One of the biggest barriers coaches face is not that people have never heard of coaching. In many ways, that would be easier. The bigger problem is that people think they know what coaching is, and they’re wrong. Most coaches are very aware of this, but knowing that this is a problem and knowing how to solve it are two very different things.
The usual response is for us to try to explain coaching. We start describing the process: powerful questions, holding space, creating awareness, self-discovery, accountability, values, goals, limiting beliefs, helping people find their own answers. None of that is necessarily wrong, and much of it may be completely accurate, but (and this is important) accuracy is not the same as commercial usefulness.
Explaining The Process Does Not Create Demand
Nobody cares about the professional processes of any individual profession, they care about what that professional can do for them. They care about the problem they are struggling with, the thing they want to resolve, the outcome they want, the risk they want to avoid, or the decision they need to make.
This is the part our profession is really bad at articulating. Not because coaches are unintelligent, and not because they are bad at what they do, but because coaching trains us to think very carefully about the process while client acquisition requires us to think very carefully about the buyer’s problem. We’re trained magnificently in the first skill and not at all in the second.
That distinction matters because potential clients do not understand, or indeed care about coaching, and so explaining the mechanics of coaching rarely helps. It often leaves them with more information about the process, but no clearer sense of why they would pay a professional rate for it.
Coaching Is Different From Other Professional Services
With most professional services, people broadly understand when they need them. They may not understand the details of how solicitors, accountants, therapists, trainers, consultants, dentists, architects, physiotherapists or psychotherapists work, but they understand enough to know when they need the services of one of them.
They know when they’ve got a legal problem, when their tax return is beyond them, when their tooth hurts, when they need plans drawn up, or when an injury needs treatment. They may not know the professional process behind any of those services, but they understand the category well enough to recognise when it’s relevant.
With coaching, that is simply not the case. Most potential clients are not walking around thinking, “This is a coaching problem.” They are thinking about the situation in front of them: the board meeting they are dreading, the team they cannot seem to lead effectively, the promotion that has made them feel exposed, the business decision they keep avoiding, the confidence issue that is costing them opportunities, or the career question that will not go away. They may be experiencing something coaching could help with, but that does not mean they know to look for a coach.
People Are Not Searching For Coaches
This is the point we need to absorb – people are not usually looking for coaches. The idea that a steady stream of potential clients will search for “coach,” find your website, understand your value, and decide to work with you is not how client acquisition works for us.
Precious few people are searching for coaches in the first place, and of the precious few searches that are for coaches, they are for every kind of coach: fitness coaches, sports coaches and all the other versions of coaching that exist in the public imagination.
Even when someone does search for a coach, there is no guarantee they are searching for your kind of coach, with your kind of expertise, for the kind of problem you are equipped to help them solve. That is why relying on being found by people already looking for coaching is such a fragile strategy.
The Client’s Problem Has To Come First
If potential clients do not know that coaching is relevant to their problem, explaining coaching is rarely the answer. The better route is to start with the problem they already recognise, which means your marketing cannot begin with the coaching process. It has to begin with the client’s world.
What’s happening in their world? What are they finding difficult, trying to change, worried about, or quietly paying a price for, emotionally, reputationally or commercially? What have they already tried, what are they afraid might happen if nothing changes, and what language would they use to describe all of that?
This is why once we can articulate the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can assimilate, everything starts to change. The work is not to persuade people to care about coaching as a concept, it’s to help the right people recognise that you understand the problem they are already living with, and that working with you is a credible way to address it.
Many Coaches Lose The Client Before It Starts
A good coach can lose a potential client long before a sales conversation ever happens, not because they are bad at coaching, not because they lack credibility, and not because the market is saturated, but because their marketing is answering a question the client is not asking.
The coach is answering, “What is coaching?” The client is asking, “Can this person help me with the thing I am dealing with?” Those are not the same question.
If your website, LinkedIn profile, content, and conversations are mostly explaining coaching, your coaching philosophy or your passion for coaching, you may be educating people about you beautifully and failing to create paying clients. Education is not enough if it does not connect the value of your work to a problem your potential client recognises as urgent, relevant, and worth paying a professional rate to resolve.
Making The Shift
The shift is not from being invisible to being visible. It is from being visible in coaching language to being visible in client language, which is a much more commercially useful distinction.
Client language does not mean dumbing down your work, it means translating the value of your work into terms that make sense outside the coaching profession and to a specific group of people – your chosen audience. It means resisting the urge to prove your coaching skill by describing your process, and instead doing the harder, more valuable work of articulating what changes for the client because of that process.
Your potential clients do not need to understand coaching the way you do and so they need to understand why working with you should matter to them. If your current marketing depends on people already knowing that they need a coach, that’s almost certainly the reason it is not producing enquiries.
Am I Talking About You?
If you found yourself reading what I’ve written here and recognising yourself in it, that’s not a coincidence – that’s good marketing. At The Coaching Revolution, we can teach you how to write for your audience so that they also recognise themselves in what you’ve said. Being able to do that is a game changer.
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