In my 15+ years of recruiting and training business coaches, I’ve discovered there are three critical attributes every business coach needs.
They are:
- The right psychometric profile
- Sales and marketing chops
- Real-world business leadership experience
If you’re feeling concerned because you’re not sure you have these critical attributes, a word of encouragement. Most people aren’t born with “the total package.” Success in business coaching comes just like success in anything else–through good old-fashioned practice and experience.
The purpose of this post is to help you understand the attributes you need to acquire as you pursue a career in business coaching.
The Right Psychometric Profile
First, you need to develop the right psychometric profile. I’ve gone into this in greater detail elsewhere, but in a nutshell, a successful coach displays the following behavioral characteristics:
- High Urgency and Intensity – the drive to achieve and accomplish things.
- High Dominance – the need to lead, influence the outcome, and make decisions.
- High Competitiveness – the drive to win and excel in competitive environments.
- Low Self-Critical – the tendency to resist beating yourself up, blaming yourself, or finding fault with yourself.
- Low Willingness to Defer – the tendency to resist the opinions and preferences of others in favor of your own.
- High Self-Confidence – the tendency to think highly of your own capabilities, decisions, and views.
- High Criticality – the tendency to critique the performance and behavior of others.
- High Energetic and Expressiveness – the drive to have lots of fun!
When you read this list, you should get a pretty clear picture of the iconic coach. You’ll see a hard-charging, focused individual with an insatiable drive to come out on top by challenging and confronting failure and mediocrity in business, yet having loads of fun and inspiring others along the way.
Sales and Marketing Chops
Next on the list of critical skills every business coach needs is sales and marketing chops.
That’s because, as a business coach, you never stop selling.
In fact, there are six kinds of sales that every business coach must make in order to be successful. They are:
- Selling the prospect into talking with you on the phone.
- Selling the prospect into meeting with you.
- Selling the prospect into buying business coaching from you.
- Selling your client into changing their ways so their business improves.
- Selling your client into paying your fee for next month based on what you’ve helped
them achieve over the past few months. - Selling the client on how it will benefit them to give you a list of their friends who also
need your help.
Many people think that they’re either “good” or “bad” at sales. That simply isn’t the case. Sales is NOT a talent; it’s a skill. And like any skill, it can be acquired.
Many people think that they’re either “good” or “bad” at sales. That simply isn’t the case. Sales is NOT a talent; it’s a skill. And like any skill, it can be acquired.
That doesn’t mean some people aren’t naturally more comfortable in sales situations than others. But like the personality traits, if you want to be successful in any business, sales and marketing skills are just something you have to develop. Period.
Real-World Business Leadership Experience
The third skill is pretty intuitive. The more business knowledge and real-world experience you have, the better you’ll be able to coach your clients.
Fortunately, this is the easiest of all to address. Even if you have NO experience now, any good business coaching system will offer extensive training materials to help you augment your education in marketing, sales, operations, finance, or what have you. I’m admittedly biased, but my own system has excellent information along these lines. But even if you choose another system, it should come equipped with the knowledge you need.
Plus, as you run your own business coaching firm, you’ll quickly gain real-world experience managing a profit center–your own! So this requirement is handled by virtue of the fact that you’re a business coach, which makes you a business owner.
For a detailed breakdown of everything you need to know as a beginning coach, check out our FREE ebook, How to Become a Business Coach.
