Coaching and Exponential Marketing Aim For Performance

Wikipedia (citing various sources, of course) defines coaching as “a structured process-driven relationship between a trained professional coach and an individual or team which includes: assessment, examining values and motivation, setting measurable goals, defining focused action plans and using validated behavioural change tools and techniques to assist them to develop competencies and remove blocks to achieve valuable and sustainable changes in their professional and personal life.” If I were to summarize the above definition in one word, this would be performance.

Paul Garrison defines marketing’s purpose in his Exponential Marketing book as being to “sell more stuff, to more people, for more money, more often and more efficiently.” Paul describes the exponential marketing process as having the following steps: destination planning -> value diagnostics -> brand architecture -> fully integrated communications -> performance alignment. If I were to summarize the above definition in one word, this would be performance.

Both coaching and exponential marketing focus on performance. Mihai Stanescu was telling me that business/executive coaching is all about performance and not about reparatory therapy (and a lot of people have the perception that coaching is out there to solve problems not help achieve performance). Paul Garrison was telling his class of marketing students that he never had issues getting a marketing budget from his boss as long as he knew exactly what he wanted to achieve and he had the strategy and tools to achieve that business objective (he was not identifying problems that needed to be solved with that marketing budget, but rather business opportunities).

Ironically, most companies, in order to achieve performance or during a crisis, focus on cutting costs. Do you see a striking difference in these two approaches to doing business?