We wouldn’t expect a brilliant architect to automatically know how to win contracts, or assume that an outstanding surgeon can also run a profitable private clinic, or that an award-winning chef can manage a restaurant’s finances. In every other profession, the skill of doing the work and the skill of finding people who will pay for the work are understood to be separate competencies. Pointing this out isn’t an insult. It’s blindingly obvious.
Yet in coaching, we treat them as one and the same. We finish our training, pass our assessments, receive our credentials, and step into the market expecting that the ability to coach will somehow generate the ability to attract clients. When it doesn’t, we don’t think “I’m missing a skill set”, we think “what’s wrong with me?”
Nothing is wrong with us. Coaching ability and marketing ability are separate professional skills, and being excellent at one tells us absolutely nothing about our ability in the other. This is not a comfortable thing to accept, particularly when we’ve just invested significant time and money in becoming qualified, and possibly not realised we needed to learn more than coaching skills. However, it is the single most useful thing we can understand about building a coaching business.
Two Sides Of A Scale, One Business
Think of a coaching business as sitting on two foundations. On one side is everything related to delivering coaching: our training, our competence, our supervision, our continuing professional development, our ability to hold a space where clients can do transformative work. This is the side our profession talks about constantly, and rightly so – it’s very important.
On the other side is everything related to creating opportunities to deliver that coaching: understanding who our clients are, knowing what problems they need help with, describing our work in language they recognise and respond to, being visible to them in the right places, and converting interest into paid engagements. This is the side our profession only touches upon lightly, and when it does, the advice often comes from coaches who already had extensive professional networks they can leverage, developed over a corporate career from before they became coaches. Their experience of finding clients is real, but it started from a position that most of us don’t share.
Both sides are necessary. Brilliant delivery skills without client acquisition skills don’t make a business, and brilliant marketing skills without the ability to deliver won’t keep clients. The problem is that our training covers one side comprehensively and the other side barely at all, which leaves the majority of us with a lopsided foundation that can’t support a viable practice.
Why We Resist This Idea
There’s a reason we struggle to accept that client acquisition is a separate skill we need to learn. Coaching training is intensive, often transformative, and it changes how we see ourselves. We emerge from it feeling capable and ready, because in coaching terms, we are capable and ready. The momentum of that experience carries an implicit promise – you are now equipped to do this work, and we are. We’re just not equipped to find people who will pay us to do it.
The other reason is that marketing has a reputation problem within the coaching profession. Many of us came to coaching because we value human connection, personal growth, and meaningful work. Marketing feels like the opposite of all of those things: transactional, manipulative and self-promotional. So when someone suggests we need to learn marketing skills, the resistance isn’t just practical, it’s emotional. Learning to market feels like becoming something we don’t want to be.
This resistance is based on a misunderstanding of what marketing a coaching business actually involves. Done well, marketing is a conversation about real problems that real people have, in language those people understand, in places where they can hear it. Not manipulation or self-promotion, but making ourselves findable by people who need what we offer and don’t yet know we exist. Most of what coaching helps with carries an element of shame, which means people don’t openly discuss it. When our marketing names their problem accurately, they feel seen and understood, often for the first time. That’s not manipulation, that’s a valuable service.
An Uncomfortable Comparison
What makes this particularly difficult to sit with is that a coach who qualified last month and a coach who has been delivering excellent coaching for fifteen years face the same learning curve when it comes to finding their own clients. The experienced coach has more stories to draw on and more confidence in their ability to deliver, but when it comes to crafting a marketing message that reaches potential clients, choosing a specific audience, and being visible to them consistently, both coaches are starting from the same place.
This feels wrong. Fifteen years of successful coaching should count for something in the marketing department, and it does, but only in a specific way. It can gives us credibility with our chosen audience, a deep understanding of client problems, and real outcomes we can reference. What it doesn’t give us is the ability to turn any of that into a message that the right people see, understand, and respond to. That translation, from coaching expertise to client-attracting communication, from talking about the coaching process to describing the possible transformation coaching can achieve, in language a potential client can assimilate is the skill that has to be learned separately.
Plenty of coaches with marketing degrees and entire marketing careers have discovered this the hard way. General marketing knowledge doesn’t transfer cleanly to coaching because no other profession faces our specific challenge – most people don’t understand what coaching is, but they think they do and they’re wrong. The techniques that work for marketing a consultancy, a therapy practice, or a training company don’t work for coaching, because the fundamental communication problem is different. People understand what a consultant, a therapist or a trainer do, which mean that they know when they require the services of one. With coaching that’s very rarely the case.
What This Means in Practice
Accepting that coaching skills and client acquisition skills are separate competencies isn’t demoralising. The realisation is liberating, because it moves the question from “why can’t I do this?” to “how do I learn this?” and that’s a question with an answer.
The answer involves three things:
- defining who we’re trying to reach with enough specificity that individual people recognise themselves in our message,
- describing the problem we solve in their language rather than ours,
- showing up consistently in the places where those people already are.
None of these require us to become someone we’re not. They require us to learn a skill set that sits alongside our coaching competence, not in opposition to it.
These skills can be learned in the same way coaching skills were learned – through structured training, practice, feedback, and supported implementation. The coaching profession has rigorous, well-designed frameworks for developing coaching competence. What it lacks is an equivalent framework for developing the competence that makes coaching financially viable. Both matter, because one without the other produces either an empty practice or a poor one.
If you’re a good coach who wants to learn the other half, let’s talk.