In-Person Seminars for Business Professionals

Tom; The big question is how you fill the room...and what do they think they will learn.

But.....How do you fill the room? Everything else is a minor detail.

Hey Claude,

Neither of these issues I'm worried about. I'm specifically keeping the attendance limited to about 10-12 people, and its going to be an intense, hands-on boot camp style workshop with worksheets, templates, etc for them to do during the seminar. The idea is to take their marketing program, such as they are, critique them, and show them how to bring them up to speed. (in a nutshell).

Tom what did you do in the past? And why do you think it would not work now? Honestly it sounds like you have more experience with this than most of us here.

For venues normally with an event like yours it would be in a hotel since it sounds like you will have overnight guests. I can't think of one conference or seminar I have been to that was not held in a hotel.

May I ask why you are having this on a Saturday? That seems like a weird day to have it but you must have experience that says that is the right day. So I would love to know the thoughts and past experience behind it.

I can honestly say I understand where Claude is coming from. The material, location, and etc are all easy comparatively to getting the room filled.

Also most people have little to no experience doing this so under estimate what it takes to fill seats.

The fact in your experience you haven't had that issue is great and I hope you will share with us all a bit of how. I know I would find value in it as would many others. I really want to know how filling the seats can be made easy.

OK everybody,
People are asking a lot of questions which I’ve sorta deliberately skated around. So let me start with a bit of background.

A few weeks ago there was a couple of very excellent threads here about lead gen for local offline businesses. Another individual that I track pretty closely is some dude named Frank Kern lol. This type of marketing is what I’m selling to local business professionals, not so much building websites, or selling leads, but rather the concept of selling an ‘end-to-end’ solution.

An end-to-end solution is when a plumber says, ‘hey, I need to rent your site, and get an average of 10-12 good leads every month. A point solution is building somebody a website that’s supposed to generate 10-12 good leads each month, if the client continues on, and does the correct promotional work.

The key difference between a point solution and an end-to-end solution is the amount of money that’s involved. The end-to-end solution is far more lucrative. At the end of the day, clients really don’t want websites, or an SEO / social media campaign, or whatever. They just want their ##^$&# phone to ring with new clients. ANYTHING ELSE is a distraction that keeps them from making a living. Its why they don't answer the phone or email.

So I am focused on delivering the total end-to-end solutions to a specific niche of business professionals. And I have different tiers of support and assistance that I will provide. For example, I make it very clear that if anybody has questions, they’re free to call me or email me and I’ll do my best to answer – no charge, even for non-clients. Or perhaps if they feel they want a bit more hand-holding, then they can buy my attention for a recurring monthly fee. Or, they can just rent a fully functional sales funnel from me for a monthly fee.

So that’s the background material.

I thought the earlier comments here were kinda interesting, from the viewpoint that everybody’s all worried about how to fill the room.

You wanna know a secret?

I completely sell out a room with one single phone call. And its not even a sales call. Usually I call one person (and it has to be the right individual) literally only to make the arrangements- I don’t even try to sell them. You see, just about every merchant, service provider, business owner, industry in town belongs to some sort of trade association. And trade associations are highly motivated by two things – somehow delivering their own value to members, and making revenue.

When you walk down the street and knock on the door for a local business, one at a time, and ask if they want to attend your seminar, their eyes glaze over, and their first question is, did you even graduate from high school. And you repeat this process about 200 times to build up a modest attendance, if you beg hard enough.

In my case what I did was contract with different trade associations. One phone call, explain what I was doing and what my credentials were (the national orgs are a lot more focused on credentials, and I do have some letters I can put behind my name), and make them an offer to split the gate fee.

I had one very large international engineering trade association that I worked closely with for quite a few years.

From about the mid 90’s to about 2007, I was regularly doing these in-person seminars at their regional conferences and their annual conference. They publicized the event (they have the credibility with their members, so if they recommended it, it must be good, right?), they kept track of the attendance, and collected the money.

The smallest seminars had 90 people in a room, and I would do a session from 8-noon, clear out the room, and do another one from 1pm to 5 pm. Usually, a third session would be held on the following morning. The price for admission to a single session was $1750.00 in addition to any other fees for their conference. We split the take 50-50.
So in the US, I was doing their national convention, and 4 regional conferences per year – a total of about 15 sessions annually. In addition, they had large membership chapters in Europe, and in South America, and they paid my way there 2x yearly to do their seminars.

In fact the largest seminars I ever did were in Mexico, with 300-500 people per session. Just a funny story, I started the presentation by telling these people that however much of my English they understood, it was a lot more than the Spanish that I understood. And then I promptly recited my entire Spanish vocabulary, Buenos Dios, Buenos Noches, and Asta La Vista Baby. (right when that Arnold movie came out). It always got a big laugh at the gringo from up north and broke the ice with the crowd.

So here’s my thought for the day, you may or may not have the credentials to approach a big national association like I had been doing. But whats wrong with calling up 3-4 chambers of commerce in your region, (or the state dental association) and cutting them a deal – 50-50 and they get their members signed up for your seminar.

One phone call to these people or similar group, your seminar gets filled, they make bank, and they give off the perception that they’re doing something worthwhile for their members.

Now in my case, with my new gig that I’m kicking off this fall, I’m planning to spill all the beans about marketing. It may sound counter-intuitive to give away most of my secrets, but here’s the deal, I deliberately want to overwhelm them. Because marketing any business isn’t a one-night stand, it’s a continual process week after week after month after month, and sooner or later, these people sorta throw in the towel and say, I’m just gonna call Tom, and let him take it over. They’re highly motivated to do what they're good at (and its not marketing), and let somebody else, like you, do what you’re good at – making their bleeping phone ring with new clients.

So back to my gig. The reason this seminar process died off a few years ago, actually there’s several, but the major contributor is that tight travel budgets, and the convenience of webinars put a lot of pressure on this process.

So that influences my strategy for my new gig. Instead of just doing a knowledge dump which can be done via webinar, I plan to do intensive, hands-on, brainstorming style bootcamp with 10-12 clients in a comfortable (expensive) hotel meeting room for a full day. I plan to do a ‘gap analysis’, in other words determine where their marketing campaigns are now, and then help them develop a specific action plan and time table for getting them to where they need to be.

So this is why I was originally asking if anyone had recent experience with doing seminars at hotels. And if they had any specific advice about the logistics of it. I do suppose I could hire a meeting planner who could handle all of these arrangements.

So, there you have it....

Tom

Fantastic thread. I've been thinking of seminars and filling the seats has been the biggest challenge. Partnering with associations is piece of cake. Thanks, Tom.

Tom, get on Jenny Hanby's list

seminarmarketingpro.com

and Daphne's

Event Strategy Solutions

No connection but they have a lot of information on seminars.

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For those interested in starting out small with seminars for neighborhood businesses, here is one way to do it cheaply.

You would be surprised how good some of the meeting rooms are at the local library branch.

And often neighborhood associations get meeting rooms for free. So team up with a local neighborhood association, which usually has a lot of small business owners, and schedule a marketing seminar in the neighborhood library branch. Split any proceeds with the association, or heck, give them all of it. You'll make far more on the back end, and you really are doing it for the experience anyway.

You'll get experience running small seminars at low cost and can scale up from there.