Student Success Story: Sara Murray

Here at The Speaker Lab, our goal is to help you get Booked and Paid to Speak. Our Student Success Stories share first hand experiences from our students of how they’ve booked paid speaking gigs and grown their businesses by applying the concepts they learned in our courses.

WHY TSL?

My platform is called Prospecting on Purpose. This is my core talk which is all about the relationship side of sales. I left my career as a sales professional in a more traditional B2B environment in the commercial construction industry, and I decided to go full-time into consulting and speaking.

A big part of my success has been the ability to cultivate relationships and then use those relationship foundations to then bridge the gap between the buyer and the seller to what I call, prized clients.

I joined The Speaker Lab because speaking has always been a pillar of my business that I wanted to build. I have always seen the value and have capitalized on the benefits of coaching and consultants to fast track my results.

My thought is if I want to accomplish something that someone has already had success with, why would I reinvent the wheel if somebody already invented it?
My original plan was consult, consult, consult, and then have speaking down the road.

But when I started to look at what really lights me up and where I felt most excited to respond to incoming leads, it was always the people that wanted me to speak at their national sales convention or people connecting with me on LinkedIn asking me to speak.

So, when I saw The Speaker Lab I thought, why would I wait a couple of years? I allowed myself to follow that energy and let it flow.

HOW DID THE VIP PROGRAM AND SPEAK FRAMEWORK IMPACTED YOUR SPEAKING BUSINESS?

I appreciated the structure of the VIP cohorts. The accountability of having to show up, do the homework, and connect with the cohort community was a big win for me in terms of momentum.
I also learned a lot from my other colleagues in my cohort group and, to my pleasant surprise, I have other business opportunities coming out of it. So the relationships that I’ve formed are having a huge ROI on my speaking business.

What I like about the SPEAK Framework is the matter-of-fact approach that The Speaker Lab takes. You all take this complicated system and make it easy by literally laying out every step we need to take. You finish one step and then you let us know the very next step to take. I appreciate that matter-of-fact structure because it’s digestible and it helped me keep motivated and moving forward.

What I really found valuable with the SPEAK framework was that wherever you are in your speaking career the resources have been so helpful. Whether your building the business or trying to gain momentum in the business, there are resources for every level.

You need a contract, they have them. Need to know how to manage a sales call, it’s there. What do you send in an initial reach out email? The Speaker Lab has you covered. It allowed me to pivot quickly when opportunities have and continue to land on my desk.

WHAT RESULTS ARE YOU EXPERIENCING?

For me, one of the big results is being a true stand out as a professional in the industry. I have a structure to my speaking business now. I focus on who I am reaching out to and why. What needs to be done before the call and after the call? Having this workflow in place has really helped me be a solid professional to the event planners I am interacting with. They are seeing the value in working with me, which is extremely important to me and the health of my speaking business.

I feel like one of the big shifts for me mentally that I had to make, especially coming from a corporate environment and going the self-employed route was going from an income business model to an impact business model. The content and messaging that I’ve received from the coaches has been things like, what’s the transformation? How will the audience think differently? Will your event planner enjoy working with you? How are you acting differently? That’s been a helpful shift for me in how I’m structuring my outward communication.

So, I really like the idea of targeting associations because it allows me to help trade shows attendees network more successfully. But what I wasn’t expecting is that corporations have been my current core competency. It’s been nice to have that flexibility or pick and choose what fits where. I think that’s been so helpful in pivoting where the business goes.

WHO WOULD YOU RECOMMEND TO THE SPEAKER LAB?

I think that there’s a huge opportunity for people who are employed to really set themselves up as a subject matter expert with the education The Speaker Lab provides. Naturally, industry events happen, trade shows happen, and I see people there on stage. They’re very smart, they’re very eloquent, but you can tell they don’t have any type of training in terms of stage presence, voice inflection, and how to keep the audience engaged.

Had I known this existed when I was in a corporate environment, I would’ve really petitioned for approval from my boss to take this program to become a better presenter and more of a presence when I’m speaking because it would fuel my own personal identity, but also enhance to the brand reputation of the organization.

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