Category: David

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.

I told you before that you have to know your audience. A similar principle applies when you’re presenting at multi-speaker events. You need to know the other speakers as well.

When I’m speaking at a conference, I always ask for a list of the speakers, and also who’s on right before and after me.

If I don’t know those two presenters, in particular, I do research to find out these things:

What do they speak about? What are they selling in the back of the room? What are their price points? Are they going to contradict my work? Now, you could do your research and still not know exactly what the person before you is going to say ~ or there could be a last-minute change in the line-up.

That’s why it’s absolutely essential that you be in the room to hear at least the speaker who’s going on right before you.

Be in the Room
You need to know what the audience just heard and adjust your speech, if necessary.

Don’t change what you’re teaching, but if you’re going to tell the audience something contradictory to what they just heard, you want to acknowledge that to the audience, so they don’t sit there, confused and uncomfortable.

That can be as simple as saying, “The previous speaker has a different perspective on this, but in my twenty years of working with clients, I have found that…”

Or you might be following someone with an emotional story, and you want to be sensitive and skillful, particularly in your opening remarks.

For instance, a couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference in Cancun, Mexico, that, due to airline problems, had to make last-minute changes in the line-up. One day, I ended up speaking after Dick and Rick Hoyt, the father and son team, who have competed as a unit in 1,000 marathons and Ironman competitions, Dick pushing his disabled son in specially designed wheelchairs.

When they finished speaking, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room, and no presenter would want to follow them. Getting up there and telling the audience that you’ve got the greatest thing since sliced bread just would not work.

I had to figure out how to transition from their story to mine and still look good.

Because I was in the room, listening to them, and reading the audience, I was able to come up with that thoughtful transition, and we ended up getting great sales that day. If I hadn’t been there to hear their story, I could have seemed insensitive or irrelevant, and our results would not have been nearly as good.

Be Prepared
The Boy Scout motto applies here. Because no matter what you set up prior to going into a speaking engagement, you can be sure they’re going to change something once you get there.

If you’re not prepared, that change could mean the death of what you’re doing.

On the other hand, a little preparation goes a long way toward ensuring that you come out looking like a star with a bucketload of sales to show for it.

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.

When it comes to negotiating with promoters, it literally pays to know your numbers.

By that, I mean, your closing percentage: the percentage of the room that buys what you sell after your presentations.

If you have a high closing percentage, you’ve got clout with promoters.

Think about it. Since the promoters generally receive 50% of your sales, it stands to reason that the more sales you make, the more valuable you are to them, and the more likely you are to get what you want.

How to Correctly Calculate Your Closing Percentage
A common mistake that speakers make when calculating their closing percentage is to use the head count, rather than the buying units. The head count is everyone in the audience. A buying unit is a person, couple or group that can make a purchase.

For instance, if you’re speaking to a room with 1,000 people, but, because of the topic, they’re all couples, you don’t have 1,000 buying units. You have 500, because, typically, a husband and wife are only going to buy one of your programs. Also counted as one buying unit could be a boss and his or her assistant or a small group from the same office.

To calculate your closing percentage, just divide the number of people who bought your product or service by the number of buying units in the room. So if you sold 100 copies of your program, and there were 400 buying units, you had a closing percentage of 25%.

Now, let’s say the head count of that room was 800. If you mistakenly used that figure, you’d get a sales ratio of only 12.5%.

Obviously, there’s a big difference in how a promoter is going to view you if you do 25% in sales versus 12.5%.

Even more important, that ratio wouldn’t accurately reflect your skill and achievement. So you could think that you’re not doing very well in your sales presentations, when you’re actually excelling.

How to Use Your Clout
Knowing your numbers can help you get booked, secure an optimum time slot, and give you leverage when promoters want to make changes.

For instance, if the promoter says, “I know your contract says you can speak for 90 minutes, but we need you to do it in 60. Can you do that?”

“Well, I could,” you’d respond, “but let me tell you what it’s going to cost you. If I do it in 60 minutes, we’re going to lose about 30% in sales. I’ve got an average closing ratio of 20%. You’ve got 500 buying units here. My product costs $1,000.” Pause to do the quick calculation. “That means you, personally, would lose about $15,000.”

“Oh,” your promoter says as the figure sinks in. “Okay. You can have your 90 minutes.”

If your closing percentage were artificially low because you didn’t calculate it properly, you just wouldn’t have the same impact.

Sure, you could insist that they honor your contract, and you should if the situation warrants it.

But it’s far better to turn potentially awkward interactions into win-wins.

Know your numbers and show promoters that it’s in their best interest to give you the consideration you’ve earned.

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.

You could follow my 8 steps to the tee and still shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to sales, if you don’t also heed the advice I’m going to give you over the next several weeks.

You need to set yourself up for a prosperous close before you even touch a foot onstage. Again, “the close” is the time during your presentation when you specifically sell the program or service that will be available in the back of the room after your talk.

The Ideal Environment
The first thing you have to do is to create and control the close and sales environment, so that it’s conducive to selling your product or service.

That means you have to negotiate with your promoter or the person who invited you to speak to make sure that the following things are in your contract. Or, if there’s no contract, that you have a verbal agreement around the following:

1. Dedicated 15-minute break. There must be a break after you speak, where nothing else is happening but the opportunity to buy your product or service. To clarify that even further, I also put in my contract that I won’t speak before lunch or dinner, or before a raffle or a drawing.

You don’t want to compete with their hunger. You don’t want to compete with anything. When you are done with your talk, the only thing you want the audience to do is to dash to your table to buy what you’ve got.

You also don’t want to give your presentation after a cocktail hour. The last thing you want is a bunch of people in the room who have been drinking. I put that term in my contract too.

2. You will break the room. You should be the one to announce the break. You don’t want anyone else getting up there and breaking the momentum you just spent 90 minutes building.

You want to be the one to say, “We’re going to take a 15-minute break now. And I’ll be in the back of the room to answer your questions.”

Educating Promoters
Since you generally will have a 50/50 financial split with your promoters, they’re likely to be amenable to those terms, but sometimes you do have to educate them.

For instance, if they want you to be the last speaker before lunch, you could say, “Well, I could, but then they’re going to be more interested in going to lunch than in purchasing stuff in the back of the room. So, that literally could cost us 30% or 40% of the sales we would have earned. That means you could lose $20,000 or $30,000.” That will get the promoter’s attention. He or she will now be in favor of your doing whatever you say you need in order to get the sales.

Obviously, you’ll have more credibility and clout if you’re not pulling figures out of the air. They should be real and provable estimates.

You get those credible figures by knowing what your conversion ratio is and the correct way to calculate it. (Many speakers do it incorrectly.)

To learn how to do that calculation and get the clout you’ve actually earned ~ and deserve ~ catch my next article in two weeks.

PS: The Neagle Code: Directions for Life is a weekly no-cost
program that is open to everyone! Each week, I'll select and personally respond to one question received via the above “The Neagle Code” page that I feel in my heart will help the most people. (You may choose to remain anonymous if you wish, with our full support.) It is my deep, heartfelt intention that ~ in answering your questions ~ I may provide you with the Universal Truths that in committed application, will set you free. Simply submit YOUR burning question at: www.DavidNeagle.com/ask-david to participate.