By Alan Weiss, CSP, CPAE
Once you identify yourself by a category—speaker, trainer, facilitator, coach, consultant, and so forth—you become a commodity, and subject to price comparisons. I tell everyone who approaches me for advice that they need to:
- Understand this is the marketing business.
- Build their brand so that they are unique.
- Focus NOT on what you do (i.e., keynotes on strategy) but rather on what you create: The ability of the client to dominate the market.
There are too many myths perpetrated which are no more credible than Sasquatch (though as I write this, there are people out there hunting for tracks). Myths include:
1. The audience is the key, and high ratings and standing ovations are indicators of success. This leads me to the fact that there are three kinds of “speakers”:
- Speaker-centered, needing attention and affection, and telling the stories they love to tell, whether relevant or not.
- Audience-centered, meaning they want manifestations of affection, like all 10’s on “smile sheets,” and those TSOs (tepid standing ovations). Everyone receives a standing ovation these days, even my dog when he visits a fire hydrant. They’ve become totally meaningless. If you want unconditional love, get a dog. I have two.
- Buyer-centered, so that the person who hired you (the executive whose budget is involved, not HR people or bureaus) is delighted and will hire you again and refer you to others. Pleasing the audience is not always a buyer priority and I’ve been hired, as much as it’s hard to believe, to totally annoy the audience and shake them out of their lethargy and complacency.
2. That humility is important. Let me define “humility”: It’s the belief in the worth of others and not demeaning your own worth. No one has ever shouted, “Get me a humble doctor (or lawyer, or consultant!” and so on). Executives want doctors who can cure them, lawyers who can protect them, experts like us who can improve them and their operations.
3. That we should jump on the latest program du jour or fad or story. Chicken Soup for the Soul, which is a brilliant book but featured even more brilliant marketing, led to Turkey Broth for the Kidneys, and so forth. If you want to fail, be derivative, and by all means tell the story of the trash collector in Disneyland for the zillionth time. If you want to be original, develop your own IP.
4. That speakers’ bureaus are important, and if you’re in their brochure you’ve “made it.” Bureaus think the client is theirs and you are their subcontractor. In fact, you are the talent. You don’t need intermediaries dealing with intermediaries (meeting planners and event coordinators). That’s why this is about the marketing business which you’d better get good at.
We need to position ourselves as experts and provide unique value that we can’t be compared to others. Then we decide, with a true buyer, how best to deliver our expertise: speaking, coaching, training, advising, facilitating, mediating, and so forth. If you have original intellectual property which you include in a speech, you can certainly use it for other professional services.
Don’t listen to the “specialize or die” nonsense. That’s a recipe for failure when technology changes, a larger organization overwhelms the market, conditions change, people get bored, or you get bored. I’ve delivered thousands of speeches, but among a vast variety of other services. You plan to speak weekly for a large fee? Unless you have a huge brand or are a “celebrity” of some sort, forget it. (How do those speakers tell the exact same speech with the same stories 50 times a year, crying at 7 minutes and 21 minutes precisely, laughing at their own jokes and stories at the exact same times?)
You need to be provocative to get a buyer’s attention. I stress “buyer” because there’s a difference between “budgets” and “money,” and buyers can move money. HR people can’t 99% of the time. So, when you’re told “there is no budget,” that’s correct because no one budgeted for someone they didn’t know who has value they didn’t anticipate. But if you convince a buyer, money can be moved from budgets with less of an ROI than you provide! (Instead of the lower-level response, “We have no budget, see us next year.”)
Here’s an example of provocation which results immediately in a substantive conversation (I don’t “sell,” I create relationships though valuable conversations):
Me: What do you do when you lose a talented employee for a good reason: retirement, death, illness, family moves, a better deal elsewhere?
Buyer: Well, we replace them as fast as possible using sources like recruiting firms, employee referrals, ads, internet solicitations, and so on.
Me: That’s exactly what you shouldn’t be doing. The first thing to do is to ask, Do we still need this job? Otherwise, you’re rushing to create a position that helped you yesterday but may not help you at all tomorrow.
That kind of provocation requires courage and confidence. So let me define three dynamics:
“Confidence” is the honest-to-God belief that you can help others.
“Arrogance” is the belief that you have nothing left to learn yourself.
“Smugness” is arrogance without the talent.
You should skate right up the confidence/arrogance border. If you don’t blow your own horn, there is no music.
I’ve been fortunate to have met a great many people in NSA (and its affiliates abroad) and to have been able to hone my craft. But my “craft” is helping organizations to dramatically improve performance, and individuals to achieve lifestyles beyond their own aspirations. You don’t achieve these successes by copying others but rather by learning from them. And you have to know how to market, not merely deliver.
Remember, you’re not trying to “sell” and take money, you’re trying to provide value and “give.” Every day should be filled with opportunity, and not a slow crawl through enemy territory.
Alan Weiss has published 55 original works, an additional 16 editions of them, and they appear in 15 languages. Million Dollar Consulting (McGraw-Hill) has been on the shelves for 33 years. His newest book will be Seven-Figure Consulting from John Wiley later this year. He has free resources, and can be reached at, alanweiss.com.