Most coaches have no shortage of ideas for what we could sell, and a good many of us have gone well past the idea stage, with programmes designed, workbooks written and pricing worked out to three tiers. What we’ve usually not done is work out how to find the people who might want to buy any of it and finding them is a separate job that needs a separate set of skills. Creating material feels productive, because at the end of a day spent on it there’s something to show for the time. The reality is however that we end up with a perfect programme and nobody to sell it to and it’s taken months to get there.
Nobody to Sell It To
I can usually spot this inside the first ten minutes of a conversation, because a coach will describe her programme in real detail and then have no answer to a simple question about who it’s for. The work itself is often excellent, thorough and carefully designed, exactly what good coach training produces. If I then ask how many people have bought it, the answer is none, or one, and the one is a friend or a former colleague. Nothing is wrong with the material, but the coach can’t tell me who it’s for. When we don’t know who something’s for, we don’t know where to go to find them.
Why We Build First
There are two beliefs that keep us doing this, and neither is factual. The first is that everything has to be finished before we can sell it, which isn’t true, because people buy a result and a coach they trust rather than a workbook, and I have never had anyone ask to see my materials before they said yes. The second is something quieter and harder to admit, which is that designing a coaching intervention is work we already know how to do, so it feels like competence in a way that client acquisition can’t, because we don’t know how to do it. Building happens in private, at our own pace, and it produces something we can look at. Doing the deep work required for the foundational aspects of client acquisition takes time, and it requires us to become beginners again, which can be deeply uncomfortable.
What the WHO Gives You
Deciding who you serve isn’t a marketing exercise sitting alongside the real work, it’s what makes the real work possible.
Once you know you help, say, newly promoted managers in pharma who are struggling to delegate, you know where those people gather, you know the words they use about the problem, and you have a reasonable idea what getting rid of it is worth to them. Pricing stops being a calculation about the income you want divided by the number of hours you’d like to work and becomes a question about what the problem costs the person who has it. The programme you’ve already built can probably stay much as it is, and now there’s somewhere to take it.
Coaches resist this idea of focusing harder than almost anything else, because our training tells us we can coach anyone. I’ve had coaches say to me, when I’ve asked them who they work with, that they work with humans and humans are everywhere, which is true and no use at all when you’re trying to decide where you need to be for maximum impact. Choosing a WHO means setting aside most of the population, and that feels like turning down income when you haven’t yet earned any.
When Building Is the Right Call
None of this means the materials you’ve written don’t matter. If you have a full diary and people waiting, then building better resources is exactly the right use of your time, and refining what you deliver is how a practice matures over years. My argument is about the order the work happens in.
Where to Start
Stop building coaching packages and materials and start learning about what professional level client acquisition skills look like for coaches. Work out who you help and what you help them with, then go and talk to those people, because those conversations will teach you more about what your programme should contain than another three months alone with a Google Doc. The material you’ve already made will still be there when you know who it’s for.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about how to figure out who you’re best placed to serve, may I offer you a way to do that for free? Why not join my free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs for four days, several times a year. Coaches who’ve been through the challenge describe it as a game changer, and they say things like why didn’t I know this before? and this is the first time niching has made sense, and it’s the first time I’ve felt excited about marketing rather than horrified by it.
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.
Recent Comments