Ask Me Anything! Affordable assessment tools, networking follow up and pricing strategy!

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organisations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learnt all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you. Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching Podcast. So today is one of my favorite types of episodes. It's an ask me anything episode where I'm answering some questions that people have asked me over the last month. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through four questions today on all sorts of topics. Everything from we're going to talk about pricing, we're going to talk networking events, we're going to talk free or low cost assessment tools and testimonial collection. So we're going to go through all of those and you know, hopefully it answers some questions that you might be having as well. Now, before I dive in, what I want to say is I'm going to give as many practical bits of advice and tips as I can, but I can't go into as much depth in the podcast as I would like to. So if you want to know more about any of these things, you're welcome to send me a message or or consider coming and joining us Inside the Corporate to Coach Accelerator. So inside the Accelerator, which is my group coaching program for executive coaches who want to get their next 10 corporate clients with a very reasonable five hours of marketing per week. If that is you, book a call with me and let's talk about whether it fits for your business. So check out the show notes for a link to have a conversation a lot of the members of the accelerator have come from the podcast. So I think if you're listening to this, you have a good sense of what I do and what the accelerator might be like. So think about this. But turbocharged with a whole lot of curriculum to support you and a lot of my eyes on your business. So I look forward to meeting with some of you and having a chat about your businesses. Check out the link in the show notes. So question one today is how should I think about pricing in comparison between working with individuals and corporates? And how would I think about nonprofit and government clients? Like the sort of the relativity between them is how I'm understanding that question. So the first thing I should say is that it is true that when you're coaching an individual versus an individual in a corporation where the corporation is the client and in a not for profit or a government organization, the truth is that in reality your pricing is going to be different and it'd be nice to say no, my price is my price, I'm very fixed. But my experience is that in reality, reality it doesn't play out like that. And most of us want to get and we also often want to do the work for perhaps those lower paying groups because they are generally very invested and there's a lot of impact we can have as a coach. So we often make some choices to do that work regardless of the fact that it may not pay as much. So I want to differentiate a couple of things when we think about pricing. One is client facing pricing and the other is your behind the scene calculation of what is involved in delivering the work. And mostly I'm talking about your back of house calculation of what is involved. Because when we think about client facing pricing, and I've got a lot of resources on my website about that if you're interested, that tends to be more value based pricing. Right? So it's more like what is the impact, what is the outcome that this client is going to get and how do they value that and how can I price accordingly? So that is absolutely still the case. That is how you should be presenting your pricing as a package with an outcome rather than a per hour cost. But nonetheless in the back end you will be thinking about what is involved from a generally an hourly or a session per session basis. And so I think that you know, pragmatically we still need to think about it in that way. And then I also think you need to know your bottom line. And by bottom line I mean that no matter who you are doing this work for, you need to feel good about getting the work at the price you're talking about. So if you were to say, okay, well I need to discount the price because I'm talking to a not for profit organization. But if you think about that discount and it really just makes you feel icky, like you aren't, it's not a good exchan exchange of your energy for the price that you've charged, then that's a sense that it's not the right work for you. And I always say would you rather get the work at that uncomfortably low rate or would you rather not get the work at that rate and also not get the work, not get the experience? And that often involves deciding in the moment what is your priority. If your priority is getting the hours, then I say price to get the work. That doesn't mean discounting necessarily and it doesn't mean underpricing. So I'm always telling people that they need to increase their prices. So I don't want to imply that you have to be low, but you would price it to be competitive. If your priority though is, you know, getting a great and you know, premium fee for the work that you do, then you would make a different decision when it comes to pricing. So I wanted all that out there. That said, you know, I always get to the brass tax and I will tell it to you straight. So the truth is there are generally differences in terms of what you would charge a corporate, what you would charge an individual, what you would charge government and what you would charge in a non profit. And so I'm going to share what I've done. Not necessarily the numbers but the ratios because I think that's important. So if you think about your corporate rate, that is generally going to be your highest rate. That is probably the rate that you, you know, you sort of feel a little bit like oh, you know, am I really going to charge that? That's the rate that feel you're stretching yourself to charge it. When you're charging an individual it is usually significantly less than that for a few reasons. One is that you don't have organizational reporting requirements, you don't bear the risk of becoming a supplier into an organization. You don't need to juggle the dynamics that are involved in that. So there is a lot less complexity, there is a lot less complex compliance involved and there can even be a lot less insurances that you're required to hold. So in my experience, most coaches will charge if they are willing to work with individuals and that's not a given. And you don't have to. But it would generally tend to be about 50% of that premium rate that you would charge a corporation. So let's say you were charging a thousand dollars per session for a corporation. You might charge an individual $500 per session. Not that you would charge it like that. You would present it as a package. Government is a really interesting one and I really put government right in the middle of the two. So I would probably think about government at that 75% rate and then for not for profit. It really depends on the organization. So there are not for profits that are, you know, philanthropically funded. They have got a lot of money available to spend and they want to, they want to spend it on these things because it creates the greatest impact. So for them the value is really clear. They're used to paying premium pricing. Other not for profits, however, are, you know, really like very small, making a huge impact. Really don't have a lot of budget and so you would probably be towards the lower end of your budget. So, you know, there is a lot that goes into it. You also need to consider, you know, the benchmarks in your area. Of course, all that pricing stuff that's in a lot of my pricing workshops. But just remembering that we need to benchmark ourselves and the three components of good benchmarking are market factors, client factors and coach factors. And you know, just drop a line if you want to know more about that. But I hope that has helped you just to think about the relativities a little bit differently. So question two today is I've just been to a networking event and I want to follow up. How do I do that? So this is a great question and this is something that actually came up in the corporate to coach accelerator group coaching this week in fact, which was great and networking events. I don't know. I have a love hate relationship with networking events. I think they're not created equal. So let's have a think about how do you get the most out of it. So firstly, I'm assuming that before you go in, you do some research, you know who's going to be there and you make a plan of the sorts of people that you want to talk to. The first thing I would say is it's really tempting to hang out with the other coaches or the other consultants. Try really hard not to do that. Try and talk to the people who fall into your ideal client categories. And then as after you leave the. Well, actually while you're there is you've really got to remember who you met and who you spoke to. So my tips for that are you can add people to LinkedIn in the moment. Now I think that that's really common. It's like instead of exchanging business cards, you'll do that or exchange business cards, of course. But typically people are adding you to LinkedIn or I would say, you know, when you, when you move on, just make a little note on your phone about a name for you to look up on LinkedIn later. And I would say everyone you talk to, add them on LinkedIn. It's just kind of a hygiene factor now that you want them there and you can do that during or afterwards. So then let's say you've done that, you've got the connection on LinkedIn and you're like, okay, well, there are maybe three or four people that I met that I had a good connection with that I think would be good for me to follow up with. My recommendation is that you need to be very specific and very tailored with your outreach after a networking event in that case. So if you met three people, right, it's likely that they're all in different roles or different industries, depending on the type of event. And so you must have a customized strategy. If, for example, you had a really good personal connection, you had a good chat, but they are people who are in your ideal clients or likely to be able to connect you to them, then I would say that's occasion, you know, book, find a coffee, like go have a coffee, catch up. Don't make it too formal because it would feel a bit strange to go from, you know, yeah, we talked about travel, we talked about life, we had laughs. And then you send them a message saying, here's my professional bio. Would you like to hire a coach? Right. So then you would connect, you'd have a coffee, you would have the conversation and you would just make sure you're learning about them professionally and sharing about what you do. Right. Personally and then you go through from there. If it was a very professional conversation, you might follow it up with an article that was relevant to what you were talking about. If they had a lot of questions, you might follow up with them with a more thought out response. And so I would just start the conversation with a view to potentially having a meeting. And if you've connected and like they're open, you know, some people are really interested in coaching and how it could help their business. Then suggest you have a meeting and you can go on site and, you know, just have a chat to them, learn more about their business and go from there. So As a, like a bonus or like an extra suggestion, I think it's really important to think about which networking events you go to. So the events should be events with your target clients and not just lots of coaches. Ideally it would be an event where you don't just sit at a table. And this was a great suggestion from one of the members of the accelerator who shared that reflection that those table based networking events really restrict your ability to talk to people. Whereas a mingling event like a drinks event or a cocktail event is much easier. So have all weathers at least you know, like a lunch or morning teas where you, you know, conference style where you get to go and meet people. Those are more. You're going to meet more people. So do factor that in when you are investing. Question 3 Are there any free or low cost assessment tools that I can add to my portfolio of assessments until I can afford to do any of the big ticket ones? Yes, there absolutely are. So I have a lot of material on what sorts of assessments you should get certified in and what to prioritise. But for the purpose of this question, I want to summarise and say that I think you should aim to have four tools in your assessment toolkit as an executive coach. So firstly I think you need a psychometric in like a personality style preferences type assessment. I think you need a strengths assessment. I think you need a 360 tool. And as a fourth you might add a team or a culture assessment. So I usually recommend that if you have the budget to invest in one tool, make it a really meaty psychometric that has got ancillary tools that you can access for free like a360 or a team assessment. My recommendation is always Hogan for that. But there are others out there that you might want to consider. There are also. So that's. If you're gonna. That's not really answering the question, but if you're gonna invest in one, that's what I recommend. There are also some tools that you can access for free or cheap. Cheaply. And the first category of those is strengths assessments. They tend to fit in this bucket and they're often. You can often use them in place of a psychometric. In some ways. I like the via Character strengths assessment. I mean actually the assessment is free. If you do it, you do the basic one, the certificate. There is no paid certification, although you can do a course that is very low cost on that. But I also find it super useful in bigger groups for individuals. The CliftonStrengths profile is great and I do recommend it, it's more detailed. The assessment itself is not free and nor is certification but you don't need to be certified to use it. And there are lots of resources that you can access to get familiar with the assessment and how to debrief it. In terms of 360 tools, there are actually a few options that I recommend that can be done without a paid certification. My favourite and my preference over and above most paid tools to be honest, is to run a series of stakeholder interviews. So you then consolidate the feedback and use it in coaching as really rich data. Of course there are some nuances in how to conduct these stakeholder interviews and things to watch out for. Things like, you know, are you going to prepare a written report? How are you going to ensure confidentiality when you're giving the feedback? And I've got a guide inside the corporate to coach accelerator on how to run this assessment if you're interested. You can also use email or survey based, survey tool based 360s forms if you're assessing for something specific. So keep that option in mind also. So hopefully that is a few ideas of how you can access some assessment tools for a for free or for very cheap. The final question is how can I get better at collecting testimonials from my coaching clients? And this is a brilliant question. Capturing testimonials is really important for your own purposes, you know, to record the outcomes of your clients and to create sort of a really a bank of positive feedback for ourselves. But it's also really important for use in marketing on your website, on LinkedIn as social proof which is really powerful where people can say okay well that person had a positive experience so therefore I'm more likely to do as well. The first thing that you need to do is have a system and God, I feel like a broken record. I'm like have a system, have a process. But you do. And by that what I mean is very simply have a standard form. And I'm usually that's some sort of automated form on iusemonday.com they've got some great forms capability but you could use a Google form or SurveyMonkey and that form is automatically or manually scheduled to be sent to coachees upon completion of a coaching engagement. You craft your questions around what it is you want them to speak about. You know, you don't ask too many questions and you will get usually quite good replies. The most important thing you do need to include that is a bit of a trick that can make or break whether someone is going to give you feedback is a section where you give them choices for how they are willing to be identified in your marketing materials. So for example are they happy? And usually you do a list and they can just select full name and organization or just first name and industry or just role and industry or completely anonymous. So people have got different sensitivities and I think it's really important to give them a choice. But my biggest recommendation testimonials is make sure you're doing it right away and if you haven't started from the start of your business, start right now. So I hope those questions were helpful to you. Of course. Inside the Corporate To Coach Accelerator in our weekly group coaching calls we answer so many questions like this and more importantly what we do is my answers are really specific to your business. So if you're curious about how this could benefit you, please head over to the Show Notes and book in a call with me. We can talk about your business. We can talk about how the accelerator can help you to grow your business business as well. And I allow I've got the sessions that you book are 30 minutes, but the truth is many of them go closer to an hour. So I would say just just bear that in mind when you book in. But I am really looking forward to speaking with some of you and I will be back with another episode next week. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers with business education, mentoring, deal clinics and more. If you'd like to contact me or work with me further, all my free resources, courses and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found@elliscarf.com. have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.