Patrick Gawrych

Once you have a prospect ready to respond to your invitation, the next steps are crucial. Ok, so you have written the content for your invitation and sent it through compliance for approval.

Your mail company has sent the invitation and guess what, people want to come to your seminar. What are you going to do to assure they have a good experience and most importantly show up?

Let me start off by saying that I have mailed over 25 million invitations for my clients and I am not a fan of people calling your office to confirm the RSVP.

Bad things can happen when you do this. Here are a few things that can happen:

1. They call after hours and get an answering machine or voicemail. Then they hang up and never call back. Some people will just not leave a message.

2. The prospect calling in will start to ask too many questions. They may ask "What's For Dinner?", "What will the Advisor Be Discussing?", or maybe "What should I do with my IRA?".

 Whatever they are asking will take time from your staff and you may not want to have your staff fielding these questions anyway. I prefer to use an answering service, if you can afford a live receptionist all the better.

 We use a company by the name of Tele-Direct to take our customers in-bound phone calls. I also suggest a three step confirmation process.

Step One: Prospect is given a confirmation # when they call in. Step Two: Send a confirmation card to the prospect. This card goes out the day after the phone call.

Step Three: Call the prospect two or three days before the seminar to confirm the number of guests.

During this call, you can tell your guests to arrive early and make sure they know how to get there. The National average for people that call in for a reservation and do not show up is about 30%. Because we do the three step confirmation process, we average a 5%-7% drop off only.

Let's do the math. 100 people call in Single call only will loose 30%, so 70 people show up. Three step Confirmation 7% drop off so 93 people show up.

If you don't think it is worth the effort to get those extra 23 prospects in the room, you must already have more prospects than you can work. If that is the case, congratulations and go hire someone to take the overflow. If you want about 25% more people to show up for the seminar, use the Three Confirmation Process.