One of the best things about my job is that I work with highly intelligent people. However, one of the worst things about my job is that I work with highly intelligent people.
That’s mostly tongue in cheek, but there is a serious point underneath it. We approach marketing and business building with a knower’s mind rather than a learner’s mind. As coaches we are professionally curious, trained to assume we don’t know, yet then when the subject turns to client acquisition we think we know, based on an opinion or a feeling. We wouldn’t dream of doing that with any other professional skill.
Where the Knower’s Mind Shows Up
The knower’s mind isn’t visible to us as having a knower’s mind. One place I see it very regularly is when I’m talking to coaches about client acquisition, it shows up as resistance to having a focus. To somebody who hasn’t been taught how marketing works, the obvious move when you’re starting a coaching business is to let as many people as possible know you exist and stay open to every opportunity. It feels right, intuitive even – and we’re encouraged to listen to our intuition when we’re coaching. Yet that intuition is completely wrong in this context.
All effective marketing is focused. There is no such thing as unfocused marketing. What we’re doing when we’re ‘marketing’ in an unfocused way is just talking, or writing – we’re not marketing.
The resistance to focus usually comes out as a worry about loss. Think of all the opportunities I’d be giving up, all the people I could help, all the doors I’d be closing. So, as a direct northern English woman, I’d like to ask you a question: how that’s working so far? Where are those opportunities? If they existed in any usable form, you’d have found them by now, or they’d have found you. I’m willing to be that they haven’t though, because the appearance of those opportunities is based on hope, and hope is not a business strategy.
Two Kinds of Credibility
Every business needs two skill sets in equal measure, and the easiest way to picture them is as two sides of a weighing scale. On one side sit the product or service – the delivery skills – which for us means our coaching. On the other sit the skills that create the opportunity to do that delivery.
Our credibility within our profession sits on the delivery side of those scales. Whether you’re a newly qualified ACC or hold a PhD in coaching, those qualifications sit on the delivery side, along with every other tool in the box: gestalt, transactional analysis, NLP, practitioner certificates, profiling tools, facilitation qualifications – no matter what certificate or qualification you have that you use in service of your client – they’re all delivery tools and they all sit on the delivery side of the scale.
This is where our professional credibility comes from. We recognise each other’s qualifications. We know at a glance that an MCC has at least 2,500 logged coaching hours behind them, and we respect the work that took. The problem is that on the other side of the scale, these qualifications and certificates mean almost nothing.
There are a few exceptions. Some associate and employed roles require specific qualifications. Occasionally a client organisation wants one, and UK public sector work is where I have seen that. For the rest of us however, our clients don’t know what those letters mean, because they don’t know what we do. Attaching post nominals to a job somebody doesn’t understand doesn’t clarify anything, and it doesn’t give us the status we long for.
Client-Side Credibility
When we deliver coaching, everything is focused on the client in front of us. When we market, it’s still client focused, but the focus shifts to the clients we understand best and can reach most easily.
If you’re feeling your knower’s mind kick in here, may I suggest that you take the reaction as data and ask yourself two questions. Why am I resisting this? and What is it about this that feels wrong? Marketing works like this whether or not we believe it.
Two things have to be true before you can market to anybody. You need to know who they are, and you need to know what they’re grappling with that working with you would resolve. You need to know both in a lot of detail.
Knowing WHO they are tells you WHERE they are and therefore where you to be. Knowing what they’re struggling with lets you talk about it the problem they have. Knowing both is key, because then we can talk about the problem that we have in the context of the potential client.
Why Context Is Important
Helen Clare is one of our mentors and her business is Menopause in Schools. She’s a menopause coach. As you may be aware, there are a large number of menopause coaches, working with a potential audience of just over half the population.
Helen works with senior women leading in schools, because she understands that context from the inside, having worked in schools both as a teacher and as an external supplier. She knows how a school operates, how the rhythm of the school year runs, and how menopause symptoms derail somebody in that environment in ways they wouldn’t elsewhere.
Someone managing menopause symptoms in a busy secondary school is in a completely different position from someone managing the same symptoms as, say, a freelance programmer working from home. They may both have the same symptoms, but they live in entirely different contexts and therefore have entirely different experience of the problem(s).
“She’s talking about me!”
Being able to describe the situation in which your potential client finds themselves, in their own lived context is what makes them think she gets it, she knows how difficult this is, and most importantly she’s talking about me. Until somebody recognises themselves in what we write or say nothing happens, because people are not searching for a coach.
The reason I say that people aren’t looking for a coach is because they don’t know what we do, which means they can’t recognise a situation where we could help. If we were lawyers, accountants, doctors or psychotherapists, people would know what we do and therefore know when they need us. That difference is enormous, and it’s the reason marketing a coaching business is a specialist skill.
Nobody on the client side of the scales cares how many hours we’ve logged, or that we’re humbled by our latest accreditation. We care about those things of course. We care very much, and we should, but our potential clients need to stop hearing about us and about coaching and start hearing about how much we understand their situation and can offer a solution.
Where Are You Already Credible?
This next part of this article is where I get the most pushback. In order to be credible with a particular group of people, we need to choose a context where we have either lived experience or a front row seat to the life of somebody with lived experience. Either is fine, because what matters is knowing that context inside out.
By context I mean an industry, profession or sector, narrowed to a job title or a small group of job titles. You need this level of detail even if the coaching you want to do has nothing to do with work. For example, if you’re a parenting coach and you want to work with parents, my first question would be which parents?, and my second would be where are you planning to find them? Parenting coach feels like an enormous audience, and that’s the trap, because none of those people know what you do or are looking for you.
Think about a specific problem, for example, a teenaged child in trouble with the law. For a police officer or a solicitor, the consequences are both real and the feelings associated with those consequences are different than those of, say, a teacher. The problem is the same, but what it means to the person living it isn’t. That’s what I mean when I say context.
That depth of understanding – knowing who they are an what they’re struggling with – is what lets you use their language rather than ours. Our clients don’t need to know we can hold space for them, because they’ve no idea what that means. They need a practical, plain description of who we help and what we help them with, before they can understand that we could help them at all.
The Biggest Objection
Coaches tell me they coach much better when they know nothing at all about the person in front of them and so they don’t want to work with people whose situation they understand.
Here’s the thing: knowing a context is not the same as knowing an individual. We can understand broadly what somebody is dealing with, but we won’t know how it’s affecting them personally. Every human is unique. We have unique sets of experience, beliefs and values and so everyone we coach will be different, even though they apparently all arrived with what appears to be the same problem.
Being able to set aside the context once the coaching starts is a professional skill, and it’s one worth learning. If you can’t set that aside, or you don’t want to, then associate coaching or an employed role is where you can find clients you know nothing about.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about this, or even have a robust conversation with me about why you disagree, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times a year. It’s four days but doesn’t mean taking four days off work. It’s about challenging our thinking, which most of us rather enjoy. Whether you agree or disagree with me as you’re reading this, I can promise you’ll get something useful from the challenge. Best of all, it’s good fun.
There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how marketing for coaches works.
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