Speakipedia Podcast #15: Simone Vincenzi

Transcript

Dave Bricker: Want to expand your speaking and storytelling skills and grow your influence business? This is Speakipedia Media brought to you by Speakipedia.com . I’m your host, Dave Bricker, bringing you straight talk and smart strategies from visionary speakers, thought leaders, and storytellers. My guest is a multi-award-winning serial entrepreneur and author who helped clients to launch more than 500 profitable businesses before he reached the age of 30. He’s passionate about building thriving community-led businesses where the members are the core and essence of the decisions and development of ideas. He’s been nominated as one of the most influential migrant entrepreneurs in the House of Parliament. He writes for Forbes Entrepreneur Magazine and he regularly features on TV and radio talking about how experts can become authorities in their field. And he’s an expert himself at helping his clients sell at scale through high converting webinar presentations. Please welcome the founder of G-TEX, Simone Vincenze.

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Simone Vincenze: Great to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Dave.

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Dave Bricker: Thank you, Simone. It’s a pleasure. So let’s start with this speaking side of your business. You’ve given over 2,000 presentations and that’s an achievement. Share the story of how you got into speaking.

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Simone Vincenze: I remember attending a webinar, sorry, a seminar in London. I was 23 at the time. I was working as a waiter in a restaurant. That’s how I arrived from Italy to the UK. And my restaurant manager, which was very involved into the personal development industry, personal growth, he started giving me books to read, seminars to attend. And I followed it because as much as I was working in a restaurant, I was always being a very curious person. I always wanted to learn. I’ve always been a seeker. And I remember attending my first event in London and something clicked. I cannot explain it. Something clicked and everything inside myself looked at the speaker that was on stage there. And I said, I want to do that.

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Simone Vincenze: I didn’t know what that was, if that was a job.

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Simone Vincenze: All I said is everything we did was like, I want to do that. And that started the process because at the time my English wasn’t that great. I could speak restaurant related English. So the vocabulary was very limited to would you like your steak rare or medium rare?

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Simone Vincenze: Did I get white or red wine? That was the limitation of my vocabulary. So I started starting to become a youth coach and I started working in schools.

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Simone Vincenze: So my baptismal fire in the speaking industry was going and delivering leadership programs in schools as a facilitator for other organizations. And that’s what I started doing when I was about 24. And in the meanwhile, in the evening, I met my business partners then. And we started running weekly events that then became also twice a week and sometimes three times a week over the years where we would invite other speakers because we were not known. We didn’t know one knew us. I didn’t even know that I could have anything to share at that point. But I would invite other speakers that would meet at events. And then having these small events with five to ten people and the people that just liked our energy. And that’s how was the start of me as a speaker starting in schools where at some point I was delivering to about 150 schools a year. Then starting the events where we were running two to three events a week consistently. At some point I also gained the confidence to say, “Now is my time to talk about what I want.” And that’s when I started delivering my own content.

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Dave Bricker: I love that. So you started off as a waiter, as so many people do, right? And you saw someone on stage and you said, “Wait, I can do that. That guy’s getting paid how much? I can do that. And the next thing you know, we’re on the journey.”

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Dave Bricker: So marvelous.

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Simone Vincenze: Exactly.

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Dave Bricker: You’ve got this wonderful speaking lane, entrepreneurship. Well, that’s a topic we all need to cultivate more expertise in. And I’m guessing that all comes from the experiences that range from huge successes to massive failures. How did you get to the point where you wanted to tell people, “I’m the entrepreneurship expert”?

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Simone Vincenze: It happened the other way around. There has never been a moment when I decided I put upon myself to say, “I’m the entrepreneurship expert,” because the reality is, the one thing that expert entrepreneurs know is that there is nothing such an expert entrepreneur. Because business is such an unpredictable word to live in that the more you know, the more you know that you don’t know, if that makes sense, right? Absolutely. I love that. And it was about eight years in, in our event business, where we started running at that point our own seminars, which we were calling Purpose to Abundance, where we were working with people to help them find their life purpose. And that was the evolution from the events where we were hosting without a speaker to running our own events and our own training. And at some point I knew that people were buying our trainings because we were making about a quarter of a million pounds at that time, with a training company. And people were joining our training to get personal development workshops. But they kept asking about business. How did you build this? How did you start your business? How did you sell? How do you market? And at that time, that’s all I was studying. That’s all I was immersed in. I was curious. I wanted--actually, I started loving the business game more than the personal development industry. And so naturally the shift happened when people and all my community started asking me about business advice. And I found that I loved more giving business advice and running business training compared to running the personal development side. So at that point I had to make a decision. Do I drop one part of the training and focus on the business development? So for a couple of years, we ran both at the same time until one became so predominant that it made sense to actually focus on doing the training for entrepreneurs, in particular focusing on launching new products and services, which is what I’ve been always really good at.

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Dave Bricker: So our astute listeners are going to pick up on the fact that I set you up to kind of talk about how you became the expert. And instead you turn that around and it’s all about serving the audience. And it’s a journey you never reach the end of, right? You keep learning, you keep growing, and you slid right into that beautifully. And I think there’s a message for some of the people listening to this today because they’re thinking, well, I’m not ready to share my message with the world yet. I’m not ready to call myself an expert. God, there are people out there who have so much more experience than I do. Who am I to offer a program on XYZ? And I think that you just have to get up there and go out there and lead with what you’ve learned. You weren’t born yesterday, and I love that you just took that learning journey and decided to share it along the way and that you’re still on it. I think that’s beautiful.

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Simone Vincenze: Exactly. And to build on that, I think that a lot of people put so much pressure on, I need to reach a certain level before I can start talking or before I can start speaking. And if you remember even how I started,

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Simone Vincenze: I looked at what can I do right now because there will always be a reason why you can’t do something, why you’re not good enough, why you’re not expert enough. There will always be thousands of reasons you can find about why you’re not ready. And I think that, and I have to thank my mentor, the great mentor at the early stage that told me, “What can you do now? Maybe you can’t do your own events. Maybe you can’t do your own training. Maybe people are not listening to you. Maybe your English is not good enough yet. But what can you do now instead?” And so for me, actually going into schools felt, “Well, at least I can talk to kids.”

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Simone Vincenze: And that’s what I could do. I could put up events where I just introduced a speaker and the other speaker was speaking, and that’s what I could do. And so I think that some people get so caught up in what they can do that they forget what they actually could do right now, which is what will lead them eventually in what they want to do, or maybe something that they don’t even know what would happen. I wouldn’t have scripted this life right now.

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Dave Bricker: Right. And by the way, kids are a really tough audience. Talk about a distracted audience that will throw you under the bus in a second.

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Kids, school kids. I taught university for 15 years, and wow, you really have to be distracting, entertaining, relevant, because otherwise they disappear into Instagram and you never get them back.

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Simone Vincenze: That was the best thing I did for my speaking career. Now that I look back, because I started my first speaking gigs in schools, when I started talking to adults or in groups of adults or seminars, you don’t have anyone that is throwing things at you while you’re speaking to adults in training room, right? Normally, you don’t have to worry about someone taking, like starting walking around the classroom, not paying attention or banging their foot on the floor because they don’t want you to go ahead with the lesson. And so I think that if you’re able to actually get the attention of kids, talking to an audience of adults, that’s a piece of cake.

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Dave Bricker: It’s true. Absolutely true.

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Dave Bricker: So another aspect of your influence business is that you truly are an international speaker, and every speaker who’s spoken in more than one country calls themselves an international speaker, right? I spoke in El Salvador once, which was cool, and I did a workshop in India. It was a virtual workshop, but hey, I’m an international speaker. But look, you’re Italian, you’re based in Europe, and you serve clients and audiences all over the world. Did that happen organically, or have you made a conscious effort to touch more people in more places? What can our viewers and listeners do to expand their influence across more borders?

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Simone Vincenze: Both. It happened organically and with conscious effort.

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Simone Vincenze: I think that I never been attached to the label “international speaker” because at the end of the day, what does it mean? You can be a bad speaker that speaks internationally. Being an international speaker doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean that you’re good, it doesn’t mean that you know your topic, it doesn’t mean that you are known. It doesn’t really mean much. I think it’s more of a label of ego and that people think sound good on social media, but on the other side, it really doesn’t make a big difference.

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Simone Vincenze: The reason why I loved being an international speaker and now it happened is because of my curiosity of cultures.

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Simone Vincenze: Going back to the reason why I moved to London and didn’t stay in Italy, London is such a multicultural city. All the cultures of the world are here. And I’m very curious about understanding different cultures, different people, different ways of being, different habits, different religions, is part of me. And traveling is part of what helps me seeing all these different cultures. And so when I was thinking about what do I want my life to be, what do I want my business to be, traveling was a big part of it. I want to travel the world, I want to see the world. Why? Because I’m interested in culture. Well, while I’m at it, why don’t I find events where I can speak at so that I can combine my business and expertise with the other passion of experiencing cultures? And I think that is a lot to be said about the power of intention. Now, when you are clear about what you want and when you said what you want and you take action towards it, then something somewhere along the line happens. And so I remember my first international speaking gig actually came from a client that saw me speaking in London, flew to London to attend one of our courses and said, “Hey, I’m running this event in Germany, which is not that far from the UK, looking at distances, but I’m running this event in Germany. Would you like to come and speak there?” “Yes, sure, sure, absolutely. I’m there. How much? I’ll come for free. I don’t care.” I just wanted to do it. And the one in Germany then got me another gig somewhere else in Spain. And then from Spain, then I met someone else that brought me to the US. And that’s where the globe opened up. And so I think there is a lot to be said about being clear and being intentional and also following what you really love to do in life.

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Dave Bricker: Yeah. And speaking is something I find that binds people together across cultures. Quick story. Last time I was in London, I just looked up Toastmasters Clubs and I went to an early morning meeting and I ended up going to breakfast afterward with 20 local people who I would never otherwise have met.

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Dave Bricker: And we were all interested in speaking as speakers stick together everywhere. I thought that was just a beautiful experience.

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Simone Vincenze: I had a great time. Which one? Do you remember which club or not?

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Dave Bricker: I don’t remember. But they met at seven o’clock in the morning in this ancient old room with wood paneling. It just looked like...

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Simone Vincenze: With a chessboard on the floor?

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Dave Bricker: I think so, yes.

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Simone Vincenze: Okay. Yes, that’s a Green Park one, which actually I’ve been to that meeting quite a few times and the meeting in Freemason Hall. This is actually also the Freemason building and they do great Toastmasters Speaking Clubs. So I’ve been there a few times and we’ve been to the same one.

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Dave Bricker: Yeah, maybe we were both there before I knew you.

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So many of our viewers and listeners are brand new to the speaking game. Talk about being nervous when speaking in front of an audience. How have you dealt with nerves and imposter syndrome and all of that kind of stuff?

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Simone Vincenze: It’s always there.

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Simone Vincenze: You learn how to manage it better. I think that what I’ve learned about nerves is the meaning that we give to the moment.

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Simone Vincenze: It’s the meaning that we give to the moment. And also it comes with experience and expertise.

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Simone Vincenze: I remember my first speaker trainer that kept drilling in me. Your first is your worst.

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Simone Vincenze: So you’re going to suck. You’re probably going to suck. You’re not going to be as good as your second or your third or your fourth or your fifth. So the win is just to do it.

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Simone Vincenze: No matter what nerves are you feeling, no matter what your mind is telling you, that’s your win. Maybe your performance is going to be poor. Maybe you’re not going to say what you really want to say. Maybe your mouth is going to be dry. Maybe you’re going to sweat like a pig while you’re there doing it. Your win is go through that and do it. Because then the second time is going to be a little bit easier. The third time, a little bit easier. The fourth time, a bit easier until you meet another level. I remember after about probably like 30, 40 events, I became quite comfortable speaking. And I didn’t have these nerves that I had at the beginning anymore. I feel nervous all the time anyway, but it’s just not those freezing, like the nerves that get you to freeze, right? Until I had to do my TEDx talk. And I did my TEDx talk probably after I did at least 200 speeches, 200 other live worshiping speeches. So I knew my topic. I knew what I was talking about. I wasn’t that nervous as much. But for my TEDx talk, I felt more nerves than my very first talk.

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Simone Vincenze: And so when I analyzed that, I was like, why is this happening? Because what the TEDx talk meant for me, I was 26 at a time. And for me, it meant making it in the speaking industry. For me, it meant creating something of value that thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people are going to watch. And so I put so much pressure on myself for that particular talk that now the nerves became even more. And so I started embracing that process. And I remember that. And I know that every time I step up my game and I do things that are not comfortable, those nerves are coming back stronger and stronger, just became better in managing them. So anyone who’s nervous know that it’s OK. Your goal is to go through it until it becomes normal, until you reach another level where you’re going to feel the nerves again. Just to do the process over and over again.

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Dave Bricker: Yeah. Keep pushing yourself. It’s interesting. Sometimes I feel the nerves after I’ve done speaking. I get this big rush like, what’s this? I’m finished. Why am I nervous? But it’s like, oh, yeah, that cut all sorts of stuff. That is same as well. It’s amazing.

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Dave Bricker: But there’s a difference, I think. And not just with speaking nerves, being courageous is not the same thing as being fearless. Being courageous is doing something in spite of your fear. You do it anyway.

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Dave Bricker: You’re not fearless. You’re courageous. You go and you do it. So I love that.

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Dave Bricker: Most speakers are busy trying to get booked at other people’s events, at conferences and meetings. And that’s great. That’s part of the business. You’ve helped so many entrepreneurs launch their own events. Share a little bit about that model, please.

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Simone Vincenze: I’ve got to say, it’s a model that I’m familiar with because that’s how I started.

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Simone Vincenze: I didn’t have anyone in that-- I didn’t know anyone at that time that could get me on their stage. And probably no event organizer in the right mind would get me on their stage when I started. So I cannot really blame them. And I also approached a few events and got some rejections. And that’s why I decided to say, well, if no one is having me on their stage or I don’t know how to approach it, let me create my own.

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Simone Vincenze: And that was what changed everything for me because now I finally could have a platform to learn, to practice, to get the experience that I needed. And so that’s why I really love the fact of-- and I encourage speakers to create their own events. Another reason why I encourage speakers to create their own events is not only that, because also you can create-- you can practice whatever you want. You can create things that you want. You can deliver new content and adapt it. So you’re not as strict like you were speaking at another person event or someone else’s stage where you’re following a brief or you might deliver the same talk over and over again. So that’s another benefit of running your own events.

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Simone Vincenze: But also the other thing that I think really helps speakers is to put yourself in the shoes of the event organizers.

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Simone Vincenze: Because a lot of speakers, they act like prima donnas. They have no clue about what’s really involved in creating, planning, filling, organizing an event, all the moving parts that there are. And a speaker that knows how to organize an event or has organized their own events before is a speaker that can speak the same language to an event organizer. They understand when to talk to them, when not to talk to them, how to interact with them, how not to interact with them, what kind of service to offer. So for example, I have a lot of doors that have opened because I approach an event and say, “Hey, I’ve organized many events. If you need any help or you want me to review maybe something, I’m more than happy to help at no cost.”

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Simone Vincenze: And nine times out of ten, they’ll take that on board.

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Simone Vincenze: So there are so many benefits and it starts by organizing something simple. You don’t have to organize this huge event with a very complicated production. But maybe your first one is inviting people that you know into a small meeting room.

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Simone Vincenze: And just going through that process is going to help you see the event industry that you are in. Because as a speaker, you are in the event industry under a completely different light. And there are always stages to this game. The other reason why I think that is really good, having your own events, is also that it allows you to sell what you want. Most of the time, you would use the event and then sell something on the back end, sell your training, sell your services, book consultations from it. So it becomes a great lead generation tool, which sometimes you will not have that freedom at someone else’s stage. Because at someone else’s stage, if they are paying you to speak, you need to deliver what they ask you to deliver. You don’t need to sell. Or maybe other times you’re going to a stage where you’re only selling depending on the side of the industry that you’re in. But when you’re organizing your own event, you do whatever you want. You own the relationship with the people there. You own the relationship with the audience. And there is nothing really more powerful than that. And that’s why I stick with the event industry, running events for so many years.

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Dave Bricker: So important. Simple things when you get to the gig, you send the meeting organizer a text. “I’m here.” Which is your signal to go worry about all the people who didn’t show up on time. Deal with the caterer. Deal with the venue. Deal with the AV team. Deal with all of the stuff. Because I’m here and I can help. So important and so basic. And yet I love this perspective of seeing the industry from the perspective of the meeting organizer.

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Dave Bricker: If you’re just tuning in, this is Speakepedia Media for aspiring and professional speakers and thought leaders who want to make more money by changing hearts, minds, and fortunes. My guest today is entrepreneurship speaker and expert, Simone Vincenzi.

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Dave Bricker: So Simone, we’re talking about putting on your own events. And of course, that can involve booking a room, hiring a caterer, an AV team, equipment, all sorts of things that can cost you money and aggravation. And that’s a perfect time to segue into talking about webinars. I know that’s turned into a chosen medium for you and you’ve done plenty of live speaking. Did COVID inspire you to focus on online presentations or were there other catalysts for becoming the webinar expert?

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Simone Vincenze: Well, I’d say that COVID forced me, like anyone else in the industry, to focus on webinars. So it wasn’t much of a choice. It became a necessity.

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Simone Vincenze: Now, at that point, I have to say that I was already running webinars for at least three years.

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Simone Vincenze: Because then we would use online presentation to drive people to the live events that we had. So our webinars were a mean to an end. It wasn’t the end goal. It was the first touch point that we would have online with our audience, with the local audience that we have built, to get them to come to our paid events or to get them to come to our free events. And so that really helped because it gave me an understanding of the different technology involved. Where to look when I speak, to have the right gear, the right camera, the right microphone, the right lighting, maybe the background, what software I’m going to use. And so I was really happy that I had that three year run when I was running webinars before COVID hit. Because then at that point, we were very busy restructuring the entire company. We had, we were running 200 events a year. We had 14 people that were working with us, 14 staff members. About eight of them were involved in the event business, which many of them we had to fire, let go. Many contractors that didn’t have contracts anymore. So it became a very difficult time for us. And if I just had to turn the top on the webinar side because otherwise I didn’t know what else to do. And then I said, well, before I was running two events a week, now I’m running two webinars a week. I don’t care how many people are going to show up. Sometimes we had two people. Sometimes we had 200.

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Simone Vincenze: If one person is showing up, if no one is showing up, I’m going to deliver that presentation. I’m going to deliver that webinar. Because from the event business, I understood that the power of consistency, there is nothing more powerful than consistency.

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Simone Vincenze: And if no one shows up, then it means that it’s a practice session for me. I can always send a replay later. And that’s where my expertise in webinars became much better because I had to learn the finer details of running webinars. Where to make the call to action. How to get people engaged. How to make sure that people actually keep looking at the screen and they don’t zone out. Because while they’re watching the webinar, they’re also washing the dishes at the same time. So how can I make sure that they stop washing the dishes actually to interact with me in the chat. Or maybe to pay attention to a story that I’m telling. Which now becomes the difference compared to having someone in a live audience. While they are there, they’re already looking at you. Maybe they’re looking at their phone, but you’ve got most of their attention anyway. You don’t know what people are doing when you’re delivering a webinar. So that became a force, the COVID forced me to become really good at webinars. And again, like it happened in the event space, people said, “Hey, I see you’re doing so many webinars. You’re doing so well.” “Why don’t you teach me?” And the new business started on the webinar side.

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Dave Bricker: Yeah, it’s interesting. And I want to take a little tangent here because you talked about giving a webinar. I know I’ve done the webinar and had three people show up. And that can feel really awkward. And at the same time, I think some people would cancel that webinar. And I’ve always used it as an opportunity to say, look, a lot of people didn’t make it today. Who signed up? They must have gotten a better offer. I can’t help that. But now there’s us and we can really get down and have more one-to-one time first name basis. And you’re going to get that much more out of that. Is that okay with you? And nobody ever says, “No, I’d rather go come back another time, but I can be part of a crowd.” I think it’s important not to be dissuaded when, especially early in the game, not so many people show up.

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Simone Vincenze: I’m completely with you. This is a lesson that I got that I’m taking also from the event business that the events that we were doing. Because sometimes we would have events with three people in the room. That’s even more awkward.

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Simone Vincenze: Because now they are there. And I remember my speaker trainer always told me, “If there is one person that listens and pays attention, you don’t take that person for granted. They’re giving you the most precious thing that they have, which is their time.

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Simone Vincenze: They have decided with all the other things that they could do to be here and listen to you.” You know how precious this is? Whether it’s one person or a hundred people or a thousand people, you respect the time of that person. And then you make it a win for them. The now is even more exclusive, as you said. So I had plenty of events where maybe two people showed up. And now we are in a room with 50 people and then two chairs there. What do you do as a speaker? Instead of standing up, you sit down. Make yourself at your level and make it a conversation. So now it doesn’t feel awkward whether it’s one person standing with two people sitting down listening in front of you. Same thing in a webinar. How can you make it engaging so then those people, they actually want to stay. And the message that they are receiving is, “You care about this more than you care about the numbers. You care about what you do more than you care about how many people you have.”

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Simone Vincenze: And when they get it, then they can have actually a stronger connection with you that you might not have with 50 people attending or a hundred people attending.

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Dave Bricker: And you never know who’s in the room. What if one of the two or three people in the room says, “How come nobody’s here? This is fantastic. I’m going to tell a whole bunch of people.” Or that person says, “Hey, I’d love to hire you to do this workshop within my company or my organization.” You don’t know who’s in the room.

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Simone Vincenze: I’ve got to say something interesting on this because sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up in the numbers. And the brain says, “More people should be here while I’m wasting my time.” And so there is an energy shift. And I remember delivering a webinar with a partner that she was supposed to bring at least 40 people. I think five people showed up in that webinar. I said, “Okay, well, I’m going to deliver an even better presentation for these five people.” One of these people that attended was then Jennifer Darling.

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Simone Vincenze: Jennifer Darling, which is how we connected, then ended up being one of our biggest partners that sent to us probably more than 100 clients and hundreds of thousands in revenues just from that connection. If in that moment I didn’t bring my A-game, Jennifer would have not said, “Oh, I want to buy from you and I want to see how we show up,” and then it didn’t become the partner that we had. And we were not having this conversation. So, point and case. You’d never know who’s in the room. And maybe two of the two people that are there, they are the one that they are going to unlock everything for you on a business or professional level.

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Dave Bricker: Never know. It’s about the audience. It’s not about you and you not hitting your population numbers, your attendance numbers. That’s about you. But whoever shows up, they get the A-game, like you say.

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Dave Bricker: So, Simone, so many people are uncomfortable with the S-word, selling. But if you want to give a “high converting webinar,” you have to have something to sell or there’s no conversion. So, talk a bit about selling from the stage and how to do that without being pushy, sleazy, or annoying, because we all hate that.

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Simone Vincenze: Yeah.

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Simone Vincenze: That’s a topic that I’m really passionate about because my niche in speaking is speak to sell. Now, when someone understands the different parts of the speaking industry, you can be a host, an emcee, a keynoter, delivering workshop, a facilitator, going into corporations, working for charities.

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Simone Vincenze: And then you have that side of the speaking industry, which is speak to sell, where you would use speaking as a form of marketing to sell your product or services. So, that’s the industry, part of the industry where I specialize, where I honed my skills.

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Simone Vincenze: There are a few reasons why. One, I think that selling from a speech is probably the most difficult skill that any speaker can get, but it’s also the most rewarding. Why is it the most difficult? Well, it’s the most difficult because you are dealing with rejection on steroids.

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Simone Vincenze: You’ve got to really become rejection-proof because imagine in a sales call, if someone says no to you, one person says no to you. If you are in a live workshop or in a webinar, you might have 50 people saying no to you at the same time, 100 people saying no to you at the same time. You might have five people there and there is the downward movement where no one buys.

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Simone Vincenze: What do you do there?

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Simone Vincenze: So, it’s really about managing your emotion. It’s a great exercise and training in managing your emotion and not being affected by the outcome or the external energy. So, that’s why it’s so difficult as a skill because it’s not what you say, it’s the emotions that come into place when you do it. Because now your action is linked to the reward of a sale and if I don’t sell, my business is going to go down. So, all these things, they play it as a conscious level.

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Simone Vincenze: But once you practice it, it becomes like delivering another piece of content. The first piece of advice that I want to give is, if you don’t want to sound like a salesperson, it’s because normally there is a switch when someone goes from content to sale.

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Simone Vincenze: If you treat sale like a normal piece of content and you practice it enough for that to feel like a normal piece of content, what’s going to happen is that there is not going to be a switch in energy, just a natural transition from the content that you have delivered before. Just that this time there is an invitation for people to buy or not. So, that’s the first thing, is to rehearse it so that you know your call to action like you know your content. Because otherwise, when the emotions take over, then that’s where people fumble and that’s where people turn into something that they are not or someone that they are not.

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Simone Vincenze: The second thing is that you don’t need to sell like everyone else’s sells.

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Simone Vincenze: Everyone has their own unique sales style. When you have a conversation with someone, you have your style. Whenever you deliver your speech, you have your style. So, it’s about being true to yourself and make sure that you know what to say, but say it in the way you want to say it. Like you would say it in a one-to-one conversation. Because if you have that in mind, now you don’t sound like a sleazy salesperson, but you sound like yourself having a conversation with someone and asking them if they are interested in joining or not.

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Simone Vincenze: And this is two things. Practice and be yourself and use your natural style and you don’t need to sell like other people just because you saw them doing it that way, you don’t need to do it. That’s the two biggest things that can unlock a lot of opportunities for sales on webinars and live events as well.

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Dave Bricker: Yeah, two principles I like to go by. One is begging never helped a relationship and people who go up on stage or anywhere else and beg you to buy, that just doesn’t work. That’s just sad.

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Dave Bricker: And then don’t go into any relationship lonely or hungry because people can smell that on you. And again, that’s about you. I think if you go in there with value valuable programs that are really going to help people, whether it’s software, whether it’s a workshop or whatever it is, whatever it is that you’re selling. If it’s genuinely valuable to people, then why should you feel bad about offering it to them? And why shouldn’t you deserve to get paid for that? I think that’s a good framing to have with the audience. It’s so important.

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Dave Bricker: And yet I’ve seen it. You ask people in a I’ve seen you ask in a webinar, how do you feel about selling and people write in the chat awkward, uncomfortable and yeah, absolutely.

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Dave Bricker: Coming back to webinars, you talk about this is your model for cyclical elements of an effective webinar clarity, conversion, expansion and influence. And so around on around the circle, clarity, conversion, expansion and influence. I love your model. Can you break it down for our listeners?

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Simone Vincenze: Yeah, absolutely. So whenever you’re running a webinar, your webinar is not just your presentation. That’s where this model comes in because what a lot of people think when they create a webinar, they just focus on the presentation.

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Simone Vincenze: But your webinar is much more than that. Your webinar is a touchpoint that you have with someone that could potentially buy from you. So it’s a way for them to see who you are. It’s a way for them to understand you to see if they like you or not, to see if they are your content is relevant for them. And so when I look at the model, webinars sits under conversion because webinar is your conversion point. But it starts with clarity, clarity on your target audience and clarity on the offers that you’re making clarity on your positioning, who you are. What are you? What is your unique selling point? What is your unique value proposition? We are going back to the basic of business. But the reason why a lot of webinars flop is because the presentation is relevant to no one and the offer is very vanilla. And a great offer can really sell itself even with not such a great presenter.

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Simone Vincenze: Because if the offer is so good that people say, “Wow, I invite the offer because of the offer,” then you know that your presentation, you can just improve becoming a better presenter, but you’re not relying on your presentation skills to coat something that is not that great and make it look better, right? So first of all, focus on clarity. Who are you? What’s your positioning? What are you great at? What’s your offer? And who is the ideal client? From there, you move to conversion. Around conversion, that’s where you develop your webinar. That’s where you say, “Okay, what do I need to say? What does my audience need to hear before they buy my offers?

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Simone Vincenze: What are the things that they need to know before they buy my offer?” So you walk your way back, “If I want to sell this offer, what presentation do I need to deliver to position this offer?” And that’s the conversion part. Then we move to expansion because we need people to attend this webinar now. What happens is that you’re going to run your webinar two or three times to your own audience, and then your registration will start declining because the people that could have already registered, they’ve registered. So you need new people. And that’s where expansion comes in, and the focus in particular that I love the most is on strategic partnerships. Finding other organizations, people that are offering complementary services or products. There is an alignment in values, and then you collaborate with them, and they put you in front of their audience, and then you have a revenue share with them. So then whatever sales you make, then you give them a percentage. Percentage varies depending on the different services, different products, so we’re not going to details now. So that’s expansion, and the more partnership you have, now you’re taking your webinar on tour. And so every time you deliver a presentation, it sounds new to someone else, instead of delivering the same one to your own audience, at some point you’ll get bored. And we’ll stop registering. And then the final part is influence. How can you raise your profile so then you become more credible? And that’s where publications come into place. That’s where association comes into play. For example, a big turning point for us as a business was when I spoke at an event in London with the Les Brown in front of a thousand people.

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Simone Vincenze: When I did another event with Gary Vee in front of 500 people in a boxing ring.

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Simone Vincenze: Those two events, they made me as a speaker. Not because they made my skill as a speaker, but they built my profile. And suddenly people, after seeing me in those two events, they saw me under a different light. It was easier to sell, it was easier for them to buy, and it almost like I had a different aura. After that, it was seeing the same Simone, still the same Simone. But after a dead event with Les Brown or that event with Gary Vee, people started taking me and G-Tex more seriously. Then I started writing for Forbes and for Entrepreneur Magazine because I understood the media game, I got elevated my profile. And that’s what then gave the credibility to validate the skills that I’ve built over the years. And that’s where the influence come into play. So the more your profile, the more you raise your profile, the stronger partnership you create, the easier it is for people to trust. And that’s where now the cycle continues. So then you know where you’re going, you have a great converting webinar, you have partnerships that fill your webinar with leads, and in the meanwhile you build your profile and influence so then you’re known in your field. And that’s how great businesses and good personal brands and speaking brands are built. And I love this model.

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Dave Bricker: I agree with you. It’s a good model.

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Dave Bricker: So tell us a little bit about the G-Tex community. I know it has a lot of moving parts to it. It’s got a lot of value to deliver. And where can people find more about G-Tex and about you?

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Simone Vincenze: The best place is our website, which is gtex.org.uk . So gtex.org.uk . That’s the website. So gtex.org.uk . And there is a free training there, which talks about the G-Tex method and how you can implement it in your business to get 10 to 20 clients a month using what I told about. We’re going to more details. There is an assessment that you can take. So if you go on the website, gtex.org.uk , that’s where you can find the free training. And in terms of what people can expect from G-Tex, well, this is...

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Simone Vincenze: G-Tex is people. It’s built by incredible people. They are people that they care, people that they want to see each other succeed, and people that are willing to show up for each other. We happen all to be in the coaching, speaking, or training industry. But the ethos is that together we can achieve way more than what we can do on our own. And that’s why I’ve created G-Tex, to create this incredible network of people that they care about the world, they care about each other, and they can support each other in achieving personal and business goals. And we facilitate training to make sure that the business part is there, but then they can focus on their personal connection to then create something really special. And that’s what G-Tex is all about.

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Dave Bricker: And G-Tex stands for?

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Simone Vincenze: Growing Together Exponentially. You can’t miss that. I can’t miss that, exactly. From the fact of this, my first website domain was growingtogetherexponentially.com , which no one could spell. My first email was simone at growingtogetherexponentially.com , which no one could write, not even myself. So that’s where we changed from Growing Together Exponentially to G-Tex. A bit easier to spell and to write.

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Dave Bricker: Right, right. Well, it’s an amazing community of people from all over the globe who get together and work not just on webinars, but on masterminding and helping one another out. It’s a very giving community you’ve put together. And anyone interested in exploring that should go to gtex.org.uk .

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Dave Bricker: Simone, thank you for being my guest today. It’s always fun to talk to you.

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Simone Vincenze: It’s a pleasure. I love the interview, and I’m a super fan of what you have created with Speakipedia.

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Simone Vincenze: Now, there is nothing like what you’ve built in the speaking industry. This is truly unique, and every speaker in the world needs to be part of Speakipedia. This is an incredible resource that everyone who’s in the speaking industry needs to use. So go, Speakipedia.

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Dave Bricker: Thank you. And now you’re a part of it.

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Simone Vincenze: I am. Proud to be.

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Dave Bricker: So I’m Dave Bricker, inviting you to explore the world’s most comprehensive resource for speakers and storytellers at speakipedia.com . If you’re watching this on social media video, please love, subscribe, and share your comments. If you’re listening to the podcast, keep your hands on the wheel. Stay safe, and I’ll see you on the next episode of Speakipedia Media.