Professional speaking is a craft that revolves around the use of ideas and words to meet buyers’ objectives. The outcome of a successful presentation should be overjoyed the buyer. You manage and guide this process by focusing on the outcomes, understanding the overall value of the process that culminates in your time on time, dealing with people who make investment decisions based upon value delivered, not minutes spent.
Professional actors aren’t speakers. While it is important for you to be thoroughly prepared, it’s sterile to be so tightly orchestrated that the audience perceives an off-the-shelf performance rather than an engaging interaction. People choose the plays and professional performances that they attend, but they usually have their speakers chosen for them. If you do a thorough job at the front end, understanding the audience and basing your value on the difference you can make in the members’ personal and professional lives, then you’ll be positioned to reap huge rewards. Ego-needs fulfillment, product sales, and adulation will follow as by-products. They should never be pursued as primary goals.
The genesis of a successful speaking career is: “The Value.”
Focus on how the client’s condition will be improved as a results of your contributions. Once you understand that, you can both attract people to you and reach out to form relationships with them.
Keep it simple. Your market approach and dealings with your clients, as well as your delivery should be simple. Keep your focus on your value how you can improve your clients’ conditions, the true economic buyer who can pay for that value, how you will pursue such buyers, and how they will be attracted to you.
One primary requisite is to be concise. Tell people what they need to know, not everything that you know. A speaker who tells the same tired stories and uses shopworn examples year after year may land some jobs, but he or she won’t build a career.
Your greatest asset is between your ears: intellectual capital. You must instantiate this so that it is manifest as intellectual property. Intellectual property takes many forms, speaking merely being one.
You can increase your business in diverse ways, and you should follow the best practices for doing this, not attempting to reinvent cold beer. That increase will add to your reputation as a professional speaker and leader, which enhances viral marketing.