Set the Appointment

The Goal is to Set the Appointment

It’s always a mistake to wait to set the appointment, or to only set appointments with people who attend the event live.  With online events, such as webinars, at least a third of the new clients often come from those who no-show to the live event.

The other problem he was facing was that the event was being marketed on Facebook. What I know about social media, especially Facebook, is that cost per lead and cost per registration are often lowest out of all the various methods. The marketing mistake that people make is looking for the cheapest source of a new process and then stopping there. You want EVERY new lead, registration, appointment, and new client that you can get with a positive return on investment. You don’t ONLY want the ones that were least expensive to get. While that may intuitively feel right, it’s a major limitation to speed of growth.

Scale the Marketing

Unfortunately, in a geographically targeted area, it’s hard to scale the online marketing at any reasonable level. You have to add other forms of advertising, certainly to include direct mail, in order to get enough attendees.

There is a real limit to how much you can do with just Facebook marketing, so expand it and add to it. Perfect marketing combines different methods and sources. Again, note back to the idea of the “Parthenon” applied to each effort. There are so many ways you can bump up your advertising campaign.

Develop the Follow-Up Reminders

Even if she did get more people interested, she didn’t have a reminder system set up to get people to turn up on the day. If someone signs up to an event two months before it happens, it is extremely likely they will forget about it. Not only this, but the system to get attendees to sign up for appointments was also very weak. Basically, she had all the pieces there to make it a very successful and lucrative event, but she failed to fine-tune the links between each key part.

• Prospect
• Registration
• Attendee
• Appointment
• Client

How many Attendees (an, “No-Shows”) made a follow-up appointment?

This is a very important part most people seem to trip on here. In fact, across the hundreds of advisors I have talked to in the past few months, I don’t think I have heard about anyone doing a particularly good job of follow-up.

You should actually first look to secure appointments for follow-ups after the attendance way back at the registration stage. The main objection to this is that the prospect has not heard your live presentation yet, so how would they know whether they want to talk to you or not?

The truth is that in some cases they are ready to book the meeting right then and there when they register (and frankly without registering to attend a group event.) They are interested in your work or your seminar and already have their mind set on a one-on-one appointment.

Prospects May Be Ready to Set the Appointment Sooner than You Think

As an aside… the higher income and higher net worth the individual is, the less likely they want to attend a live event and certainly the less likely they are to be “bribed easily to show up with a free meal.” Personally, I’d be one of those. Just show me the bottom line and let’s get on with it.

You would be foolish to miss out on getting them signed up nice and early. In fact, sometimes you will get people who register and would like to set up an appointment, but then don’t attend the live event. Signing them up early means you don’t miss out on them altogether. At every stage of the process, be sure to give the prospect the opportunity to set the appointment and start the relationship.