The Healthcare Meeting and Event Podcast: Recent Episodes

View Details

Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the health care meeting and event Podcast. Today, I want to share with you the 10 tips of how to give a killer talk. Now, these tips come from over 20 years of experience as speaking as a professional keynote speaker. And I've made all of the mistakes that I'm going to be talking about today. So believe me, I've been there. And it hurts, right? It hurts personally. And it's sad when you don't deliver the value that you really intended to deliver for your audience and your client. So tip number one is, in the old days, we used to transfer knowledge, knowledge transference was really what a keynote speaker did, here's information you don't know, and I'm gonna give it to you, then that wasn't good enough. We moved on to engagement and entertainment. In the second phase of the evolution of speaking, we took knowledge transference, and we weaponized it with fun, engaging dialogue that provided some interactivity and engagement. That was a good time, we really made some far better impacts on the way in which we served audiences. But today, in the ultimate phase of evolutionary development for speakers, we now know that we have to deliver impact. And that's tip number one, is go through the transition of going beyond just delivering transference of knowledge. And really move towards understanding your audience so well that you impact them personally and professionally. But most importantly, emotively, that's about more than just what they're thinking it's about the way they feel. And that's what it means to deliver impact. So that's tip number one. Tip number two, remember, it's not about you. It's about them. So many keynote speakers get up on the platform, and they use it as an opportunity to boast about their accomplishments and their successes. There's nothing worse than watching a speaker, talk about anything that would suggest how much better they are than the audience. In fact, the most beautiful people, the most incredible talks I've ever heard were people that were, in many ways, self deprecating, and in many ways, minimize their themselves in so many ways. And it was beautiful right there. their authentic self was there, and it was there to serve. And it was obvious. So forget you. It's not about you, it's about them. And to the extent you can serve them, because there is no greater honor than to be asked to speak at an event. It's an incredible honor. If you can really focus on how to deliver novel and actionable value, you're going to win. And so as your audience, the other one is use designs is tip number three use designs widely. I see so many people that develop these designs that are esoteric and complicated. And really, it's unfortunate, because it takes away from what could have otherwise been a really, really good presentation. I do my presentations, typically without any text whatsoever. And if I use a PowerPoint presentation, it's behind me as a series of images or videos. I don't need that crutch. I'm there because I love what I'm talking about. And I love the ability to serve that audience. So when you use design, use it really carefully. Be respectful, make it minimalistic, and clean. And remember, it's not your talk. Your talk is what you say the PowerPoint is just a backdrop. Okay, here's tip number four, ditch the gimmicks. I see so many people, I don't want to mention any specificity here because it would call them out. But I see speakers out on the road throwing gimmicky things like stuffed animals and other objects that square up with their theme into the audience. And it just no man, it's rough. It's it's diminishing. And it's disrespectful to the audience. So be really careful about the gimmicks that you use.

View Details

Hi. This is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the healthcare meeting and event Podcast. Today I'm going to talk about speaker selection. There is nothing that is more important for a healthcare meeting planner than to select the right speaker. Now, the problem is many speaker resources that are out there have some conflicts of interest, they have exclusive speakers that you can only booked through them. And the arrangement they make with these special keynote speakers is that they guarantee them so many bookings per year. And so who are they going to put in front of you? Well, an exclusive speaker, of course, good for them, good for their speaker, not necessarily good for you. So the biggest pitfall we have is many of the speaker resources have a financial conflict of interest that's endemic, that's a problem. And you always need to make certain that when you're looking at speaker selections that whoever your speaker resources, they're not just putting forward exclusive speakers. The other thing is, believe it or not, we're in a time where certain speaker resources actually get special financial allurement from booking specific speakers. And of course, that spa that's bad for everybody. It's bad for the industry. And it's certainly bad for speaking professionals. And I think it's really, really bad in particular for meeting and event planners. So what do you use them? In order to make your decision? How do you authenticate your decision? Well, the right thing to do is to make certain that the speaker cares enough about working with you, where they provide you a detailed talk abstract, that has a trend map or trend analysis that they're anchoring their presentation to. In other words, they tell you in writing, this is what I'm going to talk about. And this is why I'm going to talk about and how it's germane to your audience. Now, it can't just be germane to your audience, it has to have two other components. Number one, it has to be novel, your audience doesn't want to enter the echo chamber. They want newness, I mean, that's why they're at your event. After all, if they want oldness, they can Google it, you need to bring in experts that are bringing novel information into the room. And that is what provides significant improvements in audience satisfaction. The second thing is the information that's provided by the speaker should be actionable, like really actionable. In other words, we want new information that our audiences haven't heard about before. And we want them to be able to apply it immediately within their job function or their organization. That's how we deliver value. In fact, the number one complaint that audiences lover against meetings and meeting planners is that they spent money and time and they felt that it wasn't worth it. If they don't achieve a return on their time and money investment, they will not come back next year. Conversely, if you deliver great novelty, that's highly actionable. Those are the fundamental principles of the best events in the world without a doubt. Now, here's another issue that you have to think about. We typically hire opening keynote speakers, these are professional speakers, like myself, I speak at over 70 healthcare events per year. I've been doing it for a long time, and I deliver an engaging, fun presentation as to most professional speakers. The problem is in between the opening keynote speaker and the closing keynote speaker, which are typically professionals. They are conference speakers. Oftentimes, these are experts from inside the industry, or just individuals that have an interesting story that we bring in as part of the through line of our presentations in our events. Here's the problem. They're not expert speakers.

View Details

Hi, this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the healthcare meeting and event Podcast. Today I'm going to talk about something I'm really excited about. And it's something that really every meeting and healthcare event planner really should think about. We're in a time now where attendees are looking for layered and dynamic value, they want their involvement with an event to be layered, meaning that it's more than they used to get listening to a speaker going to a trade show going to breakout sessions, they want more than that. And the other thing that they want is they want it to be dynamic. In other words, they want the value to be continuous. They want to create that connection where there's a continuous ongoing value. And the best meeting planners are actually creating designs where they're making sure to add layered and dynamic value. And that makes those events the must attend events, always. So how do you do it? Well, today, we're going to talk about one of the value added options that you may want to consider. Because it is so powerful, it is very contemporaneous, and everybody's doing it. And that's what we call cert stacking our certification stacking. You know, recently, most large corporations are now at a point where they are accepting certifications in lieu of four year college degrees. In fact, if you take a look at some of the certification programs that are out there, you're going to make a lot more money for a certification that you get in 18 months than you are in a college degree that may take you five years, one cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 7000. The other one cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 38,000. It's pretty easy to see that if you can pay less and get more it's a better way to go. But micro certs are a new thing, especially in healthcare. And that's what we're going to be talking about today we're going to be talking about stacking micro certs. Now, micro serves our certification training programs, our certificate training programs. And the certificate training programs are short, but they provide really, really high levels of power in terms of specialized learning. But they also provide another notch on the belt of the stakeholder, they can now put the certs on their LinkedIn profile, they can provide this information to their HR department or to their supervisor. And it may in fact very much impact their ultimate revenue or income with their career, it also can impact their career advancement and the list goes on and on. So that's why great events are starting to add certs. And we're involved in many of these right now. And it's really, really exciting. Some of the more popular certs that are happening right now our patient experience training, we do a program called Patient champion, we have another program called certified patient advocate. And we have another program called certified patient experience master. And so there's training programs that go all the way up to people who own patient experience on a hospital or clinic or even drug company, all the way down to patient facing stakeholder. So certainly p x training or CX customer experience or consumer training is a big one. And this can be done in an hour workshop. And they're really, really fun, although typically, a good CERT program is going to be a two hour workshop. The other thing that we're seeing now is these micro certs that include things like certified remote worker, or certified remote worker leader and these are cert programs that help leaders do a better job of leading their remote teams. And it also provides the smaller courses certified remote worker, which is a course that helps workers understand how to compartmentalize their work and home life and how to increase productivity and those kinds of things.

View Details

Hi this is Nick Webb and welcome to another episode of the healthcare meeting and event podcast. Well, today I'd like to talk about the three aspects of what really makes a great health care event. Now, many events in different industries really don't suffer from the level of complexity that we suffer from in healthcare events. In fact, there are over 120 different trends that are happening within the healthcare landscape. With that many trends, we have to decide, you know, really, what is our design? What do we want to focus on? What's really, ultimately impacting the audience. And in order to do that, we have to do great research. Now the way that we do it in our businesses, we actually build out what's called a trend map. And the trend map looks at over 120 different key trends. And it really looks at who are the attendees? What's their job title? What's their organization? What are the industry indicators that are really determining where there is near Earth issues that they haven't probably heard about before, because we know that novelty, and action ability in content is critical for a great healthcare event. So step one, and the number one issue that we have to begin with is really the research. What are these people care about today? Now, one of the mistakes that is typically made is we do a vo see our voice of the customer approach towards attempting to understand what the audience is concerned about. But if you were to ask somebody a year before the iPod, or the iPhone was invented, you know, did they need an iPhone, they would have no idea what that was, I mean, they couldn't conceive that all knowledge in the universe could be contained in one device, the second, go into your pocket, right? And our audiences don't know either. They don't know what they don't know. And if we're counting on them to tell us what we should be delivering, we are going to deliver a really, really mediocre event. Remember, the two things that your audience wants is novelty, and other words, newness. And that means they absolutely do not want to enter the echo chamber, we have to give them novelty. But it can't just be new, it has to be actionable. So as we're looking at our research, we have to go beyond our audience to understand what the key trends are. And we need to create the linkage between those emerging and existing near Earth trends. And the things that that audience needs to know this is the foundation of the best events in the world in healthcare. And in our particular situation in healthcare. Well, we of course, have the challenge of half team to understand all of these disparate in a amorphous trends, but it's doable. We do it all the time. And again, we do it through building a trend map. The second thing that you have to do is you have to build a through line that's based on that research. So let's say that we're doing a talk on or an event on patient consumerism for a national association of primary care physicians for an example, one issue that's impacting them in a very big way, probably bigger than they even realize is the impact of hyper consumerism. And that goes far beyond just treating patients nice. It's the impact of digital, and other types of clinical and economic models that they now compete with, we need to know that they don't know it. That's why they're coming to our event, after all. So we have to design a fruit through line of consumerization. And then from there, how do we select the right speakers and the breakout sessions and the engagement methodologies to really make that unbelievable? And then of course, we need to deploy on that. Now, one of the things that I'll be talking a lot about in this podcast series is Cx design, we have to look at our audiences for what they are they are consumers. The question is, are we delivering exceptional experiences across a range of attendee consumers across the five touchpoints that they will experience in experiencing our event or meeting.