Want more clients? Want more income stability? You don’t need to hire the loud business coach posing in front of a sports car he doesn’t own. You’re better off tidying up some basics of how you coach your clients and run your business. Happy and successful clients stay longer and refer more.
Here are 6 ways you can be more successful as an online coach:
1) Lower The Friction For Your Clients
Coaches who come out of the commercial gym session model are indoctrinated with the idea that the client’s value is directly linked to the amount of time the coach spends on the client.
This goes sideways when coaches inadvertently create more tasks and friction for clients, in an effort to justify their rates.
Would you rather pay $75 for an oil change that takes 20 minutes or one that costs the same but takes 3 hours? The answer is obvious, so why do we layer on more hoops for clients to jump through, just to drive up the appearance of value?
Most people are already too busy (or feel like they are). It feels hard enough to create the time and effort needed to workout and eat healthy. We can dispense with a lot of the extra time consuming hurdles we make our clients complete. Is every question in that elaborate check in form giving you essential info to better coach your client?
Sometimes people find a ton of value in just paying someone else to plan their workouts, check in to make sure they’re on track, guide their progression, and have the coach available in those instances when they have questions or need help.
Many clients are skilled and self sufficient they just prefer to pay someone else to make these decision for them. So their mental bandwidth goes into career and or family.
The more friction you create for them the most distracting and cumbersome you make the process on their end. Keep it simple, and be responsive to their specific needs when they arise.
Audit your systems and processes to eliminate time consuming, low value tasks for your clients.
2) Simplify Your Intake Process
A lot of coaches have an elaborate and time consuming process for potential clients to wade through. Personally, I get annoyed just putting in my address and credit card info to buy something online. This is why the simplicity and low friction experience of buying on Amazon or getting an Uber is so popular.
In an early round of my 13 week online women’s group strength training program, my then business partner commissioned a website to process the intakes and sales. At the start of a launch we noticed sales were way down. I realized we had put the detailed questionnaire before the payment page.
People excited to join our program got distracted or annoyed filling out all the fields so they quit before paying. We made a simple switch and sales rocketed. We switched the order of payment and questions(we needed this info anyway). Once people made the physical and emotional commitment of paying, they now realized they need to fill out this info, like injury history, PAR-Q, and more.
We want to feel thorough in our intake questions, but an arduous field of questions during an application process may leave you and your potential client overwhelmed. Is each question necessary to deliver a great experience and coach them to success?
I recall popular celebrity trainer Ben Bruno describing the questions he asks new clients. His intake mirrors my own. We want a thorough understanding of the potential clients:
- Goals
- Workout history
- Injury and health history
- Nutrition history
- Important notes about their life and lifestyle that will enhance or interfere with their progress
Obviously some of these may lead down serious rabbit holes, but this what you need to know to start. Along the way you’ll deepen the relationship and trust by learning far more about your client.
My client Mark Brownlie (a fellow coach) and I bond over our shared love of heavy metal bands like Northlane and Health, but I didn’t ask about his music taste in an intake form.
Keep a simple application link on your website and social media profiles, or invite potential clients to email or DM you to book a consultation. We assume everyone knows we’re open to taking new clients. Some people assume we are too busy or even feel like they’re bothering us. Use frequent calls to action and create invitations for people to connect with you.
Audit your intake process and questionaires for essential information.
3) Respond Quickly and Personably
There may come a day where you build an empire with:
- A team of coaches.
- Thoughtfully automated systems.
- An app.
- A great reputation.
All allowing you to dedicate your time to:
- Fun content creation
- Building a YouTube channel.
- Running your company.
Maybe you aspire to create the next Reniassance Periodization or Macros Inc.
But reality for 99%+ of the online coaches out there is the need to be more engaged with your current and potential clients, not less.
One of the worst and last places anyone should consider automation and outsourcing is your client and potential customer interactions. Having assistant coaches or virtual assistants can be a valuable way to grow your business, but I strongly recommend against using them to interact with clients where they pretend to be you.
Nothing makes me lose respect for a peer when I get a generic reach out DM from someone I know personally. I know it’s a VA trying to initiate conversations to pretend like they’re interested in me, only hoping I’ll buy something from them.
Coaches often struggle to buy into online training because they initially can’t see how to make online training as personal as in-person training. The answer: voice and video messages. Let people see your face and hear your voice. Just the effort to pop open your phone and send a 5 to 30 second video message makes your client feel connected to you. Even better if they don’t have to wait 24 hours for a response done exclusively via email. Email will be part of delivering a great service, but consider using voice and video frequently for the added warmth of real human interaction.
While the industry standard 24 hour response is a wise hard boundary, make a practice of being much faster with your replies. The bar is low enough in our industry that you’re often competing against coaches who take 2-3 days to respond.
A potential client reached out to me years ago. He had just switched to the gym I contract at and saw 2 trainer profiles on the wall that resonated with him. I responded to his email within 2 hours and we booked a sit down meeting for the following day. We hit it off and booked his first session the day after that. On the next day the other trainer finally responded to him. This client trained 4 sessions a week with me for years. The other trainer hasn’t worked at this gym in years. Your unwillingness to respond promptly is killing your business.
No one is suggesting allow text notifications to wake you in the middle of the night, interrupt family dinners, or ignore in-person clients to respond to everything instantaneously, but it’s not hard to send a couple of quick voice notes as you transition between clients. If you’re 100% online, it shouldn’t need even close to 24 hours to respond to a paying client or someone who’s literally asking you to take their money to help them.
My friend Mike Doehla built an 8-figure nutrition coaching business(and later sold it) by focusing on over delivering on service. While most coaches claim to, Mike pushed his coaches to go above and beyond. Some of the surprising ideas Mike encouraged include:
- Give your clients your cell number.
- Respond as quickly as possible.
- Be friendlier and less authoritative – too many coaches are afraid to be friends with their clients.
- Send thank you cards or surprise gift cards for coffee, food, or even new clothes. Just consider how a client who’s lost a significant amount of weight will need to buy a new wardrobe…
4) Differentiate on Service Not Programming
Knowing how to build great programs is an essential part of being an online coach. Knowing how to adapt a program to what each client needs is even more important. But, there is bad news on this front. As artificial intelligence gets better and has access to more data, AI will create programs as good if not better than humans in milliseconds.
You won’t be able to differentiate your offering based on programming anymore(if you ever really could). But you will be able to differentiate on service.
The members of my online program enjoy the program. I build flexibility into a proven framework. But with time I realized the reason members stayed and referred wasn’t because of the exercise selection as much as it was because I’m responsive to the point that my members trust I am there to coach and support when they need me.
This testimonial from my member Samantha locked me in on what I now brand and promote my program around:
“I spent an enormous amount of money on a 1:1 coach for a year in 2023. I got a workout plan I didn’t enjoy and support in the way I didn’t need. I actually came into this program(mine) a few rounds ago while still being attached to that coach. They hadn’t given me new programming in 8 weeks and I was so upset about it. I hadn’t been in the gym in months, I felt terrible about myself. I had been following you on IG for a while and anytime I commented on a post or story you replied or responded with a voice message! My own coach who I paid my life savings to would take 3-5 days to reply to a direct text message. I asked if I could join round 8 late and you immediately set me up.
I did my first workout the next day and my passion for lifting was back. The programming was what I had been looking for, the facebook group is awesome, and getting a form check and advice almost in real time, at times was incredible. I did 2 rounds, my strength soared from squatting 85 lbs at the beginning of the first round to squatting 195 for reps by the end of the second. I’m so thankful I found you and this program. For a group program it barely feels that way. You’re somehow providing an individualized experience to everyone when they need it yet maintaining the group feel and price tag to go with it.”
Reading this made me really emotional. How would you feel if people said this about coaching with you? How would you feel if people talked about their experience with you like she did about her previous coach who took 3-5 days to respond?
5) Don’t Overcomplicate Your Programs
Coaches love to flex their knowledge. Coaches also fear that clients will leave if they don’t continually create a rotating variety complex exercises. This is just more friction for already life “frictioned out” clients. “Keep it simple stupid” is resonant because it’s true.
The basics work. Squats, lunges, and presses work. Toss in curls to keep people happy and round out your programs with proven basics. Add thoughtfully chosen creative tools to address unique client needs. The same general program templates work for the majority of clients. With some customization for individual goals, preferences, and injury history. No one is suggesting you re-use the same cookie cutter programs, but most general clients need most of the same range of basic movement patterns. Often the progression and load management become the differentiating aspects.
Spend less time agonizing over an alternative for lunges for Becky because lunges are already in Tammy’s program. Becky and Tammy aren’t even in the same city and don’t know each other. They probably both hate lunges equally. If they did know each other they would probably bond over their mutual disdain for lunges. This gives you more time to have meaningful and individualized conversations so you understand that Becky is great with accountability if she has structure to follow while Tammy needs empathetic nudges because she tends to get down on herself when she misses workouts at the beginning of the week.
6) Use an Online Training Platform That’s Easy For Your Clients To Use
I met a high-ranking executive of TrueCoach, a leading personal trainer app, at a 2017 conference. He was looking for writers for their blog and wanted me to try their online coaching software. My clumsy efforts at spreadsheets wasn’t making mine or my clients’ lives easier up to that point.
Despite the proliferation of a variety of quality online coaching platforms in recent years, some owned by good friends of mine, I’ve enjoyed TrueCoach for a handful of key reasons:
- – My clients find TrueCoach easy to use.
- – My clients can upload workout videos with ease. Not every online coaching software allows this option.
- – There’s a lot of space to add notes. Both me and my clients have all the room we need to add important notes about their workouts. I need to be able to write out detailed coaching notes and reply to their notes and concerns.
- – I can easily link my own library of videos over and above the default library.
- – TrueCoach is a popular and established platform. One of the common reasons why coaches avoid online software and stick with google sheets and email is the mantra of not relying on someone else’s platform that could disappear tomorrow. This is a valid concern for new and upstart platforms but unfounded for established and proven platforms like TrueCoach.
Though each of these features isn’t exclusive to TrueCoach, the combination means I’ve reliably been able to deliver great service to my online clients without hassle or friction on either end of the coaching relationship.
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