One question that often comes up when it comes to speaking is “How do I increase my fees?”. You may be wanting to get to the next price level, or maybe you are done speaking for “exposure” and it’s now time to start getting paid!
I’ve noticed something about the Speakers I work with that charge the most fees – they add the most value to their audiences. If there are 2 people who have the same amount of knowledge but one is getting paid more than the other – I’m pretty sure it’d be because of this one thing…
Add Value To Add Fees
You’ve done all the work. Your content is ROCK SOLID. You’ve created your presentation and practised it to perfection. Now, it’s time to charge your client a higher fee.
The easiest way to justify a fee increase is simple: add more value to your presentation.
It’s not about doing more with your content since it’s already authoritative and full of information that supports your message. Think of it this way; you keep getting speaking engagements because of your content.
So, now you can focus on value.
The more value you provide, the more benefit your client gets and the more willing they are to pay a higher price.
One sure way to add more value to your presentation is to make it more engaging.
Let’s use a gardening metaphor to illustrate this. If you have crappy soil, you can pour a lot of water into it, but it won’t do any good. The ground won’t absorb the water. So, your plants won’t benefit from what you’ve done.
Speaking is similar to that. If your audience doesn’t engage with your content, they won’t be able to absorb value or benefit from it.
How To Make Your Presentation More Engaging
When you add value through better engagement, your audience absorbs even more of your message. Thus, they get more benefit from it.
So, how do you go from wanting to add value – to making your presentation more engaging?
It would help if you managed the mood of the audience.
American poet Maya Angelou famously said: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
So, you want to make your audience feel really, really good, and you can easily do that when you manage your audience’s mood.
Manage the Mood of the Audience
In the Funny On Purpose Formula, I teach three specific ways to manage the audience’s mood using humour:
Have a humour plan
– humour can put your audience into a positive state, help you build rapport and connection, and prime your audience’s brain, so they’re ready to absorb and get into a peak state for learning and understanding. So ask yourself:
- What are you going to do with the humour?
- What do you specifically need the humour to do?
- What heavy lifting do you need help with within your presentation and your message that the humour can do for you?
Relate to the audience
– you may be passionate about your topic, but you still need to make sure that your content is relatable to your audience. So, ask yourself:
- How do you make your topic interesting and relevant to your audience?
Read the room
– make sure that your audience gets your humour. Learn to recognise if people are engaged or disengaged with what you’re saying. If you know the signs that your audience is switching off their engagement, you can make on-the-spot changes to ensure you switch them back on and re-engage them.
Summary
As you can see, humour is a great tool to achieve your ultimate goal of increasing your fees. As Danish-American comedian Victor Borge once said, “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.“
So, if you want to increase your fees and charge your worth, reverse engineer this path:
- Charge the proper fees
- Add value
- Make your presentation more engaging
- Manage the mood
- Use humour efficiently
If you want help to use more humour, be sure to sign up for my Funny On Purpose Humour Short Course.
