The Coaching Cycle…
In this blog we talk about how to use the coaching cycle to keep clients long term…
This is a theme we talk a lot about as there’s a lot of money that gets lost by coaches when they have clients leaving early… not only revenue loss from losing the client, but also the time it takes in sales and marketing to replace them!
A lot of consultants have the ability to solve a problem in a business, but that can lead to a very start/stop type of engagement. When you approach your clients with a cycle, it gives a lot of structure to your coaching that is missing when you are merely fixing problems.
So building a coaching cycle works like this…
You start with a Plan… a large part of the plan is the process you go through to make sure you’ve covered everything before you start. Without one, your subsequent sessions can feel random and “unplanned”… this is not helpful for confidence from the client!
The next part of the cycle is breaking down the Plan into specific Tasks or projects. Turns out that no one gets super-excited about a big plan with a tonne of pages to read… just looks like endless work on top of the endless work your client already has :(… So the Tasks are the bite size chunks that come from the plan… We use worksheets to help with this process of making the Tasks easy to implement. Means the client isn’t starting with a blank sheet of paper that never gets much traction between sessions.
Once the Tasks are being implemented, the next part of the cycle is to Monitor the results of those Tasks. This is to make sure the needle is moving in the right direction… if it’s not, then why are we working on it! Important here is the quantification of the Monitoring as this is what confirms to the client the ROI of the programme they are paying you for.
The last part of the cycle is the Review… this allows you to put the spotlight on them to make sure they’ve done their part of the process. Your job as coach is to lead them in the right direction… this doesn’t mean doing it for them as that’s not your role. Therefore for your programme to be successful, you need a mechanism to Review their performance and to reset the plan for the upcoming period. If you don’t review, you lose the opportunity to reset their commitment to the big picture that you planned from the outset of when you decided to work together. Gotta review people!
Now you’ve done the Review, your ready for the next Quarterly Plan and you’ve started the cycle again…
That’s the coaching cycle!
We have taken the (rather rash!) step of custom designing a Software system that builds the coaching cycle into your client programme. It take all the hard work out of operating this with your clients and gives you the tools you need to “Find your Fee” and make sure the client can see ROI on their programme to keep them long term as a client with you.
Check out our Home Page where it says SOFTWARE for a demo… if you like the look of it, we should talk!