As you can see by the categories I’ve selected, this post covers a lot of ground, but it’s nothing if not a Friday Funny.  You may have noticed that, the more I get my dander up, the more sarcastic I get and nothing does it as well as a Communication Pet Peeve! Here’s what happened.

My dh gets a bunch of emails from various Marketing Gurus each day.  Every so often they invite him to a free seminar where they give away a small amount of free information about marketing your business and then ask you to spend anywhere from $374 to $1997 for thier eBook, software product or consulting services.

We’ve been to so many of these the formula is obvious. It begins with 15 minutes of the host telling you why the speaker guru is so great, followed by 15 minutes of the Speaker Guru telling you how wonderful his life now as compared when he was a homeless, wifeless convenience store operator.  The next 15 minutes is where you pay attention because this is where the Speaker Guru tells you about his eBook, software or consulting services designed to make you drool.  The final 15 minutes is devoted to the “pitch.”  This is where they tell you the product is really worth $900 bagillion, but today ONLY, you can get it for a pittance ($374-$1997), but you have to act now because they will only sell (insert smallish number here) total at that incredibly low price!

By the way, the entire seminar is done in sketchy video or with a professional looking slide show screen where the slides consist of a white screen and the EXACT words being spoken by the Speaker Guru.  Sometimes you’re in for a treat as they do show you the product or pictures of insanely happy people who are now so rich they could buy Brazil with their pocket change.  Normally, the Speaker Guru does an atrocious job of speaking, stammers over his words and can’t spell the words on his slide show.

So last week we settled in for what we thought would be a predictable pitch as we awaited any tidbits of info that might be helpful and to determine if his product might be something worth our time only to find a goldmine of humor and an idea that will help YOU become better communicators!

The hour seminar was EXACTLY on schedule except for a few rather obvious attempts to mask the schedule executed by very poor actors.  The seminar began exactly on the hour with the host telling us that the Speaker Guru was so incredibly busy he had a last minute consulting call he had to attend so the host proceeded to take this opportunity to tell us how wonderful the Speaker Guru is.  In between he “let it slip” that there were 1000 people on the call and over 6000 waiting for one of us to get disconnected so we better close down all other computer programs in order to avoid that terrible tragedy.

At exactly 15 minutes in, the Speaker Guru, suddenly got free and began to tell us how benevolent he is to be sharing this info with us and how far he’d come in life due to this incredible system.  At exactly 30 minutes past the hour, the Speaker Guru asked for a “volunteer” from the audience that wouldn’t mind making a bunch of money for nothing tonight.   The slide show turned from the title that had been on the screen for 15 minutes to a “live picture of his brand new ClickBank account” that, after exactly 15 minutes had been refreshed to reveal that he had made $647.16!  Amazing, huh?

At exactly 45 minutes into the seminar we learned how much he wanted for this software, but what we didn’t know is this:

1. What did it do exactly?

2. What did the “volunteer” from the studio audience actually sell to make $647.16?

3. Why would selling to more than 20 people (at $997 each) dilute the system for everyone and end the world as we know it?

4. If there really were 18 people who purchased this software before the seminar ended at exactly on the next hour…

Needless to say we didn’t fork over $997 for something we didn’t understand.  Would you?  But it did spark a new passion inside me to provide even more in depth information to my customers during my seminars.  I’ll be announcing my new seminars very soon, but be assured that they will NOT follow this tired model.  I think this seminar spent about three minutes telling us about the software and what it could do for his customers and about 57 minutes telling us how wonderful, generous, caring and rich he was!  Actually, I think I will follow this model.  I’m going to spend no more than three minutes giving a bit of background to the topic and 57 minutes sharing in-depth, valuable tips for solving that particular communication issue for my customers.

Have you ever been to one of these marketing guru seminars?  What was your experience?

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