Every ranking
10 lists, each ordered by a single figure published elsewhere on this site. Read the criterion first: if it is not what you care about, the order under it does not apply to you.
This site publishes benchmarks, and the honest problem with coaching benchmarks is that most of them are not measured. There is no large-scale public study of what coaches spend to acquire a client, so the figures circulating in the industry are practitioner reports repeated until they sound official.
The rankings below use those figures because they are the best available, and every one of them says so on the page. Where a number comes from a published study it is cited; where it comes from community reports it is labelled as directional.
The distinction matters more here than on the other sites in this network, because a confident-sounding acquisition cost is exactly the kind of number people plan a quarter around.
The short answer
Ten rankings of coaching acquisition, funnels, retention and cost, each ordered by one measured or reported figure. Most acquisition numbers here are practitioner estimates rather than studies, because no large-scale public research into coaching marketing spend exists — every page says which it is.
Which figures are measured and which are reported
Measured, from published studies. Retention splits and time allocation come from the ICF Global Coaching Study 2025. Email benchmarks come from GetResponse 2024 and are cross-industry rather than coaching-specific, which makes them a floor rather than a target. Stack costs come from published vendor pricing.
Reported, from practitioner data. Channel costs, close rates by source and funnel conversions are community reports. They are consistent across many accounts, which is worth something, and they are not a study, which is worth stating.
A single documented case. The paid-search return figure comes from one engagement that was written up. Cases get written up because they worked, so it describes what is achievable rather than what is typical, and the page says that.
What the rankings cover
- Where clients actually come from, ordered by close rate then cost
- The cheapest routes to a client when there is no budget
- Funnel structures, ordered by documented conversion at the final stage
- The fastest routes to a first client, ordered by time
- Which lead sources close, ordered by discovery-call conversion
- Retention by product type, and the split that separates the income cohorts
- What a fragmented software stack costs, line by line
- Marketing ordered by return rather than by cost per lead
- Email by open and click rate, against cross-industry floors
- The platforms these benchmarks assume you are running on
Common questions
How reliable are coaching acquisition benchmarks?
Directionally reliable and not precise. No large-scale public study of coaching marketing spend exists, so the channel figures are practitioner reports. The relative ordering is well supported across many accounts; the specific percentages are estimates and are labelled as such.
Why is close rate ranked above cost?
Because cost per lead is not cost per client. A $30 lead with a 20% booking rate and a 16% close rate costs roughly $1,875 per acquired client. Both numbers are true and only the second one is about your business.
Are the email benchmarks coaching-specific?
No. They are GetResponse 2024 cross-industry figures, which is why the pages describe them as a floor. A focused coaching list of people who deliberately asked to hear from you should beat them.
Who publishes coachingstats.com?
Coachful, which makes coaching software. Coachful appears on the software rankings here and is marked as ours wherever it does. That is a real conflict of interest and it is why every list states the single criterion it is ordered by before the order appears: a ranking you can check against a published rule is arguable, and one you cannot check is worth nothing regardless of who wrote it.
What is the single most useful benchmark on this site?
That coaches earning above $120,000 get 55% of revenue from existing clients while those below $80,000 get 70% from new ones. It is measured, it is large, and it describes a difference in how a practice is run rather than in how good the coaching is.
The verdict
Use these to size a decision, not to forecast one. The orderings hold up; the decimal places do not, and the pages say which is which.
If you take one number away, take the retention split. Almost everything else on this site is about acquiring clients more cheaply, and the largest available gain is usually in not needing to.
How these are ordered
Every list names the single figure it is sorted by, before the list appears. No weighted scores out of ten: the weights are where the dishonesty hides, and nobody outside can audit them.
Coachful publishes this site and appears in these lists, marked as ours wherever it does.