to-sell program I could find and had some success. Yet, to really master it, I needed to invest heavily into a personal coach who could walk me through every detail slide-by-slide. This allowed me to start closing consistently and making big sales. This skill of speaking and selling from stage and online became one of the biggest “game changers” for my income, my confidence, and my expert business. A Risky Turnaround After learning this powerful skill, I no longer focused on just getting paid speaking engagements. Instead, I repositioned my business model to speak and sell. My new target market became international small business networking, conferences, and association events.
I began to waive my high speaking fee plus my travel expenses for an opportunity to present a full-day workshop. To give these organizations even more incentive to book me to speak, I even offered to pay them a percentage of my sales. Now you might be thinking how can you go from being one of the highest paid speakers in the world, to speaking for free. You might think that’s crazy. It was a complete 360 degree turnaround! But hold on a minute... You’re right, this big turnaround was risky. But it became a much better long-term income- generating business model. And remember that this was during a very challenged economy when most organizations were not hiring paid speakers. Most of
those budgets had already been cut in other countries as well. Therefore, I had to position myself to either waive my speaking fee to make a sale, or go after a limited number of paid speaking opportunities. You can imagine how quickly I got booked to speak once I waived my fees. It allowed me to get booked solid again and it gave me the opportunity to actually practice the skill of speaking-to-sell while gaining new clients and income at the same time. I kept improving and selling more and began to master this new skill. Soon, I was closing like those other speakers/ experts that I saw on stage. Within a few years, the economy in the states had started to improve and I was also becoming exhausted from so much travel.
Speaker Life
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