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Key Takeaways
- Choosing the right speaker is critical to an event’s success, and there are six questions that can help you determine what you’re looking for and how to find the right person.
- Approach the speaker decision process like you’re making a hiring decision. Talk with several prospects, call references and ask for results from the last event they did.
Last year, an executive at a tech company asked me whether I could keynote their employee resource group event. I knew there were speakers out there who were better aligned with their women’s program, so I kindly passed on the opportunity and sent several other names instead. I’m an ally, but I was also the wrong person for that stage. Their audience deserved someone who could speak from lived experience.
I’ve delivered hundreds of keynotes, workshops and retreats on workplace mental health, burnout and boundaries, communication and conflict for organizations like Amazon, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, LinkedIn and WebMD, but I still keep a running list of speakers I refer organizers to, because the right speaker serves everyone better. Disappointing sessions usually trace back to a good speaker standing in front of the wrong room.
The following six questions will help you decide what you want to actually receive for your investment in a speaker, and how to make sure you get the right one.
1. What needs to be different when people leave?
Organizers usually start their event planning process by focusing on a topic. I’d rather you start with the question of what needs to be different when people walk out of the room.
The speaker who raises the professional caliber of your conference isn’t necessarily the one who re-energizes a room after lunch. If you just want to attract registrations with a marquee name like Michelle Obama, that’s one thing, but if you want to run a workshop that gives managers practical tools for navigating employee mental health, that’s another.
Before you shortlist any particular speaker, answer these questions:
- What do you want attendees to do differently after they leave your session?
- Are you trying to inspire the room, teach it something new or change how people work?
- Is this session meant to draw registrations or serve the people who are already coming?
When I ask an organizer what success looks like to them, and the conversation goes quiet, I usually find that they’re not really ready to book a speaker.
2. What kind of speaker does this audience need?
Do you want lived experience, academic depth or someone who does the work daily? Those are three different speakers, yet organizers treat them as interchangeable.
I once spoke at a university and it turned out that the audience really wanted an academic. They had come for theory and peer-reviewed research, and I showed up as a practitioner with tools and exercises. Within 10 minutes, I could feel my presentation wasn’t what they were expecting.
The same thinking applies to diversity. I ask every organizer who else is speaking at their event, and I’ve declined invitations that would have put me on an all-white, all-male panel. I believe that your speakers should reflect the audience in front of them.
3. What does your speaking fee cover?
Speaking fees generally range from a modest honorarium to well into six figures. What that covers is rarely obvious from the outside, but it’s customary to include the calls before the event, the design work that turns those calls into a real session, the day itself and the debrief afterward. I also consider travel days to be working days, particularly for a multi-day offsite or leadership retreat.
Your speaker’s reputation is part of how your event gets marketed, too. Attendees have told me they registered for a conference because they saw my name on the agenda. Professional development budgets are tight, and HR leaders who can attend one conference a year regularly choose based on the speaker roster.
Still, organizers tend to lean too heavily on public visibility when choosing a speaker. A large social media following only tells you someone can market themselves, which is a very different skill than holding a room’s attention for 90 minutes. A bestselling book only tells you they can write. Neither tells you how a speaker handles questions they don’t see coming.
4. How much of this session gets built for us?
I once sat in the audience at an industry conference and recognized that the keynote was giving the exact same speech they’d given at another event I’d attended. In fact, someone I knew leaned over partway through to mention that fact to me.
To avoid stale or irrelevant material, ask what the speaker’s customization process actually involves. Dropping your logo onto a deck isn’t the same as targeting their content. They need to understand what you actually want. I once designed a conflict inventory workshop for the people team at an enterprise software company then realized in the prep call that they didn’t even want me to do conflict training. Rather, they wanted to me to equip them to deliver the training themselves. Understanding that in advance helped me reshape the entire build, from the exercises down to the facilitator notes.
5. How do you adapt when a session isn’t landing?
Another time, I was mid-session in a workshop on boundaries and self-care, about to launch into a delegation activity, when audience feedback revealed they didn’t know how to prioritize. You can’t hand work off until you know which work matters most, so how were they supposed to delegate?
So we stopped. I set the slides aside, picked up a flip chart and markers and built a prioritization exercise on the spot. We returned to delegation afterward, and it landed because we’d cleared the roadblock.
Plenty of speakers just keep clicking through their deck regardless of what’s happening in the room. While that can work for a large keynote audience, managers and executives in a training session can tell when a facilitator is just delivering a script and not addressing their needs.
It’s hard to know in advance whether a prospective speaker can adapt on the fly, which is why it’s important to go beyond the one-sheet and check references and try to watch a full-length video of their past presentations.
6. How far out is your calendar booked?
Strong speakers fill their calendars a year out, so booking late narrows your options to whoever happens to be available. Try to start looking for speakers as far ahead of time as possible. This allows you to get good prices on travel and engage in planning calls to help the expert tailor their content to your needs.
Of course, you don’t always have enough time to plan ahead, but you can still make a better decision by working closely with the speaker on their content. I once accepted a booking with under two weeks of lead time, but it went well because we were honest about what was possible.
If you’re up against a tight timeline, you might also consider hosting a virtual session, which opens up your options, though I’d press hard on whether that speaker can truly engage people remotely. Otherwise, your attendees will experience your event as just one more meeting on their calendar.
Final thoughts on hiring a professional speaker
The organizers I most respect approach this process as if they were making a hiring decision. They talk with several prospects before choosing one. They call references. They ask what the post-event survey data from the person’s last speech actually said rather than relying on testimonials. When they approach it this way, some conclude they don’t need an outside speaker at all, which can be the right answer.
When you address the questions above before you sign anything, you’ll walk into your event knowing exactly who and what you booked. That way, your audience will have a productive and engaging experience. Remember, you’ve got this!
