The first step to finding coaching clients isn’t creating a website, printing business cards, or writing your first LinkedIn post. It isn’t networking, offering free sessions, or hoping referrals will materialise.
The first step is choosing your focus.
All effective marketing is focused. If it’s not focused, it’s simply not marketing. This fundamental truth foxes coaches because we’re trained to believe we can coach anyone. The phrase “we coach the person, not the problem” becomes a barrier to business success when we struggle to reconcile universal coaching principles with the realities of client acquisition.
Resisting The Truth
Choosing a focus is essential, yet it’s the thing coaches resist most fiercely. This resistance typically manifests in two ways.
First, coaches often avoid their most obvious focus – the profession, sector, or industry within which they have the most experience and credibility. The reasons vary – some don’t want to coach people in sectors they left for negative reasons, others don’t want their network to know what they’re doing, perhaps feeling embarrassed about starting a business, whilst others believe those in their professional background don’t want coaching.
Second, when coaches want to address non-work issues like anxiety or confidence, they become confused about why they need any target audience at all. But I can coach ANYONE who is anxious! they insist, missing the point entirely.
No Focus? Not Marketing!
Coaches who resist choosing focus don’t actually market at all. They write generic LinkedIn posts about anxiety and what it feels like, believing this constitutes marketing. If I ask them for specific examples of where to find the anxious people they want to coach, they look nonplussed. They’ve dismissed the idea of focus, so they can’t think where those people might be.
This creates a fundamental problem – anxiety isn’t a location or community. Anxious people don’t gather together anywhere. However, for example, anxious solicitors do – they’re in law firms, legal associations, and professional networks. Anxious teachers also congregate in findable places – in schools, education conferences, and teaching forums.
The difference between I help anxious people and I help anxious primary school teachers isn’t just semantic – it’s the difference between having a client acquisition strategy and having none at all. As I say on repeat, once you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are.
Sector Specific Focus Is Required
The coaching industry faces a unique challenge that other professions don’t encounter. When Thomas Leonard chose the word coach in the 1990s, he repurposed a term with established meaning. Everyone understands that a coach teaches specific skills based on their expertise – but that’s not what we do. Coaching as we practice it doesn’t involve inserting our knowledge into the relationship.
The result is public confusion. People think they know what coaching is, but they’re wrong. This confusion means coaches must actively market to explain what they do – and effective explanation requires specificity.
Unlike other professional services, coaching must be marketed down to sector and job title levels because:
- Different sectors face different pressures and use different language
- A marketing manager in pharmaceuticals faces different challenges than one in software start-ups
- Generic coaching messages get lost in the noise of our advertising-saturated world
- People need to see themselves specifically reflected in your messaging to think this person understands! They’re talking about me!
The Lightbulb Moment
When coaches finally accept the need for focus and choose their target audience, the transformation is remarkable. Suddenly, they realise all the things they know about their particular group that go way beyond surface problems like anxiety.
They understand what might cause anxiety in that specific context, how it shows up differently in that particular professional environment, why people in that sector might be embarrassed about it – or even ashamed about it – and what language resonates with those professionals.
This isn’t about limiting who you can coach – you can still coach anyone. It’s about focusing on who you market to so that someone actually hears your message and knows you understand their world and the difficulties they’re having.
It’s ALL About Taking Action
Many coaches experience this lightbulb moment and immediately feel ready to launch our client acquisition process. We realise that we know where our focus should be, that we understand the problem, and can identify where our audience gathers. We feel accomplished and excited.
However, choosing our WHO is only the first piece of a much larger puzzle. Without frameworks for building know, like, and trust into everything we do, we quickly run out of things to discuss. We talk about the surface issues we recognise, but we lack the depth needed for sustained, effective marketing.
Starting With Focus
The first step to finding coaching clients is accepting that all effective marketing requires focus, even when your coaching capabilities are universal. Choose a specific profession, sector, or industry where you have credibility and understanding.
This isn’t about limiting your potential – it’s about creating the possibility of being heard in a noisy world. A niche is where we start – it doesn’t have to be where we stay, but without that first focused foundation, we’ll remain invisible to everyone.
Your next client isn’t going to find you through generic posts about coaching benefits. They’ll find you because you spoke directly to their specific situation in language they recognise, addressing challenges they face in contexts you understand.
The first step isn’t hoping clients will discover you. It’s about choosing exactly who you want to find and then learning how to reach them effectively. Everything else builds from this foundation.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the opportunity for a robust conversation to help you get your own lightbulb moment, 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).
If you’d like to truly understand WHY you need a WHO, as well as a WHAT, register for the challenge by clicking here.