Can’t wait ? Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow.
You Can also read Part of the Interview BELOW
Editor:
Today’s guest is Kim Walsh Phillips, a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and speaker who helps business owners grow through powerful messaging and high converting talks. Kim has built multiple successful businesses, worked with major brands, and is known for helping entrepreneurs turn their story, expertise, and stage presence into real revenue. Kim, it is great to have you with us.
Kim Walsh Phillips:
Oh, it’s so great to be with you.
Editor:
You are so famous for the million dollar talk and I know we’re going to get into the framework of that maybe a little later, but maybe you could start by telling us how you got into this world in the first place.
Kim Walsh Phillips:
I have always loved speaking since I was little, little, little. I was in the front of the room doing some kind of presentation, and then ended up being student council president and on the speech team. It was something I enjoyed back from my theatre background. 85% of my body is made up of the need for applause, that it’s like Tinkerbell’s light shines when I hear people cheer. And so naturally I started doing it to grow my business. I would get invited places to speak, and it was great, but it would always be just so that I would hope at the end of my talk someone would walk up to me and say, “I love what you said. How can we work together?” And it was great when it happened, but it was painful when it didn’t. And then I realised that if I used some strategies to make it less based on hope, but more on strategic positioning, that I could turn talks into profit.
And so I switched up the way I do my talks to not just be a great story but be a story that drives people to a call to action, and it dramatically changed the way I did my business. I could grow, I could go speak on stages, which I loved doing, and I could use it each time to bring in clients. And then people started coming to me saying, “How do you do that? How could you be entertaining and drive business in at the same time?” So we started working with some of our elite clients to do the same for them and they had that same success, taking a talk that is entertaining and turning it into profits.
Editor:
Can you remember the first time this happened for you, Kim? Where were you and how did it feel at that point?
Kim Walsh Phillips:
I do. I had just taught myself basically how to do it by I bought a course, and they spent more time arguing in the course about whether you should use overhead projectors or a PowerPoint, so that didn’t work. So I started going to people’s events and watching webinars and I created a blueprint for myself. And the first time I ever tried it, I had 32 people in the room and I gave my speak to sell talk and 28 of them took my offer. And as I sat in the car afterwards, I had these tears streaming down my face because it was more money I’d ever generated in one hour, like more than I had generated the whole year before. And I literally went from the day before being $55,000 in debt to making enough profit to pay that off and to propel our business forward.
And the beautiful thing about it was I knew then I had finally cracked the code, that I didn’t have to keep relying on hope, I could drive business in. And it doesn’t even need to be a big room. That first room was 32 people. It’s just that you need to put strategic positioning in place so that you could drive people into the sale.
Editor:
I can imagine that was a real pinch yourself type of moment, Kim, when that happened.
Kim Walsh Phillips:
It was.
Editor:
And what were the early challenges maybe that you faced when you first got started? Was it your own self-doubt or were you just straight out of the gate, okay, I’m going to do this and I’m going to make sure I’m successful?
Kim Walsh Phillips:
I think both things. I had a desire to do something different. So that was my first thing. I knew I enjoyed speaking, but I did not enjoy hoping and praying that clients would pay us enough to make payroll. One time I had to hawk my engagement ring in order to make payroll because things were so hard in the beginning of my company. So I knew I need to do something different and I knew that other people were doing it because I had seen them do it from the stage. I just knew I needed to figure out how.
And the thing about speaking from stage is when you’re trying it and you’re testing it, you’re doing it in real time in front of people. So there’s this fear, what if they don’t like me? What if this doesn’t work?
Kim Walsh Phillips:
But I already knew that what I was doing wasn’t working.
So the way I positioned my mindset was I’m just going to get curious. Itwasn’t that I went into it thinking this either is going to work or it’s going to fail or it’s going to be successful. I put on a mindset of, I’m going to get curious to see what would happen if I tried it. And that took all the pressure off. And now every time I speak, I’ve spoken on thousands of stages since then, I test something else and I just operate in a mindset of curiosity. Let me see if the audience would laugh here. Let me see if they’re quicker to enrol. Let me see if we get more retention if we try this thing. And one of my favourite things is operating like a scientist to see how they respond. My favourite quote is, “In God I trust, everyone else bring data.” And so I position myself as a data scientist in my mindset so it’s not win or lose. It’s just let’s see what we can find out.
Editor:
Now obviously this all converged into the million dollar talk. It’s what you’re famous for, as I mentioned in the introduction. Maybe you could just talk us through that for anybody who’s not discovered the million dollar talk before.
Kim Walsh Phillips:
Absolutely. It came from a time I was on stage and I was speaking to a group of IT professionals. So they’re naturally introverts, and I was selling a product to get them to speak on stage and on camera. So I’m trying to get a group of people who’ve never done a thing before, don’t want to do the thing, never woke up wanting to do the thing, to get them to take action. And the process I followed there is what you always want to do. You want to start with the story that tells them a before, a during, and an after that they can relate to. So I told the story of struggling, waiting on word of mouth and referrals, and how that transferred into unlocking a process to automatically generate more clients, and that’s the system we have today. So that’s step one.
Kim Walsh Phillips:
Step two is you share with them a four-step framework, because it’s something that they can follow, and you can own so they need to do it through you, so mine was speak, and then you naturally transition that into a call to action. So the invitation becomes a natural part of the presentation. It doesn’t feel like a sale…
Above is the full interview. Click Play Arrow. Enjoy!
To return to Making Web Money Click Here