Delivering speeches, seminars, and webinars (online seminars) is a terrific way to generate large quantities of quality sales leads. Why is public speaking such an effective lead-generating vehicle? Here are a few reasons:

• Speaking allows you to deliver your message to multiple potential prospects at once
  

  
  

• A well-constructed speech, seminar, or webinar can establish you as an expert in your field and increase your credibility with prospects
  

  
  

• Every speech has the potential to reach far beyond the original audience. If you deliver a compelling message, there is no telling how many times it will be repeated to others by your audience members.

Look for topics that are of particular interest to your target prospects. You can offer new approaches for solving especially troubling business problems. You can educate your prospects on compelling new technologies, or other concepts that will help them professionally or personally. You can discuss real-life case studies and share stories about how you (or your company) helped specific customers improve their businesses. Whatever topic you choose must relevant and important to your target audience.

How should you construct your speech?

Constructing an effective lead-generating speech requires walking a fine line. You want to provide your audience with truly valuable information. However, you also want to motivate them to contact you for additional information. As a result, you have to make sure you don't provide so much information that your audience can solve their problems all by themselves.

This is not a big issue if you are speaking to generate leads for a product, as the audience members will likely need to purchase the product to completely solve the problems you discuss. Where giving away too much information becomes a real issue is when you sell services. If you share all of your knowledge about how to solve specific problems, why will your audience members need to come back to you?

To avoid this undesirable outcome, follow these seven steps to constructing an effective lead-generating speech:

1. Open with an "attention grabber". This can be a truly startling fact or an emotionally compelling story that relates to one or more of the key points that you will address in your speech.
   

   
   

2. Give the audience a brief outline of the key points you will be covering in your speech.
   

   
   

3. Describe the problem or problems your speech is intended to help your audience solve.
   

   
   

4. Describe the impact of each problem as graphically as you can. Engage your audience