Have you ever arranged for one of your firm’s members to give a presentation at a conference, but it seemed to be a dud from a business-development perspective?

So you’ve arranged a presentation for one of your firm’s leading lights – we’ll call her “Janet” – and you wished her well when she left the office. Now, she’s back, and you’re asking her about what she got from it. The response you get is a sort of shrug – “I did the presentation and then I left.” No follow-up, no business cards collected, no subscriptions to the firm’s blog or social media.

One of the challenges I’ve had in getting speaking gigs to the people I most want as clients is one that you may be facing as well – what you want to talk about is not always what they want to hear.

Where do you want to be, professionally, a few years from now? Do you want to –   •  Meet the needs of an industry different from the one you serve now, maybe one that has always fascinated you?   •  Get bigger clients, which are less likely to have a problem with the fees your work is worth?   •  Become an advisor to your clients, offering strategic advice rather than a transactional service?Well … get out your suitcase, we’re going traveling.

Should you be putting more work into getting speaking engagements to build your personal profile as an expert in your field? Just maybe. Consider:• Potential clients get to see what you’re like as a person• You can interact with people from the stage, building a relationship with them• People at the event have more respect for what you say even in ordinary conversations, because you’re wearing that “Speaker” badge (It works! Really!!)• It looks good on social media, on your CV and on your LinkedIn profile

How do you gauge the effectiveness of a presentation you’ve given? Some people might say it was a success if they got through the whole event without an anxiety attack, or if they finished on time, or if they got through all the points they planned to cover. They might say it was a success if there were a lot of people in the audience.

Public speaking can be a hassle. First, there are difficulties in getting the gig (more on that in post #30), you need to prepare a message and maybe the audio-visual to go with it, and there is travel time and expense. Plus, the fact that many business professionals fear and dislike speechifying so much that they would rather have a tooth extracted without anesthetic, than give a speech.

Your potential clients probably get a lot of emails they never read. They get a lot of calls that go to voice mail, which they don’t return. Their LinkedIn feed and Twitter are flooded of content they have no time for.So how do you break through that clutter? By being where they’re already looking.

Public speaking remains one of the most effective ways to connect with potential clients, demonstrate the value you offer, and show that you’re someone that they would enjoy working with. Yet so many business professionals don’t get all their possible benefits from their public speaking program. One reason is that they don’t pick the right audience.

If public speaking is a priority for you in reaching potential clients, every opportunity to be in front of the right audience is precious. You need to get your best results from each presentation. By “results” I mean:

Have you ever finished a speech, accepted your round of applause and then found yourself wondering, “So that’s it? How can I get more benefit from all the time I’ve spent on this presentation?”Here are some simple, easy ways you can multiply your reach from public speaking, to get the best benefit from your engagement. I think that this comes in two ways. In a future post, we’ll look into how to get benefit from social media, as regards public speaking. But in this post, I’ll focus on how to get more uses from the information in your speech.