From Coach To Well-Paid Professional (Part 2)

There’s so much misunderstanding about what marketing is. I’m writing a series of articles in which I show you what good marketing looks like. I’ll be highlighting a coaching professional who is marketing well.

This is the second in a series of articles I’m writing to dispel the myth that marketing is distasteful. I’m writing it for all the coaches who are frustrated about not being able to find clients and who are fearful of marketing because of a misunderstanding about what good marketing looks like.

Introducing Paula Sheridan

Paula Sheridan is one of our mentors and is a coach who was told that ‘if your coaching is good enough, your clients will find you’ when she was training.

She completed her coach training in 2019 and quickly realised that what she’d been told simply couldn’t be true. “After all, how could anyone find me if they don’t know where I am?” She joined The Coaching Revolution at the beginning of 2020 and set about becoming visible.

Paula knew who she wanted to coach. She wanted to work with those women who return to work after maternity leave only to discover that they have been moved to the ‘mummy track’ in the minds of their colleagues. The women whose careers stall and they end up being the ‘safe pair of hands’ in the team. The women who are trusted to train new arrivals, only to find that the person they trained is subsequently promoted above them.

Paula is passionate about revealing the invisible talent in a team – often a woman who’s been there forever but somehow is never noticed.

Compassionate Coach

Paula’s clients are women in Pharma. She coaches the women I mentioned above and also works with their managers. By working with these women, she helps Pharma leaders close the gender gap without expensive external hires. The women ready to step up are often within their teams but sit, unnoticed by management.

Paula knows about these women because she worked among them when she was employed. She knows that what these women usually need help with are two things. These two things are the things that are preventing them from being noticed; they are a lack of visibility and influence. Of course, as with all coaching, those are the things that her clients need to learn how to do and wrapped up in them getting there is work on confidence, self-esteem and learning to speak up amongst many other challenges. These are, of course, all things with which coaching can help.

Learning How To Market

When Paula joined us, she didn’t know how to reach the women she wanted to coach. She knew that she could help them but was struggling to articulate this in a way that attracted them to her.

Sarah and her team certainly are the revolution that qualified coaches struggling to find clients need. With her patient and unwavering (and honest) support, I learned so much about how to communicate better and how to be noticed by the sorts of clients that I love working with.

Learning how to reach these women and then going on to help so many of them is Paula’s happy place. She gets to work with people she cares about on something important and life-changing for them.

Go and look at Paula’s profile. In particular, her posts. You can see that what she does is speak directly to the women she wants to work with and to their managers. She isn’t shouty or braggy. There’s no boasting or ‘trumpet blowing’. If you didn’t know what excellent marketing looks like, you’d be hard-pressed to know it was marketing at all.