Do I need a business coach? It was a question I asked myself many times after becoming a solopreneur in early 2019.
At first it seemed unnecessary; after all, I had worked in Corporate America for more than 20 years and definitely knew how businesses operated. But one of the first things I realized working for myself was that marketing my own business was quite different from marketing someone else’s.
Being a customer experience professional, I have trained myself to be observant in almost any customer setting, but it’s a different skill entirely to look inward and ask yourself the difficult questions.
It’s also not often that you find someone in your professional life who will tell you exactly how it is — the good, bad and ugly. Feedback is a gift for those who accept it and are willing to act on it.
I read in a coaching book that every coach needs a coach (I realize that’s a little meta) so before expanding my business I hired Bryan Kramer as my own business coach. I’ve known Bryan for about seven years, and I still remember the first moment I met him at Social Media Marketing World after following his work on Twitter and LinkedIn. He is a brilliant marketer, a great speaker, and has always been generous to me with advice and support. He even wrote an endorsement for my first book.
“Coaching enables everyone to significantly enhance their performance by successfully managing critical blockages and accelerate the process,” Bryan writes on his website. What’s fascinating to me about that sentence is that it also describes customer experience (CX) management — managing critical blockages (customer pain points) and accelerating the process (creating new, enhanced and optimized experiences).
Bryan has gotten me to think about my business differently, from my goals to my marketing to the products and services I offer. He’s allowed me to see things that even an observant customer experience professional could miss, and help me implement marketing techniques that even a seasoned marketing professional might forget. And perhaps most importantly, he’s helped me ground myself in the why behind my business — both for my clients and for me personally.
I chose customer experience coaching because CX is my passion and because, at least according to a former boss, I have a knack for always approaching business problems with the customer in mind. I also believe one of my strengths in my two-decade career was creative strategic thinking and idea generation.
So you may find yourself asking, do I need a customer experience coach? You will likely benefit from one if you:
- know you need to focus on customer experience but don’t know where to start
- are having trouble getting executive buy-in for customer experience projects
- feel like you are on an island at your company trying to promote customer experience
- want to generate lot of inspiring ideas to try at your company
- don’t know how to measure success
- like thinking about problems in a different way
- would benefit from having a trusted resource with whom you can brainstorm and evaluate ideas
- need someone who will tell you exactly how it is — the good, bad and ugly
