In our first five years of operations, we taught marketing to an eager audience of small business owners via online courses. But in 2018, we decided to shift gears into coaching.
Why abandon an evergreen source of revenue for something that takes more time and effort?
Because courses had a limited impact on our customer’s results.
Many of our students would start a course then shelve it for months at a time as higher priorities came their way. We weren’t going to just take their money when we knew they could achieve so much more.
So we thought business coaching would be a better way to influence our clients’ outcomes. Unlike courses, coaching is more engaging and involved because it offers personal experience and accountability.
At the same time, we weren’t going to settle for the status quo. We set a concrete goal: to generate $100 million of client-revenue growth. Traditional coaching wasn’t going to cut it.
Instead, we designed our marketing coaching program with a twist.
To make the most impact, we embrace both asynchronous and synchronous learning techniques. We teach coaching clients key marketing theories by giving them expert videos and other resources that they process on their own time. Then we use live calls to finalize those concepts into action. And in our program, each student has access to not just one coach but an entire team of experienced business coaches who’ve built companies themselves.
What we’ve mentioned so far only scratches the surface of our philosophy on the best way to handle coaching businesses. In this article, you’ll learn more about our approach, including:
- Why most coaching calls fail to create true change and results for many business owners
- The step-by-step system any course creator, consultant, coach, or service provider can follow to execute on their marketing strategy
- Insight on the single, biggest reason your marketing tactics succeed or fail.
Let’s jump in!
Want us to audit your business strategy and help you skyrocket revenue in the next 90 days? Schedule a complimentary strategy session with a certified coach.
Why Marketing Coaching Has to Go Beyond Biweekly Calls
Most people think they need a coach who checks in with them on biweekly calls. But from our experience, these calls are inefficient.
One reason is that traditional coaching sessions spend more time teaching than workshopping. You may use about 90% of your calls learning concepts, but only 10% attacking actual business problems.
Traditional coaching services don’t offer enough accountability, either. A live check-in once every two weeks isn’t ideal for keeping you on track.
What you need instead is daily accountability. But most one-on-one coaches often work with 15-20 clients at a time, which makes daily check-ins and reminders too much for one person to manage.
Instead of live teaching, we’ve found that most people learn best on their own time (asynchronous learning). You can learn much more efficiently with the right resources (such as educational guides and videos related to your marketing strategy).
Live calls, meanwhile, are most valuable for workshopping the concepts you learned about so you can apply them to your business (synchronous learning). We use our active coaching time to help you convert ideas into real-world action.
Installing information and checking in on your progress are best done via email and assessments. That in turn lets you maximize the benefit you receive from your time on coaching calls.
By the way — we solve the problem of daily accountability by assigning a project manager to each student. That person checks on progress and cheers you on from the sidelines, while the coaches are free to dedicate their mental energy to perfecting your strategy and execution.
How the Growth Tools Marketing Coaching Program Works
The way we coach is a tailor-made experience personalized to where you stand today with your business.
Our work together begins with a complete assessment of your business situation, your financial goals, and your life goals. We even factor in the skill sets of you and your team. We want to know everything about what you’re doing well and where you’re struggling. From there, we design a marketing plan based on what we’ve discovered.
This marketing plan lays the foundation for what we do. Think of it like a pyramid that comprises three levels:
You review that plan with your coaches every 90 days. During that time, they’ll help you decide whether to stay the course or adjust your marketing efforts.
Next is the detail work. Instead of pairing with one coach, you have access to a network of them. Every coach at Growth Tools is or was an active practitioner in business. Whenever you have tactical questions, good coaches with exact knowledge of those issues are available to assist you.
Every Monday morning, you’ll receive a list of 3-7 specific items to complete that week. Some action items will be watching lectures or perusing resources to help you understand and complete your tasks. Others will be specific steps to take in your business, like drafting the first email in a nurture series or writing the first draft of your new sales funnel.
We store all of this information for you on a custom portal, where you can work toward your business goals and communicate with coaches:
Deconstructing Playbooks: What They Are and How They Help
If your marketing plan is the foundation of our program, playbooks are the core of your plan.
Think back to the last time you read a great how-to book. You probably felt motivated and inspired because everything you learned made total sense.
But the moment you had to apply that knowledge in the real world, you likely found yourself stuck. You quickly realized that transforming those ideas into action was a lot harder than it looked.
That realization often stops many of us dead in our tracks. That’s why the chief purpose of a playbook is to keep you moving forward with an action plan.
“A book is one of the best bargains in human history,” our founder Bryan Harris says. “You can get knowledge of some people’s entire lives that’s taken years to distill down into 200 pages.”
“But converting information into action takes an extraordinary amount of energy to do,” Bryan continues. “Taking a 200-page book and converting it into actionable goals for you to actually execute on is really time-consuming.”
“A playbook converts that information into action,” Bryan adds. “So all you have to do is walk into that checklist and do the next thing.”
Playbooks give you a step-by-step framework to learn, create, review, and ship your marketing materials. They incorporate the delivery of information that allows you to understand your strategy from the right perspective.
How We Refine Our Playbooks
Building and perfecting playbooks takes years of rigorous work. We develop each of our playbooks through a time-tested approach:
- First, we try the strategies and tactics ourselves. We base playbooks on real-world experiences that our coaches have had in their own business lives.
- Next, we try those tactics on behalf of others. At this point, we refine playbooks by providing marketing services for those who need help.
- Then, we help others use those tactics. Think of this stage of the process as traditional coaching or one-on-one consulting.
- Finally, we package those experiences into training modules that people can follow.
At each step, we pay attention to feedback. From there, we make changes to playbooks as needed. Stress-tested through the years by our coaches as well as over 2,000 clients, our playbooks provide proven paths to successful results.
Why Timing Matters When It Comes to Playbooks
When executing any tactic, timing is everything. That’s why we never overlook how playbooks are sequenced in your strategy. Some playbooks work well in the early stages of business, while others yield better results later.
Take, for example, Facebook advertising. Some new businesses might try this online marketing playbook earlier than most and enjoy success. Maybe they have skilled ad buyers with broad experience, or maybe they get lucky.
But for most young businesses, the odds of lead generation are low. Facebook ads for a well-established company with strong sales funnels that knows its target market well, on the other hand? Much more likely to succeed.
“Marketing is less about any singular tactic you’re doing,” Bryan says. “It’s more about doing the right thing at the right time… and that gets overlooked.”
For any playbook, it isn’t a matter of do or don’t. Instead, it’s a choice between now or later. Our marketing coaching program takes the guesswork out of timing. You only execute playbooks that have a prime chance for success given where you are in your business.
Why Should You Hire a Marketing Coach?
To be totally honest, you don’t have to. Any business can reach its goals without working with a marketing coach. As long as you’re dogmatic, disciplined, and relentless.
Before you hire a marketing coach, ask yourself this:
- How many months or years do you want to spend figuring out something other business owners have done successfully again and again?
- How long are you willing to wait before doubling or tripling your revenue?
Base your decision on how you answer.
The benefit of working with a marketing coach is the time you save and the clarity you gain. Joining a program like Growth Tools’ is like pushing a fast-forward button on your business.
You get to work with marketing experts who’ve been in your shoes before and can communicate the steps you need to take. A coach helps you to speed up your business’s performance.
Clients in our program appreciate our marketing system’s step-by-step framework. They don’t have to worry about assessing and adjusting their strategy by themselves. They are free to focus exclusively on the next item on their to-do list.
Good coaching can be one of the smartest ways to level up in business and in other areas of life. It can do what many training courses and books can’t: convert information into action.
It’s valuable to work and learn from wise people who’ve already done what you want to do. But to collaborate with those that know how to “spoonfeed ideas in a way that’s helpful and produces the results that you want?”
“Well that’s like the holy grail if you get that,” Bryan says.
Want us to audit your business strategy and help you skyrocket revenue in the next 90 days? Schedule a complimentary strategy session with a certified coach.