7 Online Business Coaching Tools You Should Be Using (2023)
Updated: Feb 1
What if I could tell you that you’re likely working harder, not smarter for your business coaching clients? It might seem counterintuitive that we, as business coaches, spend so much time guiding our clients to easier solutions for their business, but oftentimes neglect our own. However, there are solutions out there that are either made precisely for our business or can be easily adapted.
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As a business coach myself, I want to offer some special, direct perspective about the 7 online business coaching tools that you should be using in 2021.
I would hazard a guess that you’ve given your clients some variation of the following advice: ‘If there’s one area of life you don’t want to feel frustrated by, it’s running your business. You should be able to know where you’ve been and where you are going. But in order to get there, sometimes you need help.’ That might even be your primary sales pitch to a potential client. Business coaches provide solutions to business problems, by the very nature of our jobs.
I have yet to meet a coach that hasn’t felt the irony of our job in some way or another. Spending our days making client’s lives easier, at the cost of our own. This is precisely where business coaching tools come into play. The tools that I will lay out for you today will empower you to provide actionable insights to your clients while also making your job significantly more efficient.
Intrigued? Just dying to sarcastically ask “what kind of business coaching tools should I be using?” Our lot is a know-it-all bunch so I’m sure there’s some skepticism hiding in there… but fear not!
Here are 7 of the best business coaching tools you should be using in 2021.
One note before we dive in: Each tool has varying degrees of usefulness for both the coach and the clients. For each of the tools below we are going to break down, to some degree, the benefits to each in order to aid your decisions on how best each tool will work for your business coaches.
Financial Tools
The business coaching tools with the most client facing impact are, of course, the ones involving finances. Most, but not all, KPI’s stem from financial metrics and therefore we spend an exorbitant amount of time in presentations and meetings with our clients on the subject. Hence, our prominent placement on our business coaching tools list.
1. The Budgeting Tool
Before we ever bring on a new client we ALWAYS ask them if they have a budget. Their answer is a solid baseline for what type of financial related analysis you will have to provide as well as their ability to pay your invoice. Introducing a budget tool will help you get the initial data you need to create an operational budget for your clients. This will help you more easily forecast future profits based on previous income and expenses and upcoming expected opportunities.
Best Budgeting Tools:
Excel (or similar): The most common and easiest to start with is a simple spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel is a great starting point when used correctly.
It is critically important that you utilize a trusted or highly rated excel template designed for budgeting correctly. Budgeting, in general, is a simple process, but as with anything else excel, it can be easy to misplace data in the wrong cell etc. which could become disastrous for a client.
Quickbooks (or similar): The great thing about the accounting software tools is that they likely have a budget tool built in.
However, depending on the size of the business and whether or not they have outsourced their bookkeeping or not could determine your ability to capitalize on this tool.
Budgeting Tools Benefits For Business Coaches:
Let’s start with the obvious: budgeting tools allow you to help guide the client to better spending decisions and therefore more effective growth. But also, by utilizing a tool you are able to provide a simplified and low labor function for you and your coaches.
As I mentioned at the beginning, you’ll also get an inside look into their spending capacity and can monitor their capacity to afford your services. This might be a bit of a more cynical, yet practical look at the benefits. However, if you don’t utilize a budget tool and regularly review it with clients then there is a higher chance they will find something else to spend their time and money on.
Budgeting Tools Benefits For the Business Owner:
Typical small businesses operate their spending on the FBN system. What is the FBN system you ask? Fly by Night… a.k.a Seat of the Pants budgeting. Providing the business with a budget tool allows the business owner to have a realistic view of their future spending.
If deployed correctly, you could even utilize a visual representation of the budget as the year progresses. Think: amount budgeted vs. amount spent YTD.
2. The Financial Analytics Dashboard Tool
Any business coach worth their weight needs to be creating and monitoring the KPI’s for their clients. Most of the KPI’s you will be spending your time on are going to be financially related in some way. This is where the Financial Analytics Dashboard Tool comes into play. A financial analytics dashboard will help you and your clients see trends in your revenue and expenses, among other things, over time.
The first thing that you’ll want in any good financial analytics dashboard is to have the ability to customize. Each and every client that we have will have a different mindset, goal, KPI’s or even just the ability to use their brand colors. Therefore, a cookie-cutter dashboard just isn't going to cut it.
What is a Financial Analytics Dashboard?
The importance of visualization, hence the dashboard, is hard to quantify. By the nature of our role as business coaches, we know firsthand how busy our clients can be. Having something as basic as color coding your KPI’s (i.e. Green for good, Red for bad) empowers your clients to gain critical business intelligence at a glance.
Basically, a good analytics dashboard should be simple and easy to follow, so you can get better insights into your financials, and see revenue trends and breakdowns over time. See what’s working well, what’s not working in your business or your clients’ businesses.
Best Financial Analytics Dashboard:
While it may seem obvious that I am mentioning Pineapple’s solution here, I can assure you that my mentioning is unbiased. Plain and simple: their dashboards check all the boxes for what the business coach AND the client needs.
Pineapple’s Financial Analytics Dashboard provides the Customization (CHECK!), Visualization (CHECK!), Connectivity (CHECK!), Ease of Use (CHECK!), and most importantly its Affordability (TRIPLE CHECK!).
Financial Analytics Dashboards Benefits For Business Coaches:
The up front and center benefit to us as business coaches is the reduction of labor spent manipulating raw data. Even if you consider a tool outside of what Pineapple offers, the absolute minimum you should be looking for is the ability of the tool to pull from existing systems. No more pulling reports in Quickbooks, exporting them to excel, making graphs, etc. etc. etc….
With a dashboard customized for each client you can simply spend your time doing what you’re good at, making informed recommendations to coach up your clients to success.
Financial Analytics Dashboards Benefits For the Business Owner:
From the years that I have been coaching small businesses, I can say one of the largest stressors for an owner is to make critical decisions. When you, as the coach, work with them to develop their KPI’s and then use a tool such as the financial analytics dashboard you are giving them far more than simple graphs and metrics, you’re giving them confidence.
Confidence and a finger on the pulse of their business is easily the benefit here for the business. But I would be remiss if I also didn't mention the second stage of those two: faster business growth.
Marketing Tools
A suite of marketing tools will let you see things such as what you are spending on and if it’s even worth it. They will also show you where your customers are coming from and how they heard of your business.
3. The ROI Tool
Let's take a moment to review the basics that you need to know about ROI tools for business coaches. And by basics, I mean basics...
What is an ROI Tool?
An ROI (return on investment) tool will help your clients decide if your marketing expenditures are worth it.
You can calculate it yourself by subtracting the initial value of an investment from the final value of the investment. Then divide this number (the net return) by the cost of the investment, and multiply it by 100. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage and is an often-used universal measure of profitability. For an excellent guide to the basics of ROI tabulation check out this great walkthrough Jack with Pineapple put together.
This helps you focus your efforts on those actions that produce the most return. Conversely, it allows you to identify what is costing you more than it is bringing in as a means to find savings within the business.
There is a big asterisk next to any ROI tool: it still requires a significant amount of proactive work on your or your client's part. Proper acquisition of data is paramount. A simple example would be to begin notating how all new customers of the business encountered the business (i.e. ‘I Googled XYZ’). However, the best ones will automate or minimize as much as possible.
Best ROI Tools:
We are back to… Excel: Honestly, Excel works here, but the amount of labor involved in making this a viable tool for either you or your clients sort of eliminates itself from contention.
Imagine it, you have to enter the ‘project’, then enter (accurately!) the costs of the project, then you have to manually measure all the data… only to enter that too! Depending on how many clients you juggle at a time, you might even be able to hire a full-time employee just to track and enter what’s needed to give effective advice.
ROI Calculator Tool by Pineapple: As part of their bigger picture Marketing Dashboard, they also offer a ROI calculator. Which works well if you are utilizing their other products already because they will have access to the needed data most of the time.
Look above and picture yourself performing all of those tasks. Nightmare right? Pineapple’s solution transforms that potential data hellscape into a rolling meadow on a cool spring morning.
ROI Tools Benefits For Business Coaches:
I can tell you right from the start the BIGGEST benefit having an ROI tool has done for me as a business coach. I now have the power to show my clients that the thing they just “know” works, I’m looking at you ‘neighborhood magazine’, and putting it into irrefutable data to show how much of a waste it really is.
I mean honestly, how many times have you warned a client against spending money on something with a track record of failure only to be ignored? Having this tool in your back pocket gives you an ‘I told you so’ even if you never actually say it.
Additionally, you can use the data from multiple clients over time to build better cases against the wasteful spending of future clients.
ROI Tools Benefits For the Business Owner:
As much as they will hate it, an ROI tool oftentimes will awaken the business to its marketing failures. When looking for waste within a business, net negative ROI marketing projects are the lowest hanging fruit.
We still encounter new clients that swear by the Yellow Pages for example. In fact, they are downright terrified to stop paying for paid listings on YP. In the 9+ years I have been a business coach, I have yet to see YP spending produce a positive ROI. Having a tool like this with historical data has been a godsend for preventing future waste.
4. The Marketing Dashboard Tool
This is the perfect time to transition into the more overarching Marketing Dashboard tool. I decided to place the ROI tool above this one because of both its importance, but also because it requires a vast difference of work for the business coach.
What is a Marketing Dashboard Tool?
To simplify and explain what I mean by that is that ROI requires a lot of hands-on monitoring and data acquisition. Whereas the Marketing Dashboard can mostly be pulled from existing systems that are readily available. Or another way to