DEMONSTRATING YOUR WORTH

The coaching and consulting industry can be a tough place to work. We slave away with clients, do great work, week in week out, then we move on.

We start one project, finish another and the cycle continues.

The tricky part comes when you are pitching for new work, how do you prove that what you did with your last client made a difference, or worse still, with the end of the financial year approaching and budgets being reset.

How do we prove our worth to existing clients as we renew the ongoing contracts we have in place?

More and more organisations are scrutinizing their dollar spend and seeking to prove a return on investment (ROI), before continuing with service providers.

Combine this with a shrinking budget spend and an everincreasing pool of available coaches and consultants in the marketplace.

Wouldn’t it be great to have access to some way of quickly and economically measuring the effectiveness of your work, to prove your worth and to verify an ROI for your client?

I found myself in just this position recently, having worked for a client for four years, implementing a change process and having to go cap in hand to the General Manager to plead my case, as to why they should continue to engage with me as we brought the project home to conclusion.

I’m always on the lookout for leading edge solutions and on a recent tour in the US I met Mark Rosenberger who introduced to the Performance Gap Indicator tool (PGI).

This tool has revolutionized how I now justify my place in any coaching or consultancy assignment.

When I met Mark his opening comments to me were “In medical practice giving a prescription without a diagnosis can lead to malpractice and the same rule applies in the coaching and consulting industry.

A lot of coaches and consultants knock on their prospects doors and offer to prescribe services which will solve all manner of problems, some including the common cold!

The problem is they have not performed a proper diagnosis on which to base their assessment of the issues or challenges. The next piece in the puzzle after they have prescribed a course of action, is proving it actually worked” Rosenberger said.

He went on to say “A lot of coaches talk to their prospects and they use words like ‘I hope’ or ‘I guess’ when talking about their staff and their organisations.

The PGI takes the hope and guesswork out of it and gives hard facts, which the client can’t deny”. He developed the Performance Gap Indicator, which measures and reports on five metrics in a company, Culture, Leadership, Training, Customer Service and Operations.

The more I talked to Rosenberger, the more intrigued I became about this PGI tool. He told me about a recent project he ran with Domino’s Pizza in the US.

They were talking to him about a challenge they faced with dropping customer satisfaction, they asked if he would develop a customer service campaign for their 6,000 locations across the US. Think about the size of that project for a moment.

He suggested that instead they run his diagnostic tool, the PGI first. He found that the stores with the best customer satisfaction also had the best leadership scores. He suggested that their money would be better spent training the managers to be better leaders, they did and customer satisfaction soared.

He estimates they saved Domino’s around $4-5Million on mis-directed training and loss of sales. The best part was he could verify the impact he had made by running the PGI diagnostic again six and twelve months later. How cool is that!

Rosenberger’s strategy is to lead with the PGI diagnostic and then follow up with your other more traditional offerings.

He says and I agree, “There are already a lot of other coaches and consultants out there offering leadership, customer service, cultural change programs and they struggle to prove their worth. This is a new way for coaches and consultants to stand out from the crowd, become ‘remarkable’, because you have the hard data to prove your worth”.

One of my all-time favourite tools is the DISC Profile, such a versatile tool, that you can use with individual’s teams and whole organisations. When I mentioned this to Rosenberger, he said “Funny you mention that, because that was one of the tools we used as part of the Domino’s Leadership Program”.

He knew that using DISC would have brought benefits to Domino’s however, he used the PGI to verify the need to go ahead and use this profile to increase individual’s understanding of themselves and others. He prescribed after he had diagnosed, like all good practitioners should.

Lindsay Adams

Lindsay Adams is the founder and CEO of 24x7 Assessments, one of Australia’s leading behavioural assessment suppliers. Lindsay has joined forces with some of the world’s leading creators of assessment tools and brought them to Australia. He supplies them to coaches and consultants at www.24x7assessments.com.au

As the name suggests his clients can access their own personally branded user site 24x7. All the assessments he supplies are white label, so his clients can put their own branding on their profiles.

He can be contacted at lindsay@lindsayadams.com