Paying careful attention to the logistics of your event can be the key to a profitable presentation.

Small details, such as having extra order forms and pens, can make a huge difference in your results. I told you the story about the company that lost a $30K sale when my husband was inspired to invest because the lines were long and they didn’t have an extra pen! He decided to go to lunch and “think about it,” and that was just the cooling off period he needed to decide to hold off.

Don’t let that happen to you.

Here are 5 logistics tips that you can take to the bank:

1. Create a Master Checklist
My checklist has saved me time and money and heartache on numerous occasions.

So, make a master checklist for yourself and, each time you speak, add to it the things that you need. You can download mine at www.LisaSasevichFan.com (Click the Like button to join, and you’ll be able to download it from the Fan Bonus! tab.)

And, most of all, USE your checklist. It can keep you organized and sane.

2. Collect a Bag of Tricks
I hate to waste time looking for things, so I keep a plastic bin in a drawer filled with items I like to bring with me to speaking events. It’s all organized, in one place, so I can just quickly grab it while packing.

Some of the items in my bag of tricks are:
• my own PowerPoint clicker
• a digital camera for still photos
• extra pens
• a little wrench to tighten my music stand (if I’m bringing it)
• double-sided tape if I tear a hem or my blouse is gaping. (Ladies, you know about that!)
• a flip camera for taking videos
• chargers for my phone and camera
• extra batteries for the clicker
• breath mints or spray
• face powder and blotting paper

3. Bring More Order Forms (and Pens) than You Will Need
You want to have those extra forms available at the back table because people lose theirs or they’ve written notes on them that they want to keep. If you can just hand them a blank form and a pen and let them take the other one home, they’ll be grateful.

And, as I mentioned above, sales are lost when frustrated prospects can’t find a pen, get an order form or have to wait in a long line that’s not moving.

4. Collate Your Order Forms According to Chairs, Not People
Soon after you arrive, either you or a helper should collate your order forms based upon the number of rows and chairs in each row. For instance, if there are 5 rows of 7 chairs, someone needs to make 5 batches that each contain 7 order forms. That way, the person handing them out can just give a batch to the person at the end of each aisle.

That may sound overly simple, but consider that a well-meaning helper, standing at the head of each row, counting out order forms, can eat up 10 minutes of your talk, while you’re up there…waiting.

5. PowerPoint Tips
And finally, here are a few tips for working with your PowerPoint presentation:

a. If you have a Mac, buy the little adapter (for about $10) that enables you to hook up your Mac to a projector, and keep the adaptor in your bag of tricks or travel bag.

b. Bring one printout of your PowerPoint presentation. That way, if the equipment fails, you can use the printout like an outline and talk your way through the material.

c. Bring an electronic copy of your presentation on a thumb drive. Again, if something goes wrong, and you can’t get your laptop hooked up to the projector, you have the option of trying another computer.

As I’ve said before, the angels are in the details. Be as prepared as you can be, and you’ll be ready for just about everything!

What do you keep in your bag of tricks? Let us know below!

You’ve fantasized about it, I’m sure. You’re up on stage, giving your heart out, and then when you’re done, there’s a stampede to buy your products or services.

Well, that fantasy can be a reality. It happens for my clients all the time and it can happen for you! Here are three ways to cause that rush to the back of the room:

1. First, Give Yourself Enough Time to Present Your Offer
You’re there to serve and to educate, but you can’t forget that you’re primarily there to make your offer and invite people to work with you or buy your products or services. That’s the only way they’ll get to experience the deeper transformation that’s truly possible.

One of the most common mistakes I see is presenters getting so into what they’re teaching that they only allow 5 minutes for their offer. Five minutes is not enough time! If you want people to rush to the back of the room, you have to allow enough time for your offer.

I allow 15 minutes of my 90-minute talk.

What are you doing for those 15 minutes? Ahhh, this is where the Invisible Close comes in. You’re walking them through your packages and bonuses, continuing to give value and teach as you go and, at the same time, explaining the elements of your offer and telling them exactly how to register.

You’re also connecting what they see on the order form to the seeds that you’ve been planting and the stories you’ve been telling all along. That way, nothing in your offer comes out of the blue; it all flows from and is connected to the learning that has come before.

Remember, the offer is not separate from your education. In many ways it’s the most important part, because it tells them how they can learn more and turn the information you taught into transformation in their life!

2. Don’t Tame the Tension
Through your stories and seeds, you’ve created the “gap.” That is the tension prospects feel as they confront the distance between where they are now and where they could be. As they listen to your stories and testimonials and learn of the transformation that your clients experience when they work with you, that gap is getting wider. They started off interested, but as your presentation goes on, they are getting in touch with the fact that they need what you can facilitate.

Some presenters are bothered by the discomfort the audience is feeling so they try to relieve it by taking questions or letting people share with a partner, and they kill their sales. People have to feel that tension if they’re going to buy. It tells them that they have to have what you’re offering.

3. Offer a Limited Bonus
Here’s the fun part! If you really want a rush to the back of the room, offer a bonus that isn’t on the order form to the first 10 or 20 or 30 people that sign up. You’ll be surprised by how well this works.

You could offer a signed book you wrote, a 15-20 minute consultation with you, a “Quick Start” CD that they can listen to on the way home. If you have a team and you already offer a bonus of a consultation with a team member, you could offer the first 10 people a consultation with you instead. They’ll come running, ready to buy.

Remember, bonuses don’t have to be expensive to be valuable. Think about what you already have or that you could easily create which offers high value but costs you very little. For instance, perhaps you have a teleclass onto which you could add transcripts and a worksheet to make it more relevant to the presentation.

The bottom line is you’ve worked hard; you’re offering something truly special; people should rush to receive it. So put these simple structures into place and go out there and have the best sales you’ve ever had!

What strategies have helped you cause a rush to the back of the room? Let us know below.

It’s inevitable. At some point during your speaking career, no matter how carefully you prepare, something will go wrong.

The equipment may fail; the well-known speaker sharing the stage with you may not show up; someone may step in with a tweak to the event that hurts your sales.

You may not be able to prevent the unthinkable from happening, but there are ways to salvage the event, perhaps even turn the mishap into a plus. Here are seven secrets to save the show:

1. First, Be Prepared
Use your checklists and prepare for the mishaps that commonly occur. For instance, bring your laptop in case there are problems with the A/V equipment; bring an extra copy of your introduction in case the host has lost yours; if you’re shipping product, carry a few with you in case your shipment doesn’t arrive. Those kinds of problems are more predictable and, with preparation, you can prevent them from ruining your event.

2. Breathe
If something does go wrong, remember to breathe. Take a few deep breaths to calm yourself before you do anything else. Much better to respond than to react.

3. Don’t Lose Confidence
If you experience a mishap, don’t take it personally. Problems happen to the best of us. Keep your cool and tell yourself that everything will turn out all right. If you can keep your head clear while you look for solutions, you’ll be sure to find them faster.

4. Pray
While you’re seeking solutions, don’t forget to ask for help from a higher power. You may be surprised by how quickly an answer appears. (I do this ALL the time!)

5. Maintain a Sense of Humor
When things go wrong, the audience is feeling for you, so if you’re distressed, they will be too. If you can find the humor in the situation, and even joke about it, you will not only put yourself and your audience at ease, but, seeing how well you handle stressful situations, they will like and trust you even more than if everything had gone well!

6. Don’t Panic and Throw Out Your Plan
You’ve thought long and hard about what you’re going to do, so don’t let a last-minute disruption make you throw the baby out with the bath water. During a book tour, an author I know had only a few people show up at an event. Rather than focusing on the people who had attended, she became upset at the “poor” turnout and assumed that her talk wouldn’t work in an intimate setting. The trouble was, she didn’t have a Plan B. She fumbled her way through, panicking inside. Finally, she went back to her outline and got herself back on track, realizing that small tweaks to her presentation as she went along were sufficient. She salvaged the event (including hitting her usual sales conversion rate of 50%) and, on to #7, learned several lessons.

7. Learn Those Lessons
Don’t beat yourself up; milk the mishap for lessons. Sometimes when things go wrong, there isn’t a happy ending. A person with authority might step in and make a decision that truly wrecks your sales and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You lose money, but you can look for the lessons in the experience. One of them might be to negotiate better upfront next time and state certain conditions in your contract that you need in order to attend. For example, if you plan to make an offer when speaking, make sure there is a 20-minute break after you speak and that, aside from announcing what time they should return from the break, no one is speaking between you and that break.

The bottom line: no matter how carefully we prepare, we can’t protect ourselves from every contingency. Our job is to learn how to flow with the things that go wrong; if possible, prevent them from happening again; and look for the gifts of insight and learning.

If nothing else, our setbacks make memorable stories that help others avoid the same fate.

How have you “saved the show”? What have you learned from things that have gone wrong during presentations? Let us know below.

Today’s topic may not be the sexiest (unless you love numbers!); however, keeping track of your sales conversion results, and acting on what you learn, is one of the most powerful ways to improve your business. There’s no better tool for predicting revenue, and it’s easier than you think!

In fact, tracking your results pays off in many ways that might surprise you. Here are a few:

1. Collecting and analyzing your results helps you to determine if changes you’re making are having a positive or negative effect. Your statistics provide a kind of grounding to your intuition. Your new approach may feel good to you and your clients, but if you do the numbers, you’ll have the evidence to back up that good-feeling sense.

2. Your statistics allow you to predict revenue with a fair degree of accuracy. Knowing how much money you’re likely to make is helpful for obvious reasons but, in addition, if you know what your sales conversion rate tends to be, you also know how many bonuses and how much product to bring to an event. If you know what percentage of the people you invite to an event actually show up, you know how big a room to rent.

Of course, there’s always the happy surprise, like for me last month, when I had to quickly rent a larger venue. Actually, having to scramble to find a larger room is the kind of blessing that, I find, comes at least in part from being grounded in the numbers, planning as well as I can, and then letting Source take over!

3. Your statistics help you determine which practices to continue and which to let go. Facing the numbers can be challenging if they’re not what you’d like them to be, but doing so is important. They provide a kind of truth-telling that can help you make sound choices for the future.

Which Results Should I Track?
If you want to start keeping track of your results, you’re likely wondering which ones? Here are two of the most important:

Sales Conversion. Tracking your sales conversion ratio is easy. It’s simply the number of attendees who buy divided by the total number of attendees in the audience. For instance, if 60 people attend your talk and 15 of them buy your product or service, your sales conversion rate is 25% (15 divided by 60 = .25).

You want to keep track of your sales conversion rate for each event as well as your average rate. The average is derived the same way as above: the number of those who buy over many events divided by the total number of attendees at those events. Your conversion rate per event will likely vacillate, say from 20-40%, but your average is more stable and, for that reason, is a number you can really bank on!

Per Head Average (This is my favorite!). The per head average is the average amount of revenue you receive per attendee. To figure that, you divide the total revenue of several or more events (let’s say, $100,000) by the total number of people who attended those events (let’s say, 100). In that example, the per head average is $1,000 ($100,000 divided by 100).

I love this number because it tells you that if you’re at an event with 25 attendees, there is a high probability that it will be a $25,000 event (25 x $1,000).

There’s another more subtle effect. If you look at each person at your event as contributing $1,000 to your bottom line, you’ll worry less about the ones who don’t buy and be more present to every single person there. I’ve written before about how important it is to give, give, give, and then detach from the results. Here’s an instance of the results actually helping you to do that!

The per head average is also useful if you have a target you want to reach. For example, you want to bring in $30,000 in a given month. Because you know that your per head average is $1,000, you also know that you need to have 30 attendees that month. You can then apply your marketing muscle and other statistics, such as your show-up rate, to ensure that you get your 30 attendees.

See how beneficial it can be to track your results? Just remember that if they aren’t what you’d like them to be now, they will improve. Most people find that when they start paying attention to their numbers, they have an almost magical way of getting better. Try it for yourself and see!

For a full list of the results I recommend you track, as well as a handy Excel spreadsheet, see the appendix of my home study system, The Invisible Close.

How has tracking your statistics helped your business? Let us know below!

Picture this: you’re backstage, listening to the host read the speaker introduction that you provided. If all goes well, that introduction establishes your credibility — the impression that you are an expert with proven results who can be trusted to deliver.

Now, it’s your turn to get up on stage and introduce yourself. And you have two goals — to continue to build your credibility but also to show vulnerability.

Let me be clear, vulnerability is not self-deprecation. You’re not diminishing yourself. You’re showing your heart. You’re giving people a way to connect with you, to see you as a real person, to see that you’re just like them. That way, they’ll start to realize that if you could be successful, they can too.

Build It Quickly
You want to show that vulnerability and build that credibility in the first 5 to 10 minutes of your talk. You don’t want to take a lot of time with it, but it’s absolutely critical because we buy from people that we feel connected to and trust to deliver.

Get Comfortable
The beginning of your talk has to be strong, so you need to get comfortable quickly and get on a roll. Here are two ways to do that:

1. Arrive early. Getting to the event early gives you the chance to settle in, absorb the mood of the event and take advantage of opportunities you would have missed had you not been there. Just below, I’ll tell you about an experience that I had!

2. Open with humor. If it comes naturally to you, opening with humor puts you at ease and establishes rapport with the audience. Laughing together is a great way to connect quickly.

So, I was at an event early, where the two men speaking before me each brought out family photos and very movingly talked about how their kids were a big part of their turnaround and, with teary eyes, shared how much they missed them. Of course, that melted the hearts of the mostly women in the room.

That event was the first time that I’d been away from my kids for three whole nights since they were born, and when I heard those stories I recognized the opportunity. I tossed what I’d planned to lead with and instead got up there and said, “Ladies, I think these guys are so sweet and it’s awesome that they love and miss their children. So I hope you don’t find me insensitive when I tell you that I couldn’t get on that plane fast enough! I have four days on the West Coast and I’m like, “Woo-hoo, no kids!” Everybody cracked up, laughing.

The men’s stories warmed their hearts, but everybody related to mine. In that moment, I became someone they liked, knew and trusted. And I would have missed that golden moment had I not arrived early and paid attention.

Show Vulnerability with a Story
After a quick ice-breaker like that, I generally move pretty quickly into my vulnerability story, which also conveys credibility.

When you’re looking for your story, you want to tap into what got you from where you were to where you are now and how that journey qualifies you to be facilitating transformation. Ideally, your target audience has experienced or is now experiencing what you went through. That way, again, they’ll relate to you, but they’ll also have more trust in your ability to facilitate for them the same transformation that you went through.

I often tell the story of how The Invisible Close came out of when I used to teach women how to understand men. I so wanted every woman to have that understanding that even if 60 out of 100 women registered, I’d go home and literally cry about the other 40, who didn’t make the choice to do the amazing workshop I was offering and transform their lives. It’s a good story because it shows that I was closing up to 60 percent, so my credibility is there. But it also shows that I have a heart and that I’m not just up there to be selling; I stumbled into my expertise around sales conversion because I was passionate about women understanding men.

If you can do the same, show that you are a real person with expertise and a heart, who can be trusted to deliver, you will have everything you need to generate sales AND transform the lives of many people. And at the end of the day, for me, that’s a winning hand!