Hey, hey, welcome to the Summit Host Hangout Podcast, where you'll learn how to host a high converting virtual summit that leads to your biggest signature offer at launch yet. I'm your host, Krista from Summit in a Box, and today I want to circle back to a topic we've talked about before with a little bit of an updated approach and more detailed thoughts, and that topic is when it makes sense to require promotion for your virtual summit. So, like I said, I've shared about this before, but today, I want to talk about where people go wrong with this. I'm going to talk through the different things I have done and tried in the past and what I think of those things and why I did them. And then I'll break down when I do and don't think it makes sense to require promotion. Now, keep in mind, these are all kind of generalizations. You can make the decisions that feel best for you. These are all, all of this advice that I'm gonna be talking about is very focused on our values as a business, of course. So you know, keep that in mind, place that against your own values and see how it looks, but let's dive in.
So let's start by talking about where people go wrong, when it comes to requiring speaker promotion for a summit. There's a few things, the first thing someone does wrong is they just blindly add requirements without thinking about it. And it might be oh, all these people require this of me when they pitch me, that's what I'm gonna require from my speakers, and I don't really think anything else of it. It's just like, this is what other people do, so that's what I'm going to do. And really, I feel like that's a trap people, including myself, fall into in business a lot, is not really thinking things through, like from your own perspective and against your own values, and just accepting what other people do is the way it has to be done, and that's not the case. And it's definitely not the case with requiring promotion. So I would urge you to not use what other people are doing as as your way to decide what's what's best for you with requiring promotion.
Something else people do, that I you know, don't think is serving you best with this is adding requirements kind of our of scarcity and out of self doubt and thinking like, if I don't require promotion, this summit isn't going to work. It's going to fail. I have to require promotion, so that I can see results. And that's just not the case. If you put together a solid Summit, if you position it well, if your goals and values, and all of that is clear, if you're hosting a summit that your audience is truly going to benefit from, and you're pitching the right speakers, you don't have to require anything to see results. The results will come when you're treating people well and serving people well, the results are just going to come from that. You don't need to require anything of anyone. I can already tell I'm gonna be getting on my soapbox a lot during this, but I just want you to be like encouraged and don't don't place these requirements because of any type of scarcity and self doubt you feel.
And the third thing I see hosts do, you know that I would consider like, quote unquote, wrong is asking for more than you can promise. If you are like our new business owner, if you've never had a successful launch or never hosted a summit before, and you don't know how it's gonna go, it's a big ask to require that anyone does anything for it. You know, if you don't have anything someone can look at that proves that you know what you're doing, you can create offers that work, but then you require that they promote it, like why would they? That's a risk for them to take. They work hard to build their audience. So why would they want to risk that trust they build by putting something in front of them that they really don't know what the quality is going to be like? So that's something else to consider asking for more than you can promise your speakers is a pretty big deal on something I really look a lot at when people pitch me for a summit if they are requiring anything, I'm like, okay, am I gonna see a return that equals like, what would it cost me really, to do this. To take a promotion of my own business away or to do more value add for my people and put this person in front of them instead. So those are the three places people go wrong, blindly adding requirements, adding requirements out of scarcity, and then just asking for more than you can promise.
So now I think I'll be getting off my soapbox. Now, I want to talk through the different things I have personally done in the past. Now, to be totally honest with you, I don't remember what I did in my first couple of summits, like my 2018 summit, no idea. I want to say I might have even done like two emails, but like I shouldn't have, I definitely shouldn't have. But I will talk through the options I remember. I remember I have required one email and one social media post. I have done a summit recently where I had no promo requirements. And most recently, I did one email and one social media post with a pretty hard focus on those expectations. So I'm going to talk through all of those things. Of course, I've seen other people require like three plus emails with a 5000 person email list and a 30% open rate. Please don't do that, okay? Please never ever do that. If you have to ask why, and you can ask, you can totally ask come to me on Instagram and Ask. I should just record an episode on that. Maybe I have. But just don't do it. Let's just start with that.
And talking through the different things I have done, I don't think any of my options are really like wrong are necessarily better than the other. I don't think that if you've required more than like one email, it's necessarily wrong either. I'll talk through why I made those decisions and how they went and then we'll go through what might be best for you. So my no promotion requirement was something I tested out in my summit for designers last March, and there were a couple of reasons for this. First, I wanted to increase the likelihood of people I hadn't built relationships with saying yes. So when I hosted that summit, I had not touched the business. I ran that summit for in a year, since the last time I had run that summit. So I had not been building relationships, I hadn't been talking to anybody. I haven't talked to a lot of my speakers. And for the last time, I had pitch them to speak. That, for me, that doesn't feel good. I don't like that. I don't like transactional relationships, and that's what it felt like. So I didn't feel comfortable values wise, requiring anything of them. They were doing me a big enough favor by agreeing to be a part of the summit, you know, trusting that I was still going to show up and do a great job, even though I had disappeared off the face of the earth. So I didn't feel comfortable having any type of requirements. And it was also an experiment. You know, part of my job here at Summit in a Box is experimenting with summits and reporting back on the results. And this was a way for me to see what would happen if we didn't require anything and just hosted a really awesome event, and loved on our people instead. Overall, it went fine. Fewer people promoted for sure, but we still saw good results. And the people who promoted were the ones that wanted to, which are going to be the people who bring the best results anyways. Right? People are always going to show up better, and have more effective promotions when they're promoting because they want to, and not because they have to. So when you don't have requirements, it's just the people who want to who are promoting.
So before I did that, the requirements I had the previous time I posted that summit, it was one email and one social media post, which was just really mentioned in my pitch email to them, and then on the speaker information page. So people who didn't promote did hear from me, like I emailed everyone who had not promoted at all like the week before the summit was just like, hey, I noticed your affiliate link hasn't gotten any clicks. Here's a custom email I wrote from you. Here's your link. Let me know if you have any questions. You know, but I didn't necessarily make that requirement super obvious up front. I didn't push it at all, it wasn't in the contract or anything like that, and really, it worked just fine for the type of people I was working with. Bigger names, did tend to conveniently ignore it, which I expected. But overall, most people promoted and saw good results. And really, for me, I would say this is probably the option I'll default to in the future. It's kind of like my go to option is, you know, upfront saying one email one social media posts, but not necessarily like making people like sign the dotted line saying yes, I see that and agree to it, or whatever.
In my most recent summit though, the one we hosted in December, our requirement was one email on one social media post, just like this last example, but we put a big focus on those expectations. I pushed them hard. And what I mean by that is, I talked about it specifically in our pitch email. But instead of just saying like, here's the requirement, I said, here's the requirement, and then I went on to say that I would rather have them turn me down if it was going to be a burden on them and on their promotion calendar than agree and have it be an issue. So I basically was saying, if you can't do this, like I would rather have you say no to this event, I mentioned it in the contract. It wasn't necessarily like do this or else but it was in there. And I had a box for them to check in their speaker information form saying that they understood this requirement. You know, I said, we are here to get you results we are showing up for you, we expect you to show up for us and everyone else and we had them check that box. Which was a lot more upfront than I've ever been before, but there are reasons for that.
So I feel like I'm at a place in my business where I have something to offer these people being associated with us is generally good for someone's business. Our audience trust our recommendations, I hire a ton of people I know, I refer a ton of people I know, and we have a relatively large audience. So I'm confident that people will see results from being a part of our events. We've hosted tons of events that have seen great results, you know, it was a proven event, all of that good stuff. Alongside that was the fact that I was knowingly pitching speakers who would generally tend to not promote if I let them, and I wasn't okay with that. Both for the results we were looking for, but mostly for the sake of other speakers. I was not okay with someone coming in, and just kind of riding everyone else's coattails just because they felt like they were too big of a deal to promote are too busy to promote. If they're too busy, I don't want them to be a part of this one. And like that's our that's our reasoning behind it. But because of the relationships we had with these people, it went just fine. One person did turn us down because she was doing her own promotion and wouldn't have been able to promote which is exactly what I wanted. Everyone else was totally cool with it. They got it they stuck to the requirements minus one person who skipped the email which, whatever that's going to happen right. So that was what I did most recently. So hopefully that gives you a little insight get your wheels turning a little bit for some of the different options out there really that last one I would feel like is more ballsy is the only word I can come up with, so I'm sorry if that's not you know, overly, I don't know lady like to say. And I might not recommend that to everyone but it felt it felt good to us.
So let's talk about when it does or it doesn't make sense. So let's start with when I don't personally feel like it makes sense to require promotion. If you're a newer business, hosting a first time summit and don't have a lot to offer in the way of proof that you'll deliver results, it's probably not a great option. If you're in that place, your goal should just be to land speakers. That's your number one goal. Land speakers who have the same audience as your Summit. Whether or not they all promote, being associated with other people in the industry, and building those relationships is a great thing for your business. And even if only, let's say, half promote, you're gonna see great growth you can build on in your next event, and maybe add in requirements then. Now, if you don't have requirements, you don't necessarily have to like flaunt the fact that they don't have to promote because that will actually discourage them from doing so you're like basically promoting that they don't have to, but I would leave off the promo requirement. So if you're someone thinking, but I'm hosting a summit for the results. First, I'll say to you, be realistic about the results you'll see with a first time summit with a new business. Also, I'd encourage you to look to the future, rather than just immediate results. summits bring so much ongoing benefit, especially when you focus on people on relationships, so look to the future, and what results you'll see from that. And also, of course, feel free to ignore me, I tend to err on the side of valuing relationships over numbers.
So for me, I'd rather someone said yes, pour into that relationship during my summit, grow my business in the process, and then how that relationship to continue leveraging moving forward. You know, if there was any doubt in the type of results I could bring. Another another time, it doesn't necessarily make sense to require promotion is if you're pitching someone who doesn't have an audience, or who does not have the same audience. So with our most recent Summit, our speakers we had about like inclusive events and like inclusive payment plans, they didn't necessarily have the exact audience that our summit was targeted to. So I didn't place a requirement on that, because like, it's not going to benefit any of us, for them to be promoting something to an audience that the thing wasn't created for, right? So I did remove the promo requirement from those people, and that's something else you can consider.
So let's talk about when it does make sense. First, well, I would say the biggest thing, when you have proven results to stand by on your business, that's when I feel like it makes sense to promote. It doesn't have to be a summit, but before you require that anyone puts you in front of their hard earned audience, you should have some results that show that it's safe for them to do so. So for the most part, we do talk to more experienced business owners here, in which case, this probably isn't as much of a concern for you. But if you are listening, and you're newer, it's something to consider. And then of course, it makes sense when you're pitching people with the right audience. Overall, something else to consider is that the better your relationship is with a person, the more likely they are to promote whether or not there are any types of requirements. If they like you, understand your values, value what you do in your business, they're gonna promote for you, right? And along with that, the more well targeted your event is, the more people will want to promote as well, which is why relationships and targeting are some of our biggest focuses in the Launch with a Summit Accelerator because those are the things that bring you results. Not any types of requirements you plus anybody.
So don't let seeing any type of industry standard promo requirements make you just default to thinking it's the right move for you. Reflect on why you're adding that requirement and if your speakers can expect a return that makes it worth it, okay, go for it. They need to benefit too, it's not all just about you as the host so please keep that in mind as well. We are all about feel good summit to that benefit everybody involved. I want to see that reflected in your event as well. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode For show notes and resources mentioned head to summithosthangout.com/210. Now go out and take action to plan, strategize and launch your high converting virtual Summit.
