PRACTICES AND HABITS OF 6-FIGURE SPEAKERS

What makes a speaker outstanding? What turns someone from an amateur speaker who burns out after a year into a speaker who gets repeat bookings and makes six figures a year?

Here’s a list of the habits and practices of excellent speakers. In my experience, these are the traits that all excellent speakers have in common.

If you absorb these traits and implement them in your speaking career, you’ll get repeat bookings and will be able to raise your rates to get the income you desire.

Give Them Plenty of Ideas

I remember sitting in a $500 business seminar and listening to the speakers just blather. I knew some of them and their businesses personally, and I knew that not one of them was going to share anything that any of their competitors could use. Because of that, they spoke in generalities and talked about their families and how they started off in business and where they went to college.

“This is a complete waste of time. I didn’t learn a darn thing all day long,” I said to one of my managers from a large organization I was running at the time.

So I resolved that, by gum, if ever I spoke, nobody would ever say they just got one or two good ideas out of it. I wanted people to get one hundred ideas from my speaking. That became a guide for me.

When you’re given a talk, make it your goal to give them plenty of ideas.

Be the Expert

Here’s a very important point in breaking into professional speaking: if someone asks you to speak on the biology of neuroscience and how serotonin and endorphins affect mood and behavior, you say “No, that’s not my subject.” Never agree to speak on a subject that’s completely out of your experience.

Every subject I ever agreed to speak on was within my experience. When they asked me to speak on leadership, I knew the subject because I had been a leader. I had been a sales manager in large organizations. I had hired, fired, trained and deployed, and worked with people for years. As a matter of fact, my last job before beginning to speak was CEO of a 265-million-dollar development company.

When I was asked to speak on sales and on time management, I had already studied these subjects for years.

When I was still early in my career, I had spent sixty or seventy thousand hours reading, at an average of three hours a day for twenty years. Today I’ve spent 150,000 hours of reading over forty years and more.

Be the expert in your subject. Speak only on subjects you know something about, and don’t accept bookings for subjects you don’t know much about. The money might be good, but your reputation will suffer, harming your future prospects to get booked.

Your Secret Weapon: Speaker Credibility

Your credibility as a speaker will have a tremendous impact on getting engagements. And everything that you do either helps or hurts. That’s why we talk about how important it is that you be well prepared and how important it is that your presentation turned out well.

Your level of credibility is how much people believe you. If they believe you, there will be nothing that will cause them to hesitate.

Your job is to convince them that whatever you charge, you are actually free, plus a profit. For every dollar they give you, they’re going to get two or three or five or ten dollars back.

The greater your credibility, the lower their fear of making a mistake. The more they like and trust you, the easier it is for them to buy from you — and to buy again.

Your very best source of additional talks and seminars is the people in places where you’ve already given good talks and seminars. Why? Because once you have given a good talk for a customer or a client, you have super credibility with them. You’re a known quantity. They have heard you speak, and they know that you are good.

Don’t be afraid to go back to your very best customers and let them know you’d like to work with them again. It’s much, much easier to sell a happy client than it is to go out and sell a brand-new one.

So credibility is critical. That’s why very careful preparation, thinking through your offer and giving very specific numerical results that people will get if they use your additional services are all so very important. These, plus guaranteeing what you say, all build credibility.

Amateurs focus on getting booked. 6-Figure Speakers focus on building credibility.

Keep Your Content Fresh

Early in my career, I was flying to hear someone speak one evening. I asked the businessperson next to me if he was going to see him also. He said, “No, I’ve already heard him.” I asked him how he meant that, and he said, “I’ve already heard him. He says the same thing every time. I heard him twenty years ago and again two years ago, and he said the same thing both times.”

I resolved not to let that ever happen to me. Nobody would come to my seminar twice and say that they had heard it all before. I continually dedicated myself to renewing and upgrading my content.

You’re sort of like a shopkeeper who puts stuff on the shelves. If nobody buys it, you take it off the shelves and replace it with something that someone will buy.

When I was going through the recession/depression and having a hard time selling my seminars, people told me they wanted talks on sales and on leadership and time management. I told them, “No, personal development is really the foundation of all of those subjects.” They said, “No, no — we want specific sales, leadership, and time management.” I finally said, “Okay. I hear you. I’ll do that seminar.”

At my first sales seminar, I asked what the hardest part of selling was in today’s market. The answer was getting people to make a decision. So my first half-day seminar was The Art of Closing Sales. Why? Because I figured out what people wanted more than anything else was to know how to close sales.

Tailor your talk to the current problems facing your market. Keep your content fresh. People will be excited to see you again because they know they’ll learn something new.

Improving Your Speaking Skills

To become a 6-Figure Speaker, you have to continually improve your speaking skills.

After every talk, there are two magic questions you can answer. These questions, by the way, were worth more than a million dollars to me. I call them the million-dollar questions. Right after the talk, you sit down with a pad of paper and ask yourself “What did I do right in that talk?” And the second question you ask is “What would I do differently?” If I had that talk to do over again, how would I improve it for next time?

One of the things that many speakers will do is have comment cards. They’ll create them on 5 x 8” index cards and hand them out to everybody. The purpose of these is twofold. You say to the client that what you would like everybody to do is to turn in these cards to you so that you can get a really good assessment of the value of your talk — what people liked and didn’t like.

On the comment card, you have three questions. But first of all, you ask for a grade, and I always ask for a grade of between one and twenty. If you choose one to ten, they’re likely to just pick five or six, and if you say one to five, they’ll pick three. So one to twenty is best. Then you can add up all the scores afterwards and average them. Anything over sixteen averages out to eighty percent. I say that anything over an average score of eighty is an “A grade,” and everything over ninety percent is an “A+.” You’ll find that if you do a good talk, you’ll almost always get an “A” grade.

The first question on the card is “What was the most important thing you learned from this talk?” and also “What was the least important thing?” Question two is “What one action are you going to take immediately?” Question three is “What additional subjects would you like Brian to speak on at subsequent meetings?”

Then listen to your talks and have other people listen to them as well. Look into how you could do it better by reducing “ums” and “ahs” and other little things. You may hear something you said that got a really favorable response. You will pick up a number of things that really worked which you would miss or forget if you didn’t listen to the recordings.

I have laugh lines that I’ve learned and developed over the years that always get a laugh, and I use them in particular places throughout the seminar to get people involved, to make transitions, or to get the audience’s attention. Sometimes you won’t realize your best stuff until you play back your talks.

The next step is to get a video recording. Get someone to videotape your talk so that you can review and critique it on its visual impressions. If you’re really smart, you’ll get a coach who will sit and watch with you and tell you all the different things you can do to make it even better. All of these things increase the speed at which you improve.

By the way, when you ask for feedback, and somebody says you should do more of this or less of that, always say thank you. Don’t argue, and don’t defend. Don’t try to blame it on getting there late or on bad lighting. The rule is that you never complain and never explain. Just say thank you, and write it all down. Remember that your only goal is to become better and better.

If you continually improve your skills as a speaker, then there is only one way for your career speaking to go. Upward.

How to Sell Your Products & Services from Speaking

One way to increase your income as a speaker is to sell your products and services on the stage.

I had a very simple formula that I actually backed into. During my seminars, people would ask if I had my program recorded because they would love to be able to listen to it again. And I would say, “No, I don’t have it recorded.” Finally — ding, ding, ding — a bell went off, and I realized that I needed to record it.

Here’s the interesting thing about selling products and services in any format, especially from the stage before, during, or after a talk: People can only buy when they can mentally see themselves using your services.

The way you get them to see themselves using your services is to tell stories and create pictures.

One of the very best ways to create a picture is to say to your audience, “Imagine if…”

So, to a sales or entrepreneurial audience, you could say, “Imagine if your sales and profitability were twice as high as they are today. Imagine earning twice as much as your very best year. What kind of a difference would that make in your life?”

Then you continue, “Here’s a question: Is that possible? Well, the only question you have to ask then is, is there anybody in your industry who is earning twice as much as you? If you’re honest, you’ll admit that there are lots of people who are. Those people are no smarter than you, and they’re not better than you. They’re just doing something differently than you. Whatever they are doing, you can do as well. And I’ll show you how.”

This is how you sell services, by talking about what they desire — increasing their sales, increasing their profitability, or increasing their cash flow.

Another thing I will say during seminars, and even with corporations for that matter, is “I wish I had more time with you. I’m here to talk about the seven critical factors of selling in today’s market, but I have a whole other program on how to sell higher-priced products against lower-priced competition. Does anybody get objections on the basis of price?” All the hands go up. “What if you could eliminate price as an objection? Once it comes up, you deal with it quickly and efficiently, and it never comes up again. If it never again got in the way of you making a sale, would that help you to increase your sales?”

You’ll be amazed when you seed, and you should always be smiling. When you’re offering additional services, don’t be grim — smile. Put a great big smile on your face.

If you’re speaking to a corporate client, you always want to get permission to sell any future products because they often don’t want you selling anything. However, you can say that you’d like to send everybody in the room a free gift. “I’d like them to come to my website and click on free stuff.” Additionally, free content is always appreciated.

For instance, I’ll be talking to an international sales company and ask, “Has anybody here ever had trouble getting everything done in their day?” A lot of hands will go up.

“Well, I’ve developed a system that eliminates procrastination and allows you to get more done in less time. If you want a copy of that, go to my website, and you can find it there for free. It’s really quite amazing.”

Then I continue on with my talk. I’m not trying to sell anything. I’m just giving something away. But what I’m also doing is telling people where they can find me afterward if they want something more.

This is the most important thing of all: give a really good high-content seminar!

What causes people to want to buy your product is useful, high-quality content. You want people to listen to you and say, “Gee, this guy’s got a lot of good stuff. I have got to get more.” Or “I’ve got to take a copy with me because there is just too much for me to get in one sitting.” So quality and value and high content are the keys. You want people to say, “I want more of that.” No matter how good your talk is, you’ve got to make them hungry for more. Then what you do is satisfy that hunger.

What I did was create the product or service completely in advance. Once I had designed the seminar, I looked at creating it as an audio program. I immediately recorded it so that I had that audio program available, and that was very helpful to me.

Another thing you can sell is additional seminars and workshops. Sometimes if you only have a short time to speak of up to sixty minutes, what you want to do is open your talk by saying how happy you are to be there with them. “In our time together, I’m going to give you some of the very best ideas I’ve ever discovered on this subject that will help you to achieve more of your goals in this area.”

When I do a one-hour seminar, I give seven great ideas and seven key explanations. I give them forty-nine ideas in sixty minutes to help them increase performance, output, and income. Sometimes I’ll hand out outlines that give the key points. What this is designed to do is, first of all, give them full value so they say, “Wow! This is great stuff!” Secondly, it’s designed to make them hungry for more.

I don’t mention any of my products until the mid-morning break or just before lunch. Before that, I give them highly productive ideas full blast for seventy-five to ninety minutes.

Here’s an important trick I learned for when people come up to you at your seminar and ask for your business card. I’ll say, “I would love to give you my business card, but I’m all out. Please give me your business card, and I’ll send you something in the mail.” I always have something to send. A PDF, an article, an MP3 download, or a newsletter, but I never give out business cards anymore. For the last twenty-five years, I’ve just collected other people’s cards. Then I can send them information and open the door.

Another thing I do to sell more services is to create a series of attractively packaged CDs. They cost me about $1.35 each in quantities of 1,000. I’ll tell people that I normally charge $20 or $25 for these CDs, but I’d like to give a free copy to everybody in the audience.

You can also offer a newsletter. I have six newsletters, and many people who hear me speak subscribe to them. They are short content pieces on the subject of sales, business, personal development, time management, and money. They have a couple of action suggestions at the end, and I encourage everyone I meet to sign up for them.

Whoever the audience is, I’ll offer something relevant.

Once you start to build a relationship, then you can start to offer products and services. So about ninety percent of all of my work now comes from my website. Only ten percent comes from speaking bureaus and recommendations and referrals. The website gives me plenty of good exposure.

Another thing you may want to sell is consulting or advisory services. You may want to train yourself as a consultant and work with companies and charge them your daily rate, which may be several thousand dollars a day. I have a good friend who charges $5,000 an hour as a consultant on the phone.

So how do you get people to want to book you? Again, people don’t buy services. They buy what they think or feel they will be after they have bought a product or service. In other words, they have to have a clear picture or idea or desire to experience an improved state of being as a result of listening to you.

Start with the outcome or version of themselves that your audience desires and work back to yourself. Ask yourself what your audience really wants, needs, and is willing to pay for, and what you can deliver in such a way that they would be delighted.

Getting Repeat Speaking Engagements

6-Figure Speakers know that the secret to success is this: Getting repeat business.

It takes about one tenth the amount of time and energy to get re-booked with the same satisfied, happy client as it does to go out and find a new client.

Eighty to ninety percent of the earnings of the most successful speakers I know is from repeat business. Some of my best and most successful friends have turned an initial talk into multi-year engagements. What they do is use a series of strategies and techniques to focus on the multi-year engagement process from the very first contact.

Getting multiple engagements depends on four major factors.

The first factor is to have a core talk that is so powerful that people will want to hear it again. They will book you to address their audience, and then they will recommend that other people book you.

One of the top speakers in the country was asked on a panel what the key was to getting more bookings. He said that the key to getting more bookings is to do an outstanding job on the booking you have. Speak so well that people want to hear your talk again and again.

One of these people was the head of the Las Vegas Speaker’s Association. She gave a talk to one of twenty-four newspapers in a foreign country she was visiting for the first time. The following year, that newspaper had outperformed all the others there because of the leadership work she had done with them in her seminar. The manager of the newspaper was asked why they were making so much more profit in a tough market. He said it was because of the ideas he had applied from this speaker’s seminar.

So she was booked by a second, and a third, and a fourth newspaper. She eventually had to move to that country, where she lived and worked for ten years training and retraining all twenty-four companies in that industry. On top of that, she developed new programs and built on her old ones. So one talk, properly delivered to one company in one industry, led to ten years of work.

A speaking bureau told me a speaker they represented put together one good talk for a large company, and they booked him sixty times in one year to give that talk to every single branch and division they had all over the country. This was his “hit” talk, and it made his career.

This doesn’t mean that you only have one topic. It just means you only need one “hit.” Every single person, as a speaker, has to have a hit talk — a signature talk, one that is so good that people like it and come back to hear it again and again.

The second factor is the client’s company size. How big is the company? If it’s a small company, and they only bring in one or two people to speak each year, the chance of getting multiple engagements is quite low.

What is the structure of the company? Is it local, national, or multidivisional?

What are the needs of the company? Surrounding that, you have to look at the economic situation because when the economy is slow, the very first thing to be jettisoned will be the budget for speakers.

We say “fish where the fish are.” Some companies are not really capable of supporting multiple engagements. But assuming that the company is large and has multiple divisions and a lot of people who need to be trained on a variety of subjects — that’s a good client. There is possible gold in the ground there.

The third factor depends on your subject and your range of subjects. Here’s an important point. When you speak for a company, they hire you because they think that you are a specialist in the area in which you’re speaking. After you have spoken on that subject, there’s a good chance they believe that’s basically all you’ve got to offer.

This brings us to a rule in public relations which says that before you do anything, you have to do something else first. And what you have to do first is you have to prepare well in advance of the talk. You have to sort of set the stage well in advance if you want to achieve multiple engagements.

If you want the customer to book you again, the most valuable thing of all is to start thinking about that before you’ve even spoken once. One of the qualities of top salespeople is that they think about the second and third sale before they’ve even made the first sale. So what they are doing is setting the stage. They’re biding their time and looking for a subject they can speak on that has great value and will open the eyes of the prospective client to thinking that they have much more to offer.

Finally, you have to over-deliver. Most really good speakers over-deliver.

The way that you over-deliver is you over-prepare. You go over and over your material so that the talk is really what they want to hear.

So you never say, “If you really want to get the good stuff, bring me back again.” What you say is “I know lots of great stuff, and I’m going to give you some of the best ideas here.”

Here’s an example of seeding a future engagement. I gave a talk for a company recently, and in the course of it, I digressed from my main subject and said,

“You know, there is an entire strategy of selling higher-priced products to lower-priced competitors, and I would love to talk to you about that, but it really is a subject for another day. It takes about three hours, after which you will never, ever have to worry about your customer saying they can get it cheaper somewhere else. You will know exactly how to handle the argument and have them eager to pay you more for your product rather than pay less for someone else’s. But again, that’s a subject we’ll deal with at another time.”

Some of the audience were already beginning to plan to bring me back for another seminar at their next meeting. At this point in your speaking engagement, you’ve given the talk, you’ve handed out the comment cards, and you’ve seeded the idea that you can do lots of other things. You’ve told them you would like to work with them over the long term. You’ve told them personally that there are lots of other subjects you can speak on. Here are some additional steps you can take to get repeat business.

Ways to Increase Client Satisfaction & Get Repeat Business

Include an autographed book. Send them a popular or bestselling book that might be really helpful to them personally to help them do their job.

Praise the quality of the audience, compliment them, and then offer to get back in touch. But don’t ever ask them to get back to you if they have any more interest in your services because, in terms of control, you must always keep the initiative when you’re a speaker.

You have to keep the ball moving forward. I will sometimes wait a month to contact them. One strategy people use is to wait a month and then send a gift with a letter saying, “I was just thinking about you today and remembered how much I enjoyed working with you a month ago. I was reading this over the weekend, and I thought you might enjoy a copy of it.”

My rule for letters and books is once every two months. Never send something in the mail with just your business card. Always sign your gift or the card.

Give a discount for recurring talks. Mention that you charge $XX,000 when you do this particular talk, but of course if you were to work together in the future and you were to do multiple talks, then the cost to them would be much less. You can offer to provide your services to them sort of on a wholesale basis so that it would be much more economically sensible.

Again you have to plant the seeds and tell them that you will charge less if you do multiple engagements. I can promise you that the gentleman who got the sixty speaking engagements from one company in one year was negotiated down quite handsomely. If his fee for a talk was $2,500, they probably paid him $1,000 to speak times sixty, and he probably took that.

There are companies I speak for where I’ll reduce my fees by a third, and the quid pro quo is that they will book me ten or twenty times a year. I do multiple speaking engagements for more than one client, and they book me anywhere from four to ten times a year. Some companies have booked me for as many as twenty a year.

Audio and video recordings. Many speakers will often be asked if they can be recorded. You should always give them the ability record it for internal purposes. When I began speaking, the basic rule when you gave a talk for, say, $5,000 at an event, and they wanted to record and distribute the audio, was that it would then be $10,000. If they wanted to video your presentation and send it out to their other offices, then it would be $15,000. So it was always 2X and 3X for audio and video respectively. That’s all gone now. People ask me if they should charge extra, and my answer is that they can try, but they will likely either not book you at all or just not record your talk.

So when people ask me if they can record the event, I say, “Absolutely. But it’s really important that you have a high-quality recording for people who couldn’t make the meeting.” And they are very thankful, especially since they’ve been diddled around by other speakers who want to charge extra fees.

Send a recent speech. There are two ways to send speeches. You can send them in an email in MP3, or you can send them on CD or DVD. The challenge for me — because I’m old school — is that I’m not that fluent with transferring to hard formats. I do some of this but not a lot. And many of the people you will talk to aren’t proficient, either. So what you do is ask them how they would like the material.

Remember that you want to get your stuff out there. I have people who say that I should copyright everything and charge them for the use of my original materials. No, today it’s exactly the opposite. It’s sort of like when I do radio and television interviews to promote one of my books. I don’t charge the station to appear and be interviewed. As a matter of fact, I will crawl over broken glass, use PR specialists, and get up very early in the morning if they will please, please interview me and put me in front of their audience so people can see and hear about my new book, products, services, or my upcoming seminars.

Offer to do multiple talks at not only the first talk but at other talks as well. Offer to do breakouts for managers. Say “By the way, while I’m there, could I do a breakout seminar just for your sales managers or just for your team leaders? I’m doing a two talk for the main group, but I’d be pleased to speak for one hour in a small breakout seminar where you give me a series of the key issues and questions. I’ll make the seminar the answer to these questions from my point of view.”

Getting repeat bookings is more art than science, but if you try out a few of these ideas, your chances of getting booked again will go dramatically up.

Please the Meeting Planner

6-Figure Speakers understand that word of mouth is the best way to get future business.

Word of mouth is the single most important method for you get repeat bookings. The meeting planner has to be convinced a speaker will attract a lot of attendees and will please the audience before they hire.

Therefore, your job is to make the meeting planner look good. When the meeting planner hires a good speaker, and the attendees are happy, the meeting planner looks good, is promoted, or is given a bonus.

You can imagine that after that result, the speaker will get recommended to others.

Once I was booked to speak at the annual meeting of a Fortune 1000 company. The president’s secretary was a fan of mine and had recommended me to the keynote speaker. The president had never heard of me and was reluctant to bring in someone he didn’t know for such an important meeting. However, she was able to convince the president I would be a good choice.

The talk went extremely well, and I received a standing ovation. A few weeks later, I received a letter from the secretary telling me that her boss was so impressed with my talk that she had been promoted and given a $4000 raise.

Your reputation as a speaker is important, and it spreads quickly. Ensure you keep a good reputation by impressing the meeting planner and the audience.

Please the meeting speaker, and you’ll get more referrals than you can handle.

Meet Other Speakers

If your goal is to speak effectively, you have to learn from the top professionals and model yourself after them. Attend every talk and seminar you possibly can. Notice how the speakers interact with the audience both on and off the stage.

Be Clear About Your Objective

You want to achieve complete clarity about why the meeting planner hired you. Your goal is to make the meeting planner look good, and you can only do this if you are clear about what they want you to accomplish.

Remember the objective question, and ask your clients what they would like people to say and do as a result of your talk. Once you’re clear on this, organize your talk to achieve that goal.

Some time ago, a meeting planner, the president of a large organization, told me, “Your talk was the best I’ve heard in eighteen years. You covered every single point we discussed on the telephone, exactly as you promised.” She went on to say that many other speakers promised to customize their talks but never did. Many speakers believe that “it is easier to get a new audience than it is to develop a new talk.” These people don’t last long in the speaking industry.

Learn the Names of the Key People

Learn the names of the key people in your audience and refer to them in the course of the talk.

Sometimes I put words into the mouths of the key people. I will say something like, “Your president, William Henry, is always emphasizing the importance of quality in everything you do or deliver to your customers.”

I’ll have either come across this during my research or heard them mention it in their introductory remarks. People are always flattered when you refer to them in a positive way from the stage.

Practising Gratitude

6-Figure Speakers understand the power of gratitude.

Thank everybody for bringing you in and shake hands with all the key players. Make sure to thank them personally for having you there. I always stay later and take the time to meet, greet, and thank the boss of the person who brought me in, the assistants who helped set up the stage, the sound man, and everybody else who helped. This does get around. People start talking afterward about how you were a really nice person. People say, “We should have that person back again.” This is part of seeding as well.

Compliment them on everything they did to make the meeting so successful because it is, in fact, a really complicated process, and they really appreciate it when you acknowledge this. Tell them that the audience was really good, that you feel they got a lot out of your subject, and that a lot of positive change will take place.

Summary

People often ask me what the secret is to becoming a 6-Figure Speaker. The truth is there are several traits that make up a 6-Figure Speaker. But it is a learnable skill. Remember it’s all about the audience, give them plenty of ideas, keep your content fresh, and be a credible speaker. Please your client and the meeting speaker, and you’ll get repeat bookings, which will, in turn, increase your reputation and get you even more bookings.