Tag Archives: Coaching

Developing Coaching Products

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Developing products should be at the forefront of every coach’s mind. Coaches that develop products are significantly more successful than coaches that don’t. A product is a packaged and branded educational resource. Your product should be targeted to a niche group, and be focussed on solving their specific problems. Your product can be packaged and delivered in a variety of ways.

Popular coaching-related products include: eBooks, eCourses, Mini-Courses, Podcasts, Workshops, Seminars, Tele-Clinics, Audio Programs, Webinars, etc.

Benefits

Coaches who develop educational products are well aware of the schedule of added benefits behind the package. Following are some examples:

Increased Credibility. Delivering high quality, branded products to your niche is one of the most powerful means to build your credibility. There is virtually no other way to accelerate your perception as an expert in your niche.

Improve your networks. Authorities in your niche are usually very willing to assist and participate in the development of products that assist their industry. Networking with these authorities will give you an immediate, highly leveraged entry into your niche. It will open many doors to Joint Ventures; list sharing! ; public forums; group meetings; etc.

You’ll become less reliant on your time. As a coach, what is your commodity? When everything is distilled down, what are you selling? Coaching? No. Happiness? No. Success? No. Health? No. You are selling your time! Time is your commodity. And when time is your commodity and you are reliant on selling your time, you! r income potential is extremely limited. You can only realistically work 8-hours a day. So the only way to earn more money is to charge more. There is a limit to how much you can charge. And when you stop selling your time (go on holidays with your family; get sick), your income stops.

Products are your escape from being time reliant.By commercialising products you rely less on time as your commodity.

Move from one-to-one to one-to-many. Most coaches sell one-to-one coaching as their core service. This restricts your time, and also limits your commercial reach. Commercialising products allows you to leverage your intellectual property by 10, 100, 1000 times. You can be selling hundreds of eBooks; eCourse; tele-clinic seats; pe! r week. Now that’s how to leverage your knowledge and time!

Applications

Once you have products, how can you put them to use for maximum affect? We’ll now investigate some ways you can use your products to increase enquiries; conversions and sales.

Building your list. In a previous edition of Coaching Inspirations, we discussed the sales funnel, and how important it is to get as many qualified prospects in the top of your funnel as possible. Using your products is a highly leveraged means to do this. Here are a few examples:

– Offer a free eBook as an incentive to join an online club; eZine; newsletter.

– Let people download a “Special Report” after subscribing to your list.

– Mention your list (education-based) on your tele-clinic call.

– Gather business cards or contacts at your seminar.

Loss Leader. You know by now the net marginal worth of your clients, and hence how much you can afford to invest at the front-end on acquiring a client. A strategy to attain client contracts is to use a ‘loss leader’. This means you make a financial loss at the front-end, knowing you’ll make gains over the term of the! life of your client. For instance, you may give away free vouchers to a group coaching workshop to members of your niche. This may cost you $100 per attendee. However, you get 90% of attendees into the top of your funnel; 30% of the them to level 2 within 3-months; 20% to level 3 within 6-months. The net result may be a $1,750 gain over 6-12 months per attendee.

Value-add. Products are an excellent way to value-add your services. For instance, you may use a 6-week ticket to your specialist tele-clinic as an incentive to upsell prospects from a 3-month contract to a 6-month contract.

Referral. Your products can be an excellent tool to incentivise referrals. You may go to the prospects in your funnel and say to them “We know you enjoy the information we provide you, and we’re sure you know other that would benefit from it. If you put us in touch with these people, as a thank-you we’ll give you this! XYZ product.”

JV Incentives. Products are an excellent way to provide incentives for joint ventures. For instance, just say you approach a gym or a health spa, and undertake some cooperative marketing. They write to their members and inform them that for a limited time they can go to your website and download a free special report ! “How To Overcome The 7 Biggest Barriers To You Achieving Your Fitness Goals, by specialist life coach ABC.” To download the report they have to give you their name and email address.

Conversion. You can use your products to improve conversion and shorten conversion time lines. For instance, offer your product as a value-add to a core service for a limited time.

Have you developed your coaching products yet?

Coaching Certification – It’s Not Important, But What Is?

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In the coaching profession it is not necessary to get a coaching certification. In other words just about anyone can begin coaching without prior certification from any school or institution. Although there are some places that are making moves to regulate the profession, getting a coaching certification is not a requirement to be great at what you do.

What makes a great coach?

Having a coaching certification is not the basis for one to be considered an amazing coach. If you have prior experience in your field of expertise and you have the zeal and passion to support others then you may have what it takes to be a successful professional coach. You know the ins and outs of the business because you’ve been there done it. Anyone can start their own coaching business with virtually zero training or certifications.

However there is one “training” activity all successful coaches partake in consistently. They are always being coached themselves by a coach who is ahead of where they want to be. It makes sense right? If a coach wants to help their clients grow they must be growing themselves. This is where the true learning comes from. Being coached regularly is the best way to improve as a coach and a mentor.

But in case you’re wondering why there are people who want to get certified, they were indoctrinated by coaching organizations and schools. They believe it’s essential and that’s why these institutions exist to certify them.

Many people want to get certified because they want a validation that they are good coaches. But the truth is, it is highly possible to be certified even if you are not that good of a coach. In the same way that there are many great coaches that exist out there without coaching certification.

There is nothing wrong with getting a coaching certification, but then again there is no guarantee that a certified coach can deliver better results than an uncertified one. In fact, anyone with a printer can claim that they are certified coach-and I mean anyone who may not even have experience in business or in other fields. Who knows right?

If a coaching certification doesn’t matter then, what does?

Experience, ability, a great system-these are just few of the elements that matter when it comes to choosing a business coach. Clients want to invest in people who can help them; a person whom they believe in. And coaches must have a solid background in business or in other fields in order for them to gain the respect and trust of their clients.

Experience in their field can speak for itself. Bill Gates, for example, does not need to be certified in order for him to become a successful business coach. Ask yourself, does he need a certification?

What’s also important is whether or not the he or she was able to deliver desirable results for her or his previous clients. Was she or he able to improve a business, achieve goals or improve relationships? This is an effective way to measure whether or not a coach has a system that works for their clients.

The most important reasons why certain coaches succeed in their field is their irreversible passion for what they do. Coaches can make a great difference in people’s lives only when they have a heart for coaching. And having a coaching certification cannot replace passion, experience, real and raw skills.

Coaching Tips for the Office

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As is the case with most companies, one of the toughest issues, if not the most difficult, is getting optimal performance from employees and teams. When you have employees who aren’t living up to their potential, what do you do? How do you address the high potential employee or team who just can’t seem to get started? The person who knocks it out of the park, but leaves bodies in his wake? Do you take a mentoring approach, or is coaching more appropriate?

The clearest distinction I can make between coaching and mentoring is this: Mentors often show you how to do something, and Coaches work together with people to “git-r-done.“ The “git-r-done” part is usually a skill or behavior that needs some tuning. At the very core of the tuning, is the real ability to help someone achieve without directing. You can help them discover answers to their own questions rather than telling them what to do.

There are many areas where people want to improve or focus. Work relationships, utilizing strengths, career direction, success on their own terms, and drive or will to succeed are just a few. Let’s focus on Coaching someone who has had some performance challenges, and said she wants to “git-r-done.” Now, put on your Coaching hat.

The reason I often favor Coaching is that each day, you are in the trenches with your team. You are talking to them constantly. A really interesting statistic from a psychology journal said that “Managers often spend 60% to 90% of their time in face to face communication.” When you’re talking this much, you have to be asking questions. In Coaching, well thought-out, open-ended powerful questions help to shape focus and direction. Here’s a Coaching tip from a Coach – don’t ask “why” questions. “Why” questions put people on the defensive and make them retreat. “Why” questions make you feel as if you’ve done something wrong.

Here are 6 that will help you get there:

1. What steps are you taking to achieve your goals?

2. When are you going to do it?

3. How do these steps help you “git-r-done?”

4. What might get in your way?

5. How can you remove those obstacles?

6. What support do you need?

There are more questions you can ask or variations on the questions listed, but these will give you a good foundation. The ability to Coach makes you more valuable to your team and organization. We don’t always need people to tell us exactly what to do or how to do something, but most of us appreciate encouragement and support. Successful businesses are headed up by leaders that understand the importance of Coaching.

How does it make you feel when someone tells you exactly what to do? What about when someone asks you “why….?” What does your body feel like? The answer is that your shoulders start to tighten, your face becomes tense, and you feel as if something awful is about to happen. You are bracing yourself for something bad. On the flip side, when someone offers encouragement and helps coach you, your psyche is that much better. You feel stronger and have optimism. Practice the questions.