A coaching case study is a short, structured summary of a client engagement that shows potential clients who you help, how you work, and what results you deliver.
Every day, you and other coaches are exploring strategies with leadership, transforming workplace cultures, and encouraging individuals to thoughtfully engage with their work.
For those individuals, teams, and organizations, your work speaks for itself. But sometimes speaking about that work to potential clients and highlighting everything you’ve done can be challenging. How can you effectively showcase all the ways that you’ve helped your clients?
A case study is a great tool for leveraging your expertise and impact, the kinds of people you support, and the transformative power of coaching. Case studies are short summaries that explain a coaching engagement to someone who wasn’t there. They walk an outsider through why the client hired you, what work you did together to support the client’s goals, and how that work led to a meaningful — and ideally measurable — success for the client.
The elements of a great case study are simple, but creating one can be more challenging. It requires you to think about your recent work, evaluate your success stories, draw out these key components, protect client boundaries, define clear results, and then share it all in a way that best suits the ways your clients prefer to be reached.
Choosing the Right Client Story
To create the ideal case study, you may now be wondering: which client experience do I pick?
The best case studies showcase both your specialization and your skills.
- C-suite focus? Share how you helped a CFO revitalize their business strategy.
- Team coaching focus? Share how your methods moved a team from dysfunction to high performance.
- Show off the best parts of your work and what makes you, you.
Get Client Permission Before You Write
Before putting together a case study, check with the client and confirm that it is okay to highlight your work together publicly. Make sure to reiterate your commitment to confidentiality and be clear about what the client is and is not comfortable sharing — for example, they may be comfortable with you sharing their story but not their name. If you work with a company, they may have internal protocols for such requests that must be met. Once you receive approval, you can begin drafting. It is generally a good practice to show the client the final draft, giving them insight into how you are celebrating your engagement and allowing them to understand how their story is being portrayed (and to express if they feel anything should be adjusted).
Structure Your Coaching Case Study
Once you’ve selected a client and received permission to share their story, you need to tell it. Start by outlining the engagement. Take some time to think through each element:
- Who was the recipient of your coaching?
- Was there an initial goal when you began coaching? What prompted the client to seek a coach?
- What type of coaching did you implement? Were specific exercises or tools especially helpful?
- Throughout the engagement, what progress did you see?
- What impacts did you measure? How did the client see progress?
- What were the outcomes of the engagement?
Once you have all this information, it’s time to transform it into a story! Take this opportunity to dive into the story behind your engagement. Share your insights, such as the strategies you thought would be best for the client and why, and make it your own.
Be sure to emphasize the impact and the measurable benefits. What potential clients are looking for is the benefit they may experience from others who are similar to them (your ideal client audience).
While confirming that the client is comfortable with you sharing their story, you may ask whether they would share a quote or two to include. Those quotes elevate your case study, strengthen your credibility, and convey the true impact of your work with authenticity.
Case studies can take many forms: paragraphs of written text, a video, a slide deck, or a multimedia presentation. Think about who your potential clients are and what they’re most likely to stop and read, and look for opportunities to draw attention to key phrases or results, such as with graphics or pull quotes.
How to Share Your Case Study
Once your case study is finalized, it’s time to share it! You can add it to your website so visitors can see what kind of work you do when they are exploring a potential coaching engagement, or share it directly with prospective clients when pitching the value of your coaching.
You can also share your case study. Share on social media with a testimonial quote or a visual from your case study, or a short piece of thought leadership, whether it be about how you enjoyed your work with a client or how you implement specific coaching strategies. Sharing your work on LinkedIn is a great way to show your coaching — and its benefits — at work. You can also share your coaching stories with Coaching World readers by submitting your story on the ICF website.
A strong case study can be a persuasive tool to recruit potential clients. Reaching the right new business is a new opportunity to transform your clients and their workplaces — and it may even be a future case study!
