The best market research most coaches own is in old call recordings
Coaches guess at who their buyer is while a record of their actual buyers sits unopened. How to pull 6 fields from 20 past calls and find out who really buys.
By The Coaching World
Published November 11, 2026 · 8 min read
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
The file nobody opens
Ask a coach who their ideal client is and the answer usually arrives in a confident sentence. Ask how they know, and the ground gets softer. The answer is normally a mix of the last few good clients, a sense of who was easy to talk to, and a guess.
Meanwhile the better answer may already be sitting on a hard drive. Most call software can record, and many plans include a transcript. A coach who has been running consultations for a year may have a year of people describing, in their own words, what was wrong, what they had tried, and what finally made them go looking for help.
It is easy to never open any of it.
That is a strange gap. Coaches will pay for surveys and read industry reports about buyers in general, while a record of their own buyers specifically sits in a folder nobody has opened since the call ended.
Why memory is a poor stand-in
The pattern a coach carries around is not a count. It is a story, and stories get edited.
Recent calls weigh more than older ones. Calls that went badly stick harder than calls that went fine. A client who became a friend takes up more room than 3 who quietly finished their package and left. One memorable conversation can set a whole positioning strategy, and there is no way to tell from the inside whether it was typical or an outlier.
Going back to the record does not make a coach smarter. It replaces an impression with a tally. That is a smaller claim than it sounds, and it is usually enough to change something.
Count, do not re-watch
The instinct is to start playing calls back from the beginning. That is the slowest possible version, and it is the version people abandon.
The work is extraction, not listening. For each call, pull a handful of fields and nothing else:
- The problem, in the words the person used, not the words a coach would use
- What they had already tried before this conversation
- What made them look for help now rather than last year
- What they said about money, and at what point in the call it came up
- What they hesitated over
- Whether they bought, and how long it took
6 columns, one row per call. Resist writing conclusions while extracting, because a conclusion formed on call 4 will quietly shape how calls 5 through 20 get recorded.
20 calls is enough. 10 who bought and 10 who did not, pulled from the last year. More rows tend to produce the same conclusions for more effort. Reading transcripts is faster than watching, so skim for the 6 fields rather than sitting through the conversation again.
Doing the extracting and the thinking on separate days helps. The first job is clerical and the second is not, and doing both at once is how a coach ends up with 20 rows that all confirm what they already believed.
If there is no archive yet
Plenty of coaches will open the folder and find nothing usable. Recordings with no transcripts, or no recordings at all.
Neither is a dead end. Re-watching 10 calls at increased speed is slower than reading but perfectly doable in a day, and the 6 fields are shallow enough that most of a call can be skipped. A coach with nothing recorded can start capturing the same 6 fields live, from the next conversation onward, writing them up in the 5 minutes afterwards while it is fresh. That builds the same file going forward, and the first useful read arrives after about 20 conversations rather than immediately.
Before recording anything
A coaching conversation is confidential, and an archive of recordings is a responsibility rather than an asset.
Anyone recording client or prospect calls should say so plainly and get agreement first, rather than relying on a line in a terms page. The recordings belong somewhere private, with access limited to the people who need it. Names and identifying details should come out before any of it is shared with a colleague, a contractor, or any software that processes the text.
A coach's professional body will have guidance on this, and local law may set requirements that go further. Both are worth checking once, properly, not assumed.
The 3 things this answers
The first is who actually buys, as opposed to who turns up. Those are not always the same group, and a coach only sees the difference by sorting the rows. Line up the people who bought against the people who did not and look at role, life stage, and what prompted the call. The gap between those 2 columns is usually where the useful information sits.
The second is what words to use. People often describe their own problems inconsistently, and in language no professional would choose. That language is still closer to what they would type into a search bar, and to what they will recognise on a page. A phrase that keeps recurring across calls has earned a place in the offer description more than anything written from scratch.
The third is what the objection really is. What someone says and what stops them can be different things, and a single call gives no way to tell which. 20 calls give a better chance. If the same hesitation keeps surfacing in different wording, that is the one worth designing around.
The column most coaches never think to ask about
Of those 6 columns, the one least likely to have been asked about on purpose is why now.
Most positioning describes a type of person. Buying is usually caused by an event. Something happened, and the cost of staying still went above the cost of doing something about it. A promotion that did not come. A reorganisation. A deadline that moved.
Describe the person and the message reaches people who match on paper and are perfectly content. Describe the moment and it reaches people who are already uncomfortable. Those are different audiences even when they share a job title.
Past calls are one of the few places that moment gets written down at all, and it tends to surface early, before anyone starts asking structured questions.
What to expect, and why
3 things are worth expecting, not because they always happen, but because of what the exercise is built to expose.
The niche may turn out narrower than the one a coach named, and defined by circumstance rather than industry. That is the predictable result of comparing buyers against non-buyers, since a stated niche is chosen in advance and a buying pattern is not.
The outcome buyers describe may sound smaller and more specific than the transformation on the website. That is what happens when the words come from the person paying rather than the person selling.
And a price objection may turn out to be doubt about whether the outcome will arrive. Those 2 look identical in a single conversation and separate out across 20, because genuine price resistance tends to appear early while doubt tends to appear after the outcome has been described.
If none of that shows up, the absence is informative too.
What this cannot tell you
The exercise has a hard limit worth being honest about.
Only people who got on a call are in the file. Everyone who saw the website and left, who never replied, who never heard of the coach at all, is missing. So the archive is good for sharpening an offer aimed at people already arriving, and close to useless for judging the size of a market or working out why nobody is arriving in the first place.
People are also unreliable narrators about their own buying. Someone who says a free session convinced them may have decided earlier, for reasons they never mentioned. Patterns across many calls survive that better than any single explanation does.
Treat the output as a sharper set of questions rather than a set of answers.
Where to start
Pick 10 past clients and 10 people who had a conversation and did not go ahead. Open the transcripts. Fill in 6 columns. Then put the buyers and the non-buyers side by side and look for the field where the 2 groups disagree most.
It is an afternoon of unglamorous work, and it replaces the most load-bearing guess in a coaching business with something closer to evidence.
Our articles are researched and reviewed by our editors. Read our editorial standards.
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