Going global: Where to look for new clients

The whole world is going towards online, that’s for sure, and online means globalization. But could you, as a coach, go global from a small country like Romania?

Lately, the whole education industry started to walk with courage the promising lands of online. Coaching claimed its place too. There are more and more places on the Internet where you can learn the ABC (but also the XYZ) of coaching, straight from your comfortable couch in your living room.

Back in 2005, when I discovered coaching, I joined for the first time in my life a series of online classes about how to market your services, plus an online mentoring program, both held by Steve Mitten, ex-president of ICF Global. At that time, this kind of services weren’t that spread. Yet things evolved.

Starting 2008, during a year and a half, I attended the online coaching classes of the International Coach Academy (ICA). Moreover, last year I joined at least one online conference a week, with subjects expanding from coaching to strategic sales, online marketing and leadership. Meanwhile, I chose to market the campaigns for all the four conferences of ICF Romania mostly online. It turned out to be quite a good decision, considering we also had a few foreign attendees.

Through the online I became client of businesses and people that I barely know and never even got to shake their hands. But it works. This is the law of globalization: it doesn’t really mater where you are, as long as you’re selling a product with real benefits and well marketed. What’s interesting is that – although with some exceptions – these principles apply to coaching, too.

I know a few Romanian coaches that have international clients. Also, last year, in November, I started facilitating online coaching sessions though ICA, part of a coaching certification program. Since then, four times a week, I lead the 1 hour meetings of 12 to 15 students. We meet in order to talk about coaching, to share personal experiences related to coaching and to benefit supervision and evaluation.

My students are very different: there’s a Malaysian from Poland, an American from Italy and one from North Carolina, a German from China, a Romanian from Luxembourg, and a few guys from India. I noticed that the Indian students are very rational. Even if they’re used to spiritual things more then the rest of us, their attitude is rather rational. While europeans seem blocked in assumptions, a student from India once said: “Why having a problem coaching? Go out and practice”.

There is also a globalization of the dilemmas that people interested in coaching encounter. Their challenges are related to [the lack of] clients, to identifying niches, to understanding new ways for joining valuable projects. Some of them are people from corporations who are compelled to gain coaching abilities. Some try to practice coaching in order to approach a certain market with something new. A friend was trying to enter the business market in a city in France through an International corporation, but there was no one there interested to find out how coaching could help: people were seeking results.

On the other hand, this was exactly the case of one of the biggest struggles for a coach. To avoid talking about coaching, and rather find out which are the results that the client needs and show him how – through coaching – these results can be addressed.

That’s why, essentially, it’s not the solutions that became global, but the needs.