Absolutely!
I haven't bought Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh yet, but I've read and listened through the book's promotional website. I like their core value of creating a happy corporate culture devoted to making customers happy.
While I don't think a full or multi-day event is long enough to create a real "culture" by Tony Hsieh's definition, some of the concepts he applies to Zappos certainly speaks to seminar leaders preparing to deliver their own event.
Here are a few that stood out as for me as I listened to his hour-long presentation:
1) It's important to create a comfortable setting. If you're going to have a multi-day live event where people are going to be in a room for 8-plus hours per day, please make the room as comfortable as possible for them!
Last week I saw Facebook pictures of a live event recently given by a super successful seminar leader. The attendees were crammed into a large room like sardines!! The only space they had to work in was their own seat. No tables. They had to keep their notebooks and computers at their feet or in their laps.
To me, the pictures looked worse than a fully packed coach section on a non-stop from NY to Tokyo. At least on an airplane you have overhead compartments to store some personal items. Looking at those Facebook images made me start to imagining the stink of the body odor in the room by the end of day two. Not only that, but I know this person was charging at least $1,000 tuition per head and probably twice or three times that amount. I implore you, please don't do this to several hundred people who have gone to great expense to attend your live event.
Splurge on some tables and a little extra elbow room. Have water at the table. At break time, offer snacks that energize people, not sweet bready stuff that will put everyone in a coma by early afternoon. If you can't afford to treat them like first class passengers, how about a few business class perks? Don't treat your people like they belong in steerage.
2) As a seminar leader, commit to your customer by delivering a high level of content and value. Well developed and effectively delivered content value is the primary objective. A comfortable and positive learning environment facilitates this.
Some seminar leaders put too much focus on making a grand impression instead of delivering value. Once someone opened their live event with a fancy acrobatic number, Cirque du Soleil style. Initial internal audience response: so how much of my tuition money was spent on this useless ___? Can I get a partial refund?
Others focus on too much selling. At one event I attended last year, the seminar leader spent only 50% of the time during her 3-day event teaching content. The other 50% was a series of 90-minute sales pitches offering useful but extremely expensive consulting services by various providers. I wasn't even slightly enticed to join the high end mastermind group offered at the end of the event. Frankly, I feared those weekends would also be full of sales pitches as opposed to actual mentoring.
3) Don't fail to follow up! Large groups of people gather for these live events. During the two to three days that everyone's together, everybody's feeling energetic, inspired, motivated, excited, etc. Then everybody goes home, back to their (often) lonely little offices and starts to try to implement the content on their own. Maybe they hit a snag or two. What then? There's nowhere to go for help.
I believe seminar leaders are leaving some major opportunities for relationship building (and future loyal customers) on the table at this point. So if an attendee doesn't sign up for their super-expensive mastermind groups, even though they travelled and spent thousands to attend their live event, they're largely forgotten. What are they, chopped liver? Don't seminar leaders want these folks to attending their future live events a priority?
Instead of no follow-up, or just one one-hour follow up q&a call, why not the time to create a series of q&a follow-up "implementation assistance" calls? This could be a very inexpensive continuity program. Recordings could be made, and as the questions inevitably become redundant, people could be referred to the particular call where the question was originally answered. The recordings could be repurposed and sold as a small package. But most important, the seminar leader could build and maintain a relationship with clients who weren't ready to be upsold into the big ticket programs.
This way, everybody that comes to the event still gets some special attention and is made to feel important and valued, no matter how much or little they buy afterward. I think Tony Hsieh would agree with that!
Lily Iatridis of Fearless Delivery, has a proven track record and knows the key elements in effective and engaging presentation. Her expertise is in supporting professionals to get their message expressed clearly to deliver the biggest results in their live and online presentations. Secrets and strategies such as "how-to" shortcuts, personalized instruction and even packaging the presentation are just some of the skill sets that Lily brings to her audience to create a fearless and effective delivery.
If you've ever been nervous in front of an audience, please download Lily's free ebook, "5 Steps to Neutralize Difficult Audience Members– Without A Power Struggle!" In this ebook, Lily shares simple strategies that will put your mind at ease, arm you with useful strategies, and entertain you with some stories of her own bumps along the path to public speaking success.
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