Motivational Speakers
Tonight I participated in a conversation with noted twitter opinion giver Tyler Hurst during Gary Vaynerchuck’s book signing for Crush It:
I can point to two early seminars in my sales career that really inspired me and I would attribute a good bit of my success to them. The first was a training trip to Traver Technologies that was part of our GM’s training program during my first year selling cars. The second was a Grant Cardone speaking engagement in Scottsdale about 6 months later. Traver opened my eyes to the power of appointment based selling and taking control of my own destiny when it comes to sales instead of waiting for people to just show up and offer to buy. Grant Cardone is a well known sales speaker – especially amongst car guys – and two of the salesmen that I worked with listened exclusively to his training materials and methods. A half day after the seminar I was sold and bought in completely – especially the part about always giving the client 100% of what you have.
Now to Tyler’s point, there were probably 400 people in the Cardone seminar with me, and based on the sales figures I saw from the other 15 or so salesmen from my dealership that went, maybe 10-15% of the attendees really took it to heart and bought in the way I did. So yes, the seminar alone didn’t make them successful. But I definitely would still say that I benefited from attending. I was inspired by the content, enlightened by the information, and thought of things afterwards in a new light.
This is where the success part comes in though – I acted on these things. 85%-90% of the people didn’t. Anyone can listen to someone speak for an hour or two. Just like any other educational opportunity, you have to put in the effort to really benefit from it. Don’t waste the time going to a training seminar or motivational speaker if you don’t intend to put forth the effort to actually act on the things you learn.
If you’re not going to take action, you may as well go watch a movie.
I followed this conversation and was going to blog that one of the most creative things we can do is analyze content. Content from everywhere. Conferences/Seminars are a GREAT place to get content delivered in a way that is easily digestible in format that is easy to analyze.
The big problem is most attendees barely pay attention, much less do the necessary break down of the content consumed to actually grow, learn or become more creative. As someone recently said, “you get out of such things, what you put into them…”
I see what you’re saying, but I think you were going to act eventually because that’s who you are. they didn’t make you that way in a two hour conference. It’s how life goes, few people are overachievers, the rest are followers, mirage-lovers.
I think you are right that the conference didn’t make me successful, but going there sparked me to do successful things. Does that make sense? Have you never been inspired to do something great after reading a smart person’s blog, or book? Same thing but in person.