Jane Atkinson, Speaker Launcher Blog, Speaker Coach, Presentation Skills, Speakers Bureaus » Booking Speeches

Have you picked your low hanging fruit?

jane — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:10:54 +0000

While talking to a client the other day, we were brainstorming on how to “shake the trees” and see what she has not already capitalized on with her current client base.

Funny, she had at least 3 ideas of people she could follow up with about her new keynote, a training opportunity and product sales.

Where are your low hanging fruit?

Are there clients that you should have re-connected with?

When entering into a relationship with a speaking client, do you have a long term goal in mind?

One client has this type of sales stream:

Someone reads his book
Calls to book a speech for their group
Group purchases books for entire audience
Engagement leads to consulting contracts
Consulting contracts include training and coaching
Training sessions result in more product purchased
And the whole thing goes round for each new client

Look at what picking one piece of low hanging fruit might produce!

Are you making the most of each connection with a client? Or are you ending the relationship once you leave the stage.

See you soon Wealthy Speakers.

PS: Club Quick Start is beginning another cycle (Cycle V) in September. If you are a new speaker, interested in following a strategic path to launching your business, check this out http://www.speakerlauncher.com/quickstart.html

Seasoned speakers: Interested in seeing another Club Catapult? http://www.speakerlauncher.com/clubcatapult.html (add yourself to the wait list)

What’s Your “Book More Business” Strategy

jane — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:53:35 +0000

I’ve been hearing some good news stories lately so I know that there is business out there! This tip is designed to help you get out and get your share of the pie!

Here are some ideas to consider when planning your 12 month sales and marketing initiatives (because I know you HAVE a plan, right?)

1. What expertise do you have that can help people through a difficult time?

Not all companies are in trouble right now, but the fall-out of this economy is wide reaching. So how can you help? How can you ease the pain? Bring those ideas forward in your marketing and that will help position you for success.

Does Your Preview Video Get You the Gig?

jane — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:06:27 +0000

In some cases, the speaker booking process might
look something like this:

1. The client decides they need a speaker.
2. If they don’t already have someone in mind,
they shop around online based on the topic or call
a speaker’s bureau for suggestions.
3. They view all of the speaker’s materials and
preview videos.
4. They narrow their list and perhaps set up a
phone call with the 3 or so speakers who have made
the short list.
5. Then they choose the speaker based on fee,
expertise, talent (as displayed on the video), and
the ability of the speaker to meet their needs.

In this scenario, a poor video could mean that you
don’t get past step 3. You’re out before the
conference call which means you don’t even get
a shot at telling them how you would meet their
needs.

If your video keeps you in the running, then it’s
doing the job.

Does your video show how great you are? If not,
you’ve got some work to do.

For those of you who own ‘The Wealthy Speaker’,
check out Chapter 4, for a full segment on video.
Here’s a link to the book if you need a copy:
http://www.speakerlauncher.com/tools.html

We recently did a teleclass with Robin Creasman
called Creating Your Rock Star Preview Video

To check out the MP3 of this class go to:
http://www.speakerlauncher.com/AudioTools.html

From 0 to 80 Gigs, Really?

jane — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 16:13:54 +0000

A lot of people ask me if it’s really
possible to go from 0 to 80 engagements in
just a few years and the answer is ‘YES’!

How many people do it? I’d put it around the
5% mark.

So what does it take to actually get there?

Well, I’m going to give you a formula, but we
also have an upcoming teleclass that will put
you together with someone who has done it
brilliantly in the past 3 years.

Consider these 3 questions when working
towards filling your calendar:

1. Speech – How talented are you?

Without concrete platform skills, you will
not be able to succeed. This business is NOT
all about marketing, it’s about speaking.
The people who happen to speak well AND
market well, come out at the top.

(I apologize if I’m beating this point to
death!)

2. Strategy – How well do I ’stay the
course’ and stick with my strategy?

If you’re the type of speaker who goes into
your office without any goal or list of
actions for moving your business forward
every day, then you are without strategy.

Develop your plan, know your plan, work your
plan and you will be more focused and less
likely to allow distractions to eat up your
entire day.

3. Focus – When you are clear on what you
are selling, your clients have an easier time
buying. Without that focus, you have no place
to start and you’ll spin your wheels and
waste your precious marketing dollars. If
you need help picking (or clarifying) your
lane, click here to check out your coaching
options:
http://www.speakerlauncher.com/coaching.html

4. Consistency – How consistent is your
marketing?

When you develop and follow a marketing
calendar, you know that your prospects are
hearing from you on a regular basis. This
keeps you top-of-mind for when the need for
your expertise arises.

Speech, strategy, focus and consistency are 4
keys to moving in the direction of 0 to 80
engagements per year.

And if you’d like to hear firsthand from
someone who has conquered the speaking
circuit in record time, join us for our next
teleclass:

Monday, November 26th at 2pm Eastern
Moving Quickly From 0 To 100 Gigs Per Year
With guest expert Steve Little.

Here’s the link to find out more
http://www.speakerlauncher.com/teleclass.html

It’s Crazy Simple, But it Works

jane — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 17:02:07 +0000

Sometimes we get so caught up in business
plans and websites and videos and blogs and
newsletters that we forget to do one of the
most basic marketing maneuvers.

Pick up the phone!!

Mark LeBlanc, the President of the National
Speakers Association spoke in Toronto
recently about the importance of consistency
of our outbound client calls.

Mark talked about calling just 1 prospect every
day. Now, you may want to set your goal a
little higher. That’s cool. But if you pick
up that phone at LEAST one time every day,
things will happen.

It is crazy simple.

Ask yourself a couple of questions just to
see how you are doing:

1. How many times in the past 7 days did I
pick up the phone (outbound) regarding new
business?

2. When I spoke with my prospects, was I
clear about how I could help them? (This
goes back to picking your lane, if you are
not clear, then your calls will be
ineffective). See Chapter 3 in ‘The Wealthy
Speaker’ if you need help with this.

3. How many of my calls were effective? Do
I need to work on my approach, or my target
audience?

4. If I didn’t make any calls, why not?
If you are busy speaking, that might be a
great reason, but consider whether or not
you are keeping your pipeline full for
future business.

Sometimes we need a little nudge to ensure
that we’re doing the basics consistently. I
know this one is not rocket science so all of
you will be picking up that phone – at least
once – tomorrow… won’t you?

Happy dialing!!!

ps: For articles on effective sales
check out the “booking speeches” section.

Is your website getting you booked?

jane — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 02:17:55 +0000

Recently I was working with a
speaker whose website was about 6
years old. It had evolved and
changed over the years and had a
ton of information and many
options for the visitor.

But even though he was getting
huge amounts of traffic, the
website wasn’t working. He wasn’t
getting booked for speeches or
selling product.

Why? His buyers were getting
confused. There were too many
options and as I once heard it said
‘a confused buyer never buys’.

Many of us have arrived at this
same place, myself included.
My old site wasn’t as streamlined
as I wanted so I started from
scratch and it seems to be working.

Is your site working the way you
want it to? Is it getting you booked?

If not, you might be confusing your
buyers and you should map out the
exact process and outcomes that you
desire.

Here are 3 quick checks for your
website:

1. Is it focused? Can your buyers
tell within 15 seconds what it is
you do? If you list more than 3
topics, I suspect they are confused.

2. Your ‘promise’ should be clear
letting your buyers know the value
and outcomes right up front.

3. Are you positioning as an
expert or a speaker? Remember
Brian Palmer’s quote from my book
‘The Wealthy Speaker’ he said
‘clients no longer want to hire
speakers, they want to hire smart
people who happen to speak’,

4. There should be a call to
action – what steps do you want
them to take?

As technology becomes more complex,
every once in a while, we need to
stop and regroup to ensure that
we’re not confusing our customers.

Happy booking!

ps: Watch for my brand new
product ‘Diary of a Killer Keynote:
How to Develop and Deliver a
Keynote that Blows Them Away’ with
Joe Calloway.

I believe this DVD will be one of
most helpful tools that I ever produced
and I can’t wait.

Are you turning your clients off with your voice message?

jane — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:00:28 +0000

I’m in the middle of a move of home and
office, so here’s a quick, bite size,
tip for you….

I returned a call to a speaker last week
and got his voice mail. What I heard
was disturbing.

‘Thank you for calling me, Joe Speaker,
I can help make your meeting memorable
cause I’m a really great speaker…..
blah, blah, blah, blah.’

I had to listen to 3 minutes of a sales
pitch before leaving my message! Yuck!

My question to you is this, when you are
putting your outbound message on your
office voice mail, are you setting
yourself up as an expert, or a speaker?

What are your clients hearing?

Remember what Brian Palmer of National
Speakers Bureau said in ‘The Wealthy
Speaker’, ‘clients no longer want to
hire speakers, they want to hire smart
people who happen to speak’.

Everything you do should be focused on
the value you deliver to your clients.
How you do it and the delivery channel
(in this case speaking) is secondary.

Personally, I like a voice mail to be
short and sweet – I don’t have time to
listen to 3 minutes of hoopla – and
chances are your clients don’t either.

Happy weekend everyone!

ps: If you want to know more about
positioning as an expert, pick up your
copy of ‘The Wealthy Speaker’ today,
here’s the link.
http://www.speakerlauncher.com/tools.html

Stuck at a Plateau? Four Ways to Catapult Your Business

jane — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:43:30 +0000

Speakers aren’t supposed to need help. They are the people everyone else goes to for help. But let’s face it, every once in a while, you get stuck. It’s inevitable.

No one can blame you if you’ve hit a rough patch after working like a dog for 5, 12 or even 20 years.   This business is mentally, emotionally and physically demanding. The travel alone would knock the stuffing out of most people, so it’s natural for peaks and valleys to occur.

Here are some signs that you might be stuck.

1.     Your business hasn’t grown in the past 12 months.
2.     Your speech has not changed in the last 12 months.
3.     Your spin-off rates have dropped.
4.     Your level of enthusiasm for the business or your speech has tapered off.
5.     Even if business is still coming in, all you can think about is doing something different or taking a break.

Do any of those sound familiar?

So how do you go about getting unstuck?

Step 1: Diagnose the Problem. Stop doing what you are doing and take time to sit down and truly assess where you are. Allow yourself to get quiet and really listen and observe. Many speakers simply don’t want to say the words out loud, “I’m going through a hard time.”

If you have staff, ask for their input. They can often see things that you can’t and may give you a bird’s eye view of your business. Ask yourself these questions: What is really going on in my business?   What is it that I am not seeing?

We also need to acknowledge that when a personal crisis like divorce or family illness takes place, we might have to put the business on the side burner temporarily. Only you know where your priority needs to be. One of my clients who was going through a divorce found himself getting the best ratings and standing ovations of his career. He had learned to channel his emotional turmoil into passion on the platform and it worked like a charm.

Every bump in the road that we hit may be an opportunity to catapult to the next level.

Step 2: Focus. In my experience, one common issue leads to a speaker struggling – lack of focus. Typically it’s a lack of focus around their expertise or they may not have “picked a lane” yet. Some of the speakers who have the hardest time with this are those who have been around awhile. The key is understanding that what worked in the marketplace 10 years ago does not work today.

Ten years ago you could have six or seven topics and people would book you because you were a good speaker. Not any more. And although being a generalist might pay the bills initially, you will be no further ahead five years down the road. You will not be the recognized expert on any subject. Your fees will also suffer because clients don’t pay high fees for generalists – they pay high fees for experts.

There is no room for fear when it comes to getting focused around your expertise. You have to be able to wean yourself away from business that is no longer in your lane or you will be stuck being a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.

Brian Palmer of National Speakers Bureau says, “clients no longer want to hire speakers, they want to hire smart people, who happen to speak”.

Step 3: Recognize Boredom. When you can do your speech in your sleep or have the potential to start “phoning it in,” you could be bored. If you’ve been delivering the same material for any length of time, this is a potential hazard for you.

Like Madonna (the pop star, not the religious figure), speakers have to continually reinvent themselves. We need to grow with our speech and discover new material. Our careers may have us changing lanes several times or developing a new on-ramp to our existing lane.

I find writing is one of the best ways to stay plugged into our business and develop new material. When I’m continually in an “investigative” mode, it forces me to examine and re-examine my material.

So what can you do to light a spark under your speech?

1.     Refocus on the audience. Engage with them in new ways. Do your pre-gig work differently. Meet with the key decision makers, executives or Boards of Directors for a pre-session at no charge. If you wouldn’t normally stay for an awards dinner, then stay. Go back to the basics. Challenge yourself to look at every speech as your first ever. What did you do back then that you no longer do?
2.     Take any story you’ve been telling for more than 24 months and either change it or throw it out. Make it more exciting and challenging for you to tell or, better yet, throw it out.
3.     Write an article on a new area that pertains to your lane. Find something that interests you, but that you don’t know much about.
4.     Listen to the market. What have they been consistently requesting of you that you haven’t delivered?
5.     Bring in an expert. Mark Sanborn used a presentations coach several years ago when he got stuck in a rut, and still uses things he learned from that coach today. If you need help, ask around and find a coach who has your required expertise and clicks with you.
6.     Take time off. If you need some time to recharge your batteries then take it. A burnt out speaker is no good for anyone, especially the client. Like Nike says, just do it!

Joe Calloway says he’s an expert on ruts. He is continually finding new ways to re-invent himself. Joe says “if you’re not doing something that scares the pants off you in your speech, then you probably won’t get out of the rut – you’re just tweaking. The key to creating value for the client is getting better on the platform. We want them to say ‘we’ve never seen that before’ or ‘that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!’”

Recently, I saw a speaker that I’d heard 15 years ago. He was funny, charming, captivating and the audience liked him, but he told the same stories I’d heard back then. I found it to be quite incongruent with his message of business innovation. Today’s audiences are sophisticated and expect more of you. Challenge yourself to be fresh and innovative.

Even speakers who talk about their own life experiences (such as climbing Mt. Everest or winning at the Olympics) can find new language and ways to spin the story. They can also find new ways to make it about the audience and not themselves. Art Berg, who passed away in 2002, was a great example. His own personal story of moving from a paralyzing automobile accident to becoming hugely successful in many areas of life was indeed unique to him. Despite that he found a way to make the audience – even though they weren’t in wheelchairs – believe that they too could achieve the impossible in their own lives. He made it about them, and not himself.

Step 4: Create a Vision. While you are stuck in a rut is the perfect time to develop your five-year vision. Allow yourself to think big and write down everything that you want in your life five years from now. Rich Fettke, who was my personal coach for several years, taught me how to do this and I’ve marveled every time a new vision comes to fruition. Duh! Maybe Napoleon Hill was onto something with that “what you believe you can achieve” thing?

Think about how a month in your life looks five years from now. How many speaking engagements do you deliver? Who is in that perfect audience? How much are you paid? What is the impact of your message? How much do you travel? What do you do in your free time? How do your home and office look and who is in them? Where do you and your family vacation? Be very clear and specific. Focusing on what you want as opposed to what you do not want is the fastest way out of a rut.

Bottom Line. When you walk the hallways of an NSA convention, allow yourself to be real and tell the truth about what’s going on in your business. The more real and vulnerable you are, the more you will model that for others and soon we’ll all be checking our egos and puffed up chests at the door.

If you can be honest about recognizing where you are in your business, re-energize your material and focus on where you want to go, you’ll be on the way to catapulting your business and taking it to entirely new heights.

Can’t Sell Your Way Out of a Paper Bag?

jane — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:23:58 +0000

We are constantly working to try to make our phone
ring. We build websites, demo videos, write
articles, run mail campaigns, do free speeches,
etc., to get clients to our door.

But when they get there, do we close the sale
every time? How about 50% of the time?

Many speakers suffer from the inability to sell
themselves. They might not be clear on the value
they offer or have a hard time communicating it
when put on the spot.

Some speakers have a mental block around ’sales’.
They’d much rather have someone else selling for
them because they lack confidence. But the bottom
line is that if you don’t know how to close the
deal, it’s going to be hard to train someone else
to do it for you.

You’ve probably heard me talk about using
attraction strategies to gain clients, but having
some sales skills will serve you well.

Here are a few quick tips that will help sharpen
your skills:

1. Write down some of the key ideas that you
would want to convey while talking to a client and
post them on your bulletin board for easy
reference.

2. Practice role playing with a friend or
colleague so that you’ll be less tongue tied when
a prospect calls.

3. Focus on building relationships rather than
’selling’. By putting your thoughts on the needs
of the client, you’ll take them off ’sales’.

4. Try to meet face-to-face with clients when
possible. It’s still the best way to build a
relationship and in today’s high tech world, we
might tend to forget.

5. Think beyond one speech. How can you help
your client reach their long term goals?

6. Keep track of your numbers. Knowing how often
you lose a sale and why will help you improve.

Want to know more on this subject? Join us for
our next teleclass on Wednesday, January 24, 2007
at 3pm Eastern called ‘How to Close More Business’
with guest expert Dan Seidman author of Sales
Autopsy. Here are the details
http://www.speakerlauncher.com/teleclass.sales.html

Happy Selling!

Laptop Dies, But Speaker Doesn’t

jane — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:23:13 +0000

Imagine it’s three minutes until you go on stage
and your brand new laptop dies and takes your
slide show and presentation with it.

Then, you are introduced.

You walk onto the stage, close the laptop lid, and
say ‘apparently, we’ll be doing something
different today’.

That’s exactly what my client June Cline did last
week when her technology failed.

And you know what else happened? She changed up
her program on the fly and delivered an
awesome keynote.

What would you have done?

How much are you relying on technology or props in
your presentations?

This past weekend in Vancouver, the caliber of
keynote talent at the Canadian Speakers convention
was really high. But several speakers shone through
for me and for the most part they used two tools -
their voice and their bodies.

Now I’m not saying that anyone using technology
should stop. But I would ask ‘if the electricity
went off would you still be an effective speaker’?

How much of your presentation stays inside a
comfort zone?

And really the bottom line question is, ‘are you
getting all the work that you desire’? If so,
these questions may not be necessary.

If you aren’t 100% happy with your bookings, then
this exercise is for you:

1. List 3 things that you will do in 2007 to help
move your presentation to new heights.

2. Define 2 risks that you could take to move out
of your comfort zone.

3. Send 1 e-mail to a colleague or friend and ask
them to support you in your goals.

And if you’d like to work on your business over
the holidays, I’ve got a special holiday reading
offer just for you. Check it out.
http://www.thewealthyspeaker.com/system2.html