So you hit a home run with your speech. Now what?
If you want to make more money with your speaking business, the days following your speech are some of the most important to pay attention to. That’s why you should always follow up after every speech or presentation.
If you don’t follow up with your audience or the organizer, you could be leaving some serious money on the table.
Not only can a follow-up call or email (or both!) allow you to grow your network and business by getting a testimonial or referral, but if you’re prepared, you can use this as an opportunity to expand your profitability even further.
This article will share speaker follow-up strategies that will help you grow your speaking business and generate more revenue.
Speaker Follow-Up Strategies for Corporate Events
Speaking at corporate business events provides low-hanging fruit. After your speech, you should ask the person who hired you (or the decision-maker) if they’d like your help to further implement the techniques or best practices you spoke of in your speech.
Implementation services can be one-on-one-coaching with leaders, or team consultations where you go through the primary points of your speech and discuss their actionability as a small group. You could offer follow-up training videos or webinars based on the principles of your speech. For example, you could provide one webinar a week for 6 weeks, or one group consultation followed up with 30 days of email support.
By engaging the organization after your speech, you lend yourself further credibility. It adds value to what you do and changes how you are perceived by your clients. Not only are you viewed as a speaker, you’re seen as a valuable resource to their team.
Speaker Follow-Up Strategies for Associations
This approach can still work even if your target audience isn’t corporations or corporate events. If you primarily speak to associations, you can still utilize revenue-building follow-up strategies. Typically with associations, everyone in the audience is part of a business or runs their own business.
A great way to leverage this opportunity is to close your speech with “next steps.” What is the sequence of steps that your audience needs to do to achieve the goal you speak of in your speech? One of those “next steps” could be engaging with you for further coaching or training. This way you have a built-in call-to-action with your speech that not only provides a strong close, but gives your audience a meaningful step they can take.
Remember, attendees want good ideas they can implement to see a transformation take place. That’s exactly what you can give them with the right speaker follow-up strategies.
Another way to directly engage audience members following the event is to email everyone who registered. Don’t assume they heard you speak! Not everyone who registers for events will attend. The best way to start a conversation is to ask a question instead of assuming. It can be something as simple as: “Did you have a chance to hear me speak at your [Association] meeting?”
- If they answer “Yes,” you can ask them if any of the follow-up programs you mentioned make sense to them. This specific language is recommended by speaker, author, and consultant, Lois Creamer. Our interview with her is linked at the bottom of this blog!
- If the answer is “No,” you can let them know that your speech was well received which is why you’re following up with some of the members to see if [your offered program] sounds like something they could use.
Following up your speech with an email and cultivating an email list of audience members will also help you maintain the necessary connections you need to drive more business.
How to Shape Your Follow-Up Offerings for More Revenue
If you’re looking for tips to shape your speech into a revenue-generating program, here are some things to consider:
- What are the different steps people want to learn and how can they access them? Live or in video?
- Can you create courses or webinars based on your speech? Can your speech be a video or audio product?
- Can your speech be a digital product, such as a PDF or ebook?
- Can you create a Mastermind Group based on your speech?
People learn in different ways, so sometimes it may require that you meet the potential client where they are and find how they want to learn. You may need to try a few things along the way to find what works for you and what doesn’t.
The trick is to make your follow-up services what you want it to be. You don’t want to start offering anything that will leave you unfulfilled, so always look for something that is sustainable for you.
In Closing…
Utilizing speaker follow-up strategies can give you a menu of options to add onto your speaking services. This can help you find another space within your business to expand profitability. You may find that you make more with the follow-up programs than you do with the actual speech giving!
Want to learn more? Check out this fantastic podcast featuring Lois Creamer, who shares her follow-up methods (which she dubs “Aftercare”) to help her clients get the most out of her presentations while also allowing her to bring in more revenue. Click here to listen to the value-packed 30-minute episode!
