“We recently held an educational event with David Stelzl as our keynote speaker to explain the 7 Essential Mindsets of securing critical data.  The event was held at the right time, with the right people, and at the right place and was a great success!  We had 74 people in attendance which represented 31 actual companies.  Of those, 65% signed up for a Risk Assessment that night and an additional 5 companies wanted project work done.  Since then, we’ve had two of 31 companies actually call us for help with security issues.  Both have engaged for project work.  They definitely would not have called without us doing the event.”

This quote (above), written by Nate Freeman of Network People in Largo, FL, appears on the comments page of my blog – events work, but only when done with conversion in mind.

This morning I had the privilege of meeting with various resellers from the US to talk about demand generation and exactly what it is that differentiates success from an expensive lunch meeting.  I covered the seven steps presented in my most recent book, Event Marketing, 7 Steps to Profitability Using Lunch & Learns.  One of those steps, and the one asked about this morning, involves using the right speakers – without the right speaker, you’ll just end up with an expensive lunch.

On a recent call with a reseller on the west coast, we were discussing the agenda with a proposed vendor partner/sponsor – a partner willing to support the event with JMF.  On the call he said, “If we are going to fund this, we want a speaking slot.”  The reseller on the call deferred to me, asking me what I thought I of this.  What happened next is the important part…

I simply said, “It doesn’t really matter to me who speaks – in fact, I don’t even have to speak at this event.  The only thing that matters is conversion.  Will more people move from the Attendee box to the Doing-something-about-it box if you speak or I speak?  At the end of the day, the only thing that matters in this event is conversion between these two boxes.”  It would be rare for someone to actually buy a product or service right there at the event, however , converting them to some sort of assessment or strategy session is not that hard given the right message and the right people group.  In fact, the length of the meeting, the location, the food…every decision we make should be based on maximizing conversion. Nothing else matters.

When the vendor heard these words it finally made sense – he had never thought of it quite like this.  From there we stopped worrying about who was doing what from an ego standpoint and started talking strategy – what will bring in the right audience and what will yield the highest conversion rate?

You can find more great tips in my ebook – or wait for the recording link on this webinar to be announced.

© 2013, David Stelzl