The Marketing of Professional Coaching: An Eleven Year Perspective

1.  Provide leadership

In the past five years while executive coaching has continued to mature as a product , we have also done an excellent job of demonstrating value to our clients so that clients now come to us already convinced of the merit of coaching. We have successfully differentiated executive coaching from personal coaching or, for the most part, from therapy. IJCO has played a leadership role in this effort.

Executive coaching has met the challenge identified in our 2003 article by continuing to innovate, bringing in new ideas, developing new niches, and offering a range of new services and perspectives to our clients. This innovation has fostered what are essentially mini-launches of new tools and components of executive coaching drawn from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. These interventions are keeping the profession on the cutting edge of management interventions and continually fresh and relevant to our clients today.

The authors continue to believe that this dynamism is essential to continue the growth of our product in a mature market. The Executive Coaching Summits initiated in 1998, which served as a focus for leadership and dissemination of innovation starting in 1998, no longer are adequate as a forum for this leadership of our product. Today’s more mature product requires a leadership forum that brings together practitioners with clients and thought leaders to stimulate new directions and tools that respond to the rapidly changing demands of leaders and managers in the global work place. The cutting edge of this form of leadership and innovation of our profession is being generated by ICCO, the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (www.coachingconsortium.org). ICCO holds frequent regional symposia that are designed to be multi-stakeholder dialogues from an organization-centric perspective to advance and steward the success of executive coaching in organizations globally. There is apparently an enormous market need for such conversations, since every symposium held has sold out and ICCO has turned people away.