A logical leap that costs us clients
One of the first things we learn in coach training is that we can coach anyone. It’s true, and it’s one of the things that makes coaching such a powerful profession. The skills are universal – active listening, powerful questioning, holding space for reflection. They work with anyone who sits down in front of us, regardless of their background, their industry, or their specific problem.
However, somewhere between qualifying and trying to build a business, we make an understandable but expensive logical leap. We assume that because we can coach anyone, we should market to everyone. After all, if our skills work with any client, then surely the widest possible net catches the most fish? It doesn’t, it catches almost nothing, and here’s why.
Two different skills, one big misunderstanding
Coaching ability and marketing ability are utterly different skills. When someone is sitting in front of us, we coach the person, not the problem. We don’t need to know their industry inside out or understand the specifics of their role because the coaching process handles that. But marketing happens before anyone sits down in front of us. Marketing is how we get them there in the first place, and to do that, we need to speak their language, understand their world, and describe their specific problem in words they’d actually use.
We simply cannot do that for everyone simultaneously. “I help people build confidence” is a statement that applies to roughly half the adult population, which means it resonates with nobody at all. Compare that with “I work with newly promoted engineering managers in manufacturing who are struggling to communicate technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.” That second statement will stop the right person mid-scroll because they’ll think, “That’s exactly what I’m dealing with!”
We’re not taught this when we’re learning how to coach
Most of us come from employed backgrounds, and even those of us who worked in marketing before becoming coaches will tell you there’s a massive difference between marketing someone else’s product and marketing yourself. Our education systems produce employees, not entrepreneurs, and nothing in our coach training prepares us for the commercial reality of finding our own clients.
This isn’t a criticism of coach training. Coach training does what it’s supposed to do – it teaches us how to coach. What it doesn’t do is teach us how to build a business, and these are separate professional competencies that require separate learning. Treating them as the same thing is what keeps so many qualified coaches stuck with empty diaries and a growing sense that something must be wrong with them.
There isn’t anything wrong with you, there’s simply a gap in your knowledge, and gaps can be filled.
I’ve written a book called The Intersection that addresses this head on. It walks you through the process of choosing a specific niche, step by step, with reflection questions to help you work through the resistance that inevitably shows up. It’s available in paperback or Kindle.
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