From Coach to Speaker

I recently received a call from June, an Executive Coach who specialized in women’s leadership within the finance sector.

During our discussion, June shared with me that although she was keen to grow her business, she was finding it difficult to attract new clients. She was worried that if her business didn’t grow, she would need to look for a full-time job. She also confided that she didn’t enjoy public speaking.

Sadly, June is like a lot of talented coaches I meet who are trying to build a high-quality base of paying clients. And the reality is that, although June and many coaches like her don’t enjoy public speaking, the willingness and ability to do so is one of the best ways to build your business.

As a coach, there are many benefits to speaking at events and conferences, including:

• Efficiency. Speaking to a roomful of people is like a sales conversation, multiplied!
• Generating awareness. Speaking engagements—particularly with members of your target market—build awareness of you, your brand and what you have to offer as a coach.
• Building relationships. The more people get to see you in person the more they will be able to tell if they like you or not without feeling pressure. In a coaching business, what makes you different is you. The more differentiated you are, the more valuable you are in your clients’ eyes. This means you can charge what you’re worth instead of competing against others and risking working too much to keep your head above water.

For many coaches, the greatest challenge on the way to becoming a confident, competent public speaker is making the shift from asking to telling. As a coach, you’re responsible for creating the space for the client; all of the attention is on him or her. In speaking, your audience may be paying attention to you, but your attention is on a room filled with people, each of whom brings his or her own perspective, goals and desires to the engagement. However, the purpose is the same. In coaching you’re facilitating change in your client, and in speaking you’re trying to facilitate change for everyone in the room.

These five tips will help you embrace public speaking as a tactic for building your brand and growing your business:

• Value speaking as one of your most-leveraged sales tools. Having a lot of one-on-one sales conversations isn’t an efficient use of your time. A single speaking engagement with an audience of 40 people can save you 40-plus hours of coffee meetings. Those are hours that you can instead spend coaching your paying clients.
• Analyze your audience. What problems do they have? What are their fears? What issues does your message solve? You need to have an intimate knowledge of the challenges that are happening in your audience’s world. If you don’t they will be lost quickly. As TED speaker and author Simon Sinek says, you need to “start with why.” The “why” will allow you to connect far more quickly and engage with your audience.
• Don’t facilitate. As a speaker, you have several ways to engage with your audience, including stories, analogies and humor. You shouldn’t be engaging by turning the mic over to members of the audience for the duration of the engagement. If you believe participation is the best way to keep your audience engaged, set limits: For example, you might ask them to raise their hands to gauge connection with certain points. Another option is to get audience members to chat with their neighbors at certain times throughout the presentation.
• Be mindful of activities. You risk losing energy and momentum in your presentation when you bring activities into a presentation. If you are integrating activities, make sure they move at the same pace as the presentation itself to maintain energy levels.
• Be prepared! Ensure that your message and key points are clear and well-supported by stories, examples, case studies and evidence relevant to your audience. Although you don’t want to race through your presentation, you do want to maintain good pacing and momentum: You’ll lose the connection with your audience if your presentation is slow, laborious or off-point.

By taking the time to find and prepare for speaking engagements, you can build your practice and position yourself and your brand as a coach. By making the move from asking to telling—and therefore, from coach to speaker—you can share your insights, build your brand and move from one-on-one sales conversations to one-to-many growth opportunities.