Group coaching programs are a great way to create more leverage in your business, but still being able to work with and interact with clients. Unfortunately most businesses that launch a new group coaching program make these five common mistakes.
Falling Short of Expectations
Missing the mark on customer expectations is a fast way to damage your program’s reputation. Your customers are buying into some big promise when they join your coaching program. By the time they finish, they will be able to do something they hadn’t been able to before, achieve some desired result or outcome, or experience some transformation. Your program is giving them a new way to solve a problem, and if they do the work and finish the program and it didn’t meet their expectations, then it didn’t achieve their goals. That’s not what either of you want.
When we help our clients design their group coaching program, we always begin with the end in mind. We focus on that result, the outcome we want for your members, then we reverse engineer what needs to happen to get them there. We identify the milestones along your client’s success path and the specific training, tools, and coaching that will help them achieve each of those milestones. Football teams win championships by focusing on winning each play. Winning each play leads to winning games. By breaking down the success path for your client, you design the program to help them win each play and you set expectations clearly up front.
Disengaged Members
One of the biggest risks to the success of your coaching program is disengaged members. It’s easier for members to fall through the cracks and never achieve the result they set out to achieve.
Your ability to re-engage a disengaged members is critical to the overall success of your program. You need a way to track your members’ progress, to identify drop off points and have processes in place that help pull members back in, reignite their commitment and their confidence in achieving that result.
Lack Of Feedback For Optimization
Even if you’re the world’s greatest coach and program facilitator, you still need to ask for feedback from your members. Design your program so you’re regularly asking for input Seeking feedback should be a regular part of your program and not left until the end when it’s too late to make amendments or course corrections to improve. At the beginning of the program we recommend capturing a baseline snapshot of where your members are starting, and at the end of the program you’ll want to conduct a full evaluation to make sure group members got what they were promised.
It takes a great deal of preparation to run a successful group coaching program. Take the time to plan and design your coaching program before you start building it, or sell it 🙂
