Coaching to Success

How to train your clients and referral partners to greater personal and professional success.

"You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." -Zig Ziglar

What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? What makes you different than your competition?

We all offer better service and lower price. Many of us are tired of being judged on our last deal. Could we create more business and client loyalty if we abundantly give away the tools we use to create the success we experience in our business and personal lives? Could we coach our clients and referral partners to improve and thus be more valuable to them? I believe we can.

Many of us are continuously looking for reasons to meet with our clients and referral partners. Instead of "selling" them on our products and services what if we coach them on inculcating tools into their business and life that will result in marketable improvement at work and at home? What if we give without the expectation of getting anything in return? We coach them just to give of ourselves? We share the knowledge we have in hopes of helping them to improve their lives? I believe that is the key to building our business and living a happy and fulfilled life. Give it away through coaching.

I am going to share two examples of tools that can be used to help improve the business and lives of those we touch.

Keep, Start, Stop

In every relationship we have there are things we want that person to keep doing, start doing and stop doing. Most of us don't do a good enough job of asking the people in our lives what we should keep doing, start doing and stop doing. But what if we did?

What if we improved based on their answers. Thus we provided them more of what they want and need and we increased the depth of that relationship.

The tool works by asking the person you want this information from to write out the things they want you to keep doing that you are already doing. Then they do the same with the things they want you to start doing that you aren't currently doing and the things they want you to stop doing. In my experience there are items in each of these categories with every person in our business and personal lives.

We can utilize the answers to these questions to make the adjustments and improvements to increase your value.

This can be done with clients and business partners as well as employees and any other personal relationship we have. It can be done in a big group where the group is answering these questions about their leader and doing it anonymously.

It can also be done one on one or in small groups where we exhibit transparency in our desire for feedback on how we can improve.

When I had 550+ employees working with me I asked them to do the Keep, Start, stop exercise on me. Part of it made me feel great and other parts of it were painful. But in the end I learned what I should be doing to maximize my performance as the owner and leader of that company.

The Three Steps to Teaching and Learning

Everyone learns differently. Some learn by being spoken to. Others learn by watching and still others learn by doing. Here is a tool that covers all three. This tool can be used with anyone in your personal or professional life. Teach as many people as you can this tool and watch them improve.

1. Tell them how to do it.
2. Show them how to do it by you doing it.
3. Praise what was done correctly and redirect them to improve the next time they perform the task.

I have used this tool hundreds of times with great success. It is important to remember that different people learn in different ways.