Transformation is a great word, and it would work perfectly well if the people we say it to when we’re talking about coaching understood what we meant by it. They don’t, and that’s a big problem.
There are two languages we need to speak as owners of a coaching practice and knowing which one belongs where makes everything else more straightforward. Not easier, because none of this is easy, but much more straightforward to understand.
Two Languages, Two Sides
Every successful business needs two skill sets in equal measure, and I picture them as an old-fashioned weighing scale.
On one side sit the skills we use while delivering: our coaching, and every other tool we bring out while sitting in front of a client. Gestalt, NLP, personality profiling, all of our coaching qualifications. Everything we use in service of the client sits there, and – this is important – none of these tools is a client acquisition tool. However convincingly you were told that a particular qualification is the one clients want, it simply isn’t true.
On the other side sit the skills that create the opportunities to do that delivery. Those are client acquisition skills, which is predominantly marketing and sales.
The two languages follow from that. Among ourselves, with other coaches, in supervision and during CPD, we speak coach-speak. It’s our jargon and it works beautifully, because we all know what it means. Say holding space to a colleague and they understand us exactly.
Say holding space to a non-coach and they don’t understand. What happens next predictable and happens often, but it’s a problem. We use coach-speak with the best intentions but the effect is the opposite of what we want, which is the non-coach doesn’t understand us at all. When somebody uses language we don’t understand, we feel patronised, and patronising potential clients is absolutely not our intention.
Client Acquisition
Successful client acquisition depends on our ability to articulate the value of coaching in a way that non-coaches can understand. That’s the entire process in a single sentence and whilst it’s easy for me to write, it is a complex process.
Articulating this value in a way that non-coaches can understand means describing how we can help, in terms that mean something to the person we’re talking to. Not what we do, how we help.
Jargon never makes anyone want to buy. It makes them confused, and sometimes it makes them feel a bit daft.
Let me give you an example; I walked into a computer shop with a problem I wanted solved. The young man who helped me was clearly capable and clearly well informed, and he answered my plain questions in technical language I couldn’t follow. By the end of the conversation, I understood the problem no better than when I’d walked in, so I left without buying anything. Had he been able to explain it in language I understood, I might have spent a few thousand pounds that afternoon.
That’s exactly what happens when we speak to potential clients in coach-speak.
The Rabbit Hole
When somebody asks what we do, we say we’re a coach, they ask what subject we coach on and we say no, not that kind of coach, and then we’re off – we describe the coaching process to the listener and watch in dismay as they glaze over.
Here’s the thing; nobody cares about another profession’s processes. I don’t want to know how my solicitor handles my conveyancing, I just want it done. I don’t want to know how my accountant approaches my accounts, I just want them filed.
The difference is that I know what outcome I want when I approach a solicitor or an accountant, and I know they provide it. With coaching, that is not true. People don’t know what we do, so they aren’t looking for us when they have a problem we could resolve, and describing our process gets them no closer to understanding.
There’s a post in a Facebook group I belong to offering coaches a free listing in a new coaching directory. Eighty coaches have said yes please, thinking that this is a way to paying clients. But nobody is searching for a coach – they’re not searching for us because they don’t know what we can help with. You can be on every coaching directory in the world and, if you’re lucky, pick up a little business. For most, it’s one more place to spend time describing a process nobody wants to read.
What Our Headlines Say
Before this morning’s livestream I went through some coaches’ LinkedIn headlines and took a few phrases out of them.
Working with ambitious and curious leaders and teams to navigate change. From the coach’s side, that describes exactly what they want to do. From the reader’s side it’s so vague as to be unintelligible. Nobody is sitting there thinking of themselves as an ambitious and curious leader who wants to navigate change. People are wrapped up in their own heads, their own lives and their own problems in their own language.
In addition, marketing to leaders and teams at the same time is very hard, because what a leader needs to hear before engaging a coach and what a team member needs to hear are two completely different things. They are different people who need different marketing messages. Both deserve coaching, but to understand the value of coaching in their context they need to hear very different things.
Another one offers coaching to leaders and business owners. Leaders, presumably, being employed, and business owners owning businesses. Those two groups have different values, different experiences and different attitudes to life. Trying to reach both at once makes for a foggy, confused message, and confused people do not buy. That’s true even when the message is otherwise well written.
Then there’s certified lifestyle coach, and coaching the brave. So what? Neither tells a potential client anything about the outcome they’ll get from working with these coaches.
None of this is written by careless people. It’s written by coaches doing their best with the only language they have – coach-speak. Having only this one language to talk about what we do is not our fault, but fixing it is our responsibility.
Their Language, Not Ours
What a potential client needs to see before they are willing to part with money for coaching is something that makes them think “that’s me! S/he’s talking about me!”
Getting there means using their language and understanding what language that is means choosing a focus. That focus gives us access to the specific professional language of the people we’ve chosen: what they do, how they describe their own working lives, the words they’d use to describe the problem they’re struggling with that working with us could help them resolve.
Until we know who you’re talking to, we can’t know which words to use, because articulating the value of coaching in a way non-coaches understand is different depending on which non-coach we’re taking to.
When coaches bother to spend the time learning how professional-level client acquisition works, the thing they tell me afterwards is that they’ve found their voice. They know how to talk about what they do in a way that makes people want to engage them, and – crucially – want to pay them a professional rate to do so.
Which Brings Us to Price
We talk about fees in coach training, but we rarely talk about pricing. When we do it tends to be earnings divided by hours: how much do you want to earn, how many hours do you want to work, there’s your client number. There’s absolutely no reference whatsoever to where those clients are going to come from.
A commercially astute approach would ask who these people are, whether they can pay, and how much the problem they’re struggling with is costing them. Without that, coaches end up on mates’ rates or discounting their fees the moment they sense somebody might not afford them.
It also produces the belief that price is the reason people aren’t buying coaching, but it very rarely is. Whether you charge £500 a session, £150, £50 or £5, somebody who doesn’t understand what they’ll get won’t pay you £5, let alone £500.
The problem isn’t the price. Its language people don’t understand, and it’s killing our profession.
The Missing Skill Set
Four out of five of us won’t thrive in business, and it isn’t because we are lousy coaches, it’s because we don’t know how to find clients.
Client acquisition is a professional skill, exactly as coaching is a professional skill, and it has to be learned. None of us is born good at it. Fortunately, we’re born able to learn, and that’s the whole of the advantage we get.
It feels like client acquisition should be intuition and common sense, but if that were true, we wouldn’t have the attrition rate we have.
So, once more: it isn’t our fault that we don’t know how to do this. Coach training teaches coaching, and where it ‘nods’ at what often gets called business development, the advice tends to be “have good conversations” and “network on and offline”. When we don’t understand how client acquisition works, that seems like good advice. However, if we scratch at the surface of that, we find that we don’t really know what it means. For example, network with whom, and where? If we start networking generically and we find what every coach before us has found, which is a networking room full of other coaches, all offering transformation.
It isn’t our fault that we’re struggling with this, but learning the missing skill set is our responsibility.
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?
It’s only for professional coaches, or people training to become one, and it doesn’t matter which body you belong to. ICF, EMCC, ILM etc it’s for you.
It runs several times a year and it’s four days of thinking rather than four days at a desk. A concept video lands at 7am UK each day. The video is never more than twenty minutes long and there’s a task attached that’s mostly thinking . At 5pm UK, several Coaching Revolution mentors and I spend an hour in a Zoom room answering every question that comes up. I can’t do that hour on my own any more, because there are too many questions. Coaches often tell me afterwards that we answered questions they didn’t even know they had.
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.
Recent Comments