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 most disheartening situations I encounter, and one of the most common, is the coach who is genuinely out there having conversations with people who could become clients, putting in the time and the effort, and still not converting any of it into paid work. The conversations are happening, and they’re often really good conversations, but still – no clients. And because the effort is real and visible, it’s very hard to understand what’s going wrong.
A Logical Conclusion
When conversations with potential clients don’t go anywhere, the most natural explanation is that the other person doesn’t get it. They don’t get it, they can’t see the value, or even they’re not ready. This conclusion is understandable, and it lets us off the hook in a way that feels reasonable. If potential clients don’t understand the value of coaching, it’s rarely because they can’t – it’s because we haven’t made it make sense to them.
The difficulty with this explanation is that it points us in completely the wrong direction. If potential clients don’t understand the value of coaching, that isn’t their limitation – it’s information about how we’re communicating. Most people have no framework for understanding what coaching is or what it could do for them, because they’ve never experienced it. Expecting them to see its value from the outside, based on how we describe our process or our methodology, is asking them to assimilate something they have no reference point for.
A Translation Problem
There is a skill involved in making the value of coaching legible to someone who has never been coached, and it’s a skill that coach training doesn’t cover. It has nothing to do with how good a coach you are. It’s about the ability to translate – from what coaching does, expressed in coaching language, to what a specific person in a specific situation might experience differently as a result of working with you, expressed in their language.
That translation isn’t intuitive, and most coaches haven’t come across it as a concept, let alone as something to learn and practise. So when conversations stall, we attribute it to the other person’s lack of readiness, rather than to a gap in our own ability to make the work meaningful to someone standing outside it. Neither explanation is comfortable, but only one of them gives you any control.
How To Have The Right Conversation
A conversation that moves naturally towards working together isn’t one where we’ve explained coaching thoroughly enough for the other person to understand it. It’s one where they’ve felt understood – where we’ve said something that makes them think this person gets it. That feeling of being seen is what creates the trust and the curiosity that a working relationship needs to begin.
That can only happen if we know, with real precision, who we’re talking to and what their world actually looks like from the inside. It requires specificity about the problem we’re describing, the pressure we’re naming, the outcome we’re pointing towards. Vague descriptions of what coaching can achieve don’t create that feeling. Specific, accurate descriptions of a particular person’s particular situation do. Without that level of specificity, those conversations rarely go anywhere. With it, they start to move on their own.
An Opportunity
If reading this has left you with the uncomfortable sense that your conversations aren’t quite landing the way they should, that’s not a reflection of your ability as a coach – it’s a reflection of how difficult it is to make the value of coaching clear to someone who’s never experienced it.
That’s exactly what we work on inside Nail Your Niche.
It’s a free, short challenge designed to help you get precise about who you’re speaking to and how to describe what you do in a way that actually makes sense to them, so your conversations start to move somewhere, rather than stalling.
We run Nail Your Niche several times a year and there’s also a VIP option if you’d like more direct support. For £99 (inc VAT), you’ll join three small-group mentoring sessions with me, where we can get into the specifics of your targeting, your conversations, and where things may not be translating yet.
If that feels like the missing piece, you can register for the next challenge by clicking here.