If you’re been running successful seminars to help prospect for your business, you know how hard it is to get everything right.
From getting your list, to creating engaging invitations, to finding a facility, to RSVP’ing your guests. It’s a lot of details and processes.
That works in our favor — getting a good event off the ground isn’t easy, so if we can do it, that’s something our competitors can’t.
While it sounds easy to do a good marketing event, the truth is few are able to them well consistently.
Prospecting seminar checklist
Here’s a checklist of what you’ll need to do to put on an awesome marketing event.
- Goals first: Before you do anything, you need to make it clear why you’re putting on this event. Who’s your target attendee? What does he/she look like? What’s that person struggling with that I can solve for them? What type of event suites that target’s schedule? Without looking at your goals, your event may miss its target and there’s no way to really judge your performance.
- Concept: This may sound too softy-feely but the best event-driven prospecting advisors are really good event planners. Not only do they make sure everything looks good, the topic/concept of the event tends to be really tight. Again, this goes back to your goals — the event should be really appealing to your prospects. What’s going to get them to shlepp out on a cold winter night to hear what you have to say? The draw may not even be you — maybe it’s a wholesaler (though you could do better
) or a respected author or analyst that could attract an audience. - Location: Whether its online or offline, the event needs to be housed somewhere. So, either find a compelling facility in your target location or find online meeting software to stream your event (like GotoWebinar).
- Scheduling: Make sure there aren’t any major conflicting dates (like Super Bowl weekend) that may prevent prospects from taking you up on your invite. You can check your local paper for upcoming events, a local website or something like Lanyrd — a repository for many events around the world. Spend some time to make sure you’re the headliner that night.
- Target list: Your list can be bought from a local data provider or it could be made up of prospects you already have in your database (like people you’ve met but haven’t closed yet). Partnering with a local service provider (lawyer/accountant) expands your prospecting exponentially (if you can ensure your marketing partner will hit his prospects, too).
- Coordinating signup: Whether you are emailing or sending a mailer, have someone follow up with a phone call. It’s a nice touch and could answer some questions have about the event but haven’t answered for themselves.
- Coordinating signup v2: If you’re doing an online event or an event that you’re charging for, consider using a full service ticketing solution like Eventbrite. If you’re charging for the event, Eventbrite has a built-in credit-card processing tool that is REALLY easy to use. Secret tip: You can also incentivize others to help you market your online event (like that lawyer/accountant marketing partner). If you use Eventbrite, you can provide your marketing partners with their own link and they get a percentage (set by you) on all proceeds from the tickets they’ve sold.
- Deliver a great performance: Just getting prospects to show up is a big deal. Now that they’re warm, you’ve almost there. You’ve still got to put on a great presentation. Here are some tips on a great prospecting presentation.
- Provide accessibility: Finish speaking and allow for questions before the scheduled end of your event. Make sure you mingle about afterwards. This gives your audience the chance to corner you to ask personal questions. Your call to action should happen right there — set a meeting up on the spot. Carry around your iPhone or organizer or have an assistant schedule people there on the spot. That’s key — when the prospects leave the room and the event, they lose the drive to find help for their problems.
- Follow up: Whether you follow up personally or have an assistant do it, follow-up closes the circle on the event. It provides context to the entire process and again, makes you accessible to prospects who want to take the next step. This is also a chance for great market research — if they’re interested, ask them why. If not, find out what events/topics are important to them. Get permission to invite them again to exclusive events.
What are you doing that works for seminars?
Like this content? Get more of it.
Subscribe to my weekly (free) newsletter, AdvisorInsider — full of tools, tips, and technologies to grow your investment practice.
