In a world full of innumerable skills and prospects lies the need for mentorship and effective direction, literally forming up the basis of what “coaching” means. To coach means to offer personalised and professional guidance to clients of given fields in order to bolster career development and advancement producing maximal results. This practice beams rightly in the business world; where the overall business performance is controlled and managed by professional coaches to ensure meaningful progress in clients’ businesses.
Business coaching, being a sensitive art requires improved strategies to selecting and acquiring clients to be coached, as this is crucial to the standing or falling in business outcome. The Nigerian coaching market is overwhelmed with competition bubbling with varieties of coaches and potential clients, hence the need to master veritable skills needed to acquire talent, sustain and enable them to yield productive results.
Witnessed by several global and national business landscape appraisals, the Nigerian business scope promises greatly a robust potential of emerging entrepreneurs, innovatively carving diverse niches for themselves. This has taken a rapid pace with the help of technology, globalization and the unwavering growth of urbanization.
There’s been a decline of interest in taking up white-collar jobs as graduates and students see the business world rife with plenty of opportunities to earn double the amount white-collar jobs would have promised as salaries. This crystallizes that the idea of being a CEO or business owner not being under the stringent leadership of a formal structure fuels the evidenced population of Nigeria’s business realm. Most likely this feat can be described as a positive return as this has created healthy competition in Nigeria’s economy causing brands to exert considerable pricing policies and giving consumers the leverage to utilize the beauty of choice.
However, amidst the vibrancy and growth of Nigeria’s business sector presents intense challenges such as unstable exchange rates, inflation, infrastructural deficit, corruption and an endless list of others. These challenges ought to be fronted and dissolved by business coaches using their business prowess and intellectual acumen needed to adopt strategies that could help navigate the market complexities in order to attract and retain talents in the long run.
Corporate Branding
One of the keys to gaining prominence as a business coach is through the strategic shaping of your brand. Branding has gone beyond the traditional collective ownership of a company offering specific products or services to the market. Being a brand could be you and your personhood. Personal branding explores the need to position self-values and professional contribution to given scopes necessitating the crafting of an endearing corporate image.
A corporate image serves as the face value of your brand. This enables prospective clients to resonate and believe in your professionalism even before meeting and concreting a collaboration. Business coaching is a growing competitive field, in order to be a golden fish in the pool of several fishes, personal branding stands as a major gateway.
The recent rise of new media sought the need to present the presence of business coaches in order for their individual brands to be recognized, having an edge over their traditional counterparts. This is in acute consonance with Seth Godwin’s idea, profound marketing expert, that being a brand isn’t about just your value and what can be offered on the table, it’s whereas a collection of expectations that encompasses one’s vision, mission and professional drive culminated to form a specific image about your brand. This can further influence consumer perception of one service over the other.
Building a personal brand as a business coach, it’s important to design media covers with content that represents authenticity and feasibility. It’s widely proven that digitalization has enveloped the audiences of any kind of leaders, organizations and businesses. Through the use of a smartphone, millions of people scattered around the globe can simultaneously share meaning and engage themselves in different dimensions.
In recent analysis, a profound information hub, statista, pegs that Nigeria boasts of 154 million internet users, invariably giving hints to the large number of people committing engagement in the digital terrain. Business coaches are hereby advised to proliferate the media space and carve their digital presence through the application of numerous digital marketing strategies; content marketing, social media advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO). Content sampled on media pages should include the showcase of mastery through thoughtful nuggets, video presentations and articulated insights on emerging business cues. This should be followed with a consistent flow of work-driven ideas that ensures conviction and believability that of course includes the intentional attendance of traditional conventional events to network and connect to potential clients.
Each of the above strategies are renowned to produce positive results as they sum up to ultimately provide visibility for brands. The effective creation of consistent content would cover a lot of concerns in the business field as this positions their brands as trusted and respected. Once a brand is recognized, there’s heavy belief that such a brand could be considered for a deal or collaboration.
The Power of Networking: Relationship-building
Joanne Donne made no lies when he wrote a book titled “No man is an island” as this relates to reality and the entire human existence. Nobody can do it all alone, we need a push, a rush, a stem, and support from people in order to get to the top. Relationships are the bedrocks of life as this secures the continuity of communication among humans. The absence of relationships would bring about a bland and distasteful world with little or nothing to look out for.
Nigeria is highly communal; interpersonal relationships and community bonding is commonly in practice. Amidst the inevitable human conflict and altercation, beautiful and positive relationships amongst people still thrive. It’s in the same vein business coaches need to recognize the pivotal role networking and building relationships with various business public’s play.
Relationship building is one of the skills business coaches need to nurture in order to successfully acquire clients. This relationship involves the creation of meaningful rapport and cordiality with industry peers, clients and other beneficial partners that could scale the birthing of valuable word-of-mouth referrals and golden opportunities.
Author and thought leader, Keith Ferrazzi corroborates the idea that in business dares not work alone as he noted in his “Never Eat alone” book where he buttresses that in business it’s about working with people and not against them as the former might be regrettable. Business coaches are thereby urged to actively participate in events and conferences organized by the industry giants to achieve a beautiful networking stream.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Conceptually, Corporate Social Responsibility is the series of activities designed by a brand or reputable organization to offer free services to the society and community their business is mostly affiliated with. This has proven to be one sure way of gaining more clients serving as public relations’ most profitable strategy.
Offering free consultations and workshops as a business coach is a strategy used to pool more people in for your business. When you appear to have the community at heart and support burgeoning businesses for free in whatsoever capacity, it ends up as news that could fly around for more prospective clients to be endeared. People would see the effectiveness of your job and be encouraged to be patrons of the service that you offer, leading to a transformative impact on your career.
Business coaches should enact more reach-out services tailored accordingly to prospective clients needs as an overall strategy used to magnet their target audiences.
Conclusion
It’s important to conclude that talent/client acquisition in the business sector demands more than being competent. The digital age has promulgated the adoption of multifaceted strategies a business coach must utilize for successful client acquisition. These strategies range from digital marketing to corporate branding, networking and the utilization of public relation tools. All of which can contribute to the efficient building of a successful business coaching practice and experience in a competitive-centric market.
Business coaches should continually evolve to fit in recent trends and activities in order to stay standing in business innovatively. Coaches should never forget the importance of collaboration and obeisance of professional ethics while navigating the business coaching field as this contributes to raising the bar of the industry in Nigeria.
Oladipupo Timothy Clement is a highly accomplished Real Estate and Business Coach with a career spanning over two decades. He is the Founder and CEO of Lifepage®️ Property & Investments Limited, a leading real estate company in Nigeria.
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