Should you sell coaching to individuals? My hot take.

Welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. So, my name is Ellie Scarfe. I'm a senior executive coach, and I have over 17 years experience coaching corporate clients, running coaching businesses, working as in house coach, and working as an associate coach. So I have run the full gamut of coaching business. I now work very specifically with executive coaches who want to grow their business with more corporate clients. So today's episode, I don't know, it might be slightly controversial and it might just veer into ranting territory, but I feel very strongly about this. And so I wanted to pull this out as an episode of its own. You may have heard me say this all before in various masterclasses and episodes, but I really want you to reflect on what is happening in your practice, in reality. And so my point, I guess my platform, the hill that I'm dying on, is that I think executive coaches should target organizational clients rather than individual clients. And some of you will go, well, yes, obviously, but some of you will feel a little bit like I'm pointing fingers at you, and maybe I am, because I work with a lot of coaches who are finding that things aren't going as well as they want in their business. And. And usually they come to me with a focus that they've been marketing to individuals. Right? Lead they want to offer leadership coaching to individuals. So let me give you a few reasons why I think you should be spending your business development, time, energy and money working with organizational clients and targeting organizational clients rather than individuals. So firstly, when you think of all of the money in the world that is spent on leadership and executive coaching, I would say 99% of that spend is spent by organizations and companies and potentially government bodies as well. So if you are targeting individuals, you are fishing in a much, much smaller pond, right? Potentially 1% of the budget. And I say those are not stats that I've read anyway. Those are stats based on my experience. And I think you would probably agree, if we think about it, 99% of the spend in the world on leadership and executive coaching is. Is spent by organizations. So to me, if I follow the bouncing ball, the consequence of that is we should be going after the entities that are buying those services and that are spending money on those services, and that is the organization. Another reason why is that there is a much higher relative proportion of coaches who are trying to sell to individuals based on the percentage of the. The money that individuals are spending on coaches. There is a mismatch, right? So as I mentioned, when people come to me after being in business, it might Be for a year or two or five when they haven't had the traction that they want. This is often one of the contributing factors. I won't say the reason because there are many reasons, but it is one of the big contributing factors that they are trying to sell to the wrong client and they may have some intermittent success. Right? Don't get me wrong, it is possible to sell to individuals. You know, I have had individual clients in the past, but it is my belief that we shouldn't be spending our marketing energy there because of that lack of traction. The next reason why I think you should focus on marketing and selling to organizations rather than individuals is that if you are focused on individuals, the chances are that you're not doing so for the right reasons. So I don't know whether right or wrong. Maybe that's a, that's an artificial judgment. Maybe we shouldn't say right or wrong. But often people are going after individual clients because they feel less confident or they feel a degree of fear in pursuing organizational clients because that imposter syndrome pops up when they think about why would that organization hire me? You know, little or me, I know other coaches out there, they have more experience than me. No organization is going to want to work with me. And so I guess my question to you, if you consider yourself to be in that category where you're doubting your experience, your capability, your ability to, you know, hold credibility with those organizational clients, my question is, would you rather invest the energy that you're, so you could choose to pivot, then go after individual clients and invest your energy and your, your business development, time, energy, money in trying to get some revenue from this limited pool right. Of individuals? Or might it be a better alternative to invest that energy and time and money in dealing with the confidence, right. Dealing with the fear, work, doing that work for yourself to feel better about pursuing those clients. So for me, it is a no brainer that I would rather the people that I work with, particularly inside the accelerator, rather than encouraging them to. It's like, oh, well, yeah, I can see that you're feeling, you're feeling anxious about pursuing organizational clients. Why don't you just go after the individuals instead? I don't say that. What I say is let's work on that anxiety, let's work on that fear and let's figure out how we can get you to a place where you feel much more comfortable going for it and where in fact, you know that they would be lucky to have you and that your offer will solve a real problem for Them. So that is another reason, another reason why, and really pragmatic reason why I think you should target organizational clients and not individual clients is that you can expect to charge about double the rate. Right? And so double the rate can mean lots of different things. It can mean double the income, or it can mean half of the business development effort. It can mean having to do half the amount of work and take half the amount of time, or it can mean double the payoff for the same amount of time. So that is an interesting thing to reflect on as well. And then finally, I think this is probably my most compelling reason is all about leverage. And I believe that spending time targeting your, using your business development time, energy and money targeting organizations has so much more leverage than spending that same amount of time, energy and money targeting individuals. And that is because like when you work with an individual, you complete the engagement and the engagement is done. Sometimes there will be a renewal. Absolutely. So that or an extension or a renewal. Definitely. And I always encourage you to pursue that path. However, let's think about an organization. Let's say you get one coach coaching engagement at an organization. The things that can flow from that are infinite, right? So there are any number of other coaches in the organization. If you're building relationships with the right people in the organization and doing a great job, there are opportunities to expand beyond coaching. And really this works either way, right? It could be expanding from another type of work into coaching or it could be expanding from coaching into another type of work. So for example, maybe someone you are coaching would like you to do some work with their team. So we have a team development opportunity. Or maybe the HR lead that you've been talking to needs someone to come and run a leadership workshop. Or maybe they need someone to run group coaching off the back of an existing organizational program. So really in organizations there is not that sense of one and done that there is with individuals. There are so many opportunities. There are opportunities to build, build your networks, you know, both wide and deep within those organizations and to expand on the work that you do in there. And so for largely the same investment of business development time, the opportunity that you create is, is much more, it's, it's longer term, it is more robust and it's just, you know, the quantum of opportunity that can, can come up is much higher. So I hope I've convinced you that organizations should be your primary targets. And what does it mean? It means that if you make that decision, then there are some flow on consequences, right? You need to make sure that the Language you use on your, in your coach Bio, on your LinkedIn page, on your website all speaks to the organizational buyer, right? Your outreach strategy might need to change the way you network and where you network might need to change literally who you speak to, right? So who you are, who you are talking, talking to, both metaphorically through your content and literally through, through outreach, that will change slightly. However, it is the same work that we're doing, right? It is the same messaging, largely. It's just that we need to look at that, those pain points, for example, from a different angle or a different perspective. And there may be additional pain points. We might look more strategically at organizational pain as well as the tactical pain. But you know, we still are with individuals. We are just selling in a different way. And so this, as I mentioned, this transition from primarily marketing to individuals to marketing to organizational clients is something that we work on all the time inside the accelerator. And no, it doesn't mean never working with individual clients, but it does mean not focusing your marketing energy and attention there. So I would say book a call with me if you think that there is a chance that this is a reason why you aren't bringing in the amount of clients that you would like to work with. I'm going to put the link in the show notes or you can head over to elliscarf.com forward/bookacall and book in. I want to have a chat. Feel free. I want to, I want to have a debate as well. If you want to fight me on this, I'm ready to go. So yeah, come on over, let's have a chat. You can send me a message on LinkedIn and I would love to talk to you about that. And so I'm going to end my little mini rant here. Hopefully it wasn't too ranty and was a bit helpful. I'll see you next week.