Why coaching is not pants (my uncomfortable relationship with sales)

I love to write, and I enjoy putting ideas out into the world and interacting with people about them. Being the face and the voice of my business suits me just fine. I worked in marketing and communications for a long time, after all.

It’s the selling part that makes me uncomfortable. I’ve been thinking a lot about why this might be.

At its best, sales is a way of connecting people with what they want when they want it. At its worst, it’s manipulative, invasive, undesired.

My LinkedIn inbox is a good example of this. It teems with messages from marketing experts who want to generate leads for me and to set up dozens of introductory calls each month. Yet the idea of pitching my services to random strangers from the internet in hopes of landing a very small number of them as clients doesn’t fill me with joy.

There’s also this strange phenomenon: the more I find myself sliding into selling, the less effective I seem to be. In a conversation with a potential client, if I’m justifying the rates I charge or explaining the value that coaching can provide, I don’t tend to get the work.

Word of mouth and referrals, LinkedIn and email. These are the tools I use to bring in business. The further away I go from selling, the better and more the responses tend to be. As far as I can tell, I put myself in people’s minds with the material I share. Then, when the moment arrives that they or someone they know might need a coach, I get an inquiry.

But in terms of keeping myself in people’s minds, I’m honestly never sure how much contact is enough versus too much.

If you leave a pair of pants in a website shopping cart, you can count on getting an email with the subject line, “Did you forget something?” And you probably did. It’s a fair bet to assume you got distracted with one of 47 other browser tabs or an alert on your phone or a live person standing in front of your desk. You do want those pants. And so, the store is giving you a useful reminder with a verifiable means of not leaving money on the table.

But coaching is not pants. 

My sense is that those of you who follow me along on this journey don’t want these reminders often, if ever. And I’ve never had an organization hire me to coach a team, or facilitate a discussion, on the basis of a button in an email newsletter. My realization is simple: I don’t want to pitch, and you don’t want to be pitched.

I still have many, many more questions than answers at this point in my journey of making the business work. But I do know a practice this size does not depend on hundreds or even dozens of engagements each year to be successful.

So I’m not going to focus on the size of the funnel, or conversion or close or click-through rates. I’m not going to work to generate demand.

Instead, I am going to focus on remembering value: knowing what my offer is and making sure others know it as well.

My offer is clarity. My offer is a safe space where you will be seen and heard. My offer is to challenge your thinking, to help you see your working life through a new lens and from different angles. My offer is to be present, and relentlessly devoted to your success in a way that no one else in your life will. My offer is for YOU, not everyone.  

If this resonates, let’s talk.  

Image: Thamizhpparithi Maari, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons