186: Licensing 201 — Q&A (Part 1) on Product Development, Attracting Clients, and Sales Process

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A shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

As the New York Times reporter Mark Tracy jokes in his article reviewing a new movie, there can only be so much suspense in air there. The new drama depicts Nike's quest in 1984 to sign then rookie Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal, and everyone knows that in the end, Nike will get its man. Yet the filmmakers conjure a gripping moment late in the film. Through wit and grit, Sonny Vaccaro, the Nike executive played by Matt Damon, has secured Jordan's agreement. Until Jordan's mother, played by Viola Davis, makes an additional demand, her son must receive not only a $250,000 fee, but also a cut from every sneaker sold. A shoe is just a shoe, she tells Vaccaro, until my son steps into it.

That my friends is licensing the topic of today's solo episode. My usual caveat has to stand that I am not a licensing expert. I am not sharing the way just what I've learned along the way and in eight years of setting my mind to this as a revenue stream. So if I can at least give the gift of slight clarity to any of you listening, that makes me feel good. That puts my heart and mind at ease, even though it's something that continues to vex me to this day in some ways. To that end, we have a very special workshop coming up in the BFF community. I encourage you to join right now so that you can be part of it. Longtime friendor of mine, Pamela Slim is going to be delivering a workshop just for the BFF community on certification and licensing. The workshop is going to be on May 11 at 1pm Eastern. Even if you can't join at that time. If you're a part of bff, you have access to all the recordings from any workshop we've done in recent months or in the history of the program at least last several years. You also get access to a bonus private podcast feed where I release a bonus episode every single month. You get a community of friend tours of your own that you can give and receive feedback. Brilliant sparter with and I do a live Q and A call once a month. We have hot seats the following week. There's so much good stuff in here. Even if you just join for a couple months, I know that it will be well worth your while. And if you want to join for this Pamela slim workshop on May 11 or you're hearing this far into the future and it's already passed, join and you'll get the recording because these can be very profitable business areas and there's a lot of complexity to it. Pamela is going to be walking us through how to know if and when adding a certification to your business makes sense. I tend to call this B to small B. For example, Brene Brown's daring greatly facilitators or Profit First Professionals Certification is usually when you're training many people to get certified in your method and or how to know if and when adding a corporate licensing offering is a fit for your business. I call that B2 big B. That's more similar to what I do where you're doing train the trainer within a company and then they are disseminating your wonderful information out. It can be done in other ways. It doesn't have to revolve around train the trainer. For example, I do licensing of the Pivot workbook in and of itself even if it's not a training. Companies can license that as a self guided career toolkit and pay an annual subscription to have access to that IP to that material. Pamela will talk us through the first steps involved in creating an IP certification or licensing program and even ways you can work with her and her team because she's building out this capability in her business with instructional designers on the build out and even helping with a little bit of the business planning behind it. And Pamela is one of the first people I learned licensing from in addition to mbs who's been on the POD many times. And so we're also going to leave plenty of time for Q and A where you can ask anything and everything that's on your mind. Whether it's a question for Pam, whether it's something I can answer. This time is for you. So again I'm telling you, if you just joined BFF for a couple months, this information alone will be worth your while. Visit itsfreetime.com BFF to learn more and join us. That's itsfreetime.com Bff and before I forget, apply Promo Code podcast to get 10% off your first month. With all those announcements said and done, let's dive into these amazing questions from al. They cover five categories and I am actually going to split these across two podcast episodes because it is just so much information to take in in one go. The five categories that Al submitted questions under and that I'm going to cover our product go to Market, selling and packaging, delivery and legal how do you protect your ip? Let's get into part one, starting with Product.

Al writes, if you think about the workshop as a product, how do you develop it in a way that feels right to you, but that is also something people will want to consume? How do you know it will resonate? How do you balance building something with getting it out into the market to get in front of people? Okay, I love the way Al is already thinking about the workshop as a product because it is the book. Built to Sell can really help you think about productizing any of your services and being a lot more consistent by creating a product and not just creating a custom bespoke workshop for any client for whatever topics they want. Yes, I used to do that. In the earliest days you have a workshop or two workshops maximum, probably three. They are off the shelf. You're not customizing the deck every time in little ways. Yes, you might customize your storytelling, you might customize your delivery, but you can have some core workshops around your IP and those are products. So to Al's question, how do you develop it in a way that feels right, but that's also something people want to consume. I like to keep the slide deck very tight. It's not extra dense. It's often a lot of pictures, as is the trend nowadays, but it allows me more flexibility in how I describe concepts and the stories I tell. But I'm always following a similar arc now. I landed almost randomly on the fact that when I wrote Pivot, I just didn't realize how much people love having a method. I knew at the time, of course I was intentional. I created the Pivot method because I wanted readers to be able to remember the steps, but I just had no idea how much companies would love the fact that there's a method involved. So my presentation, the breakdown is it's about 20 minutes of the big idea. It's similar to the book, but a little bit of time on the big idea. Let's say 10 to 20 minutes max. Then it's 20 minutes of walking participants through something very interactive. So they're reflecting on their own pivot in progress. It's not just me talking at them the whole time. With interactive exercises built in throughout and then the conclusion essentially and Q and A. You can have different forms of interactivity for a workshop, whether it's virtual or in person. I often like to think of it as solo reflection time. Filling something into the chat. Like everybody say where you're calling in from today. You know, that's kind of a cheesy one. You could also ask what's your favorite TV show of the moment? Or what's the app you can't live without right now? And that gets active everybody participating in the chat. One of my all hands questions like that is what's an example of a time that you pivoted? Or what's the pivot that brought you to this organization? You can also have people do breakouts. So if it's virtual, you could put them into breakout rooms in twos or four. If I'm in the room with people, I like having them turn to a partner. So that's a group of two. And at the very end, when I'm having people share their biggest aha and one next step, I like doing that in groups of four because they get more ideas. And then I'll come back together as the entire group and I'll say, can I have one representative from each of the groups of four if it's not too many and if it is too many, Just a couple hands raised. What did your group talk about? You don't have to name names what ideas came up, because this is going to help all of us reinforce what we just learned through hearing your AHAs and get ideas for possible next steps by crowdsourcing. Why did I get into that tangent on how to set up a workshop? Because I think if you know that general arc, not only is it going to make it easier for you to productize a workshop and to deliver it, but to do train the trainer if that becomes part of your licensing model. To Al's question, how do you develop in a way that feels right, but this also has product market fit. How do you know it's going to resonate? You don't know right away. I think developing a workshop is a lot like being a stand up comedian. I'm just less funny than I would like to be. But you're testing it. You know, standups are always working on bits, five minutes of a joke of a bit, and they test it. I mean, Jerry Seinfeld is famous for talking about this, of going out every night, literally, like removing anything that doesn't work and refining jokes. And refining. And refining. And refining. So you will start with a rough workshop, a rough idea I love. When MBS process tested for his book how to Begin, he didn't create slides. He wrote diagrams on index cards and he held them up to the camera during a zoom. That was him process testing a workshop or even his book before, like lock and loading it all in and just feeling like you have to know everything up front. So you will test your content, you will test your stories, you will test your slides by delivering workshops. In the beginning, yes, it's you delivering and you're refining and you're getting feedback. Once the material is vetted and you've delivered enough times and you know that it works, then you can go through a more refinement process. Brand type exercise so I've paid sometimes an entire brand strategy firm, or sometimes I've paid just someone with a good design eye that's better than mine to spruce up my slide deck and spruce up my handouts. Sometimes I'm able to cobble together my handouts myself. Now, Canva has a lot of really nice templates, but that only works if you've already done brand strategy for business. So that things like the logo, the color scheme, the look and feel are more plug and play. In order to achieve all this, make sure you always ask for feedback from the organization or from participants. If you are delivering it, let's say it's not for a company, you're delivering it to your own audience one way or another. You always gotta ask for feedback. I have what I call a general question course evaluation. I use Typeform just because I love the user experience more than Google Forms, but it's a little more expensive. Google Forms, of course, is free. One pro tip is to put a QR code to your general course evaluation on an ending slide. Now, if you're delivering a workshop for an organization, it's likely that they already have their own event feedback process. If they use an lms, a learning management system, it's likely the case that they're already going to deliver a post survey to the participants. So you probably wouldn't want to show your own QR code for your survey, but you can have that slide as backup. If the organization will not be collecting feedback and they tell you, it's okay. Or if you're delivering it to your own audience or a colleague's audience, something that's one to many and you know that the organization who's hosting you isn't going to collect feedback. Or again, you're hosting yourself in the future. Once we do get to licensing, you can even include a QR code that's unique to each licensing client and have it feed into a shared spreadsheet that they access. Now, again, this would be more for a client that doesn't already have a more sophisticated LMS or CMS content management system tool in place. But what I mean by this is you could create a company XYZ post course survey for your content. There's a QR code on the last slide so that every time one of the trainers in that organization is delivering your workshop, their participants scan the QR code with their phone in class. You leave five minutes and that's in the facilitator guide. They take the survey at the end of class and then that all feeds into. You can get Typeform to talk to a Google Sheet, or if you use Google Forms, it talks to a Google Sheet. Either way, you then share the Google sheet with that organization. And you can even go so far, I've done this for clients where maybe I aggregate the data by quarter, so it's still coming in in real time. But I might say, okay, here's all the Q1 data and here are the averages. Here's the average. Did you enjoy this class? How likely are you to apply the material of this class? Moving forward, there are some numerical responses. How likely would you be to recommend this course to a friend or to a colleague? Those could all be on a scale of 1 to 5. And then you can get a numerical average that's really good for showing the organization the data to say, look, people are really enjoying this. They're going to apply this, and they would even recommend it to a friend. That third question is most equivalent to the Net Promoter Score. Nps, which is a universal way of measuring a company's customer service, basically how well liked you are among your customers. Now, the NPS score is on a scale of 1 to 10, and I've heard Tim Ferriss say that he encourages people not to choose a 7 when they're using that rating scale. That's kind of why I like 1 to 5. For the rest of my quantitative questions, I do make sure to include the Net Promoter score as well in the Podcast Listener survey. That's a shameless plug. Speaking of surveys for you to go to itsfreetime.com survey and help shape the show. And you can see an example of the way that I am continually collecting feedback. That also reminds me I'm going to link to an episode in the show Notes on Rapid Course Creation, which will help you develop a prototype of your workshop very quickly, or even a course that you're planning to sell. Because I also talk about Always Be Listening in the Free Time book. I've talked about it on the podcast, just basically bottom line, be sure to check out the show notes for this episode because they're gonna be jam packed with everything I can possibly think of. You can view it in your podcast player right now or you can always go to itsfreetime.com episodes and again, if you wanna help me out and take the listener survey and shape future episodes just like this one, please do visit itsfreetime.com survey.

We'll be right back just after this.

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This whole conversation on testing a workshop, piloting collecting feedback is really important. The feedback is crucial because you want to have good data not only for yourself to keep improving the content, but also to ensure that these clients stay with you and renew. For example, if you're on an annual subscription like I do, you want to be able to show them quantitative data and qualitative feedback to say this program is making an impact and here's how we're measuring it quantitatively. And here are some of the qualitative comments that people are saying. I talked more about this in episode 140, part one, essentially of this conversation. You can also research Kirkpatrick's levels of evaluation because you want to be able to try to design that with any corporate client that you Might work with topic number two. Go to market. Al asks, how do you figure out who is the right buyer? How do you find the right buyers? What are ways to determine if someone or some company is the right buyer? I love this question. Al, you're always two steps ahead because the question that you're asking means you're thinking about this. There was a time where I just felt like anybody that wants licensing, let's get on a call, I'm yours. Kind of the same way. We might make a mistake with coaching clients. If you're a coach or any other service based business, it's so important to find out who your ideal buyer is. And if you've done this for individuals, who's your ideal avatar? If it's a reader, a listener, a course participant, whatever it is, you might have done this already in another part of your business. It's so crucial to do the same thing for licensing clients. Now if you're going the B to small B route, you want to think about who is your ideal certification participant. Again, I'll go back to let's say Mike Michalowicz's Profit First Professionals. Well, who is his ideal Profit First Professional? Maybe in that case it's somebody who is annoyed by old accounting practices. They are tech savvy, they are collaborative with their clients. They really want to help their clients build and project business forward, not just crunch numbers looking backward. So Mike could design his ideal, doesn't even have to be demographics, psychographics of his ideal certification client. That would be if we're doing that route or if you're going to be working with companies like I do. Who's your ideal corporate client? What are they like? What's the culture like? What's their budget like? For me, just to start the conversation around licensing, they need a budget of at least 50 grand because anything smaller starts to get in the realm of me delivering a keynote. And it's not worth me opening up my IP and basically handing over all the files to the most valuable part of my business and what I've created. For anything less than 50 grand at that point, I would suggest one or two keynotes or virtual sessions or I might even suggest another pivot trainer, somebody else that I have facilitated. But for me, in my business, less than 50 grand most likely means still doing some kind of in person or real time delivery or facilitation. And if the budget is over 50 grand, part of it, yes, is the money. And like what makes it worth it for me, part of it also indicates the sophistication and the stage of the organization. I am not going to be great with licensing for a 10 person startup company. They're not going to have the budget, they're not going to have the built out L and D function for example. So I also know, and I've learned the hard way, as with anything over the years, that I tend to work best and the best types of clients for me already have an L and D function. Ideally they already license at least one program from somebody else. I mentioned some of the flagship ones like Stephen Covey has a lot of licensing. David Allen Getting Things Done Tony Schwartz had Managing youg Energy. Now I think they have different names that I'll try to find for you because I was snooping around their website recently looking at, ooh, how do they talk about licensing? How do they set up their programs? Those are called Leader Fuel with a trademark R helping leaders manage the energy of those they lead. And the other one is called People Fuel, a scientifically grounded curriculum that energizes individuals and organizations by teaching them to more skillfully manage their energy. So that one is celebrating 20 years. That's the one that we all fell in love with at Google. Again, not because Tony Schwartz himself is so amazing, he's great. But because we loved the content. Googlers needed that content. We loved going through this training. No matter who was delivering it, the content was so valuable. That's the power of licensing. So of course I'll put links to those in the show notes. I do something very similar to the Energy project and I didn't even design it this way on purpose. I just found that I was getting so many requests for manager and leader training around the Pivot framework, specifically how to leverage it for one on one career conversations. And I was delivering a lot to individuals and so I kind of backed into inadvertently a really successful format which was a manager track and a track for individuals. My LinkedIn learning courses mirror that as well. And so I do recommend if you can with your licensing and you want to license to companies, be thinking about what is the manager training track look like and then what does the one to many individuals within the organization look like? What I love about that and the way that I often kind of in my sales process to companies say this allows everybody to have a shared language and a shared skillset around navigating what's next and the Pivot method becomes something they can talk about together. It's not just oh, the managers have learned some obscure coaching or leadership framework that's now invisible to the person sitting across from them. And meanwhile, employees, if they go through a pivot training and they do a workshop and they reflect, they can go to their manager and say, here, here's what I came up with for the pilot stage. Or well, I'm scanning now. Or here's what I came up with for the plant stage of my strengths and my vision. They have a shared language. And when I was working in career development at Google, we never had this. We had all these different templates. It was not clear how to even talk about career development, let alone navigate it, let alone have any clarity whether you were the one in the middle of it as the individual contributor, AKA employee. I just don't love that word. Or whether you're the manager and you're intimidated, you don't know how to broach the conversation with your team members, or you don't feel like you have the time, or you don't really have the coaching skills. So having these two tracks for me has been hugely beneficial. And now only in hindsight, I'm seeing, oh, the energy project. Got smart, figured out the same thing. Part of this ties to the sales process that I know Al has asked about, which we'll get to. But you want to tie your programs to a line item or department in the company's budget. So, for example, sales training. Again, we'll come to this in a future question. There's always going to be budget for sales training because that's directly tied to revenue generation. There's always usually going to be budget for manager training because that scales. If you improve the manager skills, hopefully the employees will be happier too. So just want to make sure where in the budget does your content fall? I've given you a lot of examples of my ideal corporate client and one of the things that I do. So when we have a prospective client, we have a notion tracker, of course, for prospective clients, as in they're not active clients yet. And I do a Kanban board where I mark the status of where that client is. So I would mark an outbound lead if it was someone I was going to cold approach, which never happens, AKA an empty column in my board. And then I have a column for inbound leads or a category, a status category for inbound lead. One of the things that we do when we get an inbound lead is determine are they a fit for us. Just because it's an inbound lead does not mean they're a fit for us. If somebody says, again, our budget is $10,000 and we're a 10 person startup. It's just not the right offering. Licensing just isn't the right offering. We have plenty of other stuff at every other level, but they would not move to the next status which would be Qualified lead. Qualified lead is common sales parlance, but that just means like I have qualified them that I agree there's a potential fit here just in case you have an open loop in your mind the way I would all the status columns that I have in my Pivot programs pipeline AKA opportunities. That's kind of salesforce lingo. Pipeline is really common industry lingo, however you want to call it. Here are the columns and or status categories that I have Outbound Lead currently has zero cards. Again, that is just not my jam Inbound lead Qualified Lead proposal. That's where it actually comes to putting together a proposal for them. And I try not to have too much variation in the proposals. We'll talk about that. Negotiation, legal review and contract Pilot Sometimes the outcome of all of this is just piloting with a keynote or a workshop, a one off and then I have a status called new client licensing with the touchdown emoji or womp womp womp. It could be follow up later long term hold archive not a fit for us Archive Inactive or no Reply from Org Sadly I have a lot of cards in my inactive or no reply column. Even though I sent proposals I followed up, I followed up again. Sometimes you get ghosted. I hate to say it, those are all the categories in my pipeline notion. Again I run mine as a Kanban board. That's how my mind works. That's just the way I like to do it. This allows you to then within a card for a potential client you can have those categories I just mentioned Pipeline, status, assignee next steps status as in not started in progress, waiting on the client next due date. You can have information in the metadata of a notion database like company name, company website, point of contact, point of contact, email, point of contact, LinkedIn profile because sometimes it is helpful to learn about who you're going to be speaking with client, Google Drive or Dropbox folder if you're going to create a folder for them. If you're creating a proposal or even in Canva we create all our proposals in Canva. Now you could link to the Canva proposal in a URL field and then notes and related and then I have a whole template that populates on the bottom of the card that has things like new lead checklist, record of our communications just so that we could reference when did they reach out, what did they say, what do we respond? And then company background. So key stats about them, key people, and in the news, that one is vital. I've had contracts fall apart even when they were running late at the last minute. And then only later did I realize, oh crikey, that client is really going through some stuff and it's making major headlines in the media. You want to keep tabs on that. Some people even set up Google alerts for a client or prospective client so that they know what's going on in case anything wild happens, which these days is often very likely. Al did not ask about this, but I'll go ahead and share with you. I have part of my template that says questions to ask in the exploratory call, like what are they working on? What's their timeline? How will they measure success? What does smashing success look like? What else, what else, what else? You want to really stick with that smashing success question. What is their budget range? You can also ask about their company size, locations, departments. Most everybody wants things virtually delivered these days, but you could just check is there any in person component to any of this? If it's manager training, how many managers do you want to put through the training in year one? If it's for all employees, how many do you even have? Or which departments do you want to start with a pilot or are you ready to go all in? These are important things to ask in an exploratory conversation. I learned a lot of this and I developed, you know, I'm going to have notion documentation on this. I have this kind of epic database called Licensing Sales process. It has 10 cards in it and I view it as a list. And I have spent years developing this database, reading books like Inked by Jeb Blount. Thanks to my brother Tom who recommended it. Fan friggin tastic. Do not pass go. Such a good book on sales and sales process and negotiation. There's also Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss, another great one, Value Based Pricing. Alan Weiss has a whole library of books you can read. Those two stand out. Built to Sell. As I mentioned earlier. Bottom line, I've like consumed and so has my brother. All these books on marketing and sales and sales process and in combination with what I know from trying to land a licensing client, there's all this stuff that needs to happen. And so now not only do I have the database to track our pipeline and prospective clients, but I also have a separate database that outlines the entire process because this is now getting really meta. Someday if you want to try to train somebody to sell your licensing programs that isn't you. You got to have it documented. And one of the big problems I've had is that it's more complicated and it all lives in my mind. So when I started piloting by having other people get on sales calls to promote pivot programs, I needed to get it all out of my head and onto the page. See also Free Time. That's why I wrote the Free Time book. Get it out of my head onto the page. Part of Free Time was inspired because I was bringing on a new team member and I wanted to teach her how we operate, how we think, how we work. You got to do the same thing with licensing. It's almost like it's an entirely own business in and of itself.

We'll be right back just after this.

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So the categories that I have in this list are sales, process, high level overview and roles. Who's going to do what? Stage 0 outbound sales and marketing. And that would talk about who we reach out to, who we're looking for, how we reach out. What are the guided email responses? Step 1 Inbound leads and our ideal corporate clients. I'll come back to that and read you what I wrote in there. 2. Exploratory call 3 request for additional information them and further discovery us 3B case studies confidential. That's if they ask and I send them examples of how we've worked with other partners, leaving off names of organizations because I'm often under an NDA4 discovery and prospect strategy session. Maybe we finalize the outcomes, objectives and key results or OKRs. Any insights from the buying process. 5a. Create the proposal if it doesn't follow our standard pricing, which ideally it should. So we shouldn't be creating a unique proposal every time. 5b, deliver the proposal to the prospect either on a live walkthrough, which I don't normally do. I'm too shy for that, but I know companies that do, or via PDF. 5C negotiation, if any. Again, if it's standard pricing off the shelf, there's not really room for negotiation. So I'm trying to get negotiation out of my business to the extent that I can. And I give the example of my friend Lindsay in free time who has three prices. Good, better, best and they're not up for negotiation. That's what's brilliant about her business model. Those are the three prices. There's not custom proposals. Her clients get to pick one or none. But there's not going to be all this back and forth. I've had so many clients over so many years try to constantly negotiate me down, down, down. It's probably because I allow it. It is because I allow it. And so it's a fine line. Sometimes when my business and I need the money, I'm more apt to negotiate. And if I didn't need the money and I already have $5 million of annual recurring revenue from licensing clients, I probably wouldn't negotiate at all because I would have enough. So that's a tricky one. That's like send me to the business therapist. Number six, agreement terms and legal review if needed. There will most likely always be legal review. We're going to get to that and Al's last section of questions. Number seven, invoicing and payment. I would not hand over any files until the invoice is prepaid. Upfront period, end of story 8 kickoff and materials delivery. 9 midpoint metrics, review and check in and then 10 annual renewal ideal or end of term, as in how do we renew with the client? Or how do we close them out if they decide not to renew? There you have it. Those are the ten plus sections of my licensing sales process in terms of the sop, standard operating procedures and the documentation that I've created about Philosophically, what does each of these stages mean? What are the roles and responsibilities? What are the key things to remember from the different business books that I've read and any guided responses to allow team members to just copy and paste. Because if we figured it out once or twice, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Now with that, because we were talking about ideal Clients. Let me read you exactly what I wrote in that part of the documentation. So our ideal qualified lead. Innovative forward thinking organizations who are proud of their people, operations, culture versus older, bureaucratic, more rigid, recognizable brand, ideally larger than 10,000 employees. Sophisticated L and D learning and development function that understands the value of scalable programs. Eager to invest in career development based on employee feedback and retention. Have budget over 50k, are familiar with, train the trainer and or licensing. May already have a portfolio of programs. Have an lms, a learning management system established to track participants. As in, it's not just back of the napkin. How many do you think you trained? No, there's some way of collecting that data. And then bonus, if they have a LinkedIn learning membership, that would really complement the licensing that we do together. Because then managers and employees can also watch LinkedIn learning videos that I've done five of them about Pivot. They could watch it before a training, they could watch it after. It in itself is a form of licensing this material. Because some companies only have a LinkedIn learning license. In fact, the majority only have that and they're essentially licensing pivot via their LinkedIn Learning license. And in a way, LinkedIn Learning is licensing my IP from me. They pay me a royalty based on how many views those videos get. So sometimes if someone determines, you know, we're not a fit to work together on the direct licensing, I always recommend LinkedIn learning like this is a great option. If nothing else, this will take you really far. The issue with that is sometimes that company doesn't have the budget to get a LinkedIn learning license cause it can get pricey at the organization level. But then the positive side is they get access to hundreds of thousands of incredible courses, not just mine. So I really love LinkedIn learning and that's an example of royalties and licensing and that whole structure in multiple arenas. Again with LinkedIn learning and then with corporate clients and we can have this virtuous circle of sharing wonderful information. What I open this podcast with the example of Michael Jordan's mom saying, a shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it. That's what got her to get. Not just the upfront fee for licensing his name, Jordans, Air Jordans. But a royalty every time a shoe is sold. What a fricking badass. What a badass. His mom is like, those are the times where you look back and you go, oh my goodness, can you even imagine if he had licensed his name just for a one time 250 grand versus a royalty every time a shoe is sold. I mean, now we're getting into Kevin o' Leary Shark Tank kind of stuff because he's always trying to do royalty deals. But that's the powerful part about licensing, and that's the powerful part about you building a brand that sets you apart from competitors in this content area that allows you to say a shoe is just a shoe until my son steps into it. What is the equivalent for your industry for your business? The last part that I want to briefly address for section 2 of Go to Market from Al's Questions is once you determine if they're the right buyer, how do you find them in the first place? This could be a standalone episode in and of itself. And by the way, if any of you had to figure out how to like instantly get licensing clients, give me a call. Because I've been trying to figure this out for almost a decade of not just how do you find what company fits your profile, but successfully getting through this entire process and signing on the dotted line. I've tried so many things and I've had so much attrition at every single stage in the pipeline. It's not easy. This is definitely a long game. Some ways to find them Be sure that you educate your audience with your offerings. I gave the example in episode 140 that I have a page pivotmethod.com rollout where I say here is how we can roll out Pivot at increasingly scalable options. And so the path of Pivot programs ends with licensing and train the trainer on pivotmethod.com workbook. Not only can you buy a one off workbook, but I also have Workbook for enterprise. Here's how to license the workbook and here's how it could be leveraged in your organization. So part of it is educating your audience and making it clear that train the trainer is something that you do. I've also created the Pivot Programs PDF like I talked about in episode 140. That's@pivotmethod.com companies. Again, nothing that I do is perfect, but these are the things that have helped me. Inbound leads often come from referral like they've participated. I've had many people hire me. One I felt so grateful to do was a keynote for TikTok because one of the managers there was a Pivot trainer at Google as in Google licenses Pivot. The part of it is the G2G Googlers teaching Googlers program that Google has to scale training options and so someone was a G2G pivot trainer they moved companies and then they hired me to speak at their company. And that is just so delightful. When people do move around now with pivot programs, the license is for the organization. It is not for the individual. What I mean by that is the license doesn't travel with you. Just because person A moves companies doesn't mean now company B has the right to pivot material and they can do pivot trainings because they moved companies. However, some assessment companies do work like that. So when I was at Google, I got certified in Myers Briggs to be a Myers Briggs facilitator. That license for me to facilitate and debrief with clients would have traveled with me. But behind the business, let me tell you why. Because even as a certified MBTI facilitator, the person that I'm going to be coaching is still going to pay for the assessment or I'm going to pay for them. So whether it's $50 like Colby or $100, I don't even know. MBTI as an organization is making money every time someone takes the assessment. And the only way they let you take the assessment is if you're going to debrief with a certified professional or coach. You see what I mean? So you got to figure out the numbers of does the license travel with the person you train. And I think the only way to make that make sense is when it is more around some kind of assessment or something like MBTI or Jonathan Fields is sparketype assessment, things like that. Making sure you have a strong brand. I've talked about this so many times and I'll put more episodes in the show Notes on the team that branded FreeTime and going behind the Freetime brand and just the latest brand exercise that I've done. This is so crucial. I don't think people are going to pay a lot of money for licensing if your stuff doesn't look best in class. And I really think that's a deal breaker because if it doesn't look great and cohesive, I just don't think you can command the really big numbers. I've also had peers and friend tours who host events in person and they invite for free or a very nominal fee, people who are in hr. You can also go to national HR conferences like astd. It used to be a really unfortunate name. I don't know if they renamed it. How funny is that? Astd, okay, but it stood for, like association of Something, Training and Development. Anyway, you can tell that I'm not a regular attendee, even though I guess I Should, should, or could be. But you could find events like that where HR people tend to gather or try to do workshops. If it's virtual, you don't have to go in person either. So hosting your own events to give people a taste of your material, especially if they're decision makers in companies or trying to go to the places that those types of decision makers will be showing up. I like to be discoverable on LinkedIn learning. Sometimes people find me that way, sometimes they find me through the book, and again, sometimes they find me because a company that they used to work for leveraged the material and now they want to bring it to the new company. So those are some of the things that have worked for me. Every now and then I'll get an email cold off the website with no prior relationship, no nothing. They didn't come from any of the places I just mentioned. And yet a Google search or a LinkedIn search led them to me. And then out of the gate the email submission will be like let's talk about workbook licensing. That's a dream. It almost never happens. But it has happened once, so you never know. Wow. If you're still with me, this is a long one. I keep saying it, but thanks to Al for all these fantastic questions. I might have bored you out of your mind by now. Let's end part one of Licensing 201 here. In the next half I'll talk about selling and packaging, delivery and legal. All right, so I hope you enjoyed. I would love to know what follow up questions you have, although maybe you want to hang on to them until you hear part two. I'll riff on as much as I can for part two and then you let me know what you would like for me to cover in a 301 type episode. And again, please do join us in BFF so you can also get all of Pamela Slim's certification and licensing goodness and Q and A. Join us@itsfreetime.com BFF that's itsfreetime.com BFF and even if you're joining after May 11, you'll still get access to the recording and to our private podcast feed. You hereby have permission to be overwhelmed. It's okay. I know this is a lot of information. I'm not trying to overwhelm you. You have permission to be overwhelmed. But I'm trying to open the book a little bit on what the heck all of this is. So even if you're overwhelmed, even if you need to listen to this three times, even if you're still scratching your head. Even if you then want to join us in bff, it's okay. It is overwhelming. At least it was for me, and it has been for a long time. But I still think it's worth the effort. Because when you can land a licensing client, when you've built your business and your brand and your IP to this point, it can be the most easeful, joyful, wonderful source of revenue that just hits that sweet spot of revenue, ease and joy. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. Talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening everybody.

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