As you may be aware, I run a free challenge several times a year. This year, this question was asked more than once, particularly by coaches who want to work with those who are employed by the NHS. Apparently, some employees of the NHS have access to free coaching – I don’t work in or with the NHS, so I don’t know the specifics of who and how many sessions etc.
I don’t need to know to be able to answer the (often anguished) question from coaches – ‘how do I compete with FREE?’
Here’s the thing. You don’t have to.
The simple fact is that most people, many doctors included, have no idea what our kind of coaching is, so they rarely know what kind of thing they might want to take to coaching.
Choose A Target Audience
If you market well, your chosen audience won’t be interested in free coaching as an alternative to what you’re offering. They won’t be interested in it because they don’t know that what you do might be remotely similar to the generic ‘free coaching’ they can access via work.
To market well, choose a target audience (a niche – they’re the same thing), and a problem that particular audience is grappling with that coaching can help them to resolve.
Next, create a marketing message that speaks directly to this kind of person and which empathises with their struggle. Make sure your marketing message acknowledges the problem and demonstrates your knowledge and understanding of how it’s affecting their lives, and potentially even their health.
If you put yourself where your target audience is with this empathetic, kind and knowledgeable message, what happens is that you join the conversation that’s going on inside their heads.
When they see what you’re writing and hear what you’re saying, they will be astonished because you’ll be speaking to them! You’ll be describing exactly what they’re struggling with and it will seem uncanny to them.
People Don’t Buy Coaching
The truth is that people don’t buy coaching. They buy the solution to a problem.
Whether the purchaser is an individual, a corporation, a public sector organisation or a charity makes no difference – they buy the solution to a problem, not coaching itself.
One of the things that coaches struggle to articulate is the outcome of working with them. The reason that it’s hard is that they’re sitting on the delivery side of their coaching business and not the ‘creating the opportunities to do the delivery’ side.
If you imagine an old-fashioned pair of weighing scales, your coaching skills sit on one side of those scales. On the other side sit the skills you need to create the opportunity to do the coaching.
If you’re sitting on the delivery side of your scales and I ask you what outcome a client can expect from coaching with you, the answer has to be ‘it depends’. It depends on who they are, what they want, what brought them to coaching in the first place – I could go on.
However, if you’re sitting on the other side of your scales – the creating the opportunity to do the delivery side – you know exactly who you are speaking to because you chose them. You know precisely what they’re struggling with because that’s part of your work when deciding who to focus your marketing effort on. You know what outcome they want because you’ve done your research.
In answer the question ‘How do I compete with free?’ – it’s simple, you don’t.
If you’re scratching your head and you’d like to understand more about how the ‘creating the opportunity to do the delivery’ side of a coaching business works, you can add yourself to the waiting list for the next challenge here https://thecoachingrevolution.com/NailYourNiche
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