How do I evaluate whether an executive coach is a worthwhile investment for my marketing career?
A: I coach marketing leaders for a living, so I have an obvious bias. These are the same tests I'd want you to put me, or any coach, through before you spend the money.
Step 1: Name the problem before you pick the person
Write down the one or two things you want to change in the next 3 months.
Coaching pays back when it's aimed at something specific. The common triggers I see are:
- You've just been promoted.
- You've joined a new company or picked up a new business line.
- The board or investors ask questions you struggle to answer, even with the data in front of you.
- Your department's performance has dropped and the business expects marketing to fix growth.
- You've lost confidence or lost touch with new channels.
If you can't name the problem, you're not ready to judge whether a coach is worth it.
You can read more about this in depth about this in my CMO coach
Step 2: Check that a coach is the right kind of help
A coach builds your skills against a deadline and helps you meet it. A mentor talks through problems with you and gives advice, but there's no hard deadline and rarely any follow-up. A sponsor is someone who goes out of their way for you. Before any matching call, I ask people whether they have the time and energy for a coach. I set homework and deadlines and hold you to them. People who choose looser support often struggle to tell whether they've improved.
I spoke about this specifically in my Marketing Freaks interview about marketing leadership coaching.
Step 3: Judge the coach on 6 things
1. They have experience close to yours, plus wider experience. Never the same! Someone who has held your exact role can slip into retelling their own story instead of setting goals for you. A coach with broader experience as well can step back from the situation with you.
2. Sessions are workshops with drills. Passive chats bring problems to the surface, but they don't give you the practice you need to get better.
3. There's homework. If nothing happens between sessions, nothing changes in your actual workday.
4. They cover IQ, EQ and PQ. Most coaches only work on hard skills
(IQ). Marketing leaders often stall on emotional intelligence
(EQ) and political intelligence
(PQ), which is how to work the room with the CEO, CFO and the rest of the C-suite.
5. Their templates and frameworks get adapted to your company. A generic framework falls apart the first time someone challenges it.
6. They support you between sessions. Expect a private chat line or an emergency call for a board update, a hiring decision or a clash with a peer.
I covered this in more depth with finding the best exec coach for you deep dive
Step 4: Insist on a matching call
A good coach will turn people away.
On my mandatory matching call, both of us decide whether the method and the relationship will work.
If a coach signs you up without asking hard questions about your situation, treat that as a warning sign.
This is something I enforce with every potential client. Even with coaching CEOs
Step 5: Measure the return while the coaching is running
- Score every session. I check in and score each one with coachees so we can see how they're feeling and what to adjust.
- Set an early cut-off. My rule is that if nothing has clicked within five sessions, more sessions will struggle to make a difference. If you don’t feel it and feel improvements
A typical programme is 10 to 15 one-hour sessions over 12 to 15 weeks, so five sessions is a fair checkpoint, most will feel it improvements quickly, even the most sceptical or ones told to get exec coaching.
- Look for things you can show. Good signs include a rebuilt plan, a better relationship with the CFO, a board update that landed, or a team that now runs the frameworks without you.
Read more in my coaching FAQs and CEO coaching overview
Step 6: Make sure it's about your career as well as your current job
Many coaches focus on small tactics. Tactics help, but they rarely move a career forward enough to feel it after a few months.
Ongoing friction with the CEO, or a C-suite that doesn't trust your numbers, needs someone who can zoom in on the problem and also zoom out to your career.
The CMO role also has a ceiling. CMOs are rarely promoted to CEO, and CPOs, CFOs and COOs are the more natural successors.
Coaching can help you get past that ceiling by building your business leadership skills.
Step 7: Compare it with where the money would otherwise go
Most CMOs and VPs I speak to haven't invested in themselves for years. They often waste their L&D budget on a conference ticket, or sit through cohort training that wasn't built for them.
Compare the coaching fee with that spend first. Then ask whether coaching would improve your team's and the company's performance as well as your own.
To Sum Up:
Write down the problem,
Run the matching call, check for drills,
Homework and IQ, EQ and PQ coverage, then score the first five sessions.
If you can't point to a concrete change by session five, stop and put the budget somewhere else.
What's your main problem you'd want a coach to help with?
If you share it below, I can tell you whether it sounds like a coaching problem, a specific problem solving session or whether a mentor or sponsor would serve you better.