“In” Speech Marketing --

Setting Up the Room…4Profit!

Much has been written in the speaking industry about how room set-up affects your effectiveness as a communicator, educator, speaker. It does!

This section discusses how room set-up and atmosphere affect sales – repeat speech business, consulting and product sales.

Here are some things you can do with room set-up and atmosphere to Speak 4Profit:

·       Arrange the chairs in a semi-circle to give your audience a better sight line to your face and you to theirs. People will buy more from a face they can see than from just a voice they can hear.

·       Give yourself easy aisle access to the entire audience -- so you don’t lose contact with the “way-backs” (the ones who fight for the last row) or the “side-liners” (the ones who arrive late and sit off to the sides and out of sight)

·       Use a hand-held microphone. A hand-held mike lets you roam the entire room and has the added benefits of broader voice and volume control. It also lets you put a mike in the hands of the audience during questioning.

·       Manage your chairs! Which room do you think has the most successful speaker – the one where you fight for a scarce chair or the one where there are 25 empty ones? You can always add a few chairs to make it look like you are playing to a sold-out audience…but it’s darn hard to remove the empty ones! (members arrive earlier than they used to at our NSA Central Florida chapter meetings because “amazingly”, there never seems to be enough seats.)

·       Decorate the room with props that have some relevance to your talk. An interesting, attractive room always seems to sell more books. For a speech I gave to retailers called “Mining for Gold: Secrets to Database Profits,” I spreaded lots of plastic gold coins on the tables and I wore a miner’s helmet complete with light onto the stage. After the speech, I counted only three of the 100 coins left on the tables, and one guy tried to buy my helmet!

·       Feed ‘Em! A tired audience uses the breaks and the end of your speech to find refreshments instead of visit your product table. Keep your audience’s energy high with some well-timed boosters like Hershey KissesTM. SmartiesTM always get a laugh too.

·       Music -- I don’t use music in my talks but many speakers do…to create a mood, set the stage, create excitement. If you can use music to make your speaking experience more interesting, you’ll be able to create a more favorable sales atmosphere.

Note: Be sure you understand the regulations regarding use of copyrighted music and, if you are a member of the National Speakers Association, read its Code of Professional Ethics regarding the same.