At some point during or after our coach training, most of us received some version of this advice: be visible and share your story because that’s how clients will find you. It sounds reasonable, even inspiring. The problem is that it’s useless advice, and the people giving it might be better not advising and instead signposting coaches to reputable places for client acquisition training.
Be visible where? How? To whom? Share what story? The advice offers no answers to any of these questions, which means it’s not actually advice at all. It’s a vague gesture in the direction of marketing that leaves coaches to figure out the details for themselves.
Why This Advice Doesn’t Work
The fundamental problem with share your story (usually followed by to build rapport) is that it focuses on the coach when potential clients only care about one thing – what’s in it for them? This doesn’t make them heartless or uncaring, it’s simply the position of any of us when we’re the consumer and buying anything at all. We understand this instinctively when we’re the ones buying. We don’t choose a plumber because of their compelling personal narrative, we choose them because they can fix our boiler. However, when we become the purveyor rather than the purchaser, we get confused, become susceptible to poor advice and start believing that our stories matter to strangers. They don’t.
What matters is whether we can help them with a problem they’re experiencing right now. Until we do the work to understand a) what that problem is and b) the language that our chosen target audience recognises, no amount of visibility or story-sharing will make any difference.
Where This Advice Comes From
This guidance typically comes from coach training organisations, and I know that they don’t give it to mislead, they give it because they think this is how client acquisition works because intuitively it makes sense. The problem is that effective client acquisition isn’t intuitive – in fact, it’s counterintuitive.
Coach training organisations are experts in creating brilliant coaches with excellent coaching skills, but they’re rarely experts in client acquisition. (I’ve yet to find the coach training organisation who devotes 50% of the programme to client acquisition and that’s how important learning client acquisition skills is.) When they offer advice outside their area of expertise, they cause harm even when their intentions are good.
We’d be better off as a profession if we all stayed in our lanes. Those who train coaches should focus on training coaches, and those of us who teach client acquisition should stay away from teaching coaching. Let the experts in each field teach the thing in which they’re expert, and let’s not offer what are simply opinions on subjects we are not experts in.
The Harm This Causes
Coaches who follow this advice usually fail. They try to be visible, but without structure and knowledge, they’re guessing. They share their stories earnestly because they believe it’s the right thing to do to attract clients, and when it doesn’t work, they blame themselves.
I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. Coaches who’ve done everything we were told, who showed up and shared authentically, who put ourselves out there and got nothing back. We conclude that we’re not good enough, or that the coaching profession is saturated, or that marketing simply doesn’t work. None of these conclusions are true, but they’re the only explanations available when we’ve followed advice we were given by professionals we trust.
Even the most prestigious and expensive coach training programmes in the UK get this wrong. One of them signposts their graduates to a sales mentor (who charges £3k for six sessions!) and recommends joining a coaching directory. They’re doing the right thing by not attempting to teach client acquisition themselves, but the alternatives they offer aren’t much better. Sales mentoring is no use until you have someone in a sales conversation to sell to, and marketing is what gets them there. As for directories, precious few people are actively looking for a coach, so being listed on one feels right but rarely results in the client pipeline coaches hope it will.
What Ethical Guidance Would Look Like
Coach training organisations don’t need to become experts in client acquisition, but they do need to a) recognise and b) be honest about the limits of their expertise. Ethical guidance would sound something like this: “We’re not the ones to teach you how to find clients, but here’s where you can learn that skill properly.”
Getting a client acquisition programme accredited by the ICF is hard, with hoops that few are prepared to jump through. However, knowing that the biggest professional body we have has accredited a programme, means coach training organisations can refer their graduates with confidence. They don’t have to guess whether the training is legitimate, they can point to the accreditation and trust that the programme has been assessed against recognised standards.
That would be ethical guidance – acknowledging what you don’t know, and signposting to those who do.
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