This week’s DEEmails are more of a mini-course. The topic is “The Five Biggest Mistakes Professionals Make When Speaking To Sell And How To Avoid Them.”

Each day we’ll cover one mistake.

I was thinking about packaging this mini-course and selling it, but because I’m a prince amongst men, I decided to give it to you for nada.

Onward ho…

Mistake #1: Delivering Too Much Content

“But I need to deliver a lot of value when I do a presentation,” a lawyer said when I told her that she was teaching too much.

“Yes, you should deliver value, but you are equating ‘value’ to ‘bulk, and it’s killing your conversions,” I replied.

When you teach too much, two opposing things can occur.

First, your prospects will become overwhelmed and confused, and when that happens, they don’t schedule appointments. When someone gets confused, they can get frustrated, or they will mentally tune you out.

Second, your leave your prospects with the false impression that they have all the information they need to solve their problems without your help, or at least get started. Unless your solution is ultra-simple, and if that’s the case, you don’t need a one-to-many presentation to sell it, you’ve done your audience a tremendous disservice by over-teaching because they’re not going to get the outcome they desire on their own.

Your prospects will see you as an expert and authority on your topic by delivering valuable but less information. They will enjoy your talk more, be more engaged, and you’ll whet their appetite to want to learn more about how you can help them. The result will be more appointments from every presentation you do.

So, how much content is enough?

The magic number is three.

You want to break your teaching into three “chunks” of content. Again, there are many psychological studies on this topic, but you need to know that when you deliver three pieces of valuable content, your prospects will understand it, remember it, and want to know more. Which, again, leads to higher conversions.

My lawyer-client reluctantly cut back on her teaching and was stunned to discover that her webinar conversions doubled.

Of course, we fixed another big mistake professionals make that had to do with the content itself, and that’s what we’re going to cover tomorrow in part two of this mini-course.

Kick butt, make mucho DEEnero!

Dave “The Magic Of Three” Dee