Despite there being hundreds of millions of businesses across the globe today, each and every business remains largely individual. The elements hindering the growth of one business may be the elements propelling another - they truly are unique.
This is why, as a business coach, identifying the client’s needs and being able to offer insight in the form of a coaching session specifically tailored to them is vital if they want to see success in the management of their business.
A business coaching intake form gives you the opportunity to retrieve all the information you need from your client to focus on moulding and putting together the perfect sessions for them.
Get our business coaching intake form template
Content Snare is here to help you successfully onboard your new business coaching clients. Sign up to access our built-in business coaching intake form template. It’s ready when you are.
What questions should I include in a business coaching intake form?
The aim of your business coaching intake form should really be to collect the fundamentals above all, meaning that it’s best to keep things concise.
In order to do so, we’ve come up with a list of the right questions to include and compiled them into one handy form. That way, you can get the job done in the most efficient way possible.
Basic Information
This first section will allow you to secure some basic pieces of personal information about the new client before the coaching process begins.
- Please provide your full name.
- What is your date of birth?
- What is your marital status?
- Please provide your primary contact number.
- Please provide your primary email address.
- Please provide your full home address or company address.
Basic Company Details
These three short questions will give you the opportunity to learn more about the client’s company, what the company offers and their role within the business.
- What is the name of the company?
- Please provide a brief description of what product(s)/service(s) your company offers.
- What is your occupation?
Business Questionnaire
The following questions constitute the main portion of the form, allowing you to discover more about the business goals, successes, obstacles and future.
- Please describe your ideal client in a few sentences.
- What is your business' mission statement?
- In a few sentences, please tell us your favourite elements of your business.
- What motivated you to start your business?
- Is there anything you've learned along the way so far?
- What's been your biggest win so far for the business?
- What are the biggest obstacles you're currently facing within the business?
- Where do you see your business in 6 months time?
- Where do you see your business in 12 months time?
- What are the main differences between you and your competitors?
- What is your approach to lead generation?
- What is your approach/strategy marketing-wise?
- Please provide details regarding the software or applications you're using to monitor and manage data and sales?
Why create a business coaching intake form?
Working in the business coaching industry, in order to be able to provide your clients with the aid, insight and solutions they require, you need to be completely in the loop as to their situation and how they envision the future and development of their business. For this, your business coaching intake form is crucial and what your clients can tell you is valuable information.
Your form also has the ability to make your client:
- Reflect on things they might otherwise neglect unintentionally
- Solidify their own ideas and thoughts
- Feel at ease with your expertise, strengthening your relationship with them
- Develop their answers and provide comprehensive feedback
How can Content Snare help me with my business coaching intake form?
Content Snare is an intuitive, auto-saving forms tool made to help you collect information in the best way possible. The practicality and versatility of the platform combine to give you the best experience when creating your questionnaires and forms.
There are multiple ways in which Content Snare can make everything run much more smoothly and we’ve been able to identify and list a few of those below.
Built-in templates
Doing it on your own isn’t always necessary with an extensive template gallery to choose from to help you get the most out of your time. You can modify templates as much as you like to suit your needs, add and take away questions and personalise the wording and writing style to your taste.
Templates give you a great head start and alleviate a lot of the burden, especially if the questionnaire you’re looking to create is pretty lengthy.
Straightforward sending
Sending a questionnaire manually enclosed within an email is often awkward and quite tiresome.
With Content Snare, your questionnaire is sent directly to the client in the form of a link within their invitation email. As soon as your request is published, you can sit back and relax as there’s nothing more for you to do! You can also double up on the security of your client’s questionnaire and the information they’ve provided by requiring an access pin code or for the client to create an account and log in.
No matter what happens, your clients will always receive their questionnaires quickly, efficiently and securely.
Automatic reminders
Have you ever had your consulting sessions delayed because you’re missing information from a client? We’ve also experienced the misery of having to put a project on hold for this reason so we know it’s a pain in the a.
- If they are highly critical of other websites or previous developers. Sometimes this may be well-founded criticism, but sometimes it’s just a reflection of the client.
- If they go into excessive detail about what they want. If they aren’t leaving anything open to you, there’s a real chance they are going to pick apart everything you do.
- If they leave answers like “I’ll know what I want when I see it”. Em, how does that help your designer?
- If they use silly words like “to pop”, “to have more pizzazz” or “to be maybe 20% more playful” to describe what they want.
- If they say their target audience is “everyone”. This might just mean they need some business lessons.
- If they’ve written essays in the free-text boxes.
- If they’ve asked for 25 website pages and put down an absurd budget of $500.
- If you just get that bad gut feeling about them. Yes, it’s OK to trust your gut. That bad feeling you get is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of decision-making evolution
4. Setting cost expectations
Website design questionnaires can also be a sneaky tool for showing your clients just how much is really involved in designing a website so that they can appreciate the value your agency brings to the table.
While the questions ultimately help you do a better job, the process of filling them out gets your client thinking about their website. It forces them into understanding their target audience, goals, needs, and hopefully how much this all might cost.
You can even use your survey to ask for their budget for the website directly in the form.
Bonus Tip: Automatic Quote or Estimate Generation
Here’s a little something to consider. It may or may not fit into your workflow, and it completely depends on your strategy.
We know some agencies and web designers that have all their clients run through a questionnaire that generates an estimate or even a fixed quote.
Others choose never to do this because they want the opportunity to chat to the client in person about their overall strategy and then make the sale.
If you’re using a forms tool that supports calculations and conditional logic, you can build quote generation into it. The process depends on the form tool you are using, but try searching for something like “[TOOLNAME] conditional logic” or “calculations” to find some options.
As an example, you might require your clients to put in the number of pages that they want developed and select a box if they want a contact form, a Facebook tracking code, or a popup. These might add fixed amounts to your quote, so you can deliver them an instant quote with the form.
Totally up to you if you want to explore this or not! Chat with the rest of your team to get a feel for whether it’s a good idea or not for your specific agency.
Grab your design questionnaire now
Now that you know so much about website design forms, you have two options:
- Create a design questionnaire on your own
- Use one of our ready-made templates
If you prefer the latter, make sure to check out Content Snare’s web design questionnaire. Content Snare is trusted by thousands of professionals and has been featured on platforms such as GoDaddy, Indie Hackers, WP Engine, and Future Firm.
And just in case you need more templates, we got you covered — our library of templates will help you with everything from starter websites to landing page design.