As a profession, coaches are often very good at being helpful. We’re thoughtful, reflective, generous with ideas, and usually more than willing to offer something useful if we think it might support someone. None of that is a problem. In fact, good marketing should be generous, because if people are going to trust us with something important, they need to experience something of us before they ever get on a call with us.
Generosity isn’t the problem, vague generosity is. Content that feels useful, thoughtful and kind, but doesn’t help a potential client understand what we do, who it’s for, why it matters now, or whether it’s worth paying a professional rate for. That distinction matters because being helpful and being commercially clear are not the same thing.
Helpful To Whom?
One of the uncomfortable things many of us discover, once we start looking properly at our marketing, is that a lot of our engagement is coming from other coaches. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re deliberately writing for other coaches, but it often means our language, examples, assumptions and points of emphasis are more recognisable inside the coaching profession than outside it.
This is very easy to do. Coaching language feels natural because it’s the language we’ve trained in, practised in, supervised in, and often socialised in. We talk about awareness, values, limiting beliefs, holding space, powerful questions, transformation, confidence and clarity, and other coaches understand what we mean. They may like the post, agree with it, comment on it, and share it, which can make the content feel as though it’s working.
The real question is whether a potential client would read the same piece and recognise why it matters to them. Do they see their own problem in it? Can they understand what working with you could help them resolve? Is there enough in what you’ve written for them to think, “This person understands what I’m dealing with, and I should talk to them”?
Peer Approval Is Not Client Acquisition
This is where we can get misled by our own visibility. Engagement from other coaches can feel reassuring, because it looks like evidence that what we’re saying is landing, and in one sense it is. The problem is that it is landing with people who are not going to buy coaching.
That doesn’t make peer engagement bad, and it doesn’t mean the content is worthless. The issue is whether our marketing is creating recognition in the people we want as clients. If your content is mainly appreciated by people who already understand coaching, already value coaching, and already speak the same professional language as you, it may not be doing the harder commercial work of translating your value for people outside the profession.
Good marketing is generous, but it is generous in a focused way. It gives the right people something useful enough to recognise themselves, their situation, or the cost of leaving the problem unresolved. It doesn’t simply offer thoughtful reflections into the general coaching ecosystem and hope that someone who needs us will somehow make the connection.
The Profession Is Not Failing Because Coaches Are Bad At Coaching
As a profession, we’re notoriously poor at finding paying clients. We have an astonishingly high attrition rate, and that attrition is very rarely the result of us being poor coaches. It’s almost always the result of us being unable to find clients.
Many coaches eventually decide that the profession is saturated. They look around and see far too many coaches and not enough clients, which is an understandable conclusion when they’ve been trying to build a practice and the enquiries haven’t materialised. I would argue that the profession is saturated, but what it’s saturated with is coaches who don’t understand how good, effective, ethical client acquisition works. There isn’t a lack of clients; there’s a lack of coaches who understand how to find them and that is a very different problem.
If the problem is saturation, the answer is probably discounting, louder visibility, or trying to be more impressive than the next coach. If the problem is client acquisition skill, the answer is learning how to make the value of our work clear to the people who are most likely to need it and pay for it.
Ethical Client Acquisition Is A Professional Skill
This is the part I think our profession needs to take much more seriously. Ethical client acquisition is not a personality trait, a confidence trick, or a grubby add-on to the real work. It’s a professional skill, and for coaches who want to run thriving practices, it’s not optional.
Whatever we learned at coach training about client acquisition, even if it was absolutely brilliant, was definitely nowhere near detailed enough. I would also argue that what many coaches think is brilliant and what I think is brilliant may be very different indeed, because a short module on marketing, a few suggestions about networking, or a general encouragement to be visible is not the same as learning the reality of how client acquisition works for coaches.
Good client acquisition skills are 50% of the skills required to run a thriving coaching practice. The other 50% is being able to coach well. We need both, because being excellent in the coaching conversation matters enormously, but if we can’t help the right people understand why they should get into the conversation with us in the first place, our coaching skill has nowhere to go.
Commercial Clarity Is Not Less Generous
Some coaches resist commercial clarity because they worry it will make them sound pushy, narrow, salesy, or less generous. I understand the concern, but I think it comes from misunderstanding what good marketing is actually doing.
Commercial clarity is not about manipulating people into buying coaching. It’s about making it easier for the right people to understand that we can help them. That means being clear about who we work with, what problem they have, why that problem matters, and how our work creates value in relation to it. That is not less ethical than vague helpfulness and it is much more useful.
If someone is struggling with a problem coaching could help them resolve, vague generosity may leave them feeling briefly encouraged but no closer to understanding what to do next. Commercial clarity gives them a better chance of recognising that the problem they’re living with is one we understand and can help them address.
The Shift We Need To Make
The shift is not from being helpful to being hard-nosed. It’s from being generally helpful to being helpfully specific. It’s from writing content that other coaches understand and appreciate to writing content that helps potential clients recognise themselves in our words and see why working with us is important.
That in turn means we need to stop treating client acquisition as something we should somehow be able to do intuitively. It isn’t intuitive, in fact, much of it is counterintuitive, especially for coaches who are used to thinking broadly about human potential, growth and change. The work is to become much more precise about the market, the problem, the language and the value.
Being helpful is lovely but being commercially clear is what allows a good coach to build a practice, engage paying clients, and keep doing the work we trained to do and that we love. That’s the professional skill most of us are missing, and it’s the one we need to learn if we want more good coaches to stay in the profession.
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