Any successful business needs two skill sets in equal measure, and the easiest way to picture them is as two sides of an old-fashioned weighing scale. On one side sit the delivery skills: coaching qualifications, practitioner certificates, NLP, gestalt, transactional analysis, anything we take out of the toolbox while sitting in front of a client – they all sit on this side of the scale. On the other side sit the skills that create the opportunities to do that delivery, and those are client acquisition skills, which means marketing and sales.
Somewhere along the line our profession decided that coaching skills are client acquisition skills. To be very clear – they’re not. Being a good coach can make you a very good salesperson, because listening properly and asking useful questions helps in any conversation, but that is not the same thing as coaching skills being client acquisition skills in their own right.
Who This Isn’t For
The stats say that 4 out of 5 coaching businesses fail in the first two years. Of the one in five coaches who earn a living from this, some are internal coaches, employed to coach. Some are associates, coaching other people’s clients for a fee. The rest have monetisable credibility, which means they arrived at coach training with a network already built, usually over a long career in a large organisation.
The people in that coach’s little black book are senior enough to hold a budget, able to commission coaching, and, unusually, they understand what our kind of coaching is. If that describes you, none of what follows applies. Go and use your book and the marvellous network it contains and good luck. I’m not suggesting you don’t work hard, only that you start from a different place from the rest of us.
What Has to Be True Before Somebody Pays Us
Before anyone will engage with us at all, they need to know, like and trust us, before they’ll pay a professional rate, they need to understand what’s in it for them.
Our qualifications don’t do either of those jobs, because they sit on the delivery side of the scales. From an ACC to a PhD in coaching and everything in between, they all sit on this side of the scale and to be honest, the only people who know what the letters after our names mean are other coaches. Post nominals raise our credibility within the profession, which is not the same as raising it with the people we want as clients.
Why That’s a Problem Rather Than an Inconvenience
Think of any other professional service. A doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, a physiotherapist, an architect, a psychotherapist. People understand what those people do, and because they know, they know when they need one.
With coaching, people don’t know what we do, but they think they know and they’re wrong. The majority of people believe that coaching involves a transfer of knowledge, because of course it does for other kinds of coaching. Very few people would recognise that the problem they’re grappling with is one that our kind of coaching could resolve.
The problems we help with also tend to be internalised, and they often carry a sense of shame even when there’s no logical reason for it. That’s why our competitors aren’t other coaches. Our competitors are self-help books, podcasts and YouTube channels, because those are where people go when they think the problem is a personal failing. So telling somebody you’re a coach who brings clarity and confidence doesn’t help them understand you can help them, because clarity and confidence isn’t what they think is wrong.
Where Credibility Actually Gets Built
For those of us without the black book, credibility gets built on the marketing side of the business. That’s the part coaches really resist because it’s counterintuitive. The fact is that for those of us without monetisable credibility know, like and trust sit on the marketing side of our scale.
It starts with knowing exactly who we’re talking to and exactly what they’re struggling with that coaching can help resolve. We need to understand that problem so well, in the context of the group of people we’ve chosen as our focus that we understand how it shows up in their life and what it’s costing them. That cost isn’t necessarily financial, but it does need to be an ‘expensive’ problem. Examples of other costs include reputational cost, it might be a relationship they’re at risk of losing, or it might be their health.
We also need to know what they’ve already tried to resolve the problem they have and where they want to be instead of where they are now. That last one really matters because it’s the outcome they’re searching for and people buy outcomes.
Coaches push back here, and the pushback is always the same: I can’t define an outcome for coaching because it depends. It depends on the client, on what they want, on how committed to the coaching process they are. That’s a perfectly good answer on the delivery side of the scales. On the marketing side it doesn’t depend on those things at all. What it does depend on is us being clear about who we work with, what they’re struggling with, and the impact that problem is having on them.
Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action
There’s a marketing acronym, AIDA, and it describes the process somebody moves through before they get in touch. Awareness that you exist, interest in what you’re saying, desire to find out more, and then action, which for us usually means a conversation.
Moving somebody from not knowing you exist to asking for a call is what marketing is. In one sentence, good marketing is being able to articulate the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can assimilate.
Trust comes from the reader thinking “this person is talking about me!” Coaching Revolution coaches get DMs on LinkedIn saying exactly that. When that happens, it means they’re reaching the people who would benefit most from working with them.
Know and Like
The know and like part comes from sharing a carefully curated glimpse of who you are as a human being. Coaches with a corporate background tend to dismiss this and say nobody is interested in their personal life. They’re wrong, because people buy people.
What it does not mean is sharing your story to build rapport. That advice leads to oversharing on LinkedIn, or what I’d call bleeding all over LinkedIn, I see it regularly and it makes me squirm. Coaches grit their teeth, hold their noses and post something intensely personal, and then other coaches arrive in the comments to say how brave and vulnerable it was, which validates the opposite of good marketing and keeps the whole thing going.
Apply the test we’d apply to anyone else. If a doctor or a therapist posted that material about themselves, you wouldn’t think you’d found someone to work with, you’d wonder why they were putting it on social media.
What you share instead is small and human. I post pictures of my dog, and things from my travels. When my daughters were at university I shared their graduation photographs. Beyond that I share almost nothing about my personal life, and it’s enough for people to see there’s a real human behind the understanding I’m demonstrating about their situation.
Tightening the Focus
Good ethical marketing is counterintuitive. It isn’t about casting the net wide, it’s about tightening your focus much further than feels comfortable, and that narrowing is what builds the credibility. Speaking to one specific kind of person about one specific problem is what builds coaching businesses.
We resist it because logic and intuition say the opposite. If we narrow down to one kind of person, what happens to the other eight billion, all of whom could benefit from coaching, and what about all the opportunities we’re giving up?
Here’s the test for that worry. If those opportunities existed in any usable form, you would have them by now. The reason you haven’t found them isn’t that they’re hiding, it’s that nobody knows you’re there, or what you do in a way that makes sense to them.
What Focus Actually Produces
Helen Clare is one of our mentors, and her coaching business is called Menopause in Schools. She works with school leaders, helping them support perimenopausal and menopausal staff so those people can keep doing their jobs well rather than crashing out of careers they’ve spent decades building, because of menopause symptoms.
Helen markets to school leaders. A charity got in touch to say they aren’t a school, but she was describing their staff, and did she work with organisations like them. She does now.
Helen is also a textile artist, and the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester approached her about running a series of textile art workshops on menopause. As she said at the time, she is uniquely qualified to do that.
None of those opportunities came from casting a wide net. They came from being specific enough that people understood what she does and could see themselves in it. Focus opens doors we didn’t know were there, which is the opposite of what we fear it will do.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what effective client acquisition involves, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times a year for 4 days and it isn’t weighty in terms of time. There’s a short concept video each morning and a live Q&A at 5pm UK, and everything is recorded, so nothing is lost if you can’t make the live sessions. One coach who did it told me the value she got was worth more than the gazillions of masterclasses and webinars she’d sat through on marketing over the years.
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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