Best Business Coaching Tools: 2024 Guide

The widely recognized definition of a business coach indicates a trained professional who supports & motivates business owners to bring about a transformative change in their business. A business coach guides the client with prioritizing and executing strategies, helping them identify their present as well as long term business goals, assessing their business strengths and weaknesses, providing systematic analysis about previous plans that have worked as well as those that haven’t, encouraging the client to try out new plans to promote business growth, helping clients take accountability for completing decided upon tasks to achieve business targets, regularly monitoring the progress as well as encouraging the client to focus on bettering their personal skills and attitudes that will reflect not just in their own development but also result in improving their business outcomes. 

All these responsibilities are well covered in the job description of a business coach, but what is that extra something that would truly help alter the business prospect for a client? The answer is business coaching tools – they empower the coach to get incisive insights into the client’s business realities and future requirements, thus letting the coach guide the client to achieve greater business success. 

Of course, there is no wonder pill that can cure all that affects a business and ensure surefire success. Then how do you think the top business coaches in India and abroad are making their mark in the industry? The answer is with the help of business coaching tools. These online business coaching tools can prove quite useful in bringing about a substantial change in the client’s business. Read on to learn more about the best business coaching toolkit and resources that you need to use in 2024:

Coaching Intent 

A great information-gathering tool before commencing the coaching process, it lets the business coach get a grasp on their client’s ambitions and desires by asking pertinent questions. This tool provides the coach with pointers on how to chart out a solid roadmap that addresses the client’s business realities, their future goals, the action steps needed to bridge that gap, what outputs the client expects from the coaching process, and more. This is an insightful tool for both the coach and client as it sheds light on why the client is choosing the coaching program in the context of their current situation. For the coach, it acts as a good indicator to begin the coaching on a strong note, and also as a comparison feature where the initial input can be matched with the end result to gauge how successful the entire coaching journey has been. 

Try out the Coaching Intent Tool here.

Goal Setting 

A must-have business tool as it lets the client set realistic, meaningful, attainable goals. Generally, when a task is challenging enough, people tend to treat it as a matter of honor and perform over and above their understood capabilities to try and achieve it. Goal-setting tools help the client gain clarity & visualize their business goals, determine what they are doing to go into that direction and also understand what they need to do to in order to achieve those desired goals. 

Further, once the business owner has clarity on the purpose of their business, it also becomes easy to break up those long-term goals into monthly, quarterly, or annual goals that ensure easier tracking of progress. 

For the coach, this tool is vital as it helps set accountability for the client to complete tasks that are essential for attaining those goals. The results would reflect the work put in by the client, enabling them to see for themselves where they stand and how far they have come towards accomplishing their business goals. 

Try out the Goal Setting Tool here.

Budgeting Tool 

The bottom line for any business is that their income should exceed their expenditure. The budgeting tool (most businesses use an Excel template as they are easily available, simple to use, and budget-friendly) is very important for business owners to get a realistic idea of their current and future spending. For the business coach, using this tool lets them get an inside look into the paying capacity of the business to guide their client to make informed spending decisions (for instance, make more judicious use of available money for business beneficial operations) that will finally boost their profits. 

Customized Financial Analytics Dashboard

A great tool that lets the business coach create and monitor their client’s business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as well as income and expenditure trends, the Customized Financial Analytics Dashboard lets the client gather vital business details such as the health of their finances, their revenues, and spendings. 

For the business coach, having a financial dashboard that is personalized for each client is a great time and resource saver – no more pulling data manually and preparing graphs. For the business owner, it is a great tool to ensure ease of decision-making, as all their financial data is available on a single panel which can result in accelerating their business growth. 

Project Management & Tracking 

As a business coach you may help the client devise a terrific strategy and actionable steps to follow it through, but what happens if the client does not complete even a single step before the next session? All that hard work remains on paper, disturbing the flow of the coaching process and setting back any meaningful progress that may have been made. 

A Project Management & Tracking tool is a must-have for any business coach as it gives the coach a way to hold their client accountable not just to complete the tasks assigned but to make them understand that their business growth is entirely in their own hands. In addition, it lets the coach determine how much (or if any) progress has been made between sessions and make adjustments/modifications accordingly. This is a great tool that can provide detailed and proven tracking of client actions. 

A good project management tool must let the coach collaborate easily with the client, assign tasks and monitor them regularly (create task lists, tick check tasks that are completed etc.), help set timelines for completion of project stages as well as offer scheduling & planning of coaching sessions. 

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Journal of Progress (Self-Reflections) 

Encouraging your client to maintain a coaching journal as a vital tool can help them put down their ideas, experiences, challenges, ambitions, emotions, etc. Having such a journal not only boosts the client’s self-awareness, it also liberates them to put down their innermost thoughts in a stress-free manner, whenever they feel like it. Writing a journal also helps the client focus on themselves, read and recap their musings. Sharing this journal with the coach (if the client is comfortable with it) helps the coach consensually collect valuable information about the client which only helps in assisting them in their self-developmental journey.

Try out the Self-Reflection Tool here.

SEO Tracker 

With a large number of businesses conducting their operations virtually (especially post COVID pandemic), having a strong presence online is vital. SEO or search engine optimization increases the visibility of your website on search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.), the quality & quantity of web traffic that gets directed to your website (for specific keyword searches) by making certain onsite changes. Basically, SEO is all about enabling your potential clients to find your business online easily. 

For business coaches, the SEO tracking tool is a very important instrument in providing their client a clear picture of where their business ranks online. Rankings based on keywords, competitor monitoring, in depth compilation and analysis of SEO data are some of the features that an SEO tracking tool provides. It helps the coach guide their client to formulate new strategies or tweak existing ones based on the SEO analysis. 

For the client, SEO tracking is a smart way to ensure that their online presence is robust and targeted at their intended clientele. 

Marketing Analytics 

Similar to the financial analytics dashboard, the marketing analytics dashboard (Google is one example) is an important business coaching tool. It displays marketing specific KPIs such as phone calls per week, conversions (potential to actual customers), conversion percentage, website traffic numbers, etc. 

For business coaches the marketing analytics tool is a great time and manual work saver (no more manually comparing data, analyzing it and then arriving at the result) and lets the coach concentrate on their core job of coaching. 

For the client, it gives a fair indicator of their business health, what areas are working and what issues need attention. 

ROI Calculator 

ROI or return on investment calculator (Excel is a very effective ROI Calculator) is a great tool that lets the client focus on those areas that will bring in the most returns for the money invested (but an ROI tool will give true feedback only when the data fed is accurate). 

As a business coach, the ROI calculator is an effective tool that lets you advise your client about cost-benefit analysis to figure out the rate of return that they can expect from a variety of investment proposals and to select the best option that will help maximize their revenue. 

For the client, the ROI calculator lets them determine which projects are leaking funds without giving expected returns and enables them to take corrective action and to prevent similar mistakes in the future. 

Impact Assessment 

One of the most popular business coaching tools, Impact Assessment lets the coach gain an insightful, precise and a well-rounded view of the actual impact of the concluded coaching program on the client as well as on their business.  

Generally used at the end of the coaching program, this coaching assessment tool involves the stakeholders answering open ended questions to categorize the impact of the coaching process that they went through, and whether it delivered a developmental or transformational effect. It gives them a real picture of their progress and also encourages them to provide a clear roadmap on how they will continue to sustain that progress after the coaching process ends. 

For the business coach, the Impact Assessment tool lets them analyze their client’s improvements and progress over the period of the entire coaching engagement as well as market their credentials as a successful coach and the ROI delivered to help acquire future clients.

Try out the Impact Assessment Tool here.

Completion Report 

The completion report tool helps clients to reflect back on the coaching journey, recognize the progress, absorb the knowledge gained and then plan their next step to continue this developmental journey after the coaching engagement gets over. 

For the business coach, this tool lets them gain valuable feedback about their coaching style, build on the positives and improve on the weaker areas. 

Try out the Completion Report Tool here.

To summarize, online business coaching tools help the business coach and business coaching companies hold their client accountable for their business success. For themselves, they save vital time, manual labor, and energy that can be utilized more effectively scaling their coaching business and spending time having conversations with their clients. 

For business owners/clients these tools help them gain a clear picture about the true status and health of their business in a crisp and detailed manner. The tools for coaches provide business owners with vital data that they need in order to fix the issues and grow their business. There are a number of free business coaching tools available online, which makes your coaching sessions more meaningful.

If you found this insightful, we have a list of some lesser-known business coaching tools that we bet you will find useful. Check it out here.

FAQs

1. What is the best coaching tool? What tools do business coaches use? 

There isn’t one but a number of coaching tools that are effective and their usage depends on the context they are being used in and the result that the coach is looking for. Coaching tools help the coach enable their client to function at their highest capacity by addressing their professional needs as well as that of their company to achieve business success. 

The best business coaches use a variety of tools to help their clients such as coaching goals, business purpose & vision, business history, periodic goal setting, SMART goal setting (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Based), Business SWOT analysis, personal SWOT analysis, time management, effective delegation, daily successful habits, action priority matrix, and more!

2. How can I integrate business coaching tools into my coaching practice?

A simple way to integrate business coaching tools into your coaching practice is by investing in a digital coaching platform that makes the process of administering coaching tools into your coaching engagement seamless. Simply.Coach is one such digital coaching platform that comes pre-loaded with several coaching tools one can pick from. They also have the option to customize or build a tool from scratch; additionally, it allows coaches to collect responses from participants and create reports that showcase insights and data.

3. What are some communication tools that business coaches can use to keep in touch with their clients?

Some of the communication tools that business coaches can use to keep in touch with their clients are Slack, Google Hangout, Satori, Calendly, etc.

About the author

Pallavi Godbole

Writer

An avid reader with love for books on history, sci-fi and popular fiction, Pallavi is a gifted content writer. She is also a keen listener of Indian semi & classical music. Currently, she juggles her duties of being a full-time mom with part-time content writing.