Four out of five of us who qualify as coaches never earn a living from coaching. The number usually quoted is 82%, and it has been repeated for long enough that most of us have stopped flinching at it. What gets far less attention is who makes up the one in five who do keep going, because they are not the better coaches. They tend to be coaches with credibility earned somewhere else that they can charge for, internal coaches employed by an organisation, or associate coaches delivering through a training company’s contracts. Not one of those three routes involves finding paying clients among strangers, from a standing start.
What the One in Five Have in Common
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Imagine a coach who spent twenty years as an HR director in pharmaceuticals before she trained. Her first six clients come from people who already know, like and trust her and are willing to commission coaching from her.
A different example is the internal coach who has an employed role as a coach, and where the clients are given to her as part of her role. The organisation pays regardless of how well she can explain what coaching is and why someone might want it.
Associates deliver work that somebody else has already sold, which means the difficult part, persuading an organisation that coaching is worth buying at all, was done by somebody else.
These three different kinds of coaches have one thing in common; when it comes to building a practice, none of them needs to attract people who have never heard of them.
The Rest of Us
That shared feature is where the failure rate comes from. The four in five who struggle are not lazier, less committed or worse at coaching; we are attempting the hardest version of client acquisition there is – starting from nothing.
Believing that client acquisition is simple does most of the damage, because we do not recognise the gaping hole in our knowledge. We think client acquisition is common sense, and common sense is the one thing it is not.
Two Beliefs That Are Plain Wrong
The first is that the internet reaches everybody. We post on LinkedIn and imagine everyone seeing it, when in reality a post is shown to a small sample of our connections and most of them are often other coaches. The truth is that the algorithm syndicates our post to 2-4% of our connections, and then what happens next depends on what that 2-4% does. Very few of us understand this, which is why so many of us post for a year, get almost nothing back, and conclude that we are bad at marketing, or that marketing doesn’t work.
The second belief is that a wide net catches more fish. It follows logically enough: the more people who know we coach, the more chances of finding someone who wants it. In practice the opposite happens. The biggest problem that we have, that no other professional service provider has, is that people do not know what we do, but they think they know and they’re wrong.
Let me just dig into that a little bit more. Think of any other provider of professional services: an accountant, a psychotherapist, a physiotherapist, even. People know what they do and that means they know when they require the services of one of those providers. With coaching, that’s not true. The hard truth is that very few people are looking for a coach, what they’re looking for is a solution to a problem they have, that coaching can resolve but they don’t know that.
Let’s Be Accurate
The 82% also counts businesses rather than intentions, so a coach with a pension, two clients a month and no wish for more is included in that number without having failed at all. What the figure does describe accurately is the group who wanted this to be their income and found that it wasn’t.
If You Haven’t Got a Corporate Past
The obvious response to all of this is that the only routes to clients that are successful are closed to any coach without an existing reputation or an employer, which would be a bleak conclusion. It isn’t true. Credibility can be built deliberately with a defined group of people over months, rather than accumulated over twenty years, and that is a skill rather than a stroke of luck. The starting point is deciding who you help and what you help them with.
I know coaches really struggle to figure out who they help and what they help them with, but fortunately, I can offer you some help for free.
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?
This challenge was better value than any of the gazillions of webinars I’ve attended. Finally, Something that just makes sense! (LBS Challenge Attendee)
We run the challenge 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 for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how marketing for coaches works.
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