How to Build Your Pipeline… With Free Gigs!

Yesterday, we learned an important lesson…

Those practitioner-heavy events where you currently speak often don’t have enough high-level execs who can offer valuable referrals.

And we know that you need to find a way to get in front of those execs at the right event…

… with the right type of “how to think” speech that will intrigue and inspire.

That’s why you need to develop a speech that is the “part one” of your current speech.  It’s a new speech that will target the executive-level audience in a way that helps them realize you have a vision for transformation in their industry.

The goal for your new speech is to deliver it at an event with many executives in attendance so you can inspire them to act.  

Hopefully, by the end of your talk, they will jump out of their seats to meet you at the side of the stage – eager to have you come and speak to their team members to share your new strategy.

But remember, this “part one” speech needs to be about a much bigger problem that’s relevant to those execs at the upper-level events.  

It’s specifically designed to target the top of the influence pyramid.  When this technique is done correctly, it can ignite your referral engine and lead to a cascade of new stageside leads and referrals within your fractal.  

So, here we go! 

Step #1:
Choose your target audience.

To help walk you through this process, I’m going to use speaker Robin Taub as an example.  Robin recently wrote to me with the following:

With experience, I’ve come to understand that my ideal target market is financial advisors and wealth managers. Not one advisor with a bunch of clients wanting to do an event, but a national organization like Northwestern Mutual (NM), that has the budget for my fee of USD$15,000 and wants to buy books too.

… But when I do an event, for say Northwestern Mutual, I don’t get a lot of stageside leads because they all work there!

As you can see, Robin is struggling to earn stageside leads because she is spending her time speaking to audience members lower on the influence pyramid.  They don’t have the authority or connections to offer referrals for other speaking gigs.

The first step for both you and Robin would be to determine exactly which upper-level audience you want to target.  Would it be marketing execs? Sales execs? HR execs? CIOs, CEOs, COOs, CFOs, CTOs, CCOs...? (That's not even all the C-level titles I can think of... there are CSOs, CLOs, CPOs...)

There are events for everybody on the planet.

For Robin, it would be natural to look for financial services marketing events.  And guess what?  A quick Google search reveals a LOT… like a million results pop up.  I click on the first one and find this nice-looking Digital Marketing Financial Services Summit in the Midwest.

It turns out, they have these summits all over the country.  When you scan through the site, you quickly get the flavor of the event.  Generally, these events are filled with Industry Icons – speakers representing big brand name companies – heavy hitters like Prudential, Monax, and Nationwide.  

As you can see from the speaker list, this would be an excellent networking and learning opportunity for any corporate executive.  That’s why they are so attracted to events like this.

On the downside, a lot of these events don’t pay speakers. They generally don’t need to pay anyone because all of the speakers were invited to come on their company's dime.  Some sites even have forms you can fill out to apply to be a speaker.  It’s okay to fill out this quick form, but be sure you have the right speech ready to go first.

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SpeakingGigs.ProAndrew Davis

That leads us to the next step…