Coaches Sing If I Had A Hammer.

You LOVE hammers!

You SELL hammers!

You know in your gut that hammers are cool, hip, and can change the world if given something to bang.

Everywhere you go you sell hammers. You want to sell me a hammer. You believe fervently, passionately that my situation would be vastly improved if I had a hammer. So you knuckle down, polish your pitch, and try over and over again to sell me a hammer.

The problem is that I have this screw that I am trying to attach to a piece of wood. What I really need — I figured this out on my own — is a screw driver, not a hammer. That is my situation: a man with a piece of wood, a screw, and no screw driver.

There’s an opportunity there for someone to sell me a screw driver because that’s what I need. But you don’t sell screw drivers, you sell hammers. So instead of offering me a screw driver, you persist in selling me a hammer because you are in love with hammers. That’s all you know — hammers.

“Well, you can always bang in the screw!” you shout at me, frustrated by my obvious ignorance about the virtues of hammers.

Since you refuse to acknowledge my obvious disinterest in hammers, I grab you by your shirt collar and throw you out the door.

Although I am baffled by my situation — the screw, the piece of wood, attaching the screw to the wood, etc. — I still know the difference between a nail and a screw, a hammer and a screw driver.

I am in need but I am not an idiot.

Abraham Maslow famously once said: “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

The concept is thus: individuals who are incomplete in their knowledge or training of solutions propose the same type of solution to every problem they encounter.   They opt for the more familiar solution to one that may be more effective yet with which they are unskilled.

The question you face is whether the coaching solutions you offer prospects are limited either by your training or by a predisposition to see problems in a certain way.  Looked at closely enough, there are ethical as well as practical issues here.  Not only might you be harming clients who might be better served with other solutions, you might find prospects more resistant than you expect to your marketing efforts.

Like the fellow with the screw and the piece of wood, they know the difference between a hammer and a screw driver.