The CoachAccountable Blog

“I close deals because I’ve got this thing.”

So said Greg to me when we’d met up for a beer some two years ago, referring to how having (and proudly touting) CoachAccountable as part of his deal really works as a selling point.

Hearing this gave me an idea: we should sit down and riff about it some time in the studio.  I finally got my act together and made that happen last month.

Some of the topics we covered:

• Keeping info straight & first impressions (02:30)
• Visibility & Accountability (06:53)
• Increasing perceived value (14:45)
• High touch interaction (17:08)
• Common struggles for coaches (20:56)
• Beyond the 2-day Workshop: value that lasts (26:16)
• Coaching at higher volume (31:20)

If you’re not sure you want to commit 42 minutes¹ to watching this, maybe the 2 minute teaser will help you decide.

Thanks Greg for taking time to chat and share your insight with others.  Greg’s a bit of a badass himself: he’s a Growth Coach franchisee and has set the organization record for fastest start, as measured by sales, in his first 2 years.

In other words he’s a pretty good source on how to build and run a thriving coaching business.  To apply his wisdom to running a better practice for yourself go get your 30 day trial.

Note:

Wondering if there’s a CoachAccountable app, or if we’re gonna make one and get it all up in the app stores?

The answer is no, and here’s why.

CoachAccountable will probably never had an app, because, on balance, we’ve come to the conclusion that investing the time and energy to create one would be a TERRIBLE idea. It would entail a lot of extra engineering work to build and maintain multiple versions of CA, but admittedly that’s more our problem than it is yours as a user.

Your problems as a user are:

Installation and Updates

An app causes you to ask your clients to bother with the intrusive hassle of having to find and install an app (and worry about updating and troubleshooting things like “Do I have the most updated OS installed on my phone?” or “Did I install another app that’s breaking CoachAccountable, or vice-versa?”).

By contrast, they’re gonna get into CoachAccountable by simply clicking a link in an email the system will send them.

Branding

An app also means it would be branded as CoachAccountable, rather than as your own thing (because submitting a white labeled version of CoachAccountable for each one of our customers is both impractical and explicitly disallowed).

What we’ve done instead is made it so that you and your clients can “install” CA on any device as a home screen app with just a few clicks, and THAT is branded and named as your own–far better than them having a CA app (find more about this here and  find the share-ready instructions here).

Privacy

Apps also can (and do) do lots of crappy stuff that is invasive and disrespectful to users (see for example this article published just last week), meaning users (ahem, your clients) are well within reason to be leery of installing “just one more app”.

CoachAccountable, as a web-only experience that JUST WORKS(tm) on all devices, doesn’t entail any such burdens:

• No permissions to grant.
• No update notifications.
• No silently taking up space on your disk.
• No running in the background eating your battery or raiding your contacts or listening in on your microphone for who knows what purpose (did I mention apps do crappy things?).

So those are the reasons against it, and I haven’t heard any great arguments for the upsides of an app, none that stick, anyway:

Offline access? Rarely happens, as, if you have an smartphone, cellular service at minimum can be generally assumed.

Push notifications? They’re intrusive and of little marginal benefit over already-supported SMS and email (to say nothing of their engineered addictive qualities).

Looks slick and professional? Not as much as having your own branded app icon on a home screen.

I shared this reasoning with a customer a few days ago, and promptly got this reply:

Thank you, John, for the thorough response. … It’s funny how sometimes we can get caught up in the shiny things, like apps!  You’ve really shown me that CA has the true user experience in mind.

That strikes me as a good observation, and I hope you agree.  I don’t begrudge anyone’s desire to see CoachAccountable in slick and shiny packaging.  There’s no CoachAccountable app to be found in any app store, but it’s not because we’re asleep at the wheel or falling behind.  It’s because it’s a bad idea and we’ve taken an approach that better serves you and the people you coach.

One of the biggest reasons enterprise coaching organizations sign up with CoachAccountable is to have better oversight of team coaches. Are your coaches doing what you’ve asked them to? Are they delivering on what you’ve promised your clients?

CoachAccountable helps keep track of your coaching team:

• Share your content, files, Courses and more with them
• Set the types and lengths of Appointments each coach can offer
• Pair coaches with clients, limiting or enabling a coach’s visibility of your entire client roster
• Approve various permissions, for example to allow more autonomy for head coaches or admin users

And for reporting, you’ve already got several options:

• Client activity report, which can often be an early indicator of someone who’s struggling and could use a little intervention
• Appointment reports, which gives a window into appointment hours logged and basic stats
  
• Data Lab, where you can run a report on, say, a client satisfaction level question or see trends across clients over time
  
• Happenings Report, a regularly scheduled snapshot of interactions

And our newest addition to your team management tools: the Coach Touchpoints Report.

The Coach Touchpoints report allows you to see, at a glance, how often your coaches (or just you yourself!) make contact with every one of their clients. Here’s how to set it up.

You’ll find this in Reports >> Coach Touchpoints.

Generating a Touchpoints Report

The real essence of a Touchpoints report is the date range you’re interested in and what kinds of interactions you want included.  Clicking on the “Include” button reveals the types of interactions that you can choose from.

In this case, for example, we might only care about appointments completed and comments posted.

There are also a few less essential (but handy) settings to be found by clicking the gear icon:

The “Good if”/”Bad if” settings are a little esoteric, but…

For Team Edition accounts, you can choose to include secondarily-paired clients (in addition to primary ones) when visualizing who coaches have (and haven’t) been active with.

The “Good if within” and “Bad if over” settings affect how things are color coded.  Ultimately this report is meant to give a visual look into how often coaches are interacting with clients, and if it’s frequent enough.

The resulting colorful graph will show trends in your interaction with clients, broken down by coach for Team Edition users, or just you if it’s, well, just you.  This can help you keep tabs on how you and/or your coaches are doing, and who might need a little more rigor in their outreach and upkeep.

Let’s take a look at one.

Wow, look at all those touchpoints–that Patrick Leonardo won’t leave John Larson alone!

Notice the setup here: good within three days, bad if over five days. That means that all of these green dashes say “great, this coach has been in contact with this particular client within three days”, red ones say, “whoops, they were finally in contact but it was more than five days since their last connection”, and yellow shows contacts that occurred between three and five days.

Also notice the trails: they show the progression from “we’re fine” to “not so good, it’s now been a while” to “yikes, we’re really letting this client down, interaction-wise!”

Drill Down

From here, you can hover over a date to see what particular interaction(s) occurred on that date.

You can then click on the item in question (a Worksheet, Session Note, etc.) to view it.

Added Bonuses

In the example reports above, you might notice that certain coaches aren’t interacting with certain clients at all. That might be an easy indication to update the coach’s client pairings.

Also, perhaps you’ve got a single coach account, rather than a Team Edition account. You can still use the Coach Touchpoints Report to track your own interactions with clients to see if you’re delivering on your promises. Here’s how it looks for a single coach’s account – notice you’ll see the same indicators as far as “it’s been too long”, “pretty good”, or “great job.”

From here, you can use this data to help train and develop your coaches, give gentle nudges, proactively reach out to clients, and find reasons to acknowledge your coaches, too.

Looking for a good way to manage coaches in your organization? Give the Coach Touchpoints report a try with your free 30-day trial of CoachAccountable.

It was back in 2013 when I publicly declared my policy of maintaining oblivion around other coaching platforms, and here in 2019 I’m happy to say that policy still holds.

These six years later folks still ask us how CoachAccountable stacks up against other platforms, and we remain unable to give any substantive answer to the question.

This may seem a flippant (if not outright ignorant!) position, but this 2-minute video riff explains:

As I say in the video, there are a lot other people doing great work in the space, each working to forward the institution of coaching through platforms that might operate in ways comparable to CoachAccountable.  We hear now and then someone’s comparing us to CoachLogix, or that they’re looking for an alternative to FinishAgent, or someone will ask “Hey have you heard of Coachmetrix… or Coaching Lobby… or…”.  We used to hear some folks preferred Satori (though much less since we released Offerings).

These are all just glancing understandings of the competitive landscape, and that’s good enough.  We remain content to stay out of any features arms race, and are happy instead to continue taking our lead from our customers when it comes to insight and direction on how to better CoachAccountable.

We get hints often enough that we’re on the right track.  People seem to like us enough on Capterra and just this morning ago I got an email that mentioned “Upon first glance your software seems to be the most comprehensive for coaching that I have seen”.

But ultimately it’s up to you to explore and come to your own conclusion: the choice of platform that powers your coaching practice is important enough to get right.

Be it with CoachAccountable or something else, we hope you find what will best serve your coaching!

We’re occasionally asked if CoachAccountable is available in languages other than English. It isn’t, but you and your clients can now see CoachAccountable in another language, using the solution below.

Google Chrome can help your non-English-speaking clients use CoachAccountable seamlessly in their native language. Here’s how to set it up.

1. Open Chrome and click on the three dots in the upper right >> Settings.
2. At the bottom, click Advanced.
3. Under Languages, click Language.
4. Next to English, click More (If English isn’t listed, add it by clicking Add Language).
5. Turn Offer to translate pages in this language ON.
6. At the bottom, turn Offer to translate pages that aren’t in a language you read to ON

The Result

Now, CoachAccountable should auto-translate into your chosen language. Here’s how it looks for the client (in Spanish, as an example):

CoachAccountable, translated into Spanish

And if the coach would also like to translate it into a given language (doesn’t have to be the same as the client’s; your browser is your own), here’s how that looks.

If for some reason the translation doesn’t happen automatically, follow these steps:

1. Clear cookies and cache in Google Chrome.
2. Exit Google Chrome and reopen.
3. If it’s still not translating, right click on the page.
4. Click “Translate to [your language]”
   

   Right click to get this menu

5. (optional) Click Options and “Always translate English.”

Follow those steps anytime you see CoachAccountable in English.

What’s Translated?

All of the following will be translated:

• In-app menus and labels, such as Actions, Metrics, etc.
• The help center and pop-ups
• Account settings
• Any session notes, messages, or comments you’ve written (unless they’ve already been written in the destination lanugage)
• Basically, everything.

As an added bonus, this setting can help translate ALL pages in English or other languages for your clients, without additional work. You’re potentially making life easier for them even outside of your coaching!

If you’ve been holding off on using CoachAccountable because it’s not offered in your clients’ native language, give this Google Chrome solution a try with your free 30-day trial. And always feel free to reach out with any questions!

We often hear questions like:

• I coach two different types of clients. How can I quickly filter by type?
• Where can I see extra client information, like a birthday or spouse’s name?
• Can I add ‘tags’ to clients?

The great news is that CoachAccountable already has several spots to put extra client details (and filter by those criteria).

1. Client Profile Extra

From your clients page, click the Settings icon for a given client.

Two of these clients already have information in their Profile Extra, automatically! (We’ll let you guess which two ;)

Select “Profile Extra” and write relevant details here.

Here’s how that looks back on the client list.

With that in place, you can search on the clients page and find all clients with that particular word/phrase in their Profile Extra settings. The title of an Offering also appears here if they signed up through one. You can thus search for people based on a program they signed up for. That makes it easy to see just the people who signed up for your Mastermind Group vs. your 6-week Challenge, for example.

2. Client Notes

On each client’s page, you’ll notice at the bottom left sections for Notes and Tasks. Put additional notes here – keep in mind, though, that you can’t search for this information from the client list.

3. A Private Whiteboard

You can also create a Whiteboard in a client’s account and make it private, so only you can see it. Use this as an editable repository of notes on the client. If you’ve already got several shared Whiteboards and want to keep this one separate, you can create a Folder for private Whiteboards.

Of course you can always put these notes into private Session Notes or private comments, too.

Bonus Client Organization Opportunity: Groups

While Groups aren’t necessarily a place for notes for individual clients, they do give you a great admin tool for organizing clients by type. You can put clients into a Group that they can’t see (as in, for admin-only purposes). You can message all the clients at the same time. So, let’s say you’re a health coach who works with 2 types of clients: A) an online-only group fitness program, and B) private in-person personal training clients. You’ve likely already got your A clients in a Group. But say you want to let your in-person clients know you’ll be traveling? Put them all into a Group (hidden from them), and you can message them all at the same time.

One other note about navigating through clients that belong to a given Group: if you go to a Group, then click on any client in the “Membership” listing in the left menu, you’ll find that the previous/next client links that appear are now just the members of the Group you just clicked from.  This is a very handy way to quickly surf through the client pages of only members of a specific Group!

If you’re tired of scrambling through papers looking for details on a client, keep it all organized in CoachAccountable. You get 30 days free, no commitment. Start now!

For some time, coaches have been able to change the client page arrangement. This helped customize and streamline the system; you could, for instance, turn off the Journal tab if you don’t have your clients do journaling. That gives the coachee one less thing to look at, one less thing to click on or get distracted by.

However, that had its limitations. Many coaches work with distinct groups of people, some of which journal every day and some of which never journal. Before, you as coach had to determine the page arrangement for all of your clients with a master setting.

Now, you can set this arrangement on a per-client basis.

Default Client Page Arrangement

Your default page arrangement will apply unless you customize the page arrangement for someone. Set this in Settings >> System >> Client Page Arrangement.

Turn on and off visibility for various tabs, drag them to reorder, and choose whether you’d like clients to see the invoices page. Click on each section for a brief description of what it does.

Page Arrangement for Other Coaches

As a Team Edition account owner, up at the top you’ll see a dropdown with the ability to set the default page arrangement for yourself, specific other coaches, or newly added coaches coming into your system.

Individual Client Page Arrangement

To change a single client’s page arrangement, go to Home and your clients page. Each client has a settings button in the lower right. Click that, and you’ll see Page Arrangement just above Delete/Deactivate.

You’ll have a couple options:

• Go with the organization-wide default (meaning the layout you just set up in Settings >> System >> Client Page Arrangement).
• Use this custom arrangement. Here you’ll have the same ability to turn visibility for various sections on or off, and drag to rearrange.

If you’ve got Team Edition, you’ll have a third option:

• Use whatever [clientFirstName]’s primary coach has set. The primary coach’s name is included here too, eliminating any guesswork.

Overall, this function will allow you to simplify a client’s first impression and prevent overwhelm or burnout with the system. As you build complexity with that coaching engagement, you can always turn items back on and introduce them in a controlled fashion.

Do you offer live workshops? Wonder how you could possibly use an online coaching software for in-person workshops? Wonder no more!

Dr. John Kenworthy of Leadership AdvantEdge, CoachAccountable’s customer #1, recently sent over some practical how-to (and WHY) advice on using CoachAccountable for live workshops. He also shared great perspectives on protecting intellectual property while using an online coaching platform.

We’ve edited this guest post for length and clarity – enjoy!

I’ve been using CoachAccountable for before- and after-workshop coaching follow-up.

Prompted by a recent enhancement to worksheets (the ease of adding images, video and audio), I thought, “Why not use CoachAccountable Worksheets throughout the workshop?”

Using CA for the whole programme, prework, workshop and follow-up would require some adjustments to the way the workshop ran, and a few tweaks in delivery but imagine the benefits.

Benefits of Using CoachAccountable for a Live Workshop

• Replace paper workbooks. Using CA saves me $200+ on printing and binding for each workshop, not to mention courier fees or luggage fees. It saves my shoulder when lugging workbooks half-way across the world.
• Resources actually get used. Workbooks go to the client’s office and sit there to gather dust and fill a shelf, but CoachAccountable caused ALL the clients to participate in full for the whole programme (it’s tough for them to do email whilst in the workshop).
• Easy to send out pre-work (readings, worksheets, actions) before the workshop and nag clients to do it
• Participants can take notes (in the worksheets) for each live module
• Participants can use CA worksheets to coach each other during (and after) the workshop
• Easily track during the workshop who is keeping up with the modules.
• Embed “slides” or even a live presentation in a worksheet so participants can follow (in the classroom or on the beach)
• Have a full record of their workshop – heck they can print out a Happenings Report should they request one.
• And then the follow-up: with actions they set, metrics, post workshop coaching, buddy coaching, results for the business and ROI for the programme paymasters, with evidence!
• Multinational corporations are happy with the level of security (they weren’t when I used my learning management system (LMS) instead)
• And the intellectual property? It’s all in a password-protected space for a single client and not so easy to reproduce en-masse.

It takes a little work to be ready. I’m sharing the key learnings I got from this experience so that you can avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way.

How to Set Up Your Live Workshop with CoachAccountable

Before the Workshop

• Add all clients into CoachAccountable ahead of time, and place them into a group (groups for breakouts too).
• Create a mini course on using CA. Have clients complete this course upon signup (before the live workshop).
• Send out prework as Worksheets. Files and download can accompany, but you want Worksheets to force a response to the file.
• Set up all workshop modules with form-based worksheets (an image of the key slide or better a TL:DR summary slide, (can also embed Google, Zoho, Office 365 or Prezi). A live Prezi in the Worksheet can be brilliant for live follow and space for notes below, but take note that mobile devices must use the Prezi app!
• Worksheets used in the workshop to be completed within one day – no reminders (except for Worksheets they might need to do after the workshop)
• Put modules into a Course split by days, making sure to number the modules (Worksheets) in their titles for best sorting in order of use.
• Schedule Course elements to deliver without any notifications. It’s best to time these elements for morning and afternoon delivery (or you risk overloading the client’s “what’s next” screen).

During the Workshop

• Take them through using the system live. Use your freebie client account and become a group member to show them what they will see.
• Get participants to book appointments for follow-up coaching before they leave.
• Get participants to set their own follow-up Actions and Metrics at the wrap of each day.
• Depending on their IT security – an embedded live Prezi in a worksheet works very well on a laptop (but beware what happens on mobile).
• When asking participants to buddy coach each other using a Worksheet before, during or after the workshop,
  1. Get them to write the “client” name (i.e. their buddy’s name) as the first field. Remind them to email a copy to the “client” or
  2. Get them to swap computers/smartphones so they fill it in on their own worksheet.

Advantages

Dr. John Kenworthy, footloose and fancy-free with no workbooks to carry around

No cost of printing out physical paper manuals/workbooks. No excess baggage when flying. No trees dying.

Can change content up to last possible second.

Fantastic for a “flipped classroom” educational style, with included pre- and post-coaching work – distinguishes the trainer (YOU) from the masses of other coaches.

Protects IP and makes it really difficult for those occasional valueless companies who try to steal your work (it’s actually far easier for them to steal and photocopy your physical workbooks, a situation I’ve run into in the past).

Makes sure every participant is accounted for (better still, paid for). Must have login to participate.

Easy to “nag” about prework. Easy to make sure follow up, learning in action, and actions are done. Ensures results for the participants and organisation. Provides evidence of results and, if you set the metrics right, ROI.

Potential Issues

The clients’ IT security. Check, double and triple check that what you think they can see is indeed what they see behind their firewall and on their systems. Remember this applies to CoachAccountable itself, and anything you might embed that is not on CA’s servers. If needed, get IT to make an exception for the CA domain (and give them John Larson’s contact so they can be assured of the security CA has in place).

The client insists on paper workbooks. I have one of these clients and have now told them I will not be using paper again. They informed me that I would have to provide them with iPads or tablets to do the workshop, in that case. I politely suggested that is not going to happen. For now, I’ll let them work with my competitors until they realise that they don’t get results and come back to me.

Embedding from another platform. PDF embeds (using Scribd) works for now. Google Slides (will not work in China), Zoho slides (does work in China). Prezi and Live Prezi work. Have a backup plan handy: images of your “slides”.

Notifications. When setting up worksheets for a live workshop, you do not want automatic notices going out. Also, make sure to minimise your own notifications when they submit anything for the duration of your workshop (or your inbox will be full to fullness). (Related: On Not Overwhelming Your Clients)

All in All

Way easier and better than using an LMS, PDFs, Mentimeter (and similar).

Takes a bit of patient setup, but my client was impressed, and the participants ALL participated in full for the whole programme.

One of the great things about working at CoachAccountable is that we each have built-in coaching at our jobs. To that end we’ve each got a client account under the other’s coach account (meaning John is a client of Morgan, and Morgan is a client of John). As you might imagine, that comes with a lot of material; specifically, we’ve got roughly billions of Whiteboards for collaboration (company culture, easy-access links to our reviews on Capterra and Google, etc.). That means I often need to search for a particular Whiteboard.

And here’s Sho to show us a new idea!

When Shorombo Mooij, a life and health coach from Holland, suggested folders for Whiteboards, I heartily agreed and added the task to our weekly Morgan’s the Boss session. Thanks to John’s quick work, Whiteboard folders now exist!

Here’s how to use them.

In the same way you organize Files in your Library or a client’s Files area, add a folder to your Whiteboards by clicking +Folder.

Choose the name for your folder and create it. Then, just drag and drop files onto it and they’ll be placed inside the folder.

Click the folder to see what’s inside. From here you can also create subfolders. If you want to move a file back out of the folder, just drag it onto “Up.” You’ll notice that underneath the “+ Whiteboard” button there’s a handy access to see the folder structure while you’re in it.

This actually is one of my favorite ads – it’s by the people who did the commercials for Squatty Potty and Poopourri.

To remove a folder, simply remove everything inside it, then refresh.

Thanks, Sho, for the inspiration and suggestion.

Enjoy!

Lynton’s been a power user of CoachAccountable since early 2016, using it to deliver courses to hundreds of his clients.

He’s out of the UK; we’d never talked on the phone, let alone met.  But we’ve had plenty of exchanges: on account of his geography (namely 7 hours ahead) and power user status (namely giving lots of CA Courses to clients in varied time zones) he stumbled upon a few niche bugs in how CA handled the timing of delivering course materials, allowing me to fix them and helping to build a more perfect CA.

Lynton reached out to me last month, letting me know he was going to be traveling for a while and asking me if he could export his files/setup so that he could pickup with it when ready to resume.

As you might guess I was happy to do the solid of simply pausing his account.  When he mentioned he was RV’ing through the states I offered a standing invite for a beer (or the like) if he ever passed through Denver.

Turns out he and his partner were flying right in to Denver to pick up the RV… what a lovely coincidence!  A few emails more and we were on for a gathering at Growler USA, a nice haunt right in my neighborhood.

Um, yeah, he’s bigger than that.

The name of Lynton’s program is Make me Unbreakable.  When I stepped into the pub and surveyed the clientele it was clear at a glace that “oh yeah, THIS is the guy we should be hiring to make us unbreakable”.

(I ribbed him later that his avatar photo in CA, just him in a hoodie and kinda positioned small in the frame, didn’t quite do justice to his stature :).

As I crossed the room Lynton stood to give me a warm welcome and a man hug.

As is practially always the case, I got such joy and perspective out of hearing, firsthand, from a coach what it’s like in their world (and how CA intersects with it).  We got to talking and it was a treat.

“For a fitness program, 40-45% retention past 6 months is common.  With CA it was like 85-90%.  I had customers staying on for two years and more.”

Wow, for real?  If it wasn’t already in line with his evident super-friendly nature, that fact alone might explain the jovial man hug.  He continued, “I used to send out texts every Sunday, asking after ‘how are you doing with this, how are you doing with that?  How’s your meditation?’  10-20 clients, took a lot of time.  Now the computer does all the work, and I’ve got way more clients.”

Lynton described a bit about what it was like to design those courses that had the computer doing all the work.  “Took a while to get it just right, building the course.  Spent 50 hours on the first version, tried it on myself, found it didn’t work.  Then spent 5 hours on a new version and THAT worked brilliantly.”

I said good on you for having the persistence to really get it right and reap the reward!  I could see why he wanted to keep that data intact.

Bringing us to the current moment, Lynton summarized: “Now taking 6 months off, maybe more, to travel.  Excited to get new ideas, pick up with CA later and make a new and better program.  Excited to see what’s new in CA when I do!”

The plan for Lynton and his lady friend is to RV around for a month, then travel about for one more here in the states, then Mexico, Cuba. “Who knows after that.  Looking to bounce around in Canada next February, exploring towns, may settle down in one.  Looking for somewhere else in the world, UK is so small.  With CA I can have clients anywhere in the world.”

I was so delighted and inspired to hear as much (and NOT because of the “enabled-by-CA” part, though that’s nice).  They’re basically doing a world tour and poised to go wherever the journey takes them.  This of course is near and dear to my heart, as CoachAccountable itself was gotten off the ground during my world tour with my wife in 2012/2013 (I launched it from my kitchen table in Cusco, Peru!).

We swapped stories of travel: countries to go to, cities to explore, meals to be had.  It was my honor to inspire and be inspired–it’s always super life giving to see someone ACTUALLY DO IT (whatever that big dream “IT” may be).

Guess which is which! (Hint: Lynton is the one you’d wanna take fitness advice from.)

Thanks Lynton for the beer (he insisted on buying :), and moreover for the conversation.  I wish you an amazing trip and we’ll cook up some new goodies in CA for you to check out whenever you’re ready to pickup with your coaching practice, from wherever in the world you decide to settle!