The CoachAccountable Blog

Here at CoachAccountable, we’re often asked how much time it takes to set up a coaching management system with us. It’s sort of like asking “How long will it take to get new carpet?” Lots of factors affect that one – how many rooms are you carpeting? Have you already chosen the color and style, and is it a specialty brand? Are you doing it yourself or hiring a professional installer? Does other carpet need to be removed first? Is your subfloor in good shape? Do you live in the middle of nowhere? You get the idea.

Our answer to “How long does CA setup take?” is inevitably a version of “Well, it depends. What do your clients need and what do you want the system to do?”

While that’s certainly accurate, we decided to give it a shot for fun and see how fast we could get a brand new account up and running to sell coaching online.

We used just four parts of CoachAccountable (Appointment Configuration, Calendar Sync, Payments, and Offerings) and took just 2:14 to get it completely up and running.

With just a couple minutes, you too can sell your coaching online. Watch this video to see how!

Transcript below.

Hiya! I’m John. I’m the dude who made this whole thing. Today I want to show you something kind of cool and that is how fast you can get up and running with CoachAccountable to start actually selling your coaching services from your very own website.

For this demonstration, I’m going to dust off my own website from way back in the day, when I used to do consulting. I offered coaching and part of that was offering a 20 dollar introductory coaching call. There’s a PayPal button as you can see right here that allows people to pay. But it didn’t do anything with scheduling or really much of anything else. So we’re going to replace that with a much better setup, done the CoachAccountable way.

We’re going to start here in CoachAccountable with a brand new account and let’s see how fast we can do it.

Our first stop in doing this setup is visiting the Appointments Configuration. Here we’ve got three tasks. First, we’re going to create a new appointment type, which basically defines what exactly people are booking themselves for. A name, the duration 30 minutes, we’ll even set some reminders for both parties to make sure everyone comes well-prepared.

That should be good. OK. Next up, let’s set our availability, which is basically our way of saying, “When are we taking these calls?” For example, let’s do Monday mornings and maybe afternoons, have a nice little lunch break, and then we could also do, say, Wednesdays, maybe just the afternoon, one to four.

Final step. Let’s sync up with our calendar. We have Google Calendar and we’re already logged in. This is super quick. This allows any appointments that get scheduled via CoachAccountable to also appear in our calendar as well as read from the calendar to know when we’re busy. This avoids double booking. Okay, all set.

Next up, we’re going to go set ourselves up to be able to accept payments online. We’re going to use Stripe, but you can use Square as well. If you’re already logged in and have a stripe account this goes really fast.

You can see here that I’m already logged in so it’s just a matter of clicking, “Yep, let’s connect these things.” And done! OK. We’re all set now to have CoachAccountable process payments on our behalf. By the way, CoachAccountable doesn’t take any fees.

Next up let’s create the actual Offering. So, we give it a name. We’re going to tell CoachAccountable what information should be collected for people who sign up for this. I think cell phone is a good one; name and e-mail are always there. We’re going to say that an appointment is part of this offering, and here’s our introductory call appointment type we created earlier.

Give it a price, 20 bucks, and then we could take as much or as little time as we want to customize things like the welcome message and the confirmation e-mail. This is a great opportunity to sort of give a little bit of personality and style – let people sort of get excited about what they’re getting themselves into. All right. This is all set.

Let’s get the embed code. I’m working in WordPress so I’m going to do an iframe, grab that little snippet. This is a little task for your webmaster or if you’re savvy you can do a quick cut and paste job basically put this snippet of HTML right in place (for WordPress it’s a little weird with iframes; we’re going to give it an alternate syntax and maybe a little bit styling to make it look pretty). And then once we hit the update button here, we are done.

Two minutes 14 seconds.

Let’s go see our work over here – hit refresh, and there we have it. Our sign-up widget right in place. Three simple steps. Pick a date and time based on your rules and when you’re free. Enter in some basic info and your clients can pay right online. Appointments made this way appear right in your calendar and the money paid goes right into your merchant account. Nice action!

Not bad for just over 2 minutes worth of work, right? But here’s the cool thing. As nice as it is to have a scheduling system that works right from your own website and integrates with your calendar and even takes payments for ya… The real magic comes in the fact that you can let your new signups actually access their client portal with you right at the get-go. When you do this, you can actually have certain things set up automatically and waiting for them that are going to get them sort of started before they even talk to you.

Maybe a little action plan that allows them to, you know, make progress and getting set up on the kind of work you’re going to do; maybe share some videos or articles, get them excited for your brilliance. Maybe a little worksheet that lets them noodle on things and share in advance as a proper onboarding form.

Play around with these elements and you’ll find that you can actually give people a really nice experience that lets them know they’re going to get so much more than just getting a couple conversations with you. They’re going to have a system of accountability and support that will make it real and results-based ensuring that they’re going to get their money’s worth out of working with you.

Do you have just a few minutes to find and set up the right coaching software? Give it a shot and sign up for your free trial today.

And, if you’d like to set up even more than the basics, check out our Essentials guide over on the left here or use the Getting Started guide inside CoachAccountable!

Working at CoachAccountable is pretty great. We are truly a high-performing team (we both separately get a chuckle when people are surprised there are just two of us), and our mutual coaching background allows us to coach each other, deal with the rare breakdown in a matter of minutes, and make sure we’re both constantly present to our big goal (elevating the coaching industry).

Know what else is cool? We get to do whatever we want. Meaning we get to flip the script on software companies, startups, working remotely, and pretty much whatever else we want. We get to do things like not having a bug log (no need, no accumulation), avoiding a feature request list (we’re in touch daily with the din of what people are asking for), and creating “Morgan’s the Boss” (MtB).

What’s Morgan’s the Boss, you ask?  That’s our weekly ritual, Thursday mornings for a block of 3 hours, when we invert the power structure of CoachAccountable.  Morgan gets to tell John what he should do, rather than the other way around.  It’s Morgan’s chance to call the shots and prioritize what she sees to prioritize, and John’s at her disposal to execute on those ideas.

Here’s how MtB time occurs for each of us.

Morgan’s Experience

At the last software company I worked at, here’s how suggestions from the front lines were handled.

Support team: Hey developers, every day we have to do X thing about a hundred times, and we’re often stuck waiting for you to help us out. It’d make all our lives easier if we could….

Developers: Yeah yeah, that would be nice someday. But we’re really busy fixing stuff that we shouldn’t have released because it was broken, so why don’t you write that suggestion on a scrap of paper and burn it as a sacrifice to the gods of programming in hopes it’ll someday happen?

Support team: …

How I felt at work, pre-CoachAccountable

And at CoachAccountable, during Morgan’s the Boss I get to actually ask for things that make my and John’s jobs easier. And they get done.

I can request everything from a “Loved On” button to mark when/how I’ve loved on customers (consistent with my title as Director of Customer Love and Handholding), to blog posts that have been lingering, to updated images on the signup page, to a quick way to delete multiple old Worksheets.

John makes a guess as to how long the task will take him, then races to beat the clock and show off his work. He often surprises me with a bonus item, something like, “While I was building thing X, I realized thing Y would also be great, so I built it!” I enjoy seeing the challenge take shape, too; often I’ll suggest something, John will take it to a different level, and we’ll co-create the idea of the final result. That process animates both of us as we get to step out of our expected results for the week.

The net result of Morgan’s the Boss is that I feel empowered to make my job more efficient, John’s enthusiastic about having less busywork to do, and CoachAccountable as a whole is better for it.

John’s Experience

For me, Morgan’s the Boss time is a special kind of treat for several reasons.

First, I’ve been by-and-large calling ALL the shots for CoachAccountable for quite some time now, 6 years and counting.  Yes, I love the control and being able to play this most worthy game wherein I’m fully responsible for the outcome, but boy is it nice (and a novel change of pace!) to relax the ol’ executive function for even just a little while and settle in more simply executing based on another’s leadership.  To do so is to experience one of the luxuries of being someone else’s employee, one that I, as a long term entrepreneur, had largely forgot.

Second, MtB is a chance for me to truly play, even if for just a little while, the idealized role of the utopian egalitarian leader: I get to put my money where my mouth is in saying I value the input and perspective of others and believe in their capacity to meaningfully contribute direction.  I hope to always remain open to the insights that are not necessarily mine, both from CoachAccountable customers and team members, insomuch as I genuinely prioritize and act on them.  I’m fond of the phrase “CoachAccountable is a benevolent dictatorship”, and this exercise fits that to a T.

Third, some really good stuff gets created when we go according to Morgan’s priorities rather than mine.  Routinely dealing with different things as she does, she naturally has different insights into what would help the cause.  These insights concern not only serving our users better but also making her job easier, which feeds right back into serving our users better.  Time spent making her more effective is time well spent indeed.

Finally there’s a certain energy to carrying out Morgan’s tasks in a rapid, time-bound fashion.  We hop on a Zoom call, she tells me what she wants me to do, I say something to the effect of “Okay boss, I’m on it… see you when I’m done!” and I hop off and get cracking.  It’s a game to see how quickly I can knock out the task, and there’s a keen audience of one that I’m performing for (which is way more fun than toiling in isolation).  Focus and flow come easily, and being able to proudly show off something new and done is so very rewarding.  We hop back on the Zoom call for show-and-tell, and move on to the next thing.

And that’s how it goes for the 3 hours.  It’s not exactly instant gratification, but it’s darn close and I love it.

And there you have it.  Here are some of the cool things that have come out of MtB sessions that you might have come across:

• Having a Worksheet as part of an Offering sign up process
• Rapid deletion of duplicated items in Courses and similar Worksheet assignments
• A tidier Terms of Awesome
• This speed run video of setting up an Offering from a new account in under 3 minutes.
• The former Affiliate program became the more aptly named Referral Program
• A Support Services page created using Offerings, where you can book a time for help
• The coaching hours log report (ICF credentialing, anyone?)

We continue to have fun rewriting the script and inventing new structures for how our company is “supposed to be run”, and we’ll continue to improve CoachAccountable in the myriad ways that our joint perspectives allow us to!

Sue of The Wellness Community, a CoachAccountable Team Edition coach, dropped us a line with a complex document she uses for all her clients. It’s a holistic Wellness Assessment that’s intended to give her members an idea of their current overall wellness, as well as help her match new clients with the right coach.

Sue wonders:

Is there a way for CA to compute and report a wellness score from the answers submitted in a wellness assessment? I have created an assessment with seven sections, each measuring a different area of wellness. Each answer has a score and contributes to the total for a specific area with each area contributing to the total wellness score, being a maximum of 100.

Can I also create a metric that combines all these metrics into one to give a snap shot of their overall wellness in graph form?

We were happy to reply that YES, CoachAccountable does that. It’s called a Computed Value.

Form-based Worksheets give you the ability to create professional coaching Worksheets for your clients. Many coaches find they can stop using tools like Google Docs plus Google Forms and instead assign a neat, packaged CoachAccountable Worksheet, placed where clients can easily find, complete, and review it. You can take data from your form-based Worksheets and pipe them into Metrics, allowing clients to enter data only once into the Worksheet while the Metric auto-populates both data and comments if you like.

Now, form-based Worksheets can do even more. The newest type of field, computed value, allows you to input formulas that include other form fields on your Worksheet. That means you can automatically calculate averages, sums, and so on, and of course pipe these into Metrics as well.

Let’s take a look at one in action.

From the Worksheet in this blog post, I’d like to know how a given client feels on average about the topic. I’ve already got two questions that address that opinion, so I will take the average of these to get the person’s general feeling.

Step 1 is to create the form fields you’ll use in the computed value. Basically, the system has to know what it’s supposed to add/subtract/multiply/divide. It’s like baking: you can’t start with the step that says “mix all the ingredients into the bowl” without knowing what those ingredients are. In this case, I’ve already done the work to create those.

You may remember this totally unbiased survey from such blog posts as “Using Form-Based Worksheets”.

Next, create a computed value. The name should be something you’d use as a title in a spreadsheet column. The formula, though, is where it gets really juicy.

See the options for values to include in this formula, those clickable green links? They are all from the same Worksheet I’m working on. That’s why it’s so important to create these fields in advance. Now, just click on any of those to add it to your formula.

Since I want the average, I need to add these two fields together, then divide by two. CA knows PEMDAS (remember that from school? Please excuse my dear aunt Sally?), so using parentheses makes sure that the adding gets done before the dividing.

For this post, we also learned that in the UK they use BODMAS (Brackets, Orders, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract), while in Canada they say BEDMAS (Brackets, Exponents, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract). The more you know!

I don’t want my client to see this as a question, because I only want to use it to create a Metric for her (another reason you may not want clients to see the computed value is if you’re just keeping this number for yourself. You can always run a report on just this field by using the Data Lab’s Single Field reporting function).

Because I chose to hide this computed value, I’ll need to mouse over it to see or edit the field.

This hidden field means that the Worksheet looks exactly the same to the client as it did before.

Let’s build a Metric that pipes in the data from this computed value field.

This’ll be useful for my coaching, right?

And voila! You’ve got magically appearing Metric data from a question your client didn’t even know she answered.  By the same token, it’s often nice as well to have a computed value show right within the Worksheet.  That value will magically update itself as your client fills out the other parts of the worksheet which are part of the formula.  This can be quite nice for something like a total score that grows as your client answers the questions.  Hidden or on display, you can have it whichever way makes the most sense.

Which functions can a CoachAccountable computed value do?

Pretty much any valid mathematical expression of arithmetic will work!  This includes:

• Parentheses
• Exponents
• Multiplication
• Division
• Addition
• Subtraction

And if the formula as you’ve typed it is not valid for whatever reason, perhaps some parentheses don’t match up quite right or you’ve got a typo in your input names, the system will let you know right away so you can make needed corrections.

If, like Sue, you’ve got a complicated Worksheet for your clients and you’re ready to have the math automated for you (plus reminders and more), set up your free 30-day trial with CoachAccountable now.

Do you scratch your head wondering how other coaching businesses scale beyond just one coach, and whether CoachAccountable can help you get there? Anissa Fulbright of Icenhower Coaching and Consulting graciously offered an inside peek into their rapid development. We’ve edited Anissa’s words below for length and clarity.

Brian Icenhower

The Origins of Icenhower Coaching

Brian’s been coaching for 20+ years. We have this belief that people learn in their own way[s]: touch workbooks, watch videos, print the materials, listen to a podcast or an audiobook. They’re busy, [but they need] access to these materials in different ways.

[For example], we have audiobooks; [clients say] “I’ll do it while I’m on the treadmill.” We accept [those various learning styles and used them] to make training that was versatile and up-to-date.

Icenhower Resources

We have “therealestatetrainer.com, Powered by Icenhower Coaching,” which is a free resource for [real estate] agents. When subscribers come to us, they’re so tired, and they’re like, “I’ve been looking for this.” We also have the ICCOnlineLearningCenter.com for our online video courses.

By the end of the year [2018], [we’ll have] 11 books, all turned into a training series with video modules, workbooks, and online courses.

And that’s what we’ve set out to do. We didn’t mean to be a publishing company!

Life Before CoachAccountable

[At the very beginning, Brian] was spending much more like three hours a week with [each] client then. Now it’s closer to 30 minutes, and we’re able to get more clients [and] spend less time while giving them more value. 

With CoachAccountable in place, our number of clients has gone up over five times the number we had just last year, and we have been able to add more coaches to the team, too. We have had incredible growth that we wouldn’t have been able to do without CoachAccountable, especially onboarding [clients] and getting them into a system where they can feel the value. They don’t feel like they’re getting just a 30-minute phone call; they feel like they’re getting a lot more.

Anissa Fulbright, Icenhower Coaching

Icenhower Coaching + CoachAccountable

We’re branching out, but the bread and butter of our business is [still] one-on-one coaching. It’s the most effective way for people to grow; we’re seeing a 39 percent increase in our agents’ GCI (gross commission income) after one year of coaching.

These people are busy and they’ve been in the business for a while. They just need structure and a coach that can help them hire someone effective – not their sister who needs part time work.

We take them out of the “traditional age”; they don’t have business training, so we’re taking them to that level.

Communication

Poignant reminders – e-mails, texts –  [are] important because they are texters.

They don’t want more e-mails, so I can customize [the customer experience] with texts. We [as coaches] don’t work out of email anymore, because stuff is going to get lost.

A Client’s Full Picture

My favorite part about CoachAccountable is that it’s a centralized place for us to work with clients. On a daily basis, I can check progress and history. It’s a customized experience.

[Session] Notes have been really helpful. We actually started recording our calls. We just drop the [recorded] file right into the Stream when we’re done, so [both coaches and clients] can always reference [it]. It’s helpful for the coach to be able to make those Notes quickly right on the call. The function to add Notes that are either private or [visible] is really helpful.

[Using] the Stream, the files, and the Session Notes, you can see the trajectory of where the [client is] headed. [In the Stream,] you can also look back to see what they’ve been working on and the notes from each call.

The pre-check-in [Worksheet] is helpful for Brian and [the other] coaches, because it gets people in the right mind-state. They write down anything they were working on or struggling with this week, and they know exactly what they’re going to address on the call.  So, [during a coaching call], they’ll do “old business”, then jump right into the “new business”.

Scaling a Coaching Business

CoachAccountable has allowed us to kind of duplicate [Brian]; we are able to scale because we can send actions and reminders and tasks to do between calls week to week instead of him having to spend more time on the phone [creating these systems].

Now that we’ve built out the Library, we can get 10 more coaches and they can all have at least 10 clients, then slowly work Brian out of the process. He’ll [instead] go into creating training materials. It’s really exciting to have that big-picture outlook. He’s going to be much more like, “I just get to write and build [programs].”

Coaching Client Feedback

We haven’t done a ton of marketing, but through CoachAccountable we’re able to impress the agents [who are our potential clients].

The feedback we get from our clients is that it’s a centralized place. They love working out of [CoachAccountable instead of] e-mail, because their email’s flooded. It’s really easy to use the [CoachAccountable] app. They often want to pull something up at a meeting, and they have that PDF right there.

When we unload the Library to them [in CoachAccountable], they’re stunned by the amount of [answers] they’ve been searching for. We have job descriptions and everything they need to hire, train, and grow a team. [We have the resources to] get their business plan on track and start turning their business into a machine.

Some of our agents are the top agents across the country. They’re selling 400 to 1000 homes a year and [because of our coaching], they’re spending their marketing dollars in ways that previously real estate agents weren’t doing.

Thank you to Brian Icenhower and to Anissa for sharing with us! If you’re like Icenhower Coaching and looking to scale your coaching business, try out CoachAccountable free for 30 days. If you’re building or managing a team of coaches, a Team Edition account can give you the freedom to be a real leader and help you to only do the boring work once.

5 years of doing it has me quite proficient at Photoshopping on another candle.

What a year it has been!

Version 3 launched.  That by itself is enough to mark CoachAccountable’s 6th year a powerful one.  I keep hearing of other platforms whose efforts to upgrade or release a new version end up being largely, ahem, a bug-ridden shit show.  No such problem here.

And what a relief to have that done.  Much of the time I was working on V3 my wife and I had a new baby around.  Suffice it to say that building a major revision to a system as complex as CoachAccountable when you have a new baby is challenging.

But that’s all done!  And young James, our second, is now 19 months old: largely done with teething and sleeping beautifully through the night.

With that lovely foundation of well restedness restored, plenty of other good things have happened in CoachAccountable land during this 6th year.

Since Version 3’s launch a lot of the progress on the platform has centered around a theme of letting you guys run the more nuts-and-bolts aspects of your business more smoothly, and by “business” I mean selling your services and getting paid.

We added support for automatic subscription billing.  We made it so that you could accept payments via Square.  Most importantly, we launched Offerings and Offering Bundles which allow you to sell your coaching services right from your own website.

On the more human side of things, the talented and charismatic Morgan joined as CoachAccountable’s Director of Customer Love and Hand Holding.  She and I represented at the Association of Coach Training Organizations’ annual conference whereat I gave a talk on using technology in coaching.

Beyond that sort of outreach, we made some lovely strides in making CoachAccountable itself more approachable for you, your colleagues, and your clients.  A beautifully animated 2 minute video explains the gist of CoachAccountable like never before, we finally made it super clear how everyone can install CA as an app on their smartphone through a groovy simple trick, and we got all our privacy-respecting bits in order for full compliance with the GDPR (spoiler alert: we were never doing anything nasty with anyone’s data to begin with, we just wrote up the paperwork to make it official :).

And we had the usual bevvy of technical improvements to make CA just plain run better for everyone: direct sync with Google calendars, bulk client uploads, a new thing called “Calculated Form Inputs” (which we haven’t even had time to write up yet!), and a steady stream of other enhancements and polish that make their way into CA most every week.

In summary, with all that covert work on Version 3 done and launched, this year has been a delightful and swift march towards a more perfect coaching platform.

It has been (and continues to be!) our joy to grow CoachAccountable into all the lovely things it can be in service of you guys as coaches.  We hope you love these improvements and that they’re serving you well: empowering you to do your best, most difference-making coaching.

AND I’m happy to say here and now that we STILL have plenty up our sleeves.  As always, can’t wait to show you when it’s ready.

Thank you to everyone who’s been along with us for so long (and to those of you who have just joined!).  Together we’re forwarding a most worthy industry, making it more effective and more approachable.

Here’s to the game!
John & Morgan

Sometimes coaches request to bulk onboard new clients into CoachAccountable. This can happen with a new account (when a company switches all its coachees over to CoachAccountable), or when a new program starts (suddenly 45 people in the cohort need to be added by Wednesday, help!).

Adding a client the usual way is pretty quick, but going one by one can get tedious when you’ve got more than a handful.  However, if you’re handy with a spreadsheet you can get all of their information in line and import it all with just a few clicks.

How to Bulk Import Clients

1) Bring up the client adder as usual by clicking the +Client button.   In the lower right, click on the “Bulk Import…” button.

2) In the “Bulk Import Clients” pop up you’ll see a button that says “Download Template”.  You’ll probably need to grab that as a starting point so that your client data is in the correct format.  (The template also serves as a guide to the various information you can include for clients as part of the import.)

3) In the template, add rows and enter in client information to your heart’s desire.  Commonly you will already have some sort of spreadsheet of client data that you are working from.  Filling in the template will commonly be a matter of copy-and-pasting over various key columns.

Note: the only required fields are firstName and email.

4) When you’re done save out the file.  Be certain you save it as a .csv file, .xlsx or .numbers files WILL NOT WORK.

5) Choose your .csv file as the one you want to import.

5) Observe the status of your data that’s loaded for import.  If everything looks good, dance victoriously.

More Than the Basics

Using this method, you can do more than simply add the clients into your coaching management system. You can also:

• Add profile information, such as a note about that client (this’ll show in the “profile extra” area, and is not visible to the client)
• Add clients to a Group (or two, or three, add Group columns as needed)
• Put them in a Course (or three, or more, like groups, add as many Course columns as needed) and optionally set a future start date
• For Team Edition, designate who the primary coach, secondary coach(es), and view-only coach(es) are

Errors

The system is smart enough to know when something’s messed up. For instance, it’ll throw an error if the email address is invalid.

No, you can’t write “don’t know” for someone’s email address.

Also, if you add a client who’s already in your account, CoachAccountable will notice and let you know that person won’t be added (this helps avoid paying for clients twice, too).

It’s nicer than “hey dummy – you’re already coaching this person”

Use Cases

As previously mentioned, you may want to use this function if:

• You’re new to CoachAccountable and want to add your entire roster at once.
• You want to transfer a bunch of clients from your CRM (InfusionSoft, Insightly, Hubspot, etc.) along with their relevant details.
• A new coach joins your organization and brings his/her clients.
• And more!

Were you dreading the thought of inputting all your clients? Did that keep you from signing up for CoachAccountable? Fret no more and take advantage of our 30-day free trial.

With the advent of our much-anticipated, oft-requested Offerings, you can now sell coaching directly from your own website. Offerings set up a seamless experience for your clients and prospective clients, with options to schedule an Appointment directly into your calendar, be automatically enrolled in a Course (such as an onboarding Course), and/or participate in a Group.

One of the great things about Offerings is that they eliminate the need to have a separate account with ScheduleOnce, Acuity, Calendly, or other such online scheduling systems.  This is because CA Offerings give you the ability to let prospective clients book intro calls with you directly online.

But Offerings allow you to give much more than just a way for those new clients to schedule themselves into your calendar:

• You can have the system automatically send them a coaching intake form or questionnaire prior to that first call.
• You can have a few Action items pre-loaded as tasks for your new clients to take on as part of getting started with you.
• You can share select videos or other resources for clients to review as preparation.

Essentially, this allows you to give new clients more value up front, and a sneak peak of what it will be like to work with you.  They’ll get to experience the results-oriented approach that you offer, and see that you offer real accountability in getting them where they want to go.  They can engage with the REAL system that you’ll have for them, and get a sense that, by working with you, they’re buying way more than a package of conversations.

These are things that set you apart and make their decision to buy from you easier.

Amid all these perks, there’s still a simple fact that clients who sign up for an Offering might well just be kicking the tires with that free intro call.  CoachAccountable pricing is based on the number of clients you have, and so a question we hear a lot is something to the tune of:

Since These Clients Aren’t ‘Real’, Does CoachAccountable Count Them Toward My Subscription Plan?

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer: Our goal is to have you deliver better programs, to more people, with less work. The more prospective clients you have coming in, the more paying clients you’ll have (assuming you’re able to close a reasonable percentage of earnest prospects!). And, without a doubt, those who can see the actual coaching management portal you’re using are more likely to pay – they’ve gotten a tangible idea of what your coaching will look like, and they know it ain’t just a notebook and a phone call.

Our intent is that the clients you attract via Offerings are every bit as worth adding to your roster as those you add directly.

But what if they’re not?

If any of these “potentials” aren’t viable clients, you can, with just a few clicks, deactivate them at any time. This will preserve their data, so that if in a few months they decide to pursue coaching with you, their transition is seamless.

Prospective Clients and CoachAccountable Pricing

These clients only affect your subscription price IF they happen to bump you over your current plan’s limit.

Team Edition, we didn’t forget about you! Click on the image to see both versions of the pricing.

For example, imagine you’re currently at Level 3, which includes 11-20 clients at a flat $120 per month. You have 13 active clients. Then, you book 6 free intro calls with new clients this month: you’re now at 19 clients. Since you’re still inside the 11-20 client range, you’ll still pay $120 this month.

On the other hand, if 8 new clients book free intro calls with you, you’ll have a total of 21 clients; this bumps you to level 3.5, and you’ll pay $200 this month. UNLESS, of course, one or more of those intro call clients decide not to pursue coaching; just deactivate their accounts before your billing date, and you’ll be automatically back at Level 3 (11-20 clients).

Why Do Potential Clients Count?

These clients have full access to real, live CoachAccountable accounts. With your Offering, they’ve done any and all of the following:

• Used the calendar sync and scheduling system
• Received automatic Appointment reminders (via text or email)
• Automatically received pre-session and/or post-session Worksheets
• Experienced the magic of one or more of your CoachAccountable Courses and content delivery
• Interacted with one or more of your Groups

And, you’ve just used a powerful and personal marketing tool by showing them the detailed innerworkings of your coaching process.

Best Practices for Maximizing Value

We get it, no one wants to be bumped up $80 in cost just to take on some complimentary intro calls.  Though ultimately that should enable you to close more business to more than offset any marginal CA expense, you do have a few ways to hedge against paying more than you need to:

Know your CoachAccountable billing date. Not sure when it is? Click on your name in the upper right, then go to My Account >> Invoices.

Do any housecleaning the day before. If your billing date is the 15th, do a sweep of your account on the 14th and deactivate any prospective clients who aren’t yet moved forward with coaching.  Takes just a few clicks and you can reactivate them whenever.

Develop a robust Offering. Oftentimes, the more interaction a client has with CoachAccountable, the more likely they are to be a paying client (and one with remarkable results). Utilize your Offering to its fullest; maybe you choose to automatically add clients into a Course that gets them really thinking about your content.  You can design the Course however you like.  It can assign a quick Worksheet or two, drip some relevant articles that you normally share via your blog or CRM (a la InfusionSoft or the like), or show off your personality with a few heartfelt messages.

Sell More Coaching By Putting Your Best Foot Forward

At the end of the day, Offerings allow you not only to let your would-be clients book with you, but also to show off what sort of experience they’re really going to have working with you.

That they are full-fledged clients within your account is ultimately a good thing.

Take advantage of that fact by really wowing them before you even get on the phone, and you might find them hungry and eager to work with you before you can even say hello on your intro call.

Ready to give the leads in your pipeline the true experience of your coaching? Start your free trial of CoachAccountable today, and set up an Offering in just a couple minutes.

I had the opportunity to interview Janice Lichtenwaldt, founder of I Am Virago, about her business and her experience using our coaching software. We talked for an hour and certainly could have continued on, so naturally I’ve edited for length and clarity. Enjoy!

What is Virago?

Virago is a derogatory word for an aggressive, powerful woman, [but] it used to be a title of honor in Rome, and I want to take it back.

My mission is focused on helping women come into their fullness of being. Everybody has a different definition of what is satisfying for them, so the idea behind I am Virago is to explore all of the ways you want to show up in the world, find one that speaks to you, and be unafraid to go after it.

Success for I Am Virago will be [when] women aspire to be Viragos, and little girls are saying, “I want to grow up and be a Virago.”

The Bigger Picture

[I coach] a lot of women in executive and leadership roles who are looking to get past “imposter syndrome”. Women who ask, “how do I maintain my femininity and also display strength?”

I’m launching a podcast featuring everyday women doing great work and showing the struggle. Showing vulnerability: [life’s] not easy. We all struggle. We have challenges. We all have doubts. It’s important to share that. I’m writing a book about all [these challenges], too. [Editor’s note: this podcast was launched August 1, 2018]

I’m also securing a gorgeous piece of property on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to build the Virago retreat center. It’s nine acres on a river, a thousand feet of river front, and even a swim hole. [There,] we can have intense focused retreats for women, yoga retreats, reading retreats, songwriting retreats, and corporate retreats. It’s in this beautiful area on a river out in nature, and it’s [a place to] shut out all of the modern annoyances so we can really focus on who you are.

The Origins of I Am Virago

I worked in corporate America up until June 2017. [At that point, my company’s restructuring] made me look at the different experiences that have led me to this particular spot. What I realized is, when you look back, you see a very clear pattern.

[For example,] when I was at Expedia, I helped found the women’s professional group there. When I was at T-Mobile. I helped found the women’s leadership group there. [Similarly,] I was the captain of the leadership track Women in Tech Regatta, [which has taken place in] Vancouver and Seattle and [will be held] in Amsterdam in October; I moderate and curate the panels.

Life Before CoachAccountable

Life before CoachAccountable was a little… crazy.

[My coaching management system before was] very, very high tech: a book. [I also had] an Excel spreadsheet of client names and [corresponding] numbers. Then, when I was taking notes, I would look at my Excel spreadsheet before the call. I would write the [client] number in the book, then write my client notes. The next meeting, I’d have to go in and look up their client number and find last time I talked to them in the [note]book. I wasn’t doing any pre-check-ins or post-follow-up. [I also used] Acuity for scheduling and Square for invoicing. I had all these different systems… it’s so much nicer to have it all in one system.

I Am Virago + CoachAccountable

Enter CoachAccountable! Two thumbs up.

It’s a game changer. [My clients] come to the calls way more prepared. We don’t have that awkward first few minutes going, “OK, what do you want to talk about today?”

Now they come to the call going, “So what I said on my pre-call worksheet….” We’re able to get into the call faster so they get more value out of the time.

The post-[appointment Worksheet] is even more important. Right after the call they’re so excited and they mean it that they’re going to do [the work]. And then life: squirrel!

But [with CoachAccountable], the next day they get a reminder. “What did you learn?” It’s been such a boon to them because [it] helps integrate learning. It’s also a great feedback loop for the coach because sometimes you’re just like, “Did they get anything out of it? Was there any value?” Then, you get these e-mails back and it’s like, “Oh! They actually got quite a bit of that!”

Coaching Client Feedback

The feedback [from my clients] has been extremely positive. They are much more engaged in the coaching relationship, and they sense that they are getting more value. They’re getting a higher touch experience. Where I was having one touch point (a call) with them, I now have three at least: I have the pre [worksheet], the call, and then the post worksheet.

They are given the opportunity to look inside and pull out what is what’s really going on, then write about it. No one ever gets to do that in real life. It’s a gift.

The Bottom Line

It’s going to change your life, [and] change your coaching practice.

Janice and her I Am Virago business partner, Tiberius.

A huge thank you to Janice for sharing about I Am Virago and the experience using CoachAccountable as your coaching management platform!

If you’re like pre-CoachAccountable Janice and using a notebook to manage your coaching practice, why not take us for a spin? It’s free for 30 days (sorry, no puppies included, but we can send you pictures).

Offerings enable you to let your prospective clients sign up for and/or purchase your coaching services from your own website.  Just paste a little snippet of HTML in your website and CoachAccountable takes care of the rest: a spiffy little widget appears, allowing visitors to your site to book themselves right there.

Offerings are a great way to let folks book a complimentary session with you, join a coaching group, or purchase a course that you’ve created.  With such versatility in what an Offering can entail, we haven’t been surprised to see so many coaches who have more than one.

Enter Offering Bundles.  Embedding (or linking to) an Offering makes available one single Offering.  Offering Bundles allow you to take a collection of Offerings and make them available in a single widget (or on a single, standalone page).

Setting up a bundle is a snap.  Just give it a name, pick which of your Offerings should be included (I suspect *all of ’em* will be a common setup :) ), sort them however you like, and that’s it.

Add, remove, drag to sort. ‘Nuff said.

Once your bundle is created, you’ll find the same ways of embedding that Offerings have: a <script> or <iframe> tag for a widget, as well as a URL for linking to a fully hosted page.

Like with Offerings, Offering Bundles are branded as your own in both widget and full-screen mode.

Offering Bundles in Action

I COULD put a screenshot of what a bundle looks like to your prospective coaching clients, BUT way more fun, I think, to show you one directly!  Here’s the Support Services bundle that we here at CoachAccountable are proud to make available to our customers:

You can also see how this Offering Bundle looks on its standalone page.

Feel free to play around with it, and, if you’re sincerely interested in one of these services, we of course welcome you to sign yourself up!

Offering Descriptions

With Offerings now lined up in a sort of “menu” format, it’s nice to be able to show your would-be clients (who will be perusing said menu) a little more than just the name of each one.  To that end we added the “Descriptions” part of setting up an Offering:

A blurb to go on the menu, and a description for folks who want to know more.

Whatever blurbs you set for your Offerings appear in the “Choose” step for the Offerings in a Bundle.  If you set a longer description (using the WYSIWYG editor just below), that will be accessible as well from that menu.

And that’s it!  Your online coaching portal is now able to serve as a tidy e-commerce front, making your coaching offerings more readily available to your would-be clients.  Enjoy!

If there’s one thing that’s been made crystal clear to me over 6 years of providing an online coaching platform, it’s that people generally seek (and indeed, crave) having a single system that does EVERYTHING.

“An all-in-one solution” is a bit of a cliche, often an unattainable ideal.  But I don’t fault folks for wanting it, especially in a piece of software they use to run their coaching business.

Introducing CoachAccountable Offerings, a big step towards CA being that all-in-one unicorn for coaches.

Offerings started as the answer to a question we commonly get:

CoachAccountable’s scheduling system is great for my existing clients, but how can prospective clients use it to book with me?

Sure enough, CA’s appointment scheduling was only accessible to clients already set up within CoachAccountable.  To let prospective clients book themselves into, say, a complimentary intro coaching session from your website, one needed to use a similar scheduling system, like Acuity, ScheduleOnce, or vCita.

That approach did the job okay: the more basic nuts and bolts of scheduling new clients could be handled by the other platform, setting those new clients up in CA took little time and, once they were established, their appointments too could benefit from being more tightly integrated with the coaching itself within CA.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the desire to avoid having to set up and run (and pay for!) two separate scheduling systems.

Enter CoachAccountable Offerings

Here’s Offerings in a nutshell:

You, as a coach, have things that you offer up to the world.  Offerings allows you to let people sign up and/or pay for those things from your own website.

Pretty simple!  And pretty powerful.  To the many coaches out there who have expressed interest in allowing prospective clients book themselves, CA Offerings have that handled.  It can be a complimentary session or one that you charge money for.

But CA Offerings aren’t just about letting people book with you!  A given Offering that you set up within CoachAccountable can have any (or all!) of these three components:

1. Appointment scheduling (as mentioned) — A new client can be given the opportunity to pick a time for it from your schedule, nicely synced up with your calendar to prevent double-booking.

2. Group Membership — A new client can be placed in to one or more of your Groups within CoachAccountable, meaning your Offering can also be the stuff of selling membership into a group coaching experience.

3. Course Participation — A new client can be placed into one or more of your Courses within CoachAccountable, meaning your Offering can also be the stuff of selling coaching courses that are delivered automatically.

The fact that you can choose to charge money up front for any or all of these services makes CA Offerings not just a scheduling system for attracting new customers, but also essentially a simple e-commerce system for selling your coaching programs.

That you can offer both Courses and Groups as part of an Offering means this system gives you a way to create alternate income streams based on your coaching programs in addition to just your one-on-one work with clients, and this provides a nice, automated funnel for new customers who may choose later to upgrade into your more premium, one-on-one services.

I confess, my marketer brain is getting a little excited about all this, leading me to use a liberal amount of bolding of key phrases, but this is cool stuff, because it opens up powerful ways for coaching businesses of all sizes to make their programs more accessible and easier to buy.

This is the stuff of making coaching more mainstream, and I LOVE IT.

I hope you do too.

Right then, let’s take a look at how this works!

You’ll find the place to set up your Offerings in the Settings menu:

When you click the +Offering button you’ll be presented with a form that’s broken into several sections (that may make this seem like a cumbersome affair, but don’t worry: each section is super simple!).

The first section covers the Basics: the name of the offering, the information that should be collected from new sign-ups, and who should be notified.

Tip: Unless you’ve got good reason to do otherwise, I recommend keeping the amount of info you have the system collect to a minimum.  No need to make the process daunting or cumbersome!

If you’re on Team Edition you’ll also be able to choose which coach new sign-ups should be assigned to, at least initially.  In larger organizations, it works nicely to set this to the administrative figure who is responsible for ultimately pairing a new client with the most fitting coach.  This pairing can be based on, for example, an intake form the new client might fill out.  (Incidentally, having a Course that contains that intake form as part of this Offering is a lovely way to automatically set that sort of data collection in motion!)

The 3 Components sections are simply your way of picking which ones apply:

• Which type of Appointment, if any, are they scheduling scheduling themselves into.
• Which Courses, if any, should be automatically started up for a new signup.
• Which Groups, if any, should the person signing up be automatically entered into.

Here, for example, is what it looks like to choose Courses to be part of an Offering:

Enrollment into a Course is part of the deal? Great, pick which ones!

Even if you’re not in the business of offering “Coaching Courses” per se, this is still very useful to make part of an Offering: you can design a simple, perhaps even one day, Course that sets up key things that are generally suitable for all your new clients.  This can include things like:

• Intake forms
• Onboarding documents
• Welcoming materials (like a message or a video)
• Key “getting started” assignments and action items

Basically, this is the stuff of employing a Starter Kit Course to do basic setup of new clients automatically.

You might also find it useful to have a basic (and relatively informal!) course that spans a month or so, wherein again you can schedule out some of those basic bits of the “being coached by you experience” that are generally common to all your clients.  This is the stuff of leveraging a tasteful bit of automation; do so to free yourself up for giving more of the one-on-one love and attention that makes your coaching powerful.

After Components you can configure a price for your Offering:

“$200? But I thought we were working on the Complimentary Intro Session offering!”  True–just making these screenshots more interesting. :)

Super simple: make it complimentary or put a price to it.  If you set a price, you can opt to have the system automatically email an invoice (marked as paid!) to serve as a receipt of their purchase.  This can be in addition to, or in lieu of, a Confirmation Email.

Prices are in whichever currency your account is set for.  Be sure you’ve got that setup right before you configure any of this online selling stuff.

Speaking of configuring for online selling, you’ll need to link your CoachAccountable account with either your Stripe or Square account in order to charge for your CA Offerings.

Both are super simple to link, even if you don’t yet have an account with either.  I can’t speak to Square, but I can say from personal experience that you can get up and running with a new Stripe account within about 20 minutes and CA will take you right to where you need to go in order to do so (when you go to Settings >> System >> Client Invoicing Config).

The last two sections are the stuff of you setting up some nice welcoming content: a message to display directly to your new client upon completing signup, and (optionally) a confirmation email to be sent out immediately.

A few magic tags let you personalize this a bit.

This default content is nice but it’s almost certainly a worthwhile use of your time to customize this and make it really sing for your Offering: this is your chance to properly welcome them into the experience of being coached by you!

Including the [registerButton] magic tag is a nice touch here: this turns into a button that allows a newly signed-up client to register their account and access the system right away.  If you let them do that, it’s a good idea to have some form of Starter Kit Course be part of the Offering, so that the stage is properly set when they first get in.

And that’s setting up an Offering!  Though I suspect having just one [that you make available on your website] will be a very common case, you can create as many as you like.

The Offering is Created, Now What?

When the Offering is created, close out the editor window and you’ll see it in the listing of your Offerings:

Oooh, embed code! Yeah, let’s get that.

The real magic of Offerings is, of course, being able to embed them into your website, so as to make them available to your prospective clients.

Find the Offering you wish to embed in your listing of Offerings and click “Embed code…” to get everything you need:

Widget hosted within your site, or perhaps you just want to link to the Offering’s dedicated page?

Note that when it comes to embedding your Offering, you’ve got a couple of options.  You can put a snippet of JavaScript in the HTML of one of your website’s page in order to put a widget there, and if you prefer (for whatever technical reason) you can get an iframe snippet to accomplish basically the same thing.

You can also simply directly link to a dedicated page at which your Offering is hosted.  Instead of stuffing a widget somewhere on your website, you can make, for example, a big button (or any other form of clickable link) that says “Book with me online now!”, that links to the provided URL.

Offerings in Action

What does it look like to someone going to sign up for (or purchase) your Offering?  Instead of just screenshots how about we just show you directly by embedding one right here!  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a live demo might well be worth 10 thousand. :)

We at CoachAccountable have an Offering that we’re proud to make available to our customers (and even folks who are just trying out the system), and that is a personal session with Morgan, our Director of Customer Love and Hand Holding.

CoachAccountable does an awful lot (ahem, more now with the introduction of Offerings!), and so it’s quite typically useful to have a one-on-one screen share to be shown around the system, especially because Morgan can guide you to parts of the system that are specifically relevant to your style of coaching, and point out specifically those things you’re looking for in a coaching platform (this is dear to me personally, because it breaks my heart every time I get wind of someone saying “It’s too bad that CoachAccountable doesn’t do X” when IT TOTALLY DOES X.).

If you’d like to take us up on this offering, well, you can book that right here and now!

If you’d like to see this Offering on its dedicated, full-screen page, you’ll find it here.

URLs that directly link to your Offerings are super cool, because they are naturally far more portable (and easy to share) than an embedded widget.

Fun fact for current users of CoachAccountable: if the email address you provide in signing up for the above Offering lines up with the one you already have on file, you’ll be able to link your new Client account with your existing Coach account, i.e. be able to log into both with the same username and password.

This is kinda cool, what about Offerings for my existing clients?

You can embed (and link to) the Offerings you create wherever and from wherever you like, and thus while they’re not built to show up anywhere within the CoachAccountable app itself (yet… we’ll be listening for if that is wanted!) you can let your existing clients know that they can essentially “self serve” to sign up/pay for your other Offerings as essentially “add ons” to their coaching package with you.

If your client signs up with the same email they have on file with you, their doing so will have the effect of simply adding to that existing client account, whether it be scheduling an Appointment, taking a Course, or joining a Group.  Fun stuff!

A Big Piece of the Picture

All told I am delighted to finally have Offerings available for all CoachAccountable users, current and future.  Their presence means CoachAccountable is able to support the COMPLETE life cycle of a coaching client: from helping to attract a prospective one and getting them in the door, to supporting their work and progress during the engagement, and finally to leaving them with a great souvenir when it’s over.

May Offerings serve the business side of your coaching practice beautifully.

If you don’t already have a spiffy, all-encompassing coaching platform such as this helping YOUR coaching business, we highly recommend getting one. :)