Keynote buyers want engagement and memorable moments, but corporate training buyers demand measurable ROI and behavior change. Peter Winick explains why speakers need different content strategies for each audience, not just repurposed stage material.
What are some creative ways you've seen other thought leaders take their content from the stage and restructure it into content that's sellable in other ways?
Yeah, so I mean, that's what we spend a big chunk of our time doing. So let me go half a step backwards and then I'll answer it. So the first piece is, um, there's lots of ways to do that. The trick is you have to do it properly, right? So if you're a motivational keynoter, you say, listen, I'm just going to take my keynote and chop it up into like little 5-minute chunks and blah blah blah blah blah. The point is anything you're doing has to, has to do what you're telling people it will do, right? So you got to think about what is the buyer of a keynote looking for? They've got an hour plus or minus. They want you to be engaging. They want you to be entertaining. And they want to plant a couple seeds in your head that might cause some interesting thought or at least will be something to chatter over the cocktail party or something. That's what the buyer wants, right? You know, and the buyer is not the butt in the seat, but that mystery person that's there. When you start to move into training and development programs, learning programs, etc., it's a whole different game. So what does that buyer expect? They need an ROI on that investment, and that investment better be about moving behaviors on an individual level that in the aggregate push a business needle, push a business lever in a way that I can measure. So if I'm selling A program on negotiation skills. I can get up here and talk about negotiations for an hour. You'll go, rah rah, here's 3 things, whatever. But if I'm selling a half a million dollar program to Oracle to train all their salespeople on how to be better negotiators, it better work. So the better work piece goes into before you're building anything, to know your audience, right? If you're going to be held to that standard, make sure that you're investing in the instructional design, the architecture, the thinking of putting things out there.
