Why Cheaper Coach Training Could Actually Lose You Clients!
Our approach is very hands-on and practical. It's one of the reasons we do the 3-day bootcamp, where we get you actually practicing real-life scenarios, exactly how you'd coach a leader through the challenges they face. All of our students leave our programme ready to start their career as coaches.
Author:
Ridhima Dosani
Read Time: 5 mins
Table of Contents
Why Cheaper Coach Training Could Actually Lose You Clients!
1. Cheaper / generalist coach training doesn’t give you the skills to coach high calibre clients
We have a lot of students who come to us because they've done some kind of coach training before, but they found that they didn't actually learn much. These cheaper training options typically cover a lot to do with listening or perhaps one of the most basic coaching techniques such as the GROW model but that’s just not enough for high calibre clients who have had great coaching before. Unfortunately these students come to us telling us that they’ve never been taught the more advanced coaching techniques or how to actually add real value to a client through coaching and so they end up losing clients rather than gaining them. This can be really painful both financially and in terms of a coach’s reputation and sadly coaches come to us after taking a huge hit to their confidence.
The good news is that our training puts these students back on the right track and they all leave with the confidence that they finally know exactly how to get results for clients and keep them coming back for more. But it costs those students even more money because they’ve had to pay for our programme as well as paying for the original cheaper programme when they could have come to us from the start.
Hear directly from one of our students who came back to us after choosing a cheaper / generic coach training programme elsewhere:
2. We give you practical skills
What we teach is extremely concrete and practical. We don't spend a lot of time debating for example the meaning of coaching or focusing on advanced listening skills. We get into very practical scenarios where we cover coaching techniques for exact situations you'll come across with a client. With executives, senior leaders etc, they tend to have very complex problems, so we find that methods taught on general courses don't equip you to handle the challenges these leaders and entrepreneurs face. The methods we teach cover advanced techniques that will add real value to your clients.
Our approach is very hands-on and practical. It's one of the reasons we do the 3-day bootcamp, where we get you actually practicing real-life scenarios, exactly how you'd coach a leader through the challenges they face.
3. We are not the cheapest for a reason!
The reason that we are not the cheapest is because all of our students leave our programme ready to start their career as coaches. We get a lot of students who have done other, cheaper programmes and they come to us afterwards, because they really don't have the tools to work with those kinds of clients.
Through our frequent competitor analysis, we have found that a lot of other programmes continue to charge membership fees to continue accessing their tools and resources. With us, the fee that you pay is the only fee. There are no on-going membership fees, and you have access to the tools in our student portal.
Why would you need access? Because it's full of step-by-step guides for the particular problem that you might be working through with your client.
4. We don’t want you to feel lost when dealing with a client
We hear stories from our students all the time where they've had a client and had no idea how to deal with the issue they were presented with. They (the client) knew that and shortly after they stopped working with that coach. This is what happens when you are taught theory-based approaches to coaching, but are not taught practical scenarios and exactly how to handle those specific problems that leaders are dealing with.
In our student portal, we have a step-by-step coaching guide for most of the common goals and challenges that show you exactly how to help people with those. There's no panicking involved, you know exactly how to help them, in fact, you have a roadmap for how to help them and that ensures that you haven't lost this client and you haven't blown your reputation and credibility with them.
5. The ‘GROW Model’ or active enquiry isn’t enough
There is a coaching technique called the ‘GROW model’ which informs how to have a coaching conversation. It's the most basic technique and, for some coaches, that's all they have. So, no matter the problem, all they know is how to apply the grow model. On its own, being a great listener and knowing the GROW Model doesn't actually help.
We, on the other hand, go far beyond teaching just the basics and cover enough advanced coaching techniques to fill 1000+ word manual. In fact, we have one in our student portal called 'Coaching Tools and Methodologies' which covers countless advanced coaching techniques to help you coach your clients through the most common challenges that your clients will typically need help with.
For example, there's a chapter on behavioural coaching which specifies exactly which technique to apply to each situation and how, and this is just one of many, including perceptual/mindset coaching, situational coaching, how to use assessments and so much more!
6. Learn to plan and successfully execute a coaching engagement
We also teach you exactly how to set up an engagement with a client and what should you put in place when you are planning and organising that engagement. A client will come to you with a big and complex problem. From that, you need to design an engagement that is actually going to deliver an outcome for that client. How you do that is very complex and doing it in the right way makes a huge difference.
This is why, just applying the grow model on its own isn't at all useful.
This is one of the reasons we are not shy about being expensive, because our students work with very senior, top-level people
7. How does it all work?
We're in partnership with another organisation, the Center for Executive Coaching. We, Executive Coaching Bootcamp serve our students in Europe while the CEC serves students in America. We are in partnership and together we have a very international student body.
As a team, we have all gone through a very corporate, extensive academic background and serve a huge variety of clients.
8. So you're looking for a change of direction in your career now?
We have a lot of students that come to us who want to become coaches, and many of them tend to niche in the area that they have a background in. The kind of clients that you work with could be clients specifically from that sector. You have a good understanding of their challenges, problems and you have insights of what it takes to operate in that industry at that level. However, you could niche in any area of your choosing of course.
9. We teach you how to set up your own practice
We also teach our students how to set up coaching practices as businesses. In the student portal area, we have a lot of resources on that, but in the bootcamp we also cover this subject. We talk a lot about how to position yourself as a coach in the market because there are a lot of people who are calling themselves coaches. Luckily, a lot of them are poor quality coaches, so in terms of the quality we are teaching you, you would stand out from the crowd anyway because of the quality of skills you will acquire. More importantly, you need to pitch your services to your clients, so we show you exactly how to pitch your unique experience and your angle as a coach to those clients. In terms of business coaching, we have lots of resources to help you do that.
10. What’s the credibility behind ICF accreditation?
The ICF are the biggest coaching regulatory body. In fact, I was speaking to a student yesterday, who got certified with EZRA a decade ago. Unfortunately, her clients have told her they won't work with her anymore unless she becomes ICF certified. So, what we are seeing more and more from the market is that there is a shift from clients who previously were fine with you having any certification, but now ICF is the expected standard. Even experienced coaches, who have done training through other regulatory bodies are now getting certified via ICF.
This is because the ICF has been recognised as better. The standard of the actual training that the ICF insist upon is higher than the others. And the other issue is, where students are operating now, in this global market, where a lot of the coaching people do is online, means that those students who were previously working with European clients, are now reaching international clients in US, Canada etc. The ICF is the only regulatory body that is recognised as an international one.
Also, as a coach it means that you won't have to turn down American clients who expect the ICF. European regulatory bodies are only accepted in Europe, and even then those European clients are looking for ICF credentials.
We tend to find most students need the ICF certification, unless they already have clients that would trust them and work with them, even without this certification.
11. These are the programme options we offer
Option 1: Essentials programme
Access all of our ICF accredited course training material, coach matching service and membership to our exclusive student portal. You can start tracking your coach experience hours, training hours and upgrade at any time to become fully certified or participate in our intensive seminar. During this programme, you’re also required to send recordings of your coaching sessions to us, so you’ll get direct support and feedback from our expert mentors.
Cost: $4900, or 10 monthly payments of $500
If you don’t need the credibility of a full ICF certification straight away, but you still want the ‘know-how’ so you can start working with clients ASAP, then this is the right option for you. This option enables you to attend our three day intensive bootcamp which will get you ready to hit the ground running and start coaching executives, leaders, managers, business owners, and up-and coming talent. This is a great choice if you need to quickly develop your capabilities to meet your clients’ immediate needs, because you’ll leave our programme knowing exactly how to add value for your clients. And if you ever decide later on that you do want a full ICF designation such as the ACC or PCC, then you can upgrade at any time and all the learning hours you earned from this training option will count towards it.
Cost: $7350, or 10 monthly payments of $750
Option 3: Self-study ICF ACC/PCC Certification programme
The perfect option for full flexibility! Our self-study ICF ACC/PCC programme will give you all access to our learning materials, AND include the 12 hours of ICF mentor coaching that you need to become a fully certified executive coach. This option does not include our 3-day bootcamp, so your live learning hours will need to be made up of webinars, which are run at different times throughout the week to accommodate to our large, international student body. Plus, for more guided learning, you can upgrade at any time to option 4…
Cost: $7350, or 10 monthly payments of $750
Option 4: Guided Fast-tracked ICF ACC/PCC certification programme
Our most comprehensive programme, designed to set you up for success! This is our most popular option for a good reason - it includes our established 3-day bootcamp, leaving you confident to start coaching clients straightaway, as well as all of the perks of the other three options AND ICF certification up to PCC level! You have the option to pay for this in full or go for one of the cheaper options and upgrade later down the line by paying the difference.
Cost: $9800, or 10 monthly payments of $1000
If you choose the cheaper options, there's always an upgrade. So, if you wanted to pay the difference for the full ICF certification, the training you've done in the bootcamp will count towards it.
ICF certification will boost your credibility. The ICF regulates training, so that there are certain things that the training provider has to meet in terms of quality. They don't get a say in the content, but they do get a say in quality. Clients know that when they have an ICF certified coach, they have had to jump through certain hoops and had to complete a certain amount of training that guarantees a certain level of quality. Such as meeting the amount of training and coach experience hours. It's a stamp of quality and credibility on coaching.
The students that end up not needing it are students that don't need credibility, because the clients they'd want to work with know them very well and believe they're a good coach.
Related Posts
