As I said last time, even if you’ve never spoken publicly before, you can start making sales with speaking right off the bat.
Before I get into the steps for crafting your speech to make those sales, I want to give you five things you need to consider in order to set yourself up for success.
5 Ways to Set the Stage for Prosperous Presentations
1. Consider Speaking for Free
If you don’t have an established speaking career, I definitely encourage you to consider speaking for free. Your real money is not going to come from a speaking fee anyway. It’s going to come from back-of-the-room sales.
In fact, many speakers I know make a lot more from sales than they’d ever make in speaking fees or keynotes alone.
Yes, it is sometimes possible to both get paid to speak and make sales. However, there are a lot more opportunities to speak if you’re willing to do so for free. Numerous organizations in your own community would be happy to have you.
2. Is Your Objective Leads or Sales?
Sometimes, even when you’re speaking for free, a particular venue will not let you sell. That’s not necessarily a reason to turn down the opportunity, because you can still make the event very profitable by getting leads. Leads are the names and contact information for attendees that you can contact later to offer your products and services.
You just have to make sure that you collect those leads in a way that doesn’t upset your promoter. I’ll tell you all about that later in the series.
3. Build Your Talk Around Your Product or Service
You want the subject of your talk to be directly related to what you’re selling. This may sound obvious, but some people miss that point.
For instance, if you’re offering financial consulting packages, you might do a talk on what to invest in during a down (or up) economy or how to save a bundle on your taxes.
That way, your package or program expands upon what you teach the audience during your talk.
4. Learn About the Room
You have to know something about the people you’re speaking to so that you can tailor your content or delivery somewhat. You don’t have to know everything, but you should know their background, the promoter’s background and the primary reason they’re in the room.
I’ll get into this more next time and tell you how I learned this lesson myself—painfully.
5. Get the Ratio Right
Your speech can be as long or short as you like, but ideally it’s about 90 minutes. That gives you time to follow all of the eight steps, create value and sell your product.
80% of that time should be devoted to teaching them something that they can apply in their life or business, and 20% should be devoted to the close, to overtly selling your product or service.
If you devote more than 80% to providing value, you won’t have time to do an effective close. If you close for more than 20% of the time you’re onstage, your audience might feel gypped or misled.
You’re actually selling the whole way through, but during the value portion, the selling is subtle and embedded in what you’re teaching.
The goal is that by the end of your speech, your audience wants what you have.
You don’t have to sell them anything.
They’ve already sold themselves.
David Neagle, The Million Dollar Income Acceleration Mentor and author of The Millions Within, teaches entrepreneurs and commission-based sales professionals how to quantum leap their current incomes past the 7-figure income level, often in less than 12 months. As a world-class speaker, sales trainer, and success-mindset mentor to some of the globe’s top CEOs, David also privately mentors big decision-makers in their pursuit of quantum success and peace of mind.
