Hello everyone,
I’m posting hoping to get some advice on something that is driving me crazy.
I’m an Italian teacher and I work mainly as a freelancer. I find it extremely frustrating to close a sale with Japanese customers.
Most of them ghost me, suddenly stop replying to my e-mails, book a meeting and then don’t show up.
Recently I’ve started offering 30mins free consultations on Zoom, to build trust, but at the end they just go “I’ll think about it” and disappear.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to chase them, keep getting in touch until I get a “yes” or “no”, but I’ve always thought that would scare them away so I just let things as they are.
Please, can you tell me if I’m doing something wrong or if my approach is not effective? Or just any piece of advice would be great because this situation is really frustrating to me and I’m starting to lose motivation in what I’m doing.
Thanks in advance
12 comments
Might be more about how you’re presenting rather than them.
Teaching a foreign language in Japan is as much about sales as it is education. Make sure you are offering them an entertaining experience.
How do you manage to find clients in the first place? How is service set up online for consultations? How much do you make freelancing as a teacher? Just curious to know.
This came to mind, no idea how useful it’ll be but.
One of the things my American colleague complains about is that the Subways (fast food) here have so little choice. Japanese customers just choose from the narrow menu rather than the billion options you get overseas, because generally Japanese customers like being told what is good.
So maybe when you ask them “what are your goals?” they don’t really know and realise they don’t “need” it and back out? Maybe you could offer “options”? Plan 1 is for tourism. Plan 2 is for business people. It’s probably gonna be the same grammar etc but maybe presented in a different way. When I taught eikaiwa we had the normal English textbook and a business specific one. The main difference was the focus on when we would use this language. So maybe you could offer them the choice instead of leaving the “goals” question so open?
I’m not freelance or a sales person so the above could be totally wrong. Good luck regardless!
Im an alt in the morning and i teach private lessons in my free time.
My last class with students is usually them cancelling cause they are sick, then ghost me.
I used to do private lessons. There are a lot of issues, for sure. The important thing is to build up enough good, solid students that you don’t have to spend so much time reaching out. That might be more difficult to do with Italian than English (which I teach), just because of numbers.
I guess that one of the problems is that good language learners tend to succeed (and not need teachers any more) or already have teachers.
Students who are less self-reliant might not have much idea of what their needs are. I used to do a pretty basic needs analysis where I asked them some questions about themselves. If they didn’t have conversational English yet, and didn’t state a need, I offered them conversation lessons. Other students came with suggestions – I have to write formal letters at work, or I want to study abroad. Generally, I accommodated these, and these were the more motivated students. I did turn people away for classes I didn’t want to teach (one guy wanted me to drill pronunciation of totally random words).
After this conversation, which was free, I would tell them my availability and rate, and leave it with them. I’m not sure what percentage I ended up teaching. 50%? I didn’t really consider that to be ghosting, since we hadn’t agreed on anything by that point.
As for no-shows, I didn’t really have any for the free meeting because it was free! Once we had entered into an agreement on classes, I asked them to cancel 24 hours in advance or pay for the lesson. In reality, I rarely collected a cancellation fee because most students remembered to cancel in time, and when they didn’t they tended to… disappear 🫥 I didn’t chase them.
I built up a network of legit professional contacts and I only take work through referral now. I also have a lost of policies that motivated prospective clients are encouraged by, and the wishy washy less serious ones that wouldn’t stay anyway are turned off by.
Basically all my clients are working professionals that actually need English for their job/life. Examples are teachers of interpreters/professional interpreters, google employees, government employees, and social media workers that work in both languages. Any client that doesn’t actually need English will be non-committal, not see much value in the lessons, and will not know what they actually want/need.
I also charge a professional price and have relatively high/exclusive qualifications, but I am very accommodating for the clients I do take on. I do a free consultation, zero pressure, no sales, no advertising.
It took time to get this network going, but the kinds of support and lessons I can provide are relatively rare here so positive word of mouth has landed me with more work than I can take on. The honest truth is, it’s not hard to outperform the competition here if you’ve got real experience and qualifications, provide quality and skill they can actually take into their life and job, and only bother with students that actually need English, and eventually you’ll build a client base if you’ve got the talent for it.
I have been having this idea to build a website where teachers can just manage their own contracts, no third party.
I am a freelancer teacher . I also have a successful business but my customers are not Japanese and it has notjing to do with teaching. Maybe we should get together and build a website together?
Sounds rough because like you said, no one really needs Italian aside from opera singers. And the motivation of students just isn’t the same.
It sounds like you’ve got a good business model/curriculum. So you don’t have too much trouble keeping students?
Maybe you could study sales techniques on YouTube/etc. If you have friends willing to help, ask them to go to the big eikaiwa chains and pretend they’re interested in Korean/French/German/etc. Have them study the techniques and phrases the Japanese staff use and try to apply them.
Oh and remember salesman lie. Language schools tell students they “need” to speak korean if they want to travel to Korea. But that’s not true.
I know it may not be easy, but try to build a client base through connections you have. Ask your friends or whoever if they know anyone that’d like to learn Italian. If you get a good few students I generally find they will refer others to you over time. The “social contract” of them knowing someone you know also makes Japanese people (and probably any people?) less flakey. You’ll have to gauge the type of students you have, but you could even do a “referral campaign” that if a current student refers someone and they enroll to take your lessons, their next 4 lessons are 30% off or something.
Also, you may consider not only targeting Japanese people. There’s probably a lot of foreigners in Japan (or elsewhere) that would like to learn Italian.
People value what is in-demand and expensive. I recommend charging even a small sum for intros, offering limited time slots and presenting that you have clear expectations about interactions with potential customers. If you make it seem less casual and more like a professional standard way you deal with many clients, they are apt to treat you less casually and more professionally.
I have a greater than 90% closing rate by focusing on 2 things during a trial lesson:
1. Identify one or two main issues with the students’ skills very quickly, then show them how you would go about helping them improve. I also try to explain to them how not improving will be a significant barrier to effective communication.
2. When I demonstrate how I will help them improve, I try to make it as fun and personal as possible (from the information gathered in their self-introduction).
Works for me. Hopefully, it can work for you.
Good luck.