Most of us finish our coach training on a pathway to a credential, with a genuine belief in what coaching can do for people, and very little idea of what comes next. Some of us know from before we graduate that finding clients is going to be a challenge. Others expect clients to arrive once their coaching is good enough, and discover the hard way that coaching quality and client flow are entirely separate things. Either way, the outcome is the same – a qualified, capable coach who is floundering.
The Gap In Training Is Not A Scandal
Coach training organisations are in the business of producing excellent coaches, and the best of them do exactly that. Client acquisition is outside their remit, and there is a reasonable argument that it should stay there, because teaching someone to coach and teaching someone to run a coaching business are different disciplines that require different expertise. The problem arises when coaches assume that the qualification covers everything they need, or when training organisations gesture at client acquisition without really understanding it.
I was recently shown a large series of videos on client acquisition made by the leader of a well-known coach training organisation, produced in response to complaints from former students about how hard it is to find clients. If you don’t understand how client acquisition works, the videos are convincing and the workbooks seem plausible. The advice was well-intentioned but generic and suggested that helping professionals who struggle with confidence might be a reasonable niche. The problem is that the advice was nowhere near specific enough to be useful. Which helping professionals? Where do you find them? How do you build an audience of them? These are the questions that the videos don’t answer, and without those answers, the coach following this guidance will work hard and generate very little. I don’t believe that this coach trainer is being negligent, I believe he is out of his depth on this particular subject, but doesn’t know that and that his coaches will pay the price..
Client Acquisition Is A Professional Skill
The belief that the right clients will arrive once a coach is good enough at coaching is one of the most persistent and damaging beliefs held in our profession. It positions client acquisition as something that happens to you rather than something you learn to do, and it means that coaches who think they don’t have a ‘natural gift’ for selling or self-promotion conclude that building a business simply isn’t for them. This is wrong, there’s no natural gift involved.
Client acquisition is a distinct, learnable professional skill, and like every professional skill, you cannot produce professional results until you have learned how to do it properly. A coach who has completed an ICF-accredited programme is qualified to coach. They are not automatically qualified to market a coaching business, any more than a newly qualified doctor is automatically equipped to manage a GP practice. These are different skills, and the second set has to be learned deliberately, from people who actually understand how it works.
Understanding This Is Crucial To Success
When coaches understand that client acquisition is something to be learned rather than something to be discovered or stumbled into, the frustration of not having clients moves. It stops feeling like evidence of inadequacy and starts feeling like a skills gap that can be closed – because that’s exactly what it is. The coach who has been posting on LinkedIn about confidence and resilience without generating a single enquiry is not failing because they are a bad coach. They are producing generic content aimed at no one in particular, and no one in particular is responding to it. That is a technique problem, and technique can be improved by learning.
The coaches who build viable businesses are not more talented, more confident or more naturally suited to marketing than the ones who don’t. They have simply learned what client acquisition involves, applied it consistently, and given it enough time to work.
Would you like to learn more about what coaching client acquisition involves? Let’s talk.