A coach asked me an interesting question. ‘Are you marketers who decided to focus on teaching coaches, or are you coaches who teach marketing?’
This questions is important than it seems at first I think.
Coaches Who Teach Marketing
The Coaching Revolution mentors are all qualified coaches. In fact, it is a requirement that to be a mentor. You must be running and actively marketing a coaching business.
Our programmes are taught by coaches who have learned how to market their coaching businesses and are out there, making an impact on the world with what they do. Better yet, they’re being paid a professional rate to do so.
All of these coaches are alumni – they have all been through one of our programmes and implemented all that they learned. They know where the pitfalls of learning how to market are. They are aware of the bits that invoke mind monkeys – large and small – in the heads of the coaches taking part. It gives them insight into the minds of their students that is exceptional.
Not Professional Marketers, Professional Coaches
We teach professional level marketing skills to coaches. Marketing for coaches is specialised. I have rarely found another person who says they teach marketing to coaches who realise just how specialised it is.
The reason it’s specialised is coaches have a challenge with their marketing that no other provider of professional services has. The challenge of which I am speaking has two parts. 1) no one knows what a coach is 2) they think they do but they’re wrong! Think about it – if you’re a lawyer, an accountant, an architect, a therapist – people understand what these job title mean. More importantly, they know if they need the services of one of them. With coaching, not so much.
I wish we had a job title other than coach. When Thomas Lennard founded the International Coach Federation (ICF) I wish he’d chosen a different title. In choosing a title that had an existing meaning, he condemned us (unintentionally of course) to a lifetime of being misunderstood. The existing meaning for coach was, and still is, someone who uses their skills and knowledge to help you become better at something – and that’s not what our kind of coaching is.
The ‘That’s Not What I Do’ Merry-Go-Round!
The coaches who teach our programmes know only too well how challenging it is to end up in a situation where you’re describing the coaching process to a potential client in order to explain the value in what we do.
- They also know well that no one is interested in the coaching process and they have lived experience of the frustration that this can bring.
- They have also struggled with the frustration that comes from the misunderstanding that happens when you utter the word ‘coach’ in response to the question ‘what do you do?’
Who better to teach you how to market than a coach who has been in your shoes but is now running a flourishing business because they learned and implemented what they’re teaching you?
Marketers Who Are Not Coaches
There are lots and lots (and LOTS if my DMs are anything to go by!) people who slide into your DMs to say that they ‘work with coaches just like you! to help them build coaching businesses…..’ and they are not coaches. I tend to think of these people as dodgy, which may be unfair. However, I base my opinion on the fact that if they were good at marketing themselves. they wouldn’t need to slide into your DMs at all, because you’d know who they were and what they did and you’d be hopping into their DMs.
There are those I consider to be reputable trainers too, who say that they work with ‘coaches, consultants and trainers’. I’d argue that this means that they’re not teaching coach-specific marketing, because marketing for coaches is very different from marketing for consultants and trainers, because people know what consultants and trainers do!
Coaches First And Foremost
So in answer to the question, we’re all coaches first and foremost. The Coaching Revolution’s ‘why’ is to get the world coached. I believe that coaching is a superpower; Everyone should have the experience of being coached. That’s not going to happen for as long as coaches don’t know how to articulate the value of the service that they provide.
At the end of the day, that’s all marketing is – articulating the benefits of the service we provide.
If you’d like any support building your coaching business, please do feel free to schedule a call.