Wendy McCallum (00:39)
Hi there, I'm Wendy McCallum. I'm your host today on The Coaching Edge. I'm so glad that you're here. We're talk about, I think a really, really important topic for all coaches to consider, whether you're a new coach or you've been doing this for a while. I want you to think about how you can leverage presentations, workshops and other live events to market and scale your coaching business. This is something that comes up.
time and time again in the BBB, which is my business building bootcamp for coaches. It's a one year membership where I support coaches in the building and scaling of their coaching businesses. And I hear constantly in there this, the same refrain, which is I can't stand social media. I hear it all the time. So we're always talking about different options from marketing and building an audience outside of social media.
Creating and hosting live events and workshops and presentations is one of the best ways to do that. I wanted to do a whole podcast episode on this today, because there are so many different points I want to cover around this that will get you thinking creatively about how you can use this to leverage your own coaching business. This is just one of the suggestions that I have around building an audience and scaling and building your business.
without social media. If you are curious about the other ways to do this, I really recommend that you go and listen to the 10 ways to get clients now without a big email list or social media following free masterclass that you can get anytime and watch anytime from my website. I will put the link to that in my show notes, but it is just like just a really great overview of about 10 different ways that you can start.
building your audience, your following and your newsletter list without relying on an already existing newsletter list or a big social media following. But one of the things I talk about in there is presentations and workshops. And this episode today is really gonna dig deep into that. We're gonna get into a lot of different important considerations and points. And I hope that by the end of this episode, I have convinced you to add this to your marketing funnel.
to include a presentation or workshop somewhere, at least one somewhere in your funnel. Okay, before we get into the nuts and bolts of workshops and live events for coaches, I wanna just remind you of the ways that you can work with me. This isn't something that I talk about a lot on this podcast, but I just wanna take a minute to explain the various ways that I support coaches in building their businesses outside of this podcast.
So I have a one-year membership program called the BBB, which is my business building bootcamp for coaches. It is an intimate community of very motivated coaches. I say that because those coaches are serious about building their business. I know there are lots of different forums out there for coaches around business building and that create community for coaches. But this group inside the BBB, they're really committed. They have made the decision.
that they are going to build their businesses, whether that is in a full-time way or as a part-time pursuit and they still have maybe other careers or they are partly retired. But whatever their goals are around their business, they are 100 % committed to them. And I think that makes a real difference in this community because my coaches show up. My coaches are incredibly supportive of each other, which is also amazing. And in that community, you get a combination of...
access obviously to that group of coaches. So it really is like the antidote to the loneliness that is solopreneurship. You also get access to an incredible content library of really sort of bite-sized video lessons and templates and worksheets and cheat sheets that I have created for you in all aspects of building and scaling a coaching practice. It's very well organized. One of the reasons why the membership is a year long to start is because the library is quite large and I want you to be able to work through it.
at your own pace in a way that makes sense for you and where you are in your business. Along with the content library and that community of coaches, you get access to me, an expert in the business of building a coaching business. I've been doing this now for 15 years. I have a very, very successful practice of my own. And I've also been supporting coaches now for many, many years around building their own businesses, including inside the BBB, which is almost three years old now. We have office hours every single week.
You have the opportunity to show up. It will be a small group. You will absolutely get my time in those sessions. And you can ask anything of me in that session. And you can both get my specific advice and strategy and support around whatever the piece of your business is that you're working on right now or the thing that you're stuck on. You can also crowdsource our group of really cool coaches who are all there on office hours calls. So office hours happen every single week. You get to choose between two different time slots every week, either Tuesday or Thursday.
We also have master classes on a monthly basis for all the months of the year, except for July and August. And those master classes are really, really phenomenal. I bring in experts to talk about important components of business building. Usually things that I maybe don't feel like I have deep expertise around. For example, we have somebody coming in this month to talk about hosting coaching retreats abroad.
internationally. That's not something that I do. But I know that I have coaches within my BPP who are really interested in doing that. And so I'm bringing somebody in to talk about that. So we have master classes on a monthly basis. And we also have what I call copy class, which is where I edit and review your copy. So you can bring any copy that you have developed, whether that's for a website page or a podcast pitch letter that you're working on, or maybe some ad copy or a landing page for a new program that you're launching. And I will give you some really
but effective feedback on how you can make that copy better. So all of that is included in the BBB. It is a one year membership. You can join at any time. I know I talk about the open houses sometimes here on the podcast. You can join the BBB today. The open houses do happen every couple of months and that's just an opportunity for you to join a live office hours call and get to know me a little bit more and learn a little bit about the BBB directly from me. But.
The BBB is always open for registration and I'm always happy to hop on a call with you if you're seriously considering joining and have questions. So you can always reach out to me if that's something that's of interest to you. The other way to work with me is by booking what is called the Clarity Compass Audit. And this is an opportunity for you to get my eyes on your business in a really sort of directed and focused way.
So what we do is you fill out a detailed intake form when you book that audit, where you answer a lot of questions about your business, where you are right now, things that you're doing, things that you maybe are not doing yet. We get together for an hour and we really get into it. I get to know in great detail what you are doing in your business right now, where you're at in the business building process. And I help to identify two to three areas where if I were you,
I would focus my time and energy and then together we co-create some very specific strategies for you to focus on implementing over the next three to six months. Then I put all of that in a detailed audit report, including those very specific suggestions and I send that back to you so that you have a document that you can work from. So that Clarity Compass audit is also available anytime to anyone who just wants the opportunity to have someone's eyes on their business. It's so helpful to have an objective outsider
take a look at your business model. I have done that myself so many times over the years. And as I say to my coaches in the BBB, I like to say as a coach that I'm really like the person who can see the forest from the trees. You're in the weeds every day in your coaching business. You're trying to get the social media posts done every day. You're trying to get your newsletter scheduled. You're trying to hustle and get some new one-on-one coaching clients. And all of that feels really, really overwhelming. It's hard to see the big picture.
when you're in the weeds like that. My job is to see that. And that's what that Clarity Compass audit is all about. It's to give you some clarity as to where your time will be most effectively used going forward, focusing on your business, because you can't do all the things all of the time. So that is the other way to work with me. I also have a couple of different pop-up programs that I run from time to time that you'll hear me talking about here on the podcast. But those are the two main ways to work with me if you're looking for support around your business.
Okay, I want to really get in now to this topic on using presentations and workshops to market your coaching. And the first thing I want to talk about is why presentations and workshops and or you'll hear me use the word live events as well, which is just another way of saying presentation really. Why those work so well, why they're so important. I think if you don't have this in your business model right now, you really need to think about why.
And I'm hoping that by the end of this podcast, I'm convinced you to include it in your funnel. So one of the key reasons why I love live events and why I've always included them in my business model is because it is one of the best ways to build like no trust. It was just something that we talk about all the time on this podcast. The truth is nobody's gonna hire you to work with them around their sort of deepest, darkest secrets and their biggest areas of challenge as a human.
unless they like you and know you and trust you. And the only way to build that is to get in front of them time and time again. Now you can do that through short form content. You can do that through social media posts, through your newsletter, through little lives that you do here and there. But the best way to build the fastest is to get in front of that person for a longer period of time. And live events like presentations and workshops allow you to do that. That is why I love them.
The other reason why I love them is that it provides you with a really easy opportunity to do some what I call organic or natural marketing. Organic or natural marketing is not salesy sales. I despise salesy sales. If you listen to this podcast, you know that. But what I do love is organic marketing, and that is marketing that feels natural. And for most of the coaches that I work with, this appeals to them so much more than the sort of typical, a little more masculine, a little more
aggressive model of sales that a lot of us have been taught or think we need to be doing. Natural organic sales would involve in a presentation would involve dropping in what I call organic hooks from time to time. So for example, if you're talking about the topic of burnout, which is something I talk about a lot as a coach, you might want to drop in a few client examples into that presentation and say things like,
This is one of the tools that I teach when I'm working with one among clients that I get the best feedback from. My clients find this to be incredibly helpful for them. I teach them to do this. And then you would include that tactic or topic in your workshop. If you do that a few times over the course of your presentation, you are planting the seed and reminding your audience regularly that you actually have an offer of support.
that you provide outside of presenting. So there's something more that they can get from you. And I love presentations for that. It's just a natural place to work in client stories and to provide, you know, just a really subtle yet clear reminder of the fact that you are a coach and you do this for a living and you support people in this very area that you're talking about on a one-on-one basis or in a group, whatever it might be outside of this presentation. So those are the two main reasons why I love presentations.
I also love them because they're really multi purpose in that you can take a presentation and then you can then use it in if you're strategic about it, use it in a variety of other ways in marketing. For example, something I do regularly is offer a live workshop, record it, and then use that recording as a freebie. So you will see if you go into, you know, my free resources for coaches at wendymcallum.com, for example, that there is a presentation there around
There's one on how to get clients, 10 ways to get clients outside of social media and your email list. And there's one there that's a pricing masterclass that you can get. There are a variety of different like either free or low ticket workshops. Most of those were recorded live. So I actually offered them as a live workshop. And then sometimes what I do is I edit the recording so that the live Q &A portion is removed from it. And then I'm just left with this standalone
master class or workshop that I can offer people as a freebie. So, you know, the other thing that I do sometimes is I take these workshops or presentations that are recorded and I actually use them as content in paid courses. So I might take those, something that I've offered as a one-off workshop, keep it somewhere and then use it as part of another program that I create later on. So I love the flexibility and the versatility of workshops and presentations.
Okay, one of the questions I get asked a lot is how do I know what the right topic is? So the first thing you should do is think about your niche. What's the problem that you solve? Who do you help? And what is the unique sort of process through which you do that? Like what's your special sauce? What are the tactics, tools, resources, coaching questions you ask that resonate the most with your clients when you're working with them? How can you create a more general
workshop or presentation based on that. Now, if you don't know what the problem is you solve, or who it is that you help as a coach, you've got to go do that work first. But assuming you're pretty clear on what your niche is and what type of work you do and who you support, that's where I would start. Now, you can create presentations that are sort of your signature presentation that you offer everybody. And I think it's a good idea for everybody to have at least one
signature presentation. I think actually by definition, a signature presentation is only one presentation. But you might have like a little I have a I have three or four that I offer all the time that I repeat, because they're really popular, the topics have been proven, I know that they work well, especially in the employment or corporate context. So those get offered all the time. But the other way to do it is to actually go and ask the group that you are
looking to present to, looking to create a useful presentation or workshop for what they're looking for, what they need, where the gap is. So for example, if you were looking to create a corporate presentation, which would likely be a paid presentation for a group of employees, you might go to the HR department or the managers and ask them, what's the one thing that your employees struggle with that you struggle to support them around in this particular area? And how might I be able to craft something that would help to fill that gap for you?
Filling the gap is one of the best ways to sell effectively, being responsive, finding out what the need is and then filling that need. So I do it both ways. I have some standard presentations that I offer now. Someone asked me what are my options for presentations. I send them a little document that PDF that lists the various topics that I speak on and gives them a little information about what each of those workshops or presentations might entail. But I'm also always
reminding them that I'm happy to customize a topic based on the needs of their group. So that whole choosing the right topic thing, sometimes it's best to be responsive with that. Now, if you're trying to create that signature presentation, then here are a couple of tips around that. I would really recommend that you take whatever that topic is that you come up with, think, well, this is a thing I teach all the time, or I coach people through all the time that people find to be just so impactful and insightful.
and I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna create more of a group presentation with that. Take that topic and then figure out how to make it accessible to what I call the lowest common denominator, which is really like the person in the room with the least knowledge of coaching and the lowest levels of self-awareness. That's generally how I'm thinking when I'm creating presentations because you're gonna have people at various different places of personal growth in the room.
and you want to make sure that you're providing something for everybody. So I'm always going to, like for lack of a better word, almost dumb it down a little bit. I don't want to be to be up there presenting on something and having, just losing people right from the beginning because it's just of no interest to them because it's way down the road from where they are right now or it's just overly complicated. So make sure.
that you're doing that because obviously when you're coaching one-on-one, it's really easy to gauge where that particular client is and to meet them where they are. It's a lot harder to do that with a group. So have a think about that. Make sure that it really feels accessible. The other piece that I always say is make sure that the topic is couched in the positive. So whatever the name of the topic is of the presentation, make sure that it sounds like really hopeful, optimistic, positive, like people are gonna leave and they're gonna feel so much better,
as opposed to a negative. So for example, I support a lot of coaches who coach around addictions and alcohol. A topic that was called, 10 reasons why you need to stop, you need to drink less now, is just really negative. You're gonna really struggle, I think, to get people to first of all, to even come to that topic. And second of all, it's gonna be really hard to get them engaged. But if you said something along the lines
easy ways to drink a little less in 2025 and increase your energy productivity and focus. That's just a much more positive spin on that. So really be thinking about that, making sure that it's an accessible topic for everybody. I mean, really in the presentation world, you're providing like the very first step usually in the resolution of the challenge or problem, as opposed to a more,
complicated, down the road part of the solution or resolution,
another question that we talk about a lot in the BBB is whether to charge for it or whether to do it for free. This is the biggest point of stuckness for my coaches. We go around and around on this. The truth is you can do it either way.
And I do it both ways. I offer free presentations sometimes, and I also offer paid presentations, and there are pros and cons to each. Obviously, if you're doing the corporate wellness side of things, you're creating presentations and workshops to do within organizations, there is an expectation that they will pay for that. They have an expectation that that will cost them and that it will not be free. So I'm not ever encouraging coaches to create free corporate wellness presentations.
You might want to do a couple at a lower cost or for free in the very early days just to gather some testimonials, test your presentation, idea, build your confidence around public speaking. But definitely as a long-term strategy, you want to be charging. And that is a whole other topic, how to price those things. We talk about that, obviously, inside the BBB and it's something I could do whole episode on. But you can also charge for non-corporate.
just sort of general audience or general public presentations or workshops that you might want to host either in person or online. And that works really well. mean, the upside of charging always is that when people have invested something in it, they are so much more likely to show up. So when you host something free, in my experience, you can be pretty sure that about a third of the people will show up who register when it's free.
especially if you're providing the replay.
So I'm just accustomed to that now. It's not shocking to me at all. I've done live events where we've had 500 people register and only 150 people show up live. that is just par for the course, I think with these things now. People are signing up all the time for free things and very often have no intention of attending live from the very beginning or their lives get busy and they just, they don't show up or they forget.
So the downside to the free event is that you're gonna have significantly less live turnout probably than you are on a paid. Now you'll have more people register because it's free. So at the end of the day, sometimes that just balances itself out in terms of attendance. I like paid, a reasonable ticket paid. So not too high, not too low because...
The people who sign up for that are serious and are going to put it in their calendars and are very, very likely to actually show up live. So that's the upside of that. And also, obviously, make some money. You don't want to be out there constantly doing free things. You have to find that balance so that you're generating enough revenue to stay in business, which is fairly obvious. So I do both. And, you know, there are ups and downs to both of them.
Getting out there and doing free workshops and presentations in the early days as a coach though can be a really great way to build your audience because you will require if you're doing it right that they give you their email address before you send them the details about where the event is taking place. The Zoom link or if it's in person the address and details of it. Because you want to be building your list at the very least.
so that you can continue to build like no trust with them after the presentation by way of an email sequence and getting other free valuable content in front of them.
And obviously if you're doing a virtual workshop, same thing, you you would have that be an exchange for their email address. So it's a great list building activity, a free workshop, and it can also feel a little less pressure for coaches in the early days than actually charging people to attend a workshop. But eventually I think you should start experimenting with the paid workshops as well. Your business is an experiment. I'm about to record another episode where I talk about...
why that is the very best mindset around business, this whole experiment mindset. I want you to think about workshops and presentations and live events as part of that experiment. You're try different things and different things are gonna work better for you.
Okay, we've talked a little bit about like on the in-person versus Zoom or some other online platform. mean, obviously you can do it both ways. Since the pandemic, there's been this huge shift to online. Most people are very comfortable with online and virtual stuff. I've actually done lots of paid presentations online for corporations and organizations. I've also done lots of my own sort of marketing workshops and presentations online.
I would say I prefer online overall because it takes way less of my time. So if I'm doing something in person, which I do do as well, so I will go speak in person to groups and organizations. When I'm doing it in person, there's a lot of travel time usually involved in that. I have to drive, park, do the presentation, do a little chit chat afterwards and then drive home. So it's usually at least a couple hours of my time if it's a one hour engagement versus virtual and online. can literally log on.
five minutes before the presentation starts and be done in an hour. So I love that because it's easier for me to plan around that. However, I think the perks of in-person often can feel a lot more rewarding. First of all, in the online world now, a lot of people will turn their cameras off. Now I usually ask people at the beginning of presentations to please turn their cameras on if they can, because there's nothing more uncomfortable than looking at and talking to yourself for an hour and people usually laugh and a few people will turn their cameras on.
But it is also kind of normal now to be on that type of thing and have your camera off. So that can be really challenging, especially if you haven't done a lot of public speaking. It's just awkward. In person, people are looking at you and you can really sense the level of engagement. You can sense what's going well, what's not going well. You can take pauses and breaks if it feels like people need that. can...
expand on things, if it looks like somebody is a little bit confused, you can pay attention to body language. There's a lot of stuff that's more readily available in the in-person context than online, and I think that that's all really valuable and worth thinking about. Again, it's an experiment. Try both. If you can get in front of a group of people at your local library or community center or school, or if you get...
you have a friend who works for an organization and they're looking for a speaker and you can get a paid gig somewhere, go in and do it in person and see how that feels. And I think probably you'll find that a mix of these two things ends up being the right blend for you. I find that I get clients from almost every live presentation that I do leads to some more paid work. Whether it's a paid presentation or a free presentation, it almost always leads to work.
people sign up for a program or they contact me for discovery call for one-on-one coaching, or it leads to another paid presentation. Okay, how to fill your workshops. I mean, this is obviously if you're doing a paid presentation for an organization, they're gonna fill it for you. That's not your job. If you're doing one that you are trying to fill yourself online or in the community somewhere, then you're just gonna do all the things you always do to get people.
aware of something that you're offering, any offer that you have, you're going to get on social media. You might, if it was an in-person community thing, you might actually put notices up and post on community boards, both real live community boards and virtual community boards if they exist. And then you're going to do social media marketing. You're going to talk about it all over the place. You're going to do newsletters out to your newsletter list and let them know that it's happening. You might want to consider partnerships. Is there somebody who you could...
partner with on a talk who has a bigger audience than you, who would be sharing the details of this talk with their audience so that those people will then come into your world that otherwise wouldn't come into your world. I love partnerships for these types of things. I've run challenges before as partnerships with other coaches that have exposed me to a whole new group of people that I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to. The other thing I do sometimes is I reach out to my existing client base, my past client base, and I ask that I invite them and ask them to bring a friend.
It's another way that you can do this that can be really effective to fill your workshops. Now the actual structure of the presentation or workshop is also something I could talk about an entire podcast episode. So I'm not gonna get into the details of that, but what I would say is make sure that it's not too much. This is always my biggest tip for coaches who are creating their first presentation. Don't overdo it. I would really focus on whatever the problem is that you're gonna solve, which by the way, there needs to be a very directed
problem that you are addressing in this workshop and then you're providing a very specific solution to it. Make sure that that solution is like three parts or five parts. Don't make it 10 parts or 15 parts. You're just gonna end up with way too much. It's gonna be overwhelming for you, too much information for your audience and therefore not very impactful for them. So keep it really concise. Pick a problem and then come up with
three to five specific strategies that you teach or talk about that are a part of the solution to that problem. And then make sure, like I said, that you have built those organic hooks into your presentation. I make notes the first time I do a presentation of where the client examples are, and I highlight them so I don't forget to do them in the course of the presentation. If you're doing your own presentation, of course, you can do direct marketing.
At the end of the workshop, you can talk about whatever the offer is that you have coming up that you want to invite people to join, or you can send them direct emails after the presentation, inviting them to that. If you're doing a paid presentation, that is often very frowned upon. So in the corporate world, you want to ask, is it all right for me to share my information with the group at the end of the presentation in the event that they want to learn more about my coaching and,
And sometimes they will give you permission to do that. But I would always ask. think that's good practice. We've talked about how to pitch your coaching without feeling salesy. Just drop some of those organic hooks in there. Drop in some client stories. Just remind people of, know, use your own story as well in there. Just all of that will not only help build that like no trust, but it will remind people of the fact that you actually have paid coaching offers outside of the presentation without you feeling super salesy.
leveraging other people's audiences to get more clients. We've talked about that as well, how you can partner with other coaches. But another thing to think about is, can I actually market this thing? Even if I'm just doing it myself, can I use other coaches to leverage the marketing of this? So could I do offer a live presentation, for example, on somebody else's Instagram page to their audience where I talk about...
One of the things I'm gonna be talking about in this workshop, so I give them some free valuable content over there, but not all of it. And then I let them know that I have this free workshop that's happening that they can register for. So how can you leverage other people's audiences to get more clients? And we've talked also about repurposing your workshop for long-term marketing. So taking a workshop and recording it and turning it into an evergreen free.
lead magnet, example, evergreen like masterclass lead magnet. I love that. And then I guess the last thing I just want to touch on really briefly is what to do with these presentations. If you are creating offers around public speaking and presenting what to do with that in terms of where to put it on your website. Again, I could talk about all of the intricacies of marketing presentations, paid presentations.
in an entire podcast episode, but the one thing I would say to you is have a separate page on your website for this. And the reason for that is that you're really speaking to a different client when you're trying to sell paid presentations, especially in corporations and organizations. You're talking to the HR people, you're talking to the managers, you're talking to the event coordinators, you're not talking to the one-on-one clients that you're talking to on all the other pages in your website, right? So you wanna make sure that
you have a space where you can actually use language that's going to resonate with those people who are looking to book speakers for their organization. And so I would really recommend having a page that is in your navigation bar on the top that is called something like Speaking or Wellness Presentations or Group Wellness or something like that. And then have a separate page where you talk about your presenting skills.
have a really great photo of you presenting or a video of you presenting so that people can see that you're engaging and professional and all the rest of it somewhere on that page and then talk about what makes you unique as a public speaker. If you have some testimonials, include them there. And I personally don't put my prices on the website. I use a sliding scale based on a whole bunch of different factors, including the size of the group, the length of the presentation and
And honestly, the type of organization that's hiring me, I will often offer a different rate for nonprofits than I will for for-profits. So for me, there's just a contact me page to discuss the needs of your group and pricing. But make sure that you have a separate page if this is something that you wanna offer as a part of your paid services as a coach. Okay, I hope that that got you motivated. I hope you're starting to think your wheels are turning. What could I do as a presentation?
Test it out first is a free workshop online, if that feels most comfortable before you start pitching it to organizations and groups. But this is such a great way to bring people into your world and to build that like no trust with people outside of social media, which for all the reasons might not be the best place for you and frankly is not even that reliable. We don't own social media, we don't own our social media, all the audience and following can be taken away anytime.
from us, I've had lots of coaches who've had their accounts shut down for, you know, frankly unexplained reasons, or for whom the algorithm has just suddenly stopped working the way that it used to work. So take control over that and make sure that you're incorporating in your marketing funnel, some things that you do have control over. And this is just such a, such a, an important and effective piece of building a resonant
reliable, profitable coaching business. It's just getting this.
in as part of your funnel. you know, always having some kind of a workshop or presentation coming up, just a great way to get clients and to bring some money into your business. So I hope you found that helpful and I'll see you next time on The Coaching Edge. Thanks for listening.
