summits.fun

Easy Summits

After running nearly 70 live virtual summits, I came across a new model that offered some powerful advantages. Less effort for hosts, less work for speakers, more convenient for audience members, and more leads.

If you’re a coach, consultant, or expert looking to generate 600+ warm leads without running a complicated event yourself, read on.

How Live Summits Fall Short

I love running live summits. My summit format is highly interactive, so, between the speakers, we get to have breakouts and hotseats and all kinds of good stuff with those who attend.

At some of my summits, we have had incredible connections, powerful networking, and just an amazing time. The speakers find a great stage because the audience is highly engaged. A wonderful experience.

But notice I said some. Because at others of my summits, I have found myself energetically dragging the event along. If the audience doesn’t engage, or if the speakers fail to promote, we can end up with a painfully, awkwardly quiet room.

With a live summit requiring people to commit their whole day to the event, it can be difficult to get the best, most interesting people to invest their time to be there, especially now that live events are back in full force, and with more competition from so many other virtual events.

How Recorded Summits Fall Short

Recorded summits eliminate that problem of needing people to engage live, but it also eliminates the opportunity for live engagement.

A traditional recorded summit has a variety of recorded talks available for a very limited time. The theory is that participants will clear their schedule and spend the day watching the talks. The reality is that most people watch one or two, then wander off.

It can be a decent lead generation tool for the host, because people register aspirationally, hoping they’ll find time to attend. For the speakers, however, it’s usually underwhelming.

Easy Summits Bridge the Gap

Looking at the two traditional types of summits, each has gaps.

Live summits offer engagement, and the attention of the audience, but only if enough people attend, and most people don’t have the time to spend a day, so they don’t even register.

Recorded summits don’t take up the participant’s day, but that means they’re not actually consuming the content.

What if we could create something as accessible as a recorded summit, but with the engagement of a live summit.

That’s what the Easy Summit is all about.

Easy Summits are a new format for summit:

And the best part is that, for our hosts, we do almost everything for them. Our team and our technology take care of everything from speaker management to lead tracking to content delivery and all the rest. The only thing we ask our hosts to do is invite their network to speak on the summit. And because the model only requires speakers to bring an average of 12 registrations each, they don’t need to invite major influencers, just knowledgeable experts with a community to invite.

How do Easy Summits generate a guaranteed 600+ leads? Let me tell you…
(Ready to talk now? You can click here to book a call.)

Gamified

People like to have choices, then they enjoy having the choice made for them. For example, you wouldn’t go to a restaurant with one item on the menu, but once you get there and see 20 options, you ask the waiter for a recommendation, and order that.

For that reason, every day, we email the audience with 1-3 recommended speakers to check out. Then, once they have listened to that one, the player page recommends additional talks for them to listen to, encouraging them to binge one after another.

Each talk they listen to earns them points which get them fantastic prizes offered by our hosts.

The order of the speaker highlights is based on promotional results, so the more actively they promote, the earlier they are highlighted, giving them more audience engagement.

On Demand

The summit is available to the audience for 20-45 days (usually 30), and they can listen to any talk that interests them at any time.

This means that they will engage with more of the speakers, giving the speakers more ears. Some of our top promoters have had as many as 70-90 listens (defined as listening for 10+ minutes, which we can track with our software.)

The flexible nature of the event also increases registrations, thus lead generation. Audience members aren’t being asked if they can dedicate an entire day. They are being asked if they might have 15 minutes sometimes during the month, increasing conversion.

Audio

There are a number of advantages to audio over video. In a perfect world, when we speak, the audience would sit in rapt attention watching and listening to us. In the real world, people are busy and distractible.

People engage with summits to pick up a new idea or two, and to discover experts and guides they might want to engage with. That means that their attention must be earned. If you ask for their full attention up front, you just won’t get it.

With audio, we ask them for precisely as much attention as they are ready to give. They can listen to a speaker while taking a walk or exercising or whatever. If a speaker is particularly dynamic or says something interesting, the audience member will focus their full attention right onto that talk.

But before you can get all their attention, you need some of their attention, and the accessibility of audio, lets you get some of their attention before you get all of it.

For speakers, of course, it is easier as well. They don’t have to worry about slides, lights, or any of the rest of the visual details that can distract from their message.

And the numbers bear this out, with our lowest engaged speakers getting more listens than our live summits regularly deliver.

40-70 Speakers for a More Resilient Promotion Base

A summit is a shared audience model. The speakers each promote to build a shared audience which they all get the benefit of.

After running over 70 summits, I have identified a clear pattern.

1/3 of speakers will underpromote.
1/3 of speakers will overpromote.
1/3 of speakers will do the average.

Of course, it’s not exactly 1/3. It’s approximately 1/3, so when we have 8 or 10 speakers, the results are highly variable, with some summits getting 400 registrations while others get 65.

Easy Summits have 40-70 speakers, and with that larger base, the averages play out more predictably, allowing us to guarantee our hosts 600 or more registrations, and with our best summit so far getting 1,150.

That means our host walked away with 1,150 fresh, aligned, engaged leads!

Collaborative Book

For each of our summits, we offer our speakers the chance to be part of a collaborative book. We already have the transcript from their talk, and with the application of AI technology we are able to easily convert the transcript into a compelling book chapter.

The book serves as another incentive to promote for the speakers, as only those speakers who promote to a certain level get into the book without having to pay for it.

The book is also a tool for the audience, as they can reference the PDF version of the book to go back and return to key ideas without having to listen again to an entire speech.

Custom Software

The entire summit runs on the GGS Player software, a custom software suite built explicitly to run these exact summits.

The software was built by and is regularly improved by agentic coding, allowing us to be extremely responsive to both speaker and audience requests. Regularly, we hear from our stakeholders with features and functions that would improve their summit experience. We are often able to implement those improvements within a day or two. Sometimes we even do it in a few minutes.

What It All Means

Put it all together and we have a more powerful platform for everyone.

Audience members are able to get easier access to valuable information.

Speakers are able to get better exposure to audiences and more leads from speaking.

Hosts are able to get more leads, credibility, visibility, and authority.

Everyone wins!

Get the Full Benefit as a Host

Does the idea of a guaranteed 600 or more warm, aligned leads with minimal work and effort sound appealing to you? If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, let’s talk about building your summit

Book a call with me to discuss if this might be a fit for you.

Not for you, but you know someone who could use 600 warm leads? Send them this page or forward their name to me. And, yes, I do offer a generous referral fee.

Want to learn a bit more before your call? This is a recording of a recent half hour info session where I explain in greater detail.

Must Do/Get to Do as a Host

As a host there are only 3 things you must do…

  1. Help set the name and branding for your summit (that it’s your summit, not my summit)
  2. Invite experts and knowledgeable people from your community to speak
  3. Pay me

That’s it. You could literally do those three things, sit back, and wait for me to send you the leads, and we’d have a good summit.

But there are many ways you can take this summit that I’m running for you and leverage it to your marketing advantage. Here are a few ways that other hosts have taken advantage of it, but if you have another creative idea, I’m open to it.

Leverage the Daily Emails
You could either write the daily emails yourself or give me a corpus of source material to let AI write them for you. Then you will have the chance to edit and approve them. This lets the audience hear from you every day for 30 days, so you become familiar to them.

Run a Live Masterclass or Event
The summit is normally all pre-recorded, but some hosts have had good success by offering a masterclass or webinar during the run of the event. We use the emails to invite the audience to your event, and, since we’re already emailing them daily, we can promote much more aggressively than we could otherwise.

Other Offers in the Daily Emails
In addition to live events, we can promote anything else in your daily emails. Free PDF books, video trainings, or anything else that serves your strategy

Offer Gifts in the Gamification
Audience members get points for listening to talks. You can offer gifts such as existing classes, free consultations, and other top of funnel, high value offers to move them from the summit closer to a buying opportunity.

Give Multiple Talks
It’s a good idea to give at least one talk on your summit, but you can also give multiple talks which we can specifically promote through the daily emails. It’s your summit, so you can speak as much as you want. The more they hear you, the more know-like-trust you build.

Questions? Email me at michael@guywhoknowsaguy.com