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!
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...
As a
marketing speaker and
marketing coach who works with professional speakers, consultants, and professional services firms, the topic of email marketing comes up fairly regularly.
A study conducted by Quiris discovered that people have an inner circle of 16 sources from whom they open e‐mails—that includes e‐zines they subscribe to, and their friends.
What does this mean to you? Simple: the competition is fierce.
You could be giving away free gold bars, but if no one reads any of your message how would anyone know about it? It is the age‐old question what came first—the chicken or the egg? The greatest message no one reads is no more effective than the worst message everyone reads. They have to read your message.
Your typical Internet user is overwhelmed with daily e‐mails, most of which they never read. Do you read all your e‐mail?
People do not have the time to sit and read every single e‐mail they get. They read their e‐mail the way they read their normal mail, except now they have the power to use a delete button.
They quickly scan two very important lines on every e‐mail that will help them decide. They look at the “from” line, and the subject line.
Always use the same from line when emailing to your subscriber list. Your readers must get to know and trust you. Once you create a bond with your reader and gain their trust, you will make it into their inner circle.
Isn’t this how you decide which e‐mails you will read?
Your subject line is a different story; try to give your reader a reason to read your e‐mail. Offer him a benefit for reading your message. Let him know what is in it for him or her.
Tests show that if you include the readers’ first name in the subject line, you will get a noticeable bump in response.
Think of your subject line as a mini headline. One of my most successful subject lines from my e‐zine was “Do Question Headlines Work?” There was an avalanche of response to that simple subject line.
Michael Masterson has come up with a formula he uses when he writes headlines; it’s called the 4 U’s. Your headline must be useful, unique, ultra specific, and urgent. It is a nifty little checklist. The next time you are stumped for a headline, try the 4 U’s.
Here let me show you how it is done. Check the subject line for the 4U’s, for each U give it a score of 1‐4; 1 being lousy, 4 being excellent. When you’re done average out your score and see what you have. Anything lower than a 3 should probably be re‐written.
Here is a sample subject line from a small business marketing e‐zine:
8 ways to generate a ton of repeat business
Is it useful? Every businessperson or salesperson wants to know how to increase his or her referral business. Yes, it is useful, let’s give it a 4.
Is it unique? Well, not exactly so let’s give it a 2.
Is it ultra specific? You betcha, it tells you there are 8 ways, not a couple or a few but eight specific ways. So let’s give it a 4.
How about urgent? There really is no timeframe given so let’s rate this a 2. If you add these numbers up you get 12 divide that by 4 and you get 3. Not bad, but the real question is - how can YOU do even better?
In the comments section below -- Will you share your thoughts and insights into how YOU decide which emails to open and engage with?
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...
As a marketing speaker and marketing coach, many of my clients have neither the budget nor the business model to justify a big advertising budget, much less advertising on TV... BUT a while back there was a Home Depot television commercial that brilliantly demonstrated an understanding of HOW their customers (and yours) make purchasing decisions.
It went something like this…
A man is standing in the tool department holding a drill while his wife looks on dubiously.
He obviously wants to buy it, but apparently expects some resistance from his wife so in an effort to convince her says, "Don't think of this as a drill, think of this as your new book shelves."
Well, his ploy worked because in the next scene, the same couple is standing in front of the table saws. He smiles at his wife, points to one and says, "And think of this as your new deck!"
The final scene shows the same couple getting ready to purchase a shop vac. Only this time the woman speaks up and says, "And I can think of this as my clean garage!"
Not only do they do a stellar job of articulating their products' benefits but they do so without mentioning one feature! So, the next time you're tempted to itemize your products' or services' nifty features take a deep breath and stop.
Instead, articulate how those features translate into customer benefits, outcomes, and results.
"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!
As a 
marketing speaker and marketing coach to other professional speakers, CEOs, and business owners - and certainly from my own experience - I can safely say that too often, we get caught up in trying to get everything just perfect.
While you are working on “perfect,” someone else with “just okay” is raking in all the money.
Face it - Reading the next book, attending the next seminar, or trying the latest software alone will do nothing for you. This is the classic "Ready, Aim, Aim, and Aim" syndrome. Always aiming and never pulling the trigger.
The key lies in taking action. I would like to invite you to try a technique suggested by my colleague Michael Masterson—the Ready, Fire, Aim technique. Do something; even if it is wrong, go ahead take the shot -- screw up.
At the very least, you are moving in the right direction.Fellow speaker and prosperity guru Joe Vitale says, “Money loves speed” those who take the swiftest action make the most amount of money.
Go ahead -- DO IT, and once you're moving, then worry about making it perfect.
Let's take the specific context of internet marketing as an example. And we'll start with your e-zine or blog...
In its simplest form an e‐zine or blog is all about information. Give your reader the information he wants to read about, and he will reward you with his trust and eventually his money.
There are five phases for any Internet marketing entrepreneur. In phase one, you read and study Internet marketing, go to conferences, devour e‐books and courses. At this stage, you are thinking about internet marketing all the time, yet you are not actually in it yet—not actually doing it. You don’t have a list, product, or the infrastructure in place to do business online.
In phase two, you dip your toe in the water—developing a product and making a few sales. The income is not significant. Except now, the idea of making money online is no longer merely a dream, an idea in your head. It’s reality. Making your first few sales will energize you and propel you forward to phase three.
In phase three, you develop more products, build your e‐zine subscriber list, and start making a significant spare‐time income online. Maybe it’s a thousand dollars a month in sales. Maybe it’s a thousand dollars a week. It’s not enough to live on, yet. But the extra money allows you to buy nicer things and become more financially secure.
In phase four, you reach a point where your Internet business makes enough money for you to live on—enough for you to quit your job and leave the rat race behind forever. For some people, this might be $2,000 to $3,000 a week in net online revenues.
In phase five, you double or triple the size of your list, add more products make more deals, and start making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or even a million dollars or more. You become an Internet millionaire.
The problem is that the large majority of people who explore Internet marketing never get past phase one. They get addicted to reading “make money on the Internet” materials and attending conferences and tele‐seminars on the subject. But they never actually do something.
No matter what the marketing strategy, tactic, or business development effort - get going with baby step... RIGHT NOW.
You want an inbound link back to your blog or website? Great - leave a comment below with your reactions to the "Ready, Fire, Aim" technique - and you'll have DONE something to build your business. Do it!!!
Guest column by Burt DubinHow to collect even higher speaking fees by creating alliances with sponsors…
Can you believe that a perfectly simple, marvelous, easy-to- implement marketing idea can be largely ignored by the community of professional speakers?
Can you imagine having an organization with deep pockets of cash promoting your programs at their expense, building your name and fame in markets you want to penetrate?
Can you picture this cash-rich sponsor sending along a logistics person - on the speaking tour they’ve set up for you (Be still, my beating heart!) - to handle all the physical details like room set-up for you.
And, of course, you may as well fantasize your sponsor then doing all the advance publicity to be sure you address a packed house. Well, hold on to your hat because all the above is true. It’s real. It’s happening now for 2 speakers. They are-in alphabetical order-Michael Chatman and Barb Schwarz, CSP. This article is due to their generously revealing how they do it.
What is a sponsor:
A Sponsor is a group, a company, any cash-generating, profit- making entity that can benefit from exposure to your target market. Sponsors need you because they want to market to the same folks you target.
When you work together you create a triple win. The third winner is your target market.
If your target market is schools and their students, logical sponsors include retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers. They get their name and logo on your handouts. They get great PR. They are the good guys. Remember the firms that place soft drink, snack and candy machines in the schools, suppliers of uniforms for school athletic teams. Purveyors of the foods served in the school cafeteria.
I share these insights anecdotally. I do not pretend to have access to any wisdom beyond my own experience. What I say here is true for me. You alone can decide whether it is true for you. And this may not be all there is. It’s simply what I get here and now:
Photographers who do class pictures, school ring vendors. Every entity that makes money from providing equipment, supplies, consumables to the school. If you address sales professionals, cellular phone companies, computer companies, vendors of everything salespeople buy are potential sponsors.
If you speak to real estate agents, title companies, escrow companies, mortgage companies, etc., are appropriate sponsors.
In any industry or trade group that buys from a group of vendors, any member of that group-including vendors presently frozen out by trade custom or long-time habits-is a prospective sponsor of your programs.
Your sponsor, or sponsors, use funds from their advertising or promotion budgets, funds already committed to be spent somewhere, to advertise and promote attendance at your programs.
How do sponsors benefit from promoting you:
Exposure of their products and their company before the program starts through the publicity created by any of the interested parties.
Sponsor can do a Pre-program presentation. You can sometimes, depending on the venue, give Sponsor table top display space in the back of the room. Sometimes you can arrange for sponsor to have a booth. Sponsor name and logo may go on all printed materials, including any tickets, book covers, albums, bumper stickers, your letterhead.
In media interviews you always mention sponsor’s name. Sponsor’s representatives can sit down in front and you can introduce them during program. Sponsor’s customer goodwill and loyalty is enhanced. Sponsor may get more direct business because they sponsored you.
Is there to be signage at this program? Arrange that each sponsor have the exclusive sign for their type product. If sponsor markets a soft drink and refreshments are to be served, you arrange that sponsor is to have exclusive pourage rights with no other soft drink to be made available.
There may be $ generated from your product sales-and you need to agree up front whether you keep all this or whether you revenue-share with sponsor. You can create a database of attendees or of key influencers for later follow-up.
Burt Dubin may be reached at www.speakingsuccess.com or +800-321-1225, or, from overseas, 928-753-7546. Or you can E-mail Burt at burt@BurtDubin.com. For a free subscription to Burt’s Speaking Biz Strategies Letter, send an e-mail to Burt with a one-word message, Subscribe.
Professional speaker marketing tip
Most professional speakers, consultants, coaches, and solopreneurs have a hard time moving into a niche or declaring a specialty. Most want to attract as much business as possible, so they go for broad marketing across all topics, categories, and industries, trying to attract all audiences for all that they can offer.
If you fall into this trap, your marketing messages get spread so thin that soon, you’re spending more and more time, effort, and money on marketing and getting less and less return. Does this sound familiar?
The truth is that successful experts know who they are – they “move aside” and specialize in a niche. They focus more energy on marketing their “flagship” services to a very specific target market.
Why? Because – unlike Wal-Mart or Citibank, your business can’t be all things to all people. “Move Aside” is about finding your niche, and claiming your expertise in a narrow area of specialty. In plain English, this means you want to become the “Go-To Guy” or “Go-To Gal” for your specific audience – the exact opposite of a “jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”
Perhaps you want to be known as “the consulting firm that knows the insurance industry inside and out” or “the restaurant marketing coach” or “the manufacturing turnaround expert.”
Maybe you want to appeal to corporate executives with an elite image or appeal to family business owners with a homespun image.
The people you speak with will have a very different reaction to these two mental images of your products/services:
- “I think you might be a good fit...”
- “Finally! You are exactly who we’ve been looking for!”
Let me give you an example that will make this point very clearly.
In my hometown in suburban Philadelphia, there’s a real company that lists among its services “Carpet Removal, House Cleaning, Odd Jobs, Catering.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I want a caterer, I’m looking for someone who does professional catering all the time. I don’t want to have to worry about “Did they wash their hands after the carpet removal job and before serving the guests at my daughter’s wedding?”
In fact, even among “serious” catering companies (the ones that don’t do carpet removal) if I’m looking for a caterer for a wedding, I’ll probably be drawn to “Wedding Bells Catering” much more so than “Sam’s Catering” or “Good Eats Catering.” In today’s marketplace, specialists rule.
Create your own special niche. Developing a specialty can go a long way to attracting more substantial clients. Being known as the “experts” in a particular field gives you the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. This is the edge that will tend to draw prospective clients to you. The bottom line: more speaking gigs, more consulting offers, more coaching clients, more revenue, more referrals, and taken together, just a whole lot more fun in running your professional practice.
The fact is that the marketplace values clarity, focus, and direction.
Once you become known for being great at one thing, your company can spread its wings and start to attract more business across the board through a powerful “Halo effect.” If you get known over time for being great at one thing, in the future, people will begin to naturally assume you’re great in a variety of other ways, too. However, if you try to say you’re great at everything on Day 1, nobody will believe you!
The only way to know if this will work for your business is to try it! You’ll be pleased with the speed and magnitude of the results.
What do you think? What's YOUR success story with moving aside? Agree? Disagree? Please use the COMMENTS area below to jump into the conversation...