You’re Leaving Money Just Sitting There In Your Audience

If you’re a paid professional speaker, and you don’t have products for sale, you’re losing up to 75% of your potential income.

How?

Several ways:

1. No way for potential clients to meet you inexpensively

2. No way to immediately upsell your audience

3. No incentive for your audience to stay in touch

Here’s how that can hurt you:

1. No way for potential clients to meet you inexpensively.

If the only thing you offer is your services, then you must charge a premium for them. Not everyone in your audience is going to be OK with buying something premium-priced after one meeting, so there’s a good chance of simply losing those customers instantly. Well, I dunno about you, but I don’t enjoy being tuned out without a chance!

Offering information-based products allows you to help people get to know you, without wasting your time (on long, expensive, do-it-yourself sales processes) or their time (what if they aren’t a great fit for your business? They’ve just bought something usually non-refundable: your time).

Let your comparatively inexpensive products do the selling for you! There are tons of gurus out there that sell a new client a book, then a CD or 3, then a video, then a full-on home study course, then a live training, then a year-long group coaching program, then a one-on-one mentoring program. Why? Because the model works. People need not just sales pitches, but TIME, to get comfortable with you. Seeing your face on their shelf for a few months can bring them back to you at the most wonderful times – even if you’ve lost hope that they even know you exist.

2. No way to immediately upsell your audience.

If you had your choice between $1200 in your pocket today, and $2500 in your pocket today, which would you choose?

Do you even KNOW anyone that would choose the lower amount? What an insane choice to make! And yet hundreds – nay, thousands – of speakers make this choice every single day.

If you’ve got an unpaid speaking engagement, the choice is even more stark. Why would you be content with helping people only as much as they can remember from your speech, when you could help them as much as you can record on a CD or in a book?

If you really want to help people with your speeches and programs, you need to have products. They just aren’t going to remember most of what you say in one listening. They need repetition, they need to have you in their home, in their car, in their iPod. If you really believe in what you do and you don’t have products for sale, you are cheating your audiences of your in-depth help.

Why leave them with tidbits, when they need to learn how to cook?

3. No incentive for your audience to stay in touch.

This one follows logically from the point above. I actually haven’t listened to TONS of speakers, and I do have a decent memory, but there’s no way I’m going to remember all the speakers’ names I’ve heard, much less what their message was about or if it was pretty good.

If that speaker wasn’t for me RIGHT THEN when I heard them, they went in the mental trash can. I just don’t have the space to keep everything around that might be helpful 10 years in the future.

Are you giving your audiences the ability to remember you? Because whether or not you can help them radically change their lives at the moment, if you have something inexpensive that can help them a little right now, then you gain a spot in their minds and hearts as a trusted helper. They’ll remember you later if they BECOME your perfect client.

In closing, let me remind you: On average, it’s 5 times harder to attract a new client than it is to resell to an existing client. Your audience has proven they are interested in you. Why not invest in them? They are already clients of a sort. Bring them with you as you move toward success and greater understanding!