Your coaching business runs almost entirely remotely. Your clients are all over the world. Shouldn’t your business leverage the latest tools and apps to streamline and automate your coaching business?
Every minute you’re not spending directly helping your clients succeed is a waste of your most valuable time and energy. Yet, so much of that time is spent doing administrative tasks, paperwork, or doing your own tech support.
This article will shed some light on the latest apps and tools that professional coaches are using to run their coaching business more efficiently.
The goal? To free up more of your time to focus on what matters most: Nurturing your relationships with clients and finding new ways to scale and grow your client base.
Let’s get into it!
Coaching apps are nothing new (but we embrace them more and more now)
Fascinating: Last year, the International Coaching Federation evaluated the industry's recovery from the Pandemic. The study discovered that the industry demonstrated resilience and recovered quite well from the impact of the Covid pandemic. But it also revealed some changes in the way coaches work with clients.
For example, 82% of coaches surveyed in the study reported a decrease in in-person sessions in their practice. This forced coaching professionals to adapt and embrace new technologies to manage client engagements and run their coaching businesses. And they did. According to the study, 83% of coaches today use various platforms to coach clients and manage operations.
Many of these tools focus on streamlining a particular aspect of coaching practice.
Some tools focus on scaling client communications. Apps like Clarityflow, for example, let you use asynchronous video to give clients more face time without booking more meetings.
You keep track of projects and client work with dedicated project management tools.
Coaching platforms help you scale training and create and deliver more content to clients.
Finally, admin tools simplify the task of running the business.
In short, today, as we all got used to working away from each other, as more and more of us feel comfortable communicating asynchronously, apps have become the foundation behind many aspects of our businesses.
Moreover, many of these tools can work in conjunction with one another. For example, most coaching apps integrate with other tools or offer Zapier integration, allowing you to move information between them and automate many tedious tasks.
So, what are the best tools to use in your coaching business?
Let’s take a look.
11 Best Coaching Apps and Software
COMMUNICATION
#1. Clarityflow
Clarityflow (disclaimer – this is our tool) is an asynchronous video messaging software that helps coaches scale client communication without having to book more live calls.
Clarityflow is not here to replace your live calls with clients. It is the tool to use for all the other messaging that happens in between those calls:
Answering client questions with video
Sharing updates and advice
Collecting more information from clients
Sending and reviewing client assignments
Scaling group coaching, and more.
You don’t have to engage with clients in real time for those conversations. Instead, you can communicate asynchronously in those cases and engage with more clients every day.
With Clarityflow, you can record and share asynchronous videos with clients to share your expertise, update clients on project status, answer their questions, and more.
Because of its focus on helping you scale client communication, Clarityflow is packed only with relevant features and no fluff:
Back-and-forth threads all on one page. Clarityflow allows you to create an official space where you and your client can share messages asynchronously.
Easy to use. Your clients don’t have to download or sign up for the app to use it. Instead, they simply post their videos to your account.
Easy to mix between video, audio, text, or screen sharing.
Automatic transcriptions and more.
One feature you don’t find in Clarityflow is the ability to conduct live video calls. That’s because we didn’t create it to increase your meeting count but to reduce it. However, we also know that many coaches love using Clarityflow to supplement live calls.
Want to coach more clients without having to book more calls? Try Clarityflow; the asynchronous messaging tool loved by coaches.
ADMINISTRATION/BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
#2. Paperbell
Paperbell focuses on helping you manage the “business side” of the coaching practice. The tool doesn’t focus on any particular coaching practice and is being used by practically any coaching business.
I believe its motto – “the inside of your business should be as beautiful as the outside” – explains the Paperbell makers’ philosophy quite well. Paperbell is the tool to organize your practice, from booking client appointments, collecting payments (or sending payment reminders), to signing contracts with clients digitally.
Some of its more prominent features include
Appointment scheduler
Checkout for your business and the complete billing solution
E-signature software
Client management dashboard and a client portal, and
Landing pages creator, and
The ability to deliver coaching programs and group coaching online.
The one drawback of all-in-one tools like Paperbell is the complexity that usually comes with covering so many aspects of running a coaching business in one place. Often, you may find it difficult to set everything up and optimize the tool for your needs. However, once you go through the process, the tool usually becomes easy to use.
#3. My Coach Office (previously Life Coach Office)
My Coach Office (formerly known as Life Coach Office) is another all-in-one platform for managing a coaching business. MCO provides functionality to help you:
Run administrative tasks
With MCO, you can accept and manage bookings, send invoices and payment reminders, group emails, and more.
Manage client engagements
You can create a custom journal for each client in MCO and store pre-and post-session notes, create a membership site, and allocate client homework.
Learn how to grow your business
Finally, MCO features an extensive training library packed with information to help you learn and build marketing campaigns for your business, launch online products, and more.
#4. Satori
Satori is a perfect management tool for emerging coaches who want to make a mark on their target industry. The tool focuses on streamlining three elements of a coaching business:
Operations. Like the two other business management tools on our list, Satori offers a range of features to automate scheduling and manage processes and coaching engagements. The platform also allows you to manage your billing and invoices and see how well your practice is doing with a business dashboard.
Growth. Satori also helps you make your coaching business easy to find and hire with coaching package management, intake forms, progress tracking, personalized proposals, and similar other features.
Client management. Finally, with Satori, you can streamline client enrolment, monitor and manage clients’ progress, create session notes, and offer clients self-management options with a client-facing dashboard.
STRUCTURES/PROCESSES
#5. Coach Accountable
It’s a common problem – You have many great ideas for clients and yourself. But without great structures in place, most of them eventually fall through the cracks. The result? Well, I’m sure seeing it doesn’t make you happy. But most importantly, your clients might lose their trust in you too.
Coach Accountable aims to eliminate that problem by providing a way to standardize engagements and create structures and processes to support clients along their journey so they can get more out of your coaching.
Coach Accountable supports 1-on-1 coaching and group coaching and can even help you manage a team of coaches in your business. With the platform, you can track progress and manage client plans, send reminders to maintain momentum in their journey, keep and review their records, provide additional materials, and more.
Coach Accountable also provides a mobile app for keeping up with your business on the go.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
#6. Trello and #7. ClickUp
Sometimes, the greatest challenge you face has nothing to do with your work with clients. Creating coaching programs for them, sharing knowledge and expertise, and answering their questions is actually fun. The other stuff – managing projects, coordinating so many moving parts, scheduling different aspects of the engagement, managing processes – causes the most stress, right?
Project management tools like Trello or ClickUp help you tame the chaos that eventually always creeps into projects.
I’m mentioning two such tools here - Trello and ClickUp. That’s because they are the most popular solutions used by coaches. However, there are many similar solutions – Teamwork, Asana, Flow, and Monday.com, to name a few.
Important to note - Each project management tool offers different functionality and approach to project planning, task management, progress tracking, etc. You might need to review them to find a solution that matches the way you work.
APPOINTMENT SCHEDULING
#8. Trafft and #9. CozyCal
There’s no point in denying – Your coaching practice relies on meetings. It’s true, you no longer have to meet with clients in person, and you can replace many online meetings with asynchronous coaching. But you still have to schedule and manage appointments, and that’s where tools like Trafft or CozyCal come in handy.
These two tools stand out because they have been created with service businesses in mind. Because of that, they come packed with features to help you automate bookings in your coaching business, save time and prevent overbooking:
Appointment scheduling, follow-ups, reminders,
Administering your time around the meetings,
Resources booking,
The ability to collect payments for ad-hoc consulting calls and more.
Both tools allow you to embed their booking page on your website or share access to it through a dedicated shareable link to receive bookings anytime and from anywhere.
COACHING PROGRAMS MANAGEMENT/CLIENT ENGAGEMENT
#10. Nudge Coach
Nudge started as a personal habit-tracking app and, over time, grew into a powerful tool helping coaches create and manage coaching programs at scale.
But because of its original focus on habits, the platform’s creators still put a huge emphasis on accountability and goal tracking. As a result, Nudge lets you:
Set up and track client goals to keep them accountable
Build client input forms and habit trackers
Manage group coaching with social forums, monthly challenges, and more.
Communicate with clients and more.
Because of its focus on goal-setting and habits and HIPPA compliancy, Nudge is an ideal solution for health coaches and life coaches looking to improve their coaching program management.
#11. Quenza
Quenza helps you engage clients between sessions and ensure that they do what they should be doing to progress in their journey.
With Quenza, you can:
Create custom homework exercises and activities
Send clients additional materials (which the tool describes as microlearning)
Set up questionnaires to assess client progress
Publish onboarding intake forms
Evaluate client progress with feedback forms and more
Share inspirational quotes and videos
Visualize client results and more.
Quenza is a brainchild of seasoned psychologists and founders of the PositivePsychology.com community. As a result, its functionality is often geared more toward mental well-being coaches, health coaches, mindfulness coaches, or life coaches. That said, if you coach clients in other areas, you will still find many useful features in Quenza to engage clients and ensure their success.
And that’s it…
These nine apps will help you grow and scale your coaching business, improve client communication, deliver better coaching programs, and run your business more efficiently.
All that’s left is to try them all and pick the best option for your business.
Good luck!
