Our profession has a transparency problem, and it doesn’t matter which body you belong to or who accredited your training. Where clients come from after we qualify is the question our profession seems to avoid.
If we were straightforward about it, we would say this: there are very few employed coaching roles, the competition for them is fierce, and associate work is thinner on the ground every year because the number of coaches keeps rising. The ICF’s 2025 Global Coaching Study puts the number of coach practitioners worldwide at 122,974, a 15% increase since 2023 and 54% since 2019. We would also have to admit that coach training gives us only half of the skills we need to earn a living from this.
I suspect that if the profession said all of that out loud, the number of people taking coach training would drop considerably. Plenty of people train for their own development and have no intention of practising, and that’s a perfectly good reason to do it. An increasing number of us, though, arrive thinking we could do this for a living, and we finish our training without a clear-eyed understanding of how client acquisition works for coaches.
What Fills the Knowledge Gap?
The gap tends to get filled with more training. I was talking to a group of coaches recently and one of them told me she’d been advised that if she could just reach PCC, she’d have all the clients she needed. That may be partially true in that associate companies who now have the pick of a large pool of coaches prefer those with more experience. For our own clients however, it’s irrelevant because a credential describes the number of coaching hours you have, it does nothing to help a potential client understand what we do.
Practitioner certificates and profiling qualifications get sold the same way. It may well be the case that some people are interested in a particular modality, but presenting it as the one that brings clients is disingenuous.
Coaches have also told me that when they contacted their training provider to say they were struggling to find clients, they were offered another programme, on the basis that this is the one potential clients are really interested in. They’re told that coaches who completed a particular course went on to work with a various assortment of named (and famous) organisations, with the implication that the qualification is what opened the door, but that isn’t what happened.
I don’t think coach trainers are deliberately misleading anyone. I think they’re talking outside their own knowledge and experience, which is easy to do when you’re being asked a question you want to be able to answer.
Staying in Their Lane
What I’d like is for coach training organisations to do the thing they’re excellent at, which is producing great coaches, and leave business development to people who are excellent at that. This isn’t a hypothetical objection, it comes from nine years of working with coaches who had things to unlearn before they could learn how to find clients. Let me be specific, they had to unlearn what their coach training organisation had taught them were good client acquisition strategies and skills.
Sometimes business development content is bundled into a coach training programme, and sometimes it’s an add-on with a cost. I have seen a fair amount of it because coaches share it with me, and although it is very well intentioned, I’ve yet to see any content provided by coach trainers that is good for those starting from scratch. One series of videos from an excellent provider taught that you need a niche, and offered “professionals who are anxious” as an example. That isn’t a niche because there isn’t enough in it to build a marketing strategy around, because you can’t say who those people are, where they are, or how you would find them.
Coaches have also been told to send fifty emails to their network, on the basis that the coach giving the advice did exactly that and got twenty-seven clients from it.
Some trainers do know where their expertise stops. I have good relationships with several who are clear that they can’t help people build practices, and who point their graduates towards us or towards other organisations that deliver accredited programmes in client acquisition.
Why the Fifty Emails Worked for the Person Recommending It
There is a small group of coaches, fewer than one in five, who arrive at coach training with a network already built, usually over a long corporate career. That network is full of people who know, like and trust them, and because of its longevity, many of those contacts are senior enough to hold a budget and commission coaching directly.
Those coaches finish their training, open their little black book, and go and have the good conversations we’re all told are the route to clients. It works, because they’re talking to people who already know, like and trust them and now know they have a new skill. That’s monetisable credibility.
They’ve spent years building that network and it’s very valuable. I’m not suggesting they’re cheating or that it’s easy for them, because there’s still a great deal of work involved. What tends to happen, though, is that when you ask them how they built their practice, they say they just had really good conversations, without recognising what the black book did for them. It’s like any privilege, very hard to see from the inside.
Coach training organisations tend to hold these coaches up as examples, because they do find coaching work quickly while the rest of us are left wondering who exactly we’re supposed to be having these conversations with. Then somebody recommends that book, the one that says if we lift up our eyes and look around us, we’ll see all the clients we could ever need. The problem with that book is that it does not acknowledge that this strategy rather depends on where we’re standing. Lifting up your eyes in Waitrose gives you a different result from lifting them up in Aldi.
The Coach Who Couldn’t Explain It
One coach told me she’d sat down with the most senior coach she could find, with a pen and paper, and asked her to explain step by step how she built her business. The senior coach either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell her.
She came away convinced she’d been deliberately gatekept. It was only later that she realised the truth, which was that the senior coach couldn’t tell her, because she didn’t know. She had talked to people in her network and the business grew, and she had never had to turn that into a process that somebody else could follow.
You Can’t Be Coached Across a Knowledge Gap
We’re coaches and that means that our instinct, when we hit a problem, is to get coached around it. So we find the best coach we know and ask them to help us think through our business development.
Here’s the thing – you cannot coach a marketing strategy out of a head that hasn’t got one in it. Coaching works on what somebody already knows, and this is a knowledge gap rather than a thinking gap, so no amount of good questioning will produce an effective marketing strategy. That doesn’t mean the coaching couldn’t produce ideas, but whether those ideas are effective is anyone’s guess. (Honestly, the answer is almost always not!)
What’s needed is teaching, and then mentoring while it’s applied. We need to be shown the steps in order, and then having enough check-ins along the way to provide the support and accountability, and to prevent the thing that clever people reliably do, which is take one piece of information, decide we now understand, extrapolate, and set off at speed in – the wrong direction.
Nobody Is Looking for Us
We have a problem no other professional service provider has, which is people don’t know what we do, but they think they know, and they’re wrong. A doctor, a lawyer, an architect, a therapist, all of them have job titles people understand well enough to know when they need one. Coaches don’t have that, and because people believe they already know what coaching is, and they never spend a moment considering that they might be wrong. A coach is a coach, right?
If I ask a coach who their competitors are, they’ll tell me other coaches. For associate work with the big platforms, that’s true. For private clients it isn’t, because those people aren’t looking for a coach at all.
The problems coaching helps with tend to get internalised, and they often carry a sense of shame even when there’s no reason for it. Somebody looks around, sees nobody else apparently struggling, and concludes it must be them. So they buy a self-help book, or listen to a podcast, or work through a YouTube channel, because they’re looking for a solution rather than a person. At best they might start looking for a therapist when a coach would serve them better.
Sharing Your Story
We’re taught to share our story to build rapport, and the result is coaches oversharing on LinkedIn to an extent that could damage them professionally. Other coaches arrive in the comments to say how brave and vulnerable they are, which reinforces the whole thing.
Apply the test we’d apply anywhere else. If your GP shared something incredibly personal online, or your solicitor did, you’d be uncomfortable and you’d probably think less of them professionally. We’re taught it’s a route to clients and do it anyway.
Potential clients don’t care about our backstory, and they don’t care about our qualifications either, because they don’t know what those letters mean. What they need to know, as briefly as we can manage it, is why they should pay a professional fee and what’s in it for them when they do. It’s only reasonable, we too want to know what we’re getting when we buy something and a description of a process the purveyor is going to use doesn’t cut the mustard.
One Side of the Scales
Every successful business needs two skill sets in equal measure, and it helps to picture them as two sides of a weighing scale. On one side sit the delivery skills: for example our coaching qualifications, practitioner certificates, facilitation, profiling, NLP, transactional analysis, Gestalt etc – basically, the tools we use while sitting in front of a client. It matters not how prestigious the qualification or the school where we attained it, it is a delivery tool and it sits on the delivery side of our scales. However many qualifications we add, and however high we pile them, they stay on this side of our scales. These are not client acquisition tools.
On the other side sit the skills that create the opportunities to do that delivery, which are predominantly marketing and sales. These are client acquisition tools.
Without clients and a robust process for finding them, what we have is a hobby rather than a business.
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?
We run it several times a year and 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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