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A coaching software is probably one of the most valuable systems that any coach can put in place. It can make any style of coaching better. No matter if you offer life coaching or business coaching and no matter if it’s long-term or short-term.
Your clients are spending most of the time during a coaching process outside of the sessions (more than 98%).
But as we all know in our daily life it’s easy to get distracted. There are roadblocks, habits and routines that make it difficult to stay on track and accountable.
The problem: No action means no results and that means unhappy clients. And clients who aren’t happy and successful won’t recommend your coaching service or come back.
This is where coaching software comes into play. It gives you the opportunity to support and engage your clients between sessions. It’s a tool for you and your clients. Besides that, it makes your client management effective and organizes the communication in one place. Good communication with your clients is huge for their success (and yours).
Here are 15 reasons why a coaching software can be your greatest asset
1) Session notes: A Coaching platform for effective note taking
2) Coaching Session Recap made easy – For Coach and Coachee
3) Effective Coaching: A Shared To-Do List within your software
4) Keep the coaching process going – with homework assignments
5) Coaching Software – Automatic reminders for appointments, triggers or as a friendly nudge
6) Effective coaching with software: The power of accountability and commitment
7) How to be a good coach? Session Preparation in no time with an online coaching platform
8) Coaching management software: Get the big picture of the coaching process – Anywhere and anytime
9) The magic of writing in Coaching – More than just reflection
10) Winning new clients – Showcase your Coaching with Software
11) Using a shared coaching platform to track and identify your client’s progress
12) Help your coaching clients to develop and increase self-awareness
13) Grow and keep a thriving coaching business
14) Never lose your data – Coaching Software provides a secure space to store and share information
15) A mobile app for coaches and coachees
Conclusion: Deliver a unique coaching experience to your clients
Session notes: A Coaching platform for effective note taking
Why is taking notes so important in Coaching and how can software make life easier?
Notes in coaching provide an effective way for both you and your clients to remind what has been discussed in each session. You can keep track of the progress, assignments, commitments, reactions and actions you or the client needs to take before the next session.
The quality of these notes is what matters. They need to be timely (to make sure nothing gets forgotten). And the notes need to be structured and easy to reread.
This is where a coaching software can give you the big opportunity to provide an outstanding coaching experience to your clients. A professional coaching platform provides several options:
1) Secret notes for the coach:
Your secret notes can contain everything that shouldn’t be visible to your clients. In these notes, you can
- Track reactions of clients track tools
- Methods and ideas used in the session (and how they worked)
- Track issues and misunderstandings
- Reflect upon strategies, questions and the overall success of the session, to become an even better coach
- Add comments on things and ideas for the next session
2) Shared notes:
Share the gold nuggets of each session with your clients. Write down some bullet points and leave your clients with a clear picture of what they got during their last session. By having these notes organized in a secure place you both easily can see and search past notes anytime and anywhere
3) Client notes:
Encourage your clients to summarize each session with their own gold nuggets. Ask them to take 5 minutes to write down a few paragraphs or bullet points. To help them get going you could assign a few simple questions about the session. (e.g. The session was helpful because…). These notes are super helpful as clients reflect on their session once again. They become aware of what they’ve learned and the coach can quickly find out what was most valuable to them. Any possible misunderstanding will be avoided.
A professional coaching software makes effective note-taking easy and allows you to implement these three options in your coaching practice.
Tip:
CleverMemo organizes all your notes automatically in an activity stream. You can share or keep them private with a single click. Efficiently search past notes – Session prep in no time. CleverMemo comes with ready-to-use coaching notes templates for these three options, so you can start taking and sharing notes right away. Process documentation made effective.
Coaching Session Recap made easy – For Coach and Coachee
A session recap is comparable to the client notes we’ve been talking about. It helps your clients to get the most out of coaching by reflecting on their most recent session. The recap should be done within 24 hours after each session. You could ask your clients about their greatest insights and commitments. Furthermore, you could ask where they want to be held accountable and what they want you to do more/less/differently in the next session.
When these recaps are collected in one space it gets easy for the coach and the client to reread them to prepare for the next session. A professional coaching software lets you assign these recap forms after each session with a few clicks.
Effective Coaching: A Shared To-Do List within your software
Usually, clients commit to various plans they want to put into action after each session. By writing down and sharing their to-dos they put them into existence. There is scientific evidence that the act of planning activities through to-do lists reduces the burden on the brain.
Simply writing their to-dos down will make your clients more effective. When your clients share their to-do list with their coach you both know what is getting done and what isn’t at any moment in time. You can see where your clients struggle and provide support whenever needed.
A shared to-do list has several benefits for your clients:
- They get focused, organized and set priorities
- They stay in touch with their goals
- They identify key action-steps to achieve goals faster
- Keeps them on track and provides quick wins
- Strengthens their commitment and compliance
- It’s an easy exercise to help clients keep going
Possible questions for the shared to-do list are:
- What should be done until our next session?
- By when should it be done?
- How did it go?
Tip:
CleverMemo comes with a ready-to-use „Shared to-do list“ template and several other tools.
Keep the coaching process going – with homework assignments
Chances are you’re already working with homework, worksheets or action assignments your clients agree to complete prior to their next coaching session. These actions should help them reach certain milestones and move closer to their coaching objectives.
Despite how unloved homework has been in school it helps to keep learning and developing. Assigning homework in coaching (on a regular basis) comes with many benefits:
Homework helps you to see if the strategies from your sessions are being understood and applied
Homework assignments help your clients to think about their process, ideas and goals independently
They help clients to responsibility for their development and success in the process and in life in general
Homework gives your clients a guideline to apply learnings in real life
Your follow-up on your clients’ plans, milestones and commitments is an important part of coaching. So what can you do?
This is where a professional coaching software comes into play. Assign homework exercises, worksheets, tools and automatic reminders in no time. Add an automatic email reminder (e.g. 24 hours before the homework is due) to give your client a friendly nudge.
CleverMemo will remind your clients automatically to complete their homework or actions. It takes less than a minute to assign a homework, but the benefit for your clients is huge. Encourage clients to put intentions into practice and to stay accountable.
You will find some ready-to-use homework assignment ideas (worksheets, exercises, reflection templates, journal templates) in CleverMemo.
Coaching Software – Automatic reminders for appointments, triggers or as a friendly nudge
Reminders in coaching are useful in many ways. You could use simple appointment reminders. The coaching software will send automatic email reminders to both you and your clients before each session. This will reduce your clients „no-show“ rate and makes sure you’re both prepared for a productive coaching session.
Another option are reminders for worksheets and homework assignments. You could add a reminder (e.g. 24 hours before the task is due) to give your client a friendly nudge that he didn’t mark the specific action as complete. An intelligent coaching program knows when an action (or questionnaire) is marked as done and won’t send out any more reminders.
Reminders can also be used as a tool itself. It’s like dropping a few triggers/anchors between sessions. Our human behavior is influenced by triggers and rewards and they act as the foundation of new behaviors. Many coaching clients try to establish new habits or behaviors to help them accomplish their goals.
Reminders can be used as a tool to establish new triggers that signal a moment to make a new choice. They can also be viewed to keep clients on track. A few reminder examples: Motivational phrases, affirmations, specific actions. They can help your clients to find it easier to move forward at a steady pace and to see their progress.
Tip: CleverMemo allows both you and your clients to set automatic email reminders with a few clicks
Effective coaching with software: The power of accountability and commitment
During a typical coaching session, coach and client are trying to find solutions and make plans towards the client’s goal. Usually, the client is highly motivated to put all these things into practice.
But as we all know in our daily life it’s easy to get distracted. There will be roadblocks and routines that make it difficult to stay on track and accountable. Actually, 98% of the time is spent outside of the sessions.
The problem: No action means no results and that means unhappy clients. And clients who aren’t happy and successful won’t recommend your coaching service or come back.
A very critical aspect is that of holding people accountable for their own commitments and goals.
So how can you help your clients stay accountable and engaged between sessions?
We’ve been talking about homework-assignments and to-dos earlier. These actions help your clients to get closer to their coaching objectives.
But will your clients do them immediately after their session?
It’s in our human nature to leave important things until the last minute (think about Xmas shopping on Xmas eve – EVERY YEAR!). Most of your clients will complete their homework assignments or worksheets the day of your next coaching session. They’ll do it because they know you will be asking about their progress and results.
„What gets measured gets done“ (Tom Peters)
Your follow-up regarding plans, milestones and commitments is an important part of coaching.
So what can you do?
This is where software for coaches comes into play. It’s like a coaching management system:
Exercises, worksheets, tools and automatic reminders encourage clients to put intentions into practice and to stay accountable and committed. Session recap, a shared to-do list, short feedback loops and frequent, engaging conversations transform your coaching into sustainable results.
How to be a good coach? Session Preparation in no time with an online coaching platform
At the start of a session, your client describes how things went since you’ve seen each other.
This is not optimal because it takes up valuable coaching time. There also could be reporting bias and important details or information will be lost in this on point recap.
A solution for this problem is an online coaching platform that allows your clients to document their progress and experiences on a regular basis. A secure space where the whole process is streamlined. Within 5 minutes you can see what was going on since your last session.
You already know how your client feels and how it’s going so you can provide a personalized and unique coaching experience. No need to improvise during sessions as a reaction to how it’s going. You’re making your clients feel like you really understand them. Progress reports become obsolete.
The shared activity stream helps you to prepare each session within 5 to 10 minutes. You’ll get a complete overview of whats going on whenever you want. You can review happenings, journal entries, (shared and secret) session notes, messages and worksheets at a glance. Session preparation has never been easier and more effective. Professional preparation for each session is one important part of being a good coach.
Coaching management software: Get the big picture of the coaching process – Anywhere and anytime
A CRM for coaches shows the stream of communication between you and your clients. It’s a professional tool that helps keep all those conversations, actions, journal entries, notes and files in one place. It becomes easy for you to quickly look back in time and see how things have progressed.
If clients have a place where they can record and track their thoughts, experience, roadblocks, ideas and solutions, they always have an overview of their progress and process. They can reread, reflect and recap single steps and milestones whenever they want. They can connect the dots and get a deeper understanding of their patterns and actions. That’s the foundation of establishing new habits or behaviors to help them accomplish their goals.
With the professional coaching software CleverMemo you can always decide if you want to provide your clients their entire activity stream as a PDF file. So they can reread and print it out even when the coaching is already finished.
The magic of writing in Coaching – More than just reflection
Writing down plans and goals is the first step towards making them a reality. It commits your clients to take action. Especially when they are shared and recorded with someone else (like with you – their coach). This applies to any type of coaching style: Business, health, relationship, leadership, life coaching and so on…
The recording is a very important part if you are going to monitor something. Monitoring progress, milestones and achievements is a key to success in coaching. It gives your clients a clear picture of what they already accomplished and the steps they’ve taken to do it. The notes and also journal entries are the perfect progress marker for both of you to see how far you’ve come.
Writing gives form to your clients’ ideas and gets them out their head. It also hones their powers of observation and focus during the process. Through writing them down immediately, clients preserve memories, ideas and experiences that may otherwise be lost before the next session.
Writing helps to describe feelings and emotions, as well to heal and process wounds and clearing them out. It has also been shown to help people communicate complex ideas and thoughts more effectively. Regular writing has been linked to improved mood and reduced stress levels.
A study with two groups has shown that people who write down goals and make a weekly progress report achieved their goals at a rate of 76%. Whereas the participants of the group who didn’t write anything down achieved their goals at a rate of only 36%.
To write things down in a coaching software is also a great possibility to review them anytime. CleverMemo is a secure software where all the notes, questionnaires, files and journal entries are stored in one place. Your session prep becomes super effective and clients can recap their process whenever they want.
Winning new clients – Showcase your Coaching with Software
Attracting new coaching clients is no easy task. You have to have a smart marketing strategy and a unique selling proposition (USP). Why would someone use YOUR coaching service? What makes you different from all the other business, life or leadership coaches around?
Many (potential) coaching clients don’t have a clear picture in mind what coaching exactly is and how they could benefit from it. This is where coaching software gives you the chance to showcase what you’re offering. Due to the individual nature of coaching there is no exact definition of how the coaching process is structured. There is online coaching, face-to-face coaching, life coaching, business coaching, relationship coaching, long-term coaching, short-term coaching and many more. When (potential) clients visit your website they are often asking themselves:
- Can coaching help me?
- Can THIS coach help me?
- How is it working?
- What will we be doing?
- What’s in for me?
If you are using a business or life coaching software you can easily offer a look behind the curtain. You can show them how you both will set and track goals. How you document each session and how you help them to stay on track between sessions. You show them a secure space where they always have access to.
A personal space where they can reflect, write journal and communicate with you, whenever they feel to do so. You could set up a Demo Client where you show them a few example entries, so that they get a feeling for the structure.
The value of your coaching becomes clear and you have something to show to potential clients.
Using a shared coaching platform to track and identify your client’s progress
Tracking your clients’ progress and the process is another thing where coaching software can make your coaching even better. Change and development is not a one-time event. It’s a process that takes time.
A software tool makes it easy for your coachees to get in the habit of recording and tracking their thoughts, ideas, doubts, experiences and success.
They can always re-look at their assumptions, expectations, ways of thinking, beliefs and approaches to success. Your clients get a deeper understanding and a bigger picture of their process. Growth through discovery that fosters self-awareness and lasting change. All in all, it is highly motivating for your clients to keep going and to be able to see their progress over time.
Help your coaching clients to develop and increase self-awareness
The ultimate goal of coaching is to support coachees as they gain awareness of how to move forward toward their desired outcomes. The coach can’t create awareness for the client, but she can use coaching software to provide a safe and supportive environment where there is potential for awareness to emerge.
Coaching software is the bridge between the session and your clients’ daily life. They can use it anytime to write down their observations and emotions they might be experiencing.Additionally, they can process their thoughts or feelings. Your clients can speak (write) about their successes as well as their challenges in the moment they occur. There´s no need to wait until their next session to share it with you.
Without being physically available their coach is always „present“ and listening to them. Your clients have the ability to focus completely on their thoughts and feelings, without any distractions or time pressure. They can work on their progress and awareness, wherever they are and whenever they feel like doing so.
Grow and keep a thriving coaching business
If you’re a beginner or more like a hobbyist coach you might be able to manage one or two clients successfully without a software. But even when you only got one client there comes a point when you can’t track all their assignments, worksheets, messages, actions, files and notes manually.
But isn’t email a good solution?
You can search, filter and read past emails, whenever you want. Using email to communicate with your clients you have to sync and store them on all your devices (and your clients have to do the same). Your inbox is quickly growing and becomes unmanageable. Finding a certain email or worksheet and knowing what was the last message sent to or received from each client becomes time-consuming.
Think if you really want to get distracted from doing what you love: Coaching people. By using a professional coaching software you can concentrate on serving your clients and growing your business. A coaching software stores all your client information in one central and secure location. All communication is saved in one sport, nothing gets lost and both you and your clients can see what’s going on at anytime.
Never lose your data – Coaching Software provides a secure space to store and share information
Personal data, client communication and shared files or worksheets should always be safe and secure. If you use memo books, written notes or store everything on your laptop, chances are that they get lost or stolen at some point.
Keep in mind that any records made are subject to data protection rules about:
- The nature of the data you kept
- Prevent unauthorized access to data
- Improper disclosure to third parties
- The client’s right of access to their data
As a coach, you are responsible for the confidential information. You must ensure that the data is effectively protected against access by unauthorized third parties. You must also ensure the prevention of improper disclosure of data when transmitted, received, stored or at its disposal. That’s why email isn’t a secure option.
A professional coaching software lets you adequately protect all your data from being lost or accessed by third parties. Servers can crash and hard drives can fail. But with a software hosted on a secure server and with regular and daily data backups you’ll never lose your data.
CleverMemo uses SSL encryption technology and password protection to protect your data. It’s a safe and secure way to communicate with your clients online.
A mobile app for coaches and coachees
More and more of our interaction online occurs on mobile devices. Providing your coaching clients their own mobile coaching app helps you stand out from the competition. You build a stronger coaching brand and reach out to younger demographics.
With a coaching software that provides an amazing mobile interface, you and your clients have instant access to your to all your notes, files, actions, to-dos and your entire communication stream. Your clients carry their coach in their pocket. No matter where they are and what time it is.
Whenever they feel like working on an assignment or creating a new note/journal entry they can do it. In the train, on the plane, while waiting at the doctor or during lunch time. Their coach is always just one click away. A software that can be also used as a mobile app for coaches and clients takes your service to the next level and makes your clients feel like you’re on their side. The secret to a powerful coaching relationship.
Conclusion: Deliver a unique coaching experience to your clients
A coaching software is a platform that supports you and your clients during the whole process. No matter if you offer life coaching, business coaching or something else. It organizes and improves your whole client communication outside of the sessions.
You can effectively support and engage clients between sessions and help them to get the most out of their coaching with you. Ensure lasting and sustainable results. Successful clients are likely to recommend your service and will come back. That’s your key to a thriving coaching practice.
CleverMemo is the best coaching software to accomplish all that was mentioned in this article. You can start your free trial here and see if it’s a good fit for your coaching business.
