Tell me what you do with your clients. As in, what do you help them do? Answers to this typically sound like:
“Pursue what matters most to them.”
“I help them get more confidence.”
“I work with them to have better and stronger relationships.”
“We develop leaders.”
These sorts of answers describing results are pretty standard for the industry. They’re a bit abstract in the sense that they force the listener’s imagination to do most of the heavy lifting, but that’s okay! We who are well acquainted with the coaching world (and what it’s capable of) know that these aren’t just rosy platitudes: they’re solid premises around what one can have at stake (and hope to achieve!) in working with a coach.
We who are already initiated into the world of coaching know this to be true.
But what about the uninitiated? Those looking from the outside in, curious but also rightfully skeptical? These claims appear sweeping, vague. Desirable for sure, but largely unmeasurable. Whether or not coach actually delivered on those claims? Subjective. Open to interpretation, matters of opinion. And your prospective clients know it. Even if they don’t know that they know it, they know it. And that’s what gives them the niggling sense of concern, of hesitation in accepting your claims; hesitation to say “yes” to working with you.
So this is a problem. If you’re one who can reliably deliver on what you say you do, how do you convey as much without a bunch of flowery, generic statements? How do you quell that niggling sense your clients have that you’re just giving a song and dance?
Earlier in this space I demonstrated a way to meaningfully measure mere feelings, i.e. those results that are profoundly important yet ostensibly rely on feelings and subjective language to convey. Review it if you haven’t before, but in a nutshell, it presents the art of mapping out e.g. a 5-point scale in concrete terms, terms that are relatable and easy to identify.
Examples abound in that lesson, and for today’s lesson on effectively advertising your abstract results, here’s another one.
Say a coaching company promises to improve working team relations, and operates on what they call the “Team Function/Dysfunction” scale, which they define as a simple numeric answer to the question “How’s working with your manager?”
A one means “I avoid interactions at all cost–they make my skin crawl”
A two means “It would be better if we never had to interact”
A three means “They don’t get in my way, but don’t add much either”
A four means “I enjoy our interactions”
A five means “Meeting with my manager is genuinely life giving”
Note that one could indeed measure this. You just ask the person: where do you fall on this scale? And therefore, one could measure it across lots of employees across lots of companies.
Our hypothetical coaching company could with a straight face claim “In companies of 50 employees or more, we find the average rating to be a 2.4”.
They could also point out that raising this average by 1.0 has a profound effect on stress, productivity, retention, and overall morale. We would all nod in vigorous agreement, because of course it would, and because we’d love to have our own average raised by 1.0.
And they could also say, “Our programs reliably raise this score by 1.6”. They could credibly do this, because they could have consistently measured the before and after across their company engagements to date. They really could know, and they really could just share as much as a matter of statistical fact.
And then suddenly the claim of an abstract result, “We lower stress while increasing productivity, employee retention, and overall morale” turns into a concrete claim: one that is backed up by objective measurements and expressed in plain terms that everyone can relate to and agree upon.
Same coaching work. Same overarching premise. But now has been made so much easier to say “yes” to.
So please, if you haven’t ever defined your results in such concrete terms, please take an afternoon to noodle on what sort of scale you operate on, and how far you’re able to slide clients up that scale through your work. Because we really want to know.
For further inspiration and guidance on how to do this, check out this sample pitch deck that thoroughly illustrates this approach, which is presented as part of the webinar I did called Pitching Prospects and Winning Clients.
The answers to those Worksheets can be piped right into Metrics, allowing progress along this scale to be tracked over time.
Data accumulated in this way can also then be reported on and exported in the data lab and played with to see trends across various companies, across time, across coaches in your team. All of which allows you to glean the overall story of how your work impacts important measures, which is ripe for sharing proudly in the pitch that you put out to the world.
To automate the collection of this data at the beginning and end of your engagements (and whatever suitable intervals along the way), you can design a Course that automatically drips these Worksheets out to program participants on just the right cadence.
