Shift Speaker Training Blog » Products

You’ve Got Your Prospects To The Back Of The Room . . . Now What?

Joey — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:41:46 +0000

By Donna Powell

It’s at the back of the room, or at the enrolments table where the business end of things happens. This is where the success of your presentation is measured via the number of sales you make and the money you take home in your pocket. It’s here the order forms are collected, payments are processed, questions are answered . . . and sales can be closed or lost depending on the sales skills and talents of the crew you have supporting you.

Where To Start
If you’re just starting out and you are running a small event then you might try to be superstar and do it all on your own . . . my suggestion is don’t go there! Even with a small audience, having someone to support you at the back of the room is essential. This allows you to concentrate on what it is you do best – the presentation.

As your business grows or you speak on other people’s stages then having people or crew to support you at the sales desk becomes even more important.

Here are some top tips:

Know the Offer
Make sure your crew know what you’re selling. Spend the time and go through the details of the offer and the price points before the event. This is especially important if you’re at a multi-speaker event with crew who don’t know you or haven’t seen you before.

Know the Form
Every order form is different. A completed order is like gold for your business. It IS money for you. You want to make sure that your crew:

Understand the information required on the form
Take care to make sure it’s filled in correctly
Make sure they can read all the information on it clearly so it’s easy to process the payment or enter the sale into your system when you get back to the office.

Know the Price

Is the price printed on the order form or have you left a blank space for people to write it in once you reveal your offer?
If you are not printing the offer price on the form, make sure the crew on the enrolments desk have a price list and you’re not relying on them to write the price down as you announce it from stage.
On that, when you announce the price from stage, make sure it’s the same one you told the crew.

Nothing beats experience
It’s even better if all or some of your crew have completed your program or bought your product before and can give a first hand account to potential customers. This added testimonial support is great and helps them to answer customer questions, particularly the detailed ones!

Questions
When you’re at the back of the room answering questions, remember to leave your microphone on, so that other people in the room can hear the answers as well. If one person has a question, it’s very likely other people have questions so leaving your microphone on helps encourage others to the back of the room.

So this week, think about how you can use these tips in your presentations to get the best sales results from your presentations.

How To Make Selling YOUR Product As Easy As Possible For You

Joey — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 02:04:30 +0000

By Donna Powell

So the big day has arrived! After months of hard work this is the day you launch your ebook/seminar/product into the marketplace. What’s that noise? Why, it’s the sound of thousands of customers flooding through your doors making more money for you in a week than you earned in a month at your previous job.

Here are some practical tips to help make it all as smooth as silk.

Print Lots Of Order Forms

Make sure you’ve got more than you think you’ll need as some customers like to keep a copy for their records. Also pay attention to the information you asking your customers for when they fill in your Order Form? Name, email address, postal address?

Generally the less information you ask people for on an opt in website or free giveaway, the more likely they are to fill it in. However, If you’re at the point where people are parting with their hard earned cash you can ask for a little bit more. First name AND last name are usually good to get – if for nothing else it makes identifying customers in your database much easier that having to rely on email address when you end up with 50 John’s in your system. People also generally expect postal address and billing address when ordering via credit card.

Money, Money, Money – How Are Customers Paying You?

Are you taking cash at an event? If yes, remember to think about what you’re charging and what change you might need. For example, if you’re charging £47 for something, it’s pretty likely people will hand over £50 so make sure you’ve got plenty of £1 and £2 on hand. Might sound like common sense, but gets tricky if that’s the one thing you forgot to pack and it’s a Sunday and the banks are shut.

If you’re taking credit cards, there’s no cash involved but there are other issues. Do you have your own merchant facility? Or are you running everything through PayPal? There are fees involved for each so get plenty of information.

When are you processing payments? If you’re processing them after the event, you may want to refrain from giving out any physical product or bonuses until people’s are processed and cleared. This avoids any difficulties afterwards.

Services like Eventbrite are great for event and product sales if you are just starting out or want an easy and quick option for people to purchase online. They take a commission of the sales and allow for different pricing structure and are a great option to get a sales order page up easily and quickly.

Payment plans – Yes, No, or Never?

The up side, they offer more flexibility for people to purchase your products who might otherwise not and means that overall sales are likely to be higher as a greater number of people can buy.

The down side, there will be people who default on their payments, whose cards expire and fail and who have changes in their life circumstances that mean they won’t be able to pay on time. This will take you (or someone in your team) TIME and EFFORT to follow up and manage.

What’s your refund policy and guarantee? Think about it BEFORE you sell the product, know it, clearly state it, then stick to it.

Summary

A little bit of planning upfront will make your product or event launch run smoothly and set up a strong base for your business as you expand and grow. So this week, think about what information you’re collecting from your customers and how you are using it.

How to Write a Book

Joey — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 05:00:05 +0000

You want to be looking for strategies to increase your celebrity as a speaker. One of these strategies is to write a book.
People think they don’t have time to write a book.
We have this concept that our book needs to be perfect and all emcompassing.
A friend of mine wrote his book in just 3 hours!
You don’t even have to write it yourself!
Put together the outline of what you want and have someone else do it for you.
Get over the fact your book needs to be perfect. Just get it done.

Are You a Web Celeb?

Joey — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:17:47 +0000

Did you know that Forbes publish a “Top 25 Web Celebs” list? While I’m not on there yet- I’ve managed to establish myself quite firmly at the forefront of the speaking niche, and I want to show you how you can do it in your area…

www.shiftspeakertraining.com/webceleb

In this free webinar I’ll pull back the curtain and share the lessons we have learned as we moved from successful million dollar offline business to online profit centres over the past 12 months.

Plus I’ll give you a sneak peak at some of the strategies in my new best selling book “Our Internet Secrets”. Success in any Information Business is a balance of online and offline strategies, so take a walk down “online lane” with me in this info-packed hour…

www.shiftspeakertraining.com/webceleb

Peep behind the scenes with me- I’ll tell you how we make our cool new videos too!

Cheers,

Joanna

PS. There’s only a handful of seats remaining. Get yours now- and please make sure you attend on time. It would be a shame if someone missed out on attending because there were no more places left- and then someone didn’t turn up!

www.shiftspeakertraining.com/webceleb

Leverage Your Speaking Career Using The Elegant Business Model

Joey — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:18:26 +0000

Click play to watch this video now!

The Pareto Principle is always at play when it comes to your speaking career.

Of the starry-eyed masses who choose to follow a career that involves speaking, the truth is 20% of them will make 80% of the money.

Which means the other 80% struggle, sharing the remaining 20% of income among them.

Of the 20% who succeed financially, 20% of these will have 80% of the lifestyle rewards. That is, 80% of financially successful speakers are too busy to enjoy their rewards. They may enjoy occasional holidays to ritzy destinations- sandwiched between relentless speaking engagements.

How do I know? I just described my “old speaking career”. My “new speaking career” is far more elegant.

No-one wants a life like that. That’s why I encourage my students to craft their speaking careers correctly from the get go using something I call the “Elegant Business Model”.

And that’s the topic of today’s video.

I take you step-by-step through a real life example of an Elegant Business Model from one of my clients so that you can plan one for your own speaking career.

I go into the Elegant Business Model in more detail in my “Presentation profits Blueprint”. If you have not got a copy yet- download your free copy right here on the blog.

If you are ready for the next step, and serious about creating multiple passive income streams from your speaking career- you will definitely want to join me for my New Webinar series: “The Blueprint in Action”.

I will be running this series EXCLUSIVELY for people who join me in my BRAND NEW Shift Speaker Training Silver Mentoring Program.

To celebrate the launch of the new program we’re offering “The Ultimate Speaking Resource” at an absolutely nutty and easy-to-afford price.

The Resource will include (among other goodies):

Lifetime Access to My Silver Mentoring Program so that you can create Profit Beyond Your Wildest Dreams form your speaking career…. Forever!
The Blueprint in Action LIVE Webinar Series: “30 days to new income from your speaking”- which means even if you’re a complete newbie you can make some new cash form speaking in the next 30 days!
…And one new member will be sharing the stage with me. I have set aside one place for one of my mentoring clients to WIN a $10,000 guranteed income speaking opportunity. That’s right you could make in excess of $10,000 when you speak for 90 minutes to my tried-and-tested million dollar audiences!

To find out about these and other goodies that are going to be available as part of my “Ultimate Speaking Resource” for 7 days only from the 22^nd of July 2009- go to http://shiftspeakertraining.com/silver BETWEEN THE 22ND AND 29^TH OF JULY.

After the 29^th, the doors will close, and this offer will NEVER be repeated. So make sure you take action this week!

How to secure your public speaking career using membership sites

Joey — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:59:03 +0000

One of the traps that many speakers fall into is thinking in terms of getting “Paid per speech”. But this turns you into nothing other than a highly paid labourer. But even learning to sell from stage is not going to enhance your public speaking career unless you have an Elegant Business Model.

One of the keys to making your speaking career one of freedom and lifestyle is to break the link between time and money using membership sites; or perhaps a better term is “subscriptions”.

ENHANCE YOUR PUBLIC SPEAKING CAREER WITH MEMBERSHIP SITES

The reason I don’t like the term membership site so much is because there are 6 ways to create “recurring monthly income” without having to build a highly technical “membership site”.

For many people-oriented speakers, the thought of having to build some software-dependent animal like this is too much to bear! So the good news is there are many ways to create recurring streams of highly leveraged income from your speaking career, and you can choose how complex you want them to be.

Career-enhancing subscription models for speakers include:

1. EMAIL MODEL MEMBERSHIPS: This is where your clients receive a regular email from you with a text-based lesson in it. There are two versions of this:

Simple level: A simple email full of valuable tips in your inbox.
Advanced level: A text email with a link to a website such as my newsletter “Behind the Scenes”.

The key to both is to write some simple, but valuable information and send it out by email.

2. PDF MEMBERSHIPS: This is where you send out a pdf regularly jampacked full of value. This can be emailed or posted.

Email: One that I subscribe to which I really enjoy getting is Armand Morin’s “Internet Marketing Newsletter”. He makes it look like a magazine, full of images and so on- so it is visually very appealing.
Post: My copywriting friend, Pete Godfrey (who by the way I have asked to write an article on filling rooms for you for next week’s newsletter) has a great 12 page monthly newsletter he sends out in the mail.

3. AUDIO MEMEBERSHIPS: This model is where you send out a regular audio to your members. It could be in the form of:

An audio postcard where they go to a website to listen to your pre-recorded audio;
A regular TeleSeminar where they can join in and learn and participate regularly.

4. A VIDEO MEMBERSHIP: In this case it is a regular video piece. Again this may be:

A video postcard or
A regular live TV show using ustream.com
A regular webinar where you use video and visual aids to teach your information. We have just started using GoToWebinar for our Million Dollar Masterclass webinars and we’re very impressed.

5. A SERVICE MEMBERSHIP: In this model your client is paying you for regular service from them. Our Secret Weapon Software comes with this component as a subscription. Vanessa offers monthly support and training for a nominal monthly fee.

6. A COMPLETE MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM: This may involve elements of all the others and more. Our own Silver Mentoring Program (which, by the way we are launching on July 22nd and opening the doors on a killer offer for only 7 days is an example of this. It includes:

Email and text lessons taking you through how to profit in your speaking career.
Regular TeleSeminars where I interview speaking and marketing experts.
Services such as critiques of your presentation and powerpoints.
Community through the blog.
Video training to show you speaking tips through the classes
Special members benefits such as opportunities to speak at events.

But the point of all this is that most people put off leveraging their speaking career through creating their own membership program because they think it has to be the huge whizz-bang bells and whistles version. But you can get started with something really simple for a low monthly fee and start creating your regular monthly income today.

The keys to remember are:

Create valuable content for your subscribers
Provide it at a no-brainer price
Automate and systemise it through wise software choices

But the most important thing is to get started. Don’t try to have it perfect to begin. Let me know how you go!