Positioning is what makes a coach memorable, and it comes straight from your values. Use yours to stand out and stop sounding like every other coach.
A surprising number of coaches either have no clue whatsoever what positioning is.
Or they assume it’s something only big companies need to worry about.
Well, here’s a hint as to its importance for you looking to become a fully booked coach. It might literally be the most important thing you do to get coaching clients.
Yet most coaches imagine branding agencies populated with people called Rupert and Bella, riffing with vision boards and frequently popping out to the bathroom to powder the inside of their nose, not a coach.
Others believe that positioning is simply choosing a name, such as life coach, leadership coach, or executive coach.
And yet others think their niche is their position.
Whereas we’re closer with your niche, it’s still not quite there and it is absolutely something you need to understand and implement.
Niche vs. Positioning: What Most Coaches Get Wrong
There is a restaurant in Soho, London called Bob Bob Ricard. Its niche is that it sells fine French and English cuisine.
That’s a congested niche in a city as diverse and large as London.
However, Bob Bob Ricard positioned itself in such a competitive marketplace by installing a black button in every booth, with the message “Press for Champagne” above it.
That was literally its only purpose: to be used if you wanted champagne.
It’s a ridiculous concept when you think about it. Any diner could beckon over their waiter and order champagne at any time; they hardly needed an obtrusive button.
But that button alone means the restaurant sells more champagne than any other restaurant in the UK And, on average, champagne makes up almost 50% of each table’s bill.
People go there just to press the button. And photos of people doing exactly that are regularly shared on Instagram and other social media platforms.
Nobody goes to Bob Bob Ricard for the first time and doesn’t tell other people about the champagne button.
And that is at the heart of good marketing and especially great positioning.
Making you and your story shareable.
The difference between your niche and your position
Your niche, valuable though it is, is hardly shareable for the vast majority of coaches.
There are exceptions, such as the client who I once worked with, (and I’m not making this shit up) who only coached people who’d been through multiple organ transplants, but they are very much a rarity.
On a personal level, I hate my niche of working with coaches.
Not because I hate working with coaches because, of course, I don’t I absolutely love it.
It’s just that so many unethical people have come into our industry in the years since I started the Fully Book Coached (formerly Coach the Life Coach) in 2013, that I cringe at the thought of being associated with them.
My positioning is my way around that by sharing my thoughts, beliefs and stories about the industry, warts and all.
My positioning is also formed by the fact that I use a lot of humour in my writing, and that I’m not afraid to share my fuck-ups, just as much as my successes.
Oh, and yes, and of course, because I don’t shy away from the odd F-bomb to emphasise a point.
Your niche is you telling people who you serve.
Your positioning is what people say about you to others.
Two coaches can work with the same kind of clients on the same types of problems and still be perceived completely differently.
One might be seen as gentle and reflective, another as strategic and practical, another as direct and challenging.
That difference is not created by the niche but by the positioning, and it’s crucial to becoming a fully booked coach.
The danger of being a generic coach in a saturated market
Good positioning stops you sounding generic and about as inspiring as listening to Eric Trump reading In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
Ya know, like most coaches in the online space.
They describe their work the same way countless others do, using similar vanilla coach language, issuing similar promises and using similar tones.
They rely on sincerity and hoping their good intentions alone will differentiate them.
But they won’t.
The desire to help people is merely the bar to entry for a coach and not something that can help you stand out in a saturated marketplace.
That didn’t work when I first became a coach in 2005, and I very conservatively estimate that there’s 100x more coaches now than there was back then.
The irony is that large companies spend enormous amounts of money trying to create this level of personal authenticity, while coaches (who already have it ) often neglect to use it.
Positioning is not about logos or even taglines. It’s about that word that’s almost become a cliche in self development circles; authenticity.
It is about giving your audience a sense of who you really are, what it’s like to work with you, and why you are not just another coach among thousands.
If you do not deliberately shape that perception, your audience will form one anyway, and it may not be the one you would choose.
How your values shape your positioning
Your values play a significant role in how opinions about you are formed.
Whether or not you speak about them openly, your values influence how you make decisions, the boundaries you hold, the behaviours you will not entertain, and the overall experience people have when they encounter you and your work.
Values shape expectations, your reputation and the sense people get about you, sometimes long before you’ve met them.
And that is positioning.
To make this a little bit easier to wrap your head around, consider my own business of The Fully Booked Coach.
As I mentioned, my niche is coaches, especially those who want to build successful practices.
But my positioning comes from my values and anti-values.
I am outspoken and I am unapologetically liberal.
I’m not interested in polishing my personality to make it flatter or more market-friendly.
I value integrity, humour, fairness and freedom. I have strong anti-values around manipulation, inflated promises and pomposity.
I do not need to list these values publicly, because they are apparent in the content I create and the way I interact online.
They influence the kind of clients I accept, and the kind I decline. Although, to be fair, I rarely get somebody book a consult with me who doesn’t already get me, because they’ve read my website, or they’re on my newsletter list, or follow me on social media.T
My approach would not be right for every coach, or even many coaches.
Someone working inside corporate leadership environments may need a more low-key expression of their values. Declaring political positions publicly or using humour that might divide opinion could drastically limit their opportunities.
You can express values such as courage, family, inclusion, peace, tolerance, integrity, generosity or any value you care to mention through how you operate your business and how you manage relationships, without ever needing to broadcast them loudly or explicitly.
Even when expressed subtly, people will pick up on them, and they will naturally create a degree of polarisation.
In marketing terms, polarisation a highly desirable thing. It simply means that people do not feel neutral about you. Some are drawn towards you and some step away.
Clear values discourage misaligned clients long before they book a call, which saves you and the potential client time and energy.
When coaches try to appeal to everyone, their positioning inevitably becomes vague.
Their marketing could appear on almost any coach’s website without needing to be edited.
Your core values (and anti-values) prevent that drift into blandness by giving your work structure and shape.
And when your positioning grows naturally out of your values, everything becomes easier.
You stop trying to replicate other coaches either consciously or unconsciously.
Get the clients you want by using core values.
You attract clients who appreciate what you bring and who like you and you like.
And you spend less time persuading and more time coaching.
Most importantly, your business feels like an honest extension of who you are rather than a performance you have to maintain.
Values are not an accessory, but a structural part of you as an individual and your marketing
it’s highly unlikely that there is any coach out there who’s got the same values as you. That one thing alone can help you stand out If you’re not afraid to use it.
I’m biassed, but obviously, I think you should buy The Clarity Method to help you figure out not just your values, but those of your clients.
But if you don’t want to, or you’ve already figured out your core values, open [and anti-values], Just make sure you use them.
if you have any comments, questions, or takes on Core Values, please leave me a comment.
