Coaching Company Guide
Our software tool recommendations for your company
Break the mold with your Coaching Consultancy
Choosing the right technology tools for your business is a key aspect of building your success. They may be industry specific or hold multiple important functions you can utilise to reduce time spent on processes and boost the free time your staff have to hit their goals. We've put together a host of software tools we recommend for your industry whether you're a year into your business and looking to expand, or you've been running for 10 years and now need to make upgrades to certain processes.
When choosing your next tool we recommend considering the following points:
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Does the tool have the specific features you need?
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Is the tool scalable to suit your growth?
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Is the tool compatible with your other software systems?
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Does it handle multiple functions for your teams?
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Is the price suitable for your budget?
We have not built our resources guides as review articles which compare multiple tools against each other. We have taken one or two tools we would recommend and put them forward to make your life easier as we have either carried out the research or used the tools ourselves through our clients. Of course, we recommend you perform your own research to make sure they will fit your company but our aim is to save you the leg work!
You want to keep in mind how many tools you use in your business. You may be reliant on the free plans of certain tools if you're starting out but as you begin to grow the plans may start stacking up, costing you a pretty penny. We have tried to include tools here which offer multiple functions/features for you to keep costs down. Try to keep your tech stack small if you can! It will make building your systems easier.
To visit the website of the tool we recommend, simply click the logo.
Financial
Bonsai accounting software is a fantastic and reliable ally, streamlining invoicing, expense tracking, and reporting for coaching companies/consultancies. Its user-friendly interface feels like a helpful teammate, making financial management a breeze, saving you time and sparing you headaches. Tailored reporting tools offer valuable insights, empowering you to make informed decisions with confidence. Plus, its cloud-based accessibility means you can stay on top of your finances from anywhere! It's best feature for coaches is the ability to create and sell packages with recurring payments and secure contracts.
Bonsai offer a free 7-day trial to see if the system will work for you, and after that the cheapest Starter plan is £20 per month when paid on a monthly basis. Depending on your operations, the Professional package may be better as it features more integrations.
CRM Tools
If you decide to use Bonsai for its invoicing and financial features, we would also recommend using it for its CRM functionality as well. It allows you to add new leads, track communications between them, set tasks for follow ups, and your clients and prospects have their own profiles they can access. Doing this would also save money on another software tool! Keep that stack small if you can.
Hubspot is one of the leading CRM platforms out there, with a vast range of capabilities and functions, albeit a portion of them are behind paywalls and different plans. For small to medium sized event consultancies we would opt for Hubspot as you can easily utilise the sales pipelines to track new deals, you can manage your contact list and attach every important document to a contact/company to keep information in one place.
Pricing for Hubspot Starter plans begin at £14/month per user. We would advise going for either the Service plan or Sales plan.
Marketing
Lavendar.ai is one of the new generation of AI powered cold outreach focused email marketing tools to hit the market. And, it's a great one. The tool grades your emails so you can improve your score over time with new iterations, they have many ways to personalise emails based on text and segments, and you can track how your performance is looking to make sure you're always improving. If you're into performing cold outreach, this is the platform to use as a coach.
They offer a free plan but this is quite limited and doesn't include the AI editor to help you craft your emails. You can use ChatGPT for this if needed, but we would suggest going for the Starter plan at £23 per month.
Outbound marketing
Convertkit is hailed as the number one email marketing tool for creators, and if you're a coach, you have a lot of wisdom and stories to share with your mailing list. Convertkit has a wonderful email designer tool and their delivery rate scores ensure your emails are hitting your subscribers inboxes and not the spam folder. You have access to great analytical tools to learn more about your audience, you have many tool integrations to expand your experience, and options to monetise your subscriber base. As a coach, this is exactly what you need!
They have a free plan for up to 1,000 subs, then past this you will be looking at a starting point of £33 per month depending on your amount of subs and required features.
Inbound marketing
For a coach just looking to get content out into the world, Buffer is a leader in the industry allowing you to easily create, auto-schedule and post your content. Its minimal and clean user interface makes for a shallow learning curve and offers great reports to track your analytics across multiple social media channels. We use this ourselves and with clients and have yet to run into an issue! For the larger consultancies, we would opt for a tool such as Hootsuite.
The free plan offers 10 scheduled posts across 3 channels at a time, with paid plans starting from £5/month.
Social Media
Contracts
Yup, we're back with suggesting Bonsai for your contracts if you're already using the platform for other functions as it's a multifaceted platform for coaches such as yourself. This keeps all of the information about your clients in one place and keeps costs down.
If you decide not to use Bonsai for any feature mentioned on this page, we would then recommend DropboxSign for your contracts as it also doubles as a great file management system.
Automations
Your business software stack is never complete without an automation tool, and Zapier is the pick of the bunch! We love Zapier as it allows (most) software tools to communicate with each other, making processes far smoother.
Imagine you have a prospect who signs up for your newsletter, and you want to nurture them. You can use Zapier to send the signup from your webform into your email marketing tool, send them into your CRM, and start a workflow of an email campaign to warm them up. Once they express interest, Zapier can handle your tools to get them onboarded.
It's truly great software which we recommend starting with on the Starter plan of £23.97/month because it offers multi-step automations and 750 "automations" per month.
Additional Tools
We've added some additional tools which aren't necessarily tailored for your industry, but they are widely regarded as the best options for day-to-day business functions such as messaging, security, design and more.
Whether you are working with a virtual or an in-house team, you're going to want a strong password manager which offers a high security rating to protect your passwords. Lastpass offers the ability to store passwords in customisable folders, it will generate highly secure passwords for you, and gives you the ability to share login information with a team member without giving out the password itself.
We recommend this password manager to all of our clients as it's a safe and secure method for keeping your data secure, and many people haven't considered the risks before being introduced to the tool. Starting from £3.40/user per month, it's a small price to pay for peace of mind.
Slack is a supurb messaging app to bring your team together in one application. It's easier to use than MS Teams and certainly operates better than Whatsapp for team use, but the biggest selling point is its ability to integrate with other software tools. One example is connecting it to a project management tool and automating notification messages to team members when changes are made on tickets.
While Slack does have a free plan, for smaller teams we recommend the Pro plan which is £7/user per month. This does make it a more expensive option in the market, but the capabilities more than make up for it.
Your writing is one of the foundational keys of your business, so you want to make sure it's flowing well and without errors. Grammarly is like having a wizen teacher stood behind you with a ruler, constantly peering at your spelling. The tool ensures your writing is free of spelling mistakes and grammar issues, with a surprisingly good AI module now developed with the recent push of AI technology. Grammarly runs in a host of applications meaning you'll always have the ability to check your work.
Grammarly has a great free plan to keep you in check, and for those who would be considered the team novellist, there is a paid plan of £10/month.
Canva will always be at the top of our list for web-based design work for entry and intermediate level design work for social media and documentation requirements. The templates available offer a great basis for bringing your idea to life and the design tools you have at your disposal allow for in-depth customisation.
If you have one person in your business looking after design work, we recommend the Pro subscription at £9/month, and if you have a team each adding their input to the design process you should opt for the Team plan for £100/person per year, which has a minimum of 2 people.
Miro is a fantastic visual collaboration tool tailored for innovation and creation. It provides you with a virtual whiteboard to plan, map, discuss and discover new ways of working and building your product or business processes. Whether mapping out product roadmaps, conducting brainstorming sessions, or facilitating remote team collaboration, Miro is the tool to use. You no longer have to print off a process map and hand it out to team members before a meeting, now you can all work on the same board simultaneously. We use it, and we love it!
Miro offers a free plan to get you started and feel how much better collaboration can feel. If you need more than 3 boards and more features, the Starter plan is £6.28 per user per month when billed annually. This is the plan we recommend.
That concludes our list! We recommend your look into the options we've provided and see how they fit into your company based on size, budget and how experienced your team are with adopting new tools.
Should you require help setting up and running these systems, please send an enquiry in and we will set you up with a member of our team to support your business.