The resistance most coaches feel when told to focus our client acquisition efforts on a specific type of client with a specific type of problem is entirely understandable because it feels counterintuitive. Surely casting a wider net gives us more chances of finding clients and narrowing our focus means fewer opportunities, not more. This logic is convincing, and it is also the reason so many coaches spend years marketing to everyone, yet engage very few clients before walking away, convinced that the market is saturated.
The clients we’re afraid to lose don’t exist yet
When we push back on choosing a focus, we think about all the clients we might miss out on – the life coach who also works with executives, the career coach who could equally help someone going through a divorce, the business coach who is just as comfortable with a GP as with an entrepreneur. The point worth considering is this – if any of those clients were out there finding us, we would already have them. The clients we’re afraid to lose by focusing our marketing are theoretical. They’re not in our inboxes, or on our client lists because they do not exist (and yes, I know how painful that is to read).
The numbers make this even clearer. We don’t need hundreds of clients to build a financially viable coaching business. If we work with clients on a ten-session programme at a professional rate (so, say, £1500 for the programme), the arithmetic is straightforward, and the total number of clients we need over the lifetime of our businesses is smaller than most coaches expect. The pool of potential clients within a well-chosen focus is more than sufficient. The problem is never the size of the market, it’s the invisibility of the marketing.
A Marketing Decision, Not A Coaching Constraint
The fear of becoming what coaches sometimes refer to as a cookie cutter coach, one who works with the same kind of person around the same kind of problem forever, rests on a misunderstanding of what choosing a focus actually means. A focus is a marketing decision that determines who you talk to, what audience you curate and how you describe what you do, it has nothing to do with how you coach.
If we think about it for a moment, we already know that coaching doesn’t work like that. Every client who sits across from us in a coaching conversation brings their own values, beliefs, experiences and history. Two new managers from the same sector/industry or profession, facing ostensibly the same challenge will present entirely differently in coaching, and by session three, neither of them is likely to be talking about what they thought was the issue in session one, because that’s the nature of coaching. A focus on the marketing side cannot flatten the rich, complicated, specific humans on the delivery side, because human beings aren’t flat or simple. The variety that coaches love about their work doesn’t come from marketing to everyone, it comes from coaching individual human beings, and individuals are always unique.
Specificity Is What Makes Us Visible
Unfocused client acquisition efforts produce what I call vanilla marketing – content and conversations that describe coaching in general terms, appeal to no one in particular, and generate very little response (other than from other coaches). We see it constantly – coaches who describe themselves as helping people reach their potential, overcome their limiting beliefs, or achieve their goals. These phrases are accurate and completely invisible, because they could apply to any coach, any client and any situation. What this means is that no non-coach will even see this content, because its vanilla nature means it doesn’t prick their Reticular Activating System (RAS) and that means they literally won’t see it.
Focused client acquisition work does the opposite. When a coach who works with newly promoted senior leaders in the NHS writes content that describes the specific experience of suddenly managing former peers, of feeling underprepared for a role they haven’t been trained for and of doubting their own capability within that particular setting, a specific group of people stop scrolling. Their RAS has been activated, because the content is personal, it’s about them. They think this person understands my situation. That recognition is what generates the kind of inbound enquiry that turns into a paying client, and it only happens on a regular basis when the marketing is specific enough to be meaningful.
Choosing a focus makes you more attractive to the clients who need you, not less, and for most of us, that shift in visibility is the thing we are missing.
Would you like to learn more about how to build a coaching business? Let’s talk.