Justin Devonshire

Hey guys. How are you doing? I’m happy to be here for this public speaker training.

Justin Devonshire

I am ready to go.

Justin Devonshire

Right. Yes. There’s so much we can talk about with live events, public speaker training, or big thing and these includes seminars, workshops, single day events, 90-minute events, retreats. It could be any of these things.

Justin Devonshire

There are many reasons why I encourage a lot of any kind of entrepreneurs, coaches and trainers to get involved in public speaker training. The main thing is it’s one of the fastest ways to instantly position yourself with expert credibility, and you can publish books, you can be in the media, or in things like that.

But at the end of the day, getting on stage is like the final barrier because you can have someone ghostwrite a book. You can get someone to get you into the media or on things like that but with live events, when you go on stage and teach people, you can’t fake any of it. That’s why there’s quite a high barrier to entry for a lot of people and if you make the effort to go and do it, you’re going to quickly establish yourself.

Justin Devonshire

Public speaker training is one the most lucrative things you can do and it’s why I think everyone who serious about their business should have public speaker training. If you do it, the media is going to chase you because you’re a public speaker. You will find it easier to promote book sales if you have a book. So all these three things work well but we see a speaking as being of the main big things. And of course it’s the fastest, easiest way to sell high ticket programs in high volume.

So when you put all those things together, it’s not simple. It’s not easy. It’s not a walk in the park but those who learn the skill set and go and do it are going to profit bigtime.

Justin Devonshire

Okay, that’s a great question.

One of the biggest mistake I see most trainers doing is trying to make events that are too big. I’m not suggesting you trying to be the next Tony Robbins or anything like that. It’s not about packing out huge arenas.

Justin Devonshire

When you start planning your events first, it all comes from knowing what you want to sell and wrapping a business around it.

So if I could sum up public speaker training, the key difference is that the speakers that fail with this, it’s because they look at the event as the product when it’s more like the lead magnet where you then sell products on the back end.

Justin Devonshire

People put a lot of focus in the event. They try and make it like some kind of huge Tony Robbins type of thing and put all the money into it instead of focusing on the back end.

When it comes to public speaker training and planning an event, we would first look at what you ultimately want to sell, where are you trying to ascend your customers to. It’s just like a high-end program like a one-to-one coaching program or a mastermind or some group-based program, something that should be relatively high ticket, at least about 500 dollars.

And then, you’re basically then going to fill out the event to get just the amount of people you need to make the number of sales you want.

Over the year, let’s say you want to fill up a high-end mastermind program with ten clients. You can probably do that by doing three relatively small events in over the course of the year. And if you could put 30 to 40 people in a room three times a year, and make four to five sales at each one, then that could help you fill up a ten person high-ticket mastermind.

Justin Devonshire

When we do the planning, it’s about looking at the numbers and seeing what’s the minimum amount of work we can do to get the maximum results.

Justin Devonshire

Yeah. You’re right.

Yeah. I know all the top speakers. Tony Robbins, Bill Walsh, Gerry Robert, Andy Harrington, T. Harv Eker, even Bob Proctor. This is the Speak to Sell model.

Justin Devonshire

And you’re right. There’s a lot people that will say that so then they can be pitchfest and things. And some of the bigger guys can get away with it a bit more because they have some crazy following. We call that event ‘the money platform’ where it is used as a platform to sell high-ticket programs.

If you go to like a Tony Robbins three-day event, he’ll sell all kinds of stuff like he’ll sell ten different programs at that.

So yeah, you definitely got to watch out for that. I think the bigger guys just tend to get away with it because they have such a strong fan base.

Justin Devonshire

For the newer coaches, when you are trying to establish yourself, you want to do it tactfully and you’ve got to first know that there’s nothing wrong with promoting yourself. You just need to do it in the right way.

And the way we generally do this is, when it comes to any ascension model in terms of your products, when I do public speaker training with my clients, I teach them to recognize that at an event, it is a “Done with you” service. You’re mentoring people and teaching them over two days. So it’s about giving information. Usually, in front of my guys this is a one or two- day event, I’ll tell them. Tell your audience everything. Spill the beans. Teach them everything you know.

Justin Devonshire

And then the high-ticket back-end program is usually about some accountability. Teach the people everything over the two days. Give them amazing value. Let the people see for $99, they get amazing stuff.

But at the end of it, we’re just going to say, “Look, if you’d like personal accountability or some support to do this with you over the next few months, here’s what we’ve got. Here’s our mastermind program.” It doesn’t take anything away from the event. You still give good value but you’re offering something different for sale. If that makes sense.

Justin Devonshire

Yeah. That’s it. Exactly.

Some of my clients inside the public speaker training that I do are some of the top speaker sellers in the world. They’ve always run this model.

Justin Devonshire

One thing you’ll get if you go to their event, you will get a good experience out of it. Some new speakers, they try and copy those models exactly and doesn’t quite come off the same way. Then they can sometimes get a bad reputation for being pitchfest. But the top guys like the real masters, they do it. They’re sleek and they do it in a good way.

Justin Devonshire

The first difference to figure out is if it’s for a free event or paid event. When it comes to filling up events, this is the first thing I ask everyone at my public speaker trainings. We have usually what we call the ‘preview event’ which works just the same way as like an online webinar like a 60-minute, 90-minute.

Justin Devonshire

Most of the top speakers I’ve worked with will usually start with a free event. And the free event will actually sell the paid event which is longer. And then the paid event sells the back end programs.

The difference in the events determines how we sell things. If it comes to just filling, the first is free intro event.

Justin Devonshire

Then, Facebook Ads are extremely effective because of the Pay per Click, automatic nature when you want to go high volume of leads. Facebook Ads does 70% of the work I would say.

Then, it’s leveraging your own database and then it’s working with strategic joint ventures or a big one. Usually, we could do something where if you can pair up with another speaker who could bring value to your event and they could also bring a following with them. You can do that. So you’re adding more value but they also bring their database and advertise for you. Or otherwise, just any type of affiliate deal you can do.

Justin Devonshire

Just like with online marketing, sometimes we will partner with another well-known expert in our field who has a good database that we’d like access to. We can work out something where they would promote our event. And any of the registrants that come from them, that buy something in our event, we will give a commission back to that person just like how it works with online affiliate marketing.

I’ve taken all the things from online marketing and just applied it to live events offline for offline event and works the best way. So it’s Pay per Click, and traffic your own database.

Justin Devonshire

Also for certain niches like print advertising can be quite good too for a local event. That’s something that people don’t do a lot of these days. It’s just putting out good print advert for a local seminar or whatever else might be. That will work better in a more mainstream niches like weight loss, personal development, maybe general business events. Things like that.

Justin Devonshire

Yeah.

One thing Kamala, like what I said in the beginning about public speaker training, people worry too much often that they have to fill up 100 or 200 people in an event.

Justin Devonshire

The biggest fear they have usually, at least from the clients I’ve worked with, is not speaking on stage. Their biggest fear is speaking to an empty room. So they always tell me, they’d feel okay if there were 50 people but if it’s 5 people, that’s even worse.

So I tell people that another great thing about live events is that it is flexible.

Justin Devonshire

Let’s say, you publish a book and want to sell a book. You have to order a thousand copies and then get rid of the damn things. But with this public speaker training, you can make big money from small events.

My first couple of events I ran when I was back in fitness training, I would have maybe five to ten women show up in my studio. The great thing is if you have a small seminar that wasn’t as busy as you thought it would, we call that a workshop. We just position that and say it’s a private workshop now.

Justin Devonshire

If you have 10 or 20 people in a room, and apply public speaker training, you can make several thousands of dollars just from that if you still do it in the right way. The good thing is if you plan on getting 50 people but only 10 end up coming along, you can still be flexible and you can still do something to get some of those people enrolled onto a program. You get to give them more value.

I was doing the seminar and 3 people turned up back in my early days. I just reframed it and said to those guys, “Hey! We’re doing a semi-private session.”

Justin Devonshire

You just got to find a way to make the most of it and with perseverance, and practice, and looking at your numbers. You will get more and more people. I started with three or four people in my events. Now, we can do over a thousand sometimes.

Justin Devonshire

No! You got to remember that these are some of the most qualified leads you get. This is exactly what I am teaching in my public speaker training, and right now all of you get the information for free.

One of the arguments I hear is that people say “People come to a freebie event. They’re not going to buy anything!” And the first thing I say is, “Well, if that was the case then webinars would never work.”

And the second is that the people that have come to this event are the most qualified free leads you’ll get. They’re not opting in to read an e-book in 5 minutes. They’re not opting in to a webinar where there are actually half scrolling through Facebook at the same time. These are people that have set aside time in a diary, left their homes, usually in the evening, come out in the rain and sitting with no distractions listening to you for two hours on your topic. These are committed people. And you got to realize that maybe they’re not investing money in the free view event, but they’re investing their time which is even more valuable. That’s something you just don’t get from any of them. You don’t get that from webinars or books or e-books or anything like that. You don’t need a lot of people for them to be qualified.

Justin Devonshire

The first thing is there are a lot of different speaking courses out there and what I teach is very unique. It is because the performing side is actually entwined with the profiting side. If we understand that we’re selling right from the gecko. Your confidence and your speaking appeal all ties into the number of sales you make.

The first thing is to remember that you can learn the art of speaking and that’s powerful but it has to be some strategy wrapped in there too.

Justin Devonshire

With that said to performing, there are two parts to this. There is structuring your content or your presentation and then, there’s delivering the actual content.

For the structuring side, the first thing I would tell most people is most speakers try and teach too much in their intro events, and that reduces their sales.

Justin Devonshire

That goes for any lead magnet. I always say the goal of an intro seminar or any lead magnet, is to simply give the audience the belief that the result is possible for them.

So one key thing to doing that is to teach through your case studies. Whenever you have some content, let’s say you’re going to teach three big principles in your seminars, I would always try and teach them through real case studies. It’s like coming from a third party perspective.

If you are a fitness professional and you’re going to teach about eating vegetables is fantastic or whatever. Then rather than you just and there talking and giving scientific facts and statistics, it’s better to use a case study of one of your clients so you get the social proof before the pitch comes.

You’re giving social proof all the way and it’s like saying, “Here is one of my client’s stories. She struggled with the same things as you and now here’s the result. And now she is doing really great,” “Here are three principles of about nutrition that she really talked on board and we taught her.”

Justin Devonshire

You’re using your case studies also to inspire people rather than trying to convince them later on. It’s a very subtle difference there. Such one thing is teach your content through case studies as much as you can.

The second thing when it comes to the content is to seed your products as much as you can.

It’s doesn’t help if you talk for 60 minutes about general tips and then, suddenly just spring your product on people. That’s what makes for a bad sales pitch.

Justin Devonshire

We like to seed in the beginning. I just say something like, “Hey! If I give you guys some cool content and some good ideas today, is it okay if at the end I just talk about my product for two minutes?” Everyone’s like “Yeah! Sure. That sounds great.” So you’ve taken away the anxiety for a lot of speakers and it’s been more authentic and congruent. That’s structuring the talk.

As for the delivery and the actual speaking, there’s a whole range of things here but there are basically six main nervous signals that your body gives off when you speak. These are subconscious. I help speakers identify some of those areas.

Justin Devonshire

One of the main things is moving on stage. Someone who’s nervous, you’ll find they pace back and forth across the stage. And we do this our body moves unconsciously because it’s actually preparing to run away if things get too dangerous to the brain.

So the first thing we teach at in our public speaker training courses is to get more body awareness as you speak and to practice firmly planting yourself and moving with purpose.

If you’re going to move somewhere on the stage, you’re doing it with a strict purpose or intention. That’s one of the first things.

Justin Devonshire

Another thing to do is using vocal tonality, a very powerful tool for a speaker whether they’re on stage or on a podcast or on video is to make use of pauses. Because when you do, people will listen closely.

Justin Devonshire

Exactly. And you can be saying absolute nonsense but it sounds important.

Justin Devonshire

Really?

Justin Devonshire

That’s right! Yeah. Sounds like dating gave you some public speaker training.

And another one is speaking quickly. Like you said that’s another big trait of a nervous speaker. They speak fast. There are many more things. There are six or eight main nervous tells, we call it. When I take speakers through my public speaker training boot camp over a few days, we drill down on those things.

Justin Devonshire

What’s happening is most speakers are so concerned with what they’re saying. It’s like they’re living in their head. All of us have read the studies with communication that the actual words you say count for 2% of communication, 95% is body language, and 3% is vocal tonality. We all know that but most speakers have got it the other way around and they focus so much on the 1% of the perfect wording that they don’t focus on tonality and they don’t focus on what their body is doing.

So when we teach people, this is what we say to them.

Justin Devonshire

Just trust that you trust the right words will come and just be more present in your body. Focus on how you’re standing. Focus on your breathing. Focus on moving with purpose. Focus on changing your vocal dynamics. When they do that, then they start getting into that mind frame, then they can talk nonsense. They can talk gobbledygook.

Like we show with the vocal tonality, if you can speak with good presence and body language, that can over compensate for poor wording.

Justin Devonshire

All right! Profiting! The most ignored part of public speaker trainings, and yet one of the most important pieces of public speaker trainings.

There are two ways to profit from speaking.

Justin Devonshire

The first is to get paid a keynote fee. To be a keynote speaker, you get paid for who you are. So you either need to be some kind of celebrity like Donald Trump or Paris Hilton who aren’t good speakers. They just get paid for who they are.

The other way to get a keynote is you have to achieve some kind of physical feat like climb Mt. Everest or run across Antarctica in your underwear or something like that. They get all the keynote and fees.

The second way to get money is to use your events; either free or relatively low cost to give your customers an introduction, an insight into the results that are possible for them and to give them the opportunity to work with you for the long term. We know as coaches, that’s where the difference happens. It’s not a lot of difference you can make in someone’s life in one or two days. Maybe if you’re Tony Robbins, but even he acknowledges most people will go back to their average habits.

Justin Devonshire

What I learned from one of my mentors in public speaker training was that, you’re only a speaker to make a difference. Getting people to stand up and give you an applause does not make a difference.

When you want to be able change the way people think, speak, and act, the only way we can be sure as speakers we’re doing our job of making a change is if they go the back of the room and sign up to work with you. Because then, you’ve instigated change in somebody.

You’re not going to change them in the event but you can change them enough to change their beliefs to get them to take a chance with you where you can make a real difference. That’s where the money is now and that’s where the market is shifting. People want to hear from real people; real people who’ve been through pain in their life or have an expertise to share. There are people out there who want to pay you for what you know.

Justin Devonshire

I advise people to go down the route of using events to sell their products. There’s a lot more money in doing it that way.

For example, one of my public speaker training clients, he’s one of the top speakers in the world and he has a $35,000 keynote fee. But he would rather didn’t get paid for that. Because if he goes through a room of 300 people, he knows he can sell 50 of them at least on to one of his $2,000 programs. So he will make a lot more money from his sales ability and offering products of real value than getting a $35,000 fee on stage. He can make double, triple or quadruple that in the long run.

Justin Devonshire

As for how do we do this, again it helps to seed your product early on in your talk, and to make sure that your product and your event links up.

One mistake a lot of speakers make is they think of their event first. They put an event on because they think of that as the product. They put a big theme on their event and then they wonder, “What do I sell now?” What they sell isn’t congruent with the event.

Justin Devonshire

We take you up the reverse engineering approach of saying, “What are you going to sell on the back-end?”

Let’s say, you’re going to sell a 90-day course on social media marketing. We would then make the event like a trailer or preview for the program.

If you’re going to teach five social media platforms on your program, then the seminar could be a brief introduction and some light tips on each of those 5 platforms. You would teach a bit on each of those social media platforms.

hen, it transitions nicely into the product where you say to everyone that “We’ve given you some tips to get started on each of these areas. But if you want to go and dive in deep on this, we’ve got a whole 90-day training course”, “We’d love to tell you everything today but we only have a couple of hours, it’s not possible. But on a 90-day program we can really get in deep and give you all the tools and personal guidance.”

That’s the first thing, and the thing most public speaker trainings miss. Make your product relevant to the event. In that way, your audience will have an emotional desire to buy from you but also a logical one. And they go, “Ah, yeah! That makes sense. This event is cool.” That product will add more value. Rather than if you don’t do that, people can think that you were over-hyping the event.

Some people can promise everything at the event. “This event is everything you ever need,” “Come to my event and it’ll change your life.” And then when they pitch something no one buys because the audience thinks “The event gave me everything, didn’t it? Why do we need to buy something?” So there’s no logical connection there. That’s the big thing that will help most people.

Justin Devonshire

Another public speaker training tip I could say would be having confidence. I’ve seen over and over again that you can have the perfect sales script, the perfect elements to a pitch, a fantastic product but what happens for most speakers is they get to that point where they transition from the content into the pitch. This is one more thing that public speaker trainings miss. They don’t talk about confidence and how important it is. But if you don’t have it when you make the pitch, the energy drops. You guys have felt that, right? On a webinar or something.

Justin Devonshire

Yeah. One rule in public speaker training is whatever you feel, they will feel it.

If you’re suddenly all confident with your expertise and then it comes to the pitch and your tonality drops just a little bit. The audience pick up on that and wonder why aren’t you confident.

Justin Devonshire

More than any tactic or script I could give you, it comes down to really believing in your product and believing in the opportunity you’re giving people so much that you’re excited to talk about it.

People come to my public speaker training boot camp, on the beginning, they tell me they’re afraid to get to the pitch in their events. By the time they leave, they just want to get to the pitch because that’s the most exciting part for them. They want to get to the content and then be like “Okay! Let me guys give you a real opportunity where I can really help you now.”

When you can get that with your products, people are going to feel it. They’re going to believe it if you believe it. That will over compensate for any lack of sales ability. It’s just having a straight face, 100% being able to say to your audience “Look, I’m doing this program. Here’s who it’s for. If you want this result, I really think you should come and do this. It’s a really good investment.”

Justin Devonshire

If you have some kind of risk reversal guarantee, it’s even better. But if you can just flat out say that and not be afraid and shy away from the sales, you will make more sales.

Justin Devonshire

It’s my pleasure, guys. Thank you.