Many of us who struggle to find clients eventually arrive at the same conclusion – the market is too crowded, too competitive, or too full to build a viable business in. It’s an understandable conclusion, and it also happens to be completely wrong.
The coaching market is not saturated. What we have, as a profession, is a visibility problem, and it stems from something far more specific than competition. It comes from the fact that coaching is almost impossible for coaches to explain to someone who doesn’t already understand it. The fact is that if we want find clients who will pay us a professional rate, we need to become better at articulating the value of coaching in a way non-coaches can assimilate.
Nobody knows what coaching is
No other profession faces the problem that we have. Potential clients don’t know what we do but they think they do, and they’re wrong. A doctor doesn’t need to explain what doctoring is. An accountant doesn’t spend their marketing budget educating people on what accounting involves. Their potential clients already know they need help and already understand what kind of help is available. Coaches have neither of those advantages.
When someone searches for help managing a difficult team, they are not searching for a coach. They are searching for a solution to a specific problem. If our marketing describes what we are rather than what we solve, we are invisible to them, not because the market is full, but because we’re not speaking their language.
This is the reason simply calling ourselves coaches isn’t enough. The job title does nothing to communicate value to someone who isn’t already a coach. In fact it often works against us, conjuring up images of sports coaching or motivational advice, neither of which reflects what most of us actually do. There are regularly posts on LinkedIn from coaches raging about the fact that our profession is unregulated and that anyone can call themselves a coach, without acknowledging that we don’t own the word ‘coach’ and the other coaches (who are coaches in the usual sense of the word) are perfectly entitled to call themselves coaches too.
Generic marketing makes coaches invisible
The problem compounds when we market generically. Most of us position ourselves as available to anyone who wants to grow, develop, or reach their goals, which is a perfectly accurate description of coaching and a completely ineffective piece of marketing. We are writing for everyone, which means we are writing for no one. Potential clients see the content, don’t recognise themselves in it, and scroll past.
When we choose to focus we choose things like ‘leaders and business owners’, or ‘mid-career professionals’, or ‘women in their 40s’, and we fail to realise that none of these is a tight enough focus – not by a million miles.
The problem with those non-focused audiences is that it’s impossible to find them. Who, exactly, do we think we’re writing for when we talk about ‘professionals’? How do we think they’re going to see our content? The hard truth is that they won’t.
Visibility comes from specificity. It comes from being able to describe, in plain terms that have nothing to do with coaching methodology, the exact situation a particular type of person is in and the outcome they want from it. That specificity needs to be combined with active audience curation that fits the profile of the focus we’ve chosen. If we choose ‘new managers in pharmaceutical companies, and actively curate an audience of these people, when they read content that describes precisely what it feels like to have gone from being good at their job to feeling out of their depth with a team, they stop. They think ‘this person understands me!’. That recognition is what generates enquiries, and it has nothing to do with how many other coaches exist.
Articulating value is a learnable skill
The good news is that describing the value of coaching to non-coaches is not a talent some people have and others don’t. It is a skill, and like all skills, it can be learned with the right guidance. It requires understanding why coaching is uniquely difficult to market, building a clear picture of the specific people you want to work with, and developing language that speaks to their reality rather than to your process.
I’ve yet to come across a coach training programme that includes this. That isn’t a criticism of coach training programmes at all, because developing coaching skills and developing client acquisition skills are different disciplines, and most coach training focuses, reasonably enough, on the former. The gap is real, though, and it’s why so many well-qualified coaches work hard at marketing and see very little return.