Professional coaching engagements can lead to more than just shifts in mindset; they can also create measurable financial results. By investing in coaching for their organizations, leaders can unlock leadership potential, improve team performance and discover new avenues for increasing revenue and sales.
Demonstrating a clear return on investment requires connecting improved behaviors and decision-making with tangible business outcomes. Below, 15 members of Forbes Coaches Council discuss key ways professional coaching services can contribute directly to stronger leadership and a healthier bottom line to illustrate this connection in action.
1. Improve Hiring Practices
Avoiding one bad hire, making a great hire, finally firing a troublesome employee, adjusting a business model or assisting with the strategy that closes a big deal are just a few examples of the types of issues coaches can help leaders discern and execute. All of these have profound ROI and bottom-line benefits that often allow one decision to pay for a full year of coaching. – Jim Vaselopulos, Rafti Advisors, LLC
2. Learn To Delegate Effectively
Coaching boosts revenue when leaders make better decisions, faster. ROI becomes clear when they set a baseline, track decisions made through coaching, and compare results. One executive struggled to delegate. Guided by coaching, she restructured her team, clarified roles and focused on high-value growth. Within two quarters, her unit exceeded sales targets. – Lisa L. Baker, Ascentim
3. Increase Engagement And Productivity
Coaches bring many skills, strategies, culture shifts and types of engagement to businesses. The biggest ROI on the human side of business comes from employee retention, engagement and productivity. Hiring is expensive and time-consuming. Team members who feel inspired, engaged, valued and productive stick around. Investing in a coach grows communication, accountability and ownership. Everyone wins. – Christie Garcia, Mindful Choice, LLC.
4. Sync Vision And Execution
Coaching drives revenue by helping leaders gain clarity, align teams and make faster, better decisions. When vision and execution sync, sales follow. We track ROI by linking mindset shifts to strategic moves like pricing changes, hiring or new offers that boost revenue. Add financial confidence by knowing your numbers, and results are even more powerful. Clarity and confidence will follow – Robert Gauvreau, Gauvreau | Accounting Tax Law Advisory
5. Increase Profits While Lowering Expenses
There are two key ways that highly effective coaches should show up: 1. walking the talk by putting themselves out there to achieve top wins for themselves through awards, certifications, authorship or notable program creation and 2. collecting metric-filled testimonials from clients that spell out the high ROI, such as greater profits, lower expenses, higher close rates and so much more. – Laura DeCarlo, Career Directors International
6. Create Neuro-Agile Teams
When individuals and teams they are part of understand how neuro-agile they are, as well as their preferred intelligence preferences, the real work can be done to create truly agile individuals and teams that perform. The changes undertaken can be measured over time, and neuro-agility can be monitored to assess the level of change attained. – Arthi Rabikrisson, Prerna Advisory
7. Boost A Leader’s Overall Effectiveness
Coaching is geared toward making a leader more effective in their business environment, which is typically measured in terms of business results. Any coaching engagements that tie into increases in productivity, quality, time, efficiency, growth, revenue, innovation and customer satisfaction will get noticed because that is what the business is measuring. – Evan Roth, Roth Consultancy International, LLC.
8. Transition From A Reactive To A Strategic Presence
When leaders communicate with clarity and alignment, teams move more quickly and with greater focus. In one case, a client transitioned from a reactive mode to a strategic presence, resulting in reduced internal churn and shorter sales cycles. The ROI was not just emotional; it was evident in increased speed, improved cohesion and a higher number of closed deals. – Rachel Weissman, Congruence
9. Bringing Structure To Mindset
Coaching doesn’t just boost confidence—it untangles the mental spaghetti that clogs up revenue flow. I’ve seen founders go from ghosting sales calls to owning the pitch like a TED speaker. One tweak in mindset, and boom—it could double the close rate. ROI? Try “return on insight.” The brain runs the business and coaching rewires it to win. – Anastasia Paruntseva, Visionary Partners Ltd.
10. Aligning Teams Around Goals And Vision
Often, leaders struggle to build organizations with highly motivated and engaged workers. When an executive coach helps a leader build a team of “vision movers”—workers who are aligned and motivated by the vision and goals—productivity and outcomes dramatically increase. An engaged and empowered workforce is the economic engine of profitable organizations. – Edward Doherty, One Degree Coaching, LLC
11. Advance Psychological Safety
When coaching enhances psychological safety, communication improves, trust deepens and collaboration increases—leading to fewer costly conflicts and more innovation. It’s not magic; it’s metrics meeting mindset in a very real (and profitable) way. – Dr. Ari McGrew, Tactful Disruption®
12. Remove Noise To Clarify Priorities
Clarity drives revenue. One leader got clear on priorities, stopped chasing shiny objects and aligned the team. The result? Fewer distractions, faster decisions and a cleaner pipeline. Coaching didn’t add effort—it removed noise. – Jodie Charlop, Exceleration Partners
13. Quantify Business Benchmarks
Coaching is not the sole driver of financial outcomes, but when paired with business metrics, it becomes easier to attribute part of the uplift in performance to the coaching engagement. The line to ROI becomes visible when you measure what changes, why they changed and how that impacted revenue-generating activity. Quantification of benchmarks is the result that is important and defines what success is. – Nav Thethi, The Nav Thethi
14. Optimize Sustainable Leadership
Coaching improves focus, decision-making and emotional regulation linked to higher performance. One client reduced burnout, restructured priorities and saw their team’s revenue grow steadily, not through hustle but through clarity and sustainable leadership. – Dr. Sunil Kumar, Dr Sunil Kumar Consulting
15. Close Deals With Confidence
Coaching on confidence and leadership has helped several clients close deals. For instance, coaching on how to listen to clients’ pain points, articulate the right solutions and present offers in a way that frames the transaction as an opportunity to solve the client’s challenges—rather than just selling a product—has directly led to increased sales and revenue. – Sandra Balogun, The CPA Leader
This article was originally posted on Forbes.com.