Creating and Communicating Value – Episode 32


In this episode, Beth Cougler Blom talks with Matthew Rempel about how entrepreneurs who own facilitation-related businesses can create and communicate the value we bring to our clients in various ways.

Beth and Matthew also talk about:

  • finding our ideal clients
  • dealing with fear around saying no to potential clients
  • rethinking the purpose of “the funnel”
  • becoming a source of influence rather than an influencer
  • creating value via social media

Engage with Matthew Rempel

Other Links from the Episode

Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast

Connect with Beth Cougler Blom

Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions

Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]

[Show intro]
Beth
Welcome, to Facilitating on Purpose, where we explore ideas together about designing and facilitating learning. Join me to get inspired on your journey to becoming and being a great facilitator wherever you work. I’m your host, Beth Cougler Blom.

[Episode intro]
Beth Cougler Blom
Hello, thank you so much for listening to the podcast. This is episode 32. Before I get into the intro to the episode itself, I just wanted to highlight something for you that happened with our podcast and that is that you, our community, voted us into the Top Five Most Listened-To Podcasts in the Session Lab State of Facilitation 2024 report. So, thank you so much. This is only the second year that Session Lab has put out this report and it looks like they had submissions from almost 1000 people around the world to be able to come up with the data for this year’s report. And one of the sections was about podcasts and I’m so excited that you put Facilitating on Purpose in the Top Five Most Listened-To Podcasts section. So, thank you so much. I’m really, really thrilled. I can’t believe that we’ve had this much of an impact after having released only 30 episodes because we are [animated] in some pretty good company with other podcasters in the world who have really released a lot more episodes than we have. And I just feel really, really grateful that what we’re doing here is valuable for you and it makes me want to keep on doing it for you. So thanks again and go check out that report if you want to learn a little bit more about what facilitators around the world are into these days, what’s changing for them in terms of their facilitation practice, their work in workshop or course design. Go check it out and also while you’re there, go listen to some of the other podcasts that are mentioned in the top five because I listen to them too and I’ve received a lot of value from m them as well. Thanks again.

So let’s now turn our attention to what’s happening in this episode. I’m really pleased to be able to present this conversation that I had with Matthew Rempel to you. Matthew has a company that helps social enterprises through business development and marketing challenges. Even though you and I might not define our business as a social enterprise, it doesn’t matter because these are lessons that we can apply to all of our work as well. You’ll hear me share some of the challenges that I have had and some of the things that I’m currently thinking about as it relates to my work in learning design and facilitation and the company I have. And Matthew shares some really insightful feedback and comments and he really helped me think about a couple of things in new ways, which is absolutely going to help me in my business. Matthew and I really centre our conversation around the things that we can do to create value for our clients and then to communicate that value as well in really effective ways. And ways that feel good, I would say, to ourselves and how we want to run our businesses. I know I received a lot of value from our conversation. I feel like I got some free consultation from Matthew [chuckles] throughout the call. You’re going to hear me say that at the end of the episode. So I really hope that you’re going to feel the same. Enjoy the show.

Beth Cougler Blom
Matt, so nice to see you. Welcome to the podcast today.

Matthew Rempel
Thank you for having me, Beth. It’s great to be on.

Beth
I was of course preparing for your arrival and for our conversation today. So I was looking at your website and the nature of the work that you do, and as I was doing it, I want to tell you this, just – be really upfront with my feelings. The work that you do around social entrepreneurship – helping social entrepreneurs create impact – and all the while I was thinking, ‘Well, am I a social entrepreneur? Does this apply to me? [laughter] And, you know, I don’t own a micro-financing company for the good of the world or anything like that’. And so I really came to the realization that as someone who owns a facilitation and learning design business, I think I am a social entrepreneur in some way, shape, or form because of the work that I kind of put out to the world or the clients that we have. But I’ve really never thought of myself like that before. So it’s a bit of a leap for me. But tell me, do you think that people who own businesses such as mine, are we in the realm of social entrepreneurship?

Matthew
OK, so that is a big question [laughter] with many different threads. So I’ll start first on ‘what is social entrepreneurship’ (Please!). In case people have never heard of it before. Because I found a lot of people think that it has to do with social media and it’s that’s not it at all. Social entrepreneurship is the concept of using a business model – so you’re selling goods and services – and the point of the business is to have some kind of social positive outcome. That could be something cultural like if you think of production companies or theatres, music venues potentially. You could look at the environment, if you’re reducing emissions, if you’re able to create alternatives that provide – that produce less harm and increase the good that we are producing towards the environment. And social, so things like reducing homelessness, things like reducing poverty, any number of these social problems that affect the people in the spaces that we live – or internationally. These are all elements that social enterprises are working to benefit.

And for me it’s a bit of a difficult topic because I am self-employed. If I earn more work and I do more work and I earn more money it’s me earning the money. And so working primarily for social enterprises is one of the ways I try to lean into being more of a social entrepreneur myself by trying to make sure that all of my clients are in some way pushing for a better world beyond just the things that we sell, but the ways in which we do the work.

So to answer your question, I don’t know if we’re all social entrepreneurs [laughs a bit], especially those community-based businesses. But if we’re using the money that we’re earning, if we’re using the way we operate to make the world a better place, above and beyond the products and service that we’re selling, I think we’re on our way.

Beth
I might be on my way then, and maybe other people are thinking the same thing as they’re hearing you explain. Thanks for that explanation. Because if we come into our business and work in our business and shape our business for the good of the world – I work with groups and they’re often nonprofits or community organizations and they’re doing great work for whoever their clients are – that’s really important to me in the work that we do. We love that kind of client, and in fact, I feel like I’ve been shaping my work to go more in that direction. It’s just part of what we like in terms of the values that we hold. So if we are leaning in that direction and make those intentional decisions, maybe I can call myself a social entrepreneur, although I still call myself a facilitator and a learning designer but I’m trying to do that good work in the world with what I do.

Matthew
Yeah, and I, I don’t necessarily call myself a social entrepreneur because I see so many other examples of the people that I’m working with that are doing so much more. (Yeah.) And I mean, that’s the trap of being human, I think, is we’re comparing, we’re always comparing. So maybe on a scale, we would exist within that spectrum. But to me, my work is still lacking the transparency of saying, ‘this is our impact report; this is how we’re doing it’, to be able to properly designate myself that way.

Beth
You’re right. And mine would be too, to be honest about it. For sure. Yeah. Thanks for that. But I think we can still learn the lessons that you teach when you work with social enterprises, other social entrepreneurs (Oh yeah) who are further down the spectrum than us, about helping us put ourselves out there to our clients, to our future participants. What are some of the main things that you do when you work with clients that you think that people who are in the facilitation business can learn from as well?

Matthew
Right. So one of the major things that I have to teach people is one, you have to be OK selling yourself and explain what it is you’re providing, and alongside that you need to understand very thoroughly what it is the people you’re serving actually care about. Because often the things that we do and the actual value we’re creating are two very different things.

In working with social enterprises, often the value is things like [a] reduced homelessness population, but that’s not at all the thing that they’re doing. The thing that they’re doing might be running a laundry service. Trying to communicate the differences there, especially if you’re looking at potential clients or service clients, that’s a big deal. Appealing to ‘what do people actually care about? What is the change that they are hoping to see?’ Rather than, ‘what will you do for them?’

Beth
OK, so let me try this out. What I do is facilitation work – say group process facilitation or facilitating workshops – but then the value that I’m bringing to clients – I’m actually just thinking of one of the last guests on the podcast, Alexandra Suchman, talked about how she goes in and facilitates games with organizations and why? Why games? It’s for team dynamics. It’s for helping people get to know each other more deeply, and so on. So it’s that team cohesion and helping a group work together better – is kind of the why. So I’m thinking about those things for myself too. ‘Why do we go in and do this work?’ Well it’s often to help an organization run more smoothly, people to work better together, on and on.

Matthew
Well, and you can always take it another step, like the facilitation practice and the 5 Whys. You can always go further into why are we bothering to do this? OK so if people know each other better then we’ll have fewer conflicts in the workplace. If we have fewer conflicts in the workplace then we can produce better results for our clients or for our partners or for our customers. You can take these – always go a step further – using the same tools that you’d use in facilitation to try to explain your own value that you’re making.

Beth
I love that too. I know 5 Whys. In Liberating Structures we call it 9 Whys, so we could even go (Oh, OK) even deeper into the 9 –it doesn’t matter of course, right? [laughter] Do you use tools like that with your clients then? ‘Here, go through this exercise, try to figure out what your value is that you bring to your groups or to the people you’re working with?’

Matthew
Absolutely. And sometimes – especially if it’s a one-on-one situation – it doesn’t have to be as structured as you would need it to be in a group workshop. Because in a coaching situation, when you’re able to help one person navigate their feelings and their perception of what it is that they’re doing, you can guide them along and help them get there without explicitly stating: ‘this is the exercise we’re doing’ but you can use those guiding questions like you would in any other facilitation to get people there. Absolutely. That is a tool that’s used.

Beth
I love that because actually sometimes we say that in facilitation that we don’t actually have to say what the name of the activity is. We just do the thing and lead them through it. So you’re really using facilitation skills on a one-on-one basis. I love that. I mean that’s – it’s an extra learning that you just brought to the podcast for sure [animated] in the work that you do. You are facilitating those conversations with your clients.

Matthew
Oh, absolutely. Any time people are trying to learn something, we can use communication skills. We can use facilitation skills. We can use organizational development skills. There’s so much overlap in those areas and that’s what I love about the work that I’m able to do is I get to take all of these different influences and just weave them together. A hint of a story here, use a bit of facilitation tool here, and help use those bits to help others make a bigger whole.

Beth
How do you help people find out who their clients are – who their ideal clients are, I should say. Because this is work I’ve been doing recently over the past year or so, myself, for my business, because we’ve been in the happy circumstance of just accepting work that has come our way and that pretty much works out for us. We’re happy to do a lot of the stuff that we’re doing, but starting to kind of take the company into shifts where we want to seek out people to work with and we want to make those intentional decisions about who our clients are. How do you work with people to help them figure that out?

Matthew
Oh [sighs], it’s totally different depending on if it’s an existing organization with existing clients, or a group that’s just starting out and hasn’t worked with anyone before. So for a group that already has existing clients, you’ve got a rhythm, you’ve got an existing client base. You probably have enough income to keep going but a little bit more would help with growth, would help with stability. That’s a very common experience. A big part – the first part – is often saying ‘what are we best at? What are we really excellent at that other people can’t do?’ Or, ‘What is the flavour of what we’re doing that can’t be easily replicated?’ Like if we’re thinking about restaurants, there are many different restaurants. There are many different restaurants within each niche. If we go even to imagine the stereotypical pizza place. There are lots of different businesses that exist in the space. They all have customers, but each one has a bit of a different slant. Like, we’re in Canada, if you go to a Boston Pizza, you’re expecting a family friendly, slightly sportsy experience. They’ve shifted it slightly to make it appeal to a very specific group. And that’s their first group, that’s their main group. It’ll still appeal to a bunch of people in the periphery but if they can be the first for, let’s say, elementary school sports windups, and from there the other people that connect with that group, that’s their core audience. They’ve found their best customers.

So similarly for an organization going through a shift like yours, you might want to look at what are the things that we love doing the most. Who are the clients that – we look back on our work with them and go, ‘wow that was a good time. They’re great to work with. We like doing the work. Our team fits what they needed. How can we distill the value we were providing to them and then who else needs that value?’ So in that way you can start saying no to the ones that don’t fit that category. It is a painful joy to finally be at a place where you can start saying ‘no’ to people that don’t quite fit. Because you can hand them off to others that might fit them better, and you can spend more energy refining your efforts into THE thing you like doing best or are able to do the best. And in that way you can shift an existing organization to try to find the customers that you’re looking for.

One of the great ideas around that is Seth Godin’s ‘minimum viable audience’. If you think about what number of clients or customers do you actually need to keep what you’re doing running, and saying, ‘OK if we typically have let’s say 20 client organizations a year, we only need to convince 20 people in a specific segment that we are good for them.’ And you can focus then. You can really focus in on those 20 people. Make it exactly what they need instead of be kind of what 60% of people need.

Then instead of being a whole bunch of people’s third choice, fourth choice, you can be those 20’s first and only because you’re exactly what they’re looking for.

Beth
And you said specific segments, so let’s just say the non-specific segment is community organizations. We say it so many different ways (Yeah): non-profit, not-for-profit, whatever, that group in that sector. (Yeah.) So that’s the big group. You are saying you want us to drill down maybe even more deeply into that big segment and figure out, ‘who is it within that group that we really want to work with?’ Because there’s lots of variety even within that big group itself. So find the specific segment that we want to work with within the bigger group?

Matthew
Yeah. Um, one of the ways you can think about this is imagine music genres. So you’ve got jazz. Then you’ve got smooth jazz, then you’ve got, postmodern smooth jazz. You can always slice things thinner and thinner to be more descriptive about what exactly are we talking about. And customer segments are exactly the same way.

So for myself, social enterprises is the large group that I say I’m working towards. But when I’m really thinking about who do I ideally want to be working with, I’m looking at organizations that are either just starting out or within that first three years of operation. They probably have somewhere between 2 and 10 permanent staff, maybe 10 to 30 part-time staff, and are looking at developing their managers to increase their efficiency. That is a pretty specific slice (It is!) within an industry that most people don’t even know about. [laughter]

Beth
And you’ve done the homework to get there, right? You’ve done that questioning to find – of yourself and maybe who your past clients are, as you’ve said, who you’ve enjoyed working with, and you’ve really narrowed it down to that specific segment. I like that.

Matthew
And within that it’s because it’s the things that I really enjoy. Like I love introducing new people who are now in business. They never expected to be, necessarily, but now all of a sudden they have to. They’ve been tasked with heading this initiative. Or they started with one thing and then went through transition. ‘How do we then become the right people in this new moment?’ Those kinds of personal transitions, those kinds of educational transitions, are moments that are so energizing when you go from ‘I’m stuck, I’m stuck, I’m stuck’ [to] ‘I know the way forward’ – that moment is the thing that I love.

Beth
Oh, I love looking back on a project and realizing what those really juicy moments were where you get – you can say to yourself, ‘if I had more of that, that would be a really great career or a really great company work for us, or whatever it is’. (Um-hmm.) Yeah. OK so let me ask you about fear because I have felt it myself (Oh!) [laughs] when we start drilling down, we’ve got all the possible clients in the world, but we start drilling down into this specific segment that you’re talking about. Then we do have to start saying no, and of course – people have said this to me too because we entrepreneurs talk behind the scenes, don’t we, about how to run our work and whatever – what that feeling is of fear when someone comes to you and says, ‘can you do this?’ and you say ‘no’. Like what do you tell people to tell themselves in those moments to be OK with ‘no I’m going to accept this single segment and that’s what I want to do and there is enough work. All I have to do is find 20 clients, as you said, or whatever’. How do you help people through that fear process that comes up?

Matthew
There’s definitely fear. There’s always fear. To me, I tend to hear it expressed two ways. There’s either the fear of ‘what will I do when people don’t come to me, when I can’t sell to everyone?’ There’s also the fear of ‘what if I am not picked? What if I’m not the right one? What if I mess it up?’ And maybe [there’s] a third one: ‘Will people be offended if I tell them no?’ That social aspect of ‘people are coming to me for help, how can I turn them away?’

But let’s flip it around. If you are truly narrowing down to serve a specific group of people and you can serve them best, then every time you take a client that’s from a different segment, that is something you can do but maybe not the thing you’re best at, you’re taking time away from the people that you could serve best. That opportunity cost is always going to be there. If you rearrange your marketing to say ‘we are the best option for these 15 people that I know’ – which we’re always using our abstract examples collected from our previous knowledge – and there’s more than 15 – but once you’ve made that shift and you’ve laid out: ‘this is who we’re for’, everyone else will look at it and go, ‘oh that’s not me. I don’t need what they’re doing,’ or ‘that’s not the way I want it done’. So people will self-select out because they aren’t exactly the people you’re trying to serve.

And I find heading that off before you start working with them avoids the worst problem clients. Because if you’re getting the people that are in the group you really want to serve, they know what to expect. You can talk in the same language. You don’t have to translate or code switch to try to be understood because people just get it if they’re part of that group.

Beth
I love what you just said because we do a lot of work in healthcare, we’ve realized over time – or, you know, either governmental organizations that are healthcare focussed or non-profits that are healthcare focussed, or sort of community good in that way, in a healthcare way –and over time people have said, ‘Do you have a healthcare background, Beth?’ And I go, ‘no, I do not have a healthcare background in any way, shape, or form [laughs]. I did not take science past Grade 10, even’. But then over time [in] working with so many different organizations that perhaps look at health in different ways, you know – and different people, of course, we’ve got health care providers and then we’ve got patients and family caregivers and whoever – they go, ‘you get our language. You know how to talk. You know what some of these models and frameworks and words mean’. And so I take that as a great compliment going, ‘no we’ve actually just worked on so many courses in the field that we get the lingo,’ and that really helps us with our relationships with the client. And of course to build a better course, too, in the end.

Matthew
Within that too you also don’t have to relearn what the new lingo is because if you take five years off with that segment and then you have to come back, all the words have changed.

Beth
That’s so true.

Matthew
How they’re being used.

Beth
Yeah! In healthcare we’ve had this shift – I hope I get it right – in person-first language. And so several years ago they said, ‘yes person first; always go person first’. And now there are people saying ‘no, it’s not always person first; let’s go and see what the individual thinks and what they want. Do they want “person with autism” or “I have autism” rather than “autistic”’ – you know, those kinds of differences. And so we can watch the shifts in language in a field, in a sector – the client slice you’re talking about [animated] and be really up to date on what that is. So when I’m looking at a course and I see person-first language, then I can say, ‘is this what you really want to say here? Is this the way you want to say it? Because we’ve learned over here that maybe we don’t want to do this anymore, or maybe we have to just kind of nuance the phrase so that it has more options within it or whatever’. So getting really, really clear about our client – oh man, you are really helping me here feel really good about finding that slice to work with because if we’re really happy with that group of people we can serve them so much better, as you say.

Matthew
Um-hmm. And within that, that reminds me of something I wanted to say earlier is that that segment can be different depending on what line you’re offering. Like if you have a team of seven facilitators, you can have your healthcare experts. Their slice is those health care providers. Then you could have somebody who works primarily in post-secondary support who understands the academic, the university language. And so with that you can re-segment based on who’s on the team, or what is the product or service that you’re actually offering?

Beth
Um-hmm. Yeah. Or as we grow the company or whatever, where we can have more (Exactly) than one team [member] doing various types of work. Yeah,

Matthew
Exactly. If you think about Yamaha, they do everything because they have teams for each of those different slices. It’s a bit messy once you get to that scale, but when we’re talking teams of 10 or 15 people, you can identify these two or three people, they are our healthcare team. You might get influence from other people, but they’ll be the leads because they know these people, they know what they need.

In a similar way, you wouldn’t necessarily want the same segment for an online course as you would for coaching. They are two very different modes of providing service. So you can also re-slice based on product or service instead of team.

Beth
Sure. Because you could be talking to different people. So if I’m trying to sell an online course, I am really talking right to the participants who are individuals across organizations. Rather than if I’m going to go sell an intact workshop for an intact organization, you know, a team of facilitators, say, who needs to learn something about facilitation, then I’m talking to the organization and I need to nuance my messaging or have completely different messaging maybe for those two different types of products.

Matthew
Absolutely. Like as an example from my own work, I have videos that I publish for free, just like this podcast, and that’s designed for people who are absolutely new, [and who] need the total basics. But then once they’ve had the videos, if they’ve been going for a couple years, all of a sudden their needs change. Then OK, maybe [they need] group courses, where we’re getting a little bit deeper. They’ve now developed to the point where they’re ready for that. The value that we can provide there is now right for them. OK, they can develop there for a while.

Then let’s say they’re leading an organization now. OK, one-on-one coaching might be right, now, because we’ve built in these steps to help people along in each step of their journey.

Beth
And again, you’re making it values-based for that person or that group of people, aren’t you? I’ve definitely heard people resist against the funnel. You’ve heard of the funnel. There’s sort of this – people out there saying, ‘oh, you’ve got to have your funnel’ and then some people are resisting that kind of salesy technique to drive them down that. But are you saying that if we tether ourselves to the value that we’re creating for our clients, whoever they are, and at whatever stage they’re at, then does that help us feel better about giving that to them? It’s not a trick, is it, it’s just that we’re just trying to serve these people in the best way we can.

Matthew
Of course. And you can use the funnel as an extractive marketer, or you can use the funnel as a way to understand people and their journey and change.

Beth
OK. I like that.

Matthew
Because if we’re conceiving of the funnel as ‘I need to have 300 people every month learning about my workshops’ OK that doesn’t feel very good. But if we think of the funnel as ‘these are people I’ve served and this is what they’ll need next,’ you’re just taking care of people in the way that they care about and hopefully they’re willing to pay to continue along your journey.

Beth
Yeah. I love how you said ‘taking care of people’ too. That really feels a lot better than ‘I need to shunt all these people through the door to get the money’, you know?

Matthew
Oh yeah. ‘I need to throw enough flyers at enough doors, and then maybe I’ll have enough business to keep running’. No. Why would you do that? (Yeah, yeah.) People don’t care about that.

Beth
And we don’t want to run a business like that. If we go back to where we started and why we’re in this whole thing, if it’s for the good of the world, good of people, yeah, we don’t want to feel like that as we run our business.

Matthew
And people don’t want to be marketed to. People want to be cared for. They don’t want to get marketed to.

Beth
Yeah. Can we talk about social media? [laughs] You knew – (Oh, we can. I don’t know how useful I’ll be.) – you knew we were probably going to touch on that in this conversation because I struggle with social media because it’s like, ‘who’s telling me what I need to do here for whom’ is what I keep asking myself. And so there are a lot of experts out there saying, ‘content is king. We’ve got to push the content out on social media’, and I think you’re helping me realize to just keep situating myself in who we’re trying to talk to and what they need. I guess I’m resisting all the ‘shoulds’ around pushing content out for the sake of pushing content out, because the algorithm is telling me to do that. Do you have any thoughts coming up around that and what we should do about it?

Matthew
Right. So this introduces another player beyond the client or customer or ourselves. It’s the platforms that we’re interacting through. Like, there are people online giving advice. They don’t necessarily know who is receiving that advice. They’re just speaking it out, especially if they’re in the ‘content is king’ style of discourse, they’re just saying ‘publish, publish, publish; you need enough eyeballs to make anything function’. Which is true if you’re trying to do influencer-style media. If you’re trying to teach, or if you know exactly who you’re talking to, you don’t need a 100,000 followers. You need the 50 that matter. Or the thousands that are coming along for the ride. So yes, you do need to act in such a way that the algorithm responds positively. Because if you’re not appeasing the platforms in some way, they will subdue any efforts you’re making on social media. It’ll be suppressed in not necessarily overt ways.

But then you have the flip side where Facebook used to be a great place to get a lot of people seeing your stuff for free. You’d make a Facebook group, you’d start making posts. People would join, people would follow, people would ‘like’, and you get 80% of the people that were following your page seeing your posts. Until Facebook had enough saturation, had enough people hosting their stuff on Facebook, then they said, ‘no you’ll [have] maybe 5% of your followers seeing your content unless you pay’. And so there are other platforms at different stages along that lifecycle.

When Facebook video started coming up, that became the easy way to get cheap views where you didn’t have to spend money but it still went pretty far. But that shifted. YouTube, when they introduced shorts to try to counter TikTok. Same deal. And so all social media is going through these cycles of ‘what does the platform want to share? What does it want people to be using’ and ‘what does it not care so much about? What does it think it can start being extractive?’

So in social media you definitely have to be both thinking about the people consuming the media – what do they care about, what’s worth sharing – because that’s one way around the algorithms. If all we’re doing is posting out and try and get people to like our thing so that it spins the algorithm to get more people seeing it, then we’ll create things that are only like-worthy. But if we’re trying to create the things that people see and people care about that truly speak to them, things that they’re willing to share, that’s a totally different situation. I find – back when Twitter was still Twitter, there was somebody named Amanda Nat – Amanda Natividad – who was really good at speaking into these things, saying: ‘The algorithm wants you to not post links. It wants people to keep people on the site. So what do you do? Create things that are worth looking at without pushing people off the site. Become a source of influence instead of an influencer’ – which is also borrowing from Rand Fishkin. So how can you become a source of influence? A way that other people say, ‘Ah! That’s where I got this idea. This idea is something worth sharing’. And how can you help others become that source of influence within their circles? How can you help somebody sharing your content, the thing you’ve made, how does them sharing it benefit them, the sharer. Does it make them look better to their peers? Does it make them the person in the know? Does it make them feel good? Is it inspirational?

Finding ways in and around the algorithms, in and around social media, to try to find first your people, and second the ways to interact with them that everyone involved, including the platforms, also care about.

Beth
I really like what you just said there around if I’m going to share something, maybe I’m sharing something or I’m probably sharing something that the person’s going to see it, they’re going to pick it up, they’re going to share it with their team or their organization or even their clients and there’s value in it for them (Um-hmm) to look good, to feel like they were on top of something, or whatever, and so I – I really like that. I don’t know if I’ve – I guess maybe intuitively I do that and I don’t know if I’ve really overtly thought of it that way. That if I tell someone that there’s a new update on Zoom and it’s relevant to facilitators because of x, I mean, I just think that’s cool to share [laughs] for my own knowledge and I just try to push it out so that people are aware and then they can use it in their own practices as well. I feel like I am doing that, but I’ve never really drawn attention to that I’ve done this in such an overt way like that.

Matthew
Yeah, especially in that Zoom update example. I have been saved once before by seeing a post on social media that the Zoom updates needs to be installed otherwise you can’t use breakout rooms properly. It actually saved a session once. So I would think back to ‘oh who shared that? Why did I see it? Who was in the know that helped me preventing this negative from happening?’

Beth
Yeah! Oh, that’s so good. I think the more overt we are about that to help people, then it just does come back and behooves us to do that. You know, people think of us kindly and they’ll come back and look for more and so on. I like that.

Matthew
Yeah. There’s an old social media adage that’s you have to post three helpful things before you post one self-promotion, and the ratio keeps growing – 20 helpful things before you post a self-promotion – but the general rule follows. Be more helpful than self-promoting.

Beth
Yeah, yeah, for sure. What about the thing around who you’re talking to where. Because I’ve done a little analytics on this for my own business and I’ve mapped out where business comes from and I’m very clear on that – I’m going to say it here – just a lot of it comes from referrals of people that I have either worked with before, or they’re friends of mine, colleagues in the field, whatever. I know exactly. I’ve done mind-maps about all our past work and where it’s come from and so that’s a really great thing to know.

But it means that I’ve had to question myself, ‘well who am I talking to when I’m talking on, for example, social media?’ Because I was starting to think, ‘well is it just my friends that are liking the posts?’ And it kind of was! Like, I don’t profess to have thousands of followers [laughs] on these platforms. That’s never been super important for me, as you say – I don’t care about being an influencer. You know, I’m just trying to help people in my field and do great facilitation and learning design. So how do we deal with that fact that they’re not necessarily our clients that we’re talking to, but they’re people that can spread the word of our business. Do you make that distinction? Do you help people go through that kind of thinking about who their actual client is versus who’s referring them business?

Matthew
It’s challenging in social media and social interactions more generally, because when we’re first meeting somebody they might be a lead, they might be an acquaintance, they might be somebody you met at a conference. But if you’ve seen them three times and then they send you work, we’re going to call that a referral regardless of where we found them we’re going to end up calling it a referral if it came through someone we knew. If we think of social media as the place where we expand our circle of people we know, then the choice is easy. What kind of people do we want to know, and who do we want in our circle? The reason I think podcasts are great is: one, because you get to then sit down with the people you like, or people you’d like to work with, and you get to talk about things, expand your circle in the session. This is actually how I initially built up my professional network was by – I went down a list of ‘here are the people that I’d love to have in my network’ and I invited them on a podcast.

Beth
I do the same. It’s why I feel like I’m going to be podcasting for a long time because it’s this venue to get to people that you really just want to sit and have a virtual coffee with, so to speak. (Exactly.) Yeah. It’s a great opportunity.

Matthew
But then in the publication of it, people are becoming familiar with you. As far as they’re concerned, you are more familiar to them which expands their circle. And if you’re also on a conversational social media, a two-way social media, then they can also start conversing with you. In which case it becomes both ways a widening of the circle. And in professional services, referrals are the way you’ll earn most of the business. It’s just the way things tend to be whether the referral is ‘I saw you in an industry meeting once’ or ‘somebody that you know gave me your name’. There tends to need to be an existing contact point because professional services just tend to work that way. But if we’re talking something more general, like if you’re selling a large online course, all of a sudden those chains are going to look different. And if you’d like your business to have the ability to use some of those other sources of customers or clients – because not everything is a custom learning design. Sometimes you’ve got something more basic, like let’s say a book. It’s not necessarily the same people buying it. So, to me, social media helps to balance those. It’s important to have both the strong interpersonal connections, but then also the weaker, large-scale social media style connections.

Beth
So would you say that social media – we should assume maybe in our line of work that we’re mostly talking to people who could refer us to other people? [laughs] I guess you’re saying that we should just create a wider network because we like what we do and social media is one way to get there.

Matthew
Yes. I found that social media was actually – not as a source of clients but as a source of other information. People were sharing things that I didn’t yet know about: models that I didn’t know about, tools that I didn’t know about, other people doing the work. So I found it a great way to receive context about how is the wider world doing these things. Outside my little bubble of Manitoba practitioners, how are things going more broadly?

Beth
Yeah so it’s professional development, for sure, and network-building for a good reason, not just to get sales in the future but to expand our knowledge and our craft.

Matthew
Yeah and depending on what you’re doing social media could eventually maybe become a source of clients or referrals. But it takes a long time of publishing with that intent to get there.

Beth
Is there anything else that you really want us to delve into, to really be able to share the value you bring to your clients that you think is related to facilitation and learning design people?

Matthew
One thing that I was thinking about in preparing for this was thinking about – we’re often good at explaining the value we provide in a session. Once we’re talking with the client then we’re usually pretty good at getting there. But thinking about participants before they reach the room, giving people on-ramps, helping people understand before they enter: ‘what am I personally going to get out of this? How am I expected to engage with this?’ Helping people to understand as early as possible the value that they’re going to receive and the value that they will be by being in the room. Because in facilitation, it’s not just about us at the front, but it’s how do we – by bringing the room together – bring information, bring knowledge, bring that transformation. And so people need to understand before they arrive, ‘what’s expected of me? What am I going to get out of it?’ Because you need the ‘what am I going to get out of it?’ for people to bother to show up, and if they better understand the value they bring then I tend to get better interactions because people understand what their role is in the room.

Beth
I very much agree with that. I end up having that conversation with clients a lot where ostensibly we’re talking about what’s happening inside the course or the meeting or whatever, but there’s that marketing aspect that we then go back to, you know, before they start putting the word out, basically, that I say ‘you’ve got to look at your marketing, because if your marketing…’ I’ve seen it over and over and it was particularly prevalent during Covid when everybody – well some of us were online before everybody else [laughs] – but a whole bunch of people shifted online and they started to say, ‘this is a webinar’, or ‘this is a presentation that we’re making in Zoom or whatever’ and I’ve talked about this before in the podcast, this kind of importance around language. And I’ll say: ‘If you say it’s a webinar, if you say it’s a presentation, and they come and it’s something different, then they’re surprised. They don’t want to turn their video on because all of a sudden it’s interactive’.

Then we get the reverse too, if you say that it’s an interactive thing and then they come and they’re just being talked at for an hour, then they’re really ticked off. And I’ve actually been on that end myself as a participant [animated] going ‘this isn’t what I thought it was – I thought I was going to be able to meet people and I can’t even see them in the room’, you know? So it’s a real disconnect, isn’t it? You’re saying just be really, really clear about what we’re doing here for the folks, and say that upfront.

Matthew
Yeah. Be upfront as upfront as possible. Use language that people understand from the group you’re talking to, which if you’ve niched down, if you’ve selected your slice, you should understand their language because – yeah, without it, things don’t work. People get frustrated, people get antsy. Yeah.

Beth
Years ago I had a very brief period of time where I got trained in kind of a customer service workshop. They talked about the ‘customer that never came back’, that that was a really dangerous thing, that if somehow if it’s a service industry business like a tourism industry or whatever – if a customer – you said the restaurant example before – so if a customer comes in and they have a bad experience, they’re more dangerous to the business because they go off and tell everybody about their poor experience than actually the great customers because the great customers often don’t really share as much. I don’t know if that’s still true but it makes me think about – what you’re saying just reminded me of that because if we do a great job at really lining up all those expectations and then delivering on them, we’re good. But if we don’t then they’re going to go and tell everybody about what we’ve just done. Then they’re very dangerous to us as business owners.

Matthew
Absolutely. An extra little nuance to that example is the customer that has had a problem, voiced it and had it resolved, is also likely to be your best customer for communicating what you provided. Because they’re the people that not only had a good time, they had a problem and you bothered to see them and then to fix it for them. So they end up becoming even more of a promoter of the business because they’ve had that more personal touch than just a good service.

Beth
Yeah. So we’re not trying to screw up and then, you know, make it better just to just to get that, are we? (No! [laughs]) But maybe it can help us go back to that value proposition you talked about earlier. If someone’s unhappy with us, we sure have to find out why, don’t we? Because if we’re not bringing value to them, it’s a great opportunity to figure out what is a value to them and how can we get it for them?

Matthew
Exactly. Yeah. Absolutely.

Beth
Matt, it’s been such a pleasure to speak with you, and thanks for giving me some free consulting about my own business [laughs]. It’s fascinating.

Matthew
Of course, anytime.

Beth
It’s been many years since I took marketing as a course myself and I’m sure so many things have changed and there’s always questions that come up in my business. It’s something I always talk about with colleagues of mine in the field. You know, we get together and talk about these kind of things and you’ve really illuminated and helped me feel a little bit better about some of the decisions we’re making and even to go further to try to continue to do the work that we want to do in the world. So thank you for sharing all your expertise with me today.

Matthew
Oh you’re welcome. And thank you for having me on. It’s great talking and I’ve really appreciated the questions, the way you’ve drawn them out from me. [laughs] Really appreciate it and it’s a pleasure coming on. Thank you for having me.

[Episode outro]
Beth Cougler Blom

I so appreciated my conversation with Matthew and as I reflect back on all the things that we talked about, a couple of things are jumping out at me. One of them is when I asked him about the funnel. And I know that this has kind of felt icky to a lot of us, this thing about the sales funnel and how we’re shunting people down the funnel to try to get more business from them and whatever. And he helped me remember that, yeah, the funnel isn’t just about trying to grab a whole bunch of sales. The funnel is about how we create and provide value to our clients. And I think that I’ve heard that before and I had kind of forgotten to situate myself in that knowledge. I don’t like to use the word funnel. I don’t want to think about the word funnel. But as long as I keep situating myself and grounding myself in the question about how I create value for my clients and what’s the next step that’s going to help them after this thing that we’ve done for them? What do they need after that? And what do they need six months from now, and that kind of thing, that just helps me feel more authentic about how I’m running my business and how I’m working on and developing my relationships with my clients.

It’s not about me trying to grab a whole bunch of money from them. It’s about me really being centred in their needs and figuring out if I can [chuckles] solve those needs for them or maybe even refer out to somebody else who I think could solve them in a better way, in a different way, than we could in our company. The other part of what we talked about that I’m still thinking about – and always want to keep reminding myself about too – are all those pieces around who our ideal clients are. And the more we get clear on who we really want to serve, the easier it is to serve them and the easier it is to say no to the people that actually could be served better by someone else’s company.

I’ve actually been doing a lot of strategy work in my own business these last several months in particular. And so I’ve heard some of these messages before, I’ve done a lot of the work around thinking some of these pieces through, and yet I still had insights from my conversation with Matthew to help keep propelling me on that journey to be able to serve my clients well. I hope you found a lot of value in our conversation as well and I wish you luck and success in figuring out the details of how you can create value and be really effective around communicating that to your clients.

On the next episode of the podcast, I interview Mansi Jasuja. Mansi and I are both members of an Art of Hosting group on Facebook. And we met online after I saw Mansi posting an image that she created that she entitled, “The True Cost of Non-Participatory Events”. I talk a lot about the importance of creating and facilitating participatory events, so when I saw Mansi post her image, I just knew I had to talk with her about her image and all of the pieces that are within it and what they all mean to all of us in the world who are either working with organizations and helping them run events or being the facilitators at events ourselves. What she has in this image is really, really important for us to dig into. The True Cost of Non-Participatory Events, that’s our topic on the next episode. We’ll see you then.

[Show outro]
Beth
Thank you for listening to Facilitating on Purpose. If you were inspired by something in this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague to help them expand their facilitation practice too. To find the show notes, give me feedback, or submit ideas for future episodes visit facilitatingonpurpose.com. Special thanks to Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions for producing this episode. Happy facilitating!

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