As a business or life coach (or any other kind of coaching, really), your clients trust you to give them the advice they need to improve and grow personally and professionally. The only way you can do that is if you know the full context of their life and business, and keeping that all in a notebook or spreadsheet can get unwieldy pretty quickly.
Here are 5 ways you can set up your LACRM to manage your coaching business:
1) Keep your old clients in a group so you can use them as referrals in the future, but also filter them out of your active list.
A CRM is a database for any kind of contact -- potential clients, new clients, past clients, networking partners and so on. Past clients in particular can be valuable because they can often end up being your best word-of-mouth referrers. The problem is that most of the time, you don't want to see a list with your old clients mixed in -- you want to focus on current and future initiatives.
A handy customization here is to create a group for your "Past Clients" and then simply filter them out of your main contact list via the 'Add a filter' option on your left page menu:
This way, whenever you want to pull up a list of folks to follow up with, you can be sure that you won't accidentally get to a previous client instead. At the same time, you can continue keeping your old clients in the CRM instead of deleting them if you ever need to reach back out to them for a referral.
2) Upload new versions of improvement plans or strategies in the same file tab to keep them organized.
It's easy to upload files onto a contact or company's page in the CRM but as your relationships with your clients deepen, it's likely that you'll have lots of files that you need to attach to them. A quick way to stay organized is to upload new versions of files within the same file tab:
Because you can have as many different versions of the same file as you need, you can continually upload files to the same file tags to keep them all in one place. This way, even if I have 4 different improvement plans for Barbara, uploading them as new versions ensures that I still keep things tidy with a single file tag on her profile:
3) Split your calendar up into the types of tasks and events you tackle during the day.
When your day is made up of all types of tasks and events, it makes the most sense to split up your calendar based on those types, instead of lumping everything together. Some calendar options that can come in handy for coaches would be a Networking, and Conference calendar to keep those items separate from your regular coaching schedule.
4) Track billable hours as a custom pipeline field.
One important thing to stay on top of when you're working with your clients, is your billable hours with them. Perhaps they're on a session-based schedule, or perhaps they come hour-by-hour. In any case, creating a pipeline field for "Billable Hours" allows you to update this information whenever you have a session with them.
Because I now have a field for "Billable Hours", this information will be included in my pipeline report, and I can export that data out into a spreadsheet to tally up these hours across my clients, and forecast my revenue for the next month if needed.
5) Upload pictures of paint swatches as profile photos if you want to color-code your contact list.
This tip is probably a bit of an odd one, but a nice workaround if you prefer to be able to visually distinguish contacts from one another. It's important to be able to upload contact photos and see them with a list of your clients, but if perhaps you'd rather organize contacts based on priority, you can upload something more visually arresting, like a red paint swatch, to highlight specific contacts on your contact list:
By uploading a picture of a red paint swatch to specific contacts as their profile picture, now when I look at my list of contacts, I can pinpoint them as "high priority" or "important" right off the bat.
I hope these tips have helped you use your LACRM account to manage your coaching business! If you're a business or life coach and would like to explore our template for those in the coaching industry, you can check it out here.
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