5 Surprising Ways that Business Coaching Conversations Produce Revenue Growth

As a business coach, I am often asked whether business coaching is essential in today’s business environment. After all, don’t companies have enough modern tools at their disposal to determine how to grow revenue on their own?

Here’s my answer. Coaching is essential. Not just in business, but in many walks of life. Just look at sports. Do you see sports teams ditching coaches and managers just because the players have fancy analytics and technology at their disposal? No. An informed, outside perspective is still critical to help evaluate what’s happening and make decisions that lead to positive outcomes.

You might be surprised by how effective business coaching is to help your company find new, collaborative ways to generate revenue. It starts with a simple coaching conversation to unlock hidden problems in your business approach, help you think differently about engaging with clients, and seeing the competitive landscape differently.

How Can A Coaching Conversation Support Revenue Growth?

Consider these five surprising ways that a coaching conversation can help your business achieve growth potential.

1. What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?

One of the primary conversations I have with clients is about finding the real problem to solve when engaging with a client. For service providers, there is a temptation to depend on the contents of the RFP, but the RFP typically does not tell the full story of what the owner is trying to address.

As a service provider, you may miss the real opportunity to solve a larger problem in your client’s company because you’re too busy responding to the exact specs in the RFP. My goal during these conversations is to help service providers stop, look, and listen:

• Stop trying to push your product and service.
• Look for the real problem hidden beneath the RFP.
• Listen for clues on how to solve the larger problem.

Taking this approach will allow you to develop a more comprehensive solution. You will be better positioned to grab larger pieces of scope or more pieces of project scope, leading to revenue growth.

2. Are You Siloed or Thinking Collaboratively?

Distrust is prevalent in today’s business environment. As a result, many companies have taken a silo approach of intentionally creating a working environment where owners, service providers, and project service delivery partners (P/SDPs) only communicate on a need-to-know basis.

Don’t fall for this thinking! Participating in this type of environment is a sure-fire way for your company to plateau. The answer is a more collaborative approach to help all involved parties make better decisions and accelerate project delivery. A coaching conversation can help you achieve one of two things in this area:

• Find smart clients to engage with that are committed to collaboration.
• Find better ways to communicate with existing clients that need to brought along from siloed thinking to collaborative thinking.

Once you start working differently with these clients, you will find more revenue opportunities through meaningful partnerships where everyone is seeking mutually-beneficial success.

3. Where Are You Focused?

The traditional approach of responding to RFPs turns into a numbers game. Service providers respond to as many RFPs as possible trying to win work, while owners take as many bids as possible — even poor bids — hoping to start a race to the bottom on price.

No one wins in this game. If you’re playing this game, it’s time for a coaching conversation about narrowing your focus. Don’t focus so broadly that you lose focus on the right activities in the process. Both sides need to be able to make deliberate decisions about how to spend valuable time, energy, and resources making sure projects are supported in a collaborative manner.

• Service providers: Stop chasing bids. Set priorities. Cut the rest to focus on projects where your solution can be leveraged to solve larger problems.
• Owners: Stop pursuing firms that don’t fit. Create a short list. Pursue firms that can move scope along faster in a collaborative way.

4. How Do You See the Working Relationship?

Transactional thinking is like an insidious disease. It will eat away at your purpose, mission, and revenue. Unfortunately, many companies are locked into a transactional approach to engaging with clients.

Instead of service providers just selling to an owner or owners just looking to close deals, there is a better way to conduct business. A coaching conversation can help you develop the right mindset about building authentic connection with clients and developing the right mindset about working together to solve larger problems with better solutions. Why authentic connection?

• Authentic connection comes from empathy and engagement.
• Avoid transactional thinking seeing your client as just another company.
• Adapt to your client’s needs to build relationships that will grow; not stagnate.

5. Are You Settling for the Plateau?

If you want to achieve growth, you can’t settle for plateaus. Sure, plateaus are comfortable and inviting. You reach a certain revenue level and everyone seems comfortable with the way things are being done.

But, what happens when markets change, new competitors enter the market, or a global pandemic forces you to change course? Then, what? A coaching conversation can help you identify the next best decision as you recalibrate and identify course corrections.

• Avoid operational ruts that are common at the plateau.
• Keep adapting your behavior and mindset for each new challenge.
• See how you reap the benefits of revenue growth.

Embrace a New Way of Thinking

Changing the way that you do business and engage with clients may seem like a lot of effort, but it’s worth it to produce the desired revenue growth. It starts with a shift in mindset, followed by the introduction of new behaviors and ways of thinking.

A business coach can help you develop the best approach for your company. Let’s start with a coaching conversation about your current challenges and the opportunities that are readily available in your market.

Reach out to our company today to get started. I am confident that we can identify more ways to help you achieve revenue growth!