The advice is familiar. Be visible, be consistent, share your expertise, build your personal brand. Show up on LinkedIn, network, offer value, and the clients will come. This is solid, well-intentioned marketing advice, and for most professional services it works. The problem is that it was designed for professions that don’t share our specific challenge, and applying it to a coaching business is like following a recipe written for a dish you’re not making.
When a therapist follows this advice, it works because potential clients already understand what therapy is. They know when they need it, they search for it by name, and when they find a therapist who specialises in their particular concern, they book an appointment. The advice to be visible and share expertise makes perfect sense when the audience already understands the service being offered. The same is true for accountants, consultants, personal trainers, and solicitors – people know what these professionals do, which means they can recognise when they need one.
Coaching doesn’t work this way, and the difference can be devastating. Most people don’t understand what coaching is, but they think they do and they’re wrong. This single fact makes our client acquisition challenge fundamentally different from every other profession’s, and it’s why following their playbook produces nothing but frustration.
The Wrong Playbook
Let’s think about what happens when we follow standard advice. We show up on LinkedIn and share our expertise, which typically means writing about the coaching process, personal growth, professional development, and the transformations we’ve facilitated, using language like “holding space,” “empowering,” “coaching conversations,” and “working through blocks.” This is our professional language and it describes our work accurately.
The trouble is that it only means something to other coaches. A potential client scrolling LinkedIn isn’t looking for someone to hold space for them. They don’t type “I need empowering” into a search bar. The engineering manager who can’t sleep because she’s drowning in a role she fought hard to get doesn’t know that coaching could help her, because the word “coaching” in her mind means something her company’s HR department arranges for people far more senior than her, or what her son’s football team gets on Saturday mornings. Our expertise, shared in our professional language, is invisible to the people who need it most.
We then network, as advised, telling people we’re (for example) a coach who helps professionals reach their potential. This is the equivalent of a therapist saying they help people feel better – technically true, but so broad that no individual person thinks “that’s for me.” The advice to network works brilliantly for a management consultant who can say “I help mid-sized manufacturing companies reduce supply chain costs by 15-20%.” It falls apart for us because the service we’re describing doesn’t register as something the listener needs, even when it’s exactly what they need.
Generic advice also tells us to offer free discovery calls. When the service is understood, a free initial consultation is a logical step – the potential client already knows they want the service, and the call helps them decide if this specific provider is the right fit. For coaching, the person on the call often doesn’t really understand what they’re buying, which means the conversation becomes an awkward sales pitch rather than a mutual assessment of fit. The discovery call model is designed for a buyer who already wants the service but hasn’t chosen a provider. Most of our potential clients haven’t reached the point of wanting coaching at all, because they don’t recognise their problem as one coaching can solve. In fact, they have often have no idea that there is a solution to their problem.
A Unique Communication Problem
Every other profession can market by describing what they do. A personal trainer lists their programmes, an accountant outlines their services, a solicitor names their areas of practice – and the client hears the description, recognises their own need, and makes contact. The marketing process is essentially this: describe what you do, and the right people will self-select.
For coaching, this process breaks down at the first step, because telling people what we do means that they immediately associate us with people like sports coaches. They assume that our work involves a transfer of knowledge. A description of our service doesn’t create recognition in the listener because the listener’s mental model of coaching is wrong, and we can’t correct it in a networking conversation or a LinkedIn post without sounding condescending, or by describing the coaching process – and nobody buys processes.
This is why the advice to “share our expertise” backfires so reliably. The more we share about coaching as a discipline, the more we attract an audience of fellow coaches who understand and appreciate what we’re saying, and the more invisible we become to the people who will pay for our services. It seems like a perfectly executed marketing strategy but it attracts entirely the wrong audience, which makes it worse than no strategy at all, because it produces the illusion of progress.
What Works
The client acquisition approach that works for coaching is the reverse of the generic playbook. Instead of describing what we do and hoping the right people recognise themselves, we describe a specific problem that a specific group of people have, in the language those people use to describe it, and let them draw the conclusion that we can help.
This means our marketing doesn’t talk about coaching at all. It talks about the newly qualified GP who can’t switch off after a difficult shift and it’s affecting their sleep, their relationships, and their confidence that they’re cut out for the job. Or the middle manager in financial services who got promoted for technical excellence and is now drowning in people management responsibilities nobody prepared them for. The word “coaching” might not appear until the third paragraph, and even then it’s secondary to the problem being described. It may not even appear at all.
This approach requires something that generic marketing advice doesn’t really talk about – a defined audience specific enough that individual people recognise themselves, combined with an understanding of their problems that’s deep enough to describe those problems in their own words. The opposite of “be visible and share your expertise,” this is closer to “be invisible to everyone except the specific people who need you, and when those people find you, make them feel like you’ve joined the conversation that’s going on inside their head.”
The irony is that this approach, when it works, looks effortless. Coaches with a defined audience and a clear message often say that “clients just started finding me.” To an observer, it looks exactly like the generic advice working. In reality, it’s the result of a completely different process – one that requires specific skills most of us don’t have, and that generic marketing advice actively works against.
Should we talk?
If you’ve been following the standard marketing playbook and wondering why it’s not producing results, the answer isn’t that you’re doing it wrong. You’re following advice designed for professions with a fundamentally different communication challenge. Learning the client acquisition approach that works specifically for coaching is a different skill set, and it’s one I’ve spent eight years developing and teaching.