Let’s face it. Speaking opportunities at conferences are expensive. There is pressure to ensure your message gets across to as many potential customers as possible to justify the investment. Does that mean you are entitled to sell your product at the podium and hold your customers hostage?
No.
I still remember when a speaker said to me: “I know I’m not supposed to give a sales pitch, but I’m going to do it anyway. That’s what I paid for.” He proceeded to walk to the podium and sell his product for 45 minutes. People left. They complained. Honestly, he looked foolish and, in my opinion, he threw away his money.
This mentality is killing the conference industry as we know it, and it needs to stop. There is a trickle-down effect. Your customers feel their investment to attend the event is not justified. They stop coming, and you are left with a vendor party and no customers to talk to. Then what? Your investment is now worthless. Your brand’s value in the eyes of your customers suffers. If you don’t believe me, ask any conference organizer to read through their evaluations.
If we aren’t careful, we will lose the power of face-to-face meetings. Stop selling at the podium. Here is what you should do instead:
1. Engage.
Connect with your audience. Tell a story. Draw them in. To do this, you must understand who they are. Are they seasoned professionals in the topic at hand or new to the game? Do they have technical expertise or are they more focused on business operations? Don’t spend time reviewing definitions when 99% of your audience knows what it is. Think about ways to present a technical topic to a business audience that they can relate to. Put simply, don’t talk over their heads and don’t talk down to them.
2. Inform.
Your presentation should offer solutions to challenges they currently have and provide actionable takeaways. Give them data they can’t get anywhere else. Be specific. Or have a customer do the talking for you. They can give a detailed case study without mentioning your product or service and you win by association. No demos, no screenshots. If you say it at the booth, skip it.
3. Be humble.
Have you ever sat through a presentation where everything mentioned about a project went smoothly? There were no bumps in the road? First, this isn’t believable and you may lose trust in your message. Second, it really isn’t helpful. One of the main reasons people attend events is to understand how other organizations tackled a problem, which includes both successes and lessons learned. There are ways to share your obstacles in a positive way.
4. Inspire.
Presentations are powerful opportunities to connect with your customers, arm them with information to do their jobs better and inspire them to push beyond current ways of thinking. Wouldn’t you rather leave them wanting more information than counting down the minutes until lunch?
If you focus the core of your presentation on these four principles, your customers will thank you. They will trust your message and could even see themselves working with you. Chances are, they’ll head right for your booth to learn more about what you offer. Then we all win.
