Turning Presentation Leftovers into Rich Meals
Most people treat a presentation like a single event. You give the talk, some people buy, the rest leave, and that’s it. Done. Move on to the next one.
Kennedy says that’s like throwing away perfectly good food after Thanksgiving dinner. Chapter 15 of No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations is about the leftovers. The people who showed interest but didn’t buy. The ones who signed up but never showed up. The ones who watched everything but walked away without taking action.
Those people are not gone. They are leftovers, and leftovers can make very good meals.
The Leftovers You’re Ignoring
After any presentation, you have at least three groups of unconverted people:
- People who showed interest but never registered. They clicked your link, visited your page, maybe started filling out a form. Then they stopped.
- People who registered but didn’t show up. Life happened. They got busy. They forgot.
- People who showed up but didn’t buy. They watched the whole thing, maybe even took notes, but didn’t pull out their credit card.
Most businesses do almost nothing with these groups. Kennedy found this over and over again. When he asked a group of successful financial advisors what they did with seminar attendees who didn’t book appointments, the answers were embarrassing. “Nothing much.” Or “we put them back on the mailing list,” which just meant those people got invited to the same seminar they already attended and ignored.
That’s throwing money in the trash.
Sometimes the Same Presentation Works Again
Here’s the surprising part. You don’t always need new material to convert these people. Sometimes you just need to give them the same presentation again, in a different format.
Kennedy did this with TV infomercials. People would call in after watching, talk to a salesperson, but hang up without buying. His solution? Send them a letter with a recording of the exact same infomercial they already watched. Enough of those non-buyers converted to make it profitable.
He did the same thing as a speaker on seminar tours. Many attendees left before his talk, or were too tired and spent out from buying other speakers’ products. So he mailed them a long letter that was basically a transcript of his presentation. It worked every time. Thousands of new customers who would have been lost forever.
Today you could do this with a replay email, a recorded webinar link, or even a short video summary sent the next day. The format changes, the principle stays the same. Give people a second chance to see what they missed.
The Power of Structured Follow-Up
For bigger operations, Kennedy recommends something more structured. He describes a client who sells services to dentists through live seminars and webinars. The dentists who don’t sign up after the presentation get put into not one, but three sequential follow-up campaigns.
Each campaign has 16 to 32 steps. Email, physical mail, phone calls. Over eight to ten weeks.
The first campaign restates the original presentation, broken into pieces. The second offers a simpler version of the service at a lower price. The third offers a completely different service and drives people to a new presentation.
Here’s the number that matters: the profit from these follow-up campaigns was almost equal to the profit from the original presentation. They nearly doubled their income from the same audience just by following up properly.
That’s not a fluke. Kennedy says he sees this pattern with almost every client he works with.
The Two Questions You Need to Ask
Kennedy boils this whole chapter down to two questions:
1. Where are you throwing away leftovers instead of making meals from them?
Look at every stage of your sales process. Where do people drop off? What happens to them after they drop off? If the answer is “nothing,” you found your opportunity.
2. How many times, places, and ways can you reuse your effective presentations?
A good presentation is an asset. You can turn it into emails, letters, video series, blog posts, social media content. The work of creating it is done. Now squeeze every bit of value out of it.
Your Presentation Is Not a Standalone Event
The biggest idea in this chapter is simple. Your presentation should never be a standalone thing. It’s one piece inside a bigger system. Steps happen before the presentation to get people there, and steps happen after to catch the ones who didn’t convert.
Kennedy compares unconverted prospects to cactuses holding water. The value isn’t visible from the outside. But it is there.
For financial advisors he coached, a 16-step automated follow-up system converted up to 25% of seminar attendees who didn’t book an appointment. People who would have been completely lost without that follow-up.
Don’t just present and hope. Present, then follow up. Then follow up again. And probably one more time after that.
This is post 17 of 21 in my retelling of No B.S. Guide to Powerful Presentations by Dan Kennedy.
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