There’s a point for many of us where something quietly uncomfortable becomes impossible to ignore. We’ve been doing the things that seem sensible. We’ve been talking about our work, showing up when we can, telling people we’re coaches, maybe posting on LinkedIn, maybe refining our websites, maybe hoping that if enough people know we exist, some of them will eventually become clients.
It’s an entirely understandable way to think, because in many areas of life, visibility does help. If more people know about something, more people can respond to it and it stands to reason that if more people hear about your coaching business, surely some of them will be interested. It feels logical to cast the net wide, talk to as many people as possible, and keep the message broad enough that nobody feels excluded.
The difficulty is that client acquisition for a coaching business is counterintuitive. What feels right isn’t what works.
The Intuitive Route Is The Expensive One
Most of us don’t realise we don’t know how client acquisition works. That’s not an insult – it’s the problem. We can be highly trained, thoughtful, experienced, commercially serious people and still be operating from assumptions that feel sensible but don’t produce clients.
One of the biggest assumptions is that a broad message gives us more opportunity. It feels sensible to keep the door open to everyone because coaching can help with so many things, but in practice, that broadness often makes it harder for anyone to understand why they should work with us.
When the message is broad, it doesn’t become more available, it becomes harder to recognise. People may understand that you’re a coach, but that doesn’t mean they understand what you can help them with, why it matters to them now, or whether it’s worth paying a professional rate for.
Hope Feels Softer Than Focus
This is why hope can become such a seductive strategy. We keep posting, adjusting the website, having conversations and staying visible, while quietly hoping that the right person will notice, remember us, refer us, or eventually decide they need what we do.
Hope isn’t a character flaw, and it certainly isn’t laziness. It’s often what we rely on when we haven’t learned how client acquisition works for coaching. The problem is that hope keeps the responsibility vague, because it allows us to stay busy without making the sharper commercial decisions that would make our work easier for the right people to find, understand and buy.
Focus asks more of us. It asks us to decide who we’re speaking to, what problem they have, why that problem matters, what language they use for it, and how our coaching creates value in relation to that problem. That can feel restrictive from the inside, especially when we’re used to thinking of coaching as something that can help almost anyone.
The Tighter You Focus, The Louder Your Voice
One of the things I say often is that the tighter you focus, the louder your voice. That doesn’t mean we become louder in the performative sense. It doesn’t mean posting more, shouting more, revealing more of our life online, or trying to become a bigger personality. It simply means our message becomes easier for the right people to hear because it’s no longer diluted by trying to speak to everybody.
A broad message asks people to do the work of translation. They have to work out whether our coaching is relevant to their situation and whether the value is strong enough to pay for, and most people simply won’t do that work for us. That’s work is our work as coach/marketers, which is what we must become if we’re going to make this work.
People for whom coaching could be a very good fit won’t do that work, because they don’t understand coaching the way we do and they’re not looking for a coaching process. They’re looking for help with something specific in their own world.
A focused message does that work for them. A focused message makes their problem visible in a way they can understand, so by the time they get on a call with you, they already have a much clearer sense of why coaching might be the answer to the problem they’ve been struggling with.
The Uncomfortable Bit
The uncomfortable bit is that the route that feels generous, open and safe is the route that keeps enquiries away. Talking broadly about coaching may feel like you’re making yourself available to more people, but if nobody understands why what you’re saying should matter to them, you haven’t made yourself easier to buy from.
That’s the part many coaches push against, because specificity feels risky. It feels as though we’re closing doors, when commercially it’s often the first time we make a door visible at all.
If you’ve reached the point where you realised that what you’re doing isn’t working, the next question is not whether you should be more visible. The better question is whether your visibility is focused enough for the right people to recognise why you are the solution to their problem.
I know that’s an uncomfortable idea to sit with, but it’s also the beginning of a much more serious conversation about building a coaching business that actually generates enquiries.
Recent Comments