How to design a coaching questionnaire

Online coaching questionnaires are the best way to collect information about your fresh new coaching clients before you meet them online or face-to-face. 

A coaching questionnaire is a tool that helps you collect important information to help you identify the best coaching tools and methodologies to use with each particular client. You may also need to customise your coaching program to achieve the outcome they desire.

A good online coaching questionnaire serves as a guide

A good questionnaire will also guide the client to self-evaluate. It will help them look at their own motivations to be coached and undertake this transformational journey. It’s also an opportunity for you to inform the client about your methodologies and help them understand how you need their collaboration to achieve the results they desire. Coaching cannot be fruitful unless the person being coached is completely on-board with and ready to take the necessary steps to make the changes they desire.

What makes a good online coaching questionnaire question?

The questions should be simple and easy to understand. You want to make sure that your questions are not vague. Try to keep the required answer to one or two sentences. If a question looks like it will have a long answer, try to break it down into more questions to make it feel easier.

Some Examples of great coaching questionnaire questions Here are some examples of questions you may want to snag. You might need to tweak them and add a few more specific questions about the information you need to customise your program. What are the 3 biggest challenges/struggles/difficulties/hardships you face right now that I can help you with? What changes do you want to see for yourself?  

What 3 goals do you want to achieve in the next [add programme duration here]? What do you think will be the biggest obstacles you will face to achieve these goals?

Have you tried this before? What went wrong? How is it different now?  

If you already were the kind of person it would take to succeed at this, what would you be like?  

If you could achieve anything, what would your goals be?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to making these changes?

On a scale of 1 to 10, how stressed do you feel when you think of the changes ahead? On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that you can bring about the changes you seek, with my help?  

Review and discuss the questions with your client

During your onboarding session discuss the questionnaire with your client. Dig a little deeper, and clarify those replies that seemed a little vague or based on fear.  

As a coach, your job is to go deeper to find those nuggets that your client cannot navigate by themselves.

CoachVantage coaching software allows you to create onboarding questionnaires and online forms that you can include as part of your program sign up or during the coaching engagement.

It allows you to save your forms and coaching questionnaires as templates that you can use at any time to glean information from your prospects and clients. It’s simply a must-have power tool in any coach’s toolkit. 

Are you interested to see how you can use CoachVantage to create your online questionnaires and forms? Click below for a 14-day free trial.