You’ve done the research. You’ve read books about coaching business, downloaded guides, watched webinars, maybe even taken free courses.
You know what a niche is, you understand the importance of marketing, and you’ve made a plan and yet several months in, you’re not getting enquiries.
The thing is, you’re clever. You’re used to working things out, and intelligence has probably got you through most situations in life, so it makes sense that you’d assume it would get you through this too. The problem is that client acquisition isn’t like most things.
The principles that work in coaching don’t work in marketing, the logic that feels right doesn’t land with clients, and the things that make sense to you won’t resonate with the people you’re trying to reach.
Marketing is genuinely counterintuitive, which is exactly where your intelligence starts to work against you. Clever people think they can improvise their way through something unfamiliar because we’re good at picking things up quickly, adapting on the fly, and working with incomplete information. In most professional contexts, that’s a strength, but in marketing it’s a trap because improvisation on a flawed foundation just builds a bigger mess.
You Have a Chasm, Not a Niche
Let’s start with the place where almost every clever coach goes wrong. You think you have a niche, you’ve probably said something like “I work with entrepreneurs” or “I coach managers in transition” or “I help leaders with communication.” It sounds specific and feels like you’ve narrowed down your focus, but what you actually have is a chasm so wide that your potential clients can’t hear you, no matter how much they may need to.
A real niche is the intersection of WHO (pink vertical) and WHAT (blue horizontal) in the image below. The WHO is a specific profession, sector, or industry and job title. Rather than something broad like “entrepreneurs” it should instead be something like “managing directors of family businesses turning over £1 to £5m”. The benefit of being this specific is that when you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are.
Similarly, the WHAT is a specific problem in that context, not just “communication” but “difficult conversations with underperforming staff,” and not “transition” but which transition? An example of a specific transition is “rebuilding confidence after redundancy.”
When you have both parts of that intersection, you a) know where to find these people, b) can describe their world in their language (literally, using their words), c) you understand what keeps them awake at night that working with you can resolve and d) you know what success looks like for them. Without both parts, you’re marketing to everyone and no one because your posts don’t resonate (they’re not speaking to anyone in particular), your content doesn’t convert (no one’s reticular activating system is being ‘pricked’) because the people you’re trying to reach don’t see themselves in what you’re saying (because you haven’t actually defined who they are).
We may have read about this framework or heard it explained in webinars and challenges, and we can nod along when someone walks through the grid and identify where the vertical and horizontal axes meet. However, translating that intellectual understanding into a real, commercial niche, the kind you can actually build a business around, is harder than it looks.
The clever response is to think we can figure it out ourselves, so we do some analysis, identify something vague that feels right, and move on to the next thing. The problem is that vague doesn’t resonate with anyone, nor does it bring clients.
Your Posts Are About You, Not About Your Clients
Perhaps you’ve started creating content and you’re posting on LinkedIn because that’s where your audience is (you think). You’re writing about coaching concepts, sharing your thoughts on leadership, maybe telling stories about your journey, and the posts feel good because they sound knowledgeable and show your emerging thought leadership – yet you’re getting no enquiries.
The reason isn’t that your content isn’t valuable or that your niche doesn’t use LinkedIn or that you haven’t been consistent long enough. The reason is that you’re almost certainly writing about yourself and/or the coaching process, not about the problems your clients actually have.
We coaches love talking about coaching because we can talk about building self-awareness, identifying limiting beliefs, setting goals, and breaking things down into milestones. We understand the elegance of these concepts and assume other people find them as compelling as we do, but they don’t.
Potential clients reading your posts don’t wake up in the morning wanting coaching. They wake up with a problem – they’re worried about their next board meeting, or frustrated that they can’t delegate without it falling apart, or anxious about losing team members to competitors, and that’s where the conversation needs to start – where they are now.
The other thing clever coaches do is make it about their expertise, writing about their qualifications, their methodology, their unique approach. This makes sense to us because we know how hard we worked for those qualifications and our methodology is genuinely helpful, but our potential clients don’t care about our methodologies. They care about whether we can help them solve their specific problem, and qualifications mean nothing when the vast majority of the population have no idea what we actually do, let alone what our post-nominals mean.
Writing content that actually works requires a completely different starting point than proving what we know or showing off our expertise. It’s about demonstrating that we understand their specific situation, their specific worry, the specific way that problem is affecting their work and their life. It’s about describing their challenge in their language, not our language, and it’s about showing that we understand the nuance of their particular context.
You’ve Read the Book, But You Haven’t Learned the Skill
This is the one that tends to sting a bit. You’ve invested time and maybe money in learning about business, you’ve read the marketing books, maybe taken some business development courses, and you’ve consumed a lot of content about client acquisition.
On some level, that’s great because awareness is the first step, but consuming information about something is not the same as learning how to do it. Think about the difference between reading a book about coaching and actually coaching someone. Reading teaches us the concepts, the theory, the frameworks, but the practise of observed coaching teaches us how to respond to the unexpected, how to sit with discomfort, how to read subtle cues, and how to know when we’re missing something. The learning isn’t in the content. It’s in the doing, and more importantly, it’s in the feedback we get.
Client acquisition is the same way. Reading about it gives us an overview of the landscape and makes us feel more confident than we actually should be, but the professional skill of client acquisition, knowing which of our ideas are right for our specific situation, spotting when our assumptions are flawed, and adjusting in real time based on what actually works, only comes through deliberate practice with real feedback and accountability.
This is why clever coaches often believe they’ve learned what they need to learn and then fail to get clients because they’ve absorbed the frameworks and understand the concepts, but they’re trying to apply them in isolation without someone pushing back on their thinking, without someone spotting the moment they drift into vague positioning or self-focused messaging, and without someone helping them understand why their particular niche isn’t working despite their best efforts.
When Enquiries Don’t Come
Three months pass. You’re posting regularly, you’ve networked at a few events, maybe even had some conversations with potential clients, yet the paying clients still aren’t coming.
At some point, we decide to do something about it and most clever coaches do the same thing – we add more tactics. We assume we need to be posting more frequently, so we post five times a week instead of three. We decide they need to be on more platforms, so we add TikTok or Instagram. We think our posts need to be better, so we try different formats or hooks or CTAs. We wonder if the problem is visibility, so we start pushing for speaking gigs or masterclasses, and we add, add, add, all without addressing the fundamental issues underneath.
What almost never happens is that we stop and question whether the foundation we’re building on is solid, we don’t look at our positioning and ask if it’s actually specific enough to attract anyone, and we don’t look at their posts and ask if they’re relevant to the people we’re trying to reach. Adding more tactics to a broken strategy doesn’t fix the strategy. It just means we’re doing more of something that isn’t working, which is exhausting and demoralising because we can feel ourselves working harder but getting nowhere.
After a few months of that, many of us give up, convincing ourselves that marketing doesn’t work or that we’re not cut out for this business side of things. What we don’t realise is that we were never working with a sound strategy – we were simply improvising, and improvisation doesn’t work.
The 82% Failure Rate Is Telling Us Something
The statistic that gets quoted a lot is that over 80% of qualified coaches fail to build viable businesses within two years. When we hear that, we often assume it’s because those coaches aren’t good at coaching or they didn’t work hard enough or they picked a poor niche or they weren’t talented enough, but that’s not what the data shows. It shows that qualified coaches are failing at the business side, not the coaching side.
Most of those coaches had great coaching skills and most of them were hardworking. What they struggled with was client acquisition, and the reason they struggled is that client acquisition is a professional skill that’s entirely separate from coaching ability.
Being able to help someone transform their thinking doesn’t mean we know how to talk to them about a problem they’re grappling with that working with us can resolve, it doesn’t mean we understand where they hang out online or what publications they read, and it doesn’t mean we know how to get in front of them in a way that makes them notice us. Neither does it mean we know how to describe what we do in a way that makes sense to someone who’s never thought about coaching before.
The 82% failure rate isn’t a reflection of coaching ability. It’s a reflection of the fact that most coaches are trying to figure out client acquisition by reading about it and then winging it, they’re not getting proper training, they’re not getting feedback, and they’re not learning through doing with accountability. They’re improvising, and the market is punishing that improvisation.
What to Do Instead
If you’re a clever coach (and let’s face it – that’s the majority of us) and you’re reading this thinking “oh God, that’s me,” the first thing to know is that this isn’t a personal failing. It’s just the reality of what client acquisition requires. The skill gap isn’t because you’re not smart enough, it’s because client acquisition is a learnable professional skill that no coaching training programme teaches in anything like enough detail, and most coaches don’t invest in properly.
Start with the foundation by making sure you have a real niche, the intersection of a specific profession/industry/sector and a specific problem. Sort that first – not because it’s the flashiest work, but because everything else depends on it. A clear niche is what makes everything else possible because it’s the basis of what comes next, which is where to show up, who to talk to, and what to say.
Next look at your content and ask whether it’s about the client’s problem or about you. Does it use the client’s language, or coach-speak? Is the problem described in a way that makes the people you’re trying to reach go “yes, that’s me” or is it generic enough that it could apply to anyone? An outsider reading your posts shouldn’t have to guess who you’re trying to reach because every single piece of content should be designed specifically for one person and that person sits at the centre of your niche dartboard.
Finally, get accountability, not on mindset or abundance or your why, but get accountability from someone who understands the commercial realities of coaching businesses and will push back when you’re drifting. Find someone who’ll spot when you’re adding more tactics instead of fixing the foundation and tell you when your assumptions are wrong while helping you see what’s actually happening in the market.
The clever coaches who build successful businesses aren’t the ones who’ve read the most books. They’re the ones who’ve recognised that client acquisition is a professional skill requiring more than improvisation and who’ve committed to learning it properly.
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