So You Think You Can Speak? Here's How You Can Help Us and Yourselves

Since launching Interesting Speakers last week with Adriana Stan, we’ve been inundated with requests from events wanting world-class speakers and performers, and also with notes from great people who’d like to be considered for our roster of talent for the future. It’s been a week of great problems.

As I hope the website makes clear, InterestingSpeakers.com is a thin platform designed to match the event brief to potential speakers, and all talent suggested comes from a curated list of people we know first hand to be brilliant. While we’re not actively looking to increase the number of people we suggest with the service, the entire reason the site exists is to ensure great talent finds the audience it deserves and vice versa. 

With this in mind, to help me dig out of an inbox full of keen people, I wanted to share some tips for people who’d like to speak more and professionally. They are my beliefs, I am not an expert or that experienced in this field, so feel free to ignore.

1) Do you have something unique and interesting to say?

There are many brilliant people who could write a book, but does that mean the world needs your book?

Similarly, there are a lot of smart and articulate people in the world, and there are a lot of people with expertise and experience, but do you say things that the world needs to hear?

The premise of Interesting Speakers is working with people who possess either a very unique and compelling way of bringing the views and knowledge of others together in a new way, or even better, their own very special viewpoint or opinion or perspective to light.

 I also want to stress that the world needs speakers of all backgrounds and viewpoints, and slowly event organizers are realizing this. 

So the very first question to ask is: Am I saying something that needs to be heard, and if not, how can I improve so that I am?

In addition, speakers need: 

2) Credibility

It’s not the case that every theory presented must come from a professor, or that nobody under 25 is worth listening to, or that people in business must be senior, but there does need to something about the person that conveys authority. 

You don’t need to be an author, but that helps -- maybe you have a track record as a writer or columnist, this helps too. You don’t need to be old, but experience matters. Above all else, event organizers often seek to minimize the chance of something wrong happening, than to maximize the risk of something wonderful happening. Credibility is an easy guide to ensuring that a session will run well.

Credibility is hard because one of the big challenges of speaking is there are often two types of people, academics and book writers who do great charts but have no idea how the real world works. And business people who have one case study, one claim to fame, on calling card, and no width beyond this or deeper context of theory to draw from. Speakers like Mark Ritson or Scott Galloway, are amazing speakers because they span the two worlds. It's quite nice to hear of a marketer that did a nice ad campaign or founder who sold a company once, but it's about the application of knowledge and one circumstance from one person isn't knowledge, it's a data point.

At the very top end of credibility is notoriety and fame. While speakers don’t need to be global CEOs or have a slot on TV, having built a notable profile that's rooted in real substance and proven expertise sure does help, especially if you want to command higher sums.

So the second question to ask is, am I enough of an expert or experienced enough, or anointed with enough status to talk about this in a way where I don’t feel vulnerable?And if not, what can I change?

3) Compelling Delivery

Often the easiest thing to find in the world, but seemingly often not correlating well to credibility, is charisma. All events need people to say smart things and to know their subject matter, but they have to land their points and be listened to. A compelling delivery is key for all speakers we work with. 

So the third question to ask is, am I someone people enjoy listening to, do I speak well and have content that is delivered with clarity and confidence, am I engaging? This is one of the easier parts to change through training - feel free to ask me for details on how to go about this. 

4) Value

A key aspect of great speaking is the altitude of the talk or performance or the special angle that makes it useful. It’s not particularly useful for someone to spend 30 mins talking about ALL the new technology that is being developed in the world - it’s far more useful for them to select 3 relevant technologies and show why they matter. It may not be hugely useful for a sales conference for a SAAS firm to learn about the wonder of fibonacci in nature. It’s nice to hear a case study of a tactic you implemented, but it’s more useful to rise up and talk more generally about what was learned and how to apply it in other cases.

Value comes in all flavors: it can be hands-on experience, it can be inspiration, it can be entertainment, it can be specific knowledge, but it’s key that the value is known relative to the time of day, the audience's needs and the event organizers' plan for the event. 

Which leads us to the fourth question to ask. Is the material I love talking about the most, the material that I deliver the best and have the most expertise and unique thinking on, especially relevant for conferences and events?

My key concern from 95% of inbound emails is that many people have a focus on things that are specific to their own experience, based in the past, driving back to something they're selling, and they don’t take the time to ladder it up to more general and useful advice and perspective, something helpful for the road ahead.

5) Reliability

The service is not necessarily set up to promote new, young, up-and-coming talent, but we hope it ends up that way. The issue most talent has starting out is a catch 22: you need experience to get big gigs, but big gigs need experience. 

We need people who care to listen to the needs of the client and show empathy to their needs. We don't want speakers who recount the same speech from the same book. Nor do we want people so eager to please they don't challenge the brief. We don't want those too jaded or too narcissistic to be reliable, and committed .

A good speaker will act professionally will do tech rehearsals, offer agility in timings on the day, be open to Q&A's from anyone, do their research on the audience and client, get proper training, fine-tune their delivery, practice, not overrun, be conscious of what is appropriate in each context. You can't swear like Australians do in the mid west, etc.

So with all of this in mind, some handy steps to think about: 

1) Think, is this for me?

Maybe you thought that speaking would be easy money, maybe someone told you you'd be good at it, or maybe it seemed like an easy way to build a personal brand. But just take a look at the above and think about how well-positioned you are. It's the people who have the most self-doubt who have the potential to be some of the very best speakers. It is those who want to listen to speakers who talk the best. The best speakers are often not extroverts but introverts, they have the knowledge and a unique point of view and a commitment to excellence, but just have to push themselves outside of their comfort zone and take the steps to prove their authority and build the experience.

2) Think, what material should I develop and what type of audiences would suit me best?

Using the above guidelines, think about the message or messages or subject matter you’d love to talk on and that carries real value and you have credibility on. 

Maybe you’ve set up a company that you sold to a large one and then had to merge the two, so how can this experience be turned into advice for larger companies. Maybe you’re a world expert on AI -- but what do people in a trade body need to know about it? Maybe you have experience in China, so think about how to merchandise this for audiences who care.

Identify the intersection between what you can deliver best and what the world wants to hear about now.  This doesn't mean common denominator blandness, it means drawing on themes that are consistent.

3) Create compelling ways to express what you speak on.

It’s a rare event organizer that “just wants speaker X." What they really want is to see what the speaker is planning on delivering.

Every speaker needs two things

1) An overarching expression of themselves showing what they think or speak on and what makes them special and interesting, not a bio but a sort of compelling introduction. The Lavin agency is a great place to see an agency that writes wonderful paragraphs about what a speaker is 'about"

2) A “menu” of topics they speak on. Not single words like 5G or AI, but a thesis and a one-paragraph manifesto that seduces the reader into wanting more. Create a clear description of the presentation(s) you are most likely to excel at. It's quite likely that most speakers start with one "deck" and slowly make new ones, most excellent speakers have perhaps 6 topics in them max. You are not a Chinese takeaway that does Pizza and Burgers, be proud of specialisms.

4) Practice and create proof.

It's vital that there is evidence that shows the strength of your public speaking skills. Event organizers want to see the knowledge, the energy levels, the stage presence. So be sure to have at least one representative video which can be easily accessed. Sure, testimonials help, but nothing beats a reassuring video showing you and the audience. If this is low quality, it won't help. If it's a tiny event, it may not reassure. So work hard to make something that can get over the idea you are at worst a safe choice.

5) Personal websites.

If you want to do this, then you need to have a platform that illustrates what you stand for and showcases your track record, which people can see and be pointed to.

If you can't spend the 2 hours to make a nice site on Readymag or Squarespace, then why not, the only reasonable conclusion is to think you don't care that much about this, and I'm not sure that's a good first impression.

I hope this helps.

2 killer things.

1) We only suggest speakers we've seen in person. If you'd like to raise your hand, then ONCE you've done ALL of the above, please fill in this form.

https://tomgoodwin.typeform.com/to/cAN3Nf

2) We've curated our list of about 50 speakers after attending perhaps 600 talks in 30 countries. This means we've missed a lot of amazing talent. If you'd like to suggest someone else that we should investigate, please send me an email to [email protected] with the subject "Tip-off " If you suggest yourself this way rather than filling in the form wonderfully, we can only assume bad things about your competence, ability to follow instructions and thus reliability.