One of the biggest challenges you may have in your business is keeping your pipeline full and doing it in a leveraged way.
Consistently giving group presentations (otherwise known as one-to-many selling) is a great way to do that.
Many advisors are afraid of spending thousands of dollars on mailers and people who really only come to their seminar for the steak dinner. Not to mention the time spent and stress of trying to get “derrières in chairs.”
In truth, when you know how to get people to show up and how to create presentations that convert, running your own seminars and workshops can be a powerful source of leads and revenue.
But you don’t have to spend time and money to bring in the leads speaking provides. It fact, it doesn’t have to cost you anything.
With that in mind, I’d like to expand your vision and introduce you to another type of speaking. One that can produce great results without you spending a dime.
Get in the habit of speaking at what I call hosted events.
This is an event that someone else hosts. They get the bodies in the seats, they rent the room, they deal with all the marketing and logistics. You just show up.
You may not realize these opportunities are open to you.
In my experience advisors count themselves out on this one thinking, “No one would want me to speak to their group.” That’s not true!
When I work with advisors, one of the main ideas I hammer home is that they should work on getting booked at hosted events ASAP.
It’s a lot cheaper, less time intensive, and it builds your credibility and visibility faster than any other marketing strategy.
So, you may be thinking, “This sounds great, Deirdre, but where can I find these events?”
To start, there are two strategies I suggest you use:
Strategy 1: Scan your community online
A great place to begin is searching online for opportunities in your community. Regardless of where you live, it’s likely that in your community there are dozens of live events each week that bring in outside speakers.
To get you started, below is a list of groups that commonly host events with speakers, in most communities. Plus, I’ve listed a few speaker directories.
- Eventbrite or Meetup
- C-Suite executive groups (Vistage, Convene)
- Shared co-working space
- Chambers of Commerce
- Service clubs (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis)
- Special interest clubs (The Woman’s Club, Master Gardeners, social/athletic, country clubs)
- Function-driven groups (sales, marketing, leadership development, advertising, architects, lawyers, real estate, etc.)
- Business networking groups like Polka Dot, eWomen, Local Business Network
- Community education
- Churches
- Parks and recreation activities
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Colleges and universities, especially community colleges
- Online conference sites like AllConferences.com
- Vendor events
- Speaker directories such as Speaker Services, SpeakerZone.com or FreeSpeakers.org
- Trade associations
- Check the business section of your local paper for networking events
Still skeptical it could work for you and your topic? To bust that myth please read the following list. This list includes just some of the places where advisors I know are speaking. My hope is by reading this list you will realize you too can do this and that it will also get your creative juices flowing on generating ideas.
- Chambers of Commerce events
- Business groups
- Community Education
- Community college—individually and as a guest for others who have a course
- Divorce support groups
- Lunch and Learn events: corporations, nonprofits, government
- C-Suite executive groups: Vistage, Convene (Christian CEO peer group)
- Industry events and associations
- Events for local nonprofits
- Brought in to train advisors at other companies!
- Church groups
- High schools to parents with college bound kids
- Women’s groups
- Moms’ groups
- Public school employees
- Frontline employees and managers in corporations
- Family-owned business owners
- Physicians
- Dentists
- Hospitals
- Senior programming and senior living communities
- Vendor events
Strategy 2: Scan your personal network
This is my go-to strategy for getting booked. I find it gets me booked the quickest and in front of high quality prospects. Once I tell you what it is, it’ll seem obvious, but many people never think to tap into this goldmine.
Ready?
Ask your past and current clients for connections to speaking gigs. It’s that simple.
There are two reasons why your clients are a goldmine of speaking lead connections:
- Assuming they’ve gotten great results from working with you, (and I know they have!), these people already love you. They are already your fans and more than likely would be happy to help you get speaking engagements.
- Because we know the old adage is true: “Birds of a feather flock together.” This means your clients can likely lead you to groups of prospects who are just like them. And I’m going to make the assumption that’s what you want. (If not, you may want to think about getting new clients!)
Now when I say your clients can help you get speaking engagements, here’s what I mean: Just like with any other type of prospecting, word of mouth connections are a major factor in getting booked to speak.
Your clients likely belong to groups or work in organizations that bring in speakers and you can ask your client to make an introduction to the coordinator of the group for you.
For example: Several years ago one of my clients asked me to connect them to the event coordinator for a mom’s group I belonged to at my church. I did. They booked the gig and from this one talk, they brought in 50 new clients! Turns out I fit their ideal client profile to a T. So, predictably enough, the people I hung out with were their ideal clients, too.
I said this strategy is simple and it is, but for many the execution is not easy. Here are tips to increase your success at getting connections to potential gigs:
- Sit down and make a list of people you want to reach out to. Start with those you have a great relationship with and would love to clone. Think about:
- Your clients
- COIs
- People you meet networking
- Friends and family
- Acquaintances
- Once you come up with your list make a schedule and set goals for reaching out to them. Decide how many per day/week you will reach out to and make it doable. Use a combo of email and phone calls. Like any prospecting this is where the rubber meets the road. If you don’t make a plan and you don’t reach out you won’t get the connections to gigs.
- Looking for speaking gigs is typically not a linear process. Meaning, let’s say Doug is a favorite client. He works at a company where you’d like to speak. When you contact Doug about speaking, chances are he is not the person who will book you. More likely, he will introduce you to the person who will book you or introduce you to someone closer, who will then introduce you to the booking person.
So, your leads will come from second- or third-generation introductions. I once had a client say, “I can’t ask the people I know, they all work for themselves!” A light bulb went off when I told her, “You’re not asking them to book you, you’re asking them to introduce you to people in their network who can book you or move you one step closer to being booked.”
Attitude is everything
To profit from the enormous benefits speaking at hosted events can bring you, your mindset matters! You have to be willing to be a detective to find gigs. Don’t ask one or two people and say, “This doesn’t work! Nobody wants me!” Ask 25–50 and then email me if nothing has shaken out yet. Your mindset has to be: I’ll stay persistent and follow the trail of connections where it leads me.
In closing, let me say that like anything worthwhile, getting booked at hosted events will take some work. So why do it?
My client Mike consistently uses this strategy to speak at high schools to parents of college-bound kids. About six months ago he said, “Deirdre, I was calculating how much income my college planning talks have generated for me over time in client business…and it’s north of two million dollars!”
I think that’s a pretty solid reason to do speaking engagements. Do you?
Be sure to keep an eye out for my next article where I will give you scripts to use when asking your contacts for speaking gig introductions. I will also give you a little-used strategy to dramatically increase the chances of getting a “Yes, we’d love to have you!”