• How do you choose a topic that people are hungry for?
• Most people have something they are passionate about or they have a feeling of injustice or need.
• The problem is that you have to match your passion with the market
• 1. What is your passion?
  2. What are people interested in?
  3. Who do you want to speak to? Corporate? Small Business? Parents?, Graduates? etc..
  4. What is their biggest problem?
  5. How does your passion solve their problem??
• You can still sell your passion – just use it to solve your clients problem.

This week’s BTS tip comes from our General Manager, Donna Powell.

• Scarcity creates incentive to buy
• Reward fast action takers
• Be clear on your system to your audience and your crew

• There is a secret to understanding the elements of running an event room
• Most people think the only important thing is content
• There is so much more
• Far more important than content is the participant experience
• There are three key elements to running a successful room
  1. The Speaker and content
  2. The space – the seminar room – you NEED an event manager
  3. The audio visual element – music, soundscape, slides, visual impact – you NEED a great AV Team
• It is worth investing in the AV team to get a great experience

AV Company Contact Details

UK
Ignite AV – Sanjeev Desour
http://www.igniteav.com

Australia
The AV Guys – Chris Lorez
http://www.theavguys.com.au

Question: What is one of the biggest reasons why people don’t use speaking from the stage to fast-track their business growth?

The answer? FEAR.

Why It Pays For You To Overcome YOUR Fears

The fear of public speaking is believed to be the single most common phobia and affects as much as 75% of the population.  This means if you have some ‘stuff’ about being on stage and having the spotlight focused brightly on you . . .  you are not alone.

Even the most confident people who have no trouble with public speaking often get rattled when it comes to asking for the sale.

They do a dynamic presentation and then suddenly turn into a mumbling robot.  If you have ever seen someone selling from stage and doing a bad job, then most probably you will have been turned off from doing it yourself.  But there’s a key distinction here.  It’s not the selling itself which is bad . . . it’s often the technique that is being used.  When it is done with finesse it’s as graceful as ballet.

Time To Stretch Your Comfort Zone
We all enjoy coasting along in our comfort zones, don’t we?  But the trouble with that attitude is that once you stop reaching and stretching yourself, you stop growing.

In fact, if you’re feeling comfortable right now you’re in danger of missing the big pay-off which comes with stepping out of your comfort zone.  That pay-off is – you get the confidence to take on a whole lot of other things in many areas of your life.

Start Small
A great way to start stepping out of your comfort zone is to speak in front of just a handful of people.  The confidence you will draw from this experience will allow you to get up in front of a bigger audience.

I’ve got many successful clients who decided they were going to learn how to present from stage precisely because they were so terrified of it. They knew if they didn’t overcome their fears it would hold them back from all the other opportunities life throws us.

From Painfully Shy Child To $130,000 In Ticket Sales In 3 Short Months
You may not know this, but as a child I was incredibly shy.  Like many other people, I had to work through my own issues about getting up on stage.  It was about letting go of the past and stepping out of my comfort zone.  And now look at me . . . I love being up there!  Not only that, I make a lot of money from my passion.  Using just one of my profit principles – The 7 Steps To An Effective Presentation – I made over $130,000 in ticket sales in 3 short months and without even a database of my own! I don’t say this to blast my own trumpet . . . I say this to show you what is possible when YOU step out of your comfort zone and dare to expand.

Summary
Fears can be constructive, but don’t let them hold you back from the success you deserve.  Your ideas and thoughts are valuable and the real power of speaking is in the lives you can change.  So this week, step out of your comfort zone and start sharing your message with anyone who’ll listen.  You might just find the doors of opportunity burst wide open.

Mistake # 1 – Not Selling

Your message alone is not enough to inspire people to buy your products and services.  Not giving a sales pitch to your audience is doing them a disservice. In order to make a real difference in someone’s life, you must give them the opportunity for an ongoing education.  If they don’t buy from you, they’ll buy from someone else.

Mistake # 2 – Poor Organisation

This will only cause you stress and confusion but what’s ten times worse, it leaves money on the table.  That’s because if you confuse them, you lose them. 

There are 3 key ways that poor organisation shows up:

a)   A confusing offer.  The Solution – spend time crafting a clear offer for your product
b)   Confusion about how to pay for the offer.  The solution – Be 100% clear on the system you are using to take the money and implement this system at your event.
c)   Lack of support staff.  The solution – Make sure you have at least one sales member to field questions and help close sales.

Mistake # 3 – A Rushed Offer

If you don’t give yourself enough time to make your offer at the end of your presentation, you will miss key points and this will cost you money.  Make sure you hit every point of your sales presentation.

Mistake # 4 – Answering Questions With Your Offer

I have seen countless presenters come unstuck by allowing their flow to be interrupted after making their offer.  Take questions and accept interruptions at other times during your presentation, just NOT at the crucial closing time.  Don’t even take testimonials.

Mistake # 5 – No ‘Stick’ Campaign

A ‘stick’ campaign is where you take some action to reassure the people who spent money with you that they did the right thing . . .  you do not want them to be suffering from buyer’s remorse the minute they leave the seminar room!  If they take products home with them, you might want to send them an email immediately and offer them a bonus gift of an audio interview as your thanks for your business. 

Summary

These 5 mistakes are easy to avoid especially now you know about them!  Believe me, there’s a lot of speakers out there making these mistakes and worse.  So this information alone will set you above your competitors.  So, this week why not go over your next presentation with this check-list in mind and see if you can make any tweaks or edits.  Perhaps spend time crafting your offer, or thinking through your sales system or just practice your close as calmly and as unrushed as you can.  To your speaking success!

Be prepared…  This feature article is only for people who are committed to being excellent platform speakers.   Because isn’t it true that when challenges appear that we tend to give up?  So if you’re serious about taking your speaking skills to the highest level – read on.

How To Deal With Tardiness or Absenteeism In YOUR Presentation

Giving a great presentation is easy when the audience is also easy to deal with. When the audience is challenging or causing you concerns or problems, getting through your content becomes quite difficult and challenging

Tardiness or Absenteeism
Probably the most common problem that you will notice with any group that have been together for any particular amount of time, is people showing up late after breaks or in the mornings for longer trainings or not showing up at all.

The Cause – Recognizing Common Behaviors
If you are doing personal development, financial trainings, or any presentation where you are pressing people’s buttons, they are being forced to look at how they are responsible for the results that they are getting in their life.

As soon as any group work is involved, then it becomes a bigger problem. It’s then they start disliking what you are saying or start to unconsciously undermine what is going on by being late or not showing up.

Systems and Strategies
You will to need to develop your company’s policy on tardiness and absenteeism with systems and strategies to handle these situations.
The easiest and simplest way is to have name tags that people put on when they come in the room and that you collect when they leave the room for breaks.  In smaller groups, it is obviously easy to notice when someone is not there, but in larger groups, you need better strategies around that.

I always have a list of mobile phone numbers of everyone who is there. If someone does not show up after a break, I want them to know that we notice, that we care and that if there is anything we can do to support that we will do that. I always train my event manager’s to contact anyone who does not show up.

Potential Problems
If someone is not showing up, they will ask for their money back at a later stage.  They will use the excuse that it was a “bad training” rather than confront their own unconscious blockages. You need to make sure those participants are aware that if they have not been in the room, then they have not had the experience of it.

Get good systems and strategies in your business policy. It will resolve many of the issues upfront, minimizing the impact on the group and your business.

How To Manage Lateness.
At the very beginning of your presentations, you need to set a frame around the fact that you got a lot of content to get through. On each of these 3 frames you need to get the agreement from your participants:

• You have a lot of content to get through and it’s important that they are in the room, on time, so that you get through everything that you want to teach them.
• That you are teaching at two levels – conscious and unconsciously. 
• If they are late back from the breaks, they are distracting for everyone else in the room.

Train your event manager and your crew to watch out for this and to address it if it comes up. A frank and honest conversation with the person is usually the best way to deal with it.

If you set your frames up front, most people will be on time.

Summary
This week, why not commit yourself to being an excellent platform speaker – one who does not give up when beset by challenges, but one who will do whatever it takes to succeed.  So craft some systems and strategies around tardiness or absenteeism.   Do whatever it takes to be the best.

Knowing how to introduce a speaker is a very important skill and although it seems very simple and straightforward, there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

The Purpose of Introductions
There are three main reasons to introduce a speaker correctly. The first is to grab hold of the audience’s attention,the second is to entice the audience to pay attention, and the third is to build up the credibility of the speaker. A successful MC will have the audience wanting to buy from this person even before they’ve stepped onstage.

Profiling The Audience
People who attend seminars come from diverse backgrounds, and have different purposes and reasons for being there.  It’s the job of the MC or the person doing the introduction to pull the audience together to be present and focused.

Engaging The Audience
It’s important also to establish the credibility of the speaker. You build the speaker up and make them look fabulous. You want the audience to be feeling really, really great and very blessed to have this particular person in front of them. The aim is to get an audience wanting to work closely with the speaker even before they go on stage

Audience
You need to build rapport with your audience to capture their attention.  You need to let them know what’s coming and why they really should listen to this person.  

The Plot
Once you’ve prepared your introductions, you don’t want to just be reading out notes on stage necessarily. You want to have the basics written and you want to know what key words the speaker wants you to use in their introduction. It’s that information that you will be using to connect with the audience

Tell The Audience Who You Are
I see this mistake a lot – the MC will get up and forget to introduce themselves. It’s important to tell people who you are and why you’re up on the stage. The only exception to not telling the audience who you are is if it’s all ready been done.

Our Next Speaker Is…
Make sure before you go on stage that you know the speaker’s name by heart and you know how to pronounce it.  There’s nothing worse than pronouncing a speaker’s name incorrectly.

Summary
This week, why not pretend you are MC-ing for another speaker and see you can start to practice the above points.

What’s in your head when you’re on stage?  Are you focused on connecting with your audience and building rapport or are you consciously aware of everything you’re doing – right and wrong?

If you’ve done a number of presentations, you will have had the experience of delivering your well-designed “speech” to a few different crowds.

But one thing I have noticed with speakers time and time again is that when they are actually on stage, sometimes their focus is on the wrong place.

• “I stood still most of the time like you say Jo, but at one point I thought I should move around a bit so I did.”
• “When I was building the need I know I said it all wrong and it threw me for the rest of the close.”
• “I didn’t think I was going to remember the questions, but I asked about 4 questions in first 2 minutes is that enough?

What’s Wrong Here?

On the one hand, it is great that people have awareness about what’s happening on the stage. The problem with these speakers was that with further questioning I discovered that while on stage, MOST OF THE TIME they were thinking about what they were doing, and whether they were doing it right.

While you’re busy focusing on whether you’ve asked enough questions, or changed state enough or built enough need, or been clear enough- you are stuck in your head. While you’re stuck in your head you are not doing the one thing that you should do on stage and that is:

Connect With Your Audience!

That is your single biggest and most important job once you get on stage. All you should be focusing on is connecting with them and taking them on a great journey.

That’s it.

Summary

So, forget about getting it ‘right’ on stage.  Focus instead on practicing your presentation and then when you’re up there, forget all of this and instead build your connection.  And then write in and tell me about the results…

Summary

Refreshing yourselves with these 7 simple steps is often the key to unlocking any challenges you might be experiencing in your speaking game. Remember speak with passion and authenticity and then structure the presentation around these steps. See if you can create your presentation around this model, or if you already have a presentation, see if you can hone it even more. You never know, you might just double, triple or quadruple your conversation rate…