Tag: Speak to sell

How would you like to make five figures in sales from the stage, every time you speak?

I have your attention, right? If you’re interested in speaking for the purpose of sales, you’re going to keep reading, right?

The first step in crafting your 90-minute presentation is constructing your grabber.

The grabber is the first thing you say when you get up on stage. It’s a bold statement about the promise of your work. And it’s designed to grab the attention of your audience right off the bat.

Knock Their Socks Off
You may have been taught that you should begin your speech with, “I would like to thank everybody for being here today, the promoter, Joan Smith, for having me here, and everybody who made this possible….”

While there’s nothing wrong with a little appreciation, when you’re speaking for the purpose of sales, it’s not what you lead with.

You’ll sound like an amateur to your promoter. But worse than that, you’ve bored the audience right out of the gate. They’re shutting down before you’ve even had a chance to open them up.

Instead, you want to get up there on the stage with energy, power and promise, and knock their socks off with a strong and true statement about what your program can do. You want to say something like:

“How would you like to learn five steps that will help you double your income in the next four months?”

The audience is thinking, “Wow, really? This person is going to help me double my income in four months. Yeah, I’m listening to this.”

Step 2: Lay Out the Game Plan
After you’ve grabbed the audience’s attention, briefly lay out the game plan, tell them what you’re about to do. Here are a few examples, using the Step 1 illustrations from above:

Step 1, the grabber: “How would you like to make five figures in sales from the stage, every time you speak?”

Step 2, the game plan: “Over the next hour and a half, I’m going to share with you my eight-step formula for crafting presentations that will have your audience lined up in the back of the room.”

Step 1: “How would like to be debt-free ~ and I mean you don’t owe a dime to anybody ~ in six months?”

Step 2: “Over the next 90 minutes, I’m going to teach you the five secrets that credit card companies don’t want you to know.”

And here’s an example of how it all could flow:

“Would you like to throw away your insulin syringes and get your life back? [pause] Of course, you would. Over the next 90 minutes, I’m going to teach you my five-step plan that has helped thousands of people get off insulin and lead productive and healthy lives.”

If your audience has diabetes or debt that’s strangling them or they want to make a bundle from the stage, they’re listening to you with rapt attention. They’re hanging on your every word, just waiting for what comes next.

What comes next is arguably the most critical and ignored step of all. I’ll tell you all about it next time.

As I said last time, before you do a presentation for the purpose of sales, you have to find out about the audience: their background, their needs and so on.

You want to use that information for your benefit and theirs. While still being true to yourself, you might tailor your content or delivery somewhat. In any case, you want to know how they’re likely to receive your message.

As my story below shows, ignorance is definitely not bliss. Not knowing your audience can be a fatal mistake.

My Blunder
A decade ago a network-marketing company brought me in to speak the first night of an event, and then twice more during the weekend. I was familiar with the company, but not with the particular group of people who made up the audience of 1,200.

If you’ve heard me speak, you know that I may use profanity to get a point across or snap people out of their mental hypnosis.

Also, it’s part of my story about being sucked into the dam. When that happened, the first thing that came to my mind was, “Shit!” So when I told the audience that story the first night, it seemed perfectly natural to convey what I’d said.

I came back to speak the next day, thinking that the talk had gone well and we were going to make a ton of sales. Instead, as I was about to get onstage, the promoter told me that I had offended almost everybody in the audience.

“You have to be kidding me,” I said. “I’ve been telling that story for years. What do you mean?”

“You swore on the stage,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s part of my story.”

“These are all hard-core Christians,” he said. “They came up to me in droves after you left, telling me how offended they were.”

After our conversation, I did my second presentation. And while I was able to salvage the situation somewhat, we did not get the sales that weekend that we should—or could—have.

I believe in taking responsibility for every situation in our lives, so when I looked at this one squarely, I realized the problem was I hadn’t done my research. Because I knew the group, I assumed that I knew everything I needed to know about the audience.

Had I known that this particular promoter had developed a following of Christians who would be offended by swearing, I probably would have toned down my language. Then, instead of offending them, I could have drawn them in with the absolute miracle of my survival.

After all, they and I were devout when it came to Spirit, so they could have felt a real connection to me.

I could have built upon that connection to effect transformation for them and make a lot of sales for me.

Instead, I lost a powerful opportunity by my failure to ask the promoter these four simple questions:

1. What is the background of the audience?

2. What are their main challenges or concerns?

3. What do you hope or expect the audience to learn from me? Why have you invited me to speak?

4. What is your background?

With the answers to those questions, I would have the information I needed to create a powerful and profitable experience for everyone.

Learn from my mistake. Do your research and get to know your audience. It’s not very difficult, and you’ll be so glad you did.

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.

The quickest way to make sales and build your business is through public speaking. That’s because people make a real connection with you when you’re up there telling your story.

However, not just any style of public speaking will earn you sales. You have to craft your speech for that purpose, and that’s what I’m going to show you how to do in this new series.

Even if you’ve never done any public speaking before, you can make sales right off the bat.

Would You Rather Get a Standing Ovation or Sales?
The first thing to understand is that most of the speaker training out there is completely irrelevant when it comes to making sales through speaking.

Sure, there are tried-and-true techniques that can teach you how to get an audience’s attention and garner applause. You may even get a standing ovation. That’s desirable when you’re doing a keynote.

But applause, alone, does not necessarily lead to sales. In fact, it rarely does.

If you don’t craft your speech for the purpose of sales, you’re unlikely to make any.

Speaking for Teaching Versus Sales
There is also a big difference between speaking for the purpose of teaching versus the purpose of sales.

When you’re doing a workshop or a seminar, you would not use the 8-step, crafted speech I’m teaching you in this series.

That doesn’t mean you can’t sell. You just do it in a different way.

Selling in a teaching environment is a softer sell. You give them a ton of great information and value, but you leave out the next step so that they have to acquire your product or service to learn it.

In this series, I’m teaching you how to make a 90-minute presentation that you can take to a local community or professional organization and start making sales right away.

These Steps Work
When you’re speaking for the purpose of sales, one of the primary ways to gauge your success is by calculating what percentage of the buying units in the room bought what you were selling. This is called your closing rate.

The number of buying units is not necessarily the same as the headcount. A couple would count as one buying unit because they’re only going to buy one of your program.

My closing rate is 30% and higher. Sometimes it’s MUCH higher – 80% is not uncommon. Only on very rare occasions has it been lower.

That means, when I speak, at least 3 out of 10 of the buying units in the room buy what I’m selling.

That is a conversion rate I know I can count on.

I’ll take some of the credit for that, but much of it belongs to the 8 steps in this series. They’ve been proven to work over decades of application.

I’ve got to tell you, there really is no faster way to build your business than getting this thing down.

As one of my clients said to me, “You can make bucket loads of money!”

I’ll start showing you how to fill your own buckets next time.