Let's talk about outreach
I know. Outreach.
Probably not the part of your speaking business that has you leaping out of bed in the morning.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if you had an Estelle, Joey Tribbiani’s agent in Friends, or a Jerry Maguire out there telling everyone how fabulous you are and bringing you a steady stream of bookings? Or, even better, if every enquiry simply landed in your inbox saying, “We’ve seen you, we love you, how much do you charge and where do we sign?” Sadly, that’s not how it works for most speakers.
If you want a healthy speaking business, you have to do some outreach.
Sorry about that.
But I do think we make outreach much harder than it needs to be. So let me share a few things that might make it easier.
First, stop thinking about selling
This is probably the big one. Most speakers I talk to don’t particularly like selling. They worry about being pushy, bothering people or looking desperate. So don’t sell. Help.
Instead of thinking, “How can I persuade this person to book me?”, think, “Is there something I know that could be useful to this person?” It changes the whole conversation. You’re not trying to convince somebody to buy something they don’t need.
You’re trying to find people who have a problem you can solve. Channel your inner Dr Max Goodwin from New Amsterdam: “How can I help?” Yes, I do watch far too many films and box sets.
Do your homework
Please don’t send 100 identical emails telling people how brilliant you are. Nobody wants those.
Before you contact someone, spend a few minutes finding out about them. What does their organisation do? What’s happening in their industry? Do they run events? What sort of events? Who attends them? What are they talking about at the moment? You don’t need to spend three hours researching every prospect. Just know enough to make it obvious that you have chosen to contact them.
If you’ve spotted their leadership conference in Manchester next March, mention it.
That one little detail immediately tells me this isn’t an email you’ve sent to 2,000 other people.
And then keep it short
Really short (unlike this email). Your first email is not a proposal, it’s not your life story and it certainly isn’t the place to paste your entire speaker biography. You’re simply trying to start a conversation. Aim for around 50 words. That’s harder than it sounds, by the way.
Think about the emails you receive. When a great wall of text arrives from somebody you don’t know, what do you do?
Exactly.
Your prospect is doing the same thing.
Now comes the bit you probably don’t want to hear
You have to do it consistently. You can’t spend a wet Tuesday afternoon doing some outreach, decide nobody replied and conclude that outreach doesn’t work. Nor can you stop prospecting because you suddenly have three lovely speaking bookings in the diary. Because you know what happens next.
You deliver those three gigs, come home feeling rather pleased with yourself, look at the diary for the following month and discover… nothing. An empty pipeline is a horrible thing.
So keep doing the work when you’re busy. My suggestion is five outreach activities a day. Five calls, emails, follow-ups, LinkedIn messages. Whatever makes sense. Think of it as your five a day. Sadly, it doesn’t count towards your fruit and veg.
Success is doing the five, not getting five replies. You can control whether you send the email. You can’t control whether somebody replies to it today, or ever.
Follow up
This is another place where speakers give up far too quickly. You send an email. Nothing. You send another. Still nothing. Then you decide they’re clearly not interested and stop.
People are busy. They might have seen your email at completely the wrong moment. They may not have an event now. They may have meant to reply and forgotten. They may not need you for another six months. Silence doesn’t necessarily mean no. Follow up. Politely. Mix it up. Email them. Pick up the phone. Connect on LinkedIn. Comment on something they’ve posted. You’re not stalking them. You’re staying visible.
I stayed in touch with a prospect in Miami for TEN YEARS. Ten. Eventually he contacted me and said, “Your timing is perfect.” That resulted in the biggest booking of my career, worth USD1 million. And then Covid arrived and the event was cancelled.
Just my blinking luck. But there is a happy ending. When I launched my new business working with speakers after the pandemic, he became one of my first clients and booked several sessions for himself and his assistant. Not quite the million dollars, admittedly. But the point is this: I had no idea when I first contacted him where that relationship would eventually lead.
Please track what you’re doing
You knew I was going to mention a CRM, didn’t you? If you’re doing all this outreach and relying on your memory to tell you who you contacted, when you contacted them and when you should contact them again, you are making life unnecessarily difficult.
Put it in your CRM. Every conversation. Every follow-up. Every useful bit of information you learn. And set the next activity.
Don’t finish an interaction and leave the prospect sitting there in your CRM gathering dust. Decide what happens next and when. I use Pipedrive, and if you want to try it, you can get 30 days free here: [Pipedrive link]
Finally, get better at it
Nobody starts off being brilliant at outreach. It’s a skill. You learn which emails get replies. You get more comfortable on the phone. You work out which questions start conversations. You learn when to follow up and when to leave somebody alone.
But you only learn that by doing it.
So don’t judge your outreach on whether somebody books you this week, judge it on whether you are consistently creating conversations and relationships with the sort of people who could book you. Some will go nowhere, some might turn into a booking next month and occasionally one might turn into something ten years later that you could never have predicted. That’s how this works.
So, your challenge from me is simple. Five a day.
Who are your five today?
Maria x
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