Three times a year, I run a free challenge called Nail Your Niche for qualified coaches who are struggling to find clients who can, and will, pay a professional rate for their coaching.
One of the patterns I see most consistently, across every challenge, is coaches who are genuinely busy – posting regularly, showing up online, having regular conversations – and still not converting any of it into paid work, despite doing all the things that are supposed to work. The assumption, when results aren’t there, is usually that something about the effort needs to change. Perhaps we need more outreach, better content, or a stronger message? In most cases, the effort isn’t the problem.
The Question Before The Question
Before we ask how to have better conversations with potential clients, there’s a more fundamental question we should be answering. It’s a question so simple that most of us skip it and it’s this: are we talking to the right people in the first place? It sounds almost insultingly simple, but the majority of coaches who aren’t getting clients aren’t failing at conversations – they’re having good conversations with the wrong people, and wondering why nothing is working.
This is a much easier problem to sit with than the alternative. Admitting that our targeting might be off doesn’t threaten our competence as coaches or as communicators. It simply means we’ve been aiming at the wrong thing, which is a strategic problem with a strategic solution, rather than a personal failing that requires us to become someone different.
When The Targeting Is Wrong
When we aren’t clear on exactly who we’re trying to reach, we tend to default to visibility as a proxy for progress. We measure success by activity – posts published, connections made, messages sent – because activity is easy to track and gives us a sense of momentum. The problem is that activity and client acquisition are not the same thing, and a great deal of activity directed at the wrong audience produces nothing except the gradual, demoralising realisation that something isn’t working and we can’t quite put our finger on what.
Stella – and I use that name as shorthand for the qualified, capable, genuinely skilled coach who still doesn’t have enough clients – isn’t failing because she’s not trying hard enough. She’s trying very hard indeed. The issue is that without a precise picture of who she’s trying to reach, her effort spreads out, rather than stacking up. She’s visible, in a general sense, to a general audience that doesn’t include many people who need her coaching and can afford to pay for it.
What AI Can’t Fix
There’s a growing belief among coaches that AI might be the missing piece – that if the content is sharper, the outreach more consistent, the messaging more polished, the results will follow. AI can do all of those things, and do them quickly. What it can’t do is identify the right people to aim at, because that requires something AI doesn’t have: a genuine understanding of a specific professional world, built from real experience, that allows you to describe someone’s situation back to them in a way that makes them feel seen rather than targeted.
If the targeting is wrong, AI won’t fix it, it will industrialise it. That’s not a solution, it’s an acceleration of the original problem.
A Shift That’s Essential For Success
The right conversations – the ones that move naturally towards working together, where the other person feels genuinely understood rather than sold to – don’t happen by chance or by volume. They happen when you know exactly who you’re looking for, where to find them, and what to say that will land for them specifically. Because until those two things are clear, everything else – your content, your outreach, even your conversations – will feel harder than it should. When it clicks however, client acquisition stops feeling random and starts being predictable.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about exactly what I’m talking about here, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how accurate and detailed targeting will help you find clients.