Pricing Your Seminar or Event

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TRANSCRIPT:
Avish: One thing that I know that causes a lot of confusion for people when they are starting out in seminars, is how to you price your event? So I’d love to get your thoughts on that. Let’s start right of to that with – well, let me ask you, I was to do a seminar, how would I go about pricing that?

Fred: Well, there are number of components that in go into pricing. Obviously you want to generate the maximum total revenue and remember back our formula. The total revenue is equal seminar registration plus product sells plus coaching or consulting business. So in pricing your seminar, you are not looking at the pricing and the price point in isolation. You’re looking at it as a component of total revenue. So there maybe cases in which, if all the revenue received from the seminar or strictly from seminar registration, you would use one formula. But since our formula consist of many, many or well three different components, for this example. You are going to make sure that your pricing reflects that.

So let’s say that you know that you get a lot of people to buy your materials at the event. Then it behooves you to charge less money, because you want to fill the room and make sure that happens. But the real thing to consider is number one, and people will always say, well you know I always charge extra amount of dollar for one day event. Well, you know the answer is that could be dead wrong in terms of your approach. The first thing you want to do is, you want to see if anybody else is doing seminars and what are they charging to attend an event.

So that if you’re doing, let’s say you’re doing a basketball workshop. If you’re doing a basketball workshop and you’re not a known entity, you can’t compare yourself to Micheal Jordan’s basketball workshop because by verge of the fact that he is a celebrity and a well-known name. He is going to charge a lot more money for it. So instead, the first thing you want to do is look for people that are doing seminars similar to what you’re considering doing who were at you same level of credibility in terms of expertise. So if you find somebody else who is relatively unknown that you haven’t earlier heard that much and you see that they’re charging $195 for one day seminar, that would probably where you would start your thinking at or start your testing at. So the first thing is, look around at your competition to see what they’re charging. That’s step one.

Avish: Okay, I got it. So let’s say, you’ve looked at your competition. You got an idea. The next thing you’re going to do is to figure out your seminar formula and then decide where you want to get you revenue from whether you should lower that price or raise it?

Fred: Yeah. Well. The thing about it is if you start out at the point that everybody else, what everybody else is charging, and then you say it to yourself, well I make 30 or 75% of my money from the product sells and the coaching and consulting business. You might say, you know what, in this case and again, this is all about testing. I may want to consider lowering my price to see if that will bring in a greater number of people. And remember, in the seminar business in most cases, lowering the price will increase the number of enrollees. However, sometimes by lowering a price, it may give people the perception that your seminar isn’t that good. So all of these things, you should not take my word for it. You should test it to see whether or not, it results in a greater number of people or in a greater amount of revenue.

So the first thing we want to think about, is again, how much of you revenue is generated and try it. So that the answers to pricing and the correct pricing for your seminar won’t be anything that you’re going to get from me and Avish talking about what to do here. It’s going to result from you testing different prices. And by testing, if they have Web Marketing Magic set-up, you can do what’s called split testing, where every other person gets sent to a different website which the only thing that is different is the price point, but you’re going to be, you’re saying everybody is they’re listening, they are going, “Are you kidding me? People are showing up, they‘re going to be in the same room, they paid two different prices?” Well, no. What is going to happen is you are going to end up giving people who signed up and paid more money the lower price by rebating them that amount of money, but it will give you a good idea of what price point to use the next time you do it. Does that make sense?

Avish: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great way of going about it. So what about the – one more thing about pricing is, you say if the topic is more specific or the market is more specific, you can raise your prices?

Fred: Well, you potentially could, yeah. Now you only want to raise the prices of course if your total revenue generated increased.

Avish: Okay. What do you mean when you say it can be more specific? Why is that, why does the specificity of the topic matter?

Fred: Well the thing about it is in general, say for example, I used to do a lot seminars of marketing, sort of marketing in general, “36 Secrets Everyone Should Know About Direct Marketing.” If that were the case, that seminar might be $97. But if it was “36 Direct Marketing Secrets Every Caterer Should Know,” I could charge more for that because it’s specific based on the specify niche I am going after. So the more specificity of the seminar, the greater money you can charge in general if everything else is equal.

Avish: Okay, I got it. So let’s say, you decided on your fee and you do split testing and you’re ready to go, how about things like early enrollment, do you recommend early bird discount?

Avish: I think it’s generally a good idea. The reason why is because, especially if you’re new to the seminar game, you want to try and get – the big obsession that every seminar promoter should have is getting to break-even as quickly as possible using whatever techniques are necessary. So if you can get people and seduce people in to sign up for your seminar, let’s say you have a total of a hundred – let’s say a thousand or $1500 worth of expenses on your seminar. And your seminar was $300, but you’re giving an early bird special for $150, half of the price of the seminar. Well, if your spent $1500, those are your fixed costs and you got 10 people signed up at the early bird special because it was a great deal. Now you covered your nut, you covered your $1500 expenses with 10 people sign up at the half price. That’s fine, because you want to make sure, you’re first concern should be making sure that all of your expenses are covered right off the bat and that you’ve hit the break-even point. So early bird special, good idea to do to make sure you get to break-even as quickly as possible.

Avish: Okay. What about other ways to get people to register in advance? Like advanced registration bonuses, what are those?

Fred: Well. Advance registration bonuses are giving people some extra incentive, whatever it is, if it’s an e-book or maybe it’s a consultation with you directly for 20 or 30 minutes. A lot of different things can be used to seduce people with these early registration bonuses. So now when you used in tandem, lets for example, you both have the early bird special and the early registration bonuses setup. So now not only did somebody get your $300 seminar for 150 bucks, but they also get a 20-minute consultation with you as well.

Now again, this might sound like you’re giving away the store, but remember your concern when you’re doing your seminar, especially when you first start doing them, now you can always pull this back later, but your first concern and this is why I’ve never lost money on seminar is to make sure and break-even as quickly as possible. So again, if you offer the $150 early bird bonus in addition to that offer, a 20-minute free consultation for the first 10 people that signed up, you would be stacking the deck in favor of getting the break-even very quickly.

Avish: Okay. So those are advanced registration premiums where only a few people get them. Do you like to use additional bonuses to get people to sign up?

Fred: Oh yeah. It’s always good. People like to feel like they’re getting something more than just the seminar itself. So those bonuses are a good thing to have. There would be some that are general bonuses that everybody get and then others like we just talked about that are sort of special bonuses if you’re one of the first 10 to register that kind of thing.

Avish: Okay. What would make good bonuses like that or how do you get bonuses to add on to your seminar?

Fred: Well, good bonuses like that or anything that requires, that has high perceived value and virtually low or no cost to you. So digital bonuses in the forms of pdf documents or audio or video files serve to be – those are the best bonuses that you can give people.

Avish: Okay, super. And we’re talking about pricing your seminar, pricing at $300 or $150 or however much and we talked a little bit about this one on prior sections. But you think is legitimate to even make your seminar, set your price zero for some events?

Fred: Yeah, there are a lot of people, I mean and all you need to do is look at the successful real estate seminar guys. They set their prices at zero because they know they’re going to make it up with all the product sales that they make and all the coaching and consulting business they generate. So certainly zero is a possible price point, but it depends. Take a look at what your competitors are charging and use that as a guideline for where to start.

Avish: Okay. So to summarize this segment here, we’re looking at the total revenue, so you want to look at your competition, test some prices out, obviously nothing we say is going to give, there’s no patent answer. And then look at doing some bonuses and early enrolment discounts and registrations premiums to get people to sign up.

Fred: Yeah, that in a great website which helps to make sure that you can close most of the people to go there.

Avish: Alright. Super.

Fred: Perfect.