I believe the secret to giving a good group talk is this:
Always give your audience some useful ideas that will help them to either solve a problem they have or will help them to positively improve their lives in some way.
When you give people useful ideas that will help them you do two things.
First of all you position yourself as an expert in your field.
Secondly you will usually create some very interested potential customers who are suddenly very keen to talk to you about your services.
There are three simple steps to giving a good group talk:
1: Choose the topic you will speak on and the group that you want to speak with
2: Market your talk well.
3: Give a good talk and follow up fast with any interested prospects.
Let's take a quick look at each step...
Step 1:
Choose the topic that you will be speaking on and the group you want to speak with.
Example 1: A business colleague sent me a web link a few days ago that promoted a short talk that he thought I might be interested in.
The talk is called "From idea to stock market launch in 12 months" and is on how get your business listed on a stock exchange for a fraction of the normal cost and in weeks rather than months.
The talk will also explain how to turn your private company shares into public company shares all while retaining full control of your own business.
(The talk is around an hour long and is being held in Auckland on Monday 31 October, at 1.30pm and 5.00pm at the Deloitte Centre.)
You can see more details at this link.
The audience for this talk is business owners who have a profitable, debt free business that they would like to scale up considerably.
Step 2:
Market your talk well.
If you want to have a good audience for your talk you need to promote and market it well.
One way to do this is to identify key businesses who can recommend your talk to their own clients and contacts.
In the stock exchange listing talk a good referral source could be medium sized accounting firms. One thing this business might do to promote their talk is to send a personal invitation to accountants to attend the talk and also bring with them a number of their clients who might be interested.
This would best be done by something like a hard copy letter and invitation sent by overnight courier to around 50 key accounting firms in Auckland.
Whenever you promote a talk you want to talk about the benefits that a person will gain by attending.
The clearer and more appealing these are the more people are to attend your talk.
Example 2: I'm doing a one hour talk in November, 2016 called 'Positive Persuasion Strategies for Sports Medicine Professionals'.
I'm sharing 7 strategies in this talk including...
Strategy 1: How to use the 'GAP' technique to allow your patients to see instantly the huge value in having their problem fixed.
Strategy 3: The Paper Clip method to help your patients incorporate a number of positive health habits into their normal lives.
Strategy 7: How to position yourself as an expert in your field and get key referral sources regularly promoting your sports medicine services to their own clients and contacts.
The idea here is you explain what is in your talk in a way that makes it look interesting and useful so people will want to attend your talk.
Step 3:
Give a good talk and follow up fast on all prospects.
Make sure your talk has great content that people find valuable, useful and helpful.
Then follow up fast with all the people who attend your talk.
By fast I mean within 24 hours or sooner.
When you follow up on the people who heard you give your group talk you might say something like this:
"Hello it's Graham here from XYZ organisation. Thanks for listening to my talk on ABC topic yesterday. I trust you got some useful ideas from it?"
The person will then respond.
You can then offer more information or ask if they would like to have a free no obligation meeting with you and get some more ideas on your topic.
When you follow up, after any talk you give, some people will want to receive further information, and some people will not. (This is normal and natural.)
However, the people that do want further information are now very good potential prospects for you as you already have a large amount of credibility and trust as a result of the useful ideas in your talk.
You can give both paid and unpaid group talks. Both options work well and could be worth considering as a way to market your own business.
"Great minds talk about ideas, Average minds talk about things, Small minds talk about other people." - Anonymous
Action Exercise:
Consider creating a short 30-60 minute talk that has useful tips and ideas related to your products and services.
Promote this talk to people who might be interested in the topic.
Aim for a small group of 5-10 people to start with. Then if your talk goes well you can repeat it again and invite larger numbers of people the next time.
Graham McGregor is a consultant specialising in memorable marketing. You can download his 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage' Ebook at no charge from www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com. 
