The CoachAccountable Blog

(It’s Friday as I write this, and they say it’s a bad idea to release to stuff on a Friday, because it means the poor folks who wanted to enjoy a weekend are apt be be saddled with the fallout from whatever goes wrong with the release.  But… speaking as the guy who did it all and will handle whatever fallout… well, I gotta good feeling about this. :)

It’s done!  It’s here!  And it’s ready for everyone to check out.

Version 4 ISN’T a huge mix up of things.  Truth be told, unlike Version 3 I have NOT been laboring in silence over it for the last 21 months doing a comprehensive rebuild.  The switchover from 3 to 4 is utterly seamless, with virtually everything in it’s place exactly as it was.

But Version 4 DOES feature some substantial changes. Let’s take a look!

» Continue reading “Version 4”

We’ve added a small-but-powerful feature called Resource Packages. These allow you to install various resources (like files, courses, and templates) that were created by other coaches right into your own CoachAccountable account.  Likewise, these make it possible for other coaches to install YOUR resources (should you ever want to create and share your own packages.)

A couple scenarios in which this might be useful:

• Finding Additional Resources From CoachAccountable. When you signed up, you automatically received some content from us pre-loaded into your account. We’ve provided even more content and templates for you in these packages.
• Licensing Your Coaching Material. Many coaches start expanding their business by teaching other coaches their methods, with the additional value-add of providing ready-to-use templates. By using Resource Packages, you can make available your Courses, Worksheets, Agreements and more with just a couple clicks – and provide that package only for coaches who have paid your licensing fee. This is a way to sell your well-tested coaching tools.
• Related Coach Accounts. Smaller teams sometimes vacillate between setting up with two single coach accounts or a Team Edition account (more on how to make that choice here). Now, those who choose two single coach accounts can replicate their resources and save time.
• Coaches With Two Accounts. Some coaches use two separate accounts, for reasons like varied tax law with international clients or operating under two different coaching brands.
• Franchises. We’ve heard from The Growth Coach and similar businesses: getting new franchisees set up quickly is key to their success. Corporate-sanctioned tools at their fingertips right away can help get new business owners inspired and active.
• Referrals. If you’re someone who refers CoachAccountable to other coaches in your industry, giving them materials to start with can help solidify their use of the platform.

» Continue reading “Use Resource Packages to Share Coaching Material”

In a recent conversation with a coach, I heard the following request:

I want to nurture my clients through a very specific sales funnel.

1. They should come in through a basic, self-paced Course, which only includes a few items (Actions and Worksheets).
2. Then, if they want to (and have proven themselves as a good fit), at the end of the Course they can see what else is possible with the system and upgrade to Group Coaching.
3. After that, I want to upsell with my One-on-One Coaching.
4. (Optional) the big-ticket private mastermind.

How can I best use CoachAccountable to make this funnel happen?

Enter Offering-Specific Page Arrangement. Let’s take a look.

» Continue reading “Improve the Sales Funnel Journey With Offering-Specific Page Arrangements”

I got an email from Arne of Empowerment Holdings with a request:

I have a question regarding the statistics for client engagement.

Since we have to report how active all of the coachees are we need to go to client activity and count all action assignments/completions by hand. Is there a possibility to add a feature where we you can list all stats in a certain timeframe for the whole client stock with one click?

That would be great!

A great thing about the record of coaching happenings (that CA naturally accumulates over the course of common use) is that there is a lot of insightful data that can be drawn from later to summarize and analyze things like participation, effectiveness, and ROI.  In this case I could see how the particulars of how many times a given client has done this or that would make a useful report, and one for which CA has all the data.

I sometimes get requests like this, and when I do what’s incredibly helpful is to have a mock up.

So I replied:

Possibly! It would help to have a concrete example of what sort of report would be useful in terms of tabular data.

If you mock something up as an example of what would be genuinely useful as a simple CSV, containing information and/or stats derived from what CA would have available, I’ll see about adding the ability to generate such a report automatically!

Often times when I pose the challenge, more or less to the tune of “sounds promising, please mock it up for me”, I don’t get anything back.  That’s problematic, because that means the idea for the report likely isn’t yet clearly based on a thought out use case, OR that the desired information might not actually be readily known to CoachAccountable (and if all that is clear, lacking a mock up still means I’m likely doing a lot of guesswork to create what would actually serve the need behind the request).

No such issue here.  What Arne gave me back was exactly what I needed, PLUS a little more insight into the desire fueling the request:

Hey John,

Sure, so for our client it’s super interesting to see how active the coachees are. So I could imagine a Report like this to answer the question: How actively engaged was a certain group of coachees during a certain time.

Coaching Report
	Cycle I	Cycle II	Cycle III	Total
# Coaching sessions that have taken place	231
# Coaching time in hours	288,75 h
# Milestones & Goals formulated	276
# Actions formulated	855
# Actions completed	340
# Actions incomplete	515
# Cancelled Coaching sessions	22
# Worksheets assigned	100
# Worksheets completed	60
# Data points added	100
# Metrics added	400

Perfect! Now this I can work with.  The vast world of all possible things that CA tracks (and thus could ostensibly report on) is reduced down to a set clear stats that I am assured would be interesting and worth including, and the insight into why this would be cool at all (“for our client it’s super interesting to see how active the coachees are”) made me excited to cook this up.

You can see the end result in Reports >> Data Lab >> Client Activity:

Lots of data to look at, but no need to feel overwhelmed! You can modify what’s included to get only what’s interesting.

As you can see, it’s not verbatim as suggested.  While building it I realized there were other similar categories of stats that might be interesting, and that breaking it in to sections made it more clear to follow.  I also added flexibility in letting the user choose how the data is broken into columns (either by day, week, month, quarter or year).

This is significant to point out, because it highlights an important fact: we never do programming for feature development to spec for a customer’s request (no matter how big the customer), BUT we very often run with input about what would be useful in order to create something that has the potential to be generally valuable.

Fun fact: while composing the above portions of this blog post this morning I noticed that Arne’s mock up contained a “Total” column, yet that wasn’t in the CA report as originally released last month. So I just spent a little time to add it, as well as the options to include averages and percentage stats.  Do I love my job and feel empowered to act?  You betcha!

When I originally released this I was delighted to hear back:

Thank you so much! This helps us A LOT!!!

Music to my ears: to save an organization time AND help them to better show off the work their doing to the folks that hired them?  That’s a serious double win, and I hope you’ll get similar value from this.

My thanks again to Arne who was thorough enough to illustrate what he was needing… CA is better for everyone because of it!

It’s just occurred to me that it’s been a LONG time since I wrote up a blog post under the “Delightful Collaboration” theme.  It’s not for lack of that sort of thing happening: feature requests stemming for good ideas, insightful perspectives, and specific use cases still come to us at a regular clip and we still act upon them to make CA accordingly better for everyone (recent examples include this and this!).

I figure it would be a shame for anyone to get the impression that we don’t do that sort of thing anymore, so here’s a pair of suggested improvements to CA that came in recently!

The first is another from Megan of Fidelity National Financial.  She wrote:

I had another idea for a new feature.  Would it be possible to add an option in the “What’s New” tab that would allow you to pull new items not only from a specific date (“show from..”) but also “since our last call”?  Or a drop down list of the calls logged in CA.  That way, coaches don’t have to look up the date of the last call.  They can select a call in the past and easily see what’s been accomplished since the selected call.

Let me know what you think.  Thanks!

I admit, I had to think on this one a bit.  Should the dates suggested by the system here be based on recent session notes?  Or recent scheduled appointments?  What about coaches who are prone to using one and not the other, or vice-versa?  Maybe include both, with filtering out the duplicates?

And how can I add this without cluttering up the UI for everyone with what might be a very niche-desired feature?  (After all, this was the first time I’d heard such a request in 7 years!)

The current system simply recalls your preference of your preferred look back window of X days, but there’s something nice about the precision of seeing what’s new precisely from the last call, which of course will vary from client to client.  Then I figured out an elegant way to tuck that new feature away, and I was sold: this could be a very cool thing to add for everyone.

Here’s the result:

When there is one or more to choose from, click the little appointment icon just right of the “Show since” date picker to reveal options.

I can’t deny I was tickled and stoked by the reply I got for adding this:

This is AMAZING and will make our jobs as coaches SO much easier! We’ll be able to easily narrow down what has been accomplished since the last time we spoke to our clients!  Thank you thank you!

Talk about good deeds being their own reward, and then some!  That I’ve managed to make any coaches’ lives easier is music to my ears (and something I daresay I’ve developed a healthy addiction for).

The second recent suggestion came from Twila Gates, long time CA user and generally a fan.  Twila asked:

Quick question: Is it possible to have a magic tag for “date of next appointment” and “date of last session notes” that I could place in the “profile extra” space in the settings.  It would make it quick and easy to see if each client has a next appointment set and also to know if I have completed all notes.

This one, too, I had to mull on.  A magic tag seemed a bit clunky: it would be such an easy-to-miss thing that one would have to manually add to each client’s Profile Extra.  I could see the next appointment date being universally handy, but date of last session notes felt a little niche in terms of utility and, coupled with the next appointment date, perhaps too much clutter to add to the standard display.

Ultimately I settled on adding just the next appointment date, when present, displayed standard for all clients in the My Clients listing (one out of two ain’t bad!).  To make space and prevent information overload in that listing I removed client physical addresses, figuring that sort of thing it’s nearly as a timely or topical in an at-a-glance listing (and not apt to change often, to say the least!).

And I saw a way to do Twila one better on her suggestion, which was to enable sort by next appointment, thus allowing the soonest-for-next-conversation clients to bubble right up to the top.

Here’s what this looks like:

“So, who am I working with next? Ah right, these guys!” Hover your mouse over the appointment date for more information.

And there you have it!  Delightful collaboration with the CA community remains alive and well, and everyone’s happier for it (myself included).

What I really love about these two requests in particular is that their born of nuanced experience of routinely using the system over time, and doing so with particular habits, patterns, or workflows.  Megan and Twila were both crystal clear on what would make those workflows more convenient, and clued me in to what would otherwise be a blind spot.

So to Megan and Twila, and the countless other coaches who have weighed in on how CA could be better, I say thank you!

Coaches have long had the ability to add items into a client’s record that aren’t meant to be seen by the client. Specifically, you’ve been able to add private journal entries, private Session Notes, and private comments, as well as a few key areas to add private information to the client’s profile.

Megan of Fidelity National Financial recently made a compelling case for private files:

Would it be possible to create an option to mark uploaded files as private (like there is for session notes and journal entries)? We would like to upload a PDF to our clients’ dashboards for our records (as to keep everything in the same place), but we would like it to be for our eyes only.

In particular the phrase “to keep everything in the same place” made our ears perk up, as we’re very keen to make CoachAccountable be that magical one-stop-shop for coaches.

Fast forward a few days after that request was made, and private files are now a thing!  Let’s take a look.

» Continue reading “Private Files for Comprehensive Client Records”

Every week we hear a few requests for some sort of users group, some opportunity to connect with other coaches.

While our monthly webinar series has proven a successful time for education and group contribution, there’s still more room for community.

So we’re trying something new: an in-person coaches meetup in Los Angeles, California.

» Continue reading “Join Us: In-Person Coach Meetups in Los Angeles”

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!

» Continue reading “How to Use CoachAccountable for a Live Workshop (Plus IP concerns!) – Guest Post”

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.

» Continue reading “Organize Your Whiteboards with Folders”

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?

For a quick, 3-minute video on how to set up Offerings, check out this article. Or continue reading below for the step-by-step and story!

» Continue reading “Offerings – Sell Your Coaching from your Website”