In Maven's customer research, we have found that professionally delivered lessons inspire confidence and lead to better conversion. Here's everything we know about how to do that:
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✅ Dive in right away - Present yourself for no more than 1 min. If you go longer, people will drop off.

✅ Speak fast - The faster you speak, the more ground you'll cover, and the more students will feel they learned - many people listen to podcasts and videos on 1.5x speed now so don't worry about being too rapid!

✅ Interact - Take advantage of the live aspect of the class to make your students feel involved: ask students to answer questions about their professional challenges in the chat. Invite them to ask for clarifications and respond thoughtfully.

✅ Be confident - be competent with Zoom (no technical issues), be articulate, be prepared, and remember to smile!

Don't:

❌ Start late

❌ Make technical Zoom errors like not knowing how to screenshare

❌ Make it a boring sales webinar (2 min to sell your course max)

❌ Sound unpracticed - lots of ums and pauses

❌ Skip Q&A

❌ Make it all about you (1 min on your bio max)

If you share generic advice, students won't get much value from your lesson - they can get that kind of knowledge anywhere. If you spark real and new understanding for them, they will consider enrolling in your course.

✅ Tell stories - The most valuable professional insights come from your real-world experience. That's also the best way to share knowledge! Use the STAR structure (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to bring your learnings to life for your audience.

✅ Be tactical - Share many concrete and practical examples. Consider opening up a dashboard or tool to do a live demo. Include any useful information that will help students apply their knowledge immediately.

✅ Optimize your slides for "screenshots" - Students love taking screenshots of slides to remember what they learnt. When you make your slides, consider when you might encourage students to do that.

Don't:

❌ Give generic advice without real-world context

❌ Be theoretical or abstract without getting into the specifics of how you did it

❌ Be a professor (Maven is about applied expertise, not book learning)

Mid-career professionals are busy. Here are some best practices to ensure they make space for your lesson in their calendar and feel that your content will be valuable and important to them:

✅ Drive last minute signups: People who sign up in the final week before a lesson have 70% higher attendance than those who sign up earlier. This is because the lesson is fresh in their mind. Here's a template to drive last minute signups.

✅ Personally remind your signups to attend: Maven automatically sends a reminder to all signups 1 hour before your lesson. You should also send a personal note to share more about why guests should join live, for example, a useful demo you will do. You can do this the day before you lesson, and then again 30 mins before.

Instructors who offer a promo code with their Lightning Lesson have 20% higher conversion than those who do not. This is because it creates urgency for students. We recommend creating a code and sharing it during the lesson with a QR code using the template below.

If you create a code, Maven will automatically include it in all emails to your lesson sign ups. If you leave your code active, it will be sent to all sign ups to your on-demand lesson recording. The automated email will not include an expiration date for the promo. To offer an expiring promo, you should communicate the expiration date in a slide (see below) or in a custom email.
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After your lesson, your signups are energized and eager to apply their learnings. This is the best opportunity to reach out and share more about your course. You can email your signups directly from Maven.

After your lesson, your recording will be posted automatically to your public page. Once it's available on-demand, share your lesson on social. This is a great way to provide free, value-add content to your network and bring in more prospective students. You can also add your Lightning Lesson to your LinkedIn profile in the media section.