You became a coach to help others, not because you love coaching management—so how can you do more of what you love?
This article will help you pick the right coaching management software for your practice, so you can free up time to focus on your zone of expertise. Read on for the best platforms that will keep our practice ticking over seamlessly while you scale!
Why You Need A Coaching Management Software or CRM
Most helping professionals, like coaches, get into the business to help people, not for a love of coaching management tasks such as administration, paperwork, billing, or invoicing.
Nevertheless, it’s a necessary undertaking for coaches, especially those practicing independently.
Without a way to manage all the admin involved in coaching, you”ll find yourself spending more and more time on administrative work and less time actually working with your clients.
Without a way to manage it all—your clients, your coaching forms and filings, your technology needs—you will find yourself spending more and more time on administrative work and less time actually working with your clients.
Anyone who has an online coaching business must find the time to include these tasks in their day-to-day. As the number of clients increases, it can start to get overwhelming.
This is why many coaches use coaching management software. A good platform will help you with these tasks, and perhaps even more.
7 Ways To Grow Your Business With A Coaching Platform
There are more than a few ways a great platform can help you with every step of your coaching process, from client intake to client retention after the coaching engagement ends.
But the basic premise of a coaching management system is that it takes care of as many of the ‘non-coaching’ tasks as possible, giving you more time to grow and scale up.
Think about it: with less time spent emailing, personalizing, or designing tools, the greater your impact, the better your clients’ success rates, and the more you can grow your revenue.
To illustrate, here are a few examples of things that you can do with a coaching platform:
- Onboard clients digitally by sending intake forms and collecting necessary information before you get started.
- Create and share custom content (e.g., exercises, resources, assessments) to your clients more efficiently.
- Take session notes faster and store them securely, even conveniently connect them to client profiles or share them with your client if you choose to.
- Communicate with your clients between sessions, all in one place.
- Track client progress and view results in a dashboard or as downloadable PDFs.
- Send clients feedback forms to evaluate your practice and find areas for improvement.
- Keep in touch with clients by sharing valuable content after the contract ends.
As you can see, a lot of the ‘busy work’ comes from managing your client relationships, which is why the term ‘coaching management software’ is used interchangeably with coaching CRM, coaching client management software, or coaching CRM.
We’ve reviewed a few top examples in the next section.
3 Best CRM Systems For Coaches
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the abundance of apps available today, but here are a few of the best for client relationship and coaching management functions.
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Quenza is a client engagement tool with a powerful suite of coaching management tools. With this coaching CRM, you can design personalized, branded client Activities and Pathways for automatic delivery to coachees.
Features include:
|
| Name | Quenza |
| Price | $1+ monthly |
| Good For | Coaching Management, Coaching CRM, Client Engagement, Personal Coaching, |
| More info | Quenza |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Coaching.com is a coaching CRM software with plans for practices of all sizes. With inbuilt messaging, scheduling, instant chat, and client tracking features, it’s a useful tool for building accountability, setting goals, and encouraging progress.
Features include:
|
| Name | Coaching.com |
| Price | Free+ monthly |
| Good For | Team Development, Personal Coaching, Client Engagement |
| More info | Coaching.com |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | Simple Practice comes with a good set of coaching management tools that self-employed coaches and smaller businesses can use in-house and with clients. This app also serves as a therapy practice management tool.
Features include:
|
| Name | Simple Practice |
| Price | $39+ monthly |
| Good For | Team Development, Individual Coaching, Client Interactions, Business Coaching Software |
| More info | Simple Practice |
If you’re looking for an in-depth review of coaching apps for your practice, click here.
Tools and Features That Help You Coach More Effectively
When choosing a coaching management solution, you’ll want to refer back to your practice’s needs.
Here are some tips to help guide you in choosing the right software option for you:
- Choose a software that is HIPAA and/or GDPR compliant. This is a must-have if you collect and store personal information on your clients. Maintaining client privacy should be a top priority for coaches.
- Look for a solution that facilitates automation. As your client load increases, so too will your need to send emails, set reminders, etc. Choose a solution that will automate as much of this as possible.
- Consider the client’s experience. If you’re using a solution that a client will also interact with—to book appointments, pay an invoice, or consume content—make sure to look at it from the client’s perspective. Choose something that is clean, aesthetically appealing, and easy for the client to use.
- Prioritize a solution with convenient monitoring and progress tracking. As a coach, you want to stay up-to-date on client progress. Choose a solution like Quenza that lets you check in on client progress quickly and easily.
- Think about whether it can help you scale up. A good practice management software will meet your current needs, but it should also be able to scale up as your practice scales up, handling a greater number of clients, more content, etc.
If you’re serious about growing your practice, make sure your chosen client system has these features at the bare minimum.
2 Top Coaching Platforms for Your Practice
If you only need a few things done, there are a few great apps that focus on just certain tasks but which handle them very well.
10 to 8 and vcita are two examples we’ve reviewed below.
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | 10 to 8 is a light practice manager software that allows you to integrate your email marketing, manage appointments, and digitize several other practice management tasks.
Features include:
|
| Name | 10 to 8 |
| Price | Free+ monthly |
| Good For | Marketing, Practice Management, Client Management |
| More info | 10 to 8 |
App | Details |
|---|---|
 | If billing, payment processing, and scheduling are key tasks that you’re looking to automate, vcita is a lightweight solution that does these tasks well.
Features include:
|
| Name | vcita |
| Price | $19+ monthly |
| Good For | Client Interactions, Coaching Portal |
| More info | vcita |
What Is Coaching Class Management Software?
If you’re looking to coach groups or teams, or deliver courses, ut’s a good idea to look for a solution that offers coaching class management software.
A good example is Quenza’s Group feature, which allows you to:
- Bulk import and coach cohorts of up to 50 participants
- Chat in real-time with your class or group
- Design Pathways that you can share once with your whole team or cohort, then drip-feed to them on a schedule
- Track progress live from your Dashboard
- Send notifications to encourage progress
- Visualize and export group results as graphs and PDFs
- Store, organize, and share files with your whole cohort at once.
For a closer look at how you can use coaching class management software, take a look at the video below.
What’s The Best App For Your Practice?
As noted earlier, there is no single best practice management software; each coach has different needs, and there is a range of options available to meet those needs.
However, there is one practice management software that meets most of a coach’s basic practice management needs and offers valuable features beyond that: Quenza.
Coaching Management With Quenza: A Practical Example
If you’re interested in using Quenza but wondering what that might look like, here’s a practical example of onboarding, coaching, and evaluation with a client.
Onboarding
To get coaching relationship off to a good start, a coaching agreement is one of the first pieces of content you might send to your client, as shown below:
With Quenza, you can craft a digital agreement easily using a template or Expansion like the Coaching Client Agreement above.
This Expansion template includes a section for recitals, the scope of the contract, coaching terms, fees and expenses, and more.
Coaching
During your coaching engagement, you will likely want to send engaging content to your clients. You probably have your own you want to create with the Activity builder, but there are some great options available in the Expansion library.
Below is the beginning of a sample Expansion exercise that you might customize and send to your client: the Cognitive Restructuring exercise.
The exercise walks your client through the process of cognitive restructuring, or learning to think about things in a new (more positive) way.
Once your client completes the exercise, you will be notified and you can immediately view their results.
Evaluation
At the end of your coaching contract (or at any point), you may want to gather feedback from your client on how they felt about the coaching engagement and what could be improved.
In Quenza, you can customize the Coach Evaluation Form Expansion (below) to gather this feedback. It allows your client to rate the coaching relationship based on several different aspects, including how well you listened to them and understood their point of view, how much warmth you showed them, and how much you challenged them when appropriate.
It also collects their thoughts on the results they’ve experienced so far, their overall satisfaction with the engagement, and any other comments they have.
This is valuable information for any coach to collect, as it will help you improve your program over time and ensure that you are offering high-quality service to your clients.
Final Thoughts
Practice management can be challenging for coaches, but you don’t have to let it bring you down! With a good coaching management solution, you can spend more time doing what you really love: helping your clients lead healthy, happy, and successful lives.
If you haven’t already, make sure to check out Quenza’s $1 trial, and check back here for more helpful resources and tips on running an effective coaching practice.
Happy coaching!
Frequently Asked Questions
The best way to get coaching clients depends on factors such as niche and target audience. Effective ways include networking, social media, offering consultations, client referrals, advertising, attending events, or partnering with professionals. To get coaching clients, it’s essential to develop a strong brand, communicate value, and build trust with potential clients by showing expertise, integrity, and genuine interest in helping them achieve their goals.
A digital coaching platform is a software tool enabling coaches to provide online coaching services. This platform typically includes features such as video conferencing, messaging, and file sharing. Digital coaching platforms can be used for one-on-one coaching, group coaching, or even online courses.
CRM (customer relationship management) manages customer interactions and relationships. It typically involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support processes. CCM (customer communication management) manages communications with customers across different channels. It involves using technology to design, produce, and deliver personalized and relevant communications to customers at various stages of their journey.
I’m sure you have considered this but, why has not billing, invoicing, and appointments been included in this platform?
Everything else is great and way ahead of what other coaching platforms offer in the areas of coaching management software, psychology tools, and templates. If you included the billing, invoicing, and appointments, Quenza would be by far the No. 1 coaching platform available. Just imagine – If only!
Hi Phil!
It’s great to get your feedback – are you currently using Quenza?
If so, please do upvote these features in the Feature Request section. We do our very best to prioritize the most popular features where we can!
Cath