A Side-by-Side Coaching Software Platform Review for 2023
This popular article reviewing online coaching software platforms is revised every year and was again significantly updated for 2023. We have changed the side-by-side comparison features and updated them. We also added a new provider to the list.
You’ll find an overview of the basics we are assessing at the beginning of this article where we explain each feature and what you should pay attention to when scouting for a provider. Further down, you’ll find a summary of highlights for each online coaching software platform. You can use the table of contents to navigate quickly to a section of your interest by clicking on the headlines.
Table of Contents
· TL;DR — What’s New In 2023
· The Basics You Should Know About Coaching Software Platforms
· 15 Things You Need to Know in 2023 Before Buying Coaching Software
· A Side-by-Side Review of 13 Coaching Software Platforms
∘ CoachAccountable
∘ Coaching Loft
∘ Paperbell
∘ Delenta
∘ Coaching.com
∘ LifeCoachHub
∘ Simply.Coach
∘ Quenza
∘ Coaches Console
∘ Coaching Lobby
∘ My Coach Office (MCO)
∘ Coach Simple
∘ Satori
· BONUS: Best Business Tools for Online Coaches
· Coaching Software Platforms — Our Verdict
TL;DR — What’s New In 2023
Click here to jump directly to the side-by-side comparison table below for coaching-related software.
We have run these comparisons for four years in a row now. This article covers the latest developments and has been significantly updated. The most notable changes our long-term audience will recognize are:
- Changes to the criteria or features reviewed in our comparison table intend to match the most commonly requested and offered features on the market.
- This year, we have added these features to our comparison: native videoconferencing, chat or on-platform communication, course creation, program creation, creating forms and worksheets, engagement automation, custom branding (white labeling), and goal and task creation.
- Prices were updated where they had changed. It was surprising to see how prices did not change much, in some cases not at all, despite the economic changes.
- We have noticed an increase in quality and competition, with new entrants crowding the market and existing providers aggressively improving their feature set.
- Coaching.com (formerly CoachLogix) wasn’t getting our attention until their re-launch and merger with WBECS. They were added to the side-by-side comparison of coaching software platforms. You can also find an in-depth review in this Honest Coaching.com Platform Review (With A Surprise) article.
The Basics You Should Know About Coaching Software Platforms
Being a life coach requires you to have a lot of knowledge in many different areas. You will be asked to help your clients with their jobs and careers, their relationships, and major life decisions.
Your clients will be facing any number of obstacles that you will be required to help them identify and then move past. You also need to be able to identify their unique skills and abilities and get them to embrace them.
But, as life moves on, we are constantly facing new challenges. The pandemic has been a perfect example. People all over the world had to adjust their lives to cope with change.
Many people had to change their jobs and abandon their dreams. More people started turning to life coaches to discover new options for making it all work in an entirely new way. The coaching industry had already been growing steadily, but this change sparked growth to new levels as even enterprises caught on and purchased coaching for their employees. What was once an exclusive service afforded by a small group of people became mainstream.
To run efficient coaching operations, coaches need to be organized, with systems in place to handle demand without disproportionate administrative effort. You’re in the business of coaching, after all, not in the business of indulging in administrative overload.
That’s why a coaching software platform is the best way for you to keep track of it all. But not all coaching platforms are the same, so you may have to review a few. Most platforms offer a free trial so you can test it out and see if it will work with your style and methods of coaching.
Coaching platforms vary in price, features, and customer service levels, so examine closely what you are getting for the price. Before you sign up for any coaching platform, create a list of your must-haves and contrast it with the features you can live without. This will help you review and compare apples-to-apples and speed up your decision-making process.
A Word About Multi-Sided Coaching Platforms (A.K.A. Marketplaces)
Some of these platforms allow you to showcase your services to find clients or help clients to find you. There are multi-sided platforms (“multi” because they bring multiple parties together: coach and client) that do just that. They help two parties find each other. Those types of multi-sided platforms do not provide additional features to run your coaching operations, such as invoicing or hosting and sharing of courses or worksheets and session notes.
A select few multi-sided platforms provide both: a way to generate leads through their “directory” and a way to manage your clients. Examples are in this article on “Where To Get Coaching Leads Without A Lot Of Marketing” and if you check out our deals page, you may find a promotion code or special offer from one of these companies.
15 Things You Need to Know in 2023 Before Buying Coaching Software
Many of the online coaching platforms offer the same basic features, and some provide a bit more or a bit less in their free or lower-priced subscription plans. You will find some of the features very helpful, some to make little difference.
Why that matters?
Well, we recommend that you create your own checklist of features you absolutely must have to run your coaching practice efficiently and rank it against the nice-to-have features. Features aside, you should also rank the importance of expectations you may have regarding server location (more under point 2 below), customer service levels, and user interface.
For example, a coaching software platform you like may have all you want but has unreliable service during your testing. Would you still sign up? Or, say, you find one that has the features you want but doesn’t look as “polished” in its design but has reliable service and customer support. Would you sign up?
Let’s take a look at some of the features you should consider.
1. Content Delivery Platform
If you have content to share with your clients, you want that to go as smoothly as possible. This may include worksheets, images, videos, templates, and so forth. Customers may want to share content with you or a group, as well.
It helps to have a coaching software platform that allows you to store such things in one place.
What to look for:
- Does the platform allow you to enable access levels of content for individual clients and/or groups?
- What types of content are you permitted to upload?
- Are you limited in the amount of content you can store in your account?
- Can you easily organize your content into folders?
- Bonus: Does the provider offer free content or templates (for example: free starter packages for career coaches) to speed up the setup of your business launch?
2. Share and Store Legal Documents And Sensitive Content
When you are in communication with your clients, you often have to share contracts, worksheets, and any other content you have created for your clients.
Trying to communicate all of that via email and store the files manually, you are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to save time. It is very helpful to have everything concerning a client in one place.
What to look for:
- How does the coaching software platform secure your data? How often is your data undergoing backup?
- Does the provider offer online signature capturing in your coaching agreements? This would save you time and money you’d otherwise spend on integrating a service such as DocuSign, HelloSign, etc.
- Where is your information stored? Does the coaching software platform provider’s country honor data privacy laws?
- Where are the provider’s server locations? As you are testing, do you experience a lot of delays or quick page load, for example?
4. Invoicing and Payment Processing
Payment processing allows you to collect payments, whereas invoicing solutions merely send out the invoice for your services or products. It makes your life much easier if you can do both at once.
Most of you have used a separate tool for invoicing in the past. Payment processors like Square have come a long way to help with invoicing and even scheduling appointments, but then all my client records still live in separate places.
A note on compliance:
PCI compliance is a mandatory standard required for the safety of credit card processing merchants (you). It protects your client’s payment information and is standard with integrated providers such as Stripe, Square, or Paypal.
If you are using a coaching software platform provider that integrates with these payment processors, you’re all set. If your coaching tool provider offers its payment processing solution, you want to look for PCI compliance as you must ensure it through your chosen partners.
What to look for:
- What payment provider options are offered? Is your favorite payment processor covered?
- Does the provider collect any additional fees on top of the fees you pay for the payment processor?
- Can you create subscriptions for your clients?
- Can you offer payment plans?
- Are you able to create a payment and invoicing automation as soon as a mentee or coachee decides to sign up for your coaching program?
5. In-app Session Notes
You probably write some notes during a coaching session. It helps you to see patterns, keeps you focused and listening, and uses the same verbiage the client uses. You can use your notes to mark important comments or ideas and keep track of actions the customer took away from the call or resources you had agreed to share with the client.
Keeping all your notes in one place and connected to each specific client helps keep you better organized and speeds things up considerably because you don’t need to dig around for the right folder on your computer. You want to be able to access past notes right away while you are in session without being distracted.
What to look for:
- Can you create session notes?
- Do you have a rich-text editor (allowing you to format text by adding bullet points, headlines, bold font, etc.)?
- Can you elect to share notes with clients?
- Can you add notes to a shared document or other content?
6. Goal Setting & Progress Tracking
How will you and your client track progress toward their goals? How do you measure from week to week or month to month that your coaching together has moved the needle in the right direction?
This is where goal-setting and progress-tracking features come in handy. They provide a checkpoint and accountability, but also a way to determine whether you need to dig deeper to remove obstacles standing in the way.
What to look for:
- Can both you and your client create, view, and edit goals?
- Can progress be measured? How are results or current status displayed?
7. Scheduling
This booking tool helps with eliminating the back-and-forth to coordinate a time to meet and always needing to recheck your schedules. This way, you connect your calendar(s) and can even create standard meeting types with templates and then share the link with others.
They click on it and see your availability (you can block time) and schedule themselves at their convenience. Calendly even allows for payment collection, if you want to charge per single event.
8. Customer Communication
Does the coaching platform give you the opportunity to communicate with clients directly on the platform? This can be a substantial time-saver and helps to keep information neatly collected in one place: the client record or account inside your platform.
Many online coaching software providers offer not only a discussion board or chat feature, but also allow commenting on specific documents to keep the communication tied to the context.
9. Courses & Programs
Many of the online coaching software platform vendors now include a course feature. Before you compare this feature offered by a coaching software platform with that of a full-fledged course platform, ask yourself: What do you want to achieve with courses? Where in your coaching process do courses come into play? What do you want to offer your clients through courses?
Many coaching platforms also offer the creation of “programs.” This is sometimes done via the courses feature to help clients follow a specific journey in parallel to coaching to achieve their goal in a mix of education and coaching.
10. Mobile Accessibility
This is often overlooked. Most of our world is still applying a web-first or desktop-first mentality while the world IRL has begun to view the availability of websites on mobile devices as a new standard. Open your email on your phone and click on links that haven’t been optimized for mobile and you quickly get the point.
Coaching software providers who understand the shift toward increasing mobile use are providing one of two options to coaches:
- A coaching app you and your clients can download and install from an App store, or
- A “web app”, meaning a mobile-optimized version of their online portal that does not require an app download.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages. What matters is that the offer of either one of these designed-for-mobile-access solutions improves your customer’s experience.
11. Brand Customization (White Labeling)
Most online coaching software has always allowed custom branding or white labeling which is why we did not feel compelled to call it out. However, this is a popular feature, and many platform vendors in our review
12. Videoconferencing
In a world used to Zoom, we may not think about this right away, but with so many subscription-based services, you can become quite fatigued from it all. These bills all add up. What if you could simply use the native, built-in videoconferencing feature a coaching software platform provides instead of a separate subscription? Only a few providers offer this option.
If native videoconferencing is not included with your preferred provider, look out for one-click integrations with your favorite videoconferencing tool. Ideally, the coaching software platform allows you to change your settings so that upon client scheduling, the videoconferencing dial-in information is automatically added to your invitation.
13. Group Coaching
Do you plan to scale your coaching to serve a wider audience through group coaching? Where do you plan to host the content for this group? How do you plan to manage discussions? Of course, you could try to leverage a free platform like Facebook, but you may find that some clients categorically reject the social media giant for highly personal interactions.
Using the feature within a coaching software platform also has the advantage that your uploaded materials are already in place and only need to be made accessible to a specific group. This would also allow you to keep conversations in a single place.
14. Information Security
The coaching industry is not tied to standards at the level of, i.e., healthcare with its HIPAA regulations. However, you still need to be aware of the safety of your customer information and your customer database being hosted well.
You want to make sure the information is encrypted at least with standard SSL encryption. Also, consider where the tool is hosted. Different countries have different regulations for data privacy and security, and you need to be compliant.
15. ICF Reporting
Of course, you can track all your coaching hours required for ICF certification in a spreadsheet. But why not generate this automatically with the coaching hours from your clients and go hiking with your friends instead?
Depending on your situation, these tools will prove to be more or less useful, but just because you don’t need them now doesn’t mean you never will. If you are using a free trial, try out all the features so you are better informed moving forward.
But now to the apples-to-apples comparison and individual review of coaching software platforms.
A Side-by-Side Review of 13 Coaching Software Platforms
All coaching software platform providers listed below are randomly placed, this is not a ranking.
Make a list of items you value the most and use the review to help you down-select a provider that suits your unique needs.
Some coaching software platform providers on this list are affiliates, however, none of the vendors listed anywhere in this article could influence their reviews. Opinions are my own and a contribution as a volunteer for Coachilly.com.
If you’d like to buy us a coffee for this effort, we’ll get warm and fuzzy feelings of gratitude and share a free assessment tool with you. If you’ll leave a comment about how this helped you, that’ll be rewarding, too.
CoachAccountable
While the website may look a little dated, this coaching software platform covers all of your coaching needs and offers supreme customer service. If there’s any feature you request, you can expect it to be taken seriously and in many cases implemented shortly thereafter, because CoachAccountable is quick to listen to customers and is constantly adding and improving things!
CoachAccountable has been around for many years and provides robust service and quality that makes organizations like Amazon, L’Oréal, Pepsi, Yale, and Standford University work with them (Enterprise account level). Looks like a safe bet to us!
Since we first began testing this coaching software platform in Q4/2018, it has added a ton of new features and made steady improvements. One remarkable example was our request for ICF report generation, a feature that John Larson, the founder, added within a matter of hours.
Highlights
- Starts at: $20/mo.
- Great features, intuitive interface
- Best client interaction and progress tracking
- Visually appealing user interface
- Customizable in very little time with white-labeling (make it look like your brand)
- Outstanding customer service
Coaching Loft
Coaching Loft has increased their features since our last review. This coaching software platform is highly rated on Capterra and has won awards. If I didn’t already use a great platform, this would be my next pick. If you’re looking for a great all-rounder that is decently priced, consider Coaching Loft.
Coaching Loft impresses as a great all-in-one coaching software platform. You can take session notes, send invoices, track client progress, schedule appointments, and more all from one single place. The interface is neatly organized and pleasant to the eye.
Highlights
- Starts at: Free, limited version
- Great user interface
- Reasonable pricing
- An impressive list of features that keeps growing
- A list of 500+ coaching questions
Paperbell
Paperbell strikes with a beautiful user interface, artfully designed. The coaching software platform offers an easy setup of packages for clients and fair pricing. They are designed solely for the unique work done by coaches and consultants. We’ve also noticed that Paperbell has partnered with ICF (the International Coach Federation). So, if you are an ICF member, look out for special benefits.
Highlights
- Starts at: $40/mo.
- Easy setup of landing pages, especially attractive to new coaches who may not need to set up a full website and can simply use Paperbell to create a web presence where clients can book their services
- Integrates well with other companies like Stripe, Paypal, Zoom, etc.
- Available in different currencies
- Secure via SSL
Delenta
Delenta impresses with its great user interface and the simplicity it provides. Since our last review, this coaching software platform has added a lot of new features like courses and a mobile app. Delenta wants to be your one-stop shop for coaching: you get to market yourself and run your coaching operations at the same time.
Delenta’s software allows you to schedule appointments, invoice clients, exchange documents, and so forth. Also useful are the analytics Delenta provides to help you make decisions that help you grow your coaching practice.
Delenta became an official ICF partner — so if you are an ICF member, you get access to added benefits. Get more in-depth information and a replay of the Delenta live demo here.
Highlights
- Starts at: $29/mo.
- Attractive user interface
- An impressive set of features that leave no want
- Business analytics not seen anywhere else
- Courses
- Mobile App
Coaching.com
Coaching.com (previously: CoachLogix) positions itself strongly in the coaching market by offering three attractive coaching solutions with its all-in-one platform:
- A coaching software platform that allows coaches, enterprises, and coaching companies to cover all aspects of their coaching operations. This includes calendar management and allowing clients to self-schedule sessions, invoicing, sharing content, and billing.
- A coaching marketplace that allows coaches to be found by clients and sell their offerings. Professional coaches can add their coach bios, offer their coaching engagements and give those looking for coaching an opportunity to easily schedule a first consultation with you.
- Continued education via WBECS, a yearly coaching summit with high-profile speakers.
Like all of the providers we have researched since 2018, Coaching.com is a cloud-based platform. It does not require installation and is accessible from any device with access to a standard browser. You can view the honest, in-depth review of Coaching.com in this article.
Highlights
- Starts at: $0/mo.
- Impressive design
- Programs were easy to set up
- Customer support was a big hassle, perhaps due to the time zone difference
- Their marketplace can help coaches to attract leads
- Easy to set up
LifeCoachHub
Even before we reviewed this coaching software platform, we liked that it was more than a that. LifeCoachHub also works as a marketplace where coaches find clients and can market their expertise. LifeCoachHub has been around for a long time and was one of the first platforms to combine marketplace, web profile and coaching operations software in a single place.
For beginning coaches, this should be a great place to start as it allows you to work with clients, and promote your services in one place. If you don’t have a website yet and need a simple solution to get you started, this place is for you.
Highlights
- Starts at: $17/mo.
- Integrated with a coach directory
- Easy website creation, a one-stop-shop solution
- Excellent online assessment forms in addition to the content library
- Progress tracking and client information is somewhat cluttered
Simply.Coach
Simply.Coach is a coaching software platform based in India. It helps coaches to automate repeatable tasks so they can focus more on coaching and less on administration. A good example of this is their “nudge” feature, which stood out during a live demo we recorded during our last review.
Nudges help coaches to predefine how often, and through which channel a coaching client should get reminded. In addition, they provide an attractive library of commonly used worksheets and journeys, called “pathways,” which coaches can also create on their own.
Highlights
- Starts at: $9/mo. (individual coaches)
- Intuitive, simple user interface
- Attractive pricing model
- A unique approach to a coaching library (own + partner content to share with your clients)
Quenza
Quenza made an impression with its interface and made-for-you approach: Quenza put a lot of effort into helping coaches to engage clients by helping to automate repetitive processes. In addition, this coaching software platform provides an attractive library of commonly used worksheets and journeys, called “pathways,” which coaches can also create on their own.
Highlights
- Starts at: $49/mo.
- Attractive user interface
- An impressive set of features that leave no want
- Worksheets and pre-built customer journeys not seen anywhere else
- Higher starting price, but fair to say that it’s also providing a ready-to-go coaching toolbox for newbies
Coaches Console
Coaches Console’s platform is one of the coaching software platforms that has been around for a long time and has a lot to offer. All of the criteria we’ve compared against are covered one way or another.
You can check it out for free to see what has improved or if you like the platform. Some people may like it more than other platforms. Use the free trial to see what you think.
Highlights
- Starts at: $147/mo.
- Comprehensive coaching software platform
- Great features
- Outdated design
- Highest price point
Coaching Lobby
A coaching software platform designed for coaches where clients can share documents, and add and comment on notes or documents, and most tasks are made easy with Coaching Lobby. The same features are all available for one set fee, which makes it nice as you are not pressured into buying a higher-priced subscription that you may not need.
The price is right, you have no limit on clients, and you can try it out for free for an entire month. If you are just starting out or trying to adhere to a tight budget, it might be the best choice for you.
Highlights
- Starts at: $25/mo.
- Easy brand customization (white labeling)
- A lot of features
- The provider’s website did not include a video at the time of testing
- Not entirely intuitive coaching software platform
- One flat rate
My Coach Office (MCO)
My Coach Office (MCO) helps you manage your coaching business from one coaching software platform. It is your all-in-one solution to enable you to deliver an amazing customer experience for every client without being a slave to administration.
You can use this coaching software platform on all your devices so you can run your business from anywhere. It offers one-on-one coaching or group coaching, so you can easily switch back and forth when needed.
Highlights
- Starts at: $24/mo.
- Sleek interface
- Highly visual progress-tracking
- Website updates are from 2016/2017 — which prompts the question of whether the software is actively maintained
- Only one-way document upload by the coach is mentioned in the feature description
- No information on information security is available
- Beyond Coaching Software
Coach Simple
Coach Simple’s coaching modules are customizable to match your process and coaching style. They say they are enterprise-ready for scalability while simple to use for your team, clients, admins, and coaches. You can customize your programs with this coaching software platform.
Highlights
- Starts at: $99/mo.
- Sleek interface
- Highly visual progress-tracking
- Website updates are from 2016/2017 — which prompts the question of whether the software is actively maintained
- Only one-way document upload by the coach is mentioned in the feature description
- No information on information security is available
Satori
Satori has a lot of great features, including group coaching, personalized proposals, and signature coaching packages, where you can offer multi-session packages with agreements, intake forms, check-ins, and progress tracking.
Customize the theme of your booking pages and client login area to match your brand; and enjoy a beautiful, branded booking experience on any device.
One of the bonus features of this coaching software platform was the automatic follow-up. Satori follows up with your clients to remind them to schedule sessions, check in on progress, and provide reviews of their experience when closing out their program.
Highlights
- Starts at: $23/mo.
- One-touch client enrollment
- Clean and simple interface
- Custom branding made easy
- Optimized for use on any device
- Calendar integrations and timezone conversion
- Integrates with Apple Calendar
BONUS: Best Business Tools for Online Coaches
There is plenty to do with your coaching business, and you can manage a lot by yourself these days with the right tools. Chances are you are running all your promotions, marketing, and coping with all your social media until you can afford to hire support.
There are other things you can do to make your business run smoother and free up more time to spend with your clients and running the business and staying organized.
Many of these business tools have won awards and some are available at no or very low cost. Some may even integrate with your preferred coaching software platform — either directly or via a Zapier integration.
Creating A Website or Landing Page
A website is the best place to let people know where you are and include all the information your clients and potential clients need to know. You can connect it to all your other social media and newsletters.
The landing page acts as a guide for people when they come to your website. It should be easy to read and everything should be easy to find. People won’t hang around very long if it’s too complicated.
A great place to start is Carrd. You can get whatever you need for a great price. Keep it informative and simple. Make sure people know how to contact you as soon as they get to your page and they can easily see where all the information will be.
Register Your Company
Registering your company has many benefits. It makes you look more legit than just calling your business by your name. There are also issues around filing income taxes, as you will see much better outcomes as a business rather than filing it as a personal file.
In case you do want to incorporate your business and separate your personal assets from your business, you could try Northwest Registered Agent. They are a legal firm supporting small businesses. Small, affordable fees provide you with business registration services and you will get reminders come tax time to file accurate documents with one or two clicks. Your clients will also see you as more professional and trustworthy.
Create a Logo
A logo is more than just a pretty design to put on your stationery. It helps you create your brand and your business. Looka is a great site that requires no design skills at all.
Looka combines your design preferences with AI to make beautiful logos you’ll love. Once you have your logo, use the Brand Kit to access 300+ branded templates, create custom marketing assets, build a website, and launch your business.
You want your logo to become recognizable and you want people to think of you when they see it. Find something that will be clean, professional, and fit your style of coaching.
Send Newsletters
Sending a newsletter is a great way to keep your clients informed and relay any information you want them to know. Try using Sendfox. There is a one-time fee and you have access to all the tools you need.
This site has everything you need except the high price that many other similar sites charge. You have access to unlimited automation, scheduled emails, and plenty of smart features.
Banners and Social Media
Setting up social media posts and banners for your Facebook and website background don’t need to be complicated. You can use Canva to find all the tools you need.
It’s either free or a low monthly fee at the price of a coffee. In turn, you get an ever-growing design tool to create websites, flyers, schedule social media posts (and design them all in one place), design logos, profile banners, and so much more. Unlimited designs, patterns, colors, and a large photo library are included — the selection differs for free versus paid accounts (worth the money in our view).
Create a Professional Email Signature
If you aren’t using a signature on all your email correspondence, why not? Even people without a business use them as they are very easy to do. You can make one using your own features on your email or use one that looks much more professional.
You can use Email Badge and get the polished professional look you want. Style your email without the help of a designer and follow simple steps to add the signature to your Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and other accounts.
Host Webinars
One thing everyone has embraced over the past few years is teleconferencing, online meetings, and video chats. Even grandma has learned how to use her video chat.
Hosting a one-on-one session or a group session is easy. However, not all conferencing sites are the same. If your client is in a different country, they may be charged or have difficulty connecting.
But if you want to capture a larger audience for a conference, coaching session, or an information or teaching session, then try Active Webinar. It is available at a one-time cost.
Sure there are free sites, but some of them don’t work as well as they could. Zoom just had a lot of really bad press because of its encryption. They are surely working hard on fixing that.
In any case, Zoom charges a monthly fee and you’ll pay extra for extra functionality. Active Webinar includes all that in your upfront price. Make sure you check with each provider if they integrate with your coaching software provider. Zoom integrates with a lot of cloud software vendors, so it’s worth looking into it.
Scheduling and Booking
Scheduling meetings or coaching sessions can be a hassle. If you have clients in different time zones or who work various shifts, it can be a lot of back and forth to try and book something.
You likely have heard of Calendly or MeetFox. These tools allow you to let clients book themselves on your calendar during times you have set aside as available for them. This is extremely convenient as it avoids the constant back-and-forth email exchange to find a suitable time on your calendars.
One better option is Book Like a Boss (BLAB) is a hybrid of ultra-simple landing page design paired with a booking tool. You can even collect payments directly through the page by connecting to your payment account. You can try it for two weeks for free to see if you like it.
Manage Sales Leads
Sales leads are what keep you and your business afloat. How do you manage an ever-growing list of potential clients? You had all these conversations and your post-it note collection will soon become unmanageable. What do you do once you have 500 people in your sticky note list to follow up with?
You do the same thing you are doing now: you keep them organized with a sales funnel and reminders to follow up. Start this practice early to let it become a good habit. To manage your leads, try Hubspot. It’s a huge time saver, includes a ton of features with the free version that you don’t want to miss. And Hubspot integrates with a lot of other tools.
Hubspot has a mobile app, too. Think of it as your coaching phone book for current and future customers. Hubspot also allows you to connect to your email (so you can track interactions you’ve had) and other services.
Check if Hubspot has an agreement with your preferred coaching software provider. If they don’t you can use tools like Zapier to link your data from your coaching platform to Hubspot.
You can establish a link with Zapier where your Hubspot CRM customer database is updated as soon as you create a new customer contact, e.g. in CoachAccountable and vice versa. It saves a ton of time and works beautifully.
Accounting
Your coaching software platform may provide what you need for billing and invoicing, but you still need to track your expenses and do some accounting to be ready during tax season to file your income taxes. One of the most popular and easiest accounting sites is Quickbooks Online.
Chances are you have heard of Quickbooks, as it is one of the most popular accounting sites there is. It’s ideal for small businesses and can help you save a lot of money throughout the year and help you with deductions.
It is a low-cost account for the self-employed. It even lets you add your accountant if you want one to look over your records in the future or need help with your tax return. QBO also has a mobile app to keep track of your bills on the go. The app can help you to track mileage driven to your clients and deduct it from your tax bill, which is extremely helpful.
Social Media Marketing
Not a coaching tool but still a very useful one. Planning to post all your social media content is a lot of work. Many of these platforms offer a lot but don’t always deliver.
Missinglettr does make promises and keeps them. If you have your content ready you can pre-set them to be posted on most sites. Missinglettr allows you to pre-set content to be posted for up to a year ahead.
Assuming you have the content, of course. Many things will change throughout the year but there will be items you can plan to post and they will just be there for your clients.
You need to get the attention of your future clients and Missinglettr does an outstanding job helping you to do that. Missinglettr will save you a ton of time and money and improve your content engagement rate and lead more people to visit your website.
Coaching Software Platforms — Our Verdict
Overall, we liked the platforms that provided the best customer sevice during our testing (CoachAccountable) and those that offer a combination of marketplace and operations tool (LifeCoachHub and Coaching.com). Next in line are tools that are incredibly well designed for visual appeal — which includes many of the above and we especially liked Delenta, Quenza and Satori in that category.
In the end, your business demands and taste buds call the shots. That said, we recommend that when you are looking through these coaching software platform providers, have your personal and very specific list of things you need help with in a checklist. There are going to be things in your everyday work that take up too much time or irritate you. Look for a coaching software platform that can ease your work while impressing your clients.
Most coaching software platforms offer a free trial so take advantage of that so you have a better understanding of how they work and how they will work for you.
Try these coaching software platforms with a test client so you understand how the platform works on both ends (coach and client). You can use a second email address to play the test client yourself. Some platforms give you a 30-day trial period. Make good use of it by planning your test cases. Simply put together a list of things you need to try, e.g. customers creating an appointment. A list like that will help you test in a matter of a few hours on most platforms.
This article hopefully gave you a good start to narrow down your choices. You likely won’t need every feature we have examined in 2023 but that’s quite common with any software. Ultimately, coaching software platforms are all about making your work easier. If they don’t do that, then choose something else.
Let us know what tools you use and connect with us on LinkedIn!
