One thing was for certain. I had a very strong sales and marketing background. After all, when I owned my other businesses, I was the one responsible for the recruiting, hiring, training, managing and coaching of all our employees.

In an attempt to apply my wisdom, I came up with some great practices and developed what was to be my first of several attempts to put together my new selling strategy.

I started doing what I knew how to do: to pick up the phone and start making cold calls. To my surprise, I was very successful at getting through the door and into an appointment with the decision maker. Usually, these prospects met with me out of sheer curiosity. After all, no one had ever heard of coaching outside of athletic coaching. So, I had the advantage of positioning business and life coaching as something new and unique.

A month later, I wasn’t even making enough money to stay broke. Pitch after pitch, presentation after presentation, I kept hearing the same thing. “It sounds really interesting Keith but I just can’t see how we can apply this to what we’re doing right now. Stay in touch and maybe some time in the future we can look at this again. But hey, what you’re doing now sounds great . Good luck!”