How do you justify the expense of attending professional conferences?
Event ticket, travel, hotel, food expenses – they all add up.
How do you begin to measure ROI?
If you’re like the majority of us... at the very least you total up all your receipts and hand them over to your accountant as a tax write-off.
And you toss the conference swag bag (now a cluttered pile of business cards, speaker/session notes, and vendor booth free goodies) in a closet or a corner in your office. You tell yourself you’ll get to them as soon as you catch up on all the stuff that piled up while you were away.
Especially those notes you excitedly wrote on the plane ride home that list all the action steps you’re determined to implement right away. Surely by doing that, your business will sky rocket to the next level! That's what we tell ourselves.
What I’m going to suggest might rub you the wrong way. It’s not the advice that you might expect. But it works like gangbusters.
And you’ll be reaping the benefits from attending conferences long after the keynote speakers get their audiences all worked up and full of hope... only to leave through the back door after doing the obligatory book signings.
I’m not dissing key note speakers. But if that’s all you attend a conference for, it’s much cheaper to just buy their books.
At #ICON14, the annual convention Cheryl and I attend, we made some major changes in what we focused on. In the past we immersed ourselves in attending as many break-out sessions as we could pack in a day.
We crammed our brains with as much valuable information as we could handle thinking that was the way to move our business forward. By the time the day was over, all we wanted to do was catch up on emails and missed calls and crash exhausted from all the hard work!
Larry Benet - The Connector
This time, we followed the advice of our business coach Larry Benet (aka The Connector) to leverage the event by connecting with influential people.
With Larry’s help, we determined who we wanted to connect with – those who could help us accomplish our goals – and set up meetings even before we got on the plane.
Our days were full of relaxed meetings with our best clients who were also attending the conference… power meetings with key execs at Infusionsoft… an unplanned hour-long chat one evening with Larry who was also at the event building his own connections.
But the real coupe personally for me was meeting and reliving the glory days with Reed Hoisington - one of the highest paid, most in-demand direct mortgage marketing consultants in America over a decade ago.
His Magnetic Mortgage Marketing System course literally saved my mortgage business. And it was my first introduction to the Dan Kennedy style of marketing.
Portion of Reed Hoisington's white paper for his Mortgage Magnetic Marketing System
So here's the key: make your conversations about how YOU can help THEM, not what they can do for you!
You’re building a connection, creating a relationship. It takes time, but the rewards are exponential.
The best interviewers ask the questions that we all wish they’d ask. And when the interview is over, we feel like we know the subject of the interview personally.
Here are 11 questions Larry Benet uses all the time to make connections and that you can swipe:
Here's to making some great connections!
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