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2. What background experience does she/he need?
If you find the right characteristics, personality and attitude in
a candidate, hire her or him. You can find those traits in either the high school
graduate or in the college graduate. It’s the attitude that will
causes he or she to excel, not his or her experience level or
educational background.
3. How should I pay a person to represent me?
You will either pay
your new booking agent a flat salary or a salary plus a commission.
How you pay will depend on the new booking agent's experience in a related field where skills are transferable. In
Your Booking Agent:
How to Hire Her, How to Interview Her, How to Pay Her, How to Train
Her and How to Keep Her, Mary McKay refers to three stages of development
in paying your agent.
There are clearly regional differences in compensation. You’ll
hear some advisors say that the agent should not make a large enough salary
to live on and those advisors will suggest that a commission structure
should be used to motivate the booking agent to increase prospecting efforts. I disagree.
If you have done an effective job of interviewing and screening your
candidate, you’ll know what motivates your new booking agent.
You'll also know what strengths and
weaknesses your booking agent has. If you carefully calculated the risks in hiring
this individual, you will have no problem paying your new booking agent
a salary
on which she can live. The bonus is the commission. She
should not have to suffer inadequate compensation while going through a
learning curve.
4.
I don’t have the money to pay an agent. How do I get the word out
about my expertise?
Unless you’re making
headlines in the nightly news or you’re already an industry expert with
consistent media coverage to proclaim your expertise, you’ll need to
make contact with your target market.
If you do not already have
a champion in that industry who has recommended you to a meeting planner
in your industry to whom you can refer, one who is well known, then the
basic ground work that you'll need to do is establish exactly who
you are.
Your USP (unique selling
proposition) is your elevator speech. It’s your “I am, I do”
statement. It’s one to two sentences that you say in response to the
question, “What do you do?”
This is critically
important, because if you’re going to prospect for yourself and you’re
unable to say succinctly how you can bring value to a particular
organization, you will not get past the gatekeepers.
Following your USP, you’ll
need to know the few questions to ask to qualify your prospect. In real
estate, top producers do not work with buyers that are not qualified.
You have to determine if your prospect (the organization) is qualified.
Next, you must provide
some way for your prospects to review your expertise. Your website is
the way for an individual to review you, to make a determination on
whether or not you can create solutions to their challenges. My
experience tells me that that’s not enough.
I find that most
organizations still (after 24 years) want to review your promotional
package and a DVD of you in action. Remember, this is not something you
will need if you are positioned in the media and if you are already a
champion in your industry. But if you are a motivational speaker, for
instance, and you choose to prospect all industries, you will need to
have a package to introduce yourself.
I represent speakers who
are highly paid and have been speaking for 20-30 years and the young
executives and administrators, even some of the industry veterans, still
do not recognize their names. It’s your job or your representative’s
job to introduce you to the newcomers in all organizations and to keep
your name newsworthy.
5. Can’t I just
use bureaus to get booked?
The primary purpose of bureaus is to serve the needs of the organization
seeking a speaker. They are not in the business of creating name recognition
for a speaker. Usually, a speaker's bureau is not interested in you
when you are just starting out as a speaker. By the time a bureau
might be interested in you, you may find that your calendar is already
full.
That’s OK. Give it up!
Focus instead on performing actions each day that will allow you to bring your expertise to the attention of your target market. If you’re
doing your job, bureaus will find you!
6. Should I advertise for a booking agent?
Sure. That’s
just one resource you can use to locate a booking agent. Referrals from associates
and friends are great, but why not run an ad? In Chapter 2
of Your Booking Agent: How to Hire Her,
How to Interview Her, How to Pay Her, How to Train Her and How to Keep
Her, you'll even get tips for placing your ad. The ad
should be truthful and it should screen each candidate thoroughly. If you cannot do
it objectively, hire someone to do it for you.
7. How do I get started with an agent?
You must create a system which rewards performance.
List the daily duties, expectations, scripts, accountability checklists,
and phases of increased responsibility. For help with this,
refer to Chapter 5 in Your
Booking Agent: How to Hire Her, How to Interview Her, How to Pay Her,
How to Train Her and How to Keep Her.
8. Where do I begin?
No amount of Internet
technology will produce continued and sustainable offers for paid
speaking engagements without a human being to
interface with inquiries and build a relationship. This is
critical to your success as a speaker!
You must have one person who knows your core competencies, knows
your strengths, knows your solutions to industry challenges, knows your
unique selling proposition, and knows what you will not do for money.
A
viral marketing campaign (utilizing the Internet among other things) is
an excellent supplement to familiarizing your target market with your
expertise. As you'll learn in
Part Two
of How to
Position, Prospect and Profit From Teaching Others What You Know,
the Internet will
help you qualify prospective speaking engagements. It will also bring
all kinds of traffic to your website. But, if you do not have the
customer service and the personnel (your agent) that you can rely on to
to champion your expertise, you’re overlooking
higher returns on your efforts.
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