Revenue, Participation, and Labor Intensity for Events

Are you overworked trying to get others to attend events?

Does engagement affect the value you deliver?

Are you breaking your back just to make budget?

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Here is the transcript from the video…

Okay, in this video, what we’re going to talk about is how to increase the amount of people who attended events that you had put on for your education, your professional development, or if it’s for your training. The next thing we’re going to talk about is how to increase revenue, or if revenue could also be looked at in terms of member savings, if you’re an association, in terms of holding these special events. Then, third would be to decrease the amount of labor, labor intensity that it takes in order to make these first to happen.

So let’s take a look at your specific website, right now and how it breaks down how you would get people to attend. So let’s say here’s your website right now, and hopefully you use a website. If not you’re spending a whole lot of time on the phone, you’re returning faxes, and that’s part of the labor intensity we’re going to talk about here in a bit.

But let’s say this link right over here is the education that we’re looking at. So here’s a list of, let’s say five different educational offerings that we specifically have. Whether this right here is business planning, right here is accounting, right here is marketing, right here is legal, and then the last one could be some sort of statistics or trends that you would specifically take.

So if each one of these is a value proposition, the next question is this, “Okay, if here’s our marketing, we have to send out a link to here. We have to sell this one. We have to sell this one. We have sell this one, and we have to sell this one.” What happens most of the time is, is groups that do training or have a lot of different events compartmentalize their offerings, which means that they have sell each one individually. They do not cross-sell them effectively.

So if we look at right now, if we’re going to go out to a dinner, pretend this is the dinner table, and there are four people that are at dinner. What would you order if you were at dinner? Well, first thing the waiter or the waitress would ask for is, “What would you like to drink?” Right? The second thing they would ask for is, “Would you care for an appetizer? Would you like a salad? Would you like some potato skins?” Whatever it might be.

Third thing is, “What do you want for dinner?” Right? Here’s the main entree. Here’s the course. Then what’s the fourth thing that they would ask for, that’s more often most overlooked in terms of maximizing the revenue is desert. Well if we have four people that are sitting around the table, how many of the four would eat or order dessert? Even though they’re are already full, they can’t eat any more food. They maybe take the dinner home but they’ll probably go ahead and order the dessert.

Well, one out of four, which is a conservative number, that’s 25% of increased revenue. Well, what happens if they didn’t ask if you wanted an appetizer? What happens if they wouldn’t want a dessert? So we can think about in terms of how restaurants cross-sell the existing things that they already have, they’re able to increase their amount of revenue. So then that way they’re not necessarily selling more than they have to.

So if we look at our individual classes, the business planning, accounting, marketing, legal and staff, how can we set it up to where, if this is our main website and then right down here, here are the three classes or specific events? So we’re just going to call this, event number one, event number two, and this is event number three. If I send people to the website of number one, from them registering from number one, how can they also register for number two? Do we make it easy for them, especially if it’s already connected?

Similarly, if we’re selling number two, how can we then get them from number two, once they have their credit card handy, they’re ready to hit the submit button? How can we start to send them to those different sites?

So let’s think about this as another way of this is the website, right? Typically what you have is three different options in terms of which links people would send people to. So I’m going to say this, right here, is the website. People will say, “Well, gosh, after people register for a class on our site, it goes right back to our home page. Well, gosh.” Then people have to start over the process again and especially if you’re trying to connect certain events together, like GRI1 to GRI2 to GRI3.

If you’re not giving people the proper path, chances are that they won’t know something. They’re going to miss out. Another thing to look at is some people will say, “Well gosh, we send people to the thank you page or the order confirmation.” Then, again, it’s not connected in terms of what’s the next thing that people want to take.

What I would suggest is that you have an existing, an event, or more specifically a value proposition that you’re trying to cross-sell that you want people to take action on. So this is known in terms of web terms. This is known as “the thank you URL”. Where this can be found is on the payment gateway system that you use. Or it’s kind of like your online shopping cart. There’s going to be a field. There’s going to be a box that says,”What is your thank you URL?” http:\\, whatever the name of the website is.

So when people register right here, for this… Let’s go back here. So when people register for number one, the thank you URL is for number two. The thank you URL for when you register for number two is going to be number three. So one site to kind of look at to see how they do it effectively is Amazon.com. If you’ve ever ordered something from there, they have recommended products and services. This is an example of a cross-sell. They also will send you an email that allows you to track it. Then you can also put in your favorites, or even if you didn’t buy, they’ll put keep it in a shopping cart until you’re able to make that decision.

Also think about how much time – if we accept registrations on the phone, we take them by fax and also by the internet, we have right here, here’s the amount… This is going to be a little clock for time. This is your staff right here, and how much do you pay staff and this is going to be the number of people that you attend, and this is going to be the potential savings that you’re able to get.

Well, gosh. How much time does it take somebody on the phone to be able to register? Well, sometimes it takes people ten minutes. If you’re paying staff $20 per hour to be able to get revenues, well you divide $20 per hour by the ten minutes, you would have the 50 people which would be your average. If you were to multiply these things out, you would get the specific member savings in terms of on the phone.

For fax, sometimes – well, gosh, it’d take you five minutes just to be able to enter in the credit card information that you pulled up from the fax. Chances are you’re also putting people’s credit cards at risk by accepting them by fax as well. Then if you’re paying staff $20 per hour and there are 50 people that have to go through that process think of how many minutes and savings that you would then have just because you eliminated fax. Then you have www registered from the internet. It doesn’t take any time and there’s no cost to it, no matter how many people you have attending.

So as a result what you have is what we mentioned before. Number one is we have increased attendance. That could be what we mentioned was 25%. But what if you 10% to 25% of increased attendance and you do that times 20 different events or classes you have per year? How much more member participation do you have? Then next, if we’re talking about increasing revenue, we would do the same thing, 10% to 25% times 20 events. How much money does that come out to?

Then third, if we decrease the labor intensity by, let’s say five hours times 20 different events is 100 hours. Well, gosh. That’s two and a half weeks of someone’s salary that could be focused in on other items that have more value.

So what I want you to look at is, “Okay, where can I start to save two different things?” First one would be, time, and the second thing would be, “How can I increase the money as attendance, revenue, but then also decrease the costs?”

So hopefully, this video gives you an idea of some things you can do and implement as a result. Be sure that you register for the the webinar. It’s a free webinar. It’s http://bit.ly./aemagic. If you haven’t taken this webinar yet, you are missing out.