How to Build the DPI Into Your Business

Congratulations. You’re now DPI certified! You have a good grasp of the Power Intelligence framework, and know how to debrief a DPI report and turn it into a development plan.

But knowing how to use the DPI and knowing how to build a business around it are two different things. It’s the gap between these two where some certified coaches get stuck.

The coaches who use the DPI most consistently don’t just sell an assessment. They’re selling a program, a solution to a problem their clients already know they have. The DPI sits inside the solution. And that shift from DPI-the assessment to program-that-solves-your problems changes everything: how you talk about your work, how you price it, and how easily clients say yes.

Here’s how to think through that shift for your own practice.

Start with the problem, not the tool

Your clients aren’t walking around thinking, “I need a 360-degree power assessment.” They’re thinking things like:

• My people aren’t speaking up. I can’t tell if they actually agree with me or if they’re just going along.
• We just went through a merger and the two teams still aren’t working like one.
• I keep getting told I need to be more influential, but I don’t know what that means or how to do it.
• Something’s off on my team. There’s tension and submerged conflict. People are compliant but not engaged.

Each of those is a real, felt problem. And each of them has Power Intelligence underneath it — questions about who feels they have a voice, who’s protecting themselves, who’s operating from authority versus fear, where trust has broken down.

Your job is to help clients with the problem they’re naming, not get them to engage with the framework you’re trained in.

Match the DPI to the problem they’re already solving

Here’s what that looks like in practice for a few common scenarios.

“My team isn’t engaged — they show up but they’re checked out.”

Low engagement is almost always a power story. People disengage when they feel their input doesn’t matter, when they’ve stopped believing things will change, or when the interpersonal dynamics of the team make it safer to stay quiet than to contribute. The DPI surfaces the specific, often unintended behaviors that shut people down, or tell them that their contributions don’t matter. 

The key is not to lead with the DPI or power, but lead with: “I work with leaders who are doing everything right on paper but can’t figure out why their teams aren’t fully with them. We look at the dynamics underneath the engagement data and we work on those.”

“We’re struggling with influence — especially across departments.”

Leaders who need to influence without formal authority are navigating a power landscape they often can’t see clearly. They don’t know how they’re perceived, where their credibility gaps are, or what’s driving resistance. The DPI gives them a map of how they’re using their power and gives you the coaching material to work with.

Here your positioning might be: “I help leaders build real influence, the kind of authority that travels with you, and holds in rooms where you don’t have the title. We figure out what your powers actually are, where you have gaps, and how to develop your influence.

“There’s complaints about our culture — or at minimum, people aren’t treating each other well.”

Incivility is almost always a power symptom. People act badly when they feel powerless (aggression as compensation) or when they feel powerful enough that they think the consequences don’t apply to them. Sometimes both are happening at once. The DPI can diagnose which dynamic is driving the behavior and which interventions will improve the situation..

Your positioning here: “I help organizations understand why incivility persists even when leadership is committed to changing it. Usually it’s a power problem, how authority is being used, and the impact it’s having. It’s often patterns of behavior that have taken root. But once you identity it, you can address it.”

Finding your entry point

The three examples above aren’t exhaustive. You may work in talent development, executive transitions, organizational change, DEI, public sector leadership, or something else entirely. The DPI travels across all of those contexts but your entry point will be specific to where your clients live.

Here’s a simple set of questions to find yours:

1. What problem do your clients name most often? Not the diagnostic language you’d use but the words they say when they call you.

2. What’s underneath that problem? Almost every leadership challenge has a power dynamic underneath it. Where is it? Who has power and who doesn’t? Who feels they can speak and who doesn’t? Who’s either over-using their role, or afraid to step into it?

3. What does resolution look like for the client? What would they be able to do, say, or experience that they can’t right now?

Design a package, not a menu

Once you know which problem you’re solving, instead of thinking in terms of line items — the DPI, the debrief, a follow-up coaching session — design an engagement that delivers on the outcome.

What does that look like? It could be:

• An Influence Audit package: individual DPI, two-session debrief and sense-making, a written development plan focused specifically on expanding influence in the leader’s current context
• A Team Dynamics program: introduction to power and teams session, individual and team-level DPI administration, facilitated team debrief, follow-up sessions with individuals and the team working on specific patterns the data surfaced
• A Culture Diagnostic: DPI as part of a broader organizational assessment, paired with a DPA and Group Power Profile, delivered as a leadership team engagement

The package has a name that speaks to the outcome, not the tool. It has a defined scope. It has one price, not an itemized list that invites clients to pick and choose.

A few principles worth considering:

• Price the outcome, not the components. When you itemize your offerings too granularly (“$X for the assessment, $Y per session”) clients start doing math in their heads. They think about what they can cut. When you price a package, they’re deciding whether the outcome is worth it. That’s a much better conversation.
• Build in enough to actually work. One DPI debrief and a single follow-up session rarely moves the needle. Give yourself room to do deep work. And don’t forget all the administrative work on your end – phone calls, conversations, emails, writing reports, analyzing DPIs, planning sessions. A well-scoped package protects the quality of your results and creates real value, for you and your client. 
• Make it customizable at the edges, not at the core. The package can flex on timing, on the number of participants, on whether you include team sessions or individual coaching. But the core logic — the DPI data informing a focused engagement aimed at a specific outcome — should hold. That consistency is what makes the work repeatable and scalable for your practice.

Making this stick

The coaches who build the DPI deeply into their practices tend to do a few things consistently:

• They talk about the work in outcome language — not “I use the DPI” but “I help teams where trust has broken down figure out what’s driving it.”
• They run the same package more than once. The first time through a new package is learning. But by the third time, you’re delivering it with greater confidence. 
• They also get started with pilots, reduced fees, or even pro bono work as a way to test out the package, see what lands, and refine their framing.

The DPI is a powerful tool. It surfaces things that other assessments miss and creates coaching conversations that wouldn’t happen otherwise. But it does that work best inside a well-designed engagement with a specific outcome. If you focus on the engagement and outcome, the tool will carry itself.