Good coaches struggle to find clients for a reason that has nothing to do with how well they coach. Before I get into this, let me give you a hard truth. For something to qualify as a business, it must have paying clients. If you don’t have paying clients, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. I know that can be really hard to hear if you’ve been working hard and still don’t have paying clients.
To succeed all businesses needs two separate skill sets in equal measure, and coach training only gives us one of them. Many of us don’t realise that we are missing an entire skill set until we are knee-deep in the period following our qualification and struggling to find clients.
The Two Sides of the Scales
Picture an old-fashioned set of weighing scales. On one side sit our delivery skills and we might have many qualifications that add up to an enormous skill set on this side. We might have our original qualification, an advanced qualification, practitioner certificates, personality profiling accreditations, the master’s if we have one – I could go on. On the other side sit the skills that create the opportunities to do that delivery. These skills are client acquisition skills and this is the side of the scale where The Coaching Revolution sits.
However many qualifications we stack on the first side, not one of them is a client acquisition skill. Client acquisition skills are, in plain terms, sales and marketing skills. Our profession holds marketing in fairly low regard, which is a shame, because that opinion is what stops a lot of very good coaches from succeeding.
The One in Five
The number often quoted is that 82% of coaching businesses fail within two years. Four out of five of us fail, not at coaching, but at building a business doing it.
The one in five who succeed usually fall into three groups. Some are internal coaches, employed by an organisation that gives them their clients. Some do associate work, delivering contracts that an associate company has already sold. The rest have what I call monetisable credibility, meaning they arrived at coach training with a stellar reputation built over decades in a corporate career.
Those monetisable credibility coaches can open a little black book of people who already know, like and trust them, many of them senior enough to hold a budget and commission coaching directly, and book conversations with them. Their contacts also tend to understand what our sort of coaching is, which removes the most challenging part of the conversation before it starts. They are a small proportion of the coaches being trained and a large proportion of the ones who succeed.
There’s a very famous book in coaching circles that says if we lift up our eyes and look around us, the clients are already there, and that good conversations are all we need. For the monetisable credibility coaches, it works well. For those of us without the black book, finding enough of the right people to talk to can be a problem, which is why so many of us have conversation after conversation and only ever pick up the occasional client at mates’ rates.
A Big Problem
As coaches, we have a unique problem, and it’s this: nobody knows what we do, but they think they know, and they’re wrong. No other professional service provider has this challenge. Think about it, when we consider other professional service providers; lawyer, accountant, therapist, psychotherapist – everyone knows what they do. What that means is that they know when they require the services of one of them. With coaching, that’s not the case. Precious few people are searching for a coach, because they have no idea what we do.
The word coach had a meaning long before we borrowed it, so when we say it, people understand something else entirely. They assume we will share our knowledge and experience to mentor them towards an outcome we have held and they want.
Part of what many of us love about coaching is that we don’t need to know anything about someone to coach them well. That’s true, but it belongs firmly on the delivery side of the scales. On the client acquisition side, the opposite applies: we need to know a great deal about somebody before we can say anything that will resonate with them and help them understand why we may be the solution to the problem they’re grappling with.
But Is It Ethical?
Coaches tell me they’ve read the ICF code of ethics or the global code, and that they can’t see how they market at all, because the codes say we must not have a vested interest in the outcome. When we’re trying to find a client, we obviously do have a vested interest, and some coaches find that contradiction distressing enough to either stop marketing altogether, or never start in the first place.
You can market ethically. Those codes govern the delivery side of the business, which is what they were written for.
That doesn’t mean the other side is a free-for-all. There is a code of ethics for marketing for coaches, which I wrote, and you can find it on our website. You will be relieved to know that good marketing requires no outlandish promises and no guarantees, and making them would be unethical.
People Buy Outcomes
When I ask a coach what outcome a client can reasonably expect from working with them, the answer is almost always that it depends: on who they are, on what they want, on how committed they are. That’s a perfectly good answer on the delivery side.
It’s no use at all to somebody deciding whether to pay us. People buy outcomes, not processes, and that includes us when we’re the ones buying.
Most of us have had the conversation that starts with “what do you coach on”, and we answer by describing the process. We tell them that we listen carefully, we hear what isn’t said, we ask questions that make people think, we help them reach their own conclusions. All of that is our stuff, not theirs. What somebody needs to know is why they should pay a professional rate, and the only route to that is showing them we understand the problem they’re stuck with and why it matters so much.
The Who and the What
This is where coaches struggle the most. Asked who they work with, they say things like professionals, which means nothing to anyone outside our profession. Put a thousand people in a room and ask who has the job title professional, and very few if any hands go up.
Others tell me things like they work with people navigating transitions but find it confusing when I ask them which transitions in particular, because, of course, we can coach anyone navigating any transition, can’t we?
To be able to find clients effectively, we need to have a focus to our marketing, in fact, if it isn’t focused, it isn’t marketing. The name of that focus is a target audience or a niche. Target audience and niche are synonymous.
A good niche for coaches has two elements, a WHO and a WHAT. The niche is the intersection between a specific who crosses a specific what. That’s the intersection to aim at, and it’s a decision rather than something that will reveal itself if we simply coach enough people. Waiting for it to appear can takes years, and for most of us it never appears because we can’t find enough people to coach.
Hope Is Not a Strategy
Good coaches can’t find clients because they’re trying to run a business with only half the skills it needs. Every business needs a robust client acquisition process.
Choosing that intersection is the most important first step we can take, but it’s often not obvious to us where ours should lie.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand where your most profitable niche is, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my 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 for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about where your niche is.
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