Signs to look for when finding a true professional speaker

If you are going to get a group of people into a room all at the same time who would all rather be somewhere else, you’d better have a good reason, good content, good information for them to be there.

Often the answer to this is:- "Yes I do".  After all you wouldn’t be doing this now would you!

However, to think this far and then concentrate on venue, the chair layout the seating, the guest list and then think about who is going to be delivering this content, imparting information or being the reason enough for the audience wanting to be there is usually left to last minute or given little credit. 

Well that’s just like organising a wedding, hiring the venue, working out the colour, sending out invites and then working out who the Bride and Groom should be!

In today’s connected world, audiences are wanting more and more ‘content’.

The biggest insight I’ve seen is the growth of Tech being used by the events industry in order to plan, plot and pre-engage with the audience and then use it to try and continue engagement during and after the event too.

Then they think about speakers….

The truly professionals speakers are used to dealing with those who are savvy enough to ask, to help you engage with your audience BEFORE the event, as well as AFTER.  Some professional speakers offer pre event and post event follow-up email messages – (in marketing speaker: we now call it nurture and drip campaigns), while others offer conference calls and mini consultations.

However, the true professional speaker also now understands they have to contend with technology while they are on the stage, but not many can actually handle it.

Traditionally we called it heckling.  Nowadays it’s called, ‘interaction and engagement’.

So for a true professional speaker who can handle today’s fast pace changing world, make sure your speaker can:

•   Manage taking questions and providing answers almost as if ‘off-the-cuff’, if they can’t they don’t have depth of knowledge greater than that of your audience
•  Interact and be comfortable with social media, live feed and audience apps while they are on stage – if they can’t deal with this, it means they might not be confident in their presentation enough to allow for distractions
•  Offer your audience tasters and teasers before the event and provide relevant follow up info – if they can’t, you will have more workload to do in order to get, keep and build audience loyalty.
•  Ensure their message is on task and about your event and not promoting themselves – if you use a speaker’s standard template email, chances are YOU are promoting them rather than the speaker writing something for you and your audience to promote YOU and YOUR EVENT which means you’ve just given your audience’s loyalty to the speaker.

When you engage with a speaker, always think how they can help you, pre, during and post the event and then make sure it’s down in writing in a contract.  It’s why we build such a flexible speaker management booking process to cover their involvement from start to finish of the event and not just for the speaking bit.

Using iwantaspeaker.com will help you standardise the process of working with speakers.

How Do You Pick which Expo?

It’s Expo season and it’s in full swing.  But which one do you go to?

One of the top reasons is: To Gain Knowledge.  And one of the best ways is to listen to the speakers and the Keynotes as it’s a quick way of learning new information.

So, you do your homework and work out which of the Expos’ breakout sessions and keynotes you want to attend and could be of most value and then you consider that while you are there, you might as well check ahead to see what exhibitors are there and arrange a few meet-ups. 

Come the day and….

You get to the speaker session and….

The room is empty. 

The Speaker didn’t show.

Yes, it’s annoying.

If you had known they wouldn’t show, would you honestly have gone?  It’s only at this point you realise that you will at least be getting something from the day with the meet-ups and the exhibition.  But reality is, if you knew the speaker wasn’t going to be there, you probably wouldn’t be either.

Speakers impart knowledge. This is a great way to learn about what’s hot, what’s trending and what your company needs to have or do right now.

Of the Expos I attended last year, on average, 11% of sessions were cancelled because of no speaker on the day.  5% had alternative speakers from the name advertised simply because the Event Organiser found a replacement speaker at the last minute and in one case, they had a speaker do repeat performances just to ensure that the audience had someone!

Event Organisers work hard to ensure the right people are on the stage to impart this knowledge so you are drawn to the event in the first place.  So it doesn’t help them either when a Speaker decides not to show. Not professional of the speaker and it’s them that’s potentially just wasted your time.

The only speakers the Event Organisers can 99% guarantee of turning up are the Keynotes as usually these are booked via a speaker bureau and are charged big bucks for the privilege.

Now, while you and I know that these big name speakers are interesting as a draw to get us to possibly go, it’s usually the smaller, lesser known speakers in between that we go to hear as we know their content is sometimes more valuable, relevant and related to our own business. But it’s these that are the hit and miss.

Because of this, we decided it’s about time to set a Professional Standard for booking speakers and created a speaker management system that does this –iwantaspeaker.com.

Our online process reduces the risk when it comes to hiring speakers, which means Events ran by your Event Organiser will be less likely to have a “No Shows”. 

If you’ve attended an event with a ‘No Show’, tell the organiser about us as and be assured that if they use our system, they will have our 'Icon logo' on their event which means you can be sure the next time you attend their event, you will get to see the speaker you wanted and know that they will be of a Professional Standard.  No Logo? No gogo! 

That’s why we built   iwantaspeaker.com