Dan Lievens: Accomplished Entrepreneur, Founder of 11 Businesses

A conversation with Dan Lievens, accomplished entrepreneur and founder of eleven standout businesses.

Dan knows the magic behind storytelling. Dive into the art of crafting a compelling story that resonates with your target audience and learn why it's crucial for coaches to effectively communicate their value proposition.

Dan and Alex Pascal also discuss the importance of video testimonials. They create stronger connections with clients due to their immersive nature. Explore the challenges of scaling video testimonials and strategies to overcome them. Discover how to use technology, design creative invitations, and capture testimonials at the perfect time.

Gain insights into the planning and storyboarding process, as well as how to use interview questions to elicit specific sound bites from clients. Harness the power of platforms like Zoom and Riverside for conducting interviews and collecting testimonials.

Listen to this conversation for practical tips, valuable insights, and a wealth of industry knowledge for coaches.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Dan: Depending on what level you’re at, there’s always somebody that’s going to need what you have, especially when you start diving into that unique differentiator, that unique story, that unique thing that makes you who you are, somebody will be able to resonate with that, and at that point, it doesn’t matter what you charge, it’s the right fit.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an accomplished entrepreneur and founder of 11 businesses. He built the first co-working facility in Philadelphia, where a number of startups have achieved next level success. His main focus now lies within helping purpose-driven entities make this world a better place. Please welcome Dan Lievens.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Dan.

Dan: Good morning, Alex. How are you?

Alex: I’m doing pretty well. How about you?

Dan: Good. Glad to be here. Looking forward to our conversation today.

Alex: Likewise. Thank you for being here. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today? 

Dan: Black coffee. 

Alex: Nice. I iced mine because it’s very warm here in LA, I think. Actually, today, it’s not as warm as yesterday so far but it will get up to like 86 so need a little iced coffee.

Dan: So I’m in Austin, Texas, and we may get up to about 105 today and I’m still drinking hot coffee.

Alex: I do like soup sometimes when it’s hot out so I get it.

Dan: So I’m half Chinese and there is this old belief that when it’s warm out, you should drink warm tea or something warm. It creates a thin layer of sweat on your skin and the evaporation of that sweat will cool you off far more than drinking an iced drink, supposedly.

Alex: You’ll be testing it out today.

Dan: Absolutely.

Alex: So let’s go back to the beginning. I know you do a lot of really cool marketing work and a lot of that is with coaches and other markets as well. We’ll focus on coaches today. How did your career start? How did you end up doing the work that you do today?

Dan: So, I’ve been an entrepreneur pretty much my entire life. I think my first endeavor, I was eight years old, we’re living in China at the time and my dad was a diplomat for the Belgian government so we had access to things that most people local to China did not. My mom recalls a story of her standing in the kitchen looking out the window and she would see somebody riding my beautiful purple and red bike around the block and each time it would be another kid so she runs out to the back and she sees this big line of kids waiting in line and I was charging them one yen to ride my bike around the block because I had a very…so, being an entrepreneur has been part of my upbringing, has been part of my life, and I ran incubators, accelerators, co-working facilities, really devoted my entire life in helping people find their purpose and be able to monetize off of their purpose. And so much of humans are really seeking after is to help others and I think that’s where coaching really comes in is when you have a skill set or an understanding that you can support somebody else in being better at what they do, that’s ultimately the greatest gift I think that humans have. So I’ve always created businesses and entities to support others in being able to find our true calling and monetizing off of that. And the way I got into marketing is very quickly, especially in a co-working facility, we had hundreds of businesses come through and would consult with them, we noticed that failure wasn’t necessarily because of a bad idea, failure was typically because of their inability to communicate properly their value proposition. So, that’s where I really started getting into marketing and saying, “Hey, how can we let all these coaches and entrepreneurs share with the world what it is that they truly are providing as opposed to, I mean, we’re really good at what we do but we may not be really good marketers.” So, that’s when we developed — we went as far as developing something similar to TED Talks but instead of the idea worth spreading, it was a person worth spreading so we built a stage, we had live audiences, and we would work with coaches and entrepreneurs in getting to the underlying why of what they do and we’d put them on stage and they would deliver this five-minute story on why they do what they do and not allow them to talk about what they do. And what we’ve noticed is that the audience had an immediate connection and would almost buy anything from these people having heard that story and that’s how we really kind of got into more video work and storytelling and, today, our primary focus is also allowing others to tell your story, so video testimonials and really leveraging video to get the point across and get people really engaged in what you do. 

Alex: I love that, selling the why versus the what, the impact that has and it’s so true. And, in my experience, coaches, many cases, including I think myself, sometimes, when you position yourself as a coach, it’s hard to monetize that passion that you have for kind of helping people. In my experience, a lot of coaches almost, they’re so people oriented that monetization has a negative connotation. In so many ways, I think it limits a lot of coaches. You see that with nonprofits sometimes. You run them like a nonprofit, making money is bad, and then that, ultimately, what it does is it reduces the impact that mission can have. So, tell me about your experience working with coaches in that whole aspect of monetization? Have you encountered that kind of resistance from coaches? Does your approach completely take them on a different path where they focus more on that why and that does the selling? Tell me a little bit more about this. It’s an area that I find super interesting. Part of a lot of the work that we do at Coaching.com is around streamlining that connection between the coach and a client without the coach having to do much selling, such as do your thing and then be connected with clients, because we’re trying to help them avoid that issue with monetization. So, tell me a little bit about your thoughts and experience around coaches and monetization?

Dan: Absolutely. I think part of that conversation as well is some people having that imposter syndrome, feeling like they are not qualified enough, they don’t have enough experience, therefore, they should give something away for free or they should charge less, and one thing I want to say to that, and this was taught to me by my Qigong teacher many years ago, he’s like if you can find a student, that means there’s a need, so depending on what level you’re at, there’s always somebody that’s going to need what you have, especially when you start diving into that unique differentiator, the unique story, that unique thing that makes you who you are, somebody will be able to resonate with that, and at that point, it doesn’t matter what you charge, it’s the right fit. So I think a lot of coaches, especially coming out of the gates, are feeling like they’re not qualified enough or they’re feeling that they need to get some more experience. I think being able to tell your story in a powerful way and really being able to focus in on who you’re helping and how you can help them really kind of breaks that whole barrier. And one powerful way of doing that is videos. It’s amazing today how powerful videos are in terms of marketing. There’s a statistic saying 62 percent of consumers are more likely to buy from you if you have video on your website or video reviews on your website. And for us, video is a perfect way of being able to tell that story, especially if you use it as a client testimonial. If you have been able to identify your unique gift and the unique people that you’re helping that you can charge money for, being able to have them tell the story of their transformation is critical. That’s a game changer in terms of having a new client, in our opinion.

Alex: You mentioned the why and I think when most of us hear the why, we always think of Simon Sinek. Why do you think the why makes such a difference when, in this case, talking about what you do, what is it about it that allows people to open up and be more receptive to hear someone’s story, what they’re offering versus when you come at it with like what you do?

Dan: Okay, Alex, I’ll give you an example. I’ve never used this before. So, my father, he spends probably the better part of 40 years writing a book. He was a Jesuit Catholic priest initially, he renounced his priesthood. Before he retired, he was teaching Asian thought, Taoism and Buddhism at Johns Hopkins University and he spent four years writing this book and during my appraising, a lot of times, we didn’t have a dad because he was up in the attic writing his book. Our summers were kind of revolved around his plans for the book and, literally, it took decades for him to write this book. He was never able to market it properly, he was never able to get it out into the world, and I feel like I missed out on a lot of my childhood and it’s sad to see an individual have so much passion, have so much knowledge, but yet doesn’t have the ability to get it out into the world. So I think that really kind of fuels my energy on a daily basis to come up with creative ideas to help these individuals be seen in the world. So that’s part of my why. Having heard that story, you’re probably more likely to work with me than if I said, “Hey, I provide video testimonials for coaches and their websites,” period. So, I think as a human, you get connected to the story, you visualize the story and you see the importance, you see how much of that why is fueling what they do and you know that they’re going to go above and beyond because it means everything’s good. And to be able to communicate the ability, your purpose and your effort and how much effort you’re going to put into that client sells you immediately.

Alex: It really does and it contextualized as the person, why they do what they do, how are they similar to you, how are they different, what can you learn from them. It’s just such a good way to kind of get to know someone and provide additional context to what they do. So, you are a very firm believer on the video testimonials. What is it about video, you think, that is different when it comes to testimonials? And I don’t see a lot of video testimonials at scale so I’m also interested in how do you scale that? Because, of course, it’d be better if you go to Amazon to look at video reviews from people using the products and I guess you can go to YouTube for that and you can find that, but video is not like super scalable in terms of it’s harder to do, it takes a little bit of time, so why is it more powerful and how do we scale it?

Dan: So, Amazon, you mentioned Amazon. Amazon today employs 12,000 full-time employees in tracking down written fake reviews, because they want to make sure that the testimonials or reviews are legitimate. 

Alex: It’s kind of like — I think they have as much power as the IRS. I don’t know how many IRS agents are there but it’s like… Love it.

Dan: Alex, if you go to a website and you see pages and pages of written testimonials, I guarantee you clients aren’t going to read it. They’re going to say, “Okay, check,” in my decision process of engaging with this person —

Alex: Validation. 

Dan: It’s validation, it’s a checkbox. Yes, they have testimonials, move on. How much are they? What’s the next thing I want to look at? With the video testimonial, it’s an opportunity to immerse your prospects into a story. So, when we coach people in creating video testimonials, it’s always about the transformation. There’s always a story about it. And what that does is people love stories, so not only are you saying, “Check, this person has testimonials,” we actually get to immerse your prospect in your process and they come out of it saying, “Wow, I want that,” so it’s that much more powerful. And the majority of clients don’t want to hear from the company, they want to hear from their neighbors, they want to hear from their friends, they want to hear from referrals so that’s why we’re strong, strong believers of video testimonials. Today’s generation are spending their entire time on videos. Most people wouldn’t know how to go about life without videos, right? So video is king. And, in terms of scaling testimonial videos, it’s not hard to scale. There are tons of services out there. There are AI platforms that can automate the process. We run a company as well that assists people in collecting video testimonials. There are video production companies out there as well. The biggest hurdle, I think, with video testimonials and scaling is to get people to say yes. A lot of people aren’t willing to necessarily share their experiences or are shy about getting on video. I think that’s the biggest hurdle that we see. And a lot of that’s, for coaches out there don’t want to collect testimonials, would encourage you to get creative with how you invite somebody. So the way we invite somebody is we always say, “Hey, the transformation that you have gone through in the last three months has been absolutely incredible. I’ve never seen anything like that. Your story can inspire so many others. Do you mind if we do a video interview?” Positioning like that as opposed to saying, “Hey, can you give me a video testimonial?” So really positioning the question and how do you engage people to say yes, and you’d be surprised. Most people want to be heard, most people want to help somebody else, most people want to feel like they’re important, that they made a difference and that’s kind of the area where we leverage to really get people to say yes to video testimonial. And in this day and age, especially with the forgiveness of video quality, given what we went through in the last three or four years, it’s okay to do everything virtually. You don’t have to send in a whole crew with an audio guy and all that in order to shoot a video. Zoom or Riverside or any of these platforms are more than enough. And then you also have the authenticity factor and that’s how you can create a lot more video content and testimonials out there.

Alex: Yeah, I can see how a coach would be hesitant to ask their clients to get on video and talk about their experience but I also agree that people want to be helpful and if someone helped you, you probably want to talk a little bit more about your experience working with that person so I do envision a world where we have a lot more video testimonials for coaches as part of the coaching program. It’s becoming very important for the coach to have a video where they’re talking about how they work with clients and we enable coach matching on our platform and the video is an important component. But getting the clients in the video as well and maybe even editing a video that has both the coach talking about what they do and other people supporting it is incredibly powerful from a very tactical operational lens. What’s the best way to handle that? Does a coach, in your experience, do it towards the end of the engagement if you’re collecting these video testimonials? How many clients do you need? Do you work on this across time and you put the video together? Is this something you can do at one point in time and then go back to previous clients? What are the mechanics of making this work for a coach?

Dan: So, as soon as somebody receives a transformation is the best time that we believe to catch that video testimonials. If you wait too long, they might not be interested. And then if they haven’t yet really experienced something powerful, then you’re not going to have a powerful story. So, definitely once they’ve experienced a transformation. And I would say that a lot of coaches out there today are probably using Zoom as a method of meeting people so, at the end of a session, if they’ve experienced a transformation, you can say, “Hey, I’m collecting a series of stories that I want to use in my future education. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about working together?” That’s definitely something you can just tack on at the end of a meeting. Another creative way and we’re actually in the process of publishing a book on this, Stop Marketing and Start a Movement, is instead of saying, “Hey, I wanna collect a video testimonial or video interview,” you can say, “I run a yearly award or I run a movement called, let’s say, the Sea Level Change Agents, and I would like to nominate you as one of the ambassadors for this movement because your story is so transformational.” So what you’re doing is you’re creating this movement, like the Sea Level Change Agents, and then you’re inviting people, you’re nominating people to be part of that. So, for them, it’s like, “Whoa, it’s like I won a prize.” If somebody says, “Hey, you just won a Nobel Peace Prize and we’re going to record an interview,” are you going to say yes? Of course, you’re going to say yes. So being able to create the social movement and then throwing videos underneath that, potentially a little bit more produced, maybe a little bit longer, and sharing their entire story of transformation and, at the end, being able to mention who they worked with or something like that, that’s also a very, very powerful way of collecting, quote-unquote, “testimonials.” So, at the end of the day, all we want is other people to talk about the transformation that you were able to help them provide, whether it’s in the form of an interview or a story or a testimonial really doesn’t matter.

Alex: Storytelling is so important. You can talk about — even it’s not just talking about the why, it’s like the way you go about piecing a story together could be very powerful, it could be not as powerful, right? We can’t assume that just because you talk about your why then people are going to be engaged and want to buy from you but there is something around being able to tell a story and stories bring people together, they’ve been bringing people together for thousands of years, so how do you create your story? How do you make it not just about you but about the value you can create? I mean, it’s really an art form. How do you embed other people into that story and get alignment? When you think about it a little bit more in depth, I think it becomes clear that I think all coaches should be able to build their brand using a strategy around bringing clients together and weave them into that story because, at the end of the day, it’s not just the story that you tell but it’s the story as told by the people that are part of your story when you’re helping them achieve some objectives in their personal life, work. I mean, you can say, “I’m a coach and I specialize in working with executives, helping them build executive presence,” but there’s a whole story around why is that your niche, how do you work with people, what’s the experience of someone working with you. I mean, there’s so much context in every little nook and cranny and it does sound like going through an exercise where you bring your clients into the fold, you have them talk about their experience working with you, it really brings a lot of these to life. And, at the end of the day, from a consumer perspective, it helps you get a lot better understanding of the outcomes that you can expect working with this person but also the process that you’ll be put through so it’s powerful.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. And the important thing with collecting testimonials, for listeners out there, is you get to control the narrative. As Alex says, you can really weave these stories when you control the narrative instead of just saying, “Hey, give me a video testimonial,” control the narrative as in ask them the questions, ask them to finish certain sentences so it’s important to understand, first of all, who’s your avatar, so knowing who your avatar is or the people that you want to interview, number one. Know what product or service you want to sell more of, know your niche, know your objections and then having all those things in front of you allows you to reverse engineer the interview and create a story. For example, if pricing is one of your big objections, then you ask the question saying, “Hey, Alex, I know when you first considered working with me, you thought that the price might have been a little bit high. Talk to me a little bit about that.” So if Alex says, “Hey, when I first started considering working with coach so and so, I thought the price was high but the value that I’ve received and ROI has been tremendous.” If that’s the first nine seconds of your testimonials, you’ve just basically taken that objection and thrown it out the window. So control the narrative. And when it comes to storytelling, yes, hero’s journey. Typical, typical problem and then they go into the valley and then you rescue and all that. That’s a great formula to use. Specifically, though, when it comes to video testimonials, we call it the wall. So, the wall is when somebody is on the fence about working with you. What are they feeling? What competition are they looking at? What other websites are they looking at? What’s going on in their mind? And the longer you can spend, when you’re collecting video testimonials, asking your client what it felt like and spending more time on the wall allows the prospect to completely relate to that story because that’s where they’re at. It’s like, “Oh, I was looking at this website, I was looking at that website. These are all the things that I did and I wasn’t sure about this, this, and that, but then I finally,” and then you land on the transformation. Not the what, like nobody cares about what you do, it’s all about the transformation. So the wall and a transformation and that’s I think the best way that we found in terms of being able to craft a story arc for people to really understand the value that you’re out and the transformation that you’re providing.

Alex: Yeah, hero’s Journey. I love justice Campbell. I read it years ago and maybe I’m due for another reading. I mean, I love all this work that you’re describing. I think it’s so powerful and often overlooked by coaches or maybe there’s a little bit of fear of kind of bringing your clients in and having them talk about your experience. When you’re working with a coach, how do you prepare them to venture into this process of getting these video testimonials? What does the process look like? What are some of the common questions?

Dan: So the few things that I mentioned just now in terms of really honing in on your avatar, so if your avatar is females in their 50s in the C-level suite, you don’t want to collect a testimonial from a young 20-year-old male, obviously.

Alex: So it sounds like working with you, it’s really like when you when you work with coaches, give them an opportunity oftentimes to think about what’s their specialty, what’s their market, because I think a lot of people just go through the fold and they’re like, “I’m working with this client and I’m working with this other client.” I think coaches have become a lot more sophisticated as to how they think about their practice but, sometimes, you just go with a group and a client comes your way and there’s a good, maybe personality fit but they work in a specific industry and have specific challenges. As coaches, I think, mature in their practice, they start focusing and narrowing their scope and becoming more specialized but that’s a whole journey. It sounds like when you work with coaches, that’s a good opportunity for someone to either develop an understanding of what that niche is or refine it even further by spending time with someone, thinking really about what that niche is, how they got there, where they want to take it, what kind of clients they want to attract. Is that accurate?

Dan: Absolutely. The more specific we can get when it comes to collecting testimonials, the more powerful it is. So if I’m out in the market looking for a black T shirt with two buttons and a V-neck, and I see a testimonial of this person saying, “Hey, I just bought this black T shirt that’s V-neck and two buttons,” I’m already sold. I’m going to buy it. But if I see a testimonial, “Oh, I love their T shirts,” I’m still going to keep looking around. So being able to be very specific about the industry that you’re in, and also we encourage people to have programs like a branded system, like a branded program to know, “Hey, I’ve got this thing on the shelf here. If you buy this thing, it will solve your problem.” So being able to identify the exact product or program that they want to sell and having the testimonials refer to that program is yet another way of really kind of honing in on a successful testimonial. We go through really understanding the whole sales cycle. What does a sales cycle look like? What can people expect so that we can kind of factor that into the story so that when somebody watches a testimonial, the more we can make them feel like, “This is the journey that I’m going through and this is what I need and this is what I want,” the more powerful it is. So we ask for things like what are the reasons that people really sign up for you? Go ask your clients and say, “Hey, why did you sign up with me?” “Oh, I signed up with you because I love your beard,” or whatever their reason is, then we focus on those reasons and we put those inside the story for the testimonials what’s proven to work. We talked about objections too, so the objections, being able to address those upfront, really understanding what the objections are, what are your biggest transformations that people pay you for. And another one is the surprise transformation, so, “When I first signed up with you, I really wanted to connect more with my department, but little did I know that working with you allowed me to climb the ladder,” whatever that is, that’s like a bonus. So all those little things and really understanding the journey that people go through and then once we know it, it’s almost like we’re storyboarding the perfect testimonial, a perfect story. So we have the perfect story in our mind as video directors and then we reverse engineer the whole thing by coming up with all the questions that we need to ask to get to the sound bites. And when we conduct the interviews, we know what we’re looking for so we’ll keep asking, we’ll keep asking the questions over and over again until we know we’ve got this sound bite, we’ve got that sound bite, we can string the story together, and I think most people don’t go to that extent of thought when they’re collecting testimonials and that’s where I really want to challenge everybody is, again, you get to control the narrative and it’s the best free form of marketing that you can do out there. You already have Zoom, you have Riverside, you have these platforms and you have these people’s attention, frame the invitation and think about this. I mean, the amount of thought you put into this should be the same amount of thought as you put into a white paper or designing your website. These are so, so, so, so powerful so don’t let that go by the wayside. This is a critical, critical component of your marketing.

Alex: Dan, I love the work that you’re doing. I think it solves a big problem for both coaches and their clients and I’m going back to what you said where one of your teachers said that if someone’s coming to you and is interested in what you’re selling, that means that there’s a market for that and I think that this kind of work and kind of fleshing out the value proposition and creating clarity, both for the provider but also for the consumer at scale, that’s an important part of an evolving marketplace and ecosystem. And, as we know, coaching is young, it’s a young industry, it’s a young profession, so creating clarity in terms of value, process, very, very important. So, thank you for all the work that you’re doing. I am sure coaches are going to find your insights very valuable and thank you for being on the podcast today.

Dan: Alex, thank you so much. It was my absolute pleasure.