Now where can you go on a rainy Monday evening, hear informative and enriching speeches on discovering your purpose; not what you expect; and cold calling . . . building a good prospect list; be given valuable and colorful hand-outs; and then dine on cherry tomatoes and sugar cookies? Why, Speakers Roundtable, of course.
Ericka Butler as Toastmaster-coach for the evening did a fine job of keeping the meeting on schedule even though we had two speeches of 10+ minutes. Mimi Williams opened her speech on “Discovering Your Purpose” with a visual image of OPRA in a pink dress encouraging us to “get about the business of your life.” Mimi spoke to our needs of not only wanting to enjoy life, but wanting to make a difference in the world by making some unique and special contribution. We all have a purpose. Mimi encouraged us to do something we absolutely love doing. She spoke of her uncle and his marvelous gift of looking out for people. She gave us a work sheet with questions designed to help us find our pattern of joy, fulfillment, and happiness. Our purpose with be found somewhere in that pattern. Mimi has such a tranquil yet forceful delivery.
Keith Schroder jumped right into his speech with an internet quote. “You can give a man a fish and feed him for one day. You can give a fish a man and feed him for three months.” That’s “Not What You Would Expect.” From there we went to Keith’s dog, King, who’s bout with fleas resulted in a trip to the vet. We learned that Keith had to not only treat King, but also his cat and his entire apartment with Flea Powder-chemicals (which he hates) to get rid of the fleas. In his distress he searched the internet and learned that flea powder is not a poison, but a desiccant. Yes, flea powder dehydrates the larvae and they constipate themselves to death. Not what we would expect. The game of “not what you would expect” continued and ended with Keith advising us to take his mother’s advice to “not judge a book by its cover.”
David Flach’s follow up speech Cold Calling Part II – Building a Good Prospect List” was a crammed with great information. The first item on building a list is pre-qualifying your prospects. This includes visualizing and filtering the people you are calling. You should know who you are and who the clients are that you are currently serving. Also important, you should know who you are not. David spoke of scripting your calling message to stay on point; reaching the real decision makers; and spoke to his colorful handout illustrating his five business categories that target a prospective customer. To qualify, the target customer should fall into at least three of these categories. David then spoke on social media, all the on-line resources for searching and gaining knowledge on potential clients. This was a presentation totally packed with well-presented and thoroughly useful ideas for preparing a good cold calling prospect list: just what the members’ ordered.
Iris Grimm, General Evaluator, called for the timer and grammarian reports. She then gave an insightful summary overview of our meeting, right down to that major thunder clap. Both the Grammarian Report (Kelly Vandiver) and GE’s recap were exceptionally well done.
Please see the posted schedule on this web site for next week’s (August 1) meeting assignments.
