We email HR and L&D departments with our CVs, our qualifications, and an ‘introducing me’ type pitch. Some of us have been told this is the right approach by our coach training establishments, so we send dozens or even hundreds of these emails hoping someone will respond and offer us corporate work.
They won’t and understanding why is the first step towards actually getting corporate coaching work.
The Reality of Corporate Inboxes
There’s been a 54% increase in coaches since 2019, and that’s just within the ICF. The number of coaches grew exponentially over the pandemic when people were appraising their lives and choosing different directions for their careers.
HR and L&D departments are busy places, and receiving dozens of emails a day from hopeful coaches isn’t their idea of fun. If it’s a large organisation, the platforms are able to drop (potentially) tens of thousands of hours of coaching into place reasonably easily through their existing supplier relationships. Smaller organisations may occasionally respond to a ‘blind’ email – one from someone they don’t know and have never heard of – but it is vanishingly rare.
Your carefully crafted introduction email, with your impressive qualifications and your professional CV, is landing in an inbox alongside dozens of others from coaches with equally impressive qualifications and equally professional CVs. You’re not standing out, you’re adding to the noise.
The Lottery Approach
Most coaching businesses are run by the coach themselves – we wear all 17 hats because we are the business. Trying to compete with the masses by sending pitch emails is disheartening and often futile. There’s always one coach who says “I got a contract like that,” but the majority do not.
You could continue to approach client acquisition work in the same way as winning the lottery, but that leaves a lot to chance. The odds aren’t in your favour, and hoping your email will be the one that stands out from the hundreds landing in that inbox isn’t a client acquisition strategy – it’s a gamble.
The Different Approach
Instead, as small businesses, it’s better to take a different approach – market to the coachee. The coachee doesn’t need to be the budget holder, as long as they have a professional development budget of their own. It may be that the focus you choose is a budget holder, and that’s fine, but you will also definitely need to be able to provide ‘comfort’ to the other stakeholders in the procurement process.
This is an approach that actually works for coaches building their own practices. Rather than trying to convince HR departments who are drowning in pitches from desperate coaches, you market directly to the people who need coaching and let them pull you into the organisation.
Why This Works
First of all, the coachee choosing you is massive. Most corporate coachees are given a coach or choose from a list of people they’ve never heard of, often provided by a platform or external supplier. Finding a coach who is talking about exactly the situation the coachee is grappling with is liberating – “It’s not just me!” – for the coachee, and it also gives the organisation additional security that the coachee is open to coaching and motivated to engage with the process.
When a coachee actively seeks you out because your marketing spoke directly to their situation, they’re already invested in working with you. They’re not being assigned a coach they’ve never heard of and they’re not choosing from a list of strangers. They’ve found someone who understands their specific challenge, and they want that person to coach them.
Providing Comfort to Stakeholders
Secondly, the comfort that you may need to provide to other stakeholders might be a conversation, or conversations, it could be documentation about your programme or ‘box ticking’ regarding insurance, qualifications, and credentials. This is straightforward administrative work that happens after the coachee has chosen you, not the barrier to entry that it appears to be when you’re trying to pitch cold.
When a coachee wants to work with you specifically, the organisation needs to satisfy themselves that you’re properly qualified and insured. They’re not evaluating you against hundreds of other coaches. They’re making sure you meet their basic requirements so they can engage the coach their employee has specifically requested.
The Preferred Supplier List
Finally, coaches have told me that without being on a preferred supplier list, there’s no point in even trying to get corporate work. Well, that’s just not right. Our coaches have for years found that when a coachee chooses them, things like barriers to joining a preferred supplier list vanish.
Conversations along the lines of “please could you fill in this form? You need to be on our preferred supplier list so we can engage you” have happened regularly with our coaches. The preferred supplier list isn’t a barrier when someone inside the organisation specifically wants to work with you. It becomes a formality that the organisation helps you complete so they can proceed with the engagement.
The list exists to prevent procurement departments from having to evaluate hundreds of unknown coaches. When an internal stakeholder – the coachee – has already done that evaluation and chosen you, the list becomes a checkbox rather than a wall.
What You’ve Been Told Isn’t Working
What you have understood to be true about marketing to corporate might not be true. You’ve may have been told to send your CV and qualifications to HR departments. You’ve perhaps been told you need to get on preferred supplier lists before you can get corporate work. You’ve could even have been told that corporate work comes through pitching to decision-makers and convincing them to hire you.
None of that is working for the vast majority of coaches, and yet we all keep doing it because we don’t know what else to do. We keep sending emails into the void, hoping this time will be different, wondering why we’re not getting responses when our qualifications are just as good as everyone else’s.
The approach that’s been recommended to us – often by coach training establishments who should know better but often don’t – doesn’t account for the reality that HR departments are drowning in pitches from coaches. It doesn’t account for the fact that large organisations often use the platforms that make individual coaches largely irrelevant to their procurement process. It doesn’t account for the massive increase in the number of coaches all trying the same approach at the same time.
An Approach That Works
An approach that works is marketing to coachees who have professional development budgets, speaking directly to their specific situations in language they recognise, and letting them pull you into the organisation. When someone inside the company specifically wants to work with you because your marketing spoke to their exact challenge, the barriers that seemed insurmountable suddenly become administrative formalities.
This requires you to have a specific focus – a clear target audience within the corporate world whose challenges you can describe with knowledge and empathy. You can’t market to “all corporate professionals” any more effectively than you can pitch to all HR departments. But you can market to newly promoted VPs in banking who are struggling with imposter syndrome, or senior solicitors facing burnout, or pharmaceutical marketing managers drowning in responsibility.
When you speak directly to a specific corporate audience about their specific challenges, some of them will reach out to you because they recognise themselves in your content. Some of those people will have professional development budgets and/or access to coaching funds. Some of them will want to engage you to coach them.
That’s when the organisation’s procurement team gets involved, not to evaluate you against hundreds of other coaches, but to process the engagement their employee has requested. The preferred supplier list becomes something they help you join, not a barrier they use to exclude you.
The Mindset Shift
The mindset shift from trying to convince organisations to hire you, to attracting individual coachees who then bring you into the organisation is significant. It requires accepting that your impressive qualifications and professional CV aren’t enough to stand out in an inbox full of impressive qualifications and professional CVs.
It requires recognising that as a small business competing with platforms that can drop thousands of coaching hours into place, you can’t win on volume or convenience. You can only win on specificity – by being the coach who speaks directly to a particular type of person about their particular challenges in a way that makes them think “they’re talking about me.”
Most importantly, it requires letting go of what you may have been told about how to get corporate work and being willing to try a completely different approach, even when it feels counterintuitive or risky.
What To Consider
Consider that what you have understood to be true about marketing to corporate might not be true. Consider that pitching to HR departments isn’t working because it can’t work when hundreds of coaches are doing the same thing. Consider that the preferred supplier list isn’t the barrier you think it is when someone inside the organisation specifically wants you.
Consider that there might be a better way – a way that doesn’t involve sending desperate emails into the void, a way that doesn’t depend on standing out from hundreds of identical pitches, a way that actually results in corporate coaching work rather than silence and rejection.
The corporate work you want exists. The coachees who need you are out there. But they’re not sitting in HR departments evaluating pitch emails from coaches they’ve never heard of. They’re searching for someone who understands their specific situation, and if you’re marketing to them rather than pitching to HR, they might just find you.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the opportunity for a robust conversation about this – or to just flat-out disagree with me – 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 provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations!