Your Client Management Dashboard Is Missing These 11 Features (Score Yourself / 11)

Full transcript

Coach, I'm going to show you the 11 features you need to have in your client management dashboard in 2026. And I don't really mind what systems you use to create this. I'm going to show you the principles behind it. Yes, I do have my recommendations, but if you can take the principles, you could steal some of these bits and add them on to what you're currently using. Or if it's a case that you need it completely overhauled to get all 11, you're going to have a really good idea about why you would have each different part in there. So let's jump into it without wasting any more time.

The first thing we need to have as an absolute bare minimum is all of the different things we're using for our business. If we're using Trainerize, Google Sheets, WhatsApp, Stripe, Notion, all of these things, we want them pulling the information into one place. So we're able to create these client profiles where we'll see client Sarah here: she's an active client, the last time she checked in was Monday, the monthly recurring revenue we're getting off her is £180, and she's due for renewal in 14 days. All of this information is normally stored some in a Google Sheet, some in Trainerize, some in WhatsApp messages, some on Stripe. Get that into one place, so you just have one place to go for your entire business to see anything.

Then, because we're getting all of this stuff to go into one place, we can link the clients and all their other stuff. We have the client, and let's say the client checks in. The check-in is here, and we can link that to the client, so every time they check in it's automatically linking to the client. If we wanted to check a client's entire check-in history, we could click onto the client and see all their past check-ins. The same goes for their calls, any testimonials they've given us, any payments, any onboarding stuff, any referrals. Everything is attached to the one profile, so there are no duplicates where we have multiple different client records and different bits of data in different places. Makes it so much easier.

That then allows us to create different views for different purposes. If we want to see all of our clients, a big overview, and then we're like, right, who's checked in today? We can switch to the check-in view and we'll see all the check-ins, and there'll be triage: the reds, the ambers, the greens. We want to see what clients are at risk, we'll have a separate view for that. And if you want to see who's due for renewal, you click on that and it'll show you all those clients there. But the thing is, it's all the same data in the one place. It's just these different buttons that load up different views, so we see what we need to see at that time and nothing else.

Here's a quick example. You might want to see, right, here are all my clients. We can see active clients, who's due for renewal, this person's at risk, the last time they checked in, how much we're getting off them, when they're due for renewal. Then we could open up a client and see a client overview: all their check-ins, all their payments, all the programming notes, all the testimonials, referrals, all that kind of stuff. Then we're like, right, what's the plan today? We need to go do our check-ins. So we'll go check our check-ins, check our risk clients, check who's due for renewal, any clients who are onboarding, any clients who have graduated. They all have their place inside there at the click of a button.

After we have that set up, we have the base structure. The next part you need in your client management is an automation layer. Unless you like doing everything yourself manually. Personally, I don't. If we're going to be repeating tasks and doing chains of tasks, we might as well put a system and a process in there to automate it and save us a bit of time. The first thing is automated check-in tracking. We need it to automatically track: Sarah checked in on Monday, Mike on Tuesday, Aoife is due to check in today, Dan hasn't checked in, he's three days overdue, and Niamh has checked in, she submitted on Wednesday. So then we know an auto reminder is sent to Aoife, and Dan is flagged to the coach because he's late for his check-in. And if that happens again, we'll get another notification: hey, Dan has missed two check-ins in a row, he's probably at risk, we should go talk to him.

Then we have the red flag radar, kind of like I was talking about there. You have the two missed check-ins. Anybody whose payment failed. If you're using Trainerize or something, we can monitor how long it's been since they actually logged into the app. And if you have any sort of WhatsApp messaging going through an AI, we can see whether the tone has shifted in their check-ins, whether the responses are getting shorter, one-word answers and stuff like that. Then we can flag to say, hey, based off this, we think this client could be at risk, maybe go check in on that client as well.

Then you have renewal triggers. The amount of coaches I speak to who know their clients are due to renew at some point, then they go to check it and realise it was actually in the past, that they were already due for renewal. Then they have to have that awkward conversation with the client, and they just write off the last months that they did for free, or they have to say, oh, you were actually due for renewal a month ago, and it's just not great. We need warnings so we have enough time to build up the vision for the clients, but also make sure we do not miss that point. So we have different ranges of renewal reminders that can be automatically tracked in your CRM. 30 days beforehand, start building the vision. 14 days beforehand, right, have we actually discussed it with the client, are they going to renew or not renew, all that kind of stuff. Then seven days: let's make a decision, are they doing it or are they not doing it, and lock that in.

Then onboarding. Onboarding is super overlooked. Coaches say, oh yeah, I have it automated, they just go into the app and fill in the forms and all this kind of stuff, but there are so many steps to the onboarding where people can get lost. People can end up skipping stuff, and we want to be able to track what's going on at every stage of the process. When they go into the onboarding, what have they got done? Where's their contract? Again, like I said at the start, get all that information sent back into the one place. We need some sort of an onboarding pipeline to see who is where, and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. That was one of the big things for my client Marilynn.

This is a little example of what it would look like. You'd have the check-in views. You'd have a triage. You'd have any red flags popping out to you. You'd then have a renewal pipeline, so you can easily see who's due for renewal and when. And then the onboarding pipeline: signed up, in the onboarding process, and then all the active clients as well.

Then we have the actual money side of it, the financial side. You either love this part or you hate it. For most coaches this is not tracked effectively, and if you're using Google Sheets to track it, just stop it right now. We can do much better than this. Ideally, we want to be using some sort of a payment processor like Stripe. Luckily, if you are using Stripe, we can set up a few basic automations. Every time a transaction comes in from Stripe, it will go and find the client it's associated with. That then lets us know what our monthly recurring revenue is, what the client's actual lifetime value is. We'll be able to see our churn rate, the last three payments that were late, our refund rate, and all this financial data that you would normally track on a spreadsheet if you're doing well. Some people don't track it at all and just pop into Stripe every now and again. That gives us data where we can see year on year at a glance, and anybody who's due for payments will show up there. You'll be able to track upcoming payments, when you should be getting paid, off who, when, all tracked automatically where you don't have to do it any more.

Then we have pillar four, which is the growth layer. Testimonials and referrals seem to be something coaches are not great at asking for, and I think it's because they feel awkward. They feel they have to text the client and say, hey, do you know anybody who would be interested in joining my program? And the client says, oh, I don't know. And they go, oh, that's okay, that's fine, don't worry about it. We need to start the conversation a little bit differently, and this is one way we can do it. We can have time-based triggers and action-based triggers, and trigger them depending on where the client is in the journey, to ask for a testimonial or a referral or possibly both. But the key is that we're only asking the happy clients, the clients who are actually having a good time with it. The way we do that is just logic questioning. If they answer a question about their experience out of five stars and give four stars, we're not asking for a testimonial or a referral, nothing. If they give five stars, we might ask another kind of question to test the waters, to see whether they'd be likely to give us a referral or a testimonial. If they answer that well, we might go directly and ask them for, say, a Google review style one if they're only within their first 30 days and haven't had a significant body transformation yet. If it's 90 days onwards, chances are there's a significant physical change that we'd be able to turn into an actual testimonial or a case study. And even when clients are graduating, we can turn that into case studies and testimonials with the right process behind it. So we need some sort of automated referral and testimonial capture in place. Because otherwise, let's face it, you're just not going to ask, and we want to make sure we get as much social proof out of the clients as possible.

Then lead tracking. We obviously need a way to track our leads. It's a basic thing that we should be tracking our leads, but also to be able to link the client back to the lead profile. So then when we look at it, say, six months later, and we look at all our clients, we can see where all of these clients came from. Was it a Facebook direct lead form into a WhatsApp message, and from there they were nurtured for a while and then signed up? Or was it an Instagram hand-raiser that you put up? We need a way of tracking that, so we're able to see where we should actually put our focus. So track leads, and link them directly back to the clients.

Then we have the last part, which is the reporting. Kind of the most boring part, but if it's tracked properly and done properly, it's one of the most useful things in the business, the thing that puts your mind at ease. And if you're working with any sort of business mentor, chances are they want you to be showing them this kind of data. How many active clients do we have? What's our recurring revenue, or what were our sales for the month? What's our churn at? How long are clients staying for, and is that improving? Who's at risk? What clients didn't check in? What clients are winning? What's our monthly recurring revenue? Any other dashboard stats you want visible in one place. Imagine being on a desert island. If you had to run your business from one dashboard, what data and flags would you want to be there? Get that put into a dashboard, and that would be it.

So that's all 11. It could look something like this, and once you do all of those, you're fairly set. That's the good foundation. Yes, you can start to build on other stuff, like an AI sales trainer in your lead tracker to help with actually closing more leads, and all these other add-ons, but this is the core structure of your client management systems. So score yourself out of 11. What do you actually have in place that matches that?

And if you have any questions, or you want me to audit what you're currently doing, drop me a message on Instagram with the word audit. We'll run through your entire business. We'll go through 10 areas: lead gen, lead tracking, sales, onboarding, client management, check-ins, offboarding, call management, testimonials, finance, everything inside your business. We'll give it all a score, and then I'll show you what it could look like with all the different pieces inside there. If you have any questions, feel free to pop them over. There's absolutely no hassle.