Most event audiences are hostage audiences sent by employers, not buyers. They convert at 2-3% for B2B, not the 30% speakers assume. Opt-in audiences who choose to attend convert at 25-35%, a huge difference that wrecks your numbers if you plan wrong.
So I just wanna touch on some other bad assumptions. So have any of you heard this one? So I speak 50 times a year, there's 300 people in the audience, it's 15,000 people, 30%, 25% will buy my stuff. Anybody ever worked off of that assumption? No. Okay, I've heard that some might have, right? There's different types of audiences, and I think people sometimes don't understand this. Most audiences are hostages, right? So if I work at Citibank, 3 weeks from Tuesday, there is a conference that somebody's speaking at, that is a hostage. I didn't volunteer to be there. Now, I may be a fan of that person, I may enjoy their work, but I'm not going there with my money. I have no free will. An open enrollment event, an event like this, or an event like a Grant event, those are people that have opted in with their own dollars, their own time, and their own energy. Those markets convert at 25 to 35%. The B2B market, it's 2 to 3%. So if you went into a market based on an assumption of 30% of the people are gonna buy my stuff, when in reality it's 2 or 3%, that's a bad outcome.
