However, some topics don't lend themselves to smaller group activities. I'm a little stubborn regarding this topic because I believe any size audience can participate in certain types of activities. However, your exercise has to be conducive to the topic. There's nothing worse than attending a seminar where a forced group exercise is inserted that doesn't add any value to the session.
3. Are you prepared to dedicate your business to this marketing approach?
Populating a room of up to 300 strangers requires a lot of work and expense. If this is the type of business you will choose, then prepare to be committed to it. This is a year-round marketing approach that will place you in large cities all across the country. Each year in business will allow you to reap the rewards of return customers and word-of-mouth attendees. It is essential that a professional handle the marketing. Personally, I wouldn't skimp one penny on professional marketing, because they are the ones who will get those rooms populated with attendees.
Listen and learn from the professionals.
The costs to put on open sessions can creep up on you. When you look at up-front costs that can include the marketing, mailing lists, hotel, travel, breaks, and AV support, it's not unusual to see a breakeven cost hovering around $10,000 a seminar.
The profit is high, and it's an exciting way to conduct business. If you do choose to conduct your seminar business this way, you will have a head start in providing closed sessions based on specific requests from clients. You see, general sessions always have the potential to create leads toward closed sessions; however, closed sessions never create the potential for general sessions.
For many professional speakers like myself, general sessions can be a challenge because the application of what we teach is specific. My topic is not generic enough to deliver competently to multiple customers. When I teach people to sell, I need to know exactly what they sell to provide real-world examples. My techniques do not work generically. I also need to role-play clients on the techniques I teach. Although multiple role-plays can be conducted in larger sessions, if the participants don't understand each other's businesses, the exercise is useless. That's where the closed session approach to the seminar business comes in.
A closed session seminar is a program delivered to a singular client. This doesn't necessarily mean a singular environment, just a client. When I started my business, I quickly started accumulating clients in the financial industry. This both thrilled and worried me at the same time. I was thrilled because I began to quickly create a following within a specific industry. I was worried because I was concerned I might get typecast, much like an actor, and lose my credibility in any other industry.
Closed session seminars generally are not marketed through mass marketing approaches. They are marketed slowly and methodically to specific clients. The sales cycle can often be years; however, the sale to a single client can easily represent a six-figure consulting fee. This is because these clients aren't looking for a generic message. These clients want someone to understand what they are doing and specifically to tailor the message to fit their industry and niche within that industry. In other words, they are looking for exactly what they cannot get from a general session.
The fees can be high because rarely are these companies looking for a one-day session with 300 strangers. They want to create a cultural change within their organization. To do this, they want a consultant who can map out a complete training program for all employees within their organization.
There is no set formula for this, but as your guide through the seminar world, I'd be happy to give you one man's approach. In its most simple form, my definition of truly training an organization consists of three basic programs.
1. Initial Training. For most people who put on seminars, this is their bread-and-butter program. Depending on the client's commitment, this program can take various lengths of time to deliver. It typically runs between one to three days. Allow me to make one more recommendation. Clients request closed sessions to receive the direct feedback from the speaker. This means that these programs need to be highly interactive with exercises tightly monitored. For that reason, I rarely recommend a training session with more than 20 participants.
2. Follow-up Training. Gone are the days when consulting companies could survive by delivering initial training programs and moving on. It's unfair to clients who have difficulties implementing the information they are learning in the programs they purchase. It's also foolish for the consultant who is clearly leaving money on the table. Follow-up training is not a repeat of the training that was initially offered but instead a program delivered to add on to whatever was initially taught. Sadly, many companies never make it to the follow-up training because it was never implemented. That's where the third basic program comes in.
3. Implementation Training. One of the most common questions I'm asked when I complete the initial training for a company is “When will you be back to follow up?” My answer is “Tomorrow if you would like. As a matter of fact, I'd be happy to come back on a weekly basis. However, I don't think that's a very good cost-effective solution.” I then add, “Why don't I spend some time teaching you how to implement this program? That way you can protect your investment. Then, when I come back in six months to a year, we won't have to conduct the same seminar. We can simply add to what has already been implemented.” My suggestion is when you put together a seminar or a workshop program, make sure you are putting a program together that will help management use job aids, feedback models, and implementation benchmarking. That way you'll be creating a client for life.
Another important decision that anyone who speaks for a living needs to make is how long he or she intends to speak. Let's take a moment and look at the two most common types of presentations.
Keynotes
When people think of professional speakers, often they think of keynote speakers, who give presentations that are typically delivered in an hour-or-less time frame, and often to larger audiences. With larger audiences and that short of a delivery time, it's pretty difficult to create change on a deep, cultural level. Often the expectations of these types of audiences typically can be summed up this way: “If I can learn one or two good ideas from this presentation, I'll be happy.”
When I first left Xerox, I swore I would never conduct a keynote presentation. After all, I came from what I had always felt was the Green Berets of speakers, Xerox – the greatest trainers on earth. We didn't necessarily walk into a room to speak to teach you one or two good ideas to motivate or make you feel better. We taught repeatable, predictable techniques that required fairly lengthy workshops. To talk to a group for an hour and call it training was ridiculous in our eyes.
My first year in business, I frequently was asked to deliver keynote-type presentations. I declined. There was no way I was going to give in and compromise my materials. Then one day a new client successfully persuaded me to deliver such a presentation by asking me what I normally got paid and offering to double it. A keynote speaker was born.
It didn't take me long to fall in love with this style of delivery. Not only was the money good, but the wear and tear on my body was a lot less. Which would you prefer: spending a couple of days on the road and speaking for eight or more hours, or getting up early, blowing into town, taking a limo to and from your speaking site, and making it home for dinner? I fell in love with this rock star existence, and who wouldn't? Then in 2002, the stock market corrected, the economy turned, and the speaking industry changed with it.
Those speakers who made a living giving keynotes and motivating audiences for an hour suffered, with many going out of business. In a sense, the herd was thinned a bit. Those speakers who remained in business were forced to adapt to a new way of working with clients, and keynote-type deliveries fell out of vogue. Within a few years the industry crawled back to life, and in 2008, as the market dropped, the herd thinned
