Why You Should Use Assessments in Your Coaching Business: The Best Types and Key Benefits

What are Coaching Assessments?

An assessment is a tool that can help you identify strengths/weaknesses in potential or current clients. 

An assessment also helps both you and your clients clarify what needs to be done to improve their performance. One of the biggest benefits of an assessment is that it educates the individual on where their true strengths lie, which shows them where to invest more resources. In the same vein, it shows where weaknesses lie and which areas need developing.

Types of Coaching Assessments

Coaching assessments can take a few forms depending on where they are used in the “customer life cycle.” The most common types of assessments could be used for :

5 Key Reasons to Use Assessments in Your Business

Are coaching assessments really all they are cracked up to be? You better believe it. Here are five reasons why you need to start using assessments in your business ASAP:

1. The Help You Provide Clarity

Not only do assessments give you a well-rounded picture of prospects and clients, but they also help provide clarity for clients who may have been struggling with unclear objectives or a lack of goals. 

Assessments provide a clear path for improvement and will help you identify what tactics and strategies are needed to move forward. What's not to love about assessments! They're a priceless business tool.

2. They Help You Collect Valuable Data

Assessments are great for data collection, too!

This allows you to make informed decisions about your business or your client's business and take steps towards improvement. If you use assessments for lead generation, you not only gain a list of red-hot leads, but you also give valuable information to the person being assessed. This builds immense trust... which leads to more sales!

3. They Provide Benchmarks to Prospects and Clients

Assessments also tell you how well you're doing compared to your competitors. 

If you want to stay ahead of the game, then using assessments will help you stay on top of trends and changes within your industry. Assessments provide an overview of what’s going on across your business so that you can address issues before they become a problem, instead of always scrambling to catch up.

4. They Reveal Blind Spots

As coaching tools, assessments work wonders for revealing blind spots for your clients. 

By taking an assessment, you can reveal to your prospective clients any gaps in their thinking or things they might not have considered. By using a quiz/questionnaire format, you can “grade” these prospective clients to show them how they stack up and what gaps lie between them and their goals.

5. They Save Time

Another benefit of assessments is that they can help lower costs and improve efficiency by giving the right advice and support at precisely the right time.

An assessment tool provides accountability for everyone involved, so that they know where they stand with regard to their performance and goals while also providing opportunities for development. 

Where to Use Assessments in Your Business

Your coaching or consulting business should have assessments for both lead generation and for measuring the skills of clients and any course or coaching program students.

Lead generation means gathering names and email addresses of people who take your assessment so you can follow up with them.  Your assessment-takers are red-hot leads. They're people who know they have a problem, and who are actively looking for a solution.

But it's not just coaching businesses that can use assessments.

For example, if your company does work for clients, then you might create assessments for each client to be used by the client’s staff. If you run a warehouse, then you would have an assessment for your stockroom and other inventory-related tasks. You might also have a task-based assessment that is used for all types of employees throughout your organization.

You'd also want to create an assessment program that is specific to your business, that you use to show growth, skills gaps, knowledge gaps, and more!

Quizzes vs Assessments: Key Differences

Both quizzes and assessments offer a way for your business to measure its progress. 

Quizzes are typically shorter and precise in their answers. They are true, false, yes, now, or a specific answer. Quizzes are used to measure specific knowledge, preferences, or skills.

Assessments usually require more thinking than quizzes because they are often in-depth or require the taker to think about their own experience, feelings, level of skills, or similar. An example is an employee questionnaire that includes questions about how well your employees work together as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Assessments are more varied in their use - from lead generation to personal development to business growth.

While there are academic differences between a quiz and an assessment, many people use the terms interchangeably, so don't worry too much about which you use. Pick the term that will appeal best to your audience to motivate them to complete it.

However, most people take an assessment seriously, and they see quizzes as just a bit of fun. 

There's no reason why you cannot call your assessment a quiz - it all depends on how you want your audience to see you! And never forget your ultimate goal when creating your assessments and quizzes, whether it's for generating leads, assessing team member knowledge gaps, determining where your business needs to improve, or any other outcome. That's what will drive whatever you put in your assessment.

You can even call your assessment tool something else entirely. Just plug the term into WordHippo or even ChatGPT and ask for alternatives. For example, I asked ChatGPT to give me alternative names for an assessment, and these are a few suggestions it came up with (I filtered out and tweaked a few):

I'm not sure I would use any of those terms, but they certainly give you something to work with for the name of your assessment or quiz!

Want to Skip the Intensive Time Involved in Creating Assessments to Use in Your Coaching Business?

With years of experience creating white-label (PLR) content for business coaches and consultants to customize, rebrand, and sell or use as their own, I have an entire library of assessments you can use in minutes to capture new leads or improve your client processes.

Click the button below to check out the ready-to-go assessments and quizzes we currently have in our Shop!

Enjoy!