I’d like you to picture a coach a few months out of training. She’s been told to go networking, to share her story to build rapport, and to be authentic. So she does exactly that.
She turns up at events and gets her ‘minute to win it’ or whatever they call the 60 seconds we get to introduce ourselves these days, and talks about then things coaching can help you with – reaching goals, overcoming limiting beliefs and mental barriers etc. She writes about coaching on LinkedIn, consistently, the way everybody says you should, and she talks about what coaching is, how the process works, what a client can expect from a session.
But nothing happens. Not nothing at all, because there are comments, and that’s why this is so difficult to spot from the inside. The problem is that the comments come from other coaches. They may be supportive, generous, entirely well meant, yet not one of them is from a potential client.
What She Does Next
Months of this go by. The advice she was given has no next step in it, because “be authentic” isn’t a step, so she looks around at what other coaches are doing and copies it.
What she sees is vulnerable posts, so she writes one. She shares something about her own life that would once have stayed private, and it gets more engagement than anything she’s written about coaching. Other coaches tell her how brave it was.
That’s the reward loop closing, and it’s why the behaviour escalates. Coaches end up sharing things on a public professional platform that are personal, and in my opinion not for public consumption. It damages them professionally with precisely the people they want to work with, while being applauded by the people who never will.
I want to stress that none of this is a failure of effort or intelligence. This coach did exactly what she was told to do.
The Assumption Buried in the Advice
Generic marketing advice assumes something that’s true for almost every business except ours. It assumes people already understand what you sell.
If you make cakes, you can talk about your cakes. Your customer knows what a cake is, knows when they want one, and knows roughly what it should cost. Your marketing job is to be the one they choose from among the people who sell cakes, so advice about standing out, being visible and telling your story makes perfect sense.
We have a problem no other professional service has. People don’t know what we do, but they think they know, and they’re wrong. Say “I’m a coach” and they think of a sports coach, or someone who’ll tell them what to do based on having done it themselves. They have a definition ready, it’s the wrong one, and they aren’t curious enough to check, because as far as they’re concerned there is nothing to check.
So when a coach talks about coaching, she isn’t being ignored. She’s being understood as something she isn’t, by people who then reasonably conclude they don’t want to buy.
That’s why the advice fails. It starts at step four – a place where people know what’s being sold – and we need to start at step one.
The Bit We’re Blind To
What makes this strange is that if somebody announced they were going to improvise their coaching, we’d be scathing. If they told us they’d read a book, watched some videos, thought it through and decided they’ve got the gist of it, we’d say what everyone in this profession says, which is that coaching is a professional skill, you have to be trained in it, and thinking otherwise is insulting to those of us who’ve earned the credentials.
We’re right about that. We spend a great deal of energy being angry that coaching isn’t regulated, precisely because people who haven’t trained shouldn’t be doing it.
Yet we then approach client acquisition as though it needs no training at all and take our instruction from whoever happens to be nearby. Client acquisition is also a professional skill. Improvising it produces exactly what improvised coaching would produce.
Where Effective Marketing Starts
Two things have to change, and the first one is uncomfortable.
First…
The word coach has to come out of the marketing. It’s a barrier to understanding rather than a route to it, because it triggers a definition already sitting in the reader’s head that has nothing to do with what we do. We can use it once someone understands the value of what we offer. Leading with it means the conversation starts with them misunderstanding us.
Replacing it with something meaningful and effective is the problem. We need to talk not about coaching, not the process, not the qualifications, but the thing the person is actually struggling with, described in the words they’d use to describe it themselves.
Then…
The second change is that you have to know exactly who those people are. Senior leaders isn’t specific enough, nor is professionals and definitely not women in transition. We need to be specific enough that we can name their job title and the sector they work in, because that’s what tells us where they are, what they read, which events they attend, and what language they use about their own situation.
The coach in my example was posting about coaching to an audience that she hoped was there, rather than one she curated. We do have this idea that everything we post online is seen by everyone, when the absolute opposite is true. Once you know who you’re talking to however, and what they’re wrestling with that coaching can resolve, you can write something that makes one of them stop and think ‘that’s me!’. Better yet, you don’t have to wonder where they are and how to find them, because once you know who they are, you know where they are.
That reaction, the ‘this is about me!’ reaction is the whole objective, and no amount of authenticity or rapport building can generate that.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about how to choose who to focus on with your marketing, and why you really should choose a focus at all, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
The next challenge is coming up 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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