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Our training clients include:
Corporate Marketplace
What is the opportunity? While speaking for local departments of large companies is fairly easy, speaking at national meetings is another business entirely. Many groups within a larger corporation set up its own meetings. The larger the division, the more professional the hiring, including the use of specialized internal or external meeting planners. Speakers of all statures, depending on the level of hiring, can be invited, but fees are usually at least a few thousand dollars.
Why are affiliated organizations important? They represent the highest level of speaking. A successful presentation to one group or division can lead to speaking at more groups and divisions. You can even get invited to a company’s hospitality events for their customers, clients, or business partners. These presentations can take place at trade shows or in local offices.
Where do you find these groups? Convention contacts and speaker’s bureaus are the normal source of contact.
How to you get invited to speak? You usually don’t pitch them, they hire you. Usually, because your strategic focus is what they are looking for, combining a knowledge of strategy with a knowledge of their industry. At customer events, they can use your information on strategy to draw in prospective clients or sell customers on a particular type of product as “strategic.” These presentations can often be justified hiring you by showing how the corporation’s products or services meet the strategic needs of given market area better than a competitors. These type of events pay the best because they are sponsored from marketing money rather than employee training money.
In large corporations, the budgetary authority between different function groups are important (while in smaller, privately owned business they are not.). One firm rule is that sales and marketing are where the money is. Headquarters and executive staffs always have budgets as well. Groups like HR are more difficult in terms of limited budgets, especially at a group or departmental level.
At big events where you are giving a day-long seminar (see product, seminars, below) for a corporate customer’s clients, you can also do separate training for specific customers at the event.
If a corporation has regular employee training events, you can help defray their costs by offering your seminar for free if they let you offer further training for their employees to buy. This should be presented as a win-win opportunity for company. They get valuable free training and employees become even better trained on their own. Generally, you do not offer to split fees for training employees. HR departments are not income driven.
How do you make money? They pay you. You cannot sell product directly, though you can certainly do so subtly.