Who is my customer?

Who is my customer?

photo of shop with customers

At the EMCC UK day conference, Future proofing your practice, we offered a choice of workshops which focus on developing and improving your coaching and mentoring practice. In this blog post, one of our workshop leaders, Peter Waggott gives a taster of his session on business modelling.

There is a lack of understanding within businesses and organisations as to who their customers are. In the current climate, there’s a fundamental difference between how an organisation thinks their customers do business and how their customers really operate.

Understanding your customer is key to developing and growing your coaching practice. You need to take time to know which areas you feel offer you the most chance of getting business – and quickly.

If you’re starting or developing your own business, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

Who are my target customers? 
Why should they buy from me?
What do I offer that’s different?
How can I build my business?

There are a number of challenges when setting up your coaching practice. Firstly, you need to recognize you are now Sales, Marketing, Branding, Media, PR, Accounting, etc. Sales is an uncomfortable area for many people, and in order to mitigate this, we can focus on areas where we feel more comfortable, for example by speaking to people about our coaching offer. Once we are comfortable in speaking about our business, then we can tackle the more difficult areas:

How many hours do I need to be coaching per week?
What is my hourly/daily rate? 
Is this feasible? 
What type of businesses do I want to work with? 
What areas of coaching would I like to concentrate on?
Who can I approach in my network?

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash