A coach (let’s call her Lisa) recently told me that her potential clients didn’t have a problem that needed resolving. They’re just very interested in personal development, she explained, they want to spend time and money developing themselves. Lisa was convinced that this insight made her situation different from that of other coaches.
She’s not right, of course.
Projection
When I asked Lisa what made her believe this was the case, she said she had been in that position herself when she first discovered coaching. However, when we talked about this in more detail, it turned out that she wasn’t casually interested in self-improvement when she found coaching. She was in a very senior role, feeling bored and unfulfilled, and was horrified at the prospect of spending another 10-15 years in that position.
When Lisa and I had our conversation, she was projecting her current perspective – that of someone who now appreciates personal development – onto her original problem, which was her desperate search for something more meaningful than the career trap she had found herself in.
This confusion between post-coaching perspective and pre-coaching reality is widespread. Even if we found coaching when we are battling a real problem, it’s easy for us to forget the details of that. This can lead us to believe that we were searching for a way to enhance our lives, rather than escape an awful situation.
Commercial Reality
People buy for one of two reasons – to solve a problem or to fulfil a need. For coaching, it’s always about solving a problem. No one spends hundreds or thousands of pounds on personal development as a casual hobby. Even more specifically, listening to a coach wax lyrical about the coaching process doesn’t make anyone wantto buy coaching as a personal development tool. Generally, people invest in coaching because something in their life isn’t working, and they need it to be fixed.
When we talked through what was actually happening for her at the time she sought coaching, there was an ‘aha!’ moment. Lisa realised that no one was going to spend serious money with her for personal development, and that the people she wanted to work with did indeed have urgent problems to resolve.
I’m A Special Case
Lisa had read my book, but thought its contents didn’t apply to her because she believed personal development clients were somehow different from other coaching clients. This is a version of it’s different for me or I’m a special case thinking that keeps coaches stuck.
Without recognising the real problems that our clients face, we default to talking about the coaching process rather than addressing urgent issues. We describe transformation and growth instead of speaking to the specific challenges that make people want to invest in coaching. To be fair, they are rarely searching for a coach – they’re searching for a solution to the problem they have.
Delivery -v- Business
The root of this misunderstanding lies in coaches being stuck in the delivery side of their business, which involves no commercial reality. In coaching delivery, you work with whatever the client brings. In business development, you need to identify problems that people are willing to pay to resolve.
Coaches aren’t taught how to look for problems from a commercial perspective. We’re trained to meet clients wherever they are, which is excellent for coaching but disastrous for client acquisition. The result is coaches who can’t differentiate between problems that pay and problems that don’t. We find it hard to distinguish between I’d like to feel more fulfilled (aspirational) and I’m trapped in a senior role that’s crushing my soul with 15 years left until retirement (urgent and expensive).
People don’t pay to solve problems they can live with. They pay to solve problems they can’t ignore – issues that are pressing, expensive in some way (not necessarily monetarily), or time sensitive.
I want to grow personally can be postponed indefinitely. I’m dying inside in this role and can’t face another decade of this cannot. Lisa’s potential clients aren’t browsing for personal development – they are seeking rescue from a professional situation that has become unbearable.
Once Lisa recognised her client’s real 3am problem, she realised she did have a position to take beyond being yet another coach talking about the value of personal development. She could charge professional fees because she could help resolve an urgent, expensive problem.
Understanding that there really is a problem that needs to be resolved gave Lisa a starting point. It didn’t suddenly make marketing easy – she still needed to learn how to communicate that understanding effectively, but it provided the foundation to move forward.
Pattern Recognition
This isn’t an isolated case. I’ve seen countless examples of coaches misinterpreting their clients’ situations because they can’t articulate the problem they are grappling with. We remember our own journey – the coaching, the growth and the transformation, but we forget the desperation, the urgency, the pain that made us seek help in the first place.
The coaches who succeed commercially learn to look beyond the surface language of personal development and identify the real problems driving their clients’ decisions. They understand that transformation is the outcome, not the reason people invest in coaching.
Our job as business-focused coaches is to identify the real problem(s) our potential clients have – the urgent issues that our coaching can support them in resolving. That’s where our commercial viability lies: not in serving people who are casually interested in self-improvement, but in solving problems that people desperately need fixed.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the opportunity for a robust conversation about this, or any other aspect of client acquisition, why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche? There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT). That’s plenty more opportunity for robust conversation.
If you’d like to truly understand what kind of problems people will pay to have support to remove, register for the challenge by clicking here.