Have you started collecting your coaching success stories yet? If you haven’t, you are missing out on a terrific tool for marketing your life coach business, for using in your sales conversations and for helping your life coaching clients. And in case you haven’t guessed, the best source for your personal coaching success stories is testimonials from people you have coached.

Get Testimonials From Everyone You Coach

For every coaching setting, whether complimentary sessions, individual sessions, workshops, whatever, write yourself a short script tailored to the situation, asking for a testimonial. Memorize it so it comes out naturally, and use it every time you’re in that setting. For instance, at the end of your complimentary coaching sessions you probably already have a script asking where your prospect got clarity or what was most significant for him in the call. You might ask what his next step is going to be and when is he going to take it. Whatever questions you normally use to clarify the value of the call to your prospect, ask him to put the answers in a testimonial. If your prospect got something from the call, he is one of your coaching success stories whether or not he enrolls in coaching with you. If you coach him in an ongoing relationship, you will have other opportunities to ask. But whether or not, you can still request a testimonial based on your complimentary session and you can start building your collection of coaching success stories.

Coaching Success Stories Need A Format

Like all good stories, good coaching success stories need a beginning, a middle, and an end. So in your testimonials you also want a progression in the story, and this is something worth explaining when someone accedes to your request. Ideally, you will have a sort of executive summary of what you want in the testimonial. Obviously I don’t mean content, because everyone will have her own story. But to be most effective, the testimonial needs the person’s name, where she was in her personal life or her business before the coaching; how, specifically, the coaching helped; and what, specifically, was the outcome–what changed. You want the most specific, measurable, external information you can get–“I had no paying clients before coaching with X, and I got 4 in the first month of coaching.” Or maybe “I doubled my income in the first six months of coaching.” You get the idea! Those details are what make coaching success stories credible and exciting to prospects, and encouraging to clients. You aren’t looking for someone just to say what a great guy you are and how much fun they had with you.

Turning Testimonials Into Coaching Success Stories

Testimonials come in a variety of forms. You might have some written and sent to you. You might record them digitally on a flip-cam after a group training or seminar. You might have an audio recording at the end of a telephone coaching session. Whatever the form and however else you use the quote or recording, you can take the story and write it out as a script. Title it so you know what the story is about, memorize it, and file it in your coaching success stories folder so you can find it when you want to.

If you don’t routinely ask for testimonials, you should. They and the stories that come from them can be valuable for your clients, for your business and for you.

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “Life Coach Salary Secrets” video toolkit. Just go HERE now to get your Life Coach Salary Secrets.

Dorine G Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach