This is a session from Sherry Prindle, current organizer of the Star Marketing Summit walking you through how to define yourself as a Trainer, Speaker, Coach, or Author – and get help from your peer professionals who also are part of the Marketing Summit Family!

Tim Gillette started a blog post with the above title. He had each participant in the 14th iteration of the event I organize twice a year. We were in Dallas, Texas January 3-4, 2020 and featured some very well-known speakers along with some just starting out. He said we could all participate in a blog post he would create and tag all of us. That idea inspired me to start this post.

Until now, the only comments I get on this blog is spam. Please comment here about what you learned at any if the 14 Star Marketing Summits, any of the BE Events Monica Cornetti and Jonathan Peters put on around the country, or either of the original Charleston Challenges.

What will this do? It gives the event some credibility, shows people you are a lifelong learner, and creates valuable links for driving Internet traffic. Thanks for the idea, Rock Star!

Thank you for considering attendance at the event.
The Star Marketing Summit is a peer-to-peer business-building event for speakers, coaches, authors, and other life-change professionals (we also have a lot of fun).

It differentiates itself from other events by being accessible in both price and possibility. What I mean by this is that most events have presenters who are so far ahead of you that it would take giant leaps to achieve what they are teaching. The Marketing Summit features speakers who are more moderately further along than you who share the exact actions they took to build their businesses. There are no canned presentations designed to lead you to a sales pitch. There is genuine sharing as a form of giving back and supporting one another.

Presenters and organizers are not paid to attend and do not sell from the front of the room. Anyone who does have a product or service to sell is encouraged to offer it on breaks through networking, however.

If your primary reason to attend the event is to sell your product or service, consider being a sponsor. For only a little more than the price of admission you will be able to set up a table, share a handout, and make a soft offer at the end of a high-value presentation.

Sponsorship level 2 includes admission for a colleague and a pre- or post- event webinar.

Defining
Name, Tagline, Brand – Who are you (story, background, uniqueness)?
Platform – Where, when, and how?
Target – Whom do you serve? What problem do you solve? What result can you promise?
Offer – What do you sell? (Products, Services, Topics)
Motivation – Why are you doing this?
Marketing
Statement of Offering
Topics
Bio and About
Graphic Identity
“Press Kit”
·        Press Release
·        One Sheet – Bio, Impact Statement, Offering, Testimonials/Experience
Action Photos, Head Shots, Sizzle Reel
Online Presence
·        Web Site
·        Social Media
Contacts List
Prospecting
Niche
Contacts and Organizations/individuals you want to work with
Government Agencies, Associations, Schools, Groups
Event Planners, Bureaus, and Referral Services – MPI, E-Speakers, Speaker Match, WSA, Thumbtack, Gig Salad
Networking – Exposure, Affiliation, Referrals
Social Media – LinkedIn (Pro Finder), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
Pink Spoons
·        Speaking – Fee, Low or No Fee, Webinars, Guest Stages
·        Social Media – Post, Engage, Share
·        FB – Page Posts, Group Interaction, Live Video
·        Multimedia – YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest
·        Content – Blogs, Video, LinkedIn, Guest Spots
·        Email – Opt-in, Auto-Responder, Funnel
·        Elevator Speech
·        Publications (Book, Video, Audio)
·        Free Session
Proposing
Solid Offering
System (Script, Sequence, Schedule)
Proposal
Contract
Follow Up
Fulfillment
Content (Combination of Services)
·        Keynote (Target, Title, Hook, Point of View, Interaction, Multi-Length)
·        Training (Target, Topics, Learning Outcomes, Interaction)
·        Consulting (Strategy Sessions, Shadowing, Re-Structuring, Evaluation)
·        Coaching (Goal Setting, Behavior Remediation, Strategy, Object
Measurable Result
Plan

Doing a speaking gig once in awhile can be fun, lucrative, and beneficial to participants. But if you want your business to come 100% from your efforts, you need a structure that rivals that of the training companies’.

To compete for large training and development projects, speakers and trainers need to band together. I have a Webinar platform, and a Professional Coach Certification program. Dawn Jones has a sales team and a publishing company. Dr. Angela Massey develops courses and designs course materials. Delvon Survine knows how to register as a minority business. Ellen Engel is able to get Government Contracts. Robert Carrow has NLP and Charisma. Kelli Vrla has humor. Keith New has you covered on the financial front. Julie Schnelker can design and set up your pricing. Robin White has Executive Coach Curriculum. Guy Burns leverages network relationships…

The Star Marketing Summit is more than an event that happens twice a year at various major cities. It is more than instruction and support on how to build your business and your offering. It is more than peer support for whatever you are doing. The Star Marketing Summit is the infrastructure you can use to be competitive in the training and speaking arenas. Attend one Summit to become an active part.

With a 19-year corporate training background, I thought doing keynote speeches would be easy. After all, training seminars are six hours, and keynotes are often 20 minutes.

I thought I could just isolate a specific teaching point, organize it tightly, make it funny, and deliver it like a story. But I fell flat. The audience didn’t respond; the organizers didn’t invite me back; and I wasn’t sure how to fix it.

Have you ever wondered why the keynote speaker gets paid so much more than a breakout trainer? I resented it at first, feeling like the trainer did all the work and provided all the valuable information. But then I thought about the two roles. The keynote gets the attention of the audience and riles them up, so the trainer can come in and instruct their now-open minds. It takes more preparation, practice, and finesse to do a keynote – but what specific steps does it take to make one work?

For any kind of creative or strategic planning, I use a mind map. Pick the teaching point you want to make, then branch off the sub-points as in the picture above. Make sure you have some hooks to make it memorable, and you give the audience a chance to opt in (more on how to craft a message in my blog post called The Formula for Speaking Success.

The hard part is the delivery. It mustn’t be a presentation or a performance. It is a vulnerable sharing of yourself in an intimate moment on stage. The point in a keynote is for you to be there with and for the audience. You can’t fake that, and you have to renew yourself for it every time.

I couldn’t pull off a great keynote until I could truly speak from the heart and be “out there” with them. I learned to do that by practicing vulnerability in my own life – not telling stories or giving advice – but truly sharing, with the intent of inspiring and moving my audience.

What audiences truly want is you. And keynotes are a concentrated sharing of you – your energy, your experiences, your compassion. And by sharing yourself, you fulfill your purpose in taking to the stage.

If you are a speaker, trainer, and coach who wants to build your business, consider attending a Star Marketing Summit. They are held twice a year at different cities. The next one is in Denver July 28-29. Go to www.StarMarketingSummit.com for details and support.

After an enjoyable airplane conversation where I revealed that I was a motivational speaker and executive coach, my seat mate told me, “We need a trainer to come in and present a series of five leadership modules over the course of a year.” “Great!” I said. “I would love to send you a proposal.” Just two years before, I wouldn’t even have been able to say that. I have been a corporate trainer since 1999 but have relied on small booking agents to match me with clients. “Well,” he said, “I think you’re a good fit for our culture, but I really need to do this on a larger scale. We have offices in eight cities. We would also need some assessments and up-front consultation as well as follow-up coaching…Can you do that?”

“Yes, I can do that,” I said, panicking behind the confident smile. “Here is where networking really pays off,” I thought.

Maybe it’s because we travel and can’t have normal daily interactions at home or maybe it’s because of the gregarious nature of what we do, but traveling speakers tend to stick together. In my almost 20 years on the road, I have attended Big Money Speaker bootcamps, local meetups, and mastermind groups galore. Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups filled the need between live events. Through that networking, I have amassed quite a pool from which to shop for help in fulfilling large contracts. I put the word out to my network and got the assessments, trainers, and coaches on standby within two days of submitting the proposal.

After being recruited by others in my network to collaborate on similar ad hoc engagements, we started thinking, “Maybe we should make this official!”

We had already created a support group for speakers, trainers, and coaches called the Star Marketing Summit where peers who had achieved success shared what they did to give a leg up to colleagues they cared about. Now we were emphasizing leveraging the team created through the Summit to build an infrastructure that could rival a large training company.

As an organizer of this twice-a-year event, I started scheduling professionals who could provide not only training and inspiration, but also substance. The Star Marketing Summit has grown a second pillar – The Star Performance System. The Marketing Summit trains and supports the growth of its attendees while the Performance System acts as their infrastructure.

Over the 9 years I have been meeting with colleagues in this way, I have been able to say, “Yes,” to hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts I never would have been able to fulfill on my own.

Whether you are interested in camaraderie and fun, improving your presentation skill, finding more business, or taking on the corporate world, you will find the Marketing Summit to be a consistent resource. We do not profit from your registration and do not allow presenters to “pitch” from the front of the room. This event is as different as it is game changing. Please check us out at www.StarMarketingSummit.com and register for the next event in Dallas January 5-6.

Marketing yourself requires exposure you can get through the Marketing Summit. We are putting on an optional Speaker Showcase where you can be observed by those who hire speakers. It will go from 8 a.m. to noon on Friday, January 5 and incurs no additional cost.

One speaker’s bureau will be there, and we are inviting some local businesses

Regardless of the community exposure, please participate in the Speaker Showcase as a presenter or observer to reap multiple benefits, such as a chance to:

• Practice doing a 15-minute presentation and get feedback from experts
• Compare your skills with others
• Record yourself to use in marketing your speaking

The first 12 registered participants in the January 2018 Star Marketing Summit who request it will be scheduled to present in the Showcase. Everyone is encouraged to attend as an observer

We have just added at no extra cost the opportunity to get professional pictures at the July 2017 Marketing Summit. You will need to bring your own SD card to save the photos. You might also want a couple of wardrobe changes. Do a standard headshot to use on your social media profiles, then take some live-action shots, both fun and serious. If you have a certain brand, try to dress in the uniform of that brand. Do you have clothing that matches your brand colors?

Consider all the places and contexts where you use photos, and anticipate the poses that will be helpful. I got a great price ($500) on some professional photos 5 years ago. I took 30 poses and still didn’t have what I needed to put together a web site, social site banners, speaker one-sheets, and memes. Think about exactly what you need in advance, and take advantage of this amazing bonus.

If you have done any sales training, you’ve heard that in order to buy from you, people have to Know, Like, and Trust you. In traditional marketing, this is achieved through gaining visibility, telling your story, and creating a fair offer with a strong guarantee supported by testimonials.

In front of a live audience, the formula changes a little. Many speaking workshops tell us not to begin with a joke because not everyone appreciates a joke in the same way. Another reason for that is that the audience has to believe in you before you worry about getting them to like you.

Generally audiences go from skeptics to action-takers in these five stages:

• You know your stuff (Credibility)
• I like you (Likeability)
• You’re like me (Relatability)
• I can do it (Practicality)
• I’ll believe you and do what you suggest (Applicability)

Start out with confidence, clarity, and strong content. Build rapport, then show your vulnerability. These things allow the audience to be with you rather than in front of you. If you’re so great they can’t relate, then they may believe you but never take action because they assume it doesn’t apply to them.