As a new coach, it can be easy to think of saving money and going down the road of connecting your PayPal to a free landing page, a free email software, to dropbox or open folders on Google drive and book in your clients through your Outlook calendar. But just a few weeks into serving your first clients, you begin to realise that skimping on a coach platform could ruin your reputation. Relaying emails, missed appointments and lost documents soon turn managing what was meant to be the coaching practice of your dreams into a living nightmare. Here’s how a coach platform can help support your business and why you need it from day one:  

1. Coaching Session Scheduling, cancelling and moving appointments

Research shows that the average meeting takes about 15 emails to be set. This is an extraordinary amount of time to spend managing bookings per client. Using a scheduler tool will help you avoid time wasted on booking clients, managing cancellations and moving appointments around. However getting a scheduler by itself can cost you $10 to $16 dollars per month easily, and every little extra functionality is likely to cost you a further upgrade. Using a coach platform that is built to book coaching arrangements will cost you less overall because it has all the functionality you need for a coaching practice specifically. It’s designed around your needs.

2. Invoicing, Coaching Payment Plans and Reminders

Invoicing is one of the most crucial parts of your business. From day one you need to stay on top of your finances and make sure your invoices are timely. You also want to make sure that you send reminders on time so clients don’t delay payment. Keeping your invoicing on-point will make sure that clients take you seriously and respect your payment terms. Neglecting this part of your practice can easily put you out of business and may mean you have to go back to your 9 to 5. So treat it with its due priority. A lot of accounting platforms like Quickbooks and Xero are quite pricey, so pick a digital coaching management platform that contains an invoicing function with the ability to customise invoices.

3. Coaching Package Pages and Discovery Calls

As a coach in the first months of business, you may not have a website yet, so a digital coaching platform is going to be even more important for you. When you begin to sell online, getting people on that all-important discovery call is key. But what happens after? A coaching software like CoachVantage will also give you the functionality to create a landing page for each one of your programmes. During the discovery call which they can book through any of your social media platforms using the booking link, you can share the page with all the details. The great thing is that if they decide to buy, you also have the onboarding form and the payment processing with the payment plan option directly on the page. So your client can go through the process of paying, onboarding and activating their portal login without ever needing to interact with you. This will save you a lot of time, which in the beginning is better invested in relationships and wowing your clients. You can start off with a 14 day free trial on CoachVantage to check out all the features above. Register below for the free trial