An Event Booker's Guide to Making a Good Choice of Leadership Speaker for your Kick-Off Meeting
You and your team all meet in person once, perhaps twice a year.
It could be a senior leadership offsite, a high performers programme or an all-staff programme.
Your time together is highly valuable.
It’s the time for collective minds to come together, to discuss and tackle your hardest challenges and to set the scene for the year ahead.
It’s a big investment getting the team together and everything needs to be hitting a 10/10 for maximum impact. Nothing can or should be left to chance.
So when it comes to selecting the right guest speaker to join your event, it’s a really important decision.
Having been one of those speakers who gets invited to speak at between 50 and 100 such off-sites a year and having crafted my trade for the past 7 years, it’s given me plenty of time to reflect on the factors that make all the difference in driving a successful outcome when it comes to inviting in an external speaker.
In seven years, starting with a story and then learning my craft as being an inspirational leadership speaker I’ve made my fair share of mistakes. Impossible not to when you choose a new career direction when there is no defined path for how to work as a professional leadership speaker!
In honing my craft, I’ve worked with the best coaches, agents and experts in the UK and the US. For every single talk, I prepare relentlessly and after the event deconstruct everything to assess what worked and what could be better. The journey to improvement never ever ends.
In this guide for event bookers, I will share the very best of what I’ve learnt and will focus this specifically on things that I believe will be useful for you. The things that I’ve learnt when it comes to making a good choice right from:
What’s the Conference theme and what do you want from a speaker?
What’s the best way to source a speaker?
What should you cover in a pre-booking call?
What should you expect after a pre-booking call?
What should you look for in a briefing call?
How to make sure you and the speaker are well-prepared for the day?
On the Day - what to do
After the Speech - how to maximise the value of the speaker’s time
The Day/ Week after the Event
There was a time when inviting a leadership speaker involved a brief 5-minute call for a celebrity speaker, and then they turned up on the day, did their talk about how great they were with some well-rehearsed and well worn stories, and then they speed off into the sunset.
Those days have gone and rightly so.
Understanding your audience matters. It really matters.
Linking to your themes and outcomes really matters.
Making people feel good matters
And leaving people with easy starting points to begin their own journey matters.
As does the right follow-ups the day and weeks after the event.
So, let’s dive into the detail
Why Are You Having An Event?
Because we had one last year is not the best answer here!
Reflect with the senior leaders and organisers why are we having an event at all and what does success look like?
Think about these questions:
What are the challenges we have faced over the last year?
What are the strategic goals we need to work to?
What are the hardest problems we have to solve and how can we use the brains of our very best talent to struggle well to solve these challenges?
What are the key themes and topics we need to cover?
Getting crystal clear on the outcomes and success will help you drive the best agenda and lead you on a path to select a speaker who can support and make sure your messages land.
Think of a speaker as a device. A device to impact fully land the messages that are most important to you. A device to say what you want to say, but in such a way that it has lasting impact. All too often audiences become “snow blind” to senior leaders messages because they’ve heard them all before. A skilful speaker will land your messages via a set of compelling stories in an engaging way.
How’s the Team?
It’s always about your audience.
It starts and finishes with them.
Reflect on how your team is feeling and what support do they need most to achieve their goals.
Do you have recent employee surveys sharing key insights?
Trying to plan an offsite without knowing whats going on for your team, is liking trying to navigate an ocean not knowing where you are starting from.
Who exactly will be attending the event? Consider the experience, seniority levels, gender balance, cultures and length of service. Consider any factors to really get under the skin of who is there and what they need.
With this insight, you can then start to consider what type of speaker and specifically which speaker might be a good fit who would resonate with your audience.
Booking and Sourcing an Inspirational / Motivational Speakers
Once you’re clear on the event outcomes and what your audience needs, the next logical step is sourcing speakers.
With such an important decision, the single best place to start is referrals. Speakers who have been seen by people you trust and can vouch that they will deliver a 10/10 high quality professional job for you.
Some places you might consider:
Speaker Agencies - their businesses rely on their reputation to deliver high quality speakers event after event, so this is a tried and tested route to find the best.
Events Agencies - busy agencies will certainly see many speakers every year and can vouch for who is good. Again their reputation matters so they won’t refer duff speakers. Often they may partner with speaker agencies to deliver speakers.
Ask your previous speakers who have been delivered a 10/10 for you. Who would they recommend? Again their reputation is on the line and they will only recommend the very best.
Who in your team has seen or heard brilliant speakers recently?
Go online. Search Google, scour LinkedIn, check out YouTube. There will be a wealth of resources out there. Be mindful of what one speaker agent shared with me recently which is this “there’s some people who are brilliant at marketing and creating glitzy showreels but when it comes to delivery, they were awful”.
That’s why, armed with your shortlist from your preferred sources you want to dig deep into what exactly a speaker will deliver for you.
Perhaps obvious but some things to consider when devising your shortlist:
Look for individuals who have expertise and experience relevant to your event's theme or topic.
Consider factors such as industry knowledge, professional accomplishments, speaking style, and reputation.
Review speaker bios, watch videos of past presentations, and read testimonials to gauge their suitability for your event.
Beyond the credentials and accolades, it's crucial to assess the fit between the speaker and your event. Consider factors such as the speaker's personality, communication style, and values.
Will their demeanour resonate with your audience?
Do they embody the ethos and culture of your organisation or event?
A speaker who can establish a genuine connection with the audience is more likely to captivate and inspire them.
Pre Booking Call
I consider it essential to have a pre-booking call. Both for client and speaker.
There’s only so much you can cover from desktop research and watching a 3-minute showreel, so you can and should want to have a call to make sure the fit is right.
If the speakers aren’t prepared to have a pre-booking call, that should be a red flag in itself.
It should be a short call to cover key areas such as outcomes, audience, and fit. You want to feel confident you are making the right choice.
Crucially, at the end of that call, you want to be 100% certain that the speaker has heard everything that is important to you for YOUR event. You don’t want someone half listening and then trotting out the same stories they always share. You want something that fits exactly what you need.
It’s for this reason that after every pre-booking call I always write and share back with the client everything I have heard and what I suggest.
Without this process of checking 100% the risks of getting it wrong are high. You want someone to be attentive to your needs.
Before finalising your decision, take the time to check references and read testimonials from past clients or event organisers.
Reach out to event planners who have worked with the speaker previously to gather insights into their professionalism, reliability, and effectiveness. Testimonials provide valuable firsthand accounts of the speaker's impact on audiences and can help validate your decision.
The Speaker Briefing Call
Once you’ve evaluated the options and made the decision, you will want a more detailed briefing call to go through the outcomes, audience, agenda and content in detail.
Your speaker should explain how they will meet your objectives and walk through the content, the interaction points and how it will flow. They need to listen and take your feedback to make certain it exactly matches what you want.
As you go through your speaker's presentations, look for alignment with your event's objectives and audience preferences.
To have maximum impact, look for speakers who offer fresh perspectives, actionable insights, and engaging storytelling.
Consider whether the speaker's message is relevant, timely, and impactful for your audience.
Notice the willingness and the speaker's ability to customise their presentation to address the specific needs and interests of your audience.
After this, the speaker should then prepare their content and send it over to you in advance so that you are free of any worries around content. The content is signed off and you can set it up on your systems for the day. You speaker should be looking to make your life easier at each point in the journey.
How to make sure you and the speaker are well-prepared for the day
Make sure all the logistical factors such as availability, travel requirements, technical needs, and accommodation arrangements are all tied down as early as possible. No one, least of all you needs any last-minute wobbles. Have it super clear and over-communicate rather than under-communicate. Get connected on WhatsApp - I always like to be in close contact so I can update my clients if there are any unexpected delays or issues.
Work closely with your speaker to finalise any last-minute concerns.
Ensure that the speaker feels looked after and has all the necessary resources and support to deliver a memorable and impactful presentation. It sounds small but it does make a difference - the easier and more welcome you can make a speaker feel, the better.
On The Day
Meet early with your speaker and check that everything is all going to plan. The specific things that as a speaker I always look for are:
Can I sit in on any talks that precede mine so that I can hear the messages, gauge where the audience is, and adapt any of my content as needed based on the messaging and audience responses?
Check all the slides have been uploaded and can I have a quick dry run. (At a recent event, it turns out that between the agency and client something had been lost in communication and the slides were never received. Doing this check early meant that we were able to set up the slides using one of a range of back up methods I always have)
Check if there is any new information, any red flags or sensitivities that have arisen that I should be aware of.
Check on the timings for both the talk and the Q&A and if I need to adapt my timings at all (I’m always prepared for this as to whether I need to shorten or lengthen content and can do this easily).
Who will be introducing me, do they need my intro script or would they prefer their own words. And where would they like me before the talk and after the talk.
I always prefer to have both an interactive session and to do a Q&A. Bringing the audience into the talk as much as possible means people are more invested, more engaged and crucially more likely to take the actions forwards.
After the Speech
After a talk, I always prefer to stay with the team for at least the next hour or so depending on the agenda and timings to answer follow-up questions.
A key part of delivering a thought-provoking and inspirational talk is that it impacts people on many levels and triggers thoughts, feelings and ideas. Being around to dive deeper into peoples questions is really important and means that you can help people with their specific challenges.
Creating some time and space where your audience can engage and interact with a speaker is therefore really important, as is your speaker being open and available to do this. It’s perhaps one of the best ways to maximise the value of your investment in a speaker.
Don’t leave this to chance: ideally, you want to agree on this part upfront as part of the briefing call.
The Day/ Week after the Event
Make sure that any follow-up actions have been completed.
I always like to connect with audiences on LinkedIn after an event and often get many questions there about the content I’ve raised.
Often an organiser will send through follow-up questions from the audience (sometimes gathered via an Event App) and I will either provide written answers or a video to share the answers.
This to me is crucial to helping to land the messages and continue the dialogue.
After your event, you will want to take the time to evaluate the speaker's performance and gather feedback from attendees.
Assess the speaker's effectiveness in meeting your event objectives and engaging the audience.
Reflect on what worked well and areas for improvement to inform future speaker selections.
Additionally, follow up with the speaker to express appreciation for their contribution and discuss any potential opportunities for future collaboration, or ideally offer any feedback.
Pulling it all together
Choosing the right leadership speaker for your event is an important decision that requires careful consideration and planning.
It starts with being crystal clear on event objectives, knowing your audience, researching potential speakers, evaluating fit and content, and preparing for the event, and evaluating and following up post-event.
By making a well-informed choice you can ensure a successful and impactful event experience. With the right leadership speaker, you can really add a very powerful catalyst to inspire, motivate, and empower your audience to achieve their goals and drive positive change.