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So, you’re thinking about hiring a business coach to take yourself and your business to the next level. Or, you’re curious about the difference between a business coach and a They Ask, You Answer Coaching & Training program. In any case, when you get the right business coach, it can be extremely valuable and produce an enormous return on investment for you. However, there are also some problems with typical business coaches which you need to be aware of before you make a decision that could cost you thousands.
In this article, we’ll be covering:
What is a Typical Business Coach?
Coaches exist everywhere, from sports and fitness to mindset and parenting, coaching and improvement has permeated in every area of our lives. It goes without saying then, that a business coach is someone who helps coach us to grow our business.
Business coaches are professionals who can guide leaders and business owners to grow their businesses by sharing advice, expertise and their experience.
A business coach takes the approach of improving you as the leader of your business and generally approaches your business from a high level, focusing on strategy and direction without operating from a specific framework for each area of the business.
In other words, they don’t necessarily specialise in any one business activity but are instead generalists that focus on strategy and direction.
What are the Problems with Typical Business Coaches?
Business coaches are great for helping you define your vision and help you with the structural components that come with trying to scale up e.g., pursuing new markets, changing your business model, assessing a culture problem in your organisation – all important factors that can help or inhibit your ability to grow.
The problem comes more from if you are looking for something specific I.e., improving sales results or taking marketing in-house.
It often comes down to expectation alignment. A business coach can be a great accountability partner and even help you with a strategic plan but if you’re looking for tangible and specific actions to grow sales and conversions, you’ll only get high level general advice and direction.
Why is this a problem?
If you really want to get better at something specific like sales and marketing, you need to approach it from a proven-to-work framework.
For example, if you want to get into better shape, you want to eat and exercise according to a system that has been proven to work already. Your entire diet and training regime should be based around this framework. When you do this, your chance of success by summer (a specific timeframe) increases significantly.
The same goes with business. If you want to achieve growth after hiring a business coach, your coach needs to operate his or her coaching from a specific framework or system for a specific business objective or problem. The reality is that most business coaches don’t do this, and this is a problem if you need to move beyond general strategic vision and onto specific goals like sales and marketing.
What about business coaches that do follow a framework?
While the typical business coach is a generalist, there are business coaches out there that use a framework for their coaching. These coaches are great because they are actually able to produce results for their clients, since they’re operating from a proven-to-work framework.
While this is true and these coaches definitely exist, they are few and far in between and chances are slimmer still if you’re looking to solve a specific business problem as opposed to general strategic direction.
What is a ‘They Ask, You Answer’ Coach?
‘They Ask, You Answer’ (TAYA) Coaches are certified in the framework known as TAYA. These coaches operate from a specialist point of view, specialising in the framework of TAYA, and helping their clients to grow their business through this framework.
Anyone with a laptop and a pulse can call themselves a business coach, but to be a TAYA Coach, you need to be certified by IMPACT, which involves a fair amount of learning and application. There is inherent value in a coach like this.
As mentioned earlier, there are some business coaches out there that do use a framework, and TAYA Coaches happen to be an example of one of these.
What is TAYA?
They Ask You Answer (aka TAYA) is a practical framework and sales and marketing philosophy that assumes one simple truth: if your prospect or customer asks a question, you answer, and in doing so, you will become the most trusted voice in your space and will gain more business than you ever have before.
TAYA involves writing and publishing content every single week that answers these buyer questions, and then using this content in your sales process to shorten the sales cycle and increase close rates.
TAYA coaches work with sales leaders and sales reps to coach and train them on modern selling techniques based on how the modern buyer makes decisions. This makes their coaching very specific, timely and based on a proven framework used by thousands of businesses.
How do you tell the difference between a good business coach and a bad one when both follow a framework or system?
When both business coaches follow a framework and you want to tell the good apart from the bad, you need to look at the underlying principle that they approach their work from, and how timeless that principle is.
For example, if the coach or consultant says they’re going to help you increase sales by using Facebook Ads, I would be sceptical because Facebook Ads isn’t going to last forever – it’s not timeless. However, if they say they’re going to help you increase sales by utilising the principle of trust, – well, that’s timeless, so I’d trust that.
And so, you need to ask yourself, are the principles you’re learning and mastering right now still going to matter in the next 40 years?
The other thing to look out for is do they make you AND your team better? In other words, are they training business muscles and skills that will be enduring and positively infectious in your organisation long after they are gone?
A great coach is someone you hire because you want to get better – you want to invest in yourself and your business for the long term (not just whilst they are around) when you hire a coach.
So, what’s next?
So now you know what a typical business coach looks like, how this compares to TAYA coaches and trainers and why they might pose a few problems for specific sales and marketing growth objectives.
If you’re looking to seriously grow your business, then learning the TAYA framework is a great place to start (whether or not you hire a TAYA Coach).
To get started with TAYA, we recommend these resources:
