At your last speaking engagement how many speaking leads did you get?
I got 51 and I want to show you exactly how.
I was able to get 43 executives raise their hand and say they want to book me to speak
8 executives who said they want to refer me to speaking engagements
51 in total,
And added 237 Association Executives to my email list
If you want to know the exact step-by-step strategy and tool I used to do this? Then let’s jump in.
CONTEXT
Quick background on why associations are awesome to speak at. All associations have one big thing in common, they have annual conferences.
What do they need at their annual conferences? Speakers.
All associations have members who pay dues to be involved and pay to go the annual event.
The annual event is one of the biggest value propositions for associations. The associations make a large bulk of their annual revenue from this conference and if members don’t show up and have a good experience, they may not come back next year or renew their membership. So associations have a vested interest in finding really good speakers.
So you get why associations are a great market to speak to?
There are over 100,000 associations in America alone.
If you only want to speak around 50 times a year, max, maybe you can see why associations are a good place to speak?
Not to mention every time you speak at an association's conference, there’s a good chance that their members can invite you back to speak at their individual organizations. So it’s a really good perpetual generation of speaking business.
It’s one of my top ways I fill my speaking calendar year after year for the last 2 decades.
Now that we have that set up, let’s jump into the exact process
Part 1
I’m a fan of the ASAE network (but there are many), these are associations of association executives, very meta right?
Just google a chapter plus “Call for presenters” so for example, I googled “FSAE call for presenters” and found this link: https://www.fsae.org/call-for-presentations
On this link you can submit yourself as a speaker for their conference
I submitted my idea and was accepted to be a speaker.
Simple and straightforward, right?
Now here’s where the magic happens.
Part 2
Now I get to speak at the conference, this is the most fun part. You of course have to have high value content, solve problems and be a good presenter. I absolutely respect my audiences, love my audiences and actually solve problems for them. It’s truly an honor to speak to them and I assume you feel the same way right? If not, could you do me a favor and stop reading this and leave now. I truly don’t want to help scum bags succeed. I want to help speakers who actually care about our industry do well. Good people only.
So you have to speak and do a good job and have a good heart… and as Alexander Hamilton said, “I’m not throwing away my shot” ok fine, yes that’s a dated quote but still applicable!
When I spoke at the FSAE Annual Conference I didn’t want to mess up the opportunity to get more speaking opportunities and impact more people while growing my speaking business. As speakers our best chance to get more speaking engagements is to leverage one speaking engagement to beget another.
But, If I tried to sell from the stage in ANY WAY, I would get black balled from the network and never be invited to speak anywhere within this particular industry again. There is a STRONG aversion to anyone selling from the stage in this space. So I definitely want to grow my speaking business but I don’t want to do something to get in trouble, ever been in a spot like this?
Normally when we do a good job speaking, maybe a few people will walk up to us afterwards and give us their card, but maybe they don’t even though they do want to book you. People are busy, if there is a crowd of people surrounding you after your talk, there is no physical way to have a conversation with everyone who wants to speak with you.
Meaning you are leaving A LOT of opportunities on the table.
Event hosts are also no longer giving away a contact list of people who attended to protect the privacy of their attendees.
So how did I get the 51 speaking leads plus get 237 added to my email list without selling from the stage?
Enter Talkadot
Part 3
Talkadot is a tool that lets you capture feedback from your audience and then turns that feedback into visual reports that you can share with your host. I’m going to show you why this is so important because most speakers don’t do this.
Not clear what I’m talking about yet? I can show you better than I can tell you, you can click here to see an example of how Talkadot turns audience feedback into data:
https://www.talkadot.com/s/arel/event-report/6bec8e43286bc2dd54dfae46734630ec
Talkadot turns the intangible of your speaking and turns it into tangible and provable value.
Here’s an example of how Talkadot turns audience feedback into measurable results and testimonial images:
Note that I was able to get 237 responses using Talkadot. Where the event host only collected 22 responses on their app. Talkadot provides a higher data set = higher value data.
When they scan it, it take them to a very quick survey that looks like this:
https://www.talk.ac/moodie?mode=test
During this specially designed survey, Talkadot asks for their opinion on my talk but it ALSO asks them:
“Do you book paid speakers for events?”
If and only if they answer “Yes” to that question, it then asks:
“Would you like to book Arel for a future speaking engagement?”
If they say yes, we then capture their contact information.
If at any point they say “no” to booking speakers or wanting to book me, Talkadot skips the lead capture information portion.
This is so simple but SOOO game-changing in growing your speaking business and here’s why.
If someone in the audience doesn’t want to book me to speak, they aren’t getting peppered with questions that aren’t relevant to them which would annoy them, piss them off and make them complain.
But if the DO want to book me to speak, capturing their information is helpful to them.
So with this flow set up, no one in the audience will ever feel like they are being sold to because literally only the interested parties are being asked if they want to book me to speak.
So out of 237 people that gave me feedback, 51 said they wanted me to get in touch with them about booking a speaking engagement.
So only 51 people at the event were asked if they wanted to book me. Everyone else just got normal survey questions.
Do you see why this is game-changing?
If you want to see how easy it was for me to introduce Talkadot, you can see the actual footage of me introducing it here, it only takes me about one minute and I do it right before I go into my big finish/closing:
I want you to notice, to make myself even more of a value add, I created a resource for my audience that was directly connected to my presentation and to the work they do. I let them know that as a thank you for them giving me their feedback I was going to send them an additional resource to help them.
So think of this, I’m getting feedback to show how valuable my keynote was, I’m giving away something valuable to my audience, and I’m capturing leads. Pretty cool eh?
This is such a better experience than just asking people to text a number to get your download, because this allows you to get data you can later leverage, identify speaking leads and not seem salesy.
Now when I log into my Talkadot account I can see the data on how effective my presentation was AND I have a list of all of the people who want to book me to speak, I can just reach out to them to schedule a meeting. Boom!
Keep in mind, though I got 51 leads from this talk, but in the last year I have gotten 269 booking leads, 489 referral leads and added 2,671 people to my email list from my speaking engagements
So getting leads is cool, but want to see what you can do with your feedback data?
Let me take you behind the curtain to show you what happens next.
The first thing I do is share the feedback I received from the audience to my host. Talkadot allows you to automatically generate images of the feedback and testimonials, so I download those and text them to my host saying this:
“Hi NAME, thank you so much for having me speak at your event, it was such an honor. I wanted to share some of the feedback I received from the audience so you can see what kind of impact we made today. I’ll also email you the full report, but wanted you to see a snapshot of it now :) Thank You!
[I then included the data and a few of my favorite testimonials.]
Then I email my host the full report so my client can see in numbers the impact of my presentation. I do this so they know based on data, the value my presentation brought to the conference.
How many speakers do you think do this?
Boom, this instantly separates me from every other speaker they’ve worked with.
This makes it easier for my host to refer me to others who will inevitably ask them for speaker recommendations in the future (this is called playing the long game).
We have six figures in speaking contracts in the pipeline from this one conference, pretty awesome right?
And here’s the absolute best part, I provided value to the host by collecting valuable feedback from their audience on my presentation.
I didn’t bother anyone who didn’t want to be “sold to”
The people who did want to book me were able to self-select themselves.
I am able to follow up with the people who want to book me easily because I know who they are.
I can add everyone else to my email newsletter and who knows what future business will come from that!?!?!
And by now you might be wondering, Ok, let’s talk Talkadot, “How much does Talkadot cost?”
Get this, it’s just $49 a month billed annually (just $588 for the whole year).
Talk about an ROI on a tool.
What's more, if you upgrade today, you can get Talkadot for only $499 for the first year. Use it an unlimited times this whole year.
"Limited Time Bonuses Only Available"
If you upgrade today, you will get access to these additional bonuses:
Bonus #1: $197 Value
I’ll give you the exact email templates I use to reach out to my booking & referral leads to actually get them on the phone
Bonus #2: $997 Value
I’ll give you my exact phone sales script that I’ve personally used to close millions of dollars worth of speaking engagements in my career plus a video training on how to do it.
If you had this tool, email templates, sales scripts plus 400 people you could reach out, do you think you might be able to book at least one speaking engagement? (this my friend is called a no-brainer).
So the tool and the trainings, templates, and leads can be yours today for just $588 right now.
Now put that into context. Let’s say you charge at least $2,500 for a speaking engagement (I’m sure you charge way more than that but you SHOULDN’T be charging any less than that in any speaking market).
If you charge $2,500 and invest only $588 today, you would generate a 595% return on your investment.
So the question you have to ask yourself is if you believe that with access to this tool, with leads we provide to you, and templates and systems we provide to you, do you think you could book just one more speaking engagement?
Oh…
One more thing.
If I were you, right now I would be feeling a little sense of “But I don’t want to buy something that I’m never actually going to use” and “is this legit?”
Those are good thoughts.
First, all you have to do is go into our Talkadot dashboard, download our special slide and insert it into your presentation, and that’s it.
Our tool does the rest of the work for you!
So it’s not really a big lift, and we can help you walk through it all. Every single week we hold a live zoom session for our users to jump on a Zoom with us and get any questions they may have about our tool answered (yes, we are real humans).
We also do monthly trainings on different subjects at no cost to help you book more business.
Plus we host monthly Talkadot townhall meetings so you can hear first all of the new features we have.
We have the best community of unicorn speakers (we are unicorns because most speakers don’t collect any data at all, when you do, your clients will look at you like a unicorn). And yes, I’m a real person you can find me on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/arelmoodie/
I’m also the only “Arel Moodie” in the world so you can google me and see if I’m legit :)
Oh and speaking of Linkedin, feel free to head over to Linkedin and type in “Talkadot” into the Linkedin search and see just how many other speakers are raving about Talkadot. (Pro tip, filter results by “Posts” and “Latest” to see the most recent posts of speakers using us all the time).
I share all of that to say to you directly, we are trusted by thousands of speakers, used by NSA (National Speakers Association-the largest professional speaker association in America) and we want you to see why we have raving users that we are helping all across the country.
Here’s some videos of speakers talking about why they love Talkadot: