What kind of tools do you use in your coaching business?
You may use a social media scheduler, a CRM to collect contracts and invoices, or a calendar system to schedule appointments—but what about supportive tools?
It’s important to offer tools that will fully support your clients’ transformations.
By providing more supportive tools, you can encourage your audience to dig deeper within themselves. You’ll also be able to confidently walk alongside your clients in their own transformative journey.
As a coach, you have a rare opportunity to see behind the curtain, giving your clients a safe place to open up and explore new solutions.
Whether you are a life coach, business coach, health coach, or find yourself another niche, you can enhance your coaching experience with supportive tools.
The benefits of using supportive tools in your coaching business
Supportive tools can be used inside coaching sessions and in between appointments. Some can even be beneficial to explore before your coaching engagement begins.
With the right tools, you can:
- Introduce new concepts
- Create a roadmap to success
- Personalize the coaching experience
- Help with goal setting
By illuminating the path toward self-growth, you’ll create a memorable coaching experience tailored to each of your clients. Let’s start by discussing each of these benefits in more depth.
Introduce new concepts
One of the best ways to position yourself as the right coach for potential clients is to share your unique approach to coaching.
There may be other coaches in your direct field, but you can stand out by openly sharing your coaching philosophy. This means sharing not only what your work looks like but also how it’s different from others.
By doing so, you can introduce new concepts to your growing audience that will fascinate and intrigue them. Use your methodology as a hook, so potential clients are interested to learn more through your coaching work.
Ashley Beaudin put her methodology into action when pivoting her coaching business. After engaging in self-reflection and working with clients, she decided to claim the title of Self-Sabotage Coach.
While she covers topics that are similar to other business coaches—like developing boundaries, creating lead magnets, and making a marketing plan—she approaches them through the lens of self-sabotage.
This work led Ashley to create a quiz that’s used as a supportive tool in her coaching practice. While helping others deeply understand their self-sabotage type, she also provides new insights to enhance their self-discovery journey.
Ashley likes using quizzes as a supportive tool because they can “gently facilitate an experience that leads [your audience] to an awareness, a-ha moment, or meaningful resource.”
She also says, “You can design a moment [with your quiz] that is healing, affirming, relieving, and compassionate, speaking to people exactly where they are.” If this is the kind of experience you want to create for your clients, follow Ashley’s advice.
Create a roadmap to success
There are no shortcuts to success, but a roadmap can undoubtedly help. When coaches provide a roadmap, clients get an idea of what to expect. They can anticipate obstacles and come up with solutions that work for them.
The best coaches are often the ones who have been on the path before and experienced the ups and downs. Because of their own growth, they can stand alongside their clients and support them in their transformation.
While the roadmap must be altered based on the individual, there are similar challenges everyone will face on the journey. A coach isn’t there to do the work for you, but rather to encourage and guide you along the way.
This is exactly what Lydia from Screw the Cubicle does with her coaching clients. She wants her clients to “feel good about how they can make a living,” and she offers various supportive tools to help.
Primarily working with corporate professionals who want to quit their 9-to-5 jobs, Lydia gives pointers on starting and launching a thriving business. She positions herself as a go-to expert for those who want to leap into entrepreneurship.
For years, Lydia has used a quiz to support her clients’ transformations. Before her audience begins their journey, it’s essential to know what kind of business they should start. Her quiz not only answers this question but also advises on how to start.
You could also consider creating more supportive tools like templates, calculators, checklists, and other lead magnets to aid in their journey. What does your audience need as a part of their roadmap to accomplish their goals in less time?
Personalize the coaching experience
No one is looking for one-size-fits-all solutions from their coach. Clients want to feel like the whole coaching experience is uniquely tailored to their goals, preferences, and personality.
That’s one of the benefits of working with a coach in a 1:1 or group setting. To meet your clients’ needs, it’s important to personalize their coaching sessions.
You can personalize the coaching experience by:
- Offering homework and exercises to further their learning
- Providing tools to help them track their progress
- Regularly following up with each client
- Personally responding to emails and messages
- Adding Voxer support in between client sessions
You may want to survey your clients after they finish working with you to determine if there are additional opportunities for personalization. This will help you get at the heart of what they need so you can better serve them and future clients.
Leading with personalization, brand coach Kaye Putnam decided to incorporate archetypes from a well-known psychology book into her work.
Pairing her audience members with archetype results like The Maverick and The Sage through her quiz, she’s increased course sales to six figures while directing more clients to her services.
Kaye then uses the client’s results to educate them on where they may be stuck in the branding process. After receiving a positive archetype name, her audience can wear their type proudly and deepen their understanding of what it means.
Through Kaye’s work, audience members will receive personalized guidance and advice based on their core brand personality type. Kaye’s quiz is an essential supportive tool used with every coaching client.
She also provides a branding board, free masterclass, curated color palette, and tips for each of the twelve types. These all act as valuable supportive tools that aid in her clients’ transformations, both in and out of business.
Help with goal setting
They say if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. While there should always be room for experimentation in business, it’s best to go into business with a plan.
Goal setting is an essential part of the coaching process. Without goals, it may be difficult to determine a client’s progress. A coach is meant to be a guide who can support clients on their personal path toward achieving their goals.
Research has shown that people are 42% more likely to achieve their goals if they’re written down and clearly outlined. Having the accountability of a coach can also increase the likelihood of reaching goals by as much as 76%.
To help with the goal-setting process, Nadalie of It’s All You Boo offers various checklists, planners, and other free resources to help her potential clients. These supportive tools give her audience a chance to clarify their goals before they decide on working together.
For audience members who don’t know where to start, Nadalie provides an interactive quiz experience that helps them choose their goal.
After answering a series of ten quiz questions, Nadalie provides a clear answer to what kind of goals quiz-takers should set. This can be anything from experiential goals to relationship goals.
Claiming the title of Goal Slaying Coach, Nadalie loves creating a wide variety of supportive tools to help her readers and clients. Many of these tools were inspired by her journey in entrepreneurship and blogging.
Consider what tools you may have already created to produce your best work. Can you find a way to repurpose and refine them in your coaching process? This is a great way to add a deeper level of support to your services.
Using quizzes to support client transformation as a coach
Now that you’ve seen examples of how quizzes can be a supportive tool in coaching, think about what topics your audience wants to learn about.
What problems are they facing?
What kind of solutions can you provide?
How can you add value to the conversations happening in your field?
These questions will help you choose a quiz topic and title that will get more clicks and conversions. A quiz can be used to generate leads for your coaching business or nurture clients once they begin working with you.
Before you create and launch your first quiz, remember they can be used to:
- Introduce new concepts
- Create a roadmap to success
- Personalize the coaching experience
- Help with goal setting