NCC Coaching Trends 2009 Interview No. 9: Barry Zweibel
Barry Zweibel, MCC, who can be found at GottaGettaCoach, Inc., is another highly successful executive, business, and life coach that I have not talked to in person before. I was excited to interview Barry, because we have been on several coach discussion lists over the years, including the New Coach Connection, and he always ha insightful comments. Then when I invited him to be on the Coaching Trends 2009 series, he initially said he didn’t have anything new to contribute.
That was certainly not the case! As we emailed back and forth, I discovered that Barry had a very different view about the need for new coaches to choose a niche in order to succeed than most of our previous guests in this series. Barry thinks not only do coaches not necessarily need to niche, but that a new coach who chooses a niche too soon may be making a huge mistake.
Then in our conversation Barry gave eight (count ‘em, eight) cogent reasons why a coach should not niche prematurely. Listen to this call to learn what they are. Then tell us whether you agree or disagree in the comments. We really wanna know!
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Click on the arrow to the listen to the interview now (50 min.). Or right click on the following link to download the MP3 file.
We also talked about the difference between marketing to a targeted segment of the population and niching. Barry believes that a coach needs three pistons at the minimum in their “client attraction engine” (a term used by Ernest Oriente in our first interview of this series) A coach needs to make consistent efforts to get new clients in the pipeline. There is a lot of keen insight and useful information in this recording.
Enjoy!
Your host for the Coaching Trends 2009 series is Don H. Morris. Don is a life and relationship coach in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more at donhmorris.com. He is also the list manager for the New Coach Connection discussion list hosted on Yahoo Groups.
Barry is not only a very focused and dedicated coach but one of the
real innovators in using blogging and new media. Very good that you
were able to persuade him to share.
As someone who has been told by over 20 top coaching “gurus” that I can’t take another step until I’ve defined my niche, which has cost me over a year of wasted time being stalled, it’s refreshing to hear Barry’s perspective. It makes a lot of sense that after coaching 100 – 200 clients ones coaching technique would change, and that one would become familiar with what subjects they really enjoy coaching, as well.
My concern though is if one is a generalist, how does one advertise and attract paying clients? As the saying goes, if you try to market to everyone you are marketing to no one. I wish Barry had provided information on this. While he does mention avenues of marketing, he does not explain how one can present themselves to attract clients that will pay someone who has not chosen a specialty coaching area. This has been the bane of my existence for over a year now. How do I market and attract paying clients without having a niche that appeals to one particular group or problem that I solve…?