When we’re struggling to find clients, we turn to the people who seem like they should have answers – our reciprocal coaching partners, our tutors from coach training and our fellow coaches. We have conversations that start enthusiastically and eventually become dejected. We share ideas, strategies, and encouragement. We support each other.
What we fail to realise is that often, they’re as lost as we are.
The Illusion of Expertise
I’ve heard incredibly successful people – heads of HR, C-suite executives, senior leaders – discussing the fact that ‘we just need to get the first client or two and the rest will come by referral.’ It blew my mind. How is it possible that these people are so successful in their own field and so utterly clueless about client acquisition?
The answer lies in something I learned from a conversation several years ago, unrelated to coaching, with a solicitor, a doctor, an architect, and a detective inspector. We were all talking about the fact that much of what we learn on a ‘general knowledge’ front comes from television, from books, and from films. Each of us agreed that we did most of our adult learning outside our profession this way.
What was surprising is that each of us then went on to say that the majority of what we see and read about our own professions is nonsense. We’ve never seen an accurate representation of our own field of expertise in popular media. This means that we glean information from what feels like reliable sources, but the people who work in those fields say it’s largely inaccurate.
Much of what coaches believe to be true about client acquisition is what we’ve gleaned based on common sense and general knowledge. As that conversation demonstrated, general knowledge and common sense are often completely wrong.
Why Peer Advice May Not Be The Best Advice
Coaches talk about networking, about printing flyers and building websites. None of which is effective until they have a deep understanding of who they should be addressing. Which networking events should they attend? What should their website say? Generic CV-style websites are a waste of time and energy. Flyers are very rarely a good use of time or money.
Coaches share these strategies with each other because they sound like reasonable business activities. They feel productive, doing them makes us feel like we’re making progress. They give us something to do when we don’t know what else to do.
Many of us do see that what we’re doing it isn’t working, but we don’t know what to do instead. So we share because it feels like we’re actually doing something positive, but often, we’re sharing ideas and principles that simply don’t work.
The Moment of Realisation
A coach once told me that she sat down with five of the most highly qualified coaches she knew, those with thousands of hours of coaching under their belts. She sat with a pen and a pad and asked them to explain to her, step by step, what she needed to do to find clients. She told me that she didn’t understand why they wouldn’t tell her. “It was only later,” she said, “that I realised they couldn’t tell me because they didn’t know!”
In the case of four of them, their hours had been gained either in employment, in training establishments, or in associate roles, and they simply hadn’t found their own clients. One of them did have their own clients and told her to do what they did and to reach out to her network. They said they’d sent 55 emails to their network, got 27 clients out of it, and had never looked back.
However, they were also senior leaders in corporate HR when they took this action, so they had a network who already understood coaching, already knew, liked, and trusted them, and had the authority and budget to commission coaching. That advice only works if you have that kind of network. For everyone else, it’s completely useless.
The Monetisable Credibility Blind Spot
Coaches with monetisable credibility usually don’t realise what a privileged position they’re in. They offer the advice that worked for them without realising that not everyone has a network like theirs. When that’s pointed out, they struggle to offer anything other than ‘well, reach out to your friends and family’ without understanding that know, like, and trust in a professional capacity does not often sit with friends and family.
They genuinely want to help and they’re certainly not being deliberately unhelpful. They simply don’t understand that their lived reality and path to clients isn’t replicable for coaches who don’t have the same starting point. As they’re successful, intelligent people with impressive credentials, we believe them when they tell us what to do.
So we follow their advice, we reach out to our network and we build websites. Nothing works, and we think we must be us doing it wrong because after all, it worked for them.
We don’t realise that it worked for them because they had something we don’t have (monetiseable credibility) and following their advice without that foundation is like trying to build the roof of a house before we’ve laid the foundations.
Why We Keep Listening
We keep listening to our peers and asking for their advice because they’re the people who are closest to our situation. They understand coaching and the challenges of building a practice. They’re intelligent, capable people who seem like they should know what they’re talking about.
What we don’t see is that they’re figuring it out as they go along, just like we are. They’re sharing what sounds logical based on general business knowledge. They’re repeating advice they’ve heard from other coaches who were repeating advice they’d heard. It’s become accepted wisdom in our profession, but it’s not based on anyone actually knowing how to market a coaching business from scratch.
The blind are leading the blind, and we’re all falling into the same ditches.
The Question We Need To Ask
We wouldn’t have dreamed of coaching without first learning about coaching, then learning how to coach. Many of us attended free workshops to experience some coach training before committing to a full programme. We understood that coaching was a professional skill that required professional training.
So here’s the question – if we now consider that client acquisition is a skill equally important as coaching to our goal of having a coaching business, (because if we don’t have clients we don’t have a coaching business) why are we trying to learn it from people who are as lost as we are?
When we wanted to learn how to coach, we found qualified trainers who knew what they were talking about. If we need to learn client acquisition, shouldn’t we do the same? Shouldn’t we learn from people who actually know how to market a coaching business, not from peers who are guessing based on general knowledge and common sense?
An Uncomfortable Truth
Your coaching peers are as lost as you are. The highly qualified coaches with thousands of hours might be excellent coaches, but if those hours were gained through employment or associate work, they don’t know how to find their own clients. The successful corporate leaders who transitioned to coaching might have thriving practices, but if they built them on networks from stellar corporate careers, they can’t teach you how to build one without that foundation.
The advice you’re getting from your peers isn’t bad because they’re bad people. It’s bad because they don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re sharing what sounds logical, what they’ve heard from others, what worked for someone with completely different circumstances. They’re doing their best to help, but they can’t teach what they don’t know.
You can keep asking them. You can keep having those conversations that start enthusiastically and end dejectedly. You can keep trying networking and flyers and reaching out to friends and family. You can keep hoping that eventually, someone in your peer group will figure it out and share the answer.
Or you can recognise that client acquisition is a professional skill that requires professional training, just like coaching does. You can find people who actually know how to market a coaching business and learn from them instead of learning from peers who are as lost as you are.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what effective client acquisition involves, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
We run it several times a year and 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 provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how ethical marketing works.
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