How coaching is actually sold in the United States
The discovery call is the entire funnel
Almost every American coaching engagement, whether it is executive, career, business, health or performance coaching, is sold on a conversation. Someone finds you through a referral, a podcast appearance, a LinkedIn post, a webinar or a search, books a free consultation, and decides during that call whether to work with you. Everything before the call exists to fill the calendar, and everything after it is either onboarding or a follow-up sequence.
That makes two numbers matter more than anything else on your dashboard: how many qualified consultations you hold each week, and what share of them convert. Most practices cannot answer either question reliably, because bookings live in a scheduling tool, notes live in a document, and the follow-up lives in somebody memory. The leak is rarely lead generation. It is the enquiry from three weeks ago that never received a second message.
Consumer and corporate buying look nothing alike
A private client pays by card, decides in days and buys a package or a monthly retainer. A corporate client is an entirely different animal: a human resources or learning and development sponsor, a budget that opens and closes with the fiscal calendar, a purchase order, an invoice on payment terms, and often a pilot cohort before a wider rollout. The same coach frequently sells both, and running them through one pipeline means the corporate renewal window is missed while everyone is busy answering individual enquiries.