I’m not going to give you a definitive figure, though I will give you a place to start. What I want to talk about is the process of working out what to charge, because the way most of us are taught to do it produces a meaningless number and no way of finding clients to pay it.
What We’re Taught About Pricing
Business development sessions, whether they come from a training provider or a professional body, tend to teach us how to run a business rather than how to build one. The pricing exercise usually goes like this: decide what you want to earn, decide what you’ll charge an hour, divide one by the other, and there’s the number of clients you need.
For example: You want £100,000, your coaching package is £2,000, so you need fifty clients.
There are two questions which are not addressed by that formula:
- Where are you going to find fifty people?
- Where did the £2,000 come from, other than being the number that divides neatly into £100,000?
Money Mind Monkeys
Of everything I’ve worked on with coaches over nine years, money has the most emotional weight attached to it, and pricing is right up there as one of the places this weight shows itself.
The money mind monkeys are remarkably consistent and include things like: Coaching is an altruistic profession, so charging feels wrong. If we do charge, we should charge little so more people can benefit. We’re not experienced enough yet to ask for a professional fee.
Let’s set all of those thoughts aside for a moment, because the question I want to tackle is how we arrive at a figure we can be reasonably confident the people we want to work with will pay without quibble.
Start With WHO
First of all, we need to know WHO those people are. ‘Professionals’ isn’t focused enough. ‘Women in transition’ isn’t either, because which women, and which transition?
Knowing which women and which transition matters for two reasons. You need to be able to find them, and you need to be able to describe the value of coaching in a way that they can clearly understand. They need to understand it clearly enough that they think, yes, I want that, and I’m happy to pay for it.
As a whole profession, we’re particularly bad at this. Articulating the value of coaching in a way non-coaches can assimilate is exactly what marketing is and I’ve yet to meet a coach who can do it without significant input into their knowledge gap around client acquisition first.
Ask a coach what you get from working with them and they immediately describe the coaching process. The problem with this is that nobody buys a process. For example, we don’t buy conveyancing when we sell a house, we buy the certainty that it will be done properly and the peace of mind that comes with it. We don’t buy accountancy, we buy the security of knowing the year-end accounts are correct when they’re filed.
So what are your clients buying from you?
Ask a room of coaches and you’ll hear things like confidence and clarity. Even though that answer may be correct, until the potential client understands what having that confidence and clarity will mean for them, they won’t buy it.
It’s not just them, it’s true of anyone buying a professional service. Until we know what’s in it for us, we won’t spend £2,000. To be clear, this isn’t purely a coaching problem, it’s how we all behave when we’re the ones buying. We might be able to afford something easily, but we still won’t spend money until we know what we get in return.
Where to Start on the Number
As a rule of thumb, a coach who has finished training and is building hours should be charging a private client around £125 to £150 an hour. If you’re not in the west, a mid-level lawyer’s fee in your country would be a rough benchmark.
Organisational work pays considerably more, but it has a much longer lead time. There are procurement processes, preferred supplier lists, budget cycles, and several people involved in the decision and it can take a long time to make. A private client is one person making one decision, and they can make it on their own.
Why WHO Has to Be This Specific
If I use LinkedIn as an example, not because it’s the only place we need to be, but because a) we all understand how LinkedIn works and b) every professional coach should have a well-optimised LinkedIn profile. As an aside, I’ve met hundreds of coaches who tell me their clients aren’t on LinkedIn, but I’ve yet to meet one whose potential clients genuinely aren’t.
The way we find people on LinkedIn to search for them by job title, and then industry, sector or profession. When coaches tell me they want to work with (for example) people who are overwhelmed, the problem they have with that is how do you find those people? Type “overwhelmed” into the LinkedIn search bar and what that search returns is hundreds of coaches saying they work with overwhelmed people.
There’s a bigger reason specificity matters and it’s about how human attention works. We see somewhere between 10k and 14k marketing messages a day – they’re on the sides of buses, on billboards that used to be static and now that they’re digital, they cycle through six or seven different ads. We see them in print media, in social media, on the radio, in the cinema, on the TV – I could go on. If we actually took notice of all of these ads, we’d never have the time to do anything else. Fortunately, we have a built-in process in our brains that allows us to ignore them so effectively that we don’t even notice most of them in the first place.
The RAS Filter
I’m referring to our reticular activating system (RAS), which sits in our brain and protects us from overwhelm. An example of the RAS doing its thing is when somebody recommends a film and suddenly you see it everywhere, or you start thinking about a particular car in a particular colour and they appear on every street. They were always there, but you weren’t interested, so you didn’t see them.
Our potential clients aren’t looking for a coach, so we get filtered out. They’re not looking because they don’t know what we do, and worse, they think they know and they’re wrong, which means they don’t recognise that the problem they’ve got is one coaching could resolve.
That’s why the focus has to tighten to an industry, profession or sector, and to a couple of job titles. I do understand that feels frightening but let me tell you why what it really does is give you a solid place to start. Choose lawyers as a focus (for example) and you immediately know WHERE they are: which professional networking events they attend, which conferences, which publications they read, which professional bodies they belong to. We know WHERE they are once we know WHO they are, and until we know WHO they are we have no idea where to look.
For the record, we need to choose a group of people from an industry, sector or profession in which we have either lived experience or, at the very least, a front-row seat to the lives of someone in that industry, sector or profession.
The WHAT Has to Be Urgent and Expensive
Our potential clients are struggling with something, and we need to know what it is. The problem they’re grappling with has to be both urgent and expensive. If it isn’t, it can wait, and nobody pays a professional rate to resolve something that can wait. Without urgency and cost, what you’re looking at is an irritation rather than a problem.
Expensive doesn’t only mean financially expensive, although it might. Expensive could be a career cost, where someone isn’t moving up as they’d expected for example. An expensive health-related problem could be a pre-diabetes diagnosis, or a diagnosis of high blood pressure.
Where the Price Comes From
Once you know what the problem is, and what it’s costing them to stay where they are, you can put a price on the package that moves them from where they are to where they want to be. The rule around pricing is pretty straightforward – the fee has to be less than what doing nothing is costing them.
The thing is that any price and any coaching package only works if the people who might want to buy from us can see it. They need to know we exist, understand that we know the problem they’re struggling with, see that we have empathy for it, and (most importantly) they need to hear us talking about their situation using the same language as they do. That’s how we build the “know, like and trust” that have to be in place before anyone will part with a professional sum to work with us. Deep pockets make no difference, because even if somebody has money but doesn’t understand that working with us could resolve their problem, they won’t buy our service.
The £50 Argument
Coaches tell me that £125 to £150 an hour is a lot of money and ask why not charge £50 so that we create a far bigger audience. The simple fact is that it doesn’t work like that. People won’t pay £150 for a session unless they understand what they’re going to get. They won’t pay £50 either. They won’t pay £10 or £5, because none of us spends money on things we don’t understand, however small the amount.
This Sits on the Client Acquisition Side Of Our Business
Packaging and pricing belong on the client acquisition side of the business, not the delivery side, because both depend entirely on who the client is and what they’re struggling with.
Something that’s often asked in webinars I deliver is that as coaches we are often at our best when we know nothing at all about the person in front of us, so how does what I’m suggested fit with this?
If you want to coach people you know nothing about, that’s associate coaching or an employed role, where somebody else has found the client. When you’re finding your own clients, whether private or organisational, there is no version of the work where you don’t need to understand their situation first, because until you can articulate the value they’ll receive, they won’t pay you.
Then, when they arrive to be coached, professionalism means leaving that knowledge at the door and coaching them exactly as you’d coach somebody you knew nothing about. Understanding the problem is how you get them into the room, it isn’t how you coach them once they’re there.
Hypothetical Pricing
Deciding how much you want to earn is a perfectly pleasant hypothetical exercise. It says nothing about where those clients are going to come from, and hypotheticals don’t pay bills.
But, if we know who they are, know what they’re struggling with, know what it’s costing them, and we show up where they are, and demonstrate our knowledge and understanding of what’s going on for them and empathise with their situation, then people will trust us enough to pay us to help them.
An Opportunity
May I offer you a way to learn a bit more about how client acquisition for coaches works for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times a year. If you disagree with what I’ve written here, then come along to our next one because there’s the opportunity to ask everything that’s on your mind and for us to have as robust a conversation as you like. By the end of the four days you’ll have a clear understanding of how marketing for coaches works. An added bonus is that 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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