Guest Speakers and Your Telesummit

A telesummit is primarily a list-building event, where a host interviews a collection of experts on a specific topic over a designated period of time, while a virtual audience tunes in for free.

While most telesummits end up being a huge win-win-win for the listeners, the guest experts and the host, occasionally you’ll hear hosts complain that their telesummit didn’t deliver the leads or mojo that they’d hoped for.

With a little deeper investigation, I usually find that if a telesummit had disappointing results, it wasn’t mercury in retrograde, the stars, or fate. The problem, almost always, was the wrong balance of speaker types.

That’s right. An optimal balance of the four different types of speakers will not only help you attract your ideal clients, but will encourage them to stick around, learn as much as they can, and eventually invest to go deeper with you.

If you’re following our Ultimate Telesummit Formula, you’re looking for 12 speakers: four a day for your three-day virtual event.

A balance of 4 speaker types for your telesummit will attract your ideal clients and encourage them to stay and learn from you.

Here are those four types of speakers that you want on your telesummit lineup:

1. Draw Speakers.
You want to get as many people to opt-in to your telesummit as you can, because that grows your list. So, ideally, you want to have two very well-known speakers who will draw in the audience. Now, draw speakers may or may not help you promote your telesummit by mailing to their lists. In fact, some of the big names don’t even have a list. But their name alone makes them worth inviting.

2. Content Speakers.
Your draw speakers don’t always provide the best content, so you want to make sure that you also have, ideally, three really good content speakers. Your listeners may not have heard of these subject matter experts, but they’re going to love their content. Plus, content speakers often turn out to be great promotional partners. In fact, people with smaller but well-targeted lists in your topic area sometimes do way better for you than your draw speakers.

3. Reach Speakers.
Reach speakers are experts with a big email list or large social media following in the same ideal client group as you. Often, your reach speakers will be so excited about the opportunity to be on the same lineup as your draw speakers, that they’ll promote the heck out of your event to their substantial list or following. That’s why you want half of your speakers to fall into this category.

4. Positioning Speaker.
The positioning speaker is that one special guest who really represents the promise of your telesummit as a whole, and is another huge draw that can double your opt-ins. For instance, when I did my How to Sell to Women telesummit, my team and I brainstormed about who really represents selling to women for us, and we immediately thought of Zappos. Now, I had no idea how I would make that happen, but I committed to the idea, and at a course I signed up for, guess who I was sitting next to? A director at Zappos. I got the interview, and it was a huge hit of the event.

If you want learn a lot more about how you can structure your telesummit for ultimate success, I have the opportunity for you. I want to invite you to attend the first class of my Ultimate Telesummit Formula training at no cost to you. This is not a promo. It’s module 1 of the actual training. And it takes place on Aug. 19 at 11 AM Pacific/2 PM Eastern.

Ultimate Telesummit Formula Class #1 Free!