Habit 2 Thinking – Seminars and Lunch & Learns

Continuing on with Habit 2 thinking, how does this apply with events and seminars?

When I conduct Data@Risk seminars, I am presenting educational material to business leaders, helping them establish better business practices that will better serve their customers and protect their company’s intellectual capital. This has value in and of itself, but it does not lead to many sales without a game plan. I’ve designed my keynote to guarantee three execute meetings, not just one. The first meeting comes through the educational event. My material is written to help business level people understand the risks, see why they may not be experiencing security violations when in fact they probably are, and finally to agree that it is important that they at least look to see if they have some of the more surreptitious security violations in progress within their applications. I use marketing concepts to create urgency here, driving a certain reaction. Knowing what I know about today’s cybercrime makes it easy to accomplish this because there really is a need!

The next two meetings follow. Using Habit 2 thinking, I work with my client to develop a follow up assessment process that scales to fit the opportunity. Some prospects are worth spending a great deal of time with, others not so much. The discovery process requires executive involvement; if they don’t show up, we discontinue the process and continue the marketing effort until they do. Once they agree to involvement (which is minimal by design), we go through the process identifying urgent issues. Meeting three comes in at the time of delivering our findings. Again, if the executive does not show up, we withhold the information (Since it is complementary, we can do that.) Most often, those who agree to participate upfront will also avail themselves to the deliverable review. By knowing ahead how we will get people signed up, how the follow up discovery process will be conducted, and how the deliverable will be presented, we can predict some level of success that is commensurate with our effort. But it all starts with building the follow up program before the event ever begins.