I love sharing my knowledge with new acquaintances and public speaking helps me do just that.
I’ve spoken at many local and international events, and you can check out some video recordings here:
I’ve also spent more than 10 years on stage in drama classes, so I am not a shy speaker! If you need additional information on the topic, check out my speaker overview or contact me at v at valchanova.me.
Here are some of the topics I’m passionate about and can present at your next event.
Building data-driven buyer personas
30/60 min | Presented at WordCamp Sofia, Soft Unit Conf, and more
We often put a dividing line between quantitative data and the personal relationship with clients. The thinking goes that if we focus on numbers too much we forget the actual people behind them.
We’ll fight this notion by demonstrating how data can help you understand your users and build better buyer personas. We’ll answer the following questions:
- What can Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, and Linkedin Website Demographics teach us about our audience?
- How to build on top of quantitative information with interviews and personal feedback?
- How to group and segment data into distinct personas?
Key takeaways: Even if your business is just starting, there’s lots of available information you can use to understand who your customers are, what value are they looking for and how you can talk to them efficiently.
Personas are not enough! Learn about Jobs to be Done
30/60 min | Hasn’t been presented live
Do you know what your customers want? Too often, we reply with a resounding yes when in reality we don’t have a clue. The first step to knowing more is to actually speak with your customers.
Jobs to be Done is a great methodology that helps you uncover the deeper motivation of customers. If done right, it can be a powerful weapon that can inform your messaging, product features or pricing model. In this presentation, I will present the key components of the JTBD theory. I will also share my personal experience with implementing it and using the findings in the long-term marketing strategy.
Key takeaways: Personas tell us who our customers are, but Jobs to be Done tells us why they do what they do. Having one without the other is only part of the picture – and while everyone talks about buyer personas, few people talk about Jobs to be Done. The balance should be restored
The 10 productivity commandments
30/60 min | Presented at WordCamp Sofia
Deep work, Maker time, Personal Kanban, GTD, MIT, Pomodoro… Productivity is on everyone’s mind and there’s countless advice out there. Over the years, it feels like I’ve tried it all. Not out of curiosity, but out of sheer necessity – I’m working on 4 major projects at a time, not to count a blog, a series of science events, and a course with 600 students!
In this talk, I’ll share with you the methods, routines, and tools that worked. My goal is to give you 10 actionable takeaways you can apply to your work tomorrow – or even today. Some of them include:
- Why Pomodoro can be glorious – and why it sometimes flops?
- How to make your calendar the best guardian of your sanity?
- What else to pay attention to, if time management is just half the picture?
Key takeaways: Productive people work hard to stay productive – and you can start building habits towards that one step at a time.
Setting up your growth experiments team – lessons from a failed attempt
30 min | Presented at WordCamp Bucharest
Growth is the name of the game in Tech-land. Finding the right approach requires a lot of testing and this can only be done with a regular experiments schedule.
Our internal experiments team started with lots of fanfare… and died a gruesome death just three months later. What went wrong and what we learned? And, more importantly, how we changed our approach to create a working process?
This will not be just a personal story – it will come with a list of recommendations on how to set up the growth experiments process in your team, big or small. It will teach you:
- Who you need on your growth team?
- How long should experiments run for?
- Why a bit of dictatorship can be a good thing?
Key takeaways: Growth teams are becoming more and more popular – but few people really know how to build one and make it work. This presentation gives a list of actionable advice on how to start.
Freelancer and small business branding: How to win clients by being you?
60 min | Presented at Startup Grind
If you’re a freelance professional or part of a small size team, you have to work on the brand of you. But branding is associated with expensive and complex things like logos, color schemes, and ridiculously clever business cards. Where to start? This presentation will be a better place than most.
Over the span of 30 minutes, I will give you an actionable blueprint for your branding strategy. The basis here won’t be The Big Marketing Bucks (TM), but authenticity and professionalism. You will walk away ready to:
- define your ideal audience,
- understand their needs and how you can deliver on them,
- build your value proposition by balancing the personal and the professional.
Key takeaways: Branding can be done without deep marketing knowledge if you know well your audience and their needs. Then you can provide them with consistent value, proving your professionalism.
The 4 types of content metrics
30/60 min | Hasn’t been presented live
You get a great idea about a blog post, you spend a bunch of time researching, a sleepless night writing and a couple more hours editing and fine-tuning. You then push the Publish button and see your new creation flap its wings and disappear beyond the horizon of the Internet. You’re done! Right?
Wrong! You can’t improve what you can’t measure – so how are you going to get better at content creation if you seldom look at the numbers. This talk will give you a framework for evaluating content performance based on 4 types of content metrics. If you use them daily, I guarantee you’ll see content performance improving
The big bad content planning workshop
60/90 min | Hasn’t been presented live
How many types of content do you have in your marketing plan? If the answer is “less than 10”, we’ve got some work to do!
People often think creating content is a question of creativity, but that’s not true. If you roll your sleeves up and do the work, you can come up with lots of content ideas that bring value to your users.
During this workshop, we’ll review different ways of generating content ideas and building topic groups and content clusters. We’ll cover both long-form
Key takeaways: Participants will review different approaches to idea generation and grouping content ideas in themes that they will be able to use in their everyday work. They will leave the room with at least 10 new ideas for content.