How To Get Paid To Speak (Or Use Speaking To Compliment Your Coaching Business)

Everyone who's watching the replay, thank you so much for going back and watching the replay. I have my friend Jason Connell on the line. Do you prefer Connell or Connell?

I use Connell, but my mom says Connell, my dad says Connell, so I've never really gotten to.

Alright, I'm not going to feel bad then, but I'll go for Jason Connell for now. And you know, I met Jason last year. I think I probably found him through a blog post or referral or friends of a friend or something. Ended up reaching out to him for a one hour kind of consult. I was in a place where I had done a lot of the coaching side of my business and I enjoyed that. But I realized how much potential there was if I were to do more speaking. I knew I wanted to get on more stages and so I reached out to him and signed up and paid some money and we got on the phone and Jason, you were just so dialed in during that. It was like, I think it was the best 60 minutes, the most productive 60 minutes I've ever spent with a coach consultant. Yeah, he nailed it. And I've obviously I hire those types of people all the time. And so I was like, wow, this guy has a system. He's done it before. And as a result of that conversation, I ended up building kind of a sub website for the sales training I wanted to do and ended up getting a lead and you know, closing her right over the phone. First conversation as a result of what Jason and I had talked about and got to fly to Atlanta. So anyway, I knew at that point that I wanted to share you, Jason, with some of my followers and you know, you're working on some magic behind the scenes and of course, and things like that. So I kind of wanted to get us acquainted and kind of dig in, see if we could give people some value during a quick call.

Thanks man, I appreciate that and your compliment just made my day. I want to touch on that because like, there's a couple underlying principles that probably made that session effective. And I know that almost everyone that engages with you as a coach of one sort or another, there is this raw mechanistic sense of like I've spent the past two or three years studying exclusively how to help people. Many of my clients are either coaches, authors, or both how to build speaking businesses. But one thing that happened behind the scenes is like I sent you a survey ahead of time and you and you were really good about sharing that information of like what you wanted to get out of our call together. So that allowed me to go into this dialed in. And then also you made this brilliant move. You said, like, are you assessing? You were actually guiding me. You said, are you assessing for personality? Or are you just sort of like, are these the strategies that you think work? Which made me pause and think, well, now I've got a bunch of different strategies for this. Let's figure out something that's going to work specifically for Greg. So while it's tempting for me to brush my shoulders off on one hand, I had put in a decent amount of time up front in general and a certain amount for you. But then also, your fluency in the field helped guide us towards success.

Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that. And that's. I will say to throw the comment back to you, that's a constant throughout all the different people that I hire. But I think it's super important. Right. In the coaching world, it's like helping your clients be better at being coached and being helped and whether it's having them prep for sessions and things like that is amazing. So I see we have Abby on the line. Hey, Abby. Karen. Not really on the line. That's kind of old school. Watching our live video, Daniel. Hey, everyone. Thanks for coming. And at any point, if you have a question, clarification from something you hear come up, just throw it in the comments and I'll be monitoring that feed on Facebook and, you know, pass them on to Jason. But, Jason, I guess where I wanted to start was if you could just tell people a little bit about your journey, kind of becoming a professional speaker and just kind of where that all started for you, I feel like that would be awesome.

Sure. So I started speaking full time in my early 20s. And my path in college was a little unusual. I, at 19, got fed up with college, dropped out of school, spent three years traveling the world, and I was largely volunteering and then consulting on international development projects. And I had no money. I had earned money as a child entertainer when I was in high school and middle school, but I donated all that before I went to college because I wanted to be a normal college student, if that even exists. And I was able to get corporations to sponsor my travels around the world. So I spent three years traveling, came back, I re enrolled in school, graduated, and what I wanted to do was stand on stage and share with college students how they can get sponsorships for the type of work that I was doing, for giving back locally, giving back globally. And I stood up a speaking business. And in my first year, I closed six deals for a grand total of $10,000, which even when you're 22, if you're living in the United States or Canada, I went to school in Canada. That's not enough to live off of. So I really was questioning whether or not I had what it takes to make this work, if, like I had anything of value to say, if I had the discipline, the skills, the strategy. And I was really sort of deeply frustrated that I wasn't getting the respect or the attention or the clients and audiences that I felt like I deserved and really wanted to serve as well. And I redoubled. With the help of a mentor and a coach, I redoubled my efforts on the business. I was not and am not obviously famous. I don't have a PhD, I haven't written a book. So I could really just compete on my skill on stage as well as my business practices, and over the course of a couple of years, experimented and tested with tons and tons and tons of things in speaking and the last tour that I did. So my first tour, first year of speaking, I, in six gigs, didn't even profit 10,000 bucks. Last tour I did, I was so fortunate with understanding the business that did nearly 50 dates on two continents and sort of routinely pulling down 10,000 plus per speech. And it's so tempting for me to brush my shoulders off once again and be like, this is because I'm a business, I'm not a business genius. I had good coach and good mentor, really good mentor, a guy named Jean Pierre. And as it turns out, in speaking, there are a lot of replicable systems for generating leads that have nothing to do with cold calling and a lot of old school business strategies that you can lean on. So I spent a decade, give or take, touring the country and the world. And the travel is really, really intense. It was great when I was touring with friends, but fairly isolating at times if you're doing 50, 60, 70 dates in a tour by yourself. So I quote, unquote, retired from that. I still speak occasionally, but the past two and a half, three years, I've really dedicated to helping other speakers build their businesses. And I find myself in this awesome position because I did work on the circuit for a decade. I know how that works really well. And I've spent two and a half, nearly at this point, three years refining my craft of helping coaches, authors, executives, etcetera become professional speakers. And really enjoyed that quite a bit too.

That's amazing. Yeah, it's such an amazing transition and to see where you started and then where you ended up and we all kind of like bluster through especially. I think the more painful it is at the beginning, the more you end up wanting to go back and help people who are in a similar situation.

Yes, right.

It's the same thing with, you know, I get passionate about helping coaches. It's like I know the plug, the blood, sweat and tears of like wanting to fill that roster, knowing you can help people and just not knowing what the heck to do. So I guess the next question I have for you is obviously, you know, you were a professional speaker, that was your sole focus. You didn't really have a coaching business on the side. A lot of my audience, not all of them, but a lot of the people who are going to be watching this are coaches in one form or another. They might be health coaches, business coaches, career coaches, transformational coaches, and really they're in the business of spreading a certain expertise or knowledge or wisdom and providing a certain transformation in people's lives. And so I guess what I would ask you is, in your opinion, why do you feel like speaking is a good complement to that sort of business, whether you just focus solely on speaking or it's a complement to the coaching side of the business?

Yeah, great question. I did in the last three years, I did have clients on retainer, so it was more than coaching, but I spoke on leadership development and then I did speak on self love and self compassion. Had a lot of inbound requests for coaching on self love and self compassion, but kind of steered away from that because I have no training in psychotherapy and it was something I had sort of struggled with myself. So it didn't feel right for me to teach it. But the sort of obvious or easy reason within that is like if you are giving a speech, even if it's for 20, 30 people and they have elected to come see you, let's just say you're a nutrition coach and you're speaking on the sort of high level or above the line principles of nutrition. In front of you are 20 or 30 potential leads who care about this. And a speech is an incredible one hour opportunity to inspire certain emotion, to transfer high level principles, etc. But the stuff that comes out that can often really change a life happens after the speech, you know, with accountability and fleshing out some below the line details and really customizing again, just for example, the nutritional approach to that individual. So the easy, from a business perspective answer is if your topic resonates with your audience, you have a huge amount of leads in front of you and a lot of the sales Process takes place on its own. They get to understand that you're an expert. They get to hear you and see if your style might be simpatico with their style and who they are. And the sales process starts to start because they can begin to envision working with you. And we can get into this maybe a little later. There's a couple ways to sell from the stage without ever being salesy. I mean, the singular best way to sell from the stage is not to do it. But you can start to see a lot of those conversations very fluently and naturally for your audience.

Yeah. And just to echo that, I mean, the trust and credibility that you get from being in a room of people where you're the. You're the person everyone's listening to is magic. If you're wanting to ultimately enroll some of those people who would be a good fit into clients. I have friends who. I have people who are like writers and speakers and that's all they do. And they'll tell me like, Greg, can you help coach someone on this? Because I just keep having people come up to me to coach, but like, I don't coach, I just speak. So it's like they're not even looking for coaching leads just by focusing on the speaking. And, you know, it's providing marketing for that. And I always try to impress upon coaches, like, you're really not in the business of coaching. You're in the business of results. Right. And coaching is a tool and writing is a tool. Right. You can have a book and that may be one part of someone's journey in that area. Right. The book may just get their ideas jogged and have them commit maybe to changing that area of their life, but doesn't really go much further because it's just a book. A speech might have someone see something in a new light or take that first step, but it's just an hour long experience. Right. And coaching might provide the whole transformation. The problem is that's kind of a high risk investment and leap for someone to make. Right. So could you run a business where all you do is coach people for a year Whatever, losing 50 pounds or something like that, just to give an example, you could do that and you could build that off referrals. But how much more powerful would you be if you also had some entry level experience that also filtered people that made it easier to enroll as people, as clients, and now you can meet people at those different parts of the transformation.

Totally. And you said you just triggered a couple other, like, incredible reasons why speaking and Coaching are complementary. One, most of the coaches that I personally know and have relationships with or have worked with have a mission beyond making money they actually care about, like, leaving the world or leaving a few individuals a little bit better or a little bit more intact than before the first contact. And, like, speaking is a great way to start that conversation and introduce some new ideas to a lot. A lot, A lot of people. And then, like you were saying, Greg, it fleshes out the business nicely. You can certainly run an entire business just coaching. You can certainly run an entire business just speaking.

But having the.

I mean, if you're coaching all the time and you have a client that wants to fly you into Florida for a VIP day, if you compare that with the speech, you've amplified your impact because now you're reaching a couple hundred more people as well as your income. And it also provides, you know, a more resilient and versatile business for the owner, the coach, the speaker.

Totally agree.

So.

And yeah, I think that that's amazing.

Just.

I'm looking at the comments. June says hello from New York City. Marla just signed on. Muriel coming from the Netherlands, which is cool. I've never been there. Have you been to the Netherlands?

I have, yeah, a couple times. My brother studied abroad there.

Oh, nice. Is it cool? A good place?

I liked it a lot. Yeah. Amsterdam. Amsterdam was incredible for a lot of reasons that people would guess, as well as a lot of reasons people wouldn't guess. Like, it's just this beautiful, friendly city.

Nice wooden shoes, right? Is that.

Yeah. One of my friends is from Gouda, so we went to Gouda and, like, hung out there. That's where the cheese is from.

Oh, there you go. Nice. All right, well, so, okay, so let's transition to, you know, I'm assuming someone who's watching that at this point is kind of sold on the idea of doing more speaking. So if you're. If you're speaking, I think from our conversation, it seems like the first step along with kind of mindset is niche and topic, right? So, like, if you want to speak, that's great. What do you want to speak on? And so my question for you is, how do someone who's watching this start to figure out kind of what topics they could speak on or should speak on that the market will actually pay for? And maybe even, like, what are the top three or four just proven niches in speaking?

That's a really smart question, and it's something that I messed up in my first year. So my first year speaking on, as I mentioned traveling internationally, volunteering, getting people to sponsor all that stuff. As it turns out, that's information that audiences are interested in learning, but not information that buyers are interested in paying for. So the first thing, as you suggested, is to find a topic and validate it. And there's a couple different ways to do this. But the first, lowest hanging fruit, is to ask yourself, the coach or the emerging speaker, what do I want to speak about? Sort of adjacent and probably better question is, what do people tend to turn to me for advice about? So for Greg, it often tends to be like business related issues and sales related issues and mindset related issues. But if you notice that your clients or your friends or your family are consistently asking you for advice, this is like a good beginning of a breadcrumb trail of what you might want to speak about. And I'll talk about validating your market in just a second. The other way to find a topic that I love and I talk to my clients about this a lot is thinking about if you have kids or hypothetical kids, if you could just give them one piece of guidance or advice in life, what would that be? And in doing this, you're starting to shed a little bit of light on a topic that you might like. And that is incredibly important because you're going to be working with this, your name is going to be associated with it for at least the year or whatever that you're touring on that topic. But then you do want to make sure, sure that buyers are buying the topic. And the easiest way of doing this, let's say that somebody is a fashion coach or like style and personal clothing coach. I'm sure that's a thing. I imagine that's something. What you then want to do is like Google speakers on men's fashion, speakers on cutting edge, women's fashion, whatever. And no matter what the search term is, it's going to return a ton of results. But you want to look for two things. One, in the first or second page on Google, you want to open up tabs for every single one of the speakers and every speaker in their marketing. And this is really important for buyers. Maybe we'll talk about this in a bit. Has a testimonial section or a client section or a praise section or whatever. And that's where they're going to list off the different clients and testimonials that they've worked with. Look at this stuff with a critical eye. If it just looks like two or three of their friends have given them testimonials as a courtesy Then you can assume somewhat safely that this person is aspirational. But they're not there yet. They're not with any routine sort of booking gigs consistently. Flip side, if four or five of those speakers on your topic have a lot of clients and their clients you'd be interested in working with lots of testimonials, then you start to get the sense that this is a viable market. The next thing to do here is go to some of the bigger agency sites and different agents and agencies represent different topics or subcategories of topics. But let's say for example, that you want to work on the college agency, the college market. One of the better agencies on the college market is this group called Wolfman Productions. And look at the speakers that agents are representing, especially the ones they're featuring. They feature them just on the front page of their website generally. Or they might have a tab called Featured Speakers they and see if there are any speakers on that topic. A really hot topic in the college market right now is consent and sexual assault issues and sort of issues under that umbrella. And if you Google that, you're going to find tons of working speakers on it. If you Google that with agencies, you're going to find a lot of featured speakers. So you can Quickly, this takes 10, 15 minutes. Start to validate the market that way. And I really, really, really would not put any time or energy into building out the market until you can be fairly confident. And you have these shorthand examples that people are buying. So that's the long answer. You asked a pointed question, what are the hottest topics? Pretty consistently, for the past four or five years, the biggest markets have existed as follows. First and foremost, sales. This is an easy one because it tends to pay for itself many times over if the speaker is good. Second and close and growing market is leadership. And leadership is a pretty big umbrella market. When I was touring on Self love and self compassion, I positioned that as a leadership speech because generally if someone's relationship to him or herself improves, then they are going to be more effective at work and perhaps even have to work less to get more done. And then the third topic is the sort of even broader personal development topic. This ranges from motivation to nutrition to mindset, to how you think and feel about yourself, etc. But again, with those three topics, sales, leadership, personal development, you can pretty much rest assured that you will be able to find buyers. The caveat here is like hyper niche markets. I mean, if you want to speak on using nutritional yeast as a Parmesan substitute for vegans, There might not be a market that might be too niche. And while I'm here, just one last idea and then I'll be quiet. A lot of my clients, their instinct, and I understand this, is to go broad. You know, they are a leadership speaker and under leadership, they can talk about delegation, they can talk about automation, they can talk about whatever. That's actually a mistake. What especially emerging speakers want to do is they want to really, really, really niche down and really focus on like a specific targeted plot of land instead of the entire continent. So for leadership, you know, you might. One of my clients is an MD who works with executives. He's sort of billed as a leadership speaker, but specifically what he focuses on is medical approaches to brain optimization for executives. That is a way better topic and much more effective in sales than a doctor's opinion about leadership.

Yeah, I mean, I can already hear the dissenting cries of I don't want to narrow my focus already. You know, this is such a. It's such a similar thing as choosing a coaching specialty. Right. And people hate it, at least who I serve. And they're not going to listen anyway and they're going to go broad and then they won't get clients and then they'll listen to us later. And that's okay. You got to go on your own journey. But most of the people listening to this call should have an advantage in this conversation because you should already be working with clients or you should have already maybe built a coaching website. Even if you're just getting started, you should have a sense of what type of transformation you want to help people with. So what is the corollary that you would want to speak on? Right. So you should already have a head start here. You're not starting from scratch. Although, like, you know, I'll just give our example. Right. Obviously my main business, my main niche is helping coaches fill their client roster. When I talk to you, we still stayed in the realm of sales and marketing type of thing because that's where a lot of my expertise is. It's what I'm passionate about. But I did a slight pivot for that and looked, where could I go and be a sales trainer for companies that sell services? And so it wasn't like I was only looking to go speak at mindvalley or something to a bunch of coaches getting clients. Now I could maybe I could do that too and try that, but I wanted to try something else. But I was able to create. I was able to at least position that story in my, in my marketing on how that could transfer. And so you do have some leeway in terms of if you want to experiment with something that's not in your, you know, your go to coaching niche. But I do think that having an understanding of where you already have some credibility, already have some experience. I've already worked with people personally. Use that asset because it's a big one.

Yeah. And as far as one thing I've noticed that helps, it didn't occur to me that when you're helping a coach build his or her business that you also meet resistance with the niching or niching part. That makes sense once you spell it out loud. One of the ways I explain that to speakers and for people listening, to help move the needle in the direction of choosing a niche with speaking. You know, an entry level fee should be between 25 and 3,500. Maybe you negotiate it down to 2,000 or whatever. But at that level, it takes you an hour to give a speech or a day if you have to fly in and out. You really don't need tons of clients. Which is one of the reasons that niching is deceptively safe and deceptively intelligent. Because you end up being a perfect fit for a small section of buyers. But you only need a small section of buyers. The other thing like Greg, what you did and what we did with your business, and I'm glad you fleshed that out, but I want to explain the logics to the people building their businesses, speaking businesses. Understand it. What we needed was a clean narrative for the buyer because there's not going to be a huge. There are conference buyers and like you said, mindvalley. That would love your direct topic. You know, how can coaches run their businesses and 10x or whatever it is you want to focus on for that speech. But for the buyer, especially since they're selling services, there's this clean narrative. It's like, okay, Greg has spent the past couple years helping a whole lot of individuals learn how to better sell themselves. That in many cases is a much harder sale than selling graphic design services or, you know, whatever related services. It makes sense that he would know this. It's very easy for the buyer to get from A to B narratively. And that for people listening is what you want to do with your coaching practice. You know, if your coaching practice translates perfectly to an active market, awesome. If you need to go to an adjacent market, which is what many of my clients who have been coaches in the past or are coaches need to do. Just make sure there's a clean narrative. So Your buyer understands the journey, and it doesn't take any sort of time, mentally or emotionally, for them to understand that you're an expert.

Yeah, makes total sense. I'm glad you went into detail there. So I saw a question come in from Abby. She said, what's your take on pitching the same topic to different markets? Which I think we may have just touched on briefly, but meaning the power of curiosity and relationships could be sales leadership and personal development. So how do you figure out which could have the biggest impact on my own business? Would it just be who would be my best client base? So I know Abby. I've actually worked with her personally. So she's kind of an intimacy relationship type coach and helps people connect with others more effectively. So she's saying it could be sales leadership or personal development. How do I basically, how do I position what I do in terms of a speaking market? Do you have thoughts on that?

Yeah, I love this. So, first of all, Abby, your topic is really cool. I wrote about this in an article recently, but my girlfriend and I have gotten the habit periodically of designating 15, 20, 30 minutes, however much time we need a few times a week to check in with one another. And that has made me feel so much closer to her. And I've learned, you know, I spent a huge amount of time with her, but I've learned so much about her just from that, like, dedicated time for connection and to some degree, the foundations of intimacy. So I love the work that you're doing. It sounds really, really cool. So when I have a client like you who could logically and potentially easily serve multiple markets, I really encourage them to pick one market. And if all three markets can be validated, pick the one that's the most exciting to you. And here's why. For most speakers, there's a learning curve that comes with learning how to sell yourself, generate leads, etc. We can get into all that stuff in a bit if you'd like, but. And you need specific marketing pieces for specific markets. You know, if you're speaking to universities, you want something that talks about how you're going to help their students be there. You know, form healthy relationships. Healthy, intimate relationships. If you're speaking to a corporation, you want a piece that talks about how you're going to help their salespeople rapidly form, build rapport with prospects or whatever. To keep it simple for the emerging speaker, I encourage them to focus on one market and spend about a year working that market. One in building up your name, your reputation, increasing your keynote fee, increasing the sort of like effectiveness of your keynote, your training, and then once you've done that, it can be as short as six months. Maybe if you build the business quickly, then it becomes easy to make lateral moves to other markets. But when I've watched speakers try to go after multiple markets all at once because they need different marketing, because they have to talk about their services differently, because they are generating leads from all over the place, it tends to become overwhelming and their success is much slower than when they focus on one market. So I hope that answers your question, Abby, but it sounds like you're doing cool work and I like what you. I dig it.

Yeah, I think that was very clear. I'll piggyback off it, guys. I mean, Jason's obviously the expert here, but one thing to add, Abby, is you have the what right. You have the topic. The power of curiosity, relationships. And in a way, sales leadership and personal development are also what's. They're also topics, but they also speak to the who, right? So one question you might ask yourself is, who do I want to be a hero to? Who do I want to be spending time with? Because the people you're spending time with in the sales conversations are going to be salespeople, but in leadership it might be executives and personal development, it might be normal everyday people. So by choosing what kind of vertical topic you want to go into, it might be helpful to be like, do I really want to teach the power of curiosity to relationships to a salesforce? Like, does that, is that really cool and exciting to me? Or like, do I not understand those people at all? And it will feel foreign and I'll feel awkward. So I think by doing that you get that resonance that Jason was talking about in your marketing from being super specific. And also all of these people talk to each other. So if you're focused on one thing, you're going to have a concise referral network instead of spread across three things. One thing, if you know this is to Abby and everyone else is listening. This is the same with getting coaching clients. Sometimes you're like, alright, what is the maybe? I don't know if sales leadership or personal development would be a better way to focus. Well, how do I just choose one? Because they're telling me to choose. Maybe you just have a friend who has an in with the leadership thing. So if you really don't care, just get that first.

Yes.

Put your stake in the ground. You can always expand later and just get in the game, you know. And so I think sometimes it's sometimes the over complicated and it's sometimes just like look for the opportunity if it doesn't matter to you one way or the other.

Yeah, yeah. Well said.

Cool. So, okay, so we talked about niching a bit and choosing topics. So I guess the next thing that I wanted to touch upon is a lot of coaches will give kind of free workshops, right? And that's just a marketing piece. They might run free workshops or do free talks. And really they're fine to do it for free because they know they're going to attract a certain number of clients. And so that's one model. I know you really advocate going the paid route whenever possible and I think you have some specific reasons for that. But what's your perspective on doing free speaking as maybe as a coach versus getting paid gigs and parlaying that into coaching?

Well, you know, I am basically a fan of avoiding free gigs. That's sort of the strategy I default to for myself. And it's the strategy that I've encouraged most of my clients to pursue. I've noticed that even if it's a small fee, a couple hundred bucks, people tend to treat the speaker way, way, way better than if it's totally free. But if you hear the hesitation in my voice, it's because I have a client who his topic is one that he is asked to do free speeches all the time. And I know a lot of speakers personally who would do free or inexpensive speeches and then make like 10, 20, $30,000 of back of the room sales of like courses, products, group coaching, individual coaching. So with that one client, he's a young guy, mid-20s, we sat down and like really? I called my speaker friends and asked like, how are you doing that? Because it was never part of my model. So recently I've been a little bit more of a fan of free speeches. But what I encourage people to do and when I the coaches I've worked with, the thought tends to be, well, I'll give a good free speech and then if they're interested, they'll come to me. To really turn a free speech into something that converts, whether that's for coaching or for physical products or digital products, you need to be thinking carefully about how you're going to communicate that to the audience. The lowest hanging fruit generally is a survey or something that you leave on the person's seat. And what you want to do is print out on high quality paper like some you with speaking. And I think this is true of coaching as well. You consistently want to signal that you are like a high Quality brand so that people are expecting to get great things from you and they don't mind paying premium pricing if you charge premium pricing. But so print out on high quality paper this survey that says, like, what was the most important thing that you learned? How would you rate the speaker's style? What do you wish you had more information for? And then have a checkbox that says, are you interested in learning more about working one on one with you know, coach's name? Are you interested in learning more about group coaching with coach's name? If you checked out these boxes, leave your email address. So suddenly what you're doing is you're giving. There's this psychological thing at play that I think is lost in a lot of speakers. Generally, even if it's a small, intimate workshop roundtable setting with like eight people, the speaker, the coach, the person leading the workshop has this almost like aura around them that makes it intimidating for other people to come up and sort of bond with them one on one. This is especially true if there's 1,000 people in the audience. So you need to finesse that and you need to meet the audience where they're at and give them an easy way to work with you. And allowing them to start the conversation just by opting in and leaving their information is very comfortable and natural. Now to really double down on sales, especially for free speeches, I would have that survey, the high quality survey, where they can indicate if they'd like to be contacted during the event itself. I would really be encouraging people to come up and talk to you afterwards from the stage. Maybe 2/3 of the way in the speech, say, by the way, I am going to take questions. We're doing Q and A if you're doing Q and A. But I know a lot of the stuff is personal. I will be hanging out here for at least an hour afterwards. If you have questions, come up and chat with me and you can start seeding the conversation, figuring out how you can help them, how you can work together on a more personal basis. But the other thing, I'm taking like a very circuitous route, like a crazy person to make this point. The other thing to do is like print out again with the surveys a one pager on the different services that you offer. And maybe the title is like continue the relationship. Or the title is invest even more in whatever it is you coach people on and then just have three quick options. And again, you want this professionally designed, you want this colorful, you want this printed out on high quality paper and then with like a nice like golden paperclip or something. Paperclip the survey together with the one pager and leave them on every single audience member seat. These are little things, but again, if your conversion rate is extremely low, if this moves the needle just by 1 or 2%, the impact is to a tune of many thousands of dollars or especially over the course of a year. I mean, I know at least one speaker that routinely makes six figures doing free speeches, and he's using strategies like that to pull it off. So I do think getting paid to do it is, for most people, a better route. You're treated with more respect. There's a direct roi, et cetera. But if you go into a free speech with intention. Oh, there's one other thing. And then I'll stop babbling. If you go into a free speech with intention of providing value to the audience from the stage and connecting with the people that you can help further making it easier for them, it does end up monetized. Here's the last thing for the free speech. You really need to be discerning. If you just want to get on stage, practice material, share your message with the world, terrific. You don't need to be discerning if your goal is to monetize free speeches. You really need to think about, like, is this geographically in an area where people are investing in my services? Are the people I'm speaking to for free likely to have disposable income? Are they likely to be able to invest in this type of service? Do they have the time, et cetera, et cetera? I mean, if you're speaking to a parent teacher association in a neighborhood that needs a lot of help, you should not expect to monetize that. You should expect to provide this as a service, as a gift, as an investment in that community. If you are speaking at a parent teacher. I live in Denver, at a parent teacher association meeting in Cherry Creek, which is a very affluent neighborhood in Denver, you should expect to be able to monetize that. So there is a certain level of, like, discernment that is required here as well. Great.

Yeah, I love it. The gold paperclip. That's the key.

Yeah, I saw a speaker do that. I was like, wow, that's a really nice touch. Like, held onto that paperclip for a couple days. I love that.

That's awesome. So how do you even. How do you even start getting gigs then?

So, okay, you want to match this and you helped me realize this, or your call was good testing grounds for this. You want to match the lead generation style to the emerging speakers personality and how they prefer to work. It is at least in theory possible to use Facebook ads for this stuff, but I know nothing about that. And the clients that I work with tend to not be technological people, in part because I make clear it's like we're not going to focus on technology, we're going to focus on relationships and the quality of your speech. Since I can't go through with each person that's watching this and talk to you for five minutes and assess your personality, I'll just go over the strategy that works the most effectively for most people. So what you want to do, first of all we cover this, is figure out the speech that you're going to the topic you're going to speak on and validate the market. Then there's a forking path here. Do contact your like 10 best connected friends or professional people, professional network contacts, and ask them. And let's say that the speech is on business to business sales for tech companies. Ask them, hey, do you know anyone that might be interested in a training for B2B sales for tech companies? If one of the 10 people on this list connects you, terrific. And I'll explain what to do from there in just a second. If not what you want to do, let's say you're living in Chicago. Make a list of about 10 organizations in Chicago that maybe they've got Series A or Series B funding. So they're growing, but they have a lot to learn that could benefit from a B2B sales trainer for tech companies. Then once you've either got an introduction from your friend or you've made a list to some degree, I'm going to seem vaguely hypocritical right now. What you want to do is offer that organization or the list of organizations of free speech. And you need to be thoughtful in how you do this because people generally do not immediately value things that they're just given for free, especially in the corporate market. I mean, they're used to paying for stuff and that you are not charging is going to send up a couple yellow lights for them. So what you want to do is be incredibly clear and earnest on what's going on here. You say to your friend's contact, you say to the corporation you're approaching, look, here's the truth. I have been coaching on this topic for the past 5, 10, 1, 20, whatever years and I want to branch out to speaking. I know that this is going to work. And here's the deal that I'd like to make with you. If my training is a waste of your company's time, if you do not move the needle on getting sales with other businesses, then drag my name through the coals, tell all the people that you know that I suck and not to waste my time. I mean, seriously, I know this is gonna work, so I'm happy giving you permission to that. But if it goes well, what I want you to do is introduce me to three other organizations or if it's a big company, departments within the company that might be interested in this training. And what I want to do effectively is prove to the market that I'm good. So what you're doing here is you're pre negotiating three, five, whatever worm leads. That's part one. Part two is then make another list. Or if you have that same list and you haven't called everyone, make the same list and contact the 10 organizations on your list in your area that can benefit from this work and invite them to be your VIPs. Now not all 10 organizations are going to come. And when you do invite them to be VIPs, make it clear that one, they're going to receive this high quality training. But also two, you're going to invite all the VIPs out for dinner afterwards so everybody gets to know everyone. Now the move there is if you can't afford to buy everyone dinner, buy everyone dinner. It'll cost you 500,000 bucks, but it'll pay off quickly. And I'll explain how if you can't just set clear expectations beginning, say we're all going out for dinner afterwards. You know, it's Dutch treats and nobody feels the pressure to pick up the tab. I want to like set that expectation now so everybody's comfortable. And then once you know you've invited 10 VIPs, maybe three come, maybe seven come, take everyone out for dinner. But Also going back 10 minutes, survey every single person in the audience, take those surveys, scan the surveys and send the survey this PDF scan of the surveys to all the VIPs. So what you've done now is you have. I should, I want to come back in just a moment to the overarching principle that makes this work. That might be non obvious, but what you've done now is you've in one thoughtful free speech generated, give or take, 13 warm leads. And here's what ties all this together is understanding the psychology of the buyer. So a purchase of a speech for the buyer feels high pressure. I mean, they're shutting down their organization for 75 minutes to work with you Phones aren't being answered, sales aren't being closed, websites aren't being maintained, etc. On top of that, speeches for the buyer are expensive. You know, I suggest generally speaking speakers start in the 25 to $3,500 range. But to the buyer it feels like they're investing 5% of their salary. Not the buyers pay out of pocket, but it feels like you're getting paid 5% of what they make all year for one hour. So there's this sort of like weird emotional dissonance or friction. And because the company shut down, because they're spending 2,500 bucks in an hour, this will almost certainly get your buyers boss's attention and potentially her boss's boss's attention. So to a buyer, buying a speech feels very, very high pressure. What makes them comfortable is when the speaker is trustworthy and it's known and they have a reputation to uphold and you have a relationship with them. So the reason I lean on that lead generation strategy of the VIP and the free speech and the pre negotiated warm leads is because that's how buyers like to buy speeches. And this is true across markets. The buyer psychology doesn't really change too much because now they've seen you speak, they've met you, they've seen their peers react to you in different industries or through the introductory or different corporations, businesses, whatever. So suddenly you have gone from an unknown quantity to somebody who is the type of person a business a buyer likes to do business with. And then the last thing is because of the surveys, they can see the social proof and how the audience likes you and works with you. So it goes from a sort of chicken and egg situation, nobody's ever heard of me, why are they going to pay for me to a situation of abundance. I mean you could do that strategy once or twice and make between 50 and $100,000 this year.

Yeah, brilliant. I love that strategy. And to fill in the gaps too, just because we're both familiar with my case study. It was interesting because we talked about this strategy together. The first thing that I did was we worked on the website first. We had cemented the niche and I linked that up to my main, my main page kind of in the footer navigation, my main website. And then I went and started to reach out to my warm network. Now I'm not a connector, that's not my main thing. And so I have, I was messaging people who I haven't talked to in like five years and you know, they're like, what the hell, you know, Is he messing? But anyway, I, you know, I did the work, you know, I put in that strategy for me that was yielding, you know, diminishing returns. Like nothing really came of that initial reach out, which could be totally normal for people. You got to try multiple things. And as I was preparing to do round two of kind of the colder reach outs to people in my area, it was funny because I actually had that lead who I ended up closing came through my original content. I had a blog post called why you should hire a business coach and how to find a good one. And it was on my main blog for coaches. And she had. But because I had put the website in the footer, she had found her way to the speaking page. She happened to be the CEO of a service business and they had gotten bought out. Her boss said, maybe you should look into business coaches for your people. And so she had typed in business coach or whatever. So one of my strengths is that content. And so by linking that up and just taking the next step of saying, I am a speaker, this is the type of speaking I want to do. And having that teed up, it was kind of fortuitous. You could see it as well. That was random chance. That's easy for you to say, Greg, because you had this blog post you found, but there's a couple important things. Number one is psychologically, I was saying, yep, this is something I want to bring into my world. And depending on your spiritual beliefs, that for me is important of just saying, yeah, I want it. I want these opportunities to come in and then actually having a way for that to happen, having the website, having video I record for the website with the testimonials, and having that accessible when this person came through my blog where she wouldn't have reached out to contact me if I hadn't had that separate speaking site. And so it seems like number one is really getting clear on this starting niche, this starting specialty for you as a speaker. Number two is getting something up there. It could be as simple as a Google document that you're linking people to, but getting something that has some testimonials that has what you do, that's speaking to the benefits you can provide and then starting these reach outs. And I would say that's definitely enough for everyone on the call to just get going with, you know, And I feel like if you actually do all of those steps, you continue to reach out, you're going to have at least that initial traction. I feel like if you did those.

Things right and you touched on something that Like I rarely talk about, but it feels more appropriate in this sort of setting, this type of audience. And it's not something I can ever rely on. But there does seem to be this like spiritual or like universal resonance. I've watched many of my clients, truly, and friends truly commit to getting speaking gigs and then like, almost like, and I mean that truly, like they're going to invest their time and energy and other resources into this project with or without me. And then almost out of the ether, a lead comes to them so they can start working. It's really kind of crazy. Again, I don't know that I can rely on that, but it seems to happen, I think truly with the majority of my clients and friends that I watch.

Yeah, and I mean it's gonna obviously be a whole other conversation, but even if you just take the scientific piece of it that you're cueing your brain to look for stimuli that have to do with getting speaking gigs and connecting with those people, you know, you've already plowed through so much of the other stimuli that you can filter out. So just being clear on your intention has a lot of value. Alright, so now you know, we've gotten clear on the niche, we've done some reach out to get leads. What does the actual sales process look like? If you're lucky enough to get connected with this person, even get on the phone with this person, what does that look like in the perfect world?

Really, really good question. And important for speakers to realize. There's two things I want to talk about here. One is the sales call and the other is the sales cycle. So I think this will feel familiar to coaches closing a deal for speaking. It can be a very emotional process because you feel like you are selling yourself and it feels like any acceptance or rejection is personal. To paraphrase Seth Godin, rejection often feels like the person rejecting you has seen into the core of your soul and decided that you are not a worthy human and dismissed you. So I hedge this because it really helps emerging speakers to think of themselves as a business because regardless of what vertical you're in, the buyer is making a business decision and hiring you. They're transacting money for time. So this is all to set up this sort of, for some speakers, uncomfortable reality that you want to get comfortable with an actual sales cycle like you truly want to have a plan for. Okay, I'm going to touch base with this person gently, playfully, in a sort of fun, collaborative way once a week for the next two to three weeks after they've expressed Interest in my speech to make sure that we book a sales call. And then after the sales call, I'm going to playfully, gently touch base with her once a week for the next two to three weeks to close the deal, et cetera. Again, you would have no problem doing this if you were selling any other service in the world that you think will improve someone's life. Like, if you like flotation tanks, you would be happy to do this for a flotation tank company. But because you're selling yourself, people's ego and sensitivity get in the way. I know that, I get that, I've dealt with that myself. But what you want to do, you do want to be thoughtful and follow up and touch points. Once someone expresses interest, you want to get, like I said, get in touch with them, give or take, once every week, 10 days to book the sales call. The sales call. I really messed up a ton when I started out. One of the reasons my first year was so fruitless, the instinct that a lot of speakers, myself included, have on the sales call is that you need to dazzle the client. And the instinct most people lean on is they just do a mini version of their speech and then they're like, so do you want to, do you want to work together? And obviously the answer is no, because that's such a, like, that's such a crappy relationship that you formed. Again, the buyer needs to feel like she can trust you. So what you want to do is have a conversation where you actually get to know her and when you're honest about what you can provide. So I encourage people to book 45 minute sales calls for speeches. In that breakdown, 30 minutes should be the speaker or coach listening and asking open ended questions. Fifteen minutes should be the coach painting a picture of what working together is going to be like. And there's, you know, there's eight or 10 questions that are like, pretty important. But the most important one, what do you look for when you hire a speaker? Two, what's worked well for you in the past when you've brought speakers in? Three, what didn't work well for you? Four, my aim is to be the best speaker that I, that I, that you bring in. Not just this year, but for the next three years. What would have to happen for you to confidently know that I truly was the best? And then I think I'm on number five, whatever number I'm on. The last sort of really important question is what else should I know about you, your organization, your employees, what your association that's going to help me knock this out of the park for you. And you want to ask those questions and then shut up. And then, like, wait for three, four, five seconds after they've stopped talking and then repeat back to them your understanding of what they've said. So I hear that an interactive, energetic speech really is important because this is at 8am Did I understand you correctly? This will build that trust and rapport. Then in the 15 minutes where you're talking about what working together is going to be like, be sure to use their words. The words that they choose represent how they're thinking about this in their mind, what they're picturing. Use those words. So if they say interactive, energetic, you draw out the parts of your speech and emphasize the parts of your speech that are interactive and energetic. And then the last thing, and this is usually the hardest part for my clients, is then saying, does this interest you? And at this point, the answer is almost certainly going to be yes, because you've been listening and customizing your speech in real time for them. And then you, as the salesperson, the coach speaker, want to be driving the car. So if the client has to say, well, hey, this is the hard part, but what does that cost? The client feels uncomfortable, and you two are sort of like, in this weird. Like, neither of you are leading or being led, you want to handle the quote of the price. So you say, does this interest you? The client says, yes. And then sort of, before they have a chance to extrapolate on that, you say, great, my fee for this is. And then you quote your fee. And then I used to, when I was doing my sales, I used to just be quiet. I'd say, my fee for this is 9,800 plus transportation from Denver, Colorado. And then be quiet and let them react. And as I was building out this course that you mentioned, I recorded a bunch of my own sales calls to listen to them and include them in the course. And I also started recording my clients so that I could give them more customized feedback. A way smoother handling than shutting up is the next question. Because that's actually awkward for the buyer. I realized it was awkward for me too. It feels a little, little, little bit combative. A way smoother move is say, great. My fee for this is 9,800 plus transportation to and from Denver, Colorado. Does that fit in your budget? And then you gently hand the ball back to them. And when I made that shift in my business and helped my clients, the friction was pretty well removed. And it moves from this, like, combative here I am take me or leave me to this collaborative. Let's figure out if we can make this work stance.

Yeah. And I like that addition at all of it. But I like that addition at the end for speaking because of the type of sale. You know, I often advise coaches to go silent and I don't love the question if you're coaching individuals, does that fit in your budget? Because no one really has a budget for coaching. But when you're talking about organizations, they may have a not necessarily a budget for speaking, but they have something that this is going to fall under that number that they're looking at and they can get a sense of it's not necessarily going to be super flexible the way when you're kind of creating a new category for someone with a coaching relationship that it might be. So I really like that addition. It's the same thing that I same process I went through with that client that I ended up closing. So that's super helpful. That's brilliant to ample.

Your point? When I sell consulting services I also just shut up. I quote my fee right X for this package. But with speaking it is such a different animal that anyways what I mean.

Is your job, it's super important because that's one of those fine distinctions that you've been really helpful for me with because a lot of this stuff is similar. Like a lot. If you can build a really successful coaching business, if you can sell successfully, market yourself successfully, you can, you'll probably in your pretty good shape starting off for the speaking business, it's kind of like a lot of it's low hanging fruit where go out there and get it. But there are some distinctions. The sales are a little bit different, the marketing strategy a little different. Website is a little bit different, mindset is a little bit different. And it's those little tweaks that kind of add up which is why I wanted to have you come speak to people instead of just be like, you know, just do the same thing that I'm teaching you guys anyway but apply it to coaching because there are some important distinctions. So if someone's watching this and they're kind of wanting to go a little bit deeper. We're running a free training together next week. So could you talk a little bit about that webinar and what you're wanting to cover with people there in case people are interested?

Totally. The webinar has a pretty clear goal that I've written it and designed it around. I want people that come to this webinar to be able to walk away with the information we give them and able to make their first or next $5,000 as a speaker. And then if they want to speed that up, I've got ways for them to speed that up. But it's not a traditional like Babel 90 minute webinar. This is like a tight 25 minute webinar that's going to give participants a very clear path on how to make $5,000 or more their next 5,000 bucks. As a speaker. Philosophically I like, I think the best move in situations like this is to be generous in tests with these strategies, clients have gone around and generated 15, $20,000 a speaker. So I'm excited for it. And then, you know, we're booking it for an hour. The remaining 30 minutes is for Q and A so that people have personal questions about how to transition from their coaching niche to their speaking nature or you know, what speaking is going to look like for them. We can give that time and space.

Brilliant. Alright, so I'm going to post that in the comments now, the link to sign up for that from my personal account there and then also put it in the description once we're all done. But I'm super excited for it. I'm going to probably be popping on just right at the beginning to say hi to you guys and then I'm just going to let Jason take it because it seems like he has a tight format. I may ask a few questions at the end. I mean, I'm going through this journey with you guys. So please do sign up for the webinar. I'll send a couple emails if you're on my speaking interest list to remind you about that. But anything else, Jason, that you want to add before we sign off here?

Gosh, I'm really grateful for the time together and getting to meet and interact with some of your audience. The last thing I'd add, like tag me on Facebook and if people have questions that didn't come up live, they will have like my, I don't even know the words my Facebook handle. But my hope is that like the people watching this, if you have a specific question on Greg's Facebook, I'll share this on mine. You can do it on mine. Tag me and ask me the question and I'll do my best in the next day or two to respond to that. But otherwise no, I think you like you asked some great questions. I hope we were able to help people clarify how to build these businesses because I think a lot of coaches really can and should be speaking yeah.

Well, it's super valuable for me. So just to round us out, last question for you. What do you think is the worst advice that you commonly hear given to people who are trying to start getting paid for? Speak more.

Oh, man. So it's kind of more an assumption that most speakers make. And I've had to do major surgery with, like, clients as well as friends around this. So people. This always feels so cold when I say it. And I think it's cold because I think some people have their awareness raised unexpectedly. Most people who think they're good speakers aren't. They will give a presentation at their corporation or they'll do a free gig, and three people will come up afterwards and say, you know, you were really great. It's kind of like this is an analogy that I'm stealing from, I think, the Heath brothers who wrote Stick and more recently, moments. It's kind of like if you make this, like, strawberry shortcake, your significant other makes this horrible strawberry shortcake, but she brings it to your office and everybody makes it, and she makes a huge deal or she makes a huge deal out of the strawberry shortcake. Three or four people, out of politeness, are going to come up to you or your partner and say, oh, my God, that strawberry shortcase was so good. Everybody else is going to take a bite and throw it out. But you're never gonna. Nobody's ever gonna tell me that my partner's strawberry shortcake sucked, and nobody's ever gonna tell her, so she walked. I kind of secretly know it sucks, but I'm not gonna tell her. Well, actually, I would, but that's different. That's an entirely different conversation. But she's gonna walk away with like, oh, my God. People at Jason's office love my strawberry shortcake, when in reality, they don't. This happens with speakers. Unfortunately, it is said that it. Giving a speech in front of your peers is one of the most frightening things for modern man. I don't know if I believe that, but I do know that it causes a lot of anxiety, and we can all relate to that anxiety. So oftentimes, people will tell you that you did well out of a sense of encouragement, out of a sense of empathy, not out of a sense of genuine ability. So the advice that. The implicit advice that people get that I think is bad is don't invest in your ability on stage. The truth is with. And I'll list them off real quickly, and then I'll let everyone go. The truth is, with a little bit of investment, you can take a mediocre speaker and turn her into somebody who's really interesting and engaging to watch on stage. But almost every single person is going to need that. And to paint the picture, as a professionally managed child Entertainer, I did 3, 400 paid magic shows across the United States before I was 18. When I was touring, I hired speaking coaches, acting coaches, comedians to look over my script, somebody to help me with my personal style, etc. And I was also taking improv comedy classes because at the end of the day, one thing that's really lost on speakers that is not lost on buyers is what they are buying is your ability on stage and how you can make the audience feel the more you invest in your ability on stage. Take an improv class, go to Toastmasters, watch comedians that resonate with you and deconstruct how they're putting together their conversation, their stage show, their jokes. Take acting classes, go to live plays and concerts and deconstruct what's working, what is the band doing, how are they connecting with the audience, and then bring that stuff into your live speech. In doing so, you're creating a more valuable product the clients will pay more for. You're improving yourself. I mean, things like improv classes and going to comedy shows are a hell of a lot of fun anyways. And because you're good on stage, your clients are going to be way more likely to refer you and way more likely to hire you again and again and again. So the worst advice that is terrible, and it's usually implicit advice, is do not invest in your ability on stage. The directive I would give to anyone is assume that you can always be better on stage. I've got nearly a thousand live performances under my belt and a lot of code, and I have a huge amount of room to grow. If that's true for me, that's true for most of you. I mean, the best comedians, speakers, politicians, all have room to grow. So the inverse, the advice I would give any emerging speaker is invest in your ability on stage, go take an improv class or something like that.

I'm so glad that you ended with that to round us out, because something gets lost in the marketing world, which is, you know, focus on providing a quality product. So don't forget about what's in the cake and we'll leave it there. Thanks, Jason.

Cool. Thanks, Greg. That was awesome.

Take care, brother.

You too.

Bye.