Diversifying as a coach: The value of offering Emotional Intelligence training

During the last decade, the coaching sector became the second-fastest-growing sector in the world. In fact, in the UK alone, there are over 370,000 coaching professionals registered on LinkedIn.

The problem is with strong demand and ease of entry, it's become a saturated and competitive market - making it difficult for coaching businesses to stand out. 

But for professional coaches and consultants around the world, one particular service area is providing a red-hot surge of enquiries: Emotional Intelligence.

Let’s delve into how Emotional Intelligence (EQ) coaching can help you to grow your coaching business.

Why coaches use Emotional Intelligence to attract new clients and grow their business

For decades, businesses have focussed on optimising practical skills. This is all changing, as Emotional Intelligence is now one of the most in-demand skills globally.

Why?

In short, it delivers performance improvements at all levels of an organisation and the performance can be quantified, tracked, and progress clearly assessed. This helps businesses to find a measurable solution to a range of needs, including:

• Leadership training programmes

• Wellness and wellbeing

• Cultural development/change management

• Sales enablement

• Diversity and inclusion

• Recruitment and retention

The truth is, Emotional Intelligence will always be essential. It has been proven over and over again to drive real-world results in even the most high-pressure and high-performance environments, such as in companies like Sky. 

How Emotional Intelligence grows your coaching business

There are an estimated 3 million coaches across the UK. In short, coaching is a saturated market. The good news is, EQ is a point of differentiation. It allows you to diversify your offering and truly stand out from the crowd. 

Adding Emotional Intelligence services to your coaching business allows you to conduct relevant and tailored engagements with a range of different senior roles. 

Its scientific basis, measurable nature and proven results can move your service from a nice-to-have to an absolute essential for any ambitious CEO, HR and L&D director or team leader.

Did you know? The Emotional Capital Report (ECR), the world's most advanced Emotional Intelligence assessment, offers one thing that so many books, frameworks and coaching programmes cannot: scientific and academic rigour. 

1. It is built on the latest academic and psychological research. 

2. It gives you a proven scientific way of measuring and developing your clients’ leadership skills.

3. It delivers performance improvements at all levels of an organisation.

You can find out more here >

And on top of that, Emotional Intelligence assessments like the ECR and ECR 360 are able to clearly assess and track progress through ongoing Transformational Assessments so you can secure repeat engagements that last months and years. 

This adds much-needed stability to your coaching business, rather than one-off opportunities that put immediate pressure on your sales funnel as soon as they are complete.

As an Emotional Intelligence certified coach, you could choose to target a specific area of Emotional Intelligence training or instead offer the full range of Emotional Intelligence training and target specific industries. 

4 steps to build and grow your Emotional Intelligence coaching business

RocheMartin’s Emotional Intelligence certification, with its academic background and almost 15,000 customers, provides credibility and justification for coaches and consultants around the world. 

So, how do you get started?

Step 1: Emotional Intelligence certification

The first step is getting certified. This teaches you exactly how to deliver and measure the impact of Emotional Intelligence coaching sessions.

This gives you a valuable differentiator in a crowded market of executive coaches and the confidence to speak the language of executive clients.

Moreover, with tools like the ECR, you can demonstrate your value to clients through ongoing Transformational Assessments and clear ROIs. Coaches find this gives them the opportunity to develop ongoing and long-lasting client relationships.

With RocheMartin, you can access training through a number of flexible certification options so that you can train whilst running your business:

• Emotional Intelligence Online Training is available to you 24/7. It is ideal for coaches who want to learn at their own pace and in the comfort of their own surroundings. Your training includes an in-depth mix of videos, workbooks, journals, digital sort cards, and interactive tests.

• Emotional Intelligence Webinar Training involves either four (basic) or six (advanced) three-hour live webinars. An intensive basic course can be completed in as little as just two days. The advanced training can be spread across 4-6 days. Here you will work with others and have access to best-in-class interactive tools.

• Face-to-Face Emotional Intelligence Training gives you all the same world-class learning material as digital and webinar students, with the added advantage of being able to network and build lasting partnerships with the other experienced professionals completing the training at the same time as you.

“One of the great things about the ECR Report is that it puts a lot of these concepts into the language of business and a lot of people respond very well to that. They typically like to see things rated and scaled, and it’s very easy from there to establish a base from which we can look at progress.”

Jeremy Darroch, Executive Chairman, Sky

Step 2: Targeted selling

Emotional Intelligence training is relevant to a range of positions in a typical corporate organisation. 

By leveraging the scientific background, simplicity, and credibility of the ECR and ECR 360, you can generate new leads, open sales conversations and successfully convert them into closed deals that grow your coaching business.

But that’s not all.

With the ECR being an online assessment, it provides the scalability to run it across an organisation as a whole. For example, there is no reason why you cannot deliver effective Emotional Intelligence training to both individuals and larger groups.

There’s a wealth of case studies available here to prove the value of Emotional Intelligence training. 

As you will see, the ECR is trusted to build Emotional Intelligence in some of the world’s most prominent organisations, including Deloitte, Ernst and Young, Shell, Vestas, EasyJet, Google and Mars, to name a few.

Step 3: Put your certification into practice

Once you’re Emotional Intelligence certified, you’ll want to make the most of your accreditation to reap the growth benefits. 

We recommend running an ECR assessment with a client as early as possible. 

Here’s why that’s important.

Not only does it build confidence, but the ECR also does a lot of the heavy lifting for you by automatically providing recommendations based on client scores. You can view detailed responses and the associated scores and use them to create tailored coaching strategies. 

And the best part is that the ECR gives you a rapid way to start engaging with clients across all levels of a business and across many different use cases. 

Having proven and established frameworks, systems, and methods is critical for engaging senior level leaders in productive discussions. 

Businesses have been able to improve relationship skills, engagement, and even customer focus with Emotional Intelligence training (more on this here.) 

Step 4: Securing long-term engagements

Securing long-term relationships with your clients is highly dependent on your ability to give accurate and advanced interpretations of the ECR.

This is critical for helping to secure future coaching engagements that monitor and assess any subsequent progress.

Six months after the start of your engagement, you can then conduct a second ECR test with all of your participants. This will reveal the specific progress your participants have made across each of the 10 Emotional Intelligence competencies. 

Reports summarising these improvements, as well as recommendations to enhance the programme in subsequent years, provide your clients with enormous value. It also increases the likelihood of your coaching business securing ongoing engagements.

Here are just a few examples of real life businesses that have benefited from Emotional Intelligence training:

• Sky saw a 25% increase in empathy. This has enabled them to make better decisions. It’s had a big effect on the internal dynamic of the business, making it a better place to work. 
• Optus saw a 16% increase in leadership skills. This made fundamental changes to the way the organisation behaved and its values. And six months later, the organisation worked better together, people worked more collaboratively and trusted each other more.
• Oracle saw a 92% increase in positivity. In fact, RocheMartin’s Emotional Intelligence platform completely transformed their business development culture. Their sales team are more confident in their approach and this led to exceptional commercial results. 

And if that’s not enough, Boeing found that face-to-face coaching sessions (based on their ECR results) helped to address each individual’s development opportunities. Participants said it was the most valuable hour they have had in years. 

Get certified in Emotional Intelligence today

As we’ve seen, Emotional Intelligence is a proven way to grow your coaching business. 

Demonstrating to your leads and clients the powerful results of Emotional Intelligence is the easiest way to progress sales conversations and confirm a growing portfolio of engagements.

Get the certifications, enquiries and long-term engagements you need to grow your business today. Discover how you can become a certified Emotional Intelligence coach here now.