Every successful business, coaching or otherwise, needs two skill sets in equal measure. Picture them as the two sides of a weighing scale. On one side sits the product or service, which for us means our coaching skills and everything we use while sitting in front of a client – our delivery skills. On the other side, and equally important, sit the skills that create the opportunities to do that delivery, which means finding the people who are going to buy.
If we don’t have clients, we don’t have a business. That’s a hard thing to read if it applies to you, and I’m sorry if it does, but accepting it as your current reality is what lets you move on. Telling ourselves we’re running a business when there are no clients in it is not a good use of our time, learning how to find those clients is a much better use of it.
Why Referrals Top the Hierarchy
Referrals sit right at the top of the list of ways to find clients in terms of hierarchy. A referral appears to prove that the coaching was good enough on its own, that it produced the next client with no selling involved. It’s the most flattering possible explanation for where work comes from.
The belief underneath it gets stated out loud more often than you might expect. If your coaching is good enough, your clients will find you. That particular sentence was said by a coach trainer, now an MCC, to a group of coaches who were graduating from her programme. I don’t believe she said it out of badness. I believe she said it because it was her experience, and she did not understand that her experience was unusual.
Why It Was Her Experience
There is a small group of coaches, fewer than one in five, who arrive at coach training with a network already built. It’s usually been built over a senior career in a large organisation.
That network is full of people who know, like and trust them, who hold them in high regard because of work done long before any coaching happened, and who are often senior enough to hold a budget and commission coaching directly. Many of them also understand what our kind of coaching is, which is rare. Outside the upper echelons of large organisations, most people don’t know what our kind of coaching is. When your network includes this kind of person, I call it monetisable credibility.
This trainer finished her training, opened her little black book, and had the good conversations we’re all assured are the route to clients and she won work. Then more work came on the back of it, because word travelled among people who already thought highly of her and already knew what coaching was.
From the outside, that looks exactly like referrals doing the work. It looks like proof that you simply need the first client or two and the rest will arrive on their own.
This coach earned that network over decades and I’m not saying she just got lucky. What I am saying is that she has a privilege, and like every privilege, it’s very hard to see when it’s yours. What she didn’t realise is that her experience of monetising an existing network isn’t an experience the majority can replicate.
I’ve heard capable, excellent coaches repeat the same advice, that you just need your first client or two and the rest will come by referral. They believe it, and they have no idea how client acquisition works for anybody starting without a black book.
You can see the same assumption when a group of coaches band together to form a small associate company. They’re all good coaches, and the plan is to provide coaching services to organisations, and there’s no way of finding those organisations in the plan at all. Those groups tend to fall apart after a while, when the clients don’t appear.
What We’re Asking Our Clients to Do
One of the things we’re poor at as a profession is articulating the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can assimilate. That sentence is worth reading twice, because being able to do that is marketing in a nutshell.
Ask most coaches what they do and what clients get from working with them, and the answer sits firmly on the delivery side of the scales, in coach-speak (which is what I call our jargon). We describe the process, we talk about breakthroughs, limiting beliefs, mental barriers and goals, and those aren’t words people use about their own lives.
Take limiting beliefs for example. Until the moment you realise that something you believe to be true isn’t true, that belief is simply your reality. In the 1998 film The Truman Show, Truman’s reality only stops being actual reality when his boat hits the painted dome at the edge of it. Tell a potential client you help people remove their limiting beliefs and the honest answer is that they don’t have any, because from the inside, we don’t think we do.
If we can’t describe the value of coaching in language a non-coach can take in, there’s no good reason to expect our clients to manage it for us. We’re hoping that somebody who has been through a coaching programme will describe what happened well enough that a third party feels compelled to pay a professional fee for the same thing. Sometimes that happens. Most of the time it doesn’t, because we’ve handed them a job we can’t do ourselves. We want them to articulate the value of coaching while we ourselves struggle to do so.
The Trouble With Relying on Them
Hope is not a marketing strategy, and it isn’t much of a strategy for anything else in business either. Hoping for referrals means hoping is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
We also have no control over them. We can ask, and plenty of coaches do, but we can’t decide when one arrives or how many come, which makes them impossible to plan around.
There’s a particular version of this that catches new coaches. They coach people for free, expecting that the experience will be good enough to produce a referral who pays a professional rate. What tends to happen is that free clients refer people who also want coaching for free.
Chapter One and Chapter Twenty
When a coach says all her work comes by referral, we read it and feel like we’re failing. The comparison is the problem, because the two of us started in different places.
We must resist the temptation to compare our chapter one with somebody else’s chapter twenty. That coach put the hard yards in over a career, building a reputation with people who could later commission her, but most of us have a long way to go to reach the same level of know, like and trust with an audience. That isn’t a criticism of either of us, it’s a description of two different starting points.
When Referrals Do Come
For those of us without the black book, referrals can arrive, but they arrive in year two or three rather than on day one. They come after the work, and the work looks like this.
We choose an audience and then curate it, so that we put ourselves in front of the people we want to coach. We demonstrate that we understand the problem they’re struggling with, and that we understand how much it’s costing them, at work, at home, in their relationships and sometimes in their health. We show that we know how that problem shows up day to day, and that we know what outcome they want instead. We also make sure that they understand that we can help them reach that outcome.
Doing that consistently builds credibility with an audience, which is the same asset the monetisable credibility coaches walked in with.
Referrals are the icing on a robust client acquisition process. They are not the process, and building a business on them means trying to build on something we can’t control.
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 it won’t demand a great deal of your time. It’s mostly reflection and by the end of it you’ll know where your profitable niche sits.
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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