By Linda Aspey (United Kingdom)
If you’re looking for something to breathe fresh air into your coaching business, this book is an oxygen tank.
Kevin Oubridge and Sue Burnell’s journey from reticent, naïve, but hopeful salespeople to decisive, professional business winners is an inspiration to us all. Whilst it’s aimed at the leadership coach who wants to win more business in the corporate “blue chip” world, I think this book will appeal to both new and experienced coaches from a broad spectrum. In fact I can see it transforming a few life coaching businesses too if they consider and adapt some of the principles to their practice.
They believe that many coaches don’t like to sell, don’t know how to sell, perhaps donot want to find out how to sell, and avoid doing anything that amounts to selling. I agree. In my experience this is the uppermost reason that coaches give up what they’re good at and dearly love doing. Their description of the level of discomfort that coaches can have in selling is one of the endearing qualities of the book – they treat it self-deprecatingly, honestly and with gentle humour. The occasional and very witty cartoons are worth putting on your office wall as a reminder of how uninformed and ineffective our business development attempts can be. As one says “Bob’s only crumb of comfort was that he had absolutely no idea of what he should have done differently”. Priceless.
