When I’m delivering my Nail Your Niche challenge, one of the most common objections I hear from coaches is that coaching is about the person, not their job title, or that they can coach anyone, so why would they need to know this information? And they’re absolutely right when it comes to the delivery of coaching.
But marketing your coaching business is not about delivery. It’s about visibility, relevance, and commercial traction. And in that context, knowing your potential client’s job title isn’t just useful, it’s essential.
Coaching and Client Acquisition Are Not the Same Thing
As coaches we have been trained exclusively in delivery skills:
- how to listen deeply
- how to ask great questions
- how to challenge thinking
- how to support personal transformation
That’s the coaching side of our business – the delivery side.
But running a coaching business also requires an entirely different skill set, client acquisition, and most coaches have never been taught how to do it properly. They try applying coaching logic to marketing problems, which never ends well.
In client acquisition, vague ideas like ‘I work with people who feel stuck’ or ‘I help people in transition’ are utterly useless. Marketing needs specificity, relevance, and a clear audience. In short, if it’s not focused, it’s not marketing.
That’s where job titles come in.
Why Job Titles Matter
You may understand your potential client’s struggles and have even developed a strong message that speaks to their internal world. You may be great at articulating their fears, frustrations, and aspirations and how you can help them achieve those. That’s a great start.
But here’s the problem – you can’t reach those people unless you know who they are.
Platforms like LinkedIn allow you to search for and connect with people based on their job titles. Choosing a title like ‘leader’ or ‘professional’ isn’t focused enough – you need to know the industry/sector/profession of your intended audience, and their job title. If you don’t know the job titles associated with your potential client, you cannot proactively find them. You’re forced to sit back and hope your content somehow reaches the right people. It won’t.
Hope is not a strategy. Precision is.
Job Titles Let You Curate Your Audience
Let’s say you want to work with women in mid-level leadership roles who are feeling overlooked and under-confident as they try to progress their careers. That’s a good psychographic and demographic outline. My question would be which women in mid-level leadership? What sector, profession or industry do they work in?
Finding their sector, profession or industry isn’t a ‘pick a straw’ guessing game. You need to choose one whose language you speak, and whose lives you understand.
When you know who they are, you can build a network of people who resemble your ideal client, instead of hoping your post floats into the right person’s feed by chance.
The more accurate your targeting, the more effective your messaging will be because you’ll be speaking to people who actually relate to the problem you’re describing.
The ‘Coaching is About the Person’ Fallacy
When coaches say it’s about the person, not the position, they’re conflating coaching delivery with business-building.
If you work as an associate or internal coach, someone else does the marketing for you. You don’t need to know job titles because you’re handed clients. But if you want to build your own coaching practice, you need to learn how to create the opportunities to coach and that starts with identifying who you’re trying to reach.
Think of it this way – knowing who your client is, is a gateway. You need to understand which sector/industry/profession they work in and you need to know who they are in detail. That detail includes their job title(s). Knowing this helps you reach specific people who are likely to have a particular set of challenges or goals. From there, your marketing message connects on a human level. Without the job title, you never get through the gate in the first place.
Real-World Evidence
All our mentors at The Coaching Revolution have a tightly defined target audience. Go to our website (thecoachingerevolution.com) and check the About Us page. Click through to their LinkedIn profiles. You’ll see clarity – a clear niche, a focused message, and a carefully curated audience that reflects exactly who they want to work with.
That clarity isn’t just a ‘nice to have’. It’s the foundation of their commercial success.
They’re not trying to appeal to everyone. They’re not writing generic content and hoping it lands. They know who they’re talking to, which starts with understanding what that person does for a living.
Let me be clear – even if the thing you want to coach around is not career-related, you still need to know who your target audience is. If your answer to the question ‘who do you want to work with?’ starts with the words ‘anyone who…..’ you will really struggle.
Let me give you an example. Our mentor Helen Clare is a menopause coach. It’s fair to say that anyone with a womb who lives long enough will experience menopause and so Helen could say that her target audience is ‘anyone going through menopause’. But she’s much, much smarter than that.
Helen’s business is Menopause in Schools. She focuses her marketing towards school leaders whose staff might be struggling with symptoms of peri/menopause that are impacting their work – performance and/or attendance. Other menopause coaches flip-flop around trying to speak to anyone who is struggling with menopause, Helen stays in her lane and keeps her marketing messages focused on school leaders.
Because of her focused, consistent marketing, Helen has been approached by many other people who are not school leaders and asked to deliver work for them. Examples include charities and art galleries. They approach her saying, ‘We’re not a school, but our staff are struggling with the same things you’re talking about. Do you help people like us too?’ Helen can choose whether or not she wants to work with them (spoiler alert, she said yes!)
Final Thought – Don’t Hide Behind Abstractions
One reason coaches resist choosing a job title is fear. They don’t want to get it wrong. They worry about being “too narrow” or “missing out on opportunities.” But the truth is this:
You’re not narrowing your audience by choosing a job title, you’re helping your message land in the right ears.
Until you know who you’re trying to reach and how to find them, you’re stuck in the shallow end of visibility. You may be brilliant at what you do, but brilliance is irrelevant if no one knows you exist.
Know the job title. Curate your audience. Then, let your message do the work.
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