By Malcolm Nicholson- iCN Journalist (United Kingdom)
The business coaching marketplace is evolving. The impact and benefit of coaching – no matter what flavour – is beyond dispute and so demand continues. There is a continuing flood of inexperienced or transitioning newcomers into the business, whilst within organisations the HR function wants to take on more senior coaching/mentoring. Some businesses are providing internal coaching and others are outsourcing coaching to external providers – either established consultancies who now offer coaching, or training businesses who are also providing coaching panels. This is leading to commoditisation of coaching. Consequently the need to for ‘solo-preneurs’ to market themselves effectively is becoming a matter of survival.
The route to the customer is outside the scope of this article, which focuses on how to develop your proposition for the time in front of a potential coachee.
To get an expert opinion, I spoke to Garry Mansfield, MD of Outside In Sales & Marketing. Outside In are a specialist UK B2B sales consultancy established in 2008. I like Garry’s approach because it dovetails with a coaching approach and has evolved out of frustration with too many companies selling “silver bullet” or the next big thing. Outside In realise sales challenges are more complex than a single fix and so work shoulder to shoulder with their clients.
Source: iCN Issue 15 (Marketing for Coaches); pages 10-13
About Malcolm Nicholson
Malcolm was one of the regular contributors before he became one of our journalist representing United Kingdom. Malcolm is the owner and the Coaching Director for Aspecture. With over 15 years extensive experience of providing transformational coaching to leaders in the UK and internationally. He helps leaders cope with business pressures by generating high-level coaching interventions to enable them to develop cognitive complexity and agility, making them better at what they do. He brings an additional overlay of tools taken from three other disciplines:
Sports psychology, helping people to perform at their peak; dealing with the ‘outside world’.
Complexity Theory, building leaders’ cognitive capacity to deal with highly complex circumstances for ‘in the role’.
Existentialist Coaching, making sense of unpredictability; getting clarity for the ‘inner person’.
