“Speak and grow rich” summary — Dottie Walters

Introduction

You might possess deep knowledge and great speaking talent yet struggle to earn a reliable living from your voice. Professional speaking requires transforming your expertise into a structured enterprise that markets your message and captures multiple streams of revenue. You need a proven roadmap to navigate the complexities of fees, products, and promotion.

Professional speaking is a multi-stream business combining nine essential skills, rigorous market research, value-driven pricing, smart marketing tools, and lucrative product sales.

Dottie Walters provides a complete blueprint for building a thriving speaking practice from the ground up. The book details how to locate paying markets, set profitable fees, design promotional materials, and launch high-income seminars and products. You will discover how to work effectively with bureaus and run a professional office.

How do you set professional fee schedules and secure paid bookings?
What tools and promotional materials do you need to attract meeting planners?
How can you turn presentations into back-of-room sales and high-profit seminars?

1. Welcome to the World of Professional Speaking

Professional speakers must master nine distinct pillars of business, marketing, service, and delivery to get paid for their craft.

Being a brilliant speaker is insufficient if you cannot sell the program, serve clients, or act as a businessperson. You must develop nine essential skills to succeed in the industry.

List the business subjects you know and approach with enthusiasm to establish your expertise.
Research aspects of each audience for which you can feel empathy and speak to several members before the presentation.
Ask yourself which subjects audiences will pay to learn more about to find the appropriate and specific market.
Carefully research the problems of a specific audience and hold personal interviews with attendees before the presentation.
Create presentation folders, content one-sheets, demo tapes, business cards, and letterhead.
Learn to sell yourself and your products to buyers and speakers bureaus.
Cultivate a you attitude and make everything you produce serve your clients needs.
Follow up all booking leads and sales in an immediate, businesslike, concerned, friendly, and consistent manner.
Practice out loud constantly, tape yourself speaking, and talk to the audience as if they were one person.

Celebrity business speaker Harvey Mackay hires speech and drama coaches to continually hone his performance skills.

Targeting Marketable Topics and Titles

Your booking, marketing, and promotion must always begin with the personal foundation of industries and experiences you already know. Beginners often make the mistake of trying to invent a completely new topic or compete in overcrowded general fields.

Go directly to the industry you want to speak for and conduct a survey orally or in writing.
Ask a cross-section of 50 people in your target market simple, direct questions.
Use email, fax, mail, or phone conversations to collect responses quickly.

300 names on a target list typically yield a minimum of 50 responses within 3 days.

Use the formula How to ______ So That You Can ______ as the basis for creating a title.
Write out the entire title, then take away all unnecessary words to pare it down to the essence.
Use simple, easy-to-understand words that produce the image of sleeves rolled up and ready to work.
Incorporate alliteration, rhyming words, or contrasting ideas to make titles memorable.
Add the specific group's name into the title to directly state benefits to the buyer.

Lee Boyan shifted from general sales speaking to conquering cold calls after surveying salespeople and discovering that cold calling rejection was their primary frustration.

2. Profiting from Presentations and Fees

Securing continuous speaking success requires leveraging no-fee presentations, setting structured fee schedules, and maintaining rigorous travel safeguards.

No-Fee Presentations

Speaking for no fee is a powerful promotional and practice tool that helps build a professional career and generate paid bookings. Most speeches globally are done without a fee because they offer massive benefits like correcting performance problems, gaining exposure, educating the public, selling books, and securing prospective clients.

Dottie Walters built her tiny beginning advertising business using no-fee speeches as her primary method of promotion.

Service clubs provide an accessible starting ground for speakers to test material and build recommendations before live audiences. Organizations such as Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis, and Jaycees hold regular meetings and are constantly looking for speakers. Beginners can leverage personal friends who belong to these clubs to connect with club presidents and subsequently secure lists of other chapter presidents along with letters of recommendation.

To make the most of no-fee engagements, follow these practices:

In your written introduction, close by stating you have agreed to stay after to speak to anyone searching for a speaker for a future event.
Mention past references accurately once or twice during your program.
Use rating sheets.
Include a desirable take-home item and ask audience members to pass their business cards to the aisles to receive it as a gift.
Have a form ready listing Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How, ask "Tell me about it", and then ask for their budget.
Contact your local library, Chamber of Commerce, and local newspaper for lists of service clubs and presidents.
Start with personal friends who are members of business service clubs to get introductions.
Ask club presidents for a list of other local chapter presidents and request a letter of recommendation.

Setting Speaking Fees

Speakers should establish structured fee schedules and transition to charging fees once they have gained extensive experience and market demand. Speakers can determine their worth by comparing their program's value to typical banquet bar bills, which average $10 per head plus tips and can easily exceed $3,000 for a banquet of 300 people. A speaker should start charging after giving 50 to 100 no-fee speeches. Household-name celebrity speakers receive from $10,000 to $120,000, while noncelebrity business speaker experts present ranges from $1,000 to $7,000.

Speakers can trade down their standard fees in exchange for specific high-value considerations under a value-for-value approach.

A speaker did customer service programs for an expensive toy store chain and accepted 75 percent of his regular fee plus gift certificates, setting himself up for holidays and birthdays for five years.

Apply these fee-setting and value-trading guidelines to your practice:

Become an expert and develop a passion for your subject.
Give at least 50 to 100 no-fee speeches.
Learn to be a reliable, exciting, and professional presenter.
Wait until audience members ask what you charge to speak.
Evaluate showcase opportunities to prospective buyers.
Barter part or all of your fee for products or services at full retail value.
Exchange part of your fee for an ad in a national company or association magazine.
Offer volume discounts when a buyer purchases a large number of products.
Sell a second presentation or multiple dates at the same event for a lower fee.
Offer a set of articles bundled with a keynote.
Offer a discount for payment in full at the time of booking.

Sales Skills

International speaking engagements offer adventure and cross-cultural experience rather than direct financial profit, and require specific risk-mitigation measures. Traveling from California to South Africa can take over 30 hours and introduces severe currency and logistical risks.

A speaker invited to do a seminar in South America found the promoters had fled, leaving him with a hotel bill for 300 lunches, meeting room rentals, and no airline tickets home until local police intervened.

Successful professional speakers must master basic sales strategies, treating sales as service and maintaining intelligent persistence through systematic follow-ups. Associations and corporations are the primary buyers of noncelebrity speakers, though cold letters of inquiry yield a booking in only about 1 in 20 attempts.

Roger Dawson's office has an assistant make 50 cold calls daily to qualify prospects, resulting in five qualified leads and ultimately one booking, demonstrating the need for high-volume persistence.

Replacing traditional numerical scales with detailed feedback questions transforms rating sheets into vital tools for gathering testimonials, referrals, and new bookings. About 80 percent of a 100-person audience will fill out feedback sheets, netting about 32 referral leads that can convert to six additional paid engagements.

Anne Boe stood in traffic patterns near coffee areas holding her feedback sheets after talks and never failed to receive business cards and booking requests.

Speakers sell specific dates as inventory and must implement rigorous travel-scheduling safeguards to guarantee they arrive refreshed, punctual, and reliable.

Lilly Walters insisted on arriving in Louisville the night before a full-day 8 a.m. presentation rather than taking an early morning flight on the event day, ensuring she was unaffected by potential flight cancellations.

Manage bookings and travel with these steps:

Schedule international bookings in off times.
Get a nonrefundable 50 percent deposit and the balance before leaving your native country.
Specify payment in your country's funds via wire transfer.
Never pay for your own airline tickets based on promises of later reimbursement.
Ensure the hiring group provides a credit card for hotel incidentals, placing only a small cash or check deposit yourself as a cushion.
Check with local embassies and travel agents for passports and visas months in advance.
Ask for referrals to buyers on your rating sheets after every speech.
Consult local, state, and national directories at the library.
Utilize personal networking through friends, acquaintances, and church groups.
Expand marketing efforts laterally into related fields and associated industries after initial success.
Write articles for industry publications read by your customers.
Study the news and advertisements for seminar sponsors and promotional events.
Place feedback sheets on every seat before the program begins.
Include instructions for filling out feedback sheets in the printed introduction given to the introducer.
Hold a drawing for a prize using the completed feedback sheets.
Provide a scheduled pause at the end of the presentation for the audience to complete the sheets.
Stand in traffic areas by coffee stations after the break to collect and review sheets.
Sit down with the meeting planner immediately after the event to review results.
Use Dottie Walters' four magic sales words: "Tell me about it."
Put on the role of the humble inquirer by asking gentle questions about the client's needs and goals.
Listen and take careful notes on what prospects want.
Give clients what they ask for joyfully and gladly.
Follow up consistently instead of giving up after initial rejections.
Check adjacent dates, travel time, and transit distances between venues.
Always arrive the night before an event to allow for rest and transit delays.
Never accept a date if there is only one available flight to get there.
Never take the last possible plane that will get you to the speech on time.
Confirm travel arrangements and exact transportation times with the meeting planner.
Use carry-on luggage exclusively and ship materials via Second Day Air two days in advance.

3. Where Paid Experts Find Knowledge

Professional speakers are booked because they are recognized as experts, not because they can speak on anything.

Speakers who claim they can speak on any topic are categorized as jacks of all trades and masters of none. True experts provide well-delivered, challenging, and unique information derived from diligent study. A speakers bureau asks new callers what their topic is, and heaves a weary sigh when they say they can speak on anything. There are 30,000 professional speakers listed by our bureau.

Even humorous and homespun performers must work extremely hard at becoming leading event experts through rigorous daily reading. Will Rogers presented himself as a simple cowboy with homespun wit, but he actually read every major U.S. news publication daily to maintain his insightful political humor. He used the famous line I only know what I read in the papers while delivering his political commentaries in the 1930s as the highest-paid speaker of his day.

Expertise and Positioning

True leaders actively read and apply business books rather than just buying them or reading the first chapter. Most readers only read the first chapter of business books, but successful executives devour them entirely and use the principles to gain insights. Dr. Edson Bueno, founder of Amil Grupo, reads business books constantly and read Tom Peters' In Search of Excellence. Amil Grupo generates a gross revenue of a billion dollars a year, while 95 percent of all readers of business books only read the first chapter.

You can enhance your expert status by adopting specific daily habits:

List your topics when you sign your letters.
List your topics on your business cards and letterhead.
Include your topics as part of your signature on your E-mail.
Include your mailing address, fax, phone number, and personal and company names on your E-mail.

Research Methods

Public libraries serve as vital and often neglected treasure troves of wisdom from great minds to help inform presentations. Libraries provide access to books, magazines, newsletters, audio tapes, videos, and on-line services. Lilly often faxes difficult questions to Jill, the reference librarian in the Glendora Public Library, who usually finds the answer within hours.

You should follow these library research steps:

Consult public libraries for the wisdom of great minds.
Ask reference librarians for help with sticky research questions.
Send library staff cookies or a gift occasionally to show appreciation.

Books of quotations and proverbs categorized by subject provide a powerful source of inspiration and material customization. When customizing material for a specific audience and topic like determination, quote books help the ideas flow by showing what great minds thought through the ages. The authors recommend the Rubicon Dictionary of Positive, Motivational, Life-Affirming and Inspirational Quotations by James Cook.

Electronic reference sources and CD-ROMs offer massive amounts of searchable information at a fraction of the cost and space of traditional encyclopedias. Old encyclopedia sets cost well over $1,000 a few years ago, whereas small CDs cost about $50 and take up the space of a letterhead sheet.

Joining industry and speaking associations is essential for learning niche market topics and mastering the craft of professional speaking. Association meetings allow speakers to network, discuss common problems, and observe which speakers and subjects are most successful. In a 1996 Walters Speaker Services industry-wide survey, professional speakers voted the National Speakers Association, Toastmasters International, and the American Society of Training and Development as the best associations.

You should leverage associations with these actions:

Join associations to enhance knowledge in your chosen topic area and niche market.
Join associations to enhance your education in the craft of professional speaking.
Attend industry meetings, meet people, make contacts, and get involved.

The Internet acts as a vast electronic international library that allows speakers to instantly find data, copy text, and research clients. Using basic computer tools, speakers can access websites, newsgroups, and forums at any hour to gather up-to-date facts and background information on clients. Lilly used her Macintosh Powerbook in a food hut at the Umhlametsi Game Reserve in South Africa to check email, research via an electronic encyclopedia, and post to a Trainer's Forum. By the end of 1997, analysts estimated 2,000 newspapers on-line, 17 years after Vice President Gore coined the reference to the information superhighway.

You can navigate digital research with these steps:

Buy a computer and get on-line with a user-friendly service.
Use a computer, telecommunications software, a modem, a phone line, and an Internet Service Provider.
Copy and paste needed text directly into your documents while always crediting the source.

Commercial on-line subscription databases provide deep, fast, and proprietary business intelligence that consumer services cannot match. Consumer services like America Online or CompuServe offer great basic tools and Hoover's company profiles at a flat monthly fee of $19.95 a month for unlimited access, while professional commercial services search thousands of databases simultaneously for advanced research.

You should structure your online research accordingly:

Start with a consumer on-line service like America Online or CompuServe.
Get an Internet account and subscribe to commercial database products for serious business intelligence.

4. Design Materials That Market You

Beginning speakers should avoid wasting money on expensive video demo tapes and custom brochures during their first year.

Speakers frequently make drastic changes to their content, styles, and target markets during their first hundred speeches. Spending thousands of dollars on high-end promotional materials early on is a waste because these items quickly become obsolete as you develop. You should wait until you hit fifty bookings per year in the $2,000 category before creating expensive marketing tools. The authors state they could weep over the many speakers who attempt to enter the industry and make expensive video demo tapes and brochures right at the start.

Marketing Tools Overview

Buyers rarely dig through promotional packages, so your front cover must instantly answer what problem you solve. You must structure every presentation folder or cover according to specific design rules:

Your benefit-laden topic; big
Your name; small
A line or two of your key qualifications on this particular subject
How the buyer can find you (on at least every other page)
Your picture (for all non-E-mail and most faxable materials)

Promotional materials must be specifically optimized for fax transmission since buyers frequently request them immediately. Colors and dark backgrounds turn into unreadable black blobs on fax machines, so materials intended for faxing must use black ink on white paper with high contrast. When creating faxable materials, follow these guidelines:

Keep them on as few pages as possible
Do not use large areas of black
Print everything on white paper with black or a dark ink
Use black and white photos with a light background if your skin tone is dark, and a dark background if you are fair
Reproduce your photos in lower resolution
Have an artist do a line drawing of you, and use this instead of a photo
Set your fax machine to send half-tones or gray scale
Fax them to yourself to make sure they look nice on the other end

Content One-Sheets and Demo Tapes

A content one-sheet is the most crucial marketing document for the first several years of your speaking career. It must clearly communicate what is being sold by placing the bold topic title at the top, rather than generic labels like professional speaker. Your one-sheet must include these components:

Topic title big across top
Points you will cover in this program (short outline or bullet points)
Who this topic is most appropriate for
A few endorsements
A short bio stating why you are the leading expert on this subject
What you look like (your photograph or a drawing of you)

Beginning speakers should utilize audio demo tapes before investing in expensive video demos to raise their fees gradually.

Audio demos cost between $100 and $500 to produce and duplicate for 50 high-quality copies, while low-quality video demos start between $1,000 and $3,000. Many speakers report spending $10,000 to produce a good-quality video, whereas video tape duplication costs range from $4 to $15 per copy. Buyers take about 30 seconds to form an impression on a demo tape, deciding quickly whether they like you. A proper demo tape should last from 5 to 10 minutes and follow a strict structure:

Begin with your best segment, clearly showing your knowledge of the topic with lots of audience reaction
At the point when the applause fades out, edit in a segment of you speaking to the buyer, with a very brief sentence or two on who you are and what the audience will learn
Fade back into a live presentation with audience background noise or a short music segue
Repeat this process for anywhere from five to ten minutes

The author mentions a speaker who sent video demos featuring seven speaker pals endorsing him at the beginning, which bureau owners openly laughed at. To avoid similar mistakes, obtain strong letters of recommendation by making the process frictionless for the client. You should follow these practices to gather testimonials:

Discuss a letter of recommendation with the buyer before each program
When someone important gives a sincere compliment, ask if you may quote them
Make it easy for them by offering to drop a note with the exact phrasing they used

Remember that recommendation letters expire after 2 years. Your publicity photographs must also project sharp contrast and competence rather than artistic softness. Photographers may take up to 100 shots during a studio session using professional lighting and makeup artists.

Modern electronic desktop marketing tools like websites, fax broadcasting, Fax on Demand, and commercial information networks connect over 1 million people. Peter de Jager of Canada is cited as a speaker doing huge bookings from the Internet by focusing on high-tech topics like the Year 2000 Computer Crisis. When engaging in electronic marketing, observe these rules:

Check out your market and subscribe to newsgroups, mailing lists, and special interest groups related to your product
Sign your E-mail with your name and identifying information rather than just an address
Ensure recipients have requested to be on your faxing list or provide an 800 number for removal

5. High-Profit Public Seminars

Public seminars and virtual distance learning offer the highest profit and highest risk by selling directly to individual consumers.

Public Seminars

Public seminars offer the highest profit and highest risk in the speaking industry because they are sold directly to individual consumers rather than corporations. You must act as your own sales agent, publicist, buyer, promoter, and star. Success requires a specialized niche market, established authority as an expert, and astute marketing skills.

Specialty technical seminars for consultants, doctors, and dentists charge $1,500 or more per person. A real estate seminar grossing $37,500 from 25 participants at $1,500 each can match that figure in back-of-the-room product sales for a total income of $75,000. A weekend personal growth seminar with 200 participants at $1,500 per attendee per day for a two-day retreat can generate a gross income of $300,000.

Proper image creation, newsletters, updated yearly calendars, and postcards are vital marketing tools for driving public seminar attendance. Promoters must match their pricing, titles, and venues to the target audience's expectations to avoid costly failures. Utilizing regular newsletters and multi-part postcard campaigns ensures steady prospect engagement.

A man lost over $5,000 promoting a "Making Money Fast" seminar for $25 with expensive ads on financial pages and a high-end hotel room because his title and price conflicted with the financial page readers' expectations.

Ensure your seminar appeals to a specialized market or niche.
Establish yourself as a recognized authority in the subject matter before going to the marketplace.
Develop good marketing skills and make astute use of direct mail, advertising, and promotion.
Create the right image in your marketing by aligning price, title, and venue with your target audience.
Start a newsletter aimed at your market and mail or fax it at least twice a year or quarterly.
Publish a yearly updated seminar calendar and include it with every product order, sample copy, website listing, and mailing.
Send a series of three large postcards with new updates to potential attendees three weeks apart.

Public seminar leaders can maximize revenue by combining ticket sales for cruises or resort rooms, seminar registration fees, and back-of-the-room product sales. Venues often assist with advertising and mailings. Additionally, back-of-the-room products act as a miniature information store offering books, tapes, and newsletters bought at wholesale discounts.

Barney Zick developed a major mailing list of income property investors, charged an average seminar fee, and reported average product sales of $20,000 per performance from his special materials.

Sell tickets to a cruise or rooms at a resort seminar registrations.
Stock back-of-the-room tables with bundles or systems including newsletters, books, tapes, and telephone consultation services.
Obtain publisher materials at a 40% to 50% discount off retail to stock your seminar store.

Speakers can partner with host organizations or public seminar companies to lower their financial risk while trading off a portion of the profits. Host organizations like colleges, hospitals, and chambers of commerce provide facilities and attendees on a share-the-gate basis. Alternatively, public seminar companies hire speakers for continuous circuits on a flat-fee plus product cut arrangement.

CareerTrack used Tom Peters' "In Search of Excellence" program and Wes Roberts' "Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun" through their seminar company model.

Identify potential host organizations such as colleges, churches, hospitals, chambers of commerce, and service clubs.
Contract with public seminar companies to deliver established seminar circuits on a flat daily fee plus product cut.
Maintain a schedule of multiple seminar dates managed by the hiring organization or company.

Sponsoring organizations can use seminars as fund-raisers by partnering with speakers on a share-the-gate arrangement where ticket revenue is split. Derived from an old circus term, share-the-gate involves the speaker providing the presentation while sponsors supply the attendees, hall, refreshments, advertising, mailing lists, and printing.

A woman speaker presenting "Parenting" programs works with school booster groups who enthusiastically sell seminar tickets to fund children's uniforms and gear instead of selling chocolate bars.

Contact groups within 100 miles of your home to propose share-the-gate seminar projects.
Offer at least two programs a year for each group, such as a beginner program and a follow-up advanced program.
Avoid profit-split arrangements with promoters and negotiate a direct percentage of gross ticket sales or a flat fifty-fifty gate split.

Cruise ships and exotic spa resorts provide lucrative and pleasurable venues for professional seminars, executive retreats, and working vacations. While cruise ships rarely pay fees to professional speakers unless they are celebrities, speakers can exchange programs for a working vacation at sea, hire the venue to sell tickets as a public seminar, or be booked by corporate groups.

Destination presenters tailor their expertise to cruise itineraries, such as exploring Eskimo culture on Alaskan voyages, discussing Britain's Crown Jewels on transatlantic runs to Southampton on the QE2, or sharing the lessons of Marco Polo on China cruises.

Tailor your area of expertise to match the needs, history, and destination interests of cruise ship passengers.
Exchange your seminar programs for a working vacation at sea in trade for passenger passage.
Organize high-priced executive or family retreats at resort sites by clearly stating business applications and benefits.

Virtual Seminars

Virtual seminars and distance learning use telecommunications and computer technology to create an anytime-anywhere educational environment. Distance learning eliminates travel costs, extends geographic reach, allows higher student-to-teacher ratios, and enables instantaneous updates to electronic books and workbooks at a fraction of paper production costs.

Philips used a Business Television network for its fourth annual "Customer Day" to transmit a program via satellite to over 300 sites in 55 countries across 3 continents, allowing company president Jan Timmer to broadcast his keynote speech in 17 different languages.

Send homework back and forth via mail, fax, or E-mail.
Utilize interactive video and digital tools to improve student participation, attentiveness, and just-in-time training.
Conduct mini-seminars via conference phone calls before or after live talks to establish client needs or provide follow-up training.

Speakers can conduct desktop conferencing and online classes through internet services or their own websites to reach remote audiences and generate substantial income. Presenters using desktop video applications can share digital work, spreadsheets, and interactive whiteboards, or manage student questions using electronic hand-raising icons. Teaching via personal websites allows presenters to keep all profits and avoid material costs.

Rent public rooms equipped with videoconferencing technology at local Kinko copy centers, hotels, or schools.
Market your internet seminar programs by listing them in search engines, developing E-mail lists, writing magazine articles, and linking to complementary websites.
Reduce your best thoughts into sound bytes or type bytes to keep the pace moving during live on-line chats.

6. Speaker Products and BOR Sales

Expanding your expertise into physical and digital products and capturing back-of-room sales significantly multiplies your speaking income.

Speakers are in the information business. Studies show that people absorb and remember only 10 percent of most presentations. Knowledge gathered through speaking can be reformatted into videos, audio albums, workbooks, CD ROMs, software, and merchandise. These products act as reminders that guide prospects back to you and add credibility.

Speaker Products

Traditional publishers offer worldwide distribution and handle editing, but royalties are usually 10 to 15 percent. Self-publishing requires investment, but you retain all income and maintain complete control over design. Each large publisher receives 15,000 to 20,000 unsolicited manuscripts annually, while 350,000 books are written annually but not submitted. Only 32,000 books actually go into print each year in the United States, and 5,000 copies is the average print run for a nonfiction book. When buying your own published books, the wholesale purchase discount is 35 to 50 percent off retail.

Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Zig Ziglar, and the creators of Chicken Soup for the Soul successfully self-published their work before or alongside traditional deals.

If creating a product proposal, turn seminar workbooks or recorded transcripts into at least three chapters with an outline and table of contents.
Tell the publisher why your product is unique and mention your speaking schedule as a built-in market.
Approach only publishers handling your specific topic by studying competing books in bookstores before sending a query.

Federal law requires extreme caution when quoting copyrighted material. The Copyright Office charges a statutory rate of $20 for each hour or fraction of an hour to search its records.

Keep careful records of sources and cite them to build credibility.
Contact authors directly for a brief interview to obtain original quotable material.
Reword information into your own thoughts as research when permission is unavailable.

Live programs turn into instant products. In a $100,000 total contract, a speaker was paid $10 per employee for worldwide training rights.

Turn on a high-quality tape recorder during your presentation and include a microphone on the audience.
Charge an additional fee for ancillary recording rights, such as 50 percent extra on your base fee or a set royalty fee per attendee like $1.
Specify in your contract that client-recorded tapes are for resale only at that specific event under First Rights Only terms.
Always specify in the contract that you are to receive the master and several copies of the recorded tape.

Customizing workbooks for corporate clients commands high fees. While 55 percent of surveyed buyers prefer to create workbooks themselves and bring them to the event, full customization requires writing exclusively for a single client.

Personalize workbooks by adding a client note, putting corporate logos on covers and footers, matching corporate colors, and adding meeting dates.
Choose between an itemized fee structure that highlights the high value of each component or a simple package fee combining R&D and speaking expenses.
Value your R&D time, recognizing that customization can take anywhere from three hours to several months.

Back-of-Room Sales

Back-of-room sales at live speaking events provide a highly lucrative revenue stream that must be captured immediately following the presentation.

You can gross $4,000 to $30,000 and more in back-of-room sales at a single program. A seminar power pack priced at $298 has grossed over $20,000 per seminar.

Bernard Hale Zick doubled his seminar product sales from an average of 30 packs to 68 packs by adding a free book as a gift with the purchase of a three-album power pack.

Refer to your product sales table as the autograph table to build a celebrity image and encourage interaction.
Make subtle references to your products during your speech by holding them up briefly while telling stories or citing studies.
Locate the autograph table between the exit door, refreshment area, and bathrooms in high-traffic zones.
Turn the reverse side of audience rating sheets into an order form.
Bring a cash box, order forms, pens, and volunteer gifts, and staff the table with assistants to process credit cards.

7. Promotion Techniques and Media Relations

Higher celebrity status in your field allows you to command much higher speaking fees. New speakers often wonder why a celebrity football player who gives a weak keynote gets paid well while they are better speakers, missing that people want the celebrity aura.

Promotion Strategies

Always leave a clear promotional trail leading back to your headquarters or speakers' bureau in every article, handout, and gift. Lilly Walters wrote an article on speaker expenses and included a closing box offering a free form, which generated over 495 requests from prospective buyers.

Work in the name and town of your office into articles you write.
Put your name and phone number clearly on each page of handouts and workbooks.
Decoupage short essays, poems, posters, or articles on fine-quality plaques as gifts for clients and hosts.
Include a closing offer for a free helpful document or survey to gather instant responses.

Take a survey of people in your target market to discover their greatest problems, then offer an inexpensive solution to generate free media publicity. A promotion expert surveyed downtown business owners about their greatest fears and learned they were afraid of being robbed, so she spent $200 on 'No Money on Premises' stickers, offered them free in person, and gained massive media interviews.

Ask managers, owners, and CEOs what bothers or hurts them in business.
Create an inexpensive, highly valuable solution to their greatest problem.
Report survey results to the media and offer your solution for free.
Require people to visit your office in person to pick up the free item and offer them a free idea session.

Media and Client Relations

Approach media relations by understanding that newspapers, magazines, and stations want exciting material to increase circulation and ratings, not to promote you.

Develop a you attitude in your public relations and promotions.
Know the media before you approach them by studying what they publish or broadcast.
Be an expert and keep your name in front of the media two or three times a year.
Be current by tying your expertise into stories currently appearing in the media.
Be available to return media calls within a few hours.
Be nice even when media people cannot use your materials.

8. Working with Bureaus and Home Offices

Approaching speakers' bureaus requires professional tools and 100 paid dates, while running an efficient home office ensures rapid client response.

Speakers' Bureaus

Understand the fundamental difference between speakers' bureaus and exclusive agents or management companies. Speakers' bureaus typically work for the buyers, offering a catalog of open-market presenters. Exclusive agents or personal management companies work directly for the speaker under an exclusive contract. Household name celebrities who command $50,000 and above typically attract exclusive agents.

Avoid the toxic industry practice of adding-on by setting firm, transparent fees with your sales representatives. Adding-on occurs when a broker negotiates a low net fee with the speaker and pockets the difference as an inflated markup.

Set firm fees and stick to them rather than charging whatever the market will bear.
Clarify the commission percentage directly with the broker when asked for your fee.
State clearly: And your commission is? Okay, that means I will net and you will get. Right?

The standard global commission for speakers' bureaus is 25 percent. Walters International stipulates a 25 percent commission rate for all future dates and spin-offs from bureau-booked clients.

Do not buy extra services from a representative solely to establish a relationship unless you genuinely need them.
Ensure that any fee-based service provides a tangible product or professional resource.

Consult the Walters International Directory of Agencies and Bureaus for over 500 agents and bureaus across 18 countries. Walters Speaker Services receives approximately 200 new speakers contacting them each month.

Complete at least 100 paid dates for fees of at least $2,000 per one-hour program.
Prepare demo tapes for each live speech topic, professional one-sheets, and a fee schedule with a menu of services.
Gather references from at least 50 paid speaking engagements.
Establish an office with a dedicated fax line, an assistant or management system for handling inquiries while on the road, and a protocol to return phone calls within 60 minutes.

Home Offices and Staff

A speaker can efficiently run their business from a home office to reduce overhead, eliminate commuting, and involve family members. Professional speakers must remain fully accessible from the road through laptops and prompt communication to avoid losing high-value engagements. The authors once tried reaching a speaker for three days with no response, causing their client to lose a $5,000 engagement.

Choose a quiet, brightly lit place to work away from household traffic and noise.
Consider a room with an outside door and separate bathroom so staff and delivery people can come and go without disturbing the family.
Ensure the size of the office reflects whether you handle materials in-house or job them out.
Check and clear email and messages multiple times daily using portable technology.
Respond to every telephone message promptly, meaning within three hours.
Keep your fax machine turned on 24 hours a day so international clients can send documents at any time.

Operating successfully requires installing 3 to 5 phone lines.

Install at least three phone lines, and consider five: two for incoming and outgoing calls with rotating features, one dedicated line for incoming faxes, one for the fax-modem and email, and an unlisted line for family use.
Maintain minimum required equipment including a staff computer with fax modem, a laptop with fax modem, word processing software, a scanner, a dedicated incoming fax machine, email system, online access, and a business communication system with voice mail and pager or cellular phone.

Family members often make the best early business partners, provided they are treated with professional respect and fair compensation.

Include family members in business discussions, talk shop with them, and ask for their opinions.
Pay family staff fair wages and commission incentives comparable to what would be paid to outside employees.
Never pay for substandard work, and hold family staff to high performance standards.

Hiring an inside sales and marketing person requires rigorous screening of phone demeanor, physical movement, and immediate readiness.

Place ad copy containing the words telephone and sales, and have respondents call a private line with an answering device to evaluate their voice projection and phone personality.
Observe applicant movement by having them walk a distance toward you while seated, watching for energy and bounce.
Test cooperativeness and listening by moving the interview chair after an applicant leaves and asking the next candidate to pull up a chair and sit down.
Ask candidates when they want to start; hire those who say right now or specify an immediate day rather than those who hesitate and make excuses.

The telephone functions as the front door of a speaking business, requiring strict protocols to project warmth, success, and readiness.

Answer phones on the first ring with a warm phrase such as, Thank you for calling the Walters office. How may I help you?
Never use the word hellohold or ask callers if they mind calling back later; always take complete messages.
Use positive phrasing such as She very much wants to speak to you and I will find out for you instead of negative responses.
Hang a mirror with the word smile written on it by the phone to remind staff that smiling modifies voice tone positively.
Use lightweight headsets and long telephone cords to stand up, move around, and maintain high physical energy during calls.

10 Key Ideas

Professional speaking requires mastering nine distinct business, marketing, service, and delivery skills to transform expertise into a profitable enterprise.
Speakers should target industries they already know by surveying 50 people in their market and crafting specific, benefit-driven titles using proven formulas.
Conducting 50 to 100 no-fee presentations before service clubs helps beginners build recommendations, test material, and generate future paid bookings.
Speakers can enhance their expert status and customize material by utilizing public libraries, quotation books, CD-ROMs, associations, and commercial online databases.
Content one-sheets displaying a bold topic title, outline, target audience, and bio serve as the most crucial marketing document during a speaker's first years.
Public seminars offer high profits and high risks by selling directly to individual consumers through specialized niche marketing, newsletters, and multi-part postcard campaigns.
Reformatted live programs, customized workbooks, and self-published books act as valuable reminders and credibility builders that multiply speaking income.
Back-of-room sales at live speaking events provide a highly lucrative revenue stream that can gross thousands of dollars when managed immediately following a presentation.
Offering inexpensive solutions to the greatest problems of target audiences generates free media publicity and leaves a clear promotional trail back to the speaker's headquarters.
Approaching speakers' bureaus requires completing at least 100 paid dates for fees of $2,000 or more, preparing professional demo tapes, and maintaining an efficient home office with multi-line communication systems.

Book summary “Speak and grow rich”: summary

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