The actual reasons Workshops make good Expertise Demos

It's about the bandwidth

João Landeiro

Mar 29, 2025

I've started to write a book on this stuff. You can help here.

You know I've been enamorated with the idea of the Expertise Demo:

Link: I've written about how tech demos are powerful tools to see what people don't understand yet
Link: I've written about how workshops can be designed to be Expertise Demos

But I haven't explained why Workshops make good expertise demos.
We'll fix that now.

Workshops convey expertise at a deeper level

Selling expertise is difficult mostly because of how hard it is to ascertain its value. Prospects don't see how your impressive expertise can help them and refrain from investing in your services.

So step one is making sure that the market can not only understand what you do, but also how that could help them in their own challenges.

Workshops are one of the tools to make your expertise more legible from the outside (others are online content, public speaking, publishing a book, etc).

What is unique about workshops is that they are a high-bandwidth experience.
Even in their online format, they involve participants in a much deeper way.

What follows is a rough comparison of different ways of making Expertise more tangible to outsiders. I won't pretend I don't favor workshops, but I invite you to interpret and judge this as you see fit.

Prove you can help them by doing it with them

Because workshops are a collaborative experience, they create conditions for several good things to happen:

Clients are involved in the process and guarantee you address the right themes
Clients see how you can apply your expertise to their own context
Clients feel part of the solution and will promote it internally

Finally, other aspects that are also a potent argument in favor of workshops are the fact they are time-boxed, outcome-focused and very structured. All of these characteristics make them very action-oriented and very fitting to addressing complex problems.

Everything about Expert Workshops can be calibrated to highlight the value and applicability of your expertise.

Turning Workshops into Expertise Demos

Expertise Demos are a specific type of Workshop I'm experimenting with.

When converting an existing workshop into an Expertise Demo, the best analogy I've found is pruning.

As an Expert, it's quite easy to overestimate how well non-experts will understand and absorb new concepts. Most people are getting to know concepts you've chewed on for years, so they need much more time than what feels natural to you.

Since Expertise Demos are supposed to be laser-focused on making your expertise apparent and move prospects into other services of yours, they need to be much leaner than what you probably assume.

So you must prune.

Do away with long explanations and contextualization.
Introduce the bare minimum of new concepts that are needed to move forward.
Reduce the number of activities to create more room for the ones that truly matter.

There's a catch, though:

Most experts appreciate nuance too much to feel comfortable removing parts of their process. We tend to resist this, because we feel that every bit is 100% necessary.

But of course that's not true. Some things are only 10% necessary.

Something you can do right now

Set a timer to 15 minutes
Hit doc.new on you search bar
Make a list of compliments you've received for your work. You can copy and paste screenshots, emails, etc.
What is the pattern? What do people always seem to like about your work?
That's what you need to shape your Expertise Demo around.

In other news:

I've recorded 6 episodes of my 8 episode podcast series. I haven't published them yet, but there's a link to the Spotify page at the bottom.
Because of the podcast, I've had a lot of cool chats this week. On Tuesday I spoke to people in the UK, US, Australia, Moldova, Croatia and Brazil. Makes me feel like a Work From Home James Bond (indulge me, please)
Regarding the book, I was intentional on making it a bit harder for people to join as beta readers. It's very satisfying when people go through the work to volunteer for that.
I've posted these things on LinkedIn

Oh, btw, there's this thing coming up