How to name professional team coaching when talking to clients

Advanced Seminar Thursday July 16th

In this seminar the advanced Wider Value community will be discussing how we name this thing that we do, for the purposes of marketing to prospective clients. Do we call ourselves team coaches? Consultants? Change navigators?

We’re building a new branch of the industry as team coaches, and our formal name as team coaches is neither well known nor well understood in the marketplace. For some clients, calling ourselves “team coaches” is detrimental to our marketing efforts.

Here are some considerations to ponder ahead of the live online conversation.

What are our clients looking for?

Typically, team coaching clients are looking to address a business need. Examples from my practice include

• reconfiguring team relationships to incorporate AI agents
• building a really high performing executive team
• retaining key talent during downsizing
• navigating a merger, acquisition or restructuring
• negotiating culture change in the organization
• dealing better with differences and conflict amongst team members
• helping middle managers build cohesive teams

I bet you can add more examples to this list. Each engagement is so different – don’t you find this exacerbates our naming problem? Given that we deal with such disparate problems, a generic name is a bit of a catch-all.

In fact, the generic name can do more harm than good in a corporate marketplace.

The emotional content of the name for our profession

How do clients feel when they hear mention of “team coaching” or “consultant” or “change navigator”? The name you give to your profession affects marketing at gut level. Amongst my clients, there are some whose responses to these names include

• Ew! Yuck!
• Coaching sounds like therapy
• Change navigator is too fluffy for me
• Consultants? Don’t they charge too much for advice I could get from Claude?

Yet those same clients – in my experience – often agree that they do have one or more of the business problems listed above. And many would acknowledge that they haven’t yet found a quick fix for the problem, even though that’s what they would prefer.

We will dig deeper into our options on the call.

The professional content and definition of our work

Even though the ICF has established a credential they call team coaching, the infrastructure around the credential is still weak. In particular, their so-called team coaching competencies are explicitly structured as “extensions” of individual coaching competencies. They are a long way from capturing the transformative capability of team coaching and they are no help in marketing.

However the core foundation of coaching is extremely helpful in our marketing and business development process. Partnering with the client is a term that occurs frequently in the ICF’s core competency document. This is also at the heart of building client relationships during your business development process.

If you truly partner with your client system to discover the people dimension of their business agenda, you can’t go far wrong in the prospecting phase.

Practical tips for navigating the marketing terrain

In real life, I de-emphasize generic naming of my profession, except when talking to fellow practitioners. With prospective clients, at the earliest opportunity I turn the conversation away from what I do. Rather, I seek to uncover what their business needs and how I can help. This enables me to redefine my services operationally with each client according to the scope of work we co-create.

My clients and I co-create a new and unique work product for each new engagement. During marketing, I describe what I do through storytelling of cases, seeking to find those that resonate for them. During contracting, we define the current situation and the desired outcome rigorously, and then I include a high level summary of the essence of the coaching approach – namely that participants will be empowered and held accountable to solve the problems together themselves with me as supporter and challenger.

For many successful client engagements, the words “team coaching” were barely mentioned by me and never mentioned in conversation with the client system as a whole. For the CEO to sell a successful team coaching endeavour to his or her leadership team might hinge on them knowing that this is not coaching. Yet what we did, and what they found useful, was team coaching, full-on.

Join the conversation on July 16th

Your voice is welcome as an experienced team coach, as we grapple live and interactively for 90 minutes. Registered participants will get a short, provocative video preparation from me in advance of the session. We will have serious fun exploring ways to name the thing that we do, when talking to clients and prospects.