Choice Corporate Housing Inc

By Steven Van Yoder

When Robert Middleton moved his marketing consulting practice, Action Plan Marketing, to Palo Alto, California several years ago, he started his business from scratch. He had left his well-established client base several miles away and now had to find strategies to generate new clients.

Because Middleton had always spoken to promote his business, he turned to public speaking with a vengeance. He researched local organizations whose members comprised professional business owners, his target clientele. He called chambers of commerce, business groups and others likely to be interested in his three-hour marketing workshop.

Within a few months, Middleton had spoken at over a dozen organizations, establishing his reputation as a marketing expert for professional service firms. He quickly became a known entity, having personally introduced his business and credentials to hundreds of prospects.

Better yet, Middleton’s speaking strategy helped him land all the business he could handle in a relatively short time period.

Over the course of sixteen talks, he averaged one new client each time. Today, the seminars he conducts at business groups and, increasingly, teleconferences promoted through his web site generate more than 50 percent of his business.

Speaking Is Selling

Many business people never consider standing in the front of their buying public to share professional wisdom. If you’re one of them, you’re missing the boat.

Speaking is a marketing strategy you can immediately embrace to get in front of potential customers. Speaking puts you within handshaking distance of your best prospects, many times helping you close sales before you leave the room.

By speaking regularly you can end the uncertainty of knowing where your next client will come from. Speaking can help you reach dozens, and sometimes hundreds of your best prospects every time. Speakers report that speaking regularly continuously fills their prospect pipelines, ensuring a steady stream of new clients and customers.

Speaking is effective because it showcases your knowledge before groups of people who eagerly show up to hear it. Your prospects may tune out advertising, but they’ll pay attention to your talk because it presents your knowledge in polished form to people who think it will help them.

Speaking gives you tremendous visibility and credibility that increases over time. Whenever you are in the front of a room, you get noticed. People will remember who you are and what your business does. The more people see you speak and see your business name, the more successful people think you are.

Speaking gives prospects a taste of what you offer in a non-threatening environment. When they are in a room full of people, they feel comfortable. There’s safety in numbers. They do not feel the sales pressure of a one-on-one meeting. It’s also low risk, as chances are, they didn’t pay as much to hear you speak as it would cost to hire you.

Get On The Program

You don’t have to be a seasoned speaker to put speaking to work for your business. If you’re willing to speak for free, you’ll find that there are more outlets available than you’ll know what to do with.

“If you can get up there and do a decent job you will immediately position yourself as an expert in the minds of an audience,” says business coach, author and professional speaker Caterina Rando. “You only have to be ‘decent’ to make an impact. Even though speaking can be scary at first, anybody can find groups to speak to and master the basics of giving a good speech.”

Choose the right topics

Before you contact an organization about speaking, create sample talk descriptions with catchy titles. For example, a financial planner could avoid generic descriptions like “Planning Your Retirement,” and use a more snappy title like “Enjoying Your Gold Years On A Champagne Budget”.

Targeting speaking opportunities

Once you are clear about your topic and its benefit to the audience, make some calls and offer yourself as a speaker. Here are ideas of where to look for a free podium. Many of these groups need speakers all the time.

* Chambers of Commerce
* Service Clubs
* Industry Specific Associations
* University Extensions
* Professional Associations

Getting the most out of your speech

The promotional value of your talks goes beyond your time on the podium. Often, when you speak to a group, the group publicizes the event. Many people who do not attend the event will still read the information, or will hear about you from other attendees, and may give you a call.

Consistency is the big thing. Getting out there and speaking on a regular basis keeps your pipeline full of prospects. When you’re done, put a follow up mechanism in place, even if it’s a simple mailing or newsletter. If you keep in contact with people who’ve heard you speak, you get more long-term leverage from your efforts.

By Norbert Haag

Think about it, have you ever heard about someone that was exceptional in his area without deeply loving what she does? I haven’t. If you want to be successful and a top professional in whatever you chosen to become your profession you need to have a deep love for the subject or you eventually will fail.

Without passion for what you do the pain of learning and repeating the required skills eventually will become paramount and stop you before you achieve the heights of true professionalism.

So, this is not an article for someone that wants to learn how to prepare fast food, but for those that might have a hidden desire to become great speakers.

If you want to become good at speaking, you need to have a desire to become good and a passion for your subject matter. No technique ever can replace that. It is a prerequisite and techniques are the ways you do it.

There are a lot of myths around speaking and even more around the techniques.
Stage fright is a one of the favorite topics for techniques that mostly have been given birth at a writer’s desk rather than being the essence of experience. What is stage fright anyway?

Stage fright is nothing more and nothing less than insecurity.

If you feel insecure, you start fearing. If you feel unconfident, you start fearing. If you believe you will fail – if you still have the concept of failure in your mind – you start fearing.

Nothing special with stage fright though. And because stage fright is just another fear, the cure is the same as for any other fear.

Get confident, get passionate, built self-esteem.

How do you get confident? Know your outcome and have a plan to go from where you are to where you want to be.

Translated to a speech that means, know what you want the audience to learn, have a good knowledge about the topic you are going to talk about and have a clear, precise map (your script) about where to start, where to end and what to say in between.

If you have these basics in place, your confidence will be as high as possible and you managed to eliminate the first reason for stage fright, lack of confidence.

Ok, but how can I get passionate about my topic you might ask? Well, if your topic doesn’t excite you how can you belief it might excite someone else?

Unless you find something exciting about your topic you won’t convey your message anyway. Bottom-line is, if you don’t have to share something exciting don’t share it, don’t deliver a speech on it.

The good news is that there is something exciting in every topic. Just look long enough, change the perspective, increase the frame, be curious and you will find something you can become passionate about.

Now, we are confident and passionate but still there is one major reason for stage fright left.

Little self-esteem.

This is a hard one, isn’t it? How to raise self-esteem?

Agreed this is not as easy as getting confident and passionate. But, managing this part is much more rewarding, as it will impact your whole being.

If you belief that you are mediocre or worse unworthy you have to change that belief. If you have the belief those others are better and that being better means worth more than you, you have to change that belief.

If you don’t, you will depend on what you think the others might think about you and be sure this thought is not very appealing. Not because the others might think bad things about you, most don’t even care enough about you to have second thoughts anyway, but because you tend to think others think little of you. It is you that produces your thoughts.