Understanding Coaching Clients: Pain Points, Client Success And Business Performance

by Daniel Groves, Guest Writer

As a coach, the most important skill you can master is understanding your clients. This post will help you understand your clients pain points and how you can turn that into more client and business success.

Knowing why they come to you, what they’re looking to achieve, and how your knowledge can help them reach their goals is vital to marketing your business and gaining those all-important clients.

But, identifying success and pain points isn’t always easy! To give you a ‘nudge’ in the right direction, we’ve delved deeper into the topic, looking at how you can identify what’s holding your clients back and help them overcome their hurdles. With these tips, you can become the coach your clients need. 

What Are Pain Points?

Pain points are a vital part of understanding your coaching clients. But what actually are they?

In simple terms, pain points are the key problems your clients have. They could be feelings, events, or actions that lead your client to:

• Continue negative behavior patterns

• Develop anxiety, depression, or other mental health problems

• Avoid facing the problems in their life

• Continue to be held back in life

Most of the time, your coaching clients will come to you because of their pain points, whether they know it or not. They want to take control of their life, job, or relationships, but their pain points are what’s holding them back.

Understanding Client Sucess

Alongside pain points is the idea of success. Your clients will have different ideas of what that means, though there will probably be overarching goals that remain prominent across your target market. 

It’s vital you understand what success means to the individual in front of you. Usually, this is the end goal they’re looking to head toward during your coaching sessions. They may also have smaller success points they’d like to reach on their way to their main goal which are just as important to identify.

For example, a coaching client may come to you to help them get a job. Their main idea of success is to be hired, but the targets they need to hit to get to that point include:

• Writing a CV

• Being accepted for a job interview

• Attending a job interview

Though smaller, these ideas of success are no less important. In fact, it’s these that you’ll end up working towards, breaking down the final goal into smaller tasks that are easier to track and manage. 

Why is Understanding Success and Pain Points Crucial?

There’s a lot you can do to ensure your coaching business stands out from the crowds and offers solutions to problems not yet solved for your target customer. 

From reputation management being one of the more powerful lead generation tools to creating a bespoke coaching app for your clients using Nudge. No matter what marketing approach you take, you need to know your audience first.

Clients want to feel understood before they’ve even made contact. Throughout your marketing messaging, you need to be showing that you understand their problems and sympathize with them so that they know they’ve found the right coach.

It’s also smart to pinpoint their idea of success in your marketing. You can then implement aspirational marketing, a technique that hooks clients in by offering them the life they want. 

Aside from gaining clients, a keen grasp of pain points and success will also improve your coaching sessions. Understanding problems that are specific to the individual you’re working with will create more targeted coaching sessions, tackling those hurdles to reach their end ambition. 

Get to Know Your Clients’ Pain and Success Points

Now you know more about pain points and client goals, it’s time to get to grips with how to identify them. Here’s some advice to help you get started.

Market Research

Start by conducting market research to learn more about general pain points in your niche.

Let’s say that you were creating a coaching company for people who are looking to start their own business. You should begin by looking at other coaches offering the same services. Write up a list of pain points and goals mentioned on their websites to get a better idea of what’s already on offer. 

 It’s then wise to ask people in your target audience what they would struggle with when building a business. This may identify problems that other coaches aren’t talking about and ensure you’re marketing your services correctly.

Use Your Experience

It’s likely that you have experience with the area of coaching you’re going into. Use this when identifying success and pain points. Your prior knowledge of your niche is invaluable, providing you with unique insights into your clients’ mindsets and what they’re going to need help with.

Ask the Right Questions

When in session with a client, ask them the right questions, including:

• What their goals are (both their larger ambition and smaller targets to get there)

• When they want to achieve their goals

• What’s stopping them from getting there

Be sympathetic when asking questions and ensure your client knows you understand them. Empathy is vital when coaching and can go a long way to creating trust between you and your client.

Identify Patterns

Patterns of behavior are key indicators of your client's pain points. For example, if you see that a client keeps stopping completely when they have too many tasks on their to-do list, feeling stressed and overwhelmed is clearly a pain point. A client may not always tell you outright what they struggle with, but by listening to their behavior you can often uncover what’s lurking beneath. 

How to Implement What You Learn

A keen ear for understanding success and pain points is a fantastic way to enhance business performance. Once you’ve identified general client pain points as well as how individual clients measure success, you can start implementing what you learn.

A great way to show understanding and create focus on these points is with a habits tracker. At Nudge, we’ve incorporated this into our wide range of features so that you can easily enhance accountability when creating your coaching app.

Allow clients to add small and large goals, easily track progress, and stay on track with their coaching lessons. When they next see you, you can review their progress in the app together to see what’s going well and what could be improved.

Final Words

Whether you’re starting a coaching business from scratch or improving existing performance, to achieve success you need to spend time understanding your clients.

Hopefully, this article will have given you the confidence to do just that! Remember to keep track of targets by building a handy coaching app, too, and harness the power of Nudge in your sessions.

---