Using Asynchronous Communication and “Micro Touch Points” can bolster your coaching offer while saving you time.
We'll share some best practices for how to introduce asynchronous communication in a valuable (and sustainable) way.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Hey everyone. Spencer here, founder of coach now, and a former burnt out. Welcome to the connected coach podcast, a show by coaches for coaches. Our mission is to help coaches just like you unlock your time, income and location. Today's mini episode is called harnessing the power of asynchronous communication.
Let's get to it.
Yeah. As these last few years have shown remote communication can be a lifesaver in the throes of the pandemic platforms like zoom and Skype gave us a sense of community while we're in isolation. And during this time, many coaches moved their businesses entirely online for those coaches that usually meant weekly video calls for the athlete to show what they've practiced and for the coach to give them.
don't get me wrong. Live video interactions can be valuable, but they on their own. Aren't a sustainable coaching strategy in the long term. At the end of the day, these remote video sessions, still amount to lessons that is they rely on you selling time for money. And if you've been following me for a while, you know what I'm about to say your business should never depend entirely on selling your time for.
The world is far too digital and connected to be stuck in the lesson based model today, I wanna focus on a broad, but incredibly important topic. The power of asynchronous communication. This topic is near and dear to my heart. The need for streamline asynchronous communication is what drove me to create coach now in the first.
You see, when I was actively coaching out in the world of golf, I was spending 30 to 40 hours a week outside of my normal coaching sessions, sending emails and texts and trying to keep everybody in sync. I was also doing live calls with different coaches and family members. And as you can imagine, and if you know me, you know, it was an absolute nightmare.
So for me, I wanted to make sure that I could create the optimum learning and communication environment, even when we weren't together. So flash forward to where we are today. When I've seen asynchronous communication implemented correctly, I've seen coaches save six to eight hours per week. AKA a full Workday by simply reworking their coaching offer to include online communication.
Today, I'll give you a brief overview of how you can do the same to start though. Let's talk about the old school model, AKA the lessons model. Back before smartphones took over the world. The athlete did most of their improving with their coach, but most of their actual practicing on their own without quality feedback and quality coaching athletes struggled to improve on their own.
The next lesson usually resulted in reviewing what was done the last time. Essentially one step forward, two steps back. In contrast the connected coaching model relies on asynchronous communication at its core. Asynchronous communication is all about shortening the feedback loop in the coach athlete relationship.
This means that the athlete doesn't have to wait until your schedule's aligned to keep moving forward. What this model you'll still reap the benefits of the occasional live interaction while also integrating periodic micro touch points between coaching. the way that we look at micro touch points here at coach now is essentially making sure that you can have interaction, communication, and deliver feedback to your athletes in this kind of micro experience for you, but it delivers massive value to them.
So in other words, you could do something that maybe takes one or two minutes of your time, but makes that athlete happy for the entire month because they feel like they have their coach in their. Don't just rely on the face to face coaching feedback loop, give your athletes the resources they need to achieve their goals on their own time effectively while this can sometime result in more frequent communication overall, it saves in the total amount of time and will accelerate results.
Okay. So now you get the, the general sense of why this is important, but here's the deal. It's one thing to merely offer a synchronous communication. Once you acquire a new client, it's an entirely different thing to make it mandatory, to make it a core component of your coaching strategy and how you go about introducing these ideas is incredibly important.
So let's talk about some best practice. first, never give your feedback in the wrong place. Go all in with one channel, train your athletes to only expect communication, feedback and coaching there. Now, obviously I'm going to advocate that you use coach now because it was tailor built for just this use case.
But honestly, even if you don't use our app, I highly recommend you pick just one spot and stick to it. Next require that most posts be made by the athlete. Not. And when you or the athlete creates these posts, be sure they include enough context. One example that is incredibly easy in coach now is by using filters and tags.
I'd use tags that indicate what posts require a quick reply. And those you can ignore example tags could include feedback, swing, tips, homework, et cetera. In that example, you could just monitor the posts that have the tag feedback. Don't spend more time than a few minutes per. And be sure to capitalize on high value opportunities for improvement, lastly, and potentially most important set minimum requirements for weekly interaction.
For example, you'd say as your coach, I'll add two comments and two technical analysis per week to your space. That means you as the athlete, you'll have to make at least four posts per. by doing this, you're gonna make it abundantly clear that this just isn't a perk of your offer. It's actually a requirement.
You enforce a simple sentence in your offer, goes a long way. Something like as a part of your coaching program of X per month, you're required to post at least four times when we aren't together. When implemented correctly, these asynchronous micro touch points take no more than two to three minutes of your time, but are highly motivating for your athlete's.
And will help distinguish you from the competition. And remember, it's not about giving you another place to check it's about condensing your communication so that you only have one place and all other communication channels, like email and text can be reserved for other parts of your life. So how do you include this type of communication in your offer?
First off, I'd recommend that you combine live remote sessions, live in person sessions and a synchronous coach. Posting into one unified high value offer by doing so you can save time overall by leaning in on this type of communication and modifying the rest of your coaching offer around it. So now that you've just updated your offer and the way that you're thinking about your coaching strategies, you've just saved yourself a bunch of time without lowering your income.
Now, you can use that time to focus on growing your business, developing your niche, or simply taking a much needed. In my 10 plus years of helping thousands of businesses inside of coach now, and many, many years of coaching before. I've seen this asynchronous strategy work countless times. So I'm confident that it's gonna work for you too.
I hope you've enjoyed this mini episode or what we're calling the blog pod internally, since these are all different takes on our growing database of articles. So if you like this format, please consider subscribing. So you get notifications when we drop a new episode and remember, you can learn more about what we do at coach now@coachnow.io.
And you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter@coachnow.io slash blog. Hope you have a great day talk.