Two speakers explain why converting in-person event clients to digital formats is hard: event organizers often don't control training budgets, and the sales cycle is longer than a simple speaker booking. The window to convert them is narrow, a few weeks before the event when they're engaged and willing to prepare.
Okay, so I work with a speaker. He speaks a lot on a really popular topic, and we have a real hard problem getting our speaker clients to convert to online.
Good. So let's talk about that. So there's lots of reasons for that, but I'll throw out a couple pieces. And can we give Shep a shout out? So she's working with Shep. Anybody know Shep? If you haven't seen him speak, he's awesome. Shout out to Shep. So one thing would be, who is the buyer of a speech? Literally, right? So you have to figure out— there are many buyers of a speech. In some instances, it's someone that's just involved in that event, and their job is, we're doing our annual offsite in January in Scottsdale, and I've got the whole team together for 3 days, and that event's got to kill it. Now, that might not be the person that has any responsibility or any budgetary control over professional development. So part of it is to ask in the buying process, because speaking by its very nature, and this isn't a judgment, is transactional, right? So they call you up and say, is he available? Yes. Okay, cool. What's his fee? Yes, we have the budget. We've seen his stuff, we love it, maybe we get on a call with him. Closed, right? It's a fairly simple process. Selling complex, and we'll get into this in a moment, training solutions, it probably isn't the same buyer, and you need to be able to get to them. There's this magical time period when you're a speaker a week, 2, 3 weeks before the event, well, they'll do anything you'd like for them to do in preparation for the event. There's this horrible period of being a speaker of a week, a month, 2 months after the event where they don't wanna talk to you. So the trick is to tee it up early.
