Most of us, when we qualified as coaches, have no idea how to find paying clients. So we go looking for help, and we can find plenty of people offering to teach us how to market a coaching business. The problem is that many of those people have only ever marketed one thing – their services to coaches and that matters much more than you might think.
When someone sells a programme to coaches, they’re selling to people who already understand what coaching is, already believe in its value, and are actively looking for business support. The audience is self-selecting. Coaches who are struggling to find clients are easy to find, we show up in coaching groups, we respond to posts about coaching businesses. Reaching us is relatively straightforward because we’re already in the conversation.
Selling coaching to non-coaches is a completely different problem. Our potential clients often have no idea what coaching is, or worse, they think they know and they’re wrong. They’re not searching for a coach, they’re searching for a solution to a problem they can’t fix on their own. They don’t hang out in coaching communities, they don’t speak our language, and they won’t respond to content that talks about coaching processes or methodologies because they simply don’t understand it.
We have to find our clients where they are, speak to the problem they’re experiencing in the words they’d use to describe it, and build enough credibility that they trust us with something personal before they’ve ever experienced coaching.
These are fundamentally different marketing challenges, and someone who has only done the first one is not well placed to teach you how to do the second.
An Echo Chamber
Social media makes this worse. As coaches, the only marketing we tend to see in our feeds falls into two categories:
- people marketing to coaches (because we are their target audience)
- other coaches marketing badly
We don’t see good marketing by coaches because it isn’t aimed at us. A coach who is successfully marketing to, say, newly promoted engineering managers in manufacturing isn’t showing up in your feed, because you’re not a newly promoted engineering manager in manufacturing.
This creates a distorted picture of what effective marketing looks like. We end up modelling our efforts on content that was designed to reach coaches, then wonder why it doesn’t work when we point it at HR directors or exhausted corporate parents or senior leaders in the NHS.
We Work With Those Who Have Worked With Others
At The Coaching Revolution, we regularly welcome coaches who have previously invested time and money learning marketing from someone else. The pattern is consistent in that they were given concepts and theories by their previous teacher(s), but they didn’t know what they were supposed to actually do with any of it. They couldn’t translate what they’d learned into a practical, repeatable process for getting paying clients.
When they work with us, they turn it around. Yes, there’s unlearning involved, which can be uncomfortable, but they do the work and they get results.
Our Approach Is Very Different
Every mentor at The Coaching Revolution is an alumnus. They joined as clients, learned the process, built successful coaching businesses, and now teach other coaches to do the same while continuing to run and actively market their own practices. This isn’t a small detail, it’s the whole point. You can see our team on our ‘About Us‘ page of the website. If you click on that and scroll down, you can click to see the LinkedIn profiles of each of us. I am the only one of us who is marketing to coaches.
Our private client programmes are taught by mentors who are successfully marketing their coaching to private clients right now. Our corporate programmes are taught by mentors who are currently selling coaching into organisations. Our public sector programme is taught by coaches who specialise in that sector. Even our client services team are alumni who are marketing their own coaching businesses alongside their roles with us.
That means when you’re working with our mentors, you’re not learning from someone who once did what you’re trying to do, or who teaches the theory of it, or whose only marketing experience is selling to coaches. You’re learning from someone who is doing it today, facing the same challenges you face and succeeding.
When they teach you how to write a LinkedIn post that speaks to your target audience rather than to other coaches, it’s because they write them every day, and they’re working. When they help you craft a marketing message for people who don’t know what coaching is, it’s because they solve that problem in their own business every day.
There is a large pool of mentors at The Coaching Revolution and between them they cover private client coaching, corporate coaching and public sector coaching. That breadth of current, practical experience is what makes the difference between learning theory and learning something you can implement.
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