StratComm Training Services
Help your community to excel with interactive training
My training sessions – online or in person – are always interactive, teach my best practices, and are based on real-world experience.
Generic advice and templates only help people who want to sound like everyone else. Innovators by definition want to stand out and apart from the crowd.
All my training is focused on teaching my proven systems for translating value propositions into compelling communications, whether the goal is pitching to investors, selling to customers, hiring new employees, presenting to the board, or managing other critical interactions.
Everything I teach can be applied across a broad range of circumstances that members of your community will face time and again throughout their careers.
No one likes to sit and listen to a lengthy presentation. More important, no one learns just by listening. People must implement in order to understand.
Implementation also makes new concepts real when participants put what they are learning into the context of their own value proposition and get immediate, practical feedback on how to make it better.
For the hosts of online training programs, having the participants interact is a real-time indicator that they are engaged with the materials and program. Considering the time, energy and funding that goes into programming, you deserve to know that your program is receiving value for your investment!
Your community members deserve practical tools that they can put to use immediately.
My training shares my best practices and favorite tools so that participants can gain immediate benefit.
These tools have been refined over the course of more than a decade and hundreds (and hundreds) of coaching sessions.
Past clients have told me that they bring out my tools every time they write a new pitch, presentation or proposal even years later.
Online and in person Training Services for groups from five to five hundred.
We can tailor a program for your community, whether you are looking to engage them for a single event or provide intensive training for an extended period.
Training Options
Use Cases - Clients
Your team of scientists, engineers and technicians are creative, productive and – likely – frustrated.
The value of their favorite innovations may seem obvious to them and yet translate poorly to upper management or to customers.
As a scientist by training, I have credibility in delivering a systematic approach to help your innovators to communicate effectively with important audiences, as well as saving you time and effort in defending your department budget.
Your sales team members are highly motivated to renew and enhance their kit of sales techniques. Competition is tough and, especially for high tech products, communications can be challenging.
“Perfect Pitch” seminars provide new tools and mindsets to help sales people to differentiate their offerings while focusing on customer benefits.
In small, young companies, your presentation abilities are the ones that really matter.
But as your company grows, your executive team’s presentation and pitch skills also need to be exceptional, whether for roadshows, board meetings or customer events.
Small team consults may be the best solution for your team, but if you are unsure if they will be open to this service or they just need some fine-tuning, a seminar can be the perfect solution.
From the minute you open your call for applicants until you have your final showcase or demo day, your participants need exceptional presentation skills.
I strongly recommend my Coaching Services for acceleration programs, but they often include How-To seminars for applicants, mentors and judges, as well as Clinics for applicants.
Use Cases - Situations
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Give your innovators the tools to present their ideas to management so that the business opportunities inherent in their inventions are clear and fundable.
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Your team of scientists, engineers and technicians is creative, productive and – likely – frustrated. The value of their favorite innovations may seem obvious to them and yet go unfunded during the company’s budgeting process.
But when you go to make their case to your managers,
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Training Services Descriptions
Training Services Descriptions
"How-To" Seminars
Engage your community & stakeholders
The key to a seminar that draws interest, attendance and sponsors is to present useful, actionable content in an interactive format. You can get all three with Strategic Communications seminars.
Whatever your community, it can be challenging to fill your events calendar, attract participants to new programs or find ways to bring your community together.
Seminars are a common approach to delivering value to groups, but often are boring or unmemorable. People have so many options to learn and network that poorly received content can spell disaster.
And you have many more important things to do with your time than worry about delivering content!
Strategic Communications skills are valuable to everyone, even if they do not think about their interactions in this way.
The key to tailoring a StratComm seminar to your community lies in understanding your members’ goals. Here are just a few ideas:
- For everyone: “How to actually enjoy a networking event and build your network at the same time”
- For everyone: “How to turn PowerPoint from instrument of torture to tool for success.”
- For everyone: “How to create a website in one day that communicates your value proposition”
- For new tech sales professionals: “How to interview tech-savvy customers successfully without a technical degree”
- For tech pros selling ideas to business people: “How to get a manager excited about your amazing ideas“
- For entrepreneurs who are fundraising: “How to achieve Perfect Pitch“
- For applicants to accelerators and competitions: “How to write a killer application for our program”
- For mentors and mentees: “How to get the most out of your mentoring relationship”
- For application and pitch judges: “How to compare apples and oranges and still do a great job of picking startups“
To design a great seminar for your community, let’s have a conversation about what your community needs, who your stakeholders are, and on what sectors you want to focus.
Seminars typically begin with a novel perspective on the topic followed by a systematic approach to addressing the communications issue at hand. The balance of the program is either a description of implementing a series of tools, demonstrations of the tools on volunteers’ value propositions, or a combination, depending on the preferences of the host and the participants.
My accelerator clients often have me reprise my application, mentoring and judging webinars at the beginning of every edition of their program. And I’m proud to say that I often have attendees attend year after year.
For nonprofit and academic groups, attendees typically learn tools that they apply immediately to their current situation.
An introductory seminar typically increases interest in participating in workshops, coaching and other programs as participants learn that the Perfect Pitch method is about tools, not templates and value, not image.
Interactive Clinics
Give your group access to real-time feedback
Sometimes a seminar – even one with built-in engagement – is not as interactive as you want for your community. Perhaps a pitch competition is coming up, or they need a quick review of their one-pagers or websites or other media. Clinics are a great way to help your community get instant feedback on their critical communications.
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Perhaps your community has reached their limit of traditional seminars. Maybe they want less new information and more precise feedback for their specific situation. Or there is a big deadline coming up for which several members must be prepared.
In these situations, a clinic can be a great solution that helps everyone learn while providing selected volunteers with direct (but kind) advice in real time.
A successful clinic helps its participants to solve problems they are facing today. The timing and content are often driven by your events schedule or project deadlines (in a corporate environment).
Our discovery call will focus on defining deadlines, the target audience, program goals and constraints, and required media. For instance:
- Executive summaries for budget meetings
- Elevator pitches for a pitch showcase
- One-pagers for a Demo Day or trade show
- Pitch decks for a judging round
- Videos for crowdfunding sites
The details depend on what you want your community members to accomplish, so be sure to book a 15-minute discovery call soon.
Clinics can be fun and fast-paced as we go through as many elevator pitches as possible… or focused and intense as we analyze one or two volunteers’ efforts in depth.
Either choice can work depending on the circumstances. For instance, intensive clinics are very popular for people submitting applications to accelerators while rapid-fire rounds are more beneficial to groups with short communications, such as elevator pitches.
Intensive Workshops
Elevate your community's skills
Seminars and clinics present the audience with useful tools and opportunities for feedback, but they are inherently too short in duration for dramatic change in the short term.
Significant change in how innovators implement their communications tools and deliver their message requires intensive training, real-time implementation and direct (but kind) feedback.
Most communications workshops focus on look and feel, presence, and story. They may provide templates and story-telling techniques. But the result is usually a series of carbon-copy presentations following a template of slides: “Problem”, “Solution”, “Team”, etc. Rarely do these templates provide the critical combination of content, authenticity, and clarity that audiences want.
Every innovator in your community has a their own value proposition that must serve as the foundation for any communications. If they simply follow a template, the most common result is inconsistent and incomplete presentations that leave audiences bored or confused or both.
Communications workshops must help participants to first establish their value proposition in the many dimensions of both business and technical contexts. In parallel, they can develop their compelling and authentic story. A great pitch about a mediocre value proposition is almost worse than a mediocre pitch about an exciting one.
My workshops are designed to be customized to the needs and wants of your community, including all stakeholders: innovators, sponsors, managers, partners, etc.
We start with a conversation about your goals and constraints:
- goals: great presentations to investors, customers, partners, management or others; industry or tech focus; types of media, etc.
- constraints: timing, length (half-day, two-day, over a week, a month, a quarter or longer), in person vs. online, amount of interaction desired, etc.
A proposal for the right workshop for your community, goals and budget will then be created for your approval.
Workshop participants from your community can expect to be “drinking water from a fire hose”!
The program is designed to provide a wealth of content, real-world examples, and opportunities for real-time direct (but kind) feedback on their efforts to implement what they have just learned for their own value propositions.
The end result for each participant will depend on the goals you define and on their level of effort. My favorite response from participants is “I finally understand what everyone else is doing!”
But you may find these typical results from investor-focused workshops more exciting:
- Clear, concise elevator pitches.
- Consistency among market size, revenue projections, and funding requests.
- Clarity of the problem, solution and IP.
- Focus on value and execution.
If your goals are aligned toward customers, sponsors, grant managers, or partners, the results will be tailored accordingly.
I have delivered workshops to accelerators around the world for nearly a decade and am privileged to say that most clients retain me for every edition of their program.
In these post-COVID times, I am refining an online version of the workshop that still delivers the interaction and content of the in-person version, which has been delivered successfully twice already.
CONTENT?
Multiple touches for maximum impact
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The most you can anticipate in terms of community benefit from most seminars is that participants will enjoy them and take away a useful tool or shift in mindset.
But no one becomes an expert in applying new skills based on a single 90-minute seminar. Following up a seminar with a clinic or two can help innovators to make these skills their own.
In contrast, intensive workshops (one- to two-day) can deliver a quantum jump in skill, but they can also be overwhelming. An introductory seminar or post-workshop clinic can significantly improve the participants’ capabilities.
Customizing any training session to your goals and community is essential for our mutual success. A customized series of training sessions is therefore even more tailored, so generalizing the development process is challenging!
Nonetheless, as with all customized programs, we start with a brief phone call to capture your goals and constraints, then create a series of programs that serves the needs and wants of your community.
Your custom program is designed to meet your and your community’s needs and wants, but here are some examples to consider:
- For corporate innovators: “Perfect Pitch” seminar focused on winning a budget allocation followed by one or two Clinics in which volunteers receive direct (but kind!) feedback on their submissions.
- For accelerator communities, mix and match the following:
- “Perfect Pitch” seminar focused on submitted a strong application
- One or two “Pitch Clinics” to provide feedback on volunteers’ draft submissions
- “Best Practices” seminars for judges and mentors
- Overview seminar for “Perfect Pitch” workshop for accelerator participants
- “Perfect Pitch” workshop
- Follow-up clinics or showcase to highlight new skills.
- For sales teams: “Perfect Pitch” for new products or new customers followed by a quarterly “Pitch Clinic” as new products are introduced and new salespeople are onboarded.
- For entrepreneur communities:
- Offer a series of targeted seminars on pitching to investors, customers and partners, for biotech, cleantech, edtech, fintech and other groups.
- Add in “Best Practices” seminars for mentoring, networking and other critical community skills.
The above ideas are just suggestions; tell me what you need and we will design the program that delivers!
Design a Custom Program
Multiple touches for maximum impact
Each of my training services is designed to deliver strong value on its own.
But as with any other skill, exposing your community to the training in different contexts and formats will strengthen their abilities and confidence.
The most you can anticipate in terms of community benefit from most seminars is that participants will enjoy them and take away a useful tool or shift in mindset.
But no one becomes an expert in applying new skills based on a single 90-minute seminar. Following up a seminar with a clinic or two can help innovators to make these skills their own.
In contrast, intensive workshops (one- to two-day) can deliver a quantum jump in skill, but they can also be overwhelming. An introductory seminar or post-workshop clinic can significantly improve the participants’ capabilities.
Customizing any training session to your goals and community is essential for our mutual success. A customized series of training sessions is therefore even more tailored, so generalizing the development process is challenging!
Nonetheless, as with all customized programs, we start with a brief phone call to capture your goals and constraints, then create a series of programs that serves the needs and wants of your community.
Your custom program is designed to meet your and your community’s needs and wants, but here are some examples to consider:
- For corporate innovators: “Perfect Pitch” seminar focused on winning a budget allocation followed by one or two Clinics in which volunteers receive direct (but kind!) feedback on their submissions.
- For accelerator communities, mix and match the following:
- “Perfect Pitch” seminar focused on submitted a strong application
- One or two “Pitch Clinics” to provide feedback on volunteers’ draft submissions
- “Best Practices” seminars for judges and mentors
- Overview seminar for “Perfect Pitch” workshop for accelerator participants
- “Perfect Pitch” workshop
- Follow-up clinics or showcase to highlight new skills.
- For sales teams: “Perfect Pitch” for new products or new customers followed by a quarterly “Pitch Clinic” as new products are introduced and new salespeople are onboarded.
- For entrepreneur communities:
- Offer a series of targeted seminars on pitching to investors, customers and partners, for biotech, cleantech, edtech, fintech and other groups.
- Add in “Best Practices” seminars for mentoring, networking and other critical community skills.
The above ideas are just suggestions; tell me what you need and we will design the program that delivers!
FAQ
Are your training sessions available in person or online?
How many people can attend a seminar?
I have delivered seminars to as audiences of a handful to well over a hundred. Interaction and engagement are possible with any number.
How long are your seminars?
Seminars and webinars are designed to fit the time available. My preference is for 90 minutes, as that allows enough time for maximum content delivery and interaction.
What are your training fees?
Pricing depends on length and content of an individual training session. Package pricing as well as discounts for academic and nonprofit institutions are also available.
Training sessions typically range in price from $1,000 to $20,000.
Do you offer seminar series?
Certainly! In fact, it is often beneficial to your participants to have a planned series of seminars so that they can have multiple opportunities to improve their communications skills over time.