subject: When The Speaker Is Ready The Audience Will Appear! [print this page] When The Speaker Is Ready The Audience Will Appear!
Recently, I read an article by a college professor who rued the day he wasted
showing up at a speaking event where he had been booked.
No one else attended, except for his sponsor.
Singed by the apparent rejection, he decided to avoid speaking opportunities, which I infer he did quite successfully for the next ten years.
As a professional speaker, I feel his pain; well not quite.
Though I believe it was St. Augustine that said "There is no joy in heaven over empty churches," that isn't the case with regard to speaking venues, at large.
Imagine speaking to a convention in Las Vegas, where throngs are entering and leaving your talk, chips in hand, to play the tables. Lonely in a crowd? I know that feeling.
There's a different challenge I face. Corporate clients want to overpopulate my sessions, because they equate high headcount with cost-effectiveness. Pack them in!
But the same executives that ask me to improve the skills of their associates, would recoil at the idea of allowing their children to attend a school where the faculty-student ratio was too high.
Why? Because we learn better in smaller groups, there is more engagement. Everyone knows that!
Some of my best public seminar sessions have been ultra-intimate, with 4 or 5 in attendance. Convincing those few that the event is not a failure, is a little bit of a trick; that you're just as pleased with the modest turnout as you would have been with however many.
I inaugurated a very successful speaking career with a session at Cal State Los Angeles. We had 6 or 7 in the room, and two of them showed because I personally sold them.
They LIKED ME, can you imagine, and in my next session three months later, at Indiana State, we hosted about 44, without my carnival barking. Plus, the ABC-TV news affiliate interviewed me at the scene.
Later, I would self-sponsor a seminar at a Holiday Inn, where I had to tease out two additional registrations to populate the session enough so the assembly would seem, "respectable."
Those extra bodies I recruited ended up awarding me with a six-figure training contract, a nationwide gig.
So, don't get discouraged at low turnouts, especially if you're pioneering a topic or simply are not widely known. Just as the antidote for unpopular speech is more speech, I invite you to redouble your efforts.
