The Marketing of Professional Coaching: An Eleven Year Perspective

3. Demonstrate a return on investment (ROI) and business impact

There is an increasing need to document the specific and quantifiable benefits of our service as we enter the market maturity stage. Manchester, Inc. contributed to this process in a study published in January 2001.  Their study revealed that executive coaching services provide a return on investment of six times the cost of the services. A study published in an online newsletter of the ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) cites an ROI of 529% for executive coaching. A November 2002 article  favorably highlights recent studies indicating high ROIs for executive coaching. Much more research needs to be done, and on a global scale.

We must be able to speak definitively about bottom line benefits for worldwide organizations as well as individual executive clients. For example, do organizations that provide executive coaching to their executives experience higher retention rates for those executives and possibly for their staff as a whole (the premise being that the whole staff would benefit from increased effectiveness of the executive team)? Do executives who have received coaching have a higher job satisfaction and increased management effectiveness ratings?

4. Develop partnerships with mental health professionals and other collateral professionals

Though executive coaching is focused on helping clients navigate the demands of being an executive, our clients are whole human beings who have a range of needs outside our expertise (financial planning, estate planning, medical, psychological) that require us to refer our clients to other professionals. Because we are working with the whole human being it is imperative that executive coaches stay vigilant about the line where coaching ends and the expertise of other disciplines is required. In order to best serve clients, we, as executive coaches, need to have a ready referral network of highly skilled experts in a variety of disciplines with whom we work over time in order to assure the highest level of service to our clients. The availability of these networks might be an element of the credentialing process for executive coaches.