What do corporate clients ask for?
Here is an example of the type of questions that corporate clients are setting when selecting coaches:
- When did you start work as an executive coach?
- Please provide the total hours of executive coaching undertaken in the last three years.
- Which coaching code of practice do you adhere to?
- Please describe your affiliation to relevant professional bodies.
- Please describe your route to coaching.
- What have you contributed to the development of the field of coaching?
- Please describe your recent professional and personal development that may be relevant to coaching.
- Please describe three recent assignments and their outcomes.
- Please describe your cross sector experience as an executive coach.
- Please describe your current experience of being professionally supervised as a coach,
- How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your coaching practice?
- What are your learning goals as a coach?
USEFUL LINKS
- Subscribe to the CorporateCoach RSS feeds
- Executive coaching
- Brefi Network directory of coaches

July 17th, 2006 at 4:03 pm
Interesting questions. However having been coaching with corporate clients for over two years, I can truthfully say that I have never been asked any of them by a client, other than how did I get into coaching. And that is usually after I have been doing some work with them. Could it be because I do demonstration selling and have built my client base through referrals and word of mouth - not to mention repeat business.
I seem to remember seein a similar list when I first started. They were basically a list intended to get me to join one of the professional bodies - by joining I would be able to answer some of them in a positive way. I think the question I like best is the last one. If I had a client that understood what it meant I would be well impressed.
These are the sort of questions that appear on government tenders in order to trim down the number of applicants. However, does being able to answer each of them positively actually mean that you will get a better coach, or one that has been around for a long time? Now that is a question that is worth asking.