As a coach, there are an endless number of business coaching tools that you need to run your business smoothly.
When you start off, you are going to need organizational tools and tools to build your own business and website. But as you develop, you will need to provide resources for your clients.
Some of these tools are technological, some of them involve life skills, building relationships and communication. But ultimately your goal as a coach is to enable your client to function at their highest capacity without you.
This involved not just teaching them skills for how to run their business, sell things and manage social media. It also involves guiding clients to make their own choices and supporting them spiritually and emotionally.
And in order to do this, as a coach you also need tools to care for yourself as well. So my goal here is to give an inclusive list of suggested business coaching tools that not only address your business needs, but the needs of your client and your mental health as a coach as well.
It’s hard to know which business coaching tools you really need; here are the essentials!
Tools You Need As An Entrepreneur
As a business owner, there are some coaching business tools that every entrepreneur should have. Before you really establish your coaching business, there are some foundational things you’ll want to have in place.
People need to be able to find you and know who you are. You need a way to build community and provide information. And of course you need a place to sell!
1. A Website
This is pretty basic. I am a coach for bloggers. It’s not really what I set out to do, but my niche uncovered itself over the course of my business developing. It’s who I was, and it’s who I help best for the time being. So I talk a lot about blogs, but you don’t have to have a blog on your website.
Your website is a place for people to find you on the internet. It’s a place to display your brand, get your message out. People can find you, search for your business, locate your contact info and share your page. So even if a blog is not going to be your thing, you need a website for your audience. It establishes credibility. Really, at this stage in the game if you don’t have a website you’re not in the game.
2. Payment Portal
A business is supposed to generate money, and you can’t do that without a way to accept payments. So after you get your website setup, your next step should be setting up a payment portal. Which now that you have a website should be very simple.
WordPress has plenty of plugins to help you out. There are free ways to go about accepting payments, but they are not all straight forward. I always recommend just paying for a payment portal to save yourself the time if you have the little wiggle room in your budget. Shopify is pretty reasonable and paying for the service is going to save you a lot more in Tylenol in the shirt term.
3. Social Media Presence
As a business coach, social media is a strong tool for you. Establish a presence and start building trust. Pick a platform to be consistent on and show up. Get to know people, and answer questions, establish authority, Be professional in all your interactions and build relationships with conversations.
Your social media presence will be critical to your success. It is where people will find you, probably before your website. Your referrals will come from social media. Mystery phone calls from strangers and strategy sessions will get booked after long term commitment and consistency.
4. Fiverr or a VA
You might be a creative, tech savvy person who likes to do it all on your own. And that is awesome. Plenty of my clients teach themselves everything and are very self sufficient.
But the truth is that as time goes on, your skills will get more specialized, and there will be simpler tasks that you are going to want to delegate. A virtual assistant can help take care of more monotonous tasks so you can save your time for more critical work with your clients.
Another option is to look into Fiverr. It is a database of freelancers who offer services starting at $5, and you can hire for any kind of one off administrative task or artistic task that you need done without hiring an artist for $1,000.
Tools For Prospects & Sales
As a coach, you will need coaching business tools that will help you to find your prospective clients and generate leads for sales. This involves getting connected to your audience and conducting a ton of market research.
5. Questionnaire
Questionnaires gather important statistics from your audience to help you make better decisions for your business and get a better idea of what your avatar wants.
Keep in mind questionnaires are flawed by the emotions of the person taking them. They will often mirror your language instead of using their own. So always start with open ended questions and end with multiple choice so they do not adopt your verbiage in the beginning.
6. Scheduling Tool
Once you establish your social media presence you are going to need to be consistent and keep showing up. This can take a lot of time, but fortunately this need has already been met with plenty of scheduling tool options.
You can use tools like ScheduleOnce or Calendly to schedule out your social media posts so you do not have to be manually posting everyday. This is also a simple task that could be delegated to a VA.
7. An Opt-in Form
This is often the first thing I have my clients setup once they get their website going and an email tool established. You want a way to capture the traffic that is coming to your website. And the best way to do this is to offer them something for free in exchange for their email address. People won’t give it up for free.
Come up with a relevant, valuable free tool you can offer to your site visitors, and then create an opt in form on your website. You can use it as a popup or a contact form on certain pages of your site.
An opt in form is vital for building your email list. For more help on getting an email list established and growing, check out my Facebook group. It’s a great free resource for newbies.
8. Facebook Business Manager
If you have a business you should have a Facebook business page. Then go ahead and get the Business Manager setup. It is going to give you lots of data tracking tools and longer term analytics for your audience that could be critical later on. Especially if you are ever thinking of running ads.
You will also need Facebook Business manager for some applications that require it to link to your other social media accounts.
9. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups are a place for you to start neutral conversations with prospective silence where you can offer value and leave sales out of the conversation. Look for groups in your niche. Find ones that are active with relevant posts but not so flooded that you’ll get drowned out in the noise.
Then start participating. Always go into a conversation looking to offer value. Post value posts or information, not sales or requests unless you think the post is valuable for other people. Then use those relationships to start messenger conversations and build relationships over time. As you answer people’s questions and continue to show up, they will think of you as a resource for your niche.
10. Business Cards
This may seem silly, but it took me a while to get business cards together. How many times did people ask for my info, num,ber or what I did and I could have just had this resource available in my pocket with all my info for anyone I came across.
In the Internet age we forget about face to face marketing, but you need to be as available offline as you are online.
Tools For Serving Clients
As a coach your job is to enable your client to succeed without you with important business coaching tools. To empower your client to move forward and make decisions on their own, you need to show them how to connect their own dots.
11. Resources
Coaches need to teach their clients not just the tools that they use. But they need to teach them to be resourceful. In other words, if they don’t know what they need they have the wits to find it. This involves just a little bit of tech knowledge, networking and some practice with being resourceful. Your goal is to always think of the client and how you can serve them. For more tips on focusing on service, read about selling with service here.
12. Networking
Networking is a vital tool for business coaching tools, but it can also be a difficult social skill to learn. As coaches, we need to teach our clients how to network and build relationships not just with prospects but with peers. Look for people who are doing what you are doing and build community with them. See them as a friend and not competition.
13. Communication
Communication skills are not easily learned. And I’m not just talking about feeling comfortable talking to people and being outgoing. As a coach and a business owner, we often has to embrace humility in the face of difficult clients.
We need to teach communication and social skills to our clients looking to be business owners themselves. Things like patience, emotional maturity, humility and how we should never argue with a client (no matter what).
14. Flexibility
Flexibility is also a social skill that is important as a business owner, or really just content in life in general. It is good to have standards and boundaries.
Self Care Tools For Coaches
To best care for our clients we have to care for ourselves first. That’s why I consider self care a busines coaching tool. I wanted to include some tips for maintaining balance and mental health. As a coach it can be draining giving people your energy and constantly innovating, so it is important to take breaks and slow down.
15. Community
Make sure you are connecting with other like minded people, coaches who know what you are going through. Get resources and network. Don’t just look for social media connections for clients, but peers as well.
16. Coaching or Training
Coaches should always be growing. If not your clients will always outgrow you. If you want to elevate your career, you will need to elevate yourself. I set a goal for myself to spend an hour a day doing something to educate myself, learn a new skill, listen to an interesting podcast or get some work done on a course. I am almost always being coached for something because I believe in the power of having someone tell you what to do.
17. Time Off
When you work for yourself, it is easy to work all the time. Set a schedule for yourself, and take real time off. Not a day where you do Pinterest in the morning and then kind of don’t work. Take a vacation, several days, turn off the screen and be yourself for a bit.
18. Saying No
This was a really difficult skill for me to learn, so I consider it a skill. But especially in the beginning when we are new businesses, we want to say yes to everyone. Say no to a potential client? Are you nuts?
19. Focusing on Ideal Client
But our ideal client will make us our ideal selves. And Someone who is not your ideal client is not going to get the help they need from you. So not only is it in your best interest to learn when to say no to people who just don’t fit your personality, but it serves them as well.
Coaching business tools will give you the skills that you need to empower your clients and continue to educate yourself as your business develops. It is important to address not only the needs of your business, but the emotional and mental needs of yourself and your client as well.
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