understand his problems and are here to help resolve them. If you think of yourself as offering to help instead of trying to sell, you'll stop feeling like you are being a nuisance.

In Get Clients Now!, you state the importance of rewarding one's efforts when a marketing campaign fails because, "Marketing is unpredictable.  Sometimes you do everything exactly right and still don't get the results you want when you want them."  This is a wonderful and profound statement because we often discount our own hard work, belittling our efforts, and looking for fault; which leads to discouragement and a lack of motivation to try again.  When has a marketing campaign failed you, how did you feel, and what did you do to reward yourself?

I created a workshop that I thought was going to be a big hit with potential clients, and despite all the time and money I spent on marketing it, only a couple of people signed up. I felt sad and frustrated. How could I have been so far off base? Wasn't this program something people had been asking me for? Why weren't they signing up? I had to decide for myself that I had done a good enough job at marketing the program, but there was something wrong with my timing, the design, the pricing, or in some other area. I congratulated myself for my efforts, took the weekend off, and then started designing a new program that sounded like more fun to me.

How long is long enough to test a new marketing strategy before giving it up to try something new, in hopes of it being more productive?

That's a difficult question to answer in general terms, because there are so many factors that can affect your success. I encourage my clients to first look at how they can employ a particular strategy more effectively before giving it up. Let's take networking for an example. Most people don't give it enough time. Building relationships through networking requires months of consistent investment to pay off. But you need to make sure you are networking in the right settings. 

•·         Are you encountering prospective clients and referral sources in the groups you interact with? 

•·         Can they afford your services? 

•·         Do people seem interested when you tell them what you do? 

If the answer to those questions is yes, stick with it. If it's no, rather than give up on networking, you may want to look for different groups first. You have to ask yourself the right questions before making a change.

In Get Clients Now!, you mention the importance of tracking one's efforts and results, what have you found to be the best tracking method?

I use a simple worksheet where you can see your marketing efforts and results for an entire month at one glance. (You can get one at www.getclientsnow.com/free_resources/htm .)

If you keep your tracking very simple, you can update it on a daily basis and always know where you are. I encourage clients to choose:

•·         just one goal, 

•·         no more than three projects, and 

•·         ten action steps to focus on at any one time. 

That keeps it manageable for a one-person business.

How can a naturally shy, or introvert, person step out of his (or her) comfort zone and put his (or her) fear of meeting new people and gaining new clients on the backburner long enough to make a few qualified prospects? 

If you're not naturally an outgoing person, I suggest that

you focus on marketing strategies that allow you to take advantage of the other strengths you have. 

•·         If you're good with people one-on-one, then focus on building referral relationships instead of trying to meet a lot of new people yourself. 

•·         If you're a good writer, get your articles published or work on getting publicity from the media. 

•·         Look for what you naturally enjoy doing and see how you can use that to market yourself.

There's no point in putting into your marketing plan a bunch of activities that are completely alien or frightening to you. There's no boss looking over your shoulder to make you do those things, so you'll just avoid them.

If you could leave our readers with just one thing, what would it be?

Stop looking for a "silver bullet" to solve all your marketing problems. There is no secret technique that will bring you all the clients you need with no effort at all. The real secret to marketing success is choosing a set of simple, effective things to do and doing them consistently.

People who seem to get all the clients they need effortlessly have mastered that formula. When successful business owners tell you they don't do any marketing, look again. They are probably officers of a club, columnists, speakers, or regularly lunch with influential people. Those are all marketing activities. The trick is to integrate what you do to market yourself into your daily life. That's how it becomes effortless.

Thank you for allowing me to interview you. A review of your book, which is great by the way, will accompany the interview.

Visit her at http://www.getclientsnow.com/