How to Give Your Clients 10X More Support

The realizations and moments of clarity your clients experience during their coaching sessions with you are so important...and what's even more important are the actions they take in light of those realizations and moments of clarity.

When your clients feel supported every step of the way—not just during your weekly coaching call—they get SO much better results and ultimately get SO much more value out of the coaching experience.

In this episode, I talk about one simple thing you can do to give your clients 10X more support while increasing client results and retention while also dramatically increasing the value of your coaching offer.

Hello, and welcome to the Client Attractor Show, where we talk about concrete tactics and strategies that you can use to attract your dream clients. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, client attraction coach, and author of the brand new book Client Attractor. If you've not gotten your copy yet, you can pick that up today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or clientattractorbook.com. 

In today's episode, I'm going to be talking about one simple thing you can do to better serve your clients, to help them get better results, and to help add even more value to your coaching offer. In a nutshell, it's to offer them daily ongoing support between coaching sessions. When it comes to coaching, most of us already know that during those coaching sessions, epiphanies and moments of clarity often come up, but we also know that the real magic is what clients are doing between sessions, when they're actually doing the work in light of those moments of clarity. And when you have a mechanism in place to provide support to those clients in between the sessions, several things happen that actually help your clients get better results. 

If your clients are able to really easily reach you and ask questions and get feedback throughout the week, they're ultimately going to spend less time sitting on their hands, waiting to ask that question, and more time taking action. It actually lets your clients progress or move forward at a rate that feels really good to them, rather than feeling slowed down by this idea of “Oh, I don't have my coaching session until Monday. Well, I guess I'm just going to sit around and wait until then to ask whatever question I have.” 

The second thing is that it actually strengthens the coaching relationship as a whole, because your client starts to see that you're standing in their corner, cheering them on and rooting for them, and they start to feel way more supported every step of the way, every day of the week, instead of just during an hour-long session each week. And while it does have these concrete benefits for the client, it also has specific, concrete benefits for your business as well. 

The first is that being available and accessible to your clients as they have questions really improves the overall client experience, which is going to improve client retention as a whole, which means that your clients are going to stick around with you longer, because they have this better experience, because they're actually getting the support they need and not feeling like they're paying for coaching but still on the journey all alone. The second is that by incorporating this ongoing support aspect into your marketing and sales, so actually talking about it as part of your offer, you increase the value of your coaching dramatically. Say you have a 12-week coaching package that you're pricing at $3,000. If you add in this, say, text message support, you can actually raise that rate significantly to make it even a $5,000 offer instead of a $3,000 offer, because that adds so much value for the client. 

But what does this actually look like in practice? You agree that it does make sense to be there for your clients every step of the way, and you agree that you do need a mechanism for your clients to reach out to ask questions and get feedback between their coaching sessions, but what does that actually look like? What I see work the most often is text message support, and this doesn't have to be your personal phone number. This could just as easily be a Google Voice number that you give to your clients and say, “Okay, when you have questions, here's where you can reach me pretty much any time of the day.” 

The second mechanism that I've seen work really well in this case is to use some sort of direct messenger app like Voxer, which is what I personally use. Whichever you do, though, I recommend keeping this separate from your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram direct messages, especially if you are using those direct messages for lead generation and connecting with prospects. Because if you're using, say, your Facebook DMs to communicate with your clients as well as getting new clients, things are going to start to get lost in the mix. There are also some productivity benefits of keeping them separate, in that you're able to sit down for your Facebook DMs and say, “Okay, I'm in my sales and marketing mindset,” and then maybe open your Google Voice messages or your text messages or your Voxer messages and say, “Okay, now I am in the mindset of serving my clients.” 

Of course, the big question that often comes up at this point is “Jacob, I don't want to be answering my clients’ questions at nine o'clock at night or at two in the morning,” and you absolutely should not be doing that, because when someone texts you or messages you a question, you don't need to immediately respond all the time. So while there is value in letting your clients message you at any time, it's just as important to be really clear with them on managing their expectations. As far as response times go, for example, I tend to tell my clients that I'll get back to them within 24 hours, but in most cases, I'm actually getting back to them within six or 12 hours. I very intentionally quote them a longer response time, even though I know that I will probably get to them sooner, and that is good and important for me in terms of maintaining healthy boundaries and not lying in bed at two in the morning, responding to a question that my client sent me 30 minutes ago. 

The other really important expectation to manage when you are offering this type of support to your clients is around what types of questions can be answered in this format, and what types of questions are better suited to talk about in an actual coaching session. You need to prepare your clients for when they send you a question that is really more of a coaching call question. You need to make sure they're prepared and understand that “Okay, I got this question. I really think we should talk about it on our next call, because there's not a quick answer.” This type of support mechanism is really good for quick answers and quick feedback, but you do want your clients to know that you can't answer every type of question through a text message. Usually how I handle this, when I get a text message asking a question that's better suited for a call, is I just simply say, “Hey, yeah, I think that's a really good question, and I think it requires a little bit more conversation, because there's not a quick and easy answer. I'll go ahead and put this on the agenda for our next call.”

To wrap up today's episode, the main takeaway I want you to go forth and implement in your business is to consider what different ways that you might be able to improve your client experience by offering them some sort of expanded support, maybe like text message or Voxer support. And if you're already doing that, if your clients already have this type of access to you, make sure you're emphasizing that in your marketing and in your sales, because like I mentioned, this can go a really, really long way in terms of increasing the overall value of working with you as a coach. 

As always, thank you so much for joining me for today's episode of the Client Attractor Show. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow for our next episode. Have a great day and take care.