Gill Moakes (00:02)
Welcome, welcome to the Heads Together podcast. I'm your host Gill Moakes Thank you so much for joining me again this week. Good to have you here. So I have a great little episode for you this week. It's one of those like strategy ones. It's one that you can take and run with and have a little experiment with in your own business.
It's called a virtual open house strategy. It's something that I've been practicing and kind of experimenting with myself and you know, that I love trying things out and seeing how they go and then if I think it's a something good, I'm going to share it with you, right? I can't take all the credit for this one. So I'll share a bit about that about where this ⁓ idea comes came from for me.
but yeah, I really wanted to share this with you because it's so in alignment with my values. And therefore I know for most of you listening, your values too, because you probably listened to this podcast because the way I show up for this podcast is in alignment with the way, with what matters to me. ⁓ and we know that that's what attracts our, followers, right?
So this strategy is so aligned for me because it's so transparent. And you've heard me talk about this before. I think that when you are radically authentic and completely honest and transparent about what's going on in your business, about what you're all about, about how you can help people, about what you actually offer them.
the more likely you are to attract the right clients and to build trust in with them more quickly. Okay. So I just love this strategy as a trust building lead generation strategy. Okay. Can't wait to tell you all about it. So let's dive in.
So like I say, this virtual open house strategy isn't my own creation. I have kind of copied it from one of my absolute business besties, Marion Tilley, who is the founder and CEO of the Institute of Coaching Studies. That is the Institute where I did my own ICF accreditation studies. It is in my opinion, the best there is. ⁓
some of you listening will know that I partner with the Institute and I ⁓ give a master class every quarter around some kind of business building topic. In fact, we have one coming up. Our next one is in July, which is going to be all about creating the perfect lead magnet for your business. So be sure to sign up for that one. I'll put a link in the show notes, of course. ⁓ But Marion...
really came up with this strategy. Marion and I talk every week, we absolutely, I always say, I just don't know what I do without her. We bounce ideas off of each other and ⁓ we just have such a great relationship in terms of supporting each other as we build our businesses. And Marion really came up with this strategy and I just love it.
She hosts a monthly open day for the Institute. And she was telling me about this and explaining that, well, you know, I want people to be able to see what it's all about. See, look inside at the lessons and see how the Institute operates. And I just suddenly thought, oh my goodness, that is exactly what I want to do with the Coaching Business Academy. And for the coming up,
collective, the membership. In fact, I want to do this for anyone who thinks about working with me, because I really want there to be no unanswered questions for people. I want them to know exactly what they're getting, exactly what they're investing their money in, if they decide to place their trust in me as their coach or in the academy or in the collective.
I want them to know what they're getting. And so I call it an open house, virtual open house, same thing. I basically get the chance to show people around inside the academy. literally screen share and open up the lessons, open up the workbooks, etc. And people really get to see inside and they get to see what they're having. So what they're getting, sorry.
So yeah, just love, love, love this strategy in terms of transparency. And it works incredibly well. It turns out that Marion was absolutely right. And I was right to agree with her. People do want to see what they're getting. They want to understand how it all works. What does it look like inside? What are the...
What's the layout? What are the modules? What are the different resources they're going to get access to? They want to know all those things. I always want to know those things. So one thing that is really important to make clear is that this doesn't replace being very clear with someone what the benefit is for them of joining.
I'm not saying for one moment that that advice that I give as well as other people, which is, you know, make sure you're really communicating the benefit, the so what. If I join, what is in it for me? What will improve for me? What will I be able to do after I've worked with you that I couldn't do before? This glimpse inside at the act.
mechanics and the actual deliverables of any kind of coaching program or membership.
This lead generation strategy, which is what it is, it's kind of a lead generation slash enrollment strategy, actually. It's like a massively transparent version of a webinar, of a sales webinar, right? Because instead of teaching something and then tacking onto the end of a webinar, a ⁓ short piece about
if you're interested in working with me, here's how you can do that. This is slightly different. So this is very much for people who are really aware already of the problem they have and who are already looking for solutions to that problem. So for me, for example, the people who would sign up for a virtual open house,
are people who are struggling to grow their coaching practice. Those people already know they have a problem, right? They already are very well aware that they are struggling to build that business. And they are looking for the right support. So they're already a little bit further down the road than someone who is perhaps in the pre awareness stage, you know, they're someone where we have to kind of pique their interest by teaching them some
new and then they might think, yeah, okay. Now I'd like to learn something else from this person, or I'd like to at least take an interest in what that person has to offer. No, these are people who already are looking for a solution to the problem they know they have. So someone might sign up for a virtual open house if they don't have enough coaching clients, and they're really struggling to understand.
how they can get more coaching clients, well, they already know they want some support with that. Maybe they've already been looking at different business coaches, different programs that are out there, right? For those people, this open house is perfect, because not many people do this. So this is something else I want to just share with you that is that if you do this as part of your marketing ecosystem,
you're really differentiating yourself because there aren't that many people who are confident enough to let people in completely behind the scenes and really show them around. And the people who do do it are the people who build trust much more quickly than those who don't. Okay, so let's walk you step by step through this strategy. First of all,
To deliver on this strategy, you can do it one of two ways. You could either do it as a webinar, or you can just do it as a Zoom call. There's pros and cons to both. If you host your open house as a Zoom call, there is even more transparency, right? That people get to look you in the whites of the eyes and they can ask questions.
So you can make some time for them to ask questions directly to you on that Zoom call. So that can be one way of doing it. The disadvantage of that is that if you are a little more advanced and you have a lot of people signing up for it, sometimes you're not always gonna have enough time to answer questions individually. And you can almost set yourself up for a little bit of failure if you...
don't leave enough time for people to interact at the end. There is also another factor and there's another reason why I actually deliver my virtual open houses as webinars, which are a little bit more anonymous for the people signing up. And the reason I like that is that sometimes people who are exploring what we have to offer
don't necessarily want to publicize that. If they're still in their decision making phase, they don't always want other people to know what they're considering doing, what programs they're considering taking. They don't always want to share what stage of their journey they're at. And so particularly if you are working with people who maybe have a more personal, if you're a coach who
I know I have a couple of clients who are sober coaches, for example, it's really important that there is some privacy to these sessions. So really, this depends on what kind of coaching you offer. And it depends on what stage people are at. So for example, with the collective, my membership that I'm launching in May,
For those people, some of those people are kind of at the very early stages of thinking, ⁓ yeah, I really want to train to be a coach and I want to find out more about what that might look like. But those people could have nine to five jobs, right? They don't necessarily want to ⁓ publicize. So always have that in mind when you make a decision about how you're gonna present your open house. It really does depend. Some of you are gonna say, you know what, Gill
That kind of thing doesn't matter to me, and I know it doesn't matter to my clients. And so I'm absolutely happy to do it as a Zoom call. Everything's open. We get to talk and get to know each other. And for trust building, amazing. So good. But just be aware that there are other considerations sometimes with the way people like to show up for this kind of thing. And quite often, you'll find at this stage where people are wanting to have a look behind the scenes.
They kind of are very happy to do that anonymously and to just do it with you presenting as a webinar. Just something to think about and a couple of options. One isn't right and one isn't wrong. And like anything in marketing, you might want to experiment with both and see what lands better. Okay.
So that's the first decision you're gonna make is whether you're going to just do it as a Zoom or as a webinar Zoom, much easier to set up. You're literally going to ⁓ just set up a Zoom link which you can share and you can tell people the date and time and they can just log into the Zoom. Really, really simple. Webinar, slightly different. Webinar does give you the opportunity to share some slides if you want to, which you can also do on Zoom as well, of course.
But does, a webinar style does give you that opportunity to keep it a little more anonymous. And it also gives you the opportunity to get some more interesting stats. So you'll be able to tell, you know, who stayed on until the end and, you know, the other good stuff in terms of analytics that you can get from a webinar provider. ⁓
So obviously if you're going to do it webinar style, you need to just prepare your webinar room, upload your presentation, all of that kind of thing. If you're doing it Zoom wise, you're just going to share your screen.
So the next step then is to, if you want to create some slides. So I tend to have a few slides that I kind of talk through that gives a little bit of background to me, a little bit of background to the academy. I will be doing these for the collective as well. So it'd be a bit of background to the collective too. And then you're going to switch from presenting to sharing your screen. We'll come onto that in a moment, but you might want to.
think about preparing a few slides that just really give people some insight into your offer.
Then you're going to promote your open day or your open house. And the way I do this is I absolutely share this with my email list. So I'm going to make sure that I've got an invitation going out to my email list to sign up for the open house. Really important. You know, I mean, if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you'll know how passionate I am about email list building. And ⁓ it's really important that you're going to.
invite your VIPs, your email list subscribers to your virtual open house for sure. Social media, make sure you're sharing it on social media. Invite your existing connections via a direct message. So this isn't like sending a cold, direct message to someone you're not connected with yet. This is people you're already connected with. This is a great reason to reach out.
and say, Hey, you know, you've been following me for a while, I thought this might be of interest, would love to see you there. You know, so lots of ways you can promote it. If you're doing any PR, if you're guest ⁓ speaking on someone else's podcast, for example, you might want to have that as a call to action to sign up for one of your ⁓ virtual open houses. I'm going to put the link to the website page that I have on my website.
And you'll see there I've got a countdown timer to the next open house. People can easily ⁓ subscribe, sorry, people can easily sign up for one of the upcoming sessions. It's really important when you do anything like this, whenever you host any kind of virtual event, make it easy for people to sign up, right? Make it really easy. Don't ask them for chapter inverse, ask for their email address and their name.
That's all you need at this stage. So just make sure you're making it very, very easy for them to sign up. And like I say, I'm going to pop the all of the links to how I do it are going to be in the show notes. So this is going to be super meta.
You know, because obviously I would love for you to sign up. If you sign up, you're also going to see what you get in terms of the thank you page and all of that kind of thing. And you know, I love it. I love to make sure I'm setting an example that you can copy if it makes sense for your business. So you're going to promote your open day and then on the actual open house open day, you're going to welcome people into the room. Give it a few minutes for people, for the stragglers to log in.
Make sure you hit record, because anyone who signed up for the open house, they aren't necessarily going to be able to show up live. And you know, well as I do, I mean, sometimes I sign up for things with full intention of just catching the replay, I have no intention of showing up live. And I think a lot of people do that. We're all busy. So make sure you're catering for those people too. So do hit record. And then
I want you to just give your introduction face to camera, then start sharing your slides if you're creating slides. If not, you're just going to talk face to camera for a little while about your offer. And the beautiful thing with this is that this isn't a sales pitch. Okay? What you're doing here is a perfect example of giving people the information they need.
to know they need you. Remember, I talk about that all the time when we talk about sales and selling as far as coaches is concerned, we don't need to sell, we just need to give people the information they need to know they need us. And that's a wonderful thing about these virtual open houses is that we get to do just that we're presenting information. And for those of you that struggle with selling and struggle with
⁓ articulating your prices, this can be really refreshing for you. I think there's actually something very liberating about just presenting some information, you're going to find that this is great practice for you to speak openly and easily about what you charge for your coaching. For those of you who have
an online component or resources, here's where you get to share your screen like I do with the Academy or with the collective and actually share your screen so people can see inside. So in other words, you're going to log in as if you were a student in your program or a coachee inside your program. And you're going to navigate around the buttons, you're going to say press here and it takes you to the community and press here and you've got your downloads and your workbooks. And here's what
Lesson one looks like, right? So you're going to really show them around. Now, if you're listening to this and thinking, well, okay, yeah, I get that Gill that makes really good sense if you have a program or an academy like you do. But I just do one to one coaching. I coach my clients one on one. I don't really understand what I'd be showing them around in my open house.
Well, there's a few ways you can still use this strategy, but you can tailor it so that it's a bit more ⁓ relevant for one-to-one coaching clients. So what you might do in this case is almost a few slides that might feature some testimonials or some case studies. And again, this is a very transparent
and honest presentation of what you do. And I actually think people really like that. Now, I'm not saying that this is something you want to do every week. Absolutely not. And if you're a one-to-one coach, it might be that you do it once a quarter, that you have one of these info sessions where people can come and really hear. What you could do is you could invite past clients to come on.
and say a few words about what it's like to coach with you. I guess the key thing that I really want to get across here is that we are not pretending this is anything other than what it is, which is telling people about your coaching, how it helps them, what it does for them, what it helps them do that they couldn't do previously. And you get to tell them about the nuts and bolts.
you get to talk through if you're a one-to-one coach, say, know, most of my clients coach with me bi-weekly. So every other week we get on the call for 90 minutes and we do a deep dive. And this is what my signature framework looks like. And it starts with this and it ends with this. you know, it's just a beautifully refreshing, transparent way to every now and then almost create your own infomercial about your coaching.
and don't dress it up as anything other than that. This is why I love the name of an open house or as Marion calls it with the Institute, an open day, is that even in the name, it's, and particularly I think with open house, which is what I'm using, an open house is where you will go and you'll have a really good look, a really good nose around a house that you might be interested in buying, right?
And that's what I'm inviting potential clients to come and do inside the Academy. No secrets, nothing to hide, just pure transparent honesty about if you invest in joining the Coaching Business Academy, here's what you get, here's who I am, this is my style, this is how I teach about things, this is what it looks like inside, this is what the community looks like.
here's what the master classes ⁓ look like, you know, they're getting to see the inside track. And of course, probably the most important part of this strategy is the follow up. So if someone has signed up, it means they are a hot lead for you. Now a hot lead doesn't mean they're ready to invest and work with you right now, but it
does mean that they were interested enough to want to see behind the scenes, to want to know more about you. So that is someone that I want you to make sure you're nurturing so that when the time is right for them, it might be now, it might be in a month's time, it might be in six months time, right? But when the time is right for them, you are top of their mind.
Okay, I just love this strategy. I really, really love it. I've only, you know, like I say, I'm only two in at the moment. So let's see. But I am really enjoying the strategy. And I think it's certainly brought new leads into the business. Definitely. So it's a great lead generation strategy. It's absolutely an enrollment strategy. Because of course, at the end, you're going to maybe have a slide that comes up with which is very clear.
there's a very clear call to action after an open house and that is if you want to become a student in the academy sign up here or book a call with me here. me normally it's book a call. I like to talk to people before they sign up. you know, and there's certainly if you're a one to one coach, you're going to want to have that conversation, but it's, it's a really great bit further down the line sales strategy if you like for coaches.
And we want that balance in our marketing ecosystem. We want the awareness content. We want the lead generation stuff. We want the lead magnets and the lead generation. Then we want the nurture piece. But for some people, this is going to be the right thing at the right time and is going to be the thing that encourages them to take the leap and start working with you. So I would love to hear if this has resonated with you. And if it is a strategy that you're taught,
with giving a go, please reach out to me info at jormokes.com. Reach out to me and let me know because you know I love getting your emails. It just literally makes my day. Let me know and I will absolutely reply with any little ⁓ pearls of wisdom that I can offer in terms of what's worked for me and what doesn't work. So always happy to do that. I'm also happy to share anything like my slides and stuff like that if it's going to make it easier for you to give this a go too.
Okay. Hope you've enjoyed this episode. I will be back here again, same time, same place next week. Of course, if you would like to come to a virtual open house, I'm going to put the link to that in the show notes. So do have a think about that. If you're at that stage, if you're a coach who's thinking, you know what, I know I need to do something. Now I need to take some action and get some support to grow my coaching business.
This would be a great time for you to come along to our next open house. All right. Have a brilliant week, everyone. And I will see you back here same... ⁓ sorry. Same time, same place next week. Bye for now.
