Importance of the questions

Next we will be discussing one of the most powerful bases of coaching, especially in the primary encounters with our clients, where we know little about them and need to gather useful information to plan our personalized coaching sessions.

Questions are an essential tool during the development of our coaching sessions, they are the simplest and most effective source of knowledge we have at hand. When we face our client for the first time, we do not know anything about him/her, beyond what he/she may have told us before the interview, by using well thought out questions we can get a clearer profile of the person we will start working with.

The questions are also useful to learn about the effectiveness of our advertising in the process of attracting customers, collect data that allows us to draw more effective strategies and enhance those that are giving us good results.

Taking into account the importance of this technique during the practice of our coaching sessions, we will be addressing this topic, so that you can develop this skill with your clients.

Why should we ask?

During the first meetings with our clients we will begin to talk about their interests, aspirations, goals, results they want to achieve through their sessions, among others. In general, many coaches choose to give the client the space to start talking without any pressure, that way the coach begins to receive the information and discard between what interests him/her and what does not.

We are not saying that this methodology is wrong, only that it is not the most practical when it comes to receiving valuable information from our client, as the process slows down and can stray into trivial issues.

If you are the coach there is no one better to know what you want to know from the client, not even the client can anticipate what your desire is with the interview. The most direct and effective way to gather the necessary information is to ask questions about what you want to know. You have to be the one to ask the questions and request the information, after this process you can choose to give the client the necessary time to expose their concerns.

What should we ask?

In general you can ask everything you consider necessary to build a profile as complete as possible of the client. You should prioritize to know what are the client's interests and above all what are the results he/she expects to achieve through your sessions. This is of utmost importance, because as you know your work as a coach is focused on solving the problems of your clients, so the main task is to understand what that problem is.

Another aspect of great importance is to know how to identify the weaknesses and strengths of our client. By asking questions we can rule out aspects such as their level of preparation, knowledge of their market, state of mind, level of risk tolerance, legal and financial knowledge, among others. This will be fundamental during the following sessions, since logic tells us that we should focus more on weaknesses than on strengths, only then will we be able to build a more comprehensive profile.

One question that could be very useful is about how the client came to you. This specific question will not help you to get to know your customer in particular, but it will provide you with data that is of great value with respect to your marketing and advertising. Gathering this information will allow you to know aspects of your business, appreciating which are the ways of attracting customers that are working best for you.