If I ask a coach what people are buying from them, they’ll tell me something along the lines of confidence, or clarity or perhaps support in navigating a difficult transition.
Every one of those is an answer given from the coach’s perspective and that’s a problem, because marketing anything – but especially coaching – is never from our own perspective. Effective marketing is always from the perspective of the person who might become a client, and not understanding that, and being unable to articulate coaching in a way that non-coaches can understand is where a great many coaching businesses come unstuck.
Two Sides Of A Scale
Every business that succeeds, coaching or otherwise, must have two skill sets in equal measure and I like to use the analogy of an old-fashioned weighing scale.
On one side sit the tools we use while delivering coaching: every course we’ve taken, practitioner certificates, facilitation qualifications, personality profiling, Gestalt, NLP, transactional analysis, and all of our coaching qualifications. We need to be excellent on this side – all businesses need its product or service to be good or they won’t succeed.
On the other side sit the tools that create the opportunities to do the delivery. Those are client acquisition skills, and nothing from the first side of the scale belongs over here.
To go back to when a coach answers the ‘what are people buying from you’ question with clarity and confidence, they’re standing firmly on the delivery side (although they’re almost certainly not aware of this) and they’re speaking a language other coaches understand and non-coaches don’t.
Coach Speak
We like our language. It’s our professional language and we speak it fluently, but like all jargon it doesn’t mean much to those who are not coaches. For example, when we say we help people to navigate difficult transitions, we know what we mean, but non-coaches probably don’t.
It could mean school to university, or university into a first job, or a first job into a first supervisory role, and every step after that through a career. It could equally mean single to partnered, partnered to engaged, engaged to married, married to children, or children before marriage. Anyone raising children navigates dozens of difficult transitions along the way.
All of those are real life experiences and coaching could support every one of them. However, none of them is what somebody thinks of when we say difficult transitions, and nobody lies awake at night thinking of their situation as a transition they need to navigate. That isn’t how people think about what’s happening to them.
We stay attached to the phrase because it describes the work perfectly to us. Coach-speak is our mother tongue, and when we use it we’re talking about something we care about deeply. Jargon does this in every profession. Stand in a room of computer programmers talking shop for example and you probably won’t follow a word of it, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s an inside-outside thing. What is isn’t is language that attracts clients.
What we need instead is to talk in client-speak, and client-speak changes depending on who we’re talking to.
The WHAT Is the Easy Part
A niche sits at the intersection of a WHAT and a WHO. The WHAT is the topic you want to coach around, and most coaches can get to theirs reasonably quickly.
If the answer is difficult transitions, my next question would be ‘which one?’ Returning to work after maternity leave needs one marketing message and one audience. Moving into partnership at a professional firm needs an entirely different message and a different audience.
Both of those people could benefit from coaching. However, the person returning to work after maternity leave and the person about to step into partnership would need to hear completely different things before they would be prepared to part with a professional fee for coaching support. “I help people navigate difficult transitions” doesn’t help either of them understand why they might want to do that.
The WHO Is Where the Pushback Starts
The WHO is an industry, sector or profession, and yes, it needs to be that specific. The reason for this is the problem no other professional service provider has. Nobody knows what we do, but they think they know and they’re wrong.
No other provider of professional services has this problem. If we think about a doctor, an architect or a psychotherapist. People understand what they do, and because they understand, they know when they need the services of one of them.
With coaching they don’t which is why most of us have had the conversation that goes:
- Them: what do you do?
- Us: I’m a coach
- Them: really? what do you coach on?
- Us: no, not that kind of coach
- Them: what kind of coach then?
Then we disappear down a rabbit hole trying to explain what coaching is.
The person we’re talking to doesn’t care about our professional process. Nobody does. If you asked somebody what they did, they said accountant, and then began describing the accounting process, you’d be looking for the exit. Confidence, clarity and difficult transitions are wallpaper words to a potential client, because they don’t mean the same thing to them as they do to us.
The Cookie Cutter Objection
Some coaches tell me they don’t want to choose a WHAT because they love the variety, and they don’t want to be a ‘cookie cutter coach’. One coach used exactly that phrase.
Fortunately, there’s no such thing as a cookie cutter coach. Imagine ten clients starting with you this month, every one of them returning to work after maternity leave which means that on paper they have an identical problem. However, they are also ten unique human beings with different beliefs, different experiences and different values, and any coach knows that by session three of a coaching programme, most of client’s aren’t talking about the thing that brought them to session one.
Marketing isn’t coaching. Marketing is the work that gets somebody to understand what you could help them with, so that they want to talk to you at all. Our coaching stays as varied as it always was.
Describe a Problem They Already Know They Have
This is the part that really matters – the problem you describe has to be one your potential client already recognises in themselves. Educating somebody about a problem you can see, and they can’t, is a very long road to a client. What works is naming something that’s already keeping them awake and already having an effect across their life and describing it so precisely that they think that’s me! That’s exactly what I’m struggling with. That recognition is what draws somebody towards you.
Intuition Isn’t a Marketing Strategy
Coaches will sometimes strongly disagree with this, and the disagreement is almost always based on a gut feeling that focusing cannot possibly be right. What about everybody else we could help?
It’s worth noticing that we approach everything else in our profession with a learner’s mind and yet we approach client acquisition with a knower’s mind. If you’re reading and thinking you don’t agree with me, that’s data not truth. Ask yourself why don’t you agree? It’s often because our intuition tells us that focusing isn’t the right thing to do at all.
The problem with that way of thinking is that intuition isn’t an effective marketing strategy. In fact, it’s not a marketing strategy at all. At The Coaching Revolution, we’ve worked with people holding degrees and postgraduate qualifications in marketing, people who have run entire careers as heads of marketing or brand. They come to us anyway, because they know how marketing works and they know that marketing somebody else’s brand is not the same work as marketing their own business. That’s wisdom from people who genuinely do know.
The feeling that we should cast the net wide is exactly like the public’s feeling that they know what coaching is. Confident, widely held, and wrong.
So What Are They Buying?
When people buy coaching, they’re buying a solution to a problem that’s causing them problems and keeping them awake at night.
Our job as coach marketers (and I can feel some of you objecting to that phrase already!) is to work out who those people are and what they’re struggling with that working with us would resolve. If you want a coaching business, being a coach marketer is part of the job.
In the real world, people aren’t looking for coaches at all. There is a small group, mostly in the upper reaches of large organisations, who do understand what our kind of coaching is, but they are a small minority.
No one is sifting through a list of coaches deciding which one to pick to help them navigate their difficult transition. They’re not thinking about coaching at all. They’re reading self-help books, listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos, trying to work out why they’re struggling with this thing. Quite often they see it as a personal failing, and there’s frequently shame attached to the sort of problems coaching resolves, even when there’s no logical reason for it. The shame is there anyway, which is why it isn’t something they discuss at the water cooler.
That’s who you’re writing for. Not somebody comparing coaches, but somebody who doesn’t yet know that what they’re grappling with has a solution.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what how to describe your coaching in a way that people understand, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times every year, and it doesn’t mean blocking out four days and doing nothing else. It’s light on desk time and demanding on thinking, which most coaches rather enjoy. A concept video lands in the group at 7am UK each day with a task attached, and at 5pm UK the mentors and I run a live Q&A covering every question that’s come up around that day’s topic, plus any other questions that are asked.
Coaches who’ve been through the challenge tend to ask why nobody has ever explained it to them like this before.
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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