Seminar Tips: Calling

Seminar Tips: Calling

Not Calling Seminar Attendees

One of the single biggest mistakes that you can make when it comes to making sure that your seminars are poorly attended is to not call your seminar attendees the day before they are to attend your seminar. The difference between a successful seminar and an unsuccessful seminar is taking that one additional step of calling the day before to remind them that they signed up for the following night’s seminar and that you are looking forward to seeing them there.

Most successful dental practices will call you to remind you about your appointment, mail you a post-card reminder, an email reminder and even call you a second time to remind you about your 6-month check-up. For the men and women in our industry who feel that they are above making those reminder calls or that they simply do not have the time and resources to make those calls, they will not be in our industry very long. Making reminder calls is one of the factors that separates MDRT members from the rest of the men and women that make their living in the financial services and insurance industry.

Not Calling Future Clients

Do not lose sight of the fact that before prospects become your clients, you need to first meet with them at one of your seminars. Between them attending your seminar and them meeting with you, you need to take advantage of several additional opportunities to contact them. These opportunities will come in the form of a reminder email, a reminder post-card and most importantly, a phone call reminder the day before their appointment with you.

It will be these simple, value-added steps that you take with them that will win them over and make certain that they attend your seminars and keep the appointments that they’ve set with you after your seminars. At the seminar, they are moved by what they see and hear, picturing their own financial realities and realizing that they need to talk to an expert about everything.

As the time between the seminar and their appointment with you passes, it becomes easy for them to lose their conviction in meeting with you. Your contact with them will often be the only difference between them keeping their appointments with you and forgetting about you altogether as they continue to receive additional seminar mailers from your competition every day between when they attended your seminar and when they are scheduled to meet with you.

For more tools and training for advisors working with Social Security, be sure to visit our resources page.

Seminar Tips: Pitfalls

Seminar Tips: Pitfalls

Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover

Many of the people that attend your seminars will be dressed comfortably in jeans and a t-shirt, worn-down sneakers, jacket that’s seen better days and a baseball cap that is missing more material than is left to hold it together.

Underneath those comfortable clothes are your future clients. It is easy to take a look at someone dressed casually verses someone that is dressed in business attire and decides that of the two; the better-dressed person will be the one that you land as a client. Subconsciously or intentionally, you rationalize that the better-dressed of the two is the only one that will have assets.

That line of thinking will cause you to limit your time to just a couple of audience members.

You will be missing out on a huge opportunity with the rest of your audience that do have assets to invest and are looking to work with someone just like you. Do not pre-judge anyone in your audience and you will avoid losing your opportunity with them because you assume they have no assets due to how they are dressed. I have met several doctors, prominent business owners and attorneys in the audiences that I present seminars to that are dressed like they just stepped out of a Sear’s catalogue…from 1987. In fact, one of the best clients that I was able to help one of our agent’s land, was a doctor who had just finished doing yard work and had no time to change before attending our seminar.

Exceeding An Hour

Leave your audience wanting more. For every second that you exceed your one hour presentation, you are removing appointments off your calendar. Leave them wanting more from you and you will be very successful in converting audience members into appointments and ultimately life-long clients.

Using Complex Explanations

Never pass up an opportunity to use a quick story to illustrate a complex concept. People love stories and most importantly, they remember them to the point that they will have forgotten all the details about the concept mentioned in the seminar, but will recall a story for you verbatim. You will never have a majority of your audience who are analytical and detail-oriented. Stick with simple and memorable stories to explain ideas, and when you do meet with analytical clients, you can drill down as much as you’d like beyond the stories.

For more tools and training for advisors working with Social Security, be sure to visit our resources page.