One of the biggest mistakes that a business leadership coach can make is getting confused between application and benefit. If you are not truly clear about the difference, your business leadership coaching clients can miss the boat entirely. The result will can be costly in terms of blood, sweat, and tears.

Application vs. Benefit: What You Need To Know As A Business Leadership Coach

When your business clients are excited to share a new product that they have discovered, created, or wish to share to the world; they usually end up sharing the application of that product. A good friend of mine developed an iPhone App and it hit the coveted number one position on the charts for a day right before Christmas. After listening to him tell me all about it for several minutes, I finally had to interrupt and ask him what it did. Not in terms of the cool technology, but in terms of the benefits to his customers.
Is a business leadership coach immune to the same mistakes? Not really. Often coaches will tell me about the cool stuff that they want to share with the world. How their way of coaching will change their industry. But they forget that their world may not be ready for it. Just as Steve Jobs didn’t wait for customers to see the need for Apple’s products before they were developed, anyone who wants to be on the cutting edge can’t wait for the market to demand their products or services. By then it’s too late. Steve Jobs and his crew were masters a creating a need where there wasn’t one before. They did this by selling the benefits.

How To Deliver The Benefits In 3 Simple Steps

1. Develop an avatar: Even a business leadership coach can get so excited about telling a prospect what they can do, that they forget to spell out the benefits for their clients. Who is your client? Male or female? Age? Socioeconomic status? Details so strong that you could swear he lives next door to you.
2. What are the benefits people are willing to pay cash for: These benefits will be in terms of peoples’ greatest fears, frustrations, and desires.
3. Decide how will you apply business leadership coach tools in a way that delivers what people want and need.

Once you know the above you, or your clients, can develop a business and marketing plan that will accomplish the desired outcome. When you stay in the application mode, there is too big of a disconnect between what you have and what people want. Save the application for story time with others who appreciate the details of how the App works, and teach the rest of us how we can benefit from it.

Colette Seymann
JTS Advisors Designated Accountability Coach