How to Design a Client-Magnet Presentation
As a marketing speaker and marketing coach, I see too many speakers, consultants, and thought-leading executives who commit to a speaking strategy built around their professional passions, interests, or favorite topics within their expertise.
Sounds like common sense, right? Well, that would be a huge mistake. DON’T do it!
For your speaking efforts to pay off in terms of marketing results, you need to design the presentation content NOT around what YOU are passionate about, but what your buyers and prospects are passionate about!
Imagine a pair of X-ray vision goggles that you are now using to zoom in on your target clients. Ask yourself the following:
- What do they want?
- What are they missing in their lives?
- What hurts?
- Where is the pain?
- What are they yearning for?
- What do they worry about most?
- What are their biggest headaches, heartaches, and hassles?
- What are their urgent, pervasive, and expensive problems?
Gather Live Ammo Data
What’s the first step? Research. Preparation. Homework.
Industry, regional, business, and company news is now at everyone’s fingertips on the Internet. Look for verbatim quotes, video clips, blog entries, trade journal profiles, and audio interviews to capture as much as you can from representative members of your buyer persona.
Then go directly to the source – YOUR real live customers and prospects. If you’re not intelligently researching your prospects’ issues, challenges, and pressures, how can you possibly come in with credible high-perceived-value solutions? One of the best ways to approach prospects is with:
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Research
- Data gathering
It positions you and your firm as an expert resource and it gives you valuable data you should be getting anyway!
Bottom line: for thought-leadership marketing to work for YOU, you have to be a dealer, collector, curator, and dispenser of thoughts... and one of the best ways to LEAD is to LISTEN.
As a marketing speaker and marketing coach who works with professional speakers, consultants, and professional services firms, one of THE most frequent questions I get is "How do I find the best places for me to speak so I generate business?"
I always come back with the following key question: What Audiences Are Your Clients In?
What groups do your ideal clients belong to? This will obviously determine which audiences you want to be in front of.
Not sure? Don’t guess – ask!
Here is the script to ask your current clients, prospects, and centers of influence who know your target market well…
“I’m looking to speak more in front of groups of [BUYER PERSONA]. I’d love to get your Advice, Insights, and Recommendations.”
(Thanks to my pal, networking and referral marketing speaker Michael Goldberg for the A-I-R approach!)
Another way to ask might be…
“Of all the industry groups and associations you belong to, which ones provide the most value in terms of the speakers and programs they present?”
With both of these scripts, the natural follow-up discussion would center around your desire to serve this industry/community more and to share information with them that would help them become even more successful.
Likely outcomes from this discussion would include:
- Names of specific groups, associations, and conferences
- Names of specific people serving in board or programming positions
- Names of other executives or decision-makers in the field
- Names of other companies or firms in need of similar information/services
- Specific networking introductions
- Offers of referrals to the individuals they already know
- An opportunity to reciprocate and ask how YOU might be of service to THEM
Resources for Targeting Best-Fit Venues
Finding venues to speak profitably could be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Here are some resources to help you laser-target your speaking to your best-fit audiences:
Have fun, speak well, and go generate some business.
Got questions? Comments? A resource or tip of your own? Please use the COMMENTS sections below and let's hear from YOU...
CEO Speaking is Your Best Weapon
The most successful motivational speakers, corporate executives, and professional services firm principals become recognized thought leaders in their areas of expertise because they deploy three powerful tools every time they speak – Clarity, Expertise, and Openness:
Clarity: In any speaking situation, clarity indicates power, confidence, and capability. Less is more. Convey a few points powerfully. Focus your message and like a laser beam, it will cut through even the most steely buyer you’re likely to encounter.
Expertise: Expertise has replaced dollars as your marketing investment. Those who share the most value win. Actionable, specific, do-this-now strategies and tactics are the coin of the realm. This goes beyond “educating your prospects” and even goes so far as “setting the buying criteria” or helping them do it themselves if they so choose.
Openness: Openness is about collaboration. Marketing is no longer someone yelling through a megaphone. It’s a person-to-person conversation. Forget about being the source of all information to your clients. Your new job is to open the possibilities, ask great questions, and then serve as a filter, lens, and curator. Openness means that every time you speak, you do it WITH them, you don’t do it TO them!
Mastering this kind of CEO Speaking will pay off in helping you attract, engage, and win more clients - NOW more than ever!
As a marketing speaker and marketing coach on the front lines of the meltdown economy, I'm seeing firsthand and through my clients that marketing has become even more challenging because – now more than ever – your buyers are lazy, busy, and befuddled.
See if some of these characteristics ring true with YOUR prospects and buyers over the last few months:
Lazy: Your buyers do not look forward to being marketed and sold to. The old standards of good, cheap, and fast have been replaced with the new “Web 2.0” standard of perfect, free, and now. Instant gratification, easy to buy, and effortless to install are the new watchwords for marketing and sales success. The expert at hand is the expert who gets hired.
Busy: Buyers have a million things on their plate besides researching the best options for products, services, vendors, partners, and trusted advisors. You need to become the obvious choice, the smartest choice, and the least risky choice – all in the span of a very short amount of time to be heard above their (internal and external) noise.
Befuddled: Buyers are overwhelmed with information, choices, data, specs, features, benefits, and marketing hype. It can be hard to separate the best service providers from the best marketers – and rarely are they one and the same. Your buyers have been burned, disappointed, and let down by slick marketers in the past.
So what can you do?
You won’t win them over with sizzle so your only choice is to convey TWO things with the utmost clarity and conviction:
1. We understand what you’re up against
2. We can fix it
That's marketing in a nutshell, folks! Agree? Disagree? Comments? Fire away down in the COMMENTS section and I'd love to hear from YOU...
The Challenge
Too often, professional services firms:
- Do marketing “by accident” or don’t do outbound marketing effectively
- Hope that “prospects will call us when they need us”
- Never know where their next lead is coming from
- Don’t market using their best asset – thought leadership
- Throw too many dollars into a “marketing black hole”
The Opportunity
Independent research with over 700 professional services firms proves that the #1 source of new business is “Making warm calls to existing clients” – and #2 and #3 are “Speaking at conferences and trade shows” and “Running our own seminars and events” yet if yours is like the majority of firms, you haven’t yet cracked the code on how to make this work for YOUR people to attract YOUR clients.
More research shows that 52-72% of B2B professional services BUYERS are willing to switch to new service providers across a spectrum of specialties. (Wellesley Hills Group, 2009 What’s Working in Lead Generation professional services market study)
Meaning: You’re always ONE good presentation away from closing new business.
The Payoff
Professional services firms and thought leaders within large companies can often do a MUCH better job in the following areas:
• Design and deliver a client-magnet presentation
• Generate leads without being salesy
• Use Before-During-After marketing to stay top of mind
• Maximize profits on a shoestring marketing budget
• Generate more leads, better prospects and bigger sales using irresistible offers and high-integrity techniques
...and in my experience working with clients like this, it does NOT take huge amounts of work; small, targeted shifts in your packaging, promotion, messaging, and followup makes all the difference (which we usually nail down over the course of 1 or 2 days together and then the floodgates open!)
Last Word: Marketing Skills vs. Presentation Skills
A decent presentation built for marketing and sales results will outperform a brilliant presentation built for a “standing ovation” or praise from your local Toastmaster’s club or high marks from a presentation skills coach.
Bottom line: I don’t care if you become a great speaker. I do very much care that you become a good speaker who consistently generates more leads, better prospects, and bigger sales each time you present in front of a roomful of potential buyers.
What do you think? Fire off some thoughts, comments, or questions in the COMMENTS section below. Let's talk about this one...
This smart
marketing tidbit came across my desk from Joan Stewart, aka the Publicity Hound:
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One of the most valuable tips I learned is that the onslaught of emails I'm receiving from business people offering cut-rate prices on their products and services is, for them, the quickest way to the poor house. In fact, raising prices, even in a meltdown economy, is one of the fastest ways to success.
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Why is this so smart? Well, because Joan agrees with me on this point. I'm not ashamed to share with you that for 2010, I've just raised my speaking fee. And not by a little - by a lot. Specifically, it's up by 33%. And it wasn't low to start with.
Surprise: I'm booking just as many programs - and perhaps slightly more than before with (because of?) the higher fee level.
Leave a comment below and share YOUR wisdom on what YOU are doing to raise yourself above the competition - both literally with pricing and in other more customer-centric ways...
"We often talk about ourselves as if we have permanent genetic flaws that can never be altered."
-- Marshall Goldsmith
This snippet from America's preeminent executive coach (and founding director of the Alliance for Strategic Leadership) speaks volumes about where most people are today, and where they COULD BE.
My wife was on the phone a while back with a friend who runs a video production business. She asked him, "So, Ron - do YOU have the sales gene?" Turns out that neither one of them believed they had "the sales gene." Problem is, HE was in sales and my wife wasn't!
Guess how robust his sales are?
Exactly.
Although I'm a marketing speaker and not a sales trainer, I can tell you that this mindset WILL hurt your bottom line.
And the term "gene" - as in the creativity gene, the leadership gene, the money-making gene, the happiness gene - is as FLEETING in reality as it sounds BIOLOGICALLY PERMANENT when we talk about it!
Thomas Watson, Jr. of IBM weighed in on this issue when talking about excellence (or the 'excellence gene' as we might call it in this context):
"If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work."
Try this version on for size: If you want to achieve X (sales, dating, marketing, whatever), as of this second, start believing that you DO possess that gene -- and then ACT on that fact!
Marketing speakers and marketing consultants are famous for packing in "over 100 strategies you can use immediately" and "97 secrets" or "51 immutable laws" of this and that.
Problem is - those numbers are too high. You don't need 100, you can't implement 97, and you'll never get a handle on 51.
You need 3-4 max. Three strategies. Or four tactics. Used with focus, momentum, and consistency...
Less is truly more. Here's Picasso's take on it:
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You must always work not just within, but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way, the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.
-- Pablo Picasso
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If any one thing characterizes the time in which we live, it is the tendency to strive and to overreach and to want more, more, more, now, now, now.
The problem with multi-tasking and this go-go-go pattern of life and work is that there is no room for mastery, for ease, for “strength in reserve.”
- If you want to get more done, work more slowly.
- If you want it faster, develop a singular focus.
- If you want to get better, do less.
The age of better-faster-cheaper is over. And you know what? Even if you want better-faster-cheaper, the internet has already raised the bar on you because it has brought with it the expectation of
perfect-now-free. You can’t win that game.
Success, according to Picasso’s definition of “mastery, ease, and reserve” is much like the great pot roast recipe that has been handed down from generation to generation in three simple words:
Low and slow.You can’t make a good pot roast quickly.
In a hurry? Fine.
Start cooking it sooner.
Buy good meat.
Make your own stock. Don’t open a can.
Use fresh vegetables cut to the right size.
Add only the things you like and what you know tastes good. (Hate potatoes? Don’t add them – it’s YOUR pot roast!) Take care blending the ingredients.
Cook it low and slow. (This seems like a good recipe for marketing, relationships, and life, too!)
My advice for both emerging and experienced professional speakers is to "invest in the relationship" with meeting planners and conference producers. What do I mean by that and why is it important for your success?
Invest in the relationship with meeting planners means it’s not always about the money. Most good conference producers and meeting planners consider themselves in the speaker marketing business, the speaker visibility business, the speaker credibility business. When I spent a year working "on the other side of the desk," I was thrilled to work with some incredibly accomplished and successful speakers – CSP’s, CPAE’s – because they SAW that fact.
The company I worked with had 350,000 subscribers and sent out over 10 million emails a month. If you were one of my speakers, that’s the scope and scale of reach you got from us. Your topic, your credentials, your website. 700,000 eyeballs. Do the math. (And see my note at the end of this post if you'd like to get in on this yourself!)
Today, as a speaker marketing coach, many of my professional speaker clients ask me "How do I establish visibility and credibility with my target market?" THIS is precisely one of the best ways!!
Don’t get me wrong – our speakers got paid – but it was a lot less than you might get for a corporate keynote. I know that and you know that. Put your ego in the back seat for a minute. Be willing to invest in the relationship Because if you do a great job the first time, meeting planners and association executives are often in a position to…
a. Raise your base fee
b. Revenue share with you
c. Publish your articles in hardcopy publications, websites, and blogs
d. Publish and distribute your manuals, training guides and e-learning tools
e. Promote you any way they can
For example, I had speakers start doing audio conferences for $500, and then gradually, as the relationship evolved, move up to getting over $40,000 in royalties and revenue share in a single year from our various projects together. On the other hand, if as speakers we ask for all that up front, we won’t get it.
My advice to you at the beginning of any relationship with a meeting planner or event producer is Recognize the marketing/PR value, and let the relationship develop. To adapt a favorite saying, “Do what their audience loves and the money will follow.”
NOTE: You can find a whole lot more of these "information publishing companies"
that produce audio conferences, webinars, live events, and niche hardcopy and online newsletters by visiting their professional association, the Specialty Information Publishers Association (SIPA). Perhaps one or more of these companies would make the perfect partner for YOU to expand your thought leadership platform - and get known, get booked, and get slightly famous!
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If you're an emerging or established professional speaker and it's time raise your marketing game, it's not too late to join the Speaker Profit Blueprint program... everything has been recorded and transcribed for you and our live sessions continue through May 4, 2010. Contact me to see if joining this program might be a fit for your speaking/consulting/coaching business and your specific goals.
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As a marketing speaker, I'm often asked the question if I'm also a "motivational speaker" and my answer is no. Although I do admire motivational speakers and topics - and HAVE trafficked in a bit of leadership thinking and writing.
Here's an oldie but goodies from the archives:
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There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you
damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human
duty, the duty to take the consequences.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
As a leader, I will expose you to the options and the
likely consequences of those options.
-- Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
The Leadership 22
Leadership means...
* Exposing people to options
* Getting along with people
* Being a dealer in hope
* Sales (products, services, ideas, values)
* Teaching, mentoring, guiding
* Be the example
* Results, not talk
* Bringing sides together
* Being a dispenser of enthusiasm
* Solving problems
* Blazing the trail and leaving a path
* Producing more leaders
* Showing average people how to do the work of superior people
* Character and integrity
* Putting first things first
* The capacity to translate vision into reality
* Finding a parade and getting in front of it
* Your switch is never turned off
* The ability to communicate something people want
* Action, not position
* Backbone, wishbone, funny bone
* Doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons
What do YOU think? What would you ADD? Leave a comment below and share your opinion...