How Titan's Conduct Effective Seminars

1) Make sure every attendee leaves with some value

2) Make sure you identify the key issues of the attendees, so you can follow up for future business.

So -- how do you make a speech intended for a number of people and deliver on the twin goals of providing value to all attendees and identifying potential new customers? Well, if you have seminar with ten or fewer prospects, one good way to go is to start out with something like this:

"All right -- I’d like to thank everyone for coming. Let me tell you a little bit about what we’re going to be doing this morning. My goal is to make sure that you do not feel that today’s time was wasted; your time is too valuable for that. So to make sure that this seminar delivers value for each and every one of you, I’m going to go around the room and I want each of you to answer this one question. If today’s presentation were to be valuable for you, what issues would it have to address?"

Write down the answers on a flip chart, and jot down the person’s name next to the issue that’s been raised. Now, during your speech, every time you get to the issues of downtime in your presentation, you immediately look at the person who raised the issue you’re about to discuss. You might say this.

"Lillian, you are person who brought up the important issue of reducing downtime as a result of computer crashes. Let me share with you how we are handling it."

Now you’re talking one-on-one with Lillian! She feels that you are solving her problems. You were going to talk about this anyway, but because you asked her about her problems and talked about it in this model, she feels much more involved in what you’re doing. You’ve personalized the proceedings.

You will have also achieved your second goal of identifying new business opportunities. Obviously, Lillian is very interested in reducing her downtime. When you call her to follow up, you can immediately turn the call into a discussion of the issue you’ve already identified -- the downtime she is experiencing and you can explore other issues that are relevant. (As a matter of fact, you have to ask about other challenges, because downtime may be only one issue, and perhaps not the most important issue, on her agenda.)

A point to ponder: When you talk to one individual face-to-face (as we will cover later in the chapter on presentation techniques) you are, at the same time, also having an "intimate conversation" with everybody in the audience! That’s an old speaker’s trick you can put to good use in seminars.

With larger groups, you won’t have time to ask each person individually for an issue, but you still must uncover all of the issues facing everyone in the room. How do you do that? Take the consensus approach. Simply ask audience members to speak up about the issues that make a difference to them. Here’s how it might sound: "Let me ask you all something: For this session is to be truly valuable for you, what topics would it have to address? Anyone."

Eventually, someone will say something like "Quality!" You’ll write "quality" on the flip chart and ask the gentleman who spoke up for his first name. He’ll say, "Bob." Say, "Great Bob, and thank you for your input." Then ask, "Are there any other issues out there that we need to cover?" Keep listing them until no more issues are shouted out. Be sure to put a name next to each issue. Then, when you get to the topic of quality in your talk, talk directly to Bob. Here again, by addressing one person with full attention, you are having an "intimate conversation" with everyone in the room, and you’re also making sure that all issues of concern to the audience as a whole are being covered.

After the meeting, collect as many business cards as you can, especially from those who raised issues you covered in your talk. To entice audience members to give you their cards, you can offer a special gift. For example, you might say something like this:

"If you leave us your business card, we will send you a special report on ‘How to Invest for Retirement.’"

Or:

"For a free calculator to keep track of your investments as they grow with us, just leave your business card in the big glass bowl by the door."

When you do this, don’t forget the most important piece of information: the person’s issues. Ask each person to jot down on the back of the card the three issues he or she found the most interesting in the seminar you just presented. This information lets you make a "warm follow-up call" (as opposed to a "cold call"). You now have something to discuss that’s important to your customer, something that’s likely to gain his or her time and attention instantly!

Your follow-up call might sound like this:

"Hi, John -- thanks for coming to the seminar the other day. On your business card, you noted that the issue of most importance to you is saving for retirement. Could you please describe for me the three most important things you want to do once you’ve retired?"

Collect all the business cards you can, enter the data into your computer database, and then make the follow-up calls! (And by the way, if you do a sales seminar and you don’t have any mechanism to get their business cards into your system in a way that identifies the prospect’s key issues, then you are not maintaining your database effectively!)

In addition to being a prospecting tool, your seminar can serve as a lead generator for future marketing efforts -- such as direct mail campaigns -- and as a great way to uncover referrals. You can promote your events via mailings to your target audience and perhaps two rounds of follow-up calls reminding people of the appropriate places, dates and times.

In addition to being a valuable sales tool for organizations, seminars also represent a superb initial contact strategy for professionals (such as lawyers and investment counselors) as well as home entrepreneurs. Take full advantage of this resource … and make it part of your Titan outreach campaign!