The Follow Up Plan Determines Success or Failure

What happens After You Conduct a Live Lunch & Learn Event…Is It Successful?

In my last post I talked about raising your conversion numbers. Successful lunch & learns convert. Mine are converting at about 99% over the past 12 months. Meaning, if 30 people come to the event, I expect all of them to convert to an assessment – the one thing I find that regularly leads to ongoing business.

Today I’d like to look at the follow up plan. If you don’t follow up correctly, you can’t expect to get business out of it.

Follow Up Starts At The Event

Your follow up program starts right there at the event. Step one is asking your attendees to sign up for something at the event. The best time to do that is while you are speaking.

When I go out to speak I will often offer my audience something as I am speaking. As a speaker, I don’t have an assessment. But one strategy that works well is to offer a video to the audience.  For instance, when I see the audience is really engaged – there’s energy in the room and they’re on the the edge of their seats, I’ll say, “How many of you would like a summary video of what I am getting ready to explain right now?” 90% will raise their hands. At that point I will say, “Pull out your business card, write VIDEO on it, and pass it up to me.” The response is predictable.

You can do the same with assessments. And I am doing that every month as I go out and speak to business leaders on behalf of a hosting reseller…

(If you’d like some help putting something like this together – click here on my contact form and type – Help Me Convert! and press submit).

The Power of Free Assessments to Convert

I also recommend using a free or complementary assessment.  I get more push back on this than anything else I recommend. But the fact is, this converts 60 to 80% of the time. The ROI is there so try it.

Paid assessments are great – but if you’re selling low end, $2500 assessments, to the SMB, or assessments to larger firms for under $10K, you probably don’t have any margin left anyway. And your conversion is probably low. Your sales cycle on the other hand, is likely high.

The complementary assessment should only be offered in exchange for something – like a leader showing up at an event. Don’t advertise it on your website.

Use it as leverage. Insist on doing it your way – after all, they didn’t pay. So if the decision maker won’t invest any time, stop the process. If they refuse to show up to a final review meeting, don’t hand it in. Use the complementary assessment to gain the audience you need to close the business.  You can’t do this if they’ve paid you. Once you’re paid, they control the process.

You Have About Four Weeks

Time is short. When you make the conversion in the meeting, emotions are high. High conversion rates mean an emotional response it taking place. It’s no different than an old fashion revival meeting. The hands go up, and the more people see hands going up, the more they want to raise their hand.

But this emotion won’t last. You know they have a need. They don’t. But with this emotional response comes a willingness to let you look under the covers. It’s your chance to build a second emotional response that has substance behind it. Assess and find the urgent things.

You have about 4 weeks to get this done. Once that time expires, the emotions go down. It will be harder to get them to act at this point. So follow up quickly and get it done. Don’t invite more people to your event than you can effectively follow up on.

© 2016, David Stelzl

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