“Sell me. What can Commit do for me?”

Recently I had a coach email me and say:

“Help me truly understand what Commit can do for me… Why do I need this? Sell me.”

This prompted me to dig deep and spill all the reasons why we built Commit, why coaches all over the world use it every day, and why if you don’t use it you should take it for a test drive for a full week.

The bottom line after thinking about all the benefits of Commit , after combing through hundreds of emails from coaches praising our product, after asking coaches why they use Commit, is that it does 1 thing really well:

1. Commit saves you time!

Alright so I said, ‘Commit saves you time’. If you believe me, stop reading this and just go sign up at www.commitswimming.com. If you want to hear what I responded to the coach that prompted me to ‘sell him’ on Commit, read on…

If you take nothing else away from this post, watch this video:

Commit is a productivity tool for coaches. You write your workouts on the web or on your phone. It’s that simple. That’s it. There are 2 parts as to why this makes Commit useful for you.

PART ONE

First, because the workouts are stored electronically (instead of on the back of your lunch napkin) you can…

1. Search your workouts to pull up an old workout in seconds: http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22414-find-your-old-workouts

2. Organize your workouts into folders for easy access: http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22417-organizing-your-workouts

3. Analyze your training plan without having to manually add up volume/ percentage kick/ etc. This analysis can be for any of your training groups or individual athletes for any dates you want to look at: http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22418-using-your-dashboard

5. Quickly take attendance with a few taps on your phone: http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22421-doing-the-most-with-a-workout

6. Collaborate with your coaches by connecting to the same team on Commit: http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22415-adding-coaches-to-your-team

7. Save favorite sets of yours for easy access to pull back up and insert into a new workout: http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22422-store-your-favorite-sets

8. You don’t have to email or print anymore because all your coaches have them on their phone.

9. Create attendance reports for any training group or date range you want at any time.

10. Your athletes get a free workout journal if you invite them to your team without lifting a figure. This has been shown to keep swimmers more engaged throughout the season.

You get the idea. Once the workouts are stored as ‘data’, the features we can add for you are endless. And, we continually add features based on coach feedback. If you talk to any coach that uses Commit they can attest that we work faster and harder than any other team to get this done for you.

Part Two

Second, you might be asking, well there are other products that do this… like Hy-tek’s old team manager add-on ‘workout manager’ or TeamUnify’s MainSet, or ‘Workouts for Swim Coaches’ on the iPad. What makes Commit different from these?

The answer is that all of these tools suck time away from you as a coach because now it takes 30 minutes longer than before to write a workout. You are restricted to toggling set ranges and rep numbers and adding a character limited description. There’s a reason none of these caught on and Commit has.

Coming from a world where most coaches use paper and pencil to free-form write their workouts, we developed an algorithm where you do the same thing you were always doing (write workout free-form) but maintain all the benefits about having the workouts stored digitally that I mentioned above. Watch this video to learn about the algorithm:

http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22419-writing-sets-best-practices

So, at the end of the day because the workouts are now digitally stored AND you’re not dealing with frustrating workout inputs, Commit saves coaches time. We hear this every single day from new users. And, it’s the single most important driver of why coaches use Commit. What’s more valuable than your time?

Hopefully, www.commitswimming.com shows you everything I just told you. If you still have questions or want to be sold more I’m happy to hop on the phone anytime: 267–664–9395.

At this point I got a response from the coach saying this…

“OK features we can add are endless are simply words. I want your details as to what that means. I don’t talk to any coaches who use commit, so don’t give me homework. I am giving you a shot, SELL ME.”

Fair enough. I love the pushback and request for more explicit information. So here it is…

In less than a year below is the non-exhaustive list of features we added at coaches requests. It took 3 of us, 3 months to launch Commit. And then we added all of this. AND responded to/ solved any issue or bug a coach has come across right away. To the point where now I can count on 1 hand the number of ‘issues’ our users have had in months. Point being we move fast and aren’t going anywhere.

1. Roster import
2. Athlete specific dashboard
3. Mobile and tablet dashboard
4. Invite athletes so they can view their workout history
5. Running distance & time on printout
6. Setting default intervals and intensities
7. Email auto complete when sending workouts
8. Organize workouts into different folders
9. Preview workouts
10. mass email/print workouts
11. Attendance reports across any selected date range
12. Displaying 100 pace when typing a set
13. Deleting sets in the set bank
14. Free-form text box
15. Copying and pasting from Word documents
16. Emailing workouts
17. Favoriting sets
18. Searching workouts by name
19. Naming workouts
20. Brackets to block the parser
21. Add time between sets
22. Time based distances
23. Stress meter

The coach also asked me about TeamUnify integration, if the coach collaboration was just like a Google Doc, and the athlete version of Commit. See below for my responses.

Re: TeamUnify Integration

Export your roster from TU in a .csv format. Adjust it in excel so columns go first, last, email. Then import into Commit:

http://support.commitswimming.com/article/show/22416-adding-athletes-to-your-team

If you don’t want to do it, I will do it for you if you send me your roster.

Re: Coach collaboration — just like google doc?

Yes — exactly like you do already on Google Docs. But google docs doesn’t do all the things above.

Re: Athlete journals

What kid wants to physically write stuff in a journal? This is FREE and on their phone. You should be sold there.

Originally published at http://wow.commitswimming.com on January 10, 2017.