Coaches want to coach everyone. We want to change the world one person at a time. We finish our coaching courses, with our hearts full and an evangelical attitude to our newfound superpower. We can coach anyone and we don’t want to be known for one thing.
Reality Bites HARD!
It doesn’t take very long for reality to bite and sadly, with those who want to coach for a living, it bites very hard indeed.
That belief that we all had that a coaching qualification = paying clients rapidly evaporates. What we actually finish our coaching qualifications with is a vocation, not a business.
In order to actually create the coaching business we desperately want, we have to learn a new skillset and it’s one that doesn’t come naturally to coaches; business development.
Selling Is A Dirty Word
I’ve spoken to coaches who have turned their noses up in disgust at the very thought of selling coaching. These coaches live in a world where they believe that they can emote clients into being, that just by being wonderful coaches, they will attract the right clients. They say, in somewhat condescending tones, that referral business is what it’s all about…
Referral Business
Referrals are incredibly important and we teach our mentees to make effective use of them. However, referrals don’t come from no clients. You have to have clients in order to get referrals, right? So how do you get those first clients?
One way that all coaches will have tried is delivering free coaching sessions to anyone who would like one (strategy sessions, discovery, chemistry, whatever you want to call them). No matter how wonderful these may be for the client, they don’t all lead to paying clients. The conversion rate for these sessions into paying clients is low. Referrals from those who have had a free session are almost always referrals to someone else who’d like a bit of free coaching.
I can feel one or two of you reading this thinking ‘I got a ££££ client from that kind of client!!’ and I’m sure that you did. However, you are in an extremely small minority.
So, what do you do?
Become known for ONE thing
You and I both know that you can coach anyone. We know that.
However you can’t market to anyone. You can try to market to anyone (everyone?) but the cold, hard truth is that it just doesn’t work.
We both know that you can coach around any topic; career change, relationship issues, confidence, parenting, retirement, health… The list is literally endless.
However, you can’t market all that to anyone. You need to be known for ONE thing, and you need to market it cleanly, clearly and in the right place. Anything else leads to confusion and the thing that I know to be true about confused people is that they don’t buy.
In time, you can add other things into the mix, but at the beginning, you need to choose your ONE thing and you need to choose it wisely.
What’s Your ONE Thing?
Defining your one thing can be hard. How do you decide which one of the many facets of coaching that you’d like to be known for?
You could spend the next 6 months on your own thinking about what your one thing is. What if you pick the wrong one thing? What if you miss something crucial when you’re defining it?
This is where The Coaching Revolution comes in. The very first mentoring session that you have will start to address this very point. You will begin to define your ONE thing. In 6 months, you can be spending your time delivering coaching to clients who want to pay you for doing so, rather than agonising over which ONE thing you need to become known for.
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