The Choreographed Close: Structuring On-Stage Sales Presentations That Convert

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. If you have ever heard of Dan Kennedy talking about how to get your presentation perfect, or how Russell Brunson talks about getting a perfect webinar, this episode is going to be one you're going to want to listen to. Today we're going to be listening to Dustin Matthews and Dan Kennedy on how to choreograph the close. Now, Dustin Matthews took a speaking class in high school and found a loophole and left. And ever since then, he has been sneaking onto stages and literally changing the world. And so, we're going to be talking about is those pieces of your presentation that you more than likely miss from the start, as well as what are all the things that happen around your presentation? What are the marketing that you should be doing beforehand? What are the follow-up pieces that you do afterwards? And how does this work in person and online? What are the different variations? How do you make this work? This is a very interesting episode if you want to figure out how to take your currently working presentation to yet another level. And so with no ado, let's go ahead and get started with Dustin Matthews and Dan Kennedy on The Choreographed Close: Structuring Onstage Sales Presentations That Convert.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons. They're kind of laws. Laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Hello everybody, good afternoon. Um, if you're here for the Diamond Call, you're in the right place at the right time. Congratulations. I have Dustin Matthews of Speaking Empire with me. We'll get to his introduction in just a minute or two. So Call of the Day is all about a combination of crafting and using great presentations and moving prospects to action. Dustin, of course, as you all probably know, very familiar to GKIC members. He and his team at Speaking Empire lock people in a room and help them put together the best possible presentations for their purposes. And of course also deal with everything that wraps around those presentations, including funnels and processes to move prospects to action. So Dustin, thank you for doing the call. Let's start with sort of bring people up to speed from whence you came, how you and Speaking Empire came to be, and what the business looks like today.

Got it, Dan. Well, it's great to be on the call. I was the guy that found the legal loophole. We'll start with this. I was the guy that found the legal loophole in college where I was forced to take public speaking. In order to graduate, you just had to take the class. I went and cajoled, but I took the class and I'd like to say that I conquered it and did it, but I ended up leaving. I was so motivated by not taking the class that I found a loophole to get out of it. Now I run a company called Speaking Empire. Along the way I found out that it was just my own belief that I just needed to go out there and start speaking. It all changed for me when I got introduced to you and coming to a super conference and both summits and seeing the speakers on stage, seeing you speak and obviously Dave and hearing your story of how you used to stutter and yet you were able to go out there and conquer it. So I went out and I did it. I was able to get people to treat me as the expert. If you've seen a picture of me and you think I have a baby face now, you should have seen me 10 years ago. I learned to come through the power of speaking because it grew my business. I started seeing the results of it. Now I start working with people from all around the world that leverage powerful presentations, so financial planners, bricks-and-mortar folks in the coaches, authors, and consultants. Really what we do is we show people not really how to be a motivational speaker, but as you mentioned, Dan, how do you get people into action. Whether you're raising money for a charity, you're trying to get them to buy your product and service, or you got them for a client appreciation seminar in your building, how do you get them to act? Really that's what Speaking Up Higher is all about.

Let's talk about that broadly first and then narrowly second. So broadly, like here today before this call, you and I both simultaneously identified the chief flaw in what somebody else was doing, which was the absence of an offer. Everything else was right, but gee, where's the offer and where's the deadline and where's all of that? When you work with the butcher, baker, candlestick makers that you just described, financial advisor, doctor, you know, whatever, and their objective is to move prospects from some kind of presentation to a next step, what are the most common mistakes you see them making and what's the most important fix that you guide them to putting in place?

Well, let's start here. I mean, the most obvious one that occurs to me is when someone sits down to write even a sales letter, Dan, but let's talk presentation because that's what this call is about. When someone sits down to actually write that message, oftentimes they start with the first slide. They open up PowerPoint or Keynote and they write the title slide or the headline. But the challenge with that is you really ought to start start with the end in mind. And so when you do that, when you start thinking, what's the end in mind? Do I want them to sign up for a strategy session or an appointment? Do I want them to buy an initial product? Because when you start thinking that way, then everything that you do in your presentation, you do through the lens of, well, does this further the sale? Does this get them to want to act? And so the challenge is, is most people, they'll sit down and they'll start with that title slide. And even if it takes you, a couple days, a couple weeks, or months, by the time you're done with that project, you've lost your steam. And so the most important part of any presentation is the close and the actual performance of the presentation. It's your actual close. And I always say this, Dan, the kid at McDonald's, right? You walk into a McDonald's, right? You got the right person in front of you. You've got the pimply-faced kid at the counter. That person doesn't have to be the world's greatest salesperson to make the sale because the right person walked in, somebody that's hungry. Is there right in front of them, right in front of the— in the menu right there staring at you. And so people just naturally buy. And so the biggest mistake, just to reiterate, is writing with the end in mind. Like, does everything lead to that sale, lead to that quote?

So I think people are kind of, I don't know, cowardly about this, intimidated about this, in that they think that emphasizing an offer and a call to action and doing everything and building their presentation and delivering their presentation all focused to make that happen causes an audience not to like them and not to be well received. And so I always see them, their formula is like teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, or entertain, entertain, entertain, entertain, entertain, and then almost like it was Scotch taped on at the end, oh, by the way, here's something that you can do. Am I, are you in agreement with me that that's what people do? Briefly, what's the better, what's the replacement for that?

Well, Dan, you're absolutely right about that. So there's actually two things I want to comment on. We often see the teacher that comes, and so they just want to teach everybody everything, and we call it they vomit on the audience, as vulgar as that is. And the idea is you want to deliver massive value, and you think that value is a way to get the sale. So there's a difference between value. The way I love to put this is if you look at our society, right? Who makes the most money in our society? Athletes, entertainers, right? What do teachers make relative to athletes and entertainers? They're on the other side of the spectrum. And so there is an art and a science to this, meaning that you don't want to teach, but you do want to deliver value. You want to deliver awareness, and you don't want to just entertain and be the funny guy the whole time because then they're not going to take you seriously. And so there's a balance to do it. And so I often see most people want to over-teach to try to get the sale. And so we have this technology that we've created called Presentaining, which basically tells you how to deliver a presentation in a powerful way so that you can actually get them to take action. Now, what you want to do, or what you want to consider in your presentation, is that if you've got the right people in the room and you've got a world-class product, but you truly believe in your product, it's really your duty or it's your obligation to share that with them. Now, usually then when I say that to audiences, you know, I'll get some buy-in from that, but I still understand at a certain level that some people, they just, they have that fear like they're selling something. They picture the used car salesperson, you know, and the bad experience they had for selling. And so what we like to say is start selling right away. And what I mean by that is you let people know that there's an opportunity. And when you do that, there's not this whole resistance where the crowd is sitting there, when's he going to pitch, when's he going to pitch. When's he going to pitch? If you let people know right away, I mean, they're not dumb, they know. And so if you let them know right away, the resistance goes down substantially, and it's a whole lot easier on you and on them to take that action.

So let's take a— let's use a financial advisor. When you, when you get them um, and he's doing his 90-minute or 2-hour, uh, dog and pony show. Um, I always joke, you know, they're rounding up old people, getting them in the room by waving steak at the door, and then, and then, and then doing their dog and pony show. What does that look like to you? And often What do you get them to change?

Well, what I look at it, my lens that I look at it is that it's a whole performance. The big word that I want to share with people is choreography. So if you happen to be in a place where you're taking notes, I want you to write that down. And so, yes, at Speaking Up, we focus on delivery, or I take a look at the actual message, but that's only one component of it. I really want people to think bigger on this, Dan. It's a sales process as you teach. It's a choreography. So what is the marketing? What is the message that goes out before? What is the follow-up sequence that's going to them to get them excited or to get them in the right frame of mind so that when they show up at the events or at your seminar or your presentation virtually even online, you know, are they in the right frame of mind? Are they already accepting certain things? Most people have heard it takes 7 yeses to make a sale. So have we gotten them to sort of say yes in their head mentally a few times so that when they come to the presentation they're ready to go? Now on the flip side of that is what are we doing afterwards, right? So after we've given the presentation, what's the follow-up that's taking place? What's the marketing? What's the messaging that's going out to get those people into action? And so if you're really paying close attention, you'll notice I haven't even talked about the presentation. I've really just talked about the marketing. Because it's so very important, I mean the presentation is so powerful, but if you will do the front-end stuff and you'll do the back-end, you often can find more money by doing and focusing your time there by improving that process. Now, in terms of the presentation, I'll tell you this, Dan. Most folks that we work with, most private clients, whether they're financial planners, info marketers, coaches, authors, speakers, most folks that we work with, you know, they lack a structure in their presentation. They just get up there, a lot of them are winging it, and so there's no script, there's no formula to it. And so what ends up happening is if they have a great day, they may get lots of people to enroll. However, if they have an off day, they may get no one to enroll. And the challenge with that is it's always a moving target, and so many folks that we work with are unscripted when they first start, but then we show them our process and our formula, and then what they do is they walk away with something that's consistent and they can test things to engineer a result that's more consistent.

Well, so I want to make a point about that, but it's as good a place as any to also plug something. The next No BS Series book, which should be released and in Amazon's hands and Barnes Noble's hands and so forth by the second week of June, soon, but you can probably preorder it at Amazon right now. It is co-authored by Dustin, his partner Dave, and I on effective presentations. And if you will, why don't you plug the book, buddy?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Dan and I have been doing a lot of research, and what we've determined is the formula, the case studies, stories, and so we've put it inside the book called The No BS Guide to Powerful Presentations or NoBSPresentations.com. From there you can find all the links to Amazon and where you can get it. And if you preorder it now, you'll get it right when it comes out, so you want to make sure to take care of that. And so inside the book we lay out a formula. We talk about presenting, we talk about the offer. And I want to mention this, Dan. Usually when I talk about doing presentations, certain segments of the audience, they tune out, and the reason why is they say, Well, Dustin, I'm not a speaker. You know, I don't do webinars or I don't give presentations. And I just want to make a comment. We all give presentations, right? So we're all speakers. And what I mean by that is even if you have to communicate to your kids to get them to do something, you got to communicate to your spouse, right, to sell her on an idea or where we're going to take the next vacation. Everybody really is presenting in some form or fashion. What most people are doing is they're just kind of going at it willy-nilly. They're not even thinking about what they're saying as they're saying it. And so when you script things, you can get more consistent results. And so in the book, we talk about how do you engineer a message that calls people into action. And so whether you're doing a nonprofit, you've got a business, you've got a retail store, and you've got clerks that interface with customers. There's a presentation, there's a choreography that goes into a successful selling system and process, and that's all inside the No BS book.

So the point I was going to make, what's really interesting about this is that most jobs and most occupations and most professions all revolve around consistent choreography around structure. So if you go to the dental hygienist, which presumably you do, and you go 3 times a year or 4 times a year, that hygienist, if he or she is any good, is actually doing the exact same process, the exact same things, in the exact same order, in the exact same way, every single time. They're gonna start at one place, they're gonna finish at another, and so forth. And if you fly, you hope that the mechanics and the inspectors are going over the aircraft by process the same way, the same things in the same order, checking things off. There's a structure for what they do. And really everything including the making of that McDonald's burger that you referred to earlier falls into this category. For some reason salespeople are resistant to it and other people when they step into a selling role are resistant to it and are often as you pointed out, operating without a structure to what they do, let alone a script, without even really a structure. And really, even if they haven't, they haven't given a lot of thought to it. It happened accidentally more than it happened on purpose. And yet they wouldn't accept it. I mean, if you go to Nordstrom's and climb up on the shoeshine stand, the shoeshine guy has a structure for what he does. He has a process. He knows how many minutes it should take. He's going to work from the front to the back, etc., etc. And yet salespeople are just— like, I often get the argument of, well, I don't want to remove the spontaneity and the flexibility from what I do. And— but they should hope that most of the other people providing services to them are not committed to such spontaneity and flexibility, especially say a heart surgeon. Why do you think there's this resistance to structure and organization and architecture and specific word choices and so forth when it comes to presentations?

Well, Dan, I mean, that's a great point. I mean, I believe that the resistance is, you know, a lot of people that, you know, it does take some courage to get up upright and speak and present if you're going to speak on the stage. But what I often find is a lot of people that actually embrace being in front of others, a lot of them are more creatives. And so I hear the argument that, you know, it's going to be creative, you know, it's not going to be less creative, I'm going to end up hating it, it's just going to be a process over and over again. So I hear that a lot is that it's just going to— it's not going to be good if I'm not myself, right? And so you have to take into account, well, there's a trade-off. I mean, you can absolutely go up there, and some people are better at it than others, meaning they could just get up and they can talk in front of others and just win a room over. However, you know, unless you're gifted or unless you're an entertainer, you know, going back to a structure or process will bring you those consistent results. And so sure, go out, be the spontaneous person, and what you do— what the trade-off is, is lack of consistency. So one day you may come home with tons of sales and, you know, great revenue that day and then other days you may not. And so, you know, I think that this resistance is that they lose a piece of themselves. And so, you know, when you script things, when you at least choreograph them as you pointed out, Dan, when you follow a structure, you can get more consistent results. And if you think about this, Dan, I always go back to what you share about Disney. You know, when they start their process, when they want to create a great experience for the client, or for the person coming to the park, I'm sure their first process that they created isn't what it is now today. And so if you don't have something, you know, structured, then you can't improve upon it because you don't realize what you're improving upon. If you're just winging it every time, you just never can get consistent results and you can't remember, well, did I try that? You know, is this a better experience now or was it last time? And so I think that's why there's that big—

resistance to structure. So tell us about differences between a presentation in a room to 30 or 300 and a presentation delivered via live webcast or a presentation otherwise delivered online. Canned and played on demand. So people will, I think, believe that it's a zebra and a horse, that there are huge differences, and that online media lends itself to quick and dirty. So talk about online versus offline.

Sure, sure. I mean, at the end of the day, no matter what message we're putting out there, if your message is to sell— and I would believe that, you know, almost 90% of the messages, almost 100% of the messages are selling, whether we're trying to instill values in our kids or we're trying to sell a product or service, or whether we're just trying to get someone to say, hey, go see that movie, right? Like, we're trying to to sell an idea or sell a concept. So at the end of the day, when you think about it like that, there's a structure to sales, right? And so yes, there are variances in the sales process, but at the end of the day, there are 5 core components to a powerful message that sells. So when you keep that in mind, that you can take about 80% of the message, and then if you go on to a webinar, you will tweak something or if you're in front of a live audience, you have certain advantages and disadvantages. So let's take the room as an example, right? When you're in front of a room, you can check in with your audience. So you can ask them these things that we call trial closes. You can ask them questions. And if you see like one hand go up in a room full of, you know, 50 or so, you can kind of see they're unengaged and so you have the opportunity to tell a story. You have the opportunity to do something or really force response.— in that situation. Just as if you were sitting across from somebody one-on-one and doing a one-on-one sales presentation, you can see if they tune out and you can do things to change that, right? And so online, we don't have that ability. And so what we do is we trade our conversion percentage for masses online. So let me say it a different way. In a room, in a live experience with you or in your retail store, When you've got somebody there, you can expect 50%, 60%, and if they're qualified, 80% and 90% closing ratios. However, online, we trade that for obviously getting more people online, but the conversion actually goes down. The nuances are different when it comes to offline or online, but Dan, as you recommend so often, we like to marry both of them. And so if we can get people to show up in a room, great. If we can send them an email ahead of time, great. If we can sell it offline, we like to combine all those to really impact the choreography and the experience, which ultimately leads to more sales.

Do you think that the online experience, a presentation delivered one way or another online— can be as effective as physical and live? Is it even possible?

Well, I think that's a loaded question. I would think— and the natural action, the natural answer is no, meaning that you can never convert as well online. If we now look at our process, and you know what comes to mind is Iron Tribe Fitness. You know, members of the community, the GKIC community, also clients of ours. You know, they had a sales representative, a franchise manager, sales manager, and he would talk to everybody that was interested in investing in an Iron Tribe franchise. And so obviously he was taking anybody that was interested in, you know, his closing ratio was all across the board because there was no qualification. And so what we decided to do was we put together a webinar presentation. So whenever they got a request for— to buy a franchise, we told them, listen, you need to go watch this webinar. The webinar was about 60 minutes or so. It sold them on the dream. It sold them on the vision. And what was interesting here is we actually got the founder to actually do the webinar. So he told his story. Now, you're not going to get the founder to sit down in front of every prospect, right? And so we were able to leverage the star factor, the credibility of the founder in a presentation. Then at the end of that presentation, there was qualification, and it said, you know, if you meet this criteria, if you're somebody that, you know, is part of the community, and so what all their criteria for what makes somebody a good candidate for this, they would fill out an application. At that point, the sales manager would now only talk to the most qualified leads. And so in terms of closing percentage, they went up dramatically because they went through this process. But Dan, if you looked at it overall, if you looked at all the people that went into this funnel, you could say, well, gosh, the conversion is a lot lower. However, I would say that because they were less qualified, they didn't count.

You know, it's a very interesting thing. There's enormous resistance to qualifying and screening out and not presenting to, not meeting with, not pitching people, and I find the resistance is enormously multiplied when it is a business owner who employs salespeople because his attitude is, I'm paying them to sell and I don't want to waste any leads, and they should, you know, have to have to take their best shot at everybody. And yet every situation like you described where some steps are put in to thin that herd and deploy the salesperson only at highly qualified prospects, the results wind up better. The salesperson or people don't burn out. Um, they perform better because they're put in an opportunity where they can perform better. And the screening, however it's done, which the model you just described is I think the best model, which is a standardized presentation delivered by media followed by some sort of application process that moves you to human contact or stops you from human contact if in fact you don't qualify. These scenarios are almost always more profitable to operate and yet there's just enormous resistance to them. And I think people ought to be aware that when you have an asset like a salesperson you want to deploy that asset— excuse me— in the most productive way possible. And that's really what group presentations and group presentations delivered by media are all about. One of the last questions I want to ask you is, is there much difference in the way you build a presentation to sell a big-ticket item or sell a low-ticket item or a tangible product versus a service?

This is a good question, Dan. So when it comes to selling, like I said earlier, everything requires a structure. So there's going to be nuances. And so, you know, we talk about in the book the structure. We go a lot into that. We obviously talk about nuances a little bit in the book as well. You have that structure that's going to carry you very far. Now, if you're selling something sophisticated— I'll go into the nuance here for those that may be in the corporate world or selling a high-ticket item. You know, you got to take in all the variables into account, meaning like if you only have— let's say you're in a room, right? You do a seminar, and if you only have them there for an hour, and let's say you're trying to sell a $100,000 thing, well, you better make sure that room is incredibly qualified with the, you know, people that can afford to make, you know, write that check. Or what you could consider doing is, in a high-ticket sale, is doing this application or takeaway sale. And so when you do that, it makes you more magnetic to the people that can afford it, and it also delays the sale and allows you to build your case. And so a lot of people just want to go for the sale right away, even selling a big-ticket item. When oftentimes that will hurt them. And so the answer to the low-ticket versus bigger-ticket item is it is just as hard to sell a low-ticket item as a bigger-ticket item. However, you don't want to make the mistake of just trying to, you know, sell the most expensive thing to the wrong audience. And so the variables go into account. Now in terms of the physical versus, you know, the info marketing or the coaching, The structure remains the same, and what I mean by that, I like to look at infomercials, Dan. And so infomercials on TV selling a physical product, you know, as crazy and as cheesy as you may remember these infomercials, you're going to get the slicer, you're going to get the dicer, you're going to get the juicer, and when you act now today, we're going to double your order. Now, you never have to take it to that level, right, depending on where you are. Maybe you're in corporate or maybe you speak to associations or maybe you deal with high net worth individuals. You can never do that, right? But the fact is they're layering on bonuses or gifts for taking action. And so again, you want to look at the structures, you want to look at the fundamentals, and then where you want to pivot is you want to take a look at adding in different things depending on the marketplace. And so the last, the last thing I want to communicate there is something that you've taught me, which is whether you're in physical or information, it's often beneficial to include the other things. So if you're in retail Right, let's take Proactiv as an example, right? So they sell the glop on TV. Well, if you look at the offer, they're not just giving you the glop and the brush, but if you take a look, there's almost always some sort of info marketing component, some sort of free report, some sort of guide, recipes, or something like that. And then if you take a look at info marketing, you know, Dan, I remember the story you used to tell about the sales trainer in Phoenix that would come in and he would sell the information.. But the reason why most people ended up buying from that particular person was they got the mug with the cute slogan on it. So they introduced the physical. I believe the savviest marketers, speakers, entrepreneurs are leveraging both information in their offer and physical, something physical that people can walk away with.

That's very cool. I got one last question for you. Who's one of the best speakers, myself excluded, who's one of the best speakers you've ever seen and why do you rank them that way?

That's funny. I was just asked this on the cab over. I was explaining what I do and I'm always interested to see if they bite and if they ask me more questions beyond that. And so my answer was Steve Jobs. I'm actually going through his book right now. Again, you would think I might have said a Les Brown or a Jim Rohn or a Tony Robbins, right? But that's the easy answer, I think. And so I look at Steve Jobs because, you know, he held these press conferences, master of choreography. Again, it's not all about the presentation, it's the lead-up. And so I believe he was a master at one, filling the room, getting people excited, and then also delivering the presentation, really selling people the story. I mean, he's selling a box of electrical components, right? Yes, it looks nice. But Steve understood the art of getting people excited and then the art of the pitch and the demonstration. So for that reason, I call him my number one speaker.

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