by
Phil Beene, Co-founder / Nudge Coach
Client success is fuel for any business. This is certainly no less true when we’re talking about knowledge work; coaching, teaching, advising clients to become something more - a better version of themselves.
What are the raw materials of client success? What do we absolutely know our clients have to show up with in order for us to help them become more?
And finally, how can knowing that help us do a better job keeping our clients engaged?
I’ve been on a tunneling expedition across the internet over the last several weeks trying to answer these questions to my satisfaction.
Efforts at answering questions this essential rarely produce as clean a result as you’d like. But I think you’ll find it’s worth digging in with me if it means even a glimpse at the deeper truths that can be leveraged for lasting success in your business.
So back to those raw materials. Client. Success. You need a client. You need them to be successful.
Successful according to whom? To them of course. They need to FEEL like the experience was successful to want to talk about it and say nice things about you.
It’s nice if you can measure the outcome - numbers help. But there’s nothing more powerful than an authentically happy client. And happiness is a feeling, not a number. Roll your eyes if you want engineers. The human condition is emotional.
But for you rationalistic folk, let’s use logic as our shovel to dig deeper until we unearth the raw materials a client needs at their disposal to have success working with us.
They need to engage with us. This is fundamental. You can have a perfect program, but with no engagement there’s simply zero chance of success.
Engagement, then, is one of the first principles of client success. But let’s keep digging.
They also need to take enough action to experience SOME change. So what will they need to enable them to engage and experience a change?
And HERE, is where I think we start to hit paydirt.
It was after digging and digging (and giving up a few times), that I found the most useful answer in the most unlikely of places…
It came from, of all things, a newsletter that just so happened to land in my inbox only a couple of weeks ago.
That newsletter, among other things, described a productivity framework called TEA, which stands for Time, Energy and Attention.
It was developed by Thanh Pham, a productivity expert and founder of Asian Efficiency, in an effort to break down productivity to it’s most essential elements, or what he ended up referring to as it’s “3 currencies.”
Time
Energy
Attention
“Productivity,” it turns out, requires the same raw materials as what we need from our clients if we want them to engage with us, and be successful. This makes sense after all. In the end, we need them to be productive in some way to see progress, right?
If they are going to engage, they need to have time, or make time for our program. If they are going to take action to change, they need energy to commit to it. And if they’re going to stay at it long enough to feel successful, we’ll consistently need to have their attention.
As a result, when we're thinking about aligning how we'll deliver our programs to harness our clients' peak productivity levels, we'll want to ask ourselves:
“When are my clients most likely to have the Time, Energy and Attention to engage?”
You can see how this would be valuable in determining when we should deliver the most intensive pieces of our programs.
Now, you certainly cannot always know when each client's potential productivity peaks. But we can use what we do know to make an educated guess.
TEA and the Work Week
It's easy to forget that the work week is itself a framework to which virtually all of us subscribe.
Do you think your Time, Energy and Attention fluctuate throughout the week? I know mine do.
I'm FAR more likely to be running on all cylinders, and ready to tackle new things at the beginning of the work week than towards the end, when my stores of time, energy and attention are more depleted.
Friday is for tying up loose ends - finishing what I've already started. Saturday is for mental rest, recovery and rejuvenation (or chasing a toddler around in my case).
Those days are plainly NOT for starting new things the way my life is structured. And I know I'm not the only one.
This data showing the variance in Card Open Rates inside Nudge based on the day of the week each Card is delivered I think illustrates my point…
Coaching programs are about learning new ways to live, new habits, tackling new challenges to become better versions of our selves.
And this graph suggests to me that we simply don't have the same stores of time, energy, and attention at the end of the week that we do at the beginning.
From this I would suggest that making efforts to time the delivery of new, time-intensive, or complex steps in our programs to hit a refreshed set of eyes on Sunday or Monday is a worthwhile strategy to consider if we want to give our clients the best possible chance to engage with and absorb the information we're sharing.
In fact, delivering critical content early in the week might not be the only logical time-based strategy for taking advantage of peak TEA (time, energy, attention). The same truth appears to hold within the context of each individual day of the week.
Nudge platform data also shows that a striking spike in client engagement occurs between the hours of 6 and 9am (Card Open data based on the client’s timezone).
This suggests that on top of delivering content early in the week, scheduling or sending messages or notifications to remind clients and reinforce learnings could benefit from a focus on the early hours of the morning, when the information, and your clients minds are still fresh.
So timing content and communication to best fit into our clients’ lives is crucial to capturing their time, energy and attention.
But as we know, there’s more to true learning than absorbing information. We have to also make it stick so it can be internalized and routinely acted upon.
Information retention (and as a result, activation) is where client successes are made. And this means we have our next set of crucial questions to explore.
What's the likelihood that our clients will forget this information even if we gave them the best possible chance to absorb it?
And is there anything we can do to 'hack' the process of forgetting - to give them the best possible chance to retain it?
Information Retention: Hacking the 'Forgetting Curve'
In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus effectively founded the psychological study of memory.
Through his pioneering research on learning and knowledge retention (using himself as his primary subject at times) he developed the theory that became known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve.
The idea was simple. After he learned something new, he would test himself for information retention at different time intervals to measure the percentage of the information he retained.
He found that if he learned something and then didn't review the information at all, after a day he would have already lost over half the information. After a week, the vast majority of information. After a month - not much left at all.
In his efforts to combat his own forgetting curve he tested out various time intervals at which he would briefly review the information learned and then assess his retention.
This line of experimentation led to a theory known as the Spacing Effect.
(from a 2017 webcast by Josh Bersin on disruption in corporate learning)
Ebbinghaus found that by reviewing the information learned at specific intervals he could have a dramatic impact on his longer term retention information.
And if he spaced out multiple review sessions properly, the information would stick for even longer - thus flattening the Forgetting Curve.
Essentially he found that the most effective review process was to briefly review the information 10 minutes after, 1 day after, 1 week after, and 1 month after.
So what should we take away from this as program designers? As coaches, mentors, advisors, trainers, educators?
Once isn't enough.
As another great academic, this one from the century prior to Ebbinghaus, put it:
“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”
It's time to more strategically build repetition and opportunities for reflection into your programs if you haven't already.
As you can see in the Spacing Effect graph above, the difference in information retention, and resulting impact on your clients could be staggering.
Reminders and Reinforcement
There are no magic bullets in coaching relationships, but there are a set of underlying principles that we can apply in combination to give our clients every opportunity to succeed.
Our first learning is that clients need TEA (time, energy and attention) to engage with our programs. And we can help with that by thoughtfully timing our content and communication to fit into their lives when they are most likely to feel fresh and ready to engage.
Once we’ve done that, it’s incumbent upon us as coaches (educators, advisors, mentors, etc) to do what we can to ensure that every crucial lesson shared becomes a lifelong lesson learned.
Thus our second lesson is that we can’t take information retention for granted. People forget. But if we intentionally and systematically remind them, we can flatten the forgetting curve, and again, raise our clients chances for success.
Thus our job on this journey is at least partly to master the process of reminding them what’s important, and reinforcing what they already ‘know’.
I think it’s worth noting that this whole post was a transparent effort at working backwards to find the first principles of client success.
While I’d say we uncovered some of the raw materials of client engagement and success, we arguably didn’t make it all the way there. So what did we miss?
What is it that makes a client WANT to give us their time, energy, and attention?
That is an essential question (and perhaps one for another article). We didn’t get into motivation here. But if you want my two cents, I think there’s a very good case to be made that it starts with WHY.
