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Attracting High-Paying Clients With Seminars

This article is more than 2 years old.

If you are a professional or consultant who wants more impact and influence, where should you invest your time, talent and treasure?

The clear-cut answer: regularly host small-scale seminars for five to ten prospects.

This is especially true for professional service and consulting firms in the fields accounting, dental practice consulting, financial services, management consulting, marketing and advertising, executive search services, software development, technology services, and law firm management.

The biggest problem for consultants and professionals is not enough high-paying clients. Many feel marketing and sales are too time consuming, expensive or undignified. However, research has proven there is a better way. This problem can be solved in three steps.

Step one: Pick the pain. Are you into pain? If you want high-paying clients, you should be. Select a target-rich audience of prospects that needs your services. Then determine what pain they want solved that you can help with. Choose a title for the event. One good approach is to offer to help them overcome common blunders in this area.

Step two: Pick a place, date and time. In the former times before the pandemic the most choices for locations were conference rooms in large law and accounting offices, banks, chambers of commerce, country clubs, colleges and hotels (the most expensive option). After Covid-19 hit, the most common location was Zoom. A new word was coined: Zoominar. Moving forward, expect a combination of live and virtual events.

Step three: Pick the right content. There’s too much information out there. What prospects want is analysis. Don’t bombard attendees with 1,001 ways to solve the problem, give them the seven best solutions. Make the sessions. Offer follow up one-on-one strategy calls.

Does this really work? In the last five years I have interviewed hundreds of professionals and consultants who have had great success with seminars.

An Indiana sales consultant used seminars and publishing books to set himself apart from the competition and build a multi-million-dollar consulting firm. He finds riches in the niche of clients wanting to land the big whale accounts.

A Tennessee dental practice consultant makes more than $280,000 a year as a speaker and consultant. For over 20 years she had wanted to put on seminars and write a book, but it was more of a wish than anything until she took the time to learn how to do it.

A California hiring and executive search practice firm used the seminar strategy to add at least $250,000 per year in additional revenue for the past decade. The firm’s seminars reveal the big blunder that causes more than half of recruited executives to fail to meet expectations in the first 18 months.

Marketing with seminars is about exposing your expertise to potential prospects and referrals sources. The most effective marketing strategy for people who sell services and high-end products is free or low-cost seminars.

Unlike giving a speech at a client industry meeting, the advantage of the seminar you put on is you get to select the topic, time, place and invitation list. You can promote the event through direct mail, email, phone calls, publicity and social media such as LinkedIn.

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