Many of us have blocks around selling from stage – when this is one of the most sure-fire ways to make money! So let’s look at the 4 common fears around selling from stage:

Summary

Don’t let your fears be the reason you don’t get out there and give these things a shot.  You will always have doubts and reservations about things, but let that be the reason to get out there and do it; rather than stopping you.  Until you actually start, you will never really learn these tools. You will never do it perfectly, I have never done it perfectly and I doubt I ever will. There’s always more to learn – but the fastest way to learn is to do!!

For me, the importance of passion in selling is probably the most powerful piece of advice I can give to new speakers.  I always try to speak from the heart and connect with the audience in this heart-felt way.  When I bring my heart into my speaking, it always follows that my sales increase.  And believe me, this isn’t about trying to create more sales; it’s simply about being passionate about what I do. 

Bring Your Heart Into Your Sales
Think about it.  Children are some of the best sales people around, not because they know all the tips and tricks on creating a masterful close, but because they are undeniably passionate about their view point and their outcome.  They will not take no for an answer and they are not afraid to show it.

Likewise your passion for your product, service or message will shine through over and above any techniques you learn.  I’m not saying don’t learn the techniques:  you must.  But technique without passion is fruitless.

Passion on stage comes from being passionate about what you do in life.

The Attractor Factor
In the Attractor Factor, Dr. Joe Vitale cites a study where a group of 1500 people were given the option of joining two groups.  Group A was a group of people who were going to pick a career they believed was going to be a practical way to make a lot of money and then they were going to follow their passions after they made enough money.

1255 people joined Group A.  

Group B was a group of people who were going to pick a career that they were interested in and passionate about and just trust that the money would come.  Only 245 people joined Group B.

20 years later there were 101 millionaires out of the 1500 people who signed up for the study.  100 of the millionaires came from group B, the group of people who followed their passions and just trusted that the money would come.
 
Only 1 out of the 1255 people who picked a career because they believed it was a practical way to make a living actually became a millionaire.

This study shows that you do not need to have a plan or know how you are going to make money by following your passion.  All you need to do is to follow your passion.  Remember the great Dr. Martin Luther  King Jr. said,

       “I have a dream! . . .”
 
 He did not say:

       “I have a plan.”

The Key
Discover what you are passionate about.  You may already know this exactly.  What is it that lights you up?  How can you use this to inform your sales presentations? Try asking yourself some of the following questions to connect with your passion:

·    What did you love to do as a child?
·    What do you love about your product or service?
·    Why do you want the world to know about it?

Summary
It’s clear from this that living from that heart-felt passion will not only give you a sense of purpose in your career – and on stage – but it will also attract more abundance to you.  There’s no more compelling call to action from an audience’s perspective than watching someone come from a place of true authenticity and love.  Forget about getting ‘it’ right next time you speak, just try connecting more with your passions in your next presentation and see the effect on the audience this has.

Last week we looked at 10 great leadership styles to model.  In the 2nd of this 2-part series, we’re focussing on the 10 major causes of leadership failure.  Read these to avoid the pitfalls!

Disorganisation of Details
No leader is ever ‘too busy’ to do anything.  When you admit you are too busy, you show up your inefficiency.  One leadership style to definitely avoid is the “I’m too busy” attitude.

Unwillingness To Do Menial Tasks
To be a great leader, you have to get your hands dirty sometimes! If you want a great example, you only need to think of Gandhi.  His leadership style was so effective because he wasn’t above his followers, he was one of them.

Expect To Be Paid For What You Do
The most successful leaders I know get paid not for what they know, but for what they do with what they know.   Leadership style focusses on action.

Fear of Competition
Don’t focus on others, focus on what you are doing and how you can do it better.  The best leaders in the world train their team members to take over.  Only in this way, can you give attention to many things, i.e., leverage out to make more money.

Lack of Imagination
A weak leadership style is one of no imagination. With no imagination then you have no hope of meeting emergencies and of creating plans which your team will be inspired to follow.

Selfishness
If you’re the kind of leader who claims all the credit then this is bound to cause resentment.  The most powerful leaders actually give all the credit to their team because it’s a fact that people work harder for commendation and recognition than they will for money alone.  Love your team and they will love you!  Another definate leadership style to avoid is selfishness.

Over-Indulgence
This clearly does not command respect.  Enough said.

Lack of Loyalty
Any leader who is not loyal to his/her team will not be leader for long. 

Authority
If you’re trying to lead through the “authority” of your role, you’re trying to lead by force.  Real leaders lead through encouragement.  In the wise words of Mo-tzu,“People only become unmanageable when one tries to lead them with a violent love….But if one approaches them with trust and takes them by the hand….there will not be a single one will not adapt himself to the rule.” 

Your Job Title
Great leaders don’t need fancy job titles to gain respect.  A true leadership style is one through his/her actions not by the words on their business card – their offices are free of ostentation and open to anyone to enter.

Bonus Tip – Good Delegation

OK, so this isn’t one to avoid, but it’s so useful I thought I would include it anyway. To be a good business owner we have to be prepared to let go of the things we are not so good at and delegate them to others.  But not abdicate responsibility for them.

Good delegation is:

1. Ask someone to achieve an outcome
2. Ask if they accept responsibility for it
3. Give them authority to complete it (or outline what you want to be consulted about)
4. Schedule to review progress on estimated completion date.

Most people just hand it over like a parcel and never check in.

What’s Next?
A strong leadership style is to be modeled over time. I don’t think it’s something to be achieved overnight, but we can certainly start now.  It might help if you looked at the list honestly and asked yourself “Which of these am I doing?”  “Which of these could I stop doing?”  Choose one of the things you want to start doing now and you might just find that you’ve taken the first step towards great leadership.

As a speaker, the first key area that you need to really always be focusing on building is your credibility. 

What is Credibility?
Credibility is the way that your market perceives you and it’s vital to be credible to them.

Why Is It Important To Have Good Credibilty?

Because your audience needs to trust you and promoters need to trust you.  Event planners need to trust you.  If you want to be in demand for speaking engagements then you need to be a sought-after person.

First and foremost, that means you need to be trustworthy.  You need to have a story to tell, have a reputation behind you and be credible.  Now, there are lots of ways of establishing and working on building your credibility.

What Should You Focus On To Build Your Credibilty?

1. Story
   Look at your background – what’s in your background becomes a really good reason why people should listen to you.
   What is it in your background that gives you some credibility?
2. Results
   Another part to your credibility is your results – things that you’ve personally achieved in your life.
   My credibility is based around how I made over $1.25 million in my first 12 months as a professional speaker.  That has credibility!
   We refer to this kind of credibility statement as a “hook”—it’s a hook that instantly captures people’s attention.  It captures their imagination and they get excited!
3. Profitability
   Another very important factor, especially if you’re doing multi-speaker events, where you’re doing affiliates, and you’re sharing profit etc with the host, is you need to also be a profitable speaker.  Promoters want to know that you can actually make sales.  That’s yet another thing that will add to your credibility.

Make sure that you constantly track and record your results!

4. Integrity and Authenticity
   Always focus on maintaining good relationships with promoters, event planners, and people that you’ve worked with in the past.  That’s a really vital part of it….  So that people can trust you.  Credibility is all about establishing and maintaining trust.
5. Testimonials
   Another really quick and easy way to get credibility is through the use of testimonials. 
6. Media Endorsement
   Another way of building credibility is 3rd party endorsement from the media.  So if you’ve been in the newspapers, magazines, and so forth, you can use that resource as part of your armour of credibility.
7. Success of Students
   If you’re an educator and you’re teaching people, then it’s really good to use the  success of your students, because that’s probably the best thing that you can use to reflect your own credibility.

Always look at building up credibility in order to become attractive to promoters and other presenters.

So, I’ve given you lots of useful tips here.  What one thing can you do this week to start building your credibility?  Could it be trying to get some media endorsement?  What about getting those testimonials together?  Or even working on your bio to strengthen your hook?  The sooner you start building your credibility, the more promoters and audiences will want to work with you!

In Part one of this 2 part series I looked at why to use success stories in your presentation and in this, the second part I’m expanding on how to use success stories in your presentation.  Remember, there’s nothing more influential than hearing how someone else has become successful to inspire people to action.

The “HOOK” to grab your audience from the get-go!

The best way to start a great success story is with an audience-grabbing opening question. It’s a fantastic way to engage your audience.  An obvious opening question would be,  “Does anyone here know Joe Bloggs?” 

Painting the Picture

The next step is the details of the story. When I met the person, here’s what their life was like before they joined my program.  Let the audience know the biggest challenge for that person that they needed to overcome.

Prove Success

Here is where you will explain how the tools were applied to create proven success. We are going to want to know those skills and lessons.  And then you show the results:

• Increased his closing ratio from his presentations three times
• Has more clients that he knows what to do with
• Is enjoying the financial rewards of that with his partner..

Good OR Good?!

Before Picture: My biggest challenge was!

After Picture: Ultimate benefit!

It’s key that you get into the details of the story by following these steps:

• Does anyone know …?
• Acknowledge that – “I wish you did…” or “Brilliant, you’ll love…”
• When I first met them – their biggest challenge was…
• What happened was…
• What that meant was…

Multi-Sensory Language

To take your success stories to another level, you can use multi-sensory language. This is what I call VAK:

• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthetic 

Provide a visual picture of what he/she looks like.  Include something he/she told you ‘She was telling me the other day..” which is the auditory part of the story. And kinesthetically, a real sense of power (you would act this one out a bit). So we get to know him/her even more.

You’ll love this TIP!

If you don’t have any success stories, go to your clients.

• Ask them what successes have they had.
• Find out what people have been up to or get on the phone to your clients.
• You can run “The World’s Greatest Testimonial Competition!”

Summary

By now, you know why and how to use success stories in your presentations!  So, if you still haven’t got any success stories, why don’t you make it your focus this week to gather as many as possible so that next time you give a presentation you can inspire  your audience to take the next step with you.

There’s nothing more powerful than using a success story in your presentation to prove what you say is true.  And there’s nothing more influential than hearing how someone else has become successful to inspire people to action.

Why You Need To Use A Success Story In Your Presentation

This is a bit of a no-brainer but I thought I would spell it out anyway.  Why do you need to use success stories in your presentation?  The key benefits of using success stories are:

• They hammer home your credibility.
• They convince your audience that you do what you say you do – that you can deliver; the bigger the results the better.
• They prove you have market trust in you – this makes your audience more receptive to putting their trust in you.
• It uses social proof perfectly – other people have risked their time and money investing in you.  It worked for them so it could work for you.
• By using someone else’s words to promote you, and not just you saying how good you are, it’s a compelling call to action.

What Makes A Good Success Story?

A good success story in a presentation should be brief and to the point. It should be a balance of enough detail and enough emotional impact and yet still be nice and clear.

The lesson in the telling of success stories of other people is take them back to the place where they were emotionally.  Paint out that journey from struggle to success. Share these stories with your audience as faithfully as you know them.  This is a really key point – be honest in your success stories because if you aren’t, this lack of honesty will come back and bite you.

The 5 Keys of How To Make A Good Success Story In A Presentation

• The “hook” to grab your audiences’ attention
• Painting the Picture
• Prove Success
• Using Multi Sensory Language
• A Success Story for when you don’t have a Success Story

A success story in a presentation is not about proving how good you are at what you do, although it certainly does that. It’s about opening up the emotional place and allowing people access to it. And then of course, you give them the tool that allowed you to make the shift. It’s this change that makes all the difference in the world.

In my next article, we’ll break this down and examine the 5 key components in more detail.  So in the meantime, if you don’t have any success stories why don’t you ask your clients and ask them what they’ve been up to.  Get on the phone to them and see what successes they’ve had.  You could even run the world’s greatest testimonial competition!

Good luck!

How To Make An Impact

Public speaking is very much about improving our communication skills, for when we know how to communicate effectively (to one person or to an entire room full of people) we also know how to inform, inspire and persuade others.

Each and every time you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are.  People form opinions about us, based not only on our appearance but also on our communication skills. And while many people go to great lengths to look good, dress professionally and so on, very few people take any sort of action to improve their communication skills. And believe me, there is nothing more effective than standing on stage for improving your communication skills!

Many of the world’s most successful people are also highly developed communicators. They have taken the time and energy to develop and hone their communication skills. As a result, they know how to inform, persuade and inspire others.

Public speaking is a sure-fire way to improve your communication skills.

Do You Want To Be In High Demand?

Strong communicators are in high demand.  Next time you pick up the newspaper have a look at the careers section – regardless of whether you speak on stage or not. Virtually every job listing requests that applicants have good or excellent ‘communication skills’. Your success lies in your ability to communicate your message – regardless of which platform you speak from. If your message is unclear and you appear unconfident, this dramatically impacts on your end result.

But just like any other skill, public speaking is a skill which must be learned!

So, why don’t you make a point to practice your presentation and hone those communication skills even further?  You can never stop learning how to communicate more and more effectively – and this will serve you in almost every walk of life, be it professionally or personally.

Creating emotion has a few key elements that cannot be missed. These are:

1. Awareness
2. Intention
3. Vocal strength and flexibility

1. Awareness

The first key is to recognize the power that the voice has in impacting and creating change in another human and as such, how this can generate more sales.

It has been said that the words that we choose are only 7% of the message that we communicate.  38% of our message is due to our tonality, and 55% of it is due to our physiology, our physical action.

So over a third of your outcome depends on your voice.

Create awareness of your own voice and use it dramatically.

Listen to how you use your voice, listen to the vocal range that you have.

Start to listen to other people’s voices, how they use them, and then start to bring awareness to the extremes that you use in your own voice. Do you have extremes or is it all flat lining? 

You will make more money from stage AND make it easier to listen to you if you can work on your voice variation.

2. Set the intention

These are the intentions you will want to set if you want to make more money from stage:

• That you will start to expand your vocal range
• You will create moods with your voice
• You will carry your confidence in your voice
• And that your voice will take people on an emotional journey.

3. Vocal Strength and Flexibility

If you start to learn how to use your voice in a powerful manner, then you’ll find that it will be more powerful for longer, and you will be able to preserve and conserve your voice.   You want to use your voice in such a way that it touches the hearts and minds of the people in your audience and thus create more sales from speaking.

Don’t Be Just Comfortable, Be Memorable
If you’re committed to becoming, not just a profitable speaker, but also a memorable speaker, then the next step is to get masterful with your voice.

Be the sort of person that when people leave the room they continue to talk about you, not just because of your content, but because of your style, your charisma and your ability to take them on an emotional journey.   And be the sort of speaker that makes massive money from stage!

So, What’s Next?
Well, my suggestion would be to go and see a high drama movie!

Listen to the way these highly trained actors use their voice to create mood.
Notice the high, the loud, the soft, notice the pace changes, notice the volume changes.
So this week I want you to spend the whole time listening to people with a new intention and then see how you can utilize this in your next speaking gig.

And remember, have fun!

Making the time to develop your voice increases your ability to emotionally move roomfuls of people and in turn increases your conversion rate.  Public speaking is an area with the potential to make a lot of money so it makes sense to invest time on your voice.  Remember….

Your voice becomes your money-making machinery.

Developing your voice also:
Builds your confidence on and off stage
Having a strong and powerful voice builds and carries your confidence to every member in your audience.

There are two sides to this coin:

1. It’s your voice that will give you away if you’re not confident.
2. A confident voice will cause you to feel more confident in your presentation and in yourself generally.

So with a good strong confident voice you’re going to really make that lasting impression we are after.  It is a positive feedback loop.

It enables you to perform and create whilst on stage

A powerful and flexible voice gives you the ability to create the most incredible moods. These are the moments where it is just you and the audience, hanging on your every word, feeling your every nuance.
Your voice enables you to create a full palette of moods:

• Conspiracy: “shhh- don’t tell anyone but…”
• Expectation:  “when all of a sudden, you would not believe it…”
• Pain: “It was the most heart-wrenching decision I had ever had to make…”
• Elation or hysteria:  “I was stunned, rapt, we were wildly celebrating…”
• Seduction: “As I looked at the options, I could tell there was really no choice but to…”

You name it…with your voice, you can create it.

When you become a master of creating mood in your audience, what happens is you become a master of the emotional journey of your audience.

A salesperson who is in control of the emotional journey of the person in front of them can control the action they take on that journey…and there you have it – “sales” in a nutshell.  This is why sales from public speaking is so powerful.  You’re not just converting one person, you’re converting hundreds!

When you can control the emotional journey of your audience you can control the action they take on that journey.

So, next time you stand on stage with the aim of making sales, why don’t you spend some time focusing on creating mood in your audience and then see what happens when you take them on an emotional journey.  You never know what magic might happen to your conversion rate!

Speaking is a key area in almost every business, be it negotiations, promotions and of course, speaking and selling from stage. 
This makes it ALL THE MORE important to know just how powerful your voice can be. 

Your Voice Is Your Money-Making Machinery.

Understanding this will make you a truly exceptional speaker with the power to move roomfuls of people AND make you huge sales from your public speaking.  If you’ve ever watched any great speaker, the people that stand out in your mind well after the story has ended are those who create a mood in the space. They convey emotions so powerfully that it takes you on the journey with them.
Interestingly, sales are about the emotional journey too. A big part of being a speaker and taking people on an emotional journey is the use of your voice.   An even bigger part of being a speaker is to make sales.

How Improving Your Voice Will Make You More Memorable, Captivating and Entertaining As A Speaker

There are many great and profitable speakers out there who have never considered how improving their voice could benefit their sales, so that’s where you already have a leg up on them!

Whilst your voice is not the most important thing that will directly impact your sales from your public speaking on the day, it WILL directly impact how memorable, captivating and entertaining you are as a speaker…so think of those referrals and the long-term goals of your business!

In other words, WHY should you consider becoming a vocal artist?

The benefits of becoming a vocal artist

• If you learn to protect your voice and rehearse effectively you will have a long and profitable career as a speaker
• Great vocal control builds your confidence on and off stage
• Powerful vocal technique gives you flexibility to perform and create whilst on stage

If speaking is a key element of creating your business, be it promotion, sales or communication, your voice becomes your money-making machinery. If your voice is not in shape then essentially you are losing your uniqueness in the marketplace and losing sales from your public speaking.

Remember, your voice is your money-making machinery, so what can you be doing right now to start caring more for your voice?