Coaches are a huge market, and we’re notoriously poor at finding clients. This makes us a target, and there are charlatans who have noticed.
I get between 15 and 20 people every week who oil themselves up and slide, uninvited, into my DMs offering to find me 10-20 warm leads a month or take me to 6 figures in 90 days. Some are audacious enough to put a meeting invitation directly into my diary for a webinar I never asked to attend. It’s perpetual and horrible, and every coach I’ve spoken to has had the same experience.
These people have built businesses on the back of the struggle we have with client acquisition. They make big promises and charge big fees, and I’ve worked with coaches who’ve spent anything from £5k to $22k on programmes from various gurus and not found a single client on the back of it. What they were left with was a bunch of information and nothing actionable.
Why We Fall For It
As a profession, we’re notoriously undereducated in client acquisition. Our coach training programmes taught us how to coach well, but they didn’t teach us how to find people to coach, and for most of us, this has come as an unpleasant surprise.
The problem is compounded by the fact that coaches tend to be intelligent, capable people who are used to being able to wing it with great success throughout their lives. When we’ve winged it before, we’ve done so from a position of underlying knowledge and skill, but we have zero knowledge and skill about client acquisition. I’ve worked with coaches who have degrees and entire careers in marketing who still struggled to market their coaching businesses, because marketing coaching is different from marketing products people already understand. Our western education systems produce employees, not entrepreneurs, and most of us arrive at coaching without any foundation in how to build a business.
On top of this, many of us have genuine ethical concerns about marketing. We worry about being pushy, about making promises we can’t keep, about coming across as salesy. This adds another layer of confusion, because we’re not just trying to learn client acquisition, we’re trying to find a way to do it that doesn’t compromise our integrity. When someone promises an easy answer that will magically solve all of this, we want to believe them.
The biggest problem for clever, capable coaches is that client acquisition is counterintuitive. Although it feels right to cast our nets wide and tell everyone about our coaching businesses, the truth is that all good marketing is focused. What works feels wrong, and what feels right doesn’t work, which leaves many of us convinced that there’s something we’re missing.
This is where the charlatans come in. When someone tells us they have the secret to success, we feel hopeful because we believe there must be a secret. There isn’t. There’s just a set of skills we don’t know, and learning those skills takes time and effort. The problem is that time and effort don’t sell programmes, so the charlatans promise shortcuts instead.
The Red Flags
If anyone tells you it’s easy, that’s a red flag. If anyone tells you it’s fast, that’s a red flag. If anyone tells you it’s just one thing, that’s a red flag. If anyone tells you that you’ll be earning six figures later this year, that’s a red flag. Yes, some coaches do achieve this in a short time frame, but they’re in the minority, and anyone who promises it as a likely outcome isn’t being honest.
There’s another red flag worth paying attention to – how does their marketing make you feel? Does it speak to you and resonate with you? Do you find yourself thinking ‘they’re talking about me!’? If so that’s a good thing. If it doesn’t, it’s a red flag.
The people who slide into your DMs uninvited, who make inflated promises, who use pressure tactics and artificial urgency are showing you exactly what they think good marketing looks like. If their methods make you uncomfortable, the tactics they teach you will probably make you uncomfortable too. Coaches who worry about ethical marketing should be deeply suspicious of anyone whose own marketing feels unethical.
Basically, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Client acquisition is a professional skill that takes time to learn, just like coaching itself. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling you something that won’t deliver.
What Legitimate Training Looks Like
There is good client acquisition training out there for coaches, but you need to know what to look for.
Look for a structured programme with live teaching rather than a collection of videos and PDFs for you to work through on your own. Look for accreditation by one of our professional bodies, which means the training has been assessed against recognised standards. Look for testimonials, and better yet, ask to speak to someone who is currently on the programme so you can hear what it’s really like.
Look for training that teaches client acquisition methods aligned with your values as a coach. You shouldn’t have to choose between finding clients and maintaining your integrity, and if a programme is teaching tactics that feel manipulative or pushy, it’s not the right programme for you. Ethical client acquisition exists, and legitimate training will show you how to do it.
Perhaps most importantly, look at who is teaching it. Are they coaches who actively market their own businesses to real clients, or do they only market to struggling coaches? There’s an entire industry of people who make money by teaching coaches how to make money, without ever having made money from coaching themselves. That should concern you.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to talk more about learning to market a coaching business, why not book a call.
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