Planning a Business Seminar that Draws Your Target Audience

This one gets a bit twisted but stick with me. Your task is to create a business seminar to attract, in this example, CEOs of middle-market private companies. For this purpose you have gathered six or seven executives from different professional service firms (your law firm, private wealth management, accounting, business consulting, etc.) to plan and sponsor the event or series.

At the first organizing meeting each of the professional services executives weigh in on what the topic of the seminar should be:

• The accountant states that everyone he is dealing with is concerned about tax reporting changes. That should be our topic area.
  
• The business consultant states that her network of relationships is totally concerned about increasing the value of their companies as they get ready for some type of liquidity event. That is where we should focus.
• The wealth manager states that his network is all buzzing about distribution of assets. This is the topic that will draw our target audience.

Each sponsor executive will of course be surrounded by people with specific needs, and in turn, believe those special needs dominate the minds of all CEOs. Sound familiar?

The correct way to determine a hot topic is to have each sponsor call five CEOs and ask one simple question. "If someone could teach you about any one topic to help you and your business, right now today, what would that topic be?"

An add-on question could be, "Whom would you like to learn it from?"

Try this little thing and you may be amazed at the number of CEOs that line up to get at a seat at your next seminar.