3 Important Lessons I Learned From Interviewing Today’s Top 2019 Speakers

Going into 2020, just like many of you reading this, I wanted to make sure I had a better speaking business in 2020 than I did last year. However, instead of asking my team what we should do differently, buying new books, or training courses about the speaking industry, I decided to do something a bit different. This year I connected with other speakers from LinkedIn and had conversations focusing on just simple and yet, a fundamental one thing: ‘How do you get speaking gigs?'

• To provide some background context, I have been speaking for a few years and have done 56 events in 2019. Note, I haven’t saved anyone on 9/11, won an Olympic medal, nor won an academic award. In fact, by most keynoting standards, I am pretty below average, a bachelor's degree from a decent university and a few self-published books, but nothing much beyond that. The strategies that I was looking for strategies that will cover non-celebrity and celebrities profiles. 

I did not know what to expect from this new approach, but I took a wide range of different speaker’s profiles. For instance, some of the interviews were speakers who only did unpaid gigs, while others were internationally known celebrities charging mid-five figures! Then it hit me, during these calls, at times the unpaid speakers had the same knowledge about how to ‘get’ speaking gigs as the industry celebrities- none. Yes, that was shocking! In fact, a lot of times, the answer would be a haltingly “I am not sure, they just found me....” 

Okay, but what happens if they stop finding you? How do you go back to getting gigs? I wanted to ask them.

And then I realized that they stumbled upon the One Hit Wonder Trap. 

Avoiding the One Hit Wonder Trap

While a certain topic trends whether that is the personal story of a speaker or a topic like Social Media, certain speakers ride the wave having hundreds of speaking requests over a span of several years. During this wave, the speaker is continuously found and booked without really doing much marketing. However, once a topic or story becomes less trendy, the speaker’s number of engagements slowly decline to a fraction of where they were. 

At this point, that speaker becomes a One Hit Wonder. Like in the music industry, you were hot once, and now you are not. Some of the speakers I interviewed were speakers in this limbo. They were once booked for $30,000 but had no idea on how to keep getting booked at that rate. Should they redo their website? Write another book? Drop some money on a television public relations campaign? Unfortunately, they had no certainty on how to duplicate their past success.

I said to myself, well, It's evident that some people are getting booked consistently so what are they doing differently?

And then, after reviewing my notes from the interviews, and analyzing my own personal experience in the speaking industry, I found a pattern that would reveal the key to the labyrinth of getting booked consistently. The successful ones were asking themselves these three questions:

1. What activities generate new speaking engagements?
2. How long does it take to acquire new speaking gigs? 
3. How much does it cost to get a new speaking engagement?

The power behind these questions is subtle but extremely practical. Let’s dive a bit deeper into each of these questions to reveal their importance: 

Question 1: What Activities Generate New Speaking Engagements?

This question focuses on what you should do when it comes to a speaking business. 

Let’s say you only want to get 25 engagements a year and you are currently at 12. Chances are you don’t know what you need to do more to reach this goal. In order to avoid the One Hit Wonder state, if your calendar becomes more empty you need to know what things generate gigs.

When I first started learning about marketing, I read a few books by Brian Tracy who has an approach of taking very complicated processes and boiling them down into simple how-tos. For instance, when an organization would hire him to increase their sales, Brian would have each rep carry a stopwatch with them and time how much time they spent talking to customers. After collecting the data for a week, the results were astonishing. Most of the sales reps were only spending 1 to 2 hours a day talking to customers. As a result, Brian asked them to double the amount of time, and sure enough, just about every time the sales doubled. Simple and straightforward: more time with prospective customers equals more sales.

Now that sounds nice, but could a similar strategy work for the speaking industry? 

Turns out yes! And what most speakers should ultimately focus on in marketing similar to Brian’s advice is: 

Maximizing the number of conversations that you have with event planners who have a budget that matches your speaking fee. 

If the activity that you are doing does not line up with this end goal, chances are you are wasting your time. 

Now on this premise, it means marketing strategies like radio interviews, writing articles, telemarketing, television appearances, referrals all are aimed at the same goal, having conversations with people who can hire you. Some strategies are more direct like email, while others like radio interviews require someone to hear the conversation and then reach out. However, they all follow the same law. Heck, I even talked to one speaker who got booked for $5,000 from doing one local radio interview… Who still listens to local radio anyway? 

Some of the speakers I talked to dump thousands of hours into activities that have little to zero benefit into their business with the end goal of getting booked more. My favorite out of these is Instagram. For some reason, people believe that if you have a large following on Instagram, it would magically translate into having more speaking engagements. It’s not Instagram that is going to get you gigs but having conversations with the event planners who are on Instagram that will do so. That means if your audience on Instagram is mainly dog lovers because you post lots of pictures of your puppy on Instagram...guess what? No one is going to book you because you are not even engaging with an audience that can book you.

It may be shocking, but many social media platforms tend to be massive time sucks for up and coming speakers because the public gratification mirror similar effects of being on stage. Interestingly enough, some of the most successful speakers out there, Josh Linkner, Ryan Estis, and Mark Sanborn, all 7 figure speakers have very sub-par social media accounts compared to most Millennials today. How are they able to be successful without worrying that much about social media?

Because they figured out how to maximize conversations with the people who can book them without having to leverage that marketing channel. It doesn’t matter what channel you use as long as you are having conversations with event planners that have a budget that meets your speaker fee requirements.

Question 2: How Long Does It Take To Acquire Speaking Gigs

I have had speaking gigs close within one day and others that take a couple of years. However, the important thing to note here is that if you are looking to double or triple your engagements it's important to know how long it takes to go from initial contact to 100% payment. Unfortunately, this can range from a month to years. 

In the world of sales, the time it takes to be fully paid for a gig is often referred to as the ‘sales cycle’. If the sales cycle is short, you will see money quickly after the initial contact, and if the sales cycle is long, the money takes forever to show up.

If you are unable to answer this question, you will probably struggle to plan ahead for the ups and downs of the speaking industry. Especially those bizarre dry months of August and December. Fun fact, a lot of comedy clubs are busiest during December, unlike the speaking industry. Funny how that works right? No pun intended.

Kicking off for 2020 it's important to know how long it takes to get booked because often people think it takes a week. Unfortunately, the selection process is much longer than that. However, that is true in some cases, but more often they are early in the planning phases of their conferences. For instance, here are the typical steps in planning a conference in relevance to speakers: 

1. Collecting feedback from last year's conference. 
2. Selecting the conference theme and topics.
3. Reaching out and evaluate different speakers.
4. Narrowing speaker options.
5. Contract signing.
6. Deposit to solidify conference lineup.
7. Conference day, second deposit released.

Going from 1 to 7 can take anywhere from 6-12 months. Ultimately speakers want to start conversations at step 3 and last to step 5. The important thing to note here is, there is a buying cycle and understanding its length will help you navigate the booking seasons as a speaker. Don’t expect to get booked overnight, it's a long process.

Question 3: How Much Does It Cost to Acquire a New Speaking Gig?

Here is the marketer’s dream question. Once you answer this, you will know exactly what to spend it will take to plan out your marketing plan for 2020. Let’s say your average gig is $10,000, and it costs you roughly $3,000 of marketing effort to obtain that gig. Maybe the marketing dollars are in Public Relations or Google Ads regardless of the marketing tactic translates to a gig. If you know those activities result in gigs, and you know how much you spend to acquire one gig- double that, and you should see a double in your speaking business. 

While this might seem revolutionary, it's a simple marketing practice. Unfortunately, this conversation is not often had because most speakers run their business through branding without marketing. 

It’s like asking a plumber “how do you get customers?” If they would answer, “I am not really sure they just find me”, versus another plumber who responds “I spent $100 a week on Yelp Ads and that gives me 2 new customers.” Comparing these two responses, who do you think has more control over their business’ future? Yes, the first one is doing well now, but what if all of those customers leave town? Are they able to generate new customers quickly? Probably not. 

Another example, a speaker I interviewed earned just shy of half a million a year in 2019 and spent roughly $100,000 on pay per click advertising. He knew his numbers to get a gig and just kept increasing his marketing dollars for a continuous positive return on investment. While most people would be deathly afraid of pushing their marketing dollars that high, the math worked out for them so they continued to push. 

Now from knowing questions 1, 2 and finally answering 3, you effectively uncover the complexity behind getting paid gigs. By unlocking these answers you will know how long it takes to generate a speaking gig, what activities to do, and how much it costs to generate a gig. At that point, the speaking industry becomes more of a math game than a hope and a prayer game. In addition, it becomes more systematic, predictable, and of course, fun.

Important Side Note: I understand that there are hundreds of things that go into a successful speaking business such as video content, thought leadership, well-written programs, or an epic demo video. However, my main point in this article is that there are fundamental aspects to a successful speaking business that if violated or neglected it becomes exponentially more difficult to have a speaking business that generates consistent revenue. For example, in the case of selling any product, the reviews, website, and product itself all need to be sharp, but to have sales growth there needs to be a marketing plan in place.

Setting Sails for 2020

Fortunately in the world of business, when we hear that common adage:

Build a better mousetrap and they will come

Most people don’t believe that expression. However, for some bizarre reason many speakers believe:

Write an epic keynote and event planners will be beating down the door of your inbox.

Of course, that is not true, and going through the dozens of interviews was both exploratory and insightful by confirming it. If you ever want to chat about getting more gigs, I will be happy to chat. I hope you benefit in learning from what I have uncovered and by doing so you have an amazing start into the 2020 year!