Fitting Your Proprietary Framework Into Your Signature Talk

Whether you’re a coach, consultant, or advisor, you need a proprietary process to help differentiate your message.

Some call this process your framework, method, or pathway - different names, same concept. What’s your step-by-step process for giving clients the results they expect when working with you?

Most industry experts have a framework with three to seven steps, usually three to five. You might call these phases, stages, or steps.

About half of the experts I’ve worked with use public speaking to reach a larger audience through a Signature Talk.

This is typically a thirty- to forty-five-minute talk that you can give as a keynote, breakout session, webinar, lunch-and-learn, or other type of speaking opportunity.

So, if you have a longer proprietary framework, one that has five, six, or even seven steps, how do you fit that longer framework inside your Signature Talk?

• How do you ensure your talk doesn’t go way over time?
• How do you make sure your audience doesn’t get overwhelmed?
• If you have seven steps to your framework, how do you ensure you don’t leave out any steps?

What do you do when your framework doesn’t seem to fit a standard time frame for your Signature Talk?

If you have a longer framework, one that has five or more steps, there are three options on how to fit your framework into your Signature Talk…

Option 1: Pick-and-Choose Which Steps to Highlight.

If you have a seven-step process but only thirty minutes for your Signature Talk, you could choose to cover only three or four of your steps.

How do you choose which steps to cover?

You probably have a favorite step in your process.?Maybe it’s one that’s a real catalyst for getting great results for your clients. Maybe it’s a step that you love to do because it’s fulfilling for you.

The reasons can vary by the audience, but this is a popular approach by many speakers who want the flexibility to adapt their talk to any audience with a bit of a teaser.

So, what’s the teaser? If my framework has seven steps, and I only cover three of those steps, what’s your number-one question?

"What are the other four steps?"

Now, this can frustrate the more Type-A members of your audience because we want to know ALL the steps, right?

How do you fix that? You can say, “My process has seven steps. Yes, each step in my process has a purpose, but for the sake of time today, I’m only going to go in-depth on three of these steps.”

Later in your talk, after you briefly mentioned the other four steps without going into any detail about them, you can say this…

“Now, I mentioned earlier that there are seven steps in my process. We’ve covered three, but what about the other four? Can I give you the whole process in one document so you can see how this can work for your business AND we don’t go over our time limit here?”

Of course, your audience is going to say, “Yes!” That’s when you have a lead magnet, training, or some other actually valuable resource that details every step of your process.

How does your audience get that resource? They trade you their contact info, and now, you’re in a lead generation conversation.

Option 2: Cover All Your Framework Steps In an Unbalanced Way.

If your framework is too long for a standard Signature Talk time frame, you can cover all of your framework’s steps in an unbalanced way.

This helps the more Type-A members of your audience stay focused throughout your entire talk. This is also the group that would want you to give equal time to every step so it’s nice and orderly. We can't always have everything we want.

Instead, we’re going to cover all of your steps, all five, six, seven steps, in an unbalanced way. Sort all of your steps into two categories: features and fly-bys.

Which steps of your process do you want to feature in this Signature Talk?

And, which steps do you want to fly by, maybe spending at most two minutes talking about?

You want to give your audience enough time to understand the value and function of each step. This provides a great context for your framework in its entirety. It also allows you to spend more time on the steps you want to feature.

Option 3: Cover All Steps With Equal Emphasis.

That leads us to our third option. If you have a longer framework that doesn’t seem to fit a standard thirty-minute time frame for your Signature Talk, you can take the 'Even Steven' route.

Take eighty-five percent of your allotted time frame, and divide it by the total number of steps in your framework. This gives you the remaining fifteen percent for your talk intro and closing.

This approach gives equal weight to each step in your process. As you probably already realize, this is the hardest option to master well for one key reason: audience overwhelm.

Covering a seven-step framework in just under twenty-six minutes is a recipe for losing audience members’ attention.

It’s a firehose of information in a short time span. Can it be done? Yes, I’ve seen it done well a handful of times.

More often than not, though, I’ve seen speakers lose their audiences trying to cover that much ground in a short period of time.

So, those are three solid options for fitting your framework into your Signature Talk?

The question is, which option do I recommend?

Personally, I recommend Option number two: Covering all your framework steps in an unbalanced way for three big reasons.

1. It holds your audience’s attention better.
2. It removes distracting 'gaps' in your process for more Type-A audience members.
3. You can still embed the lead gen offer in your talk about sending them the resource that details every step in your framework.

Consider all your options, pick the one that works for you, and let me know which option you like in the comments section below.

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