How to Nail Down Great Speakers for Your Next Event

Finding speakers for an event is never easy. Not to mention finding the right speakers who will captivate your audience and wow the stage.

Does your event have the right speakers? Are you using the right tactics to find and attract speakers? Does your event create enough value for your speakers?

In this new Run of Show video, we walk you through our step-by-step process in scouting the best speakers for your events. We cover everything from deciding on your event theme, to the types of speakers to search for, to how to really sell your event and lock them down.

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Video Transcript:

Today we're going to leave our calculators behind and talk about why we got into events in the first place.

Partners are incredible -- they help you bring in new audiences, they can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. So, how do you get great partners?

The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. You find the right partner, you wanna pitch that partner, and then you really wanna lock it in, and execute, and get the most value out of that partnership.

We're gonna walk through each three of those things right now.

Make Your Event Flow

Let's walk through a real life scenario. We're throwing a 100-person event. So, in order to fill the room with 100 people, I like to send out about 10 times the number of invitations, so that's inviting around 1,000 people.

Then, I like to try and get about 4 times the ratio of RSVPs to the capacity of the room. That comes to 400 people. In an event, you typically see what's called a flow, in and out of the venue throughout the event. You're really gonna try to get about 150 people or more to actually attend the event, so we're gonna look for about a 1.5x attendance rate.

The goal that we're gonna talk about today, is how to improve the percentage between RSVPs and attendees.

2. Combine areas of expertise

Even if you’re looking for a snapshot of an adorable dog, you definitely won’t be disappointed.

Welcome to this week's Run of Show. I was thinking back to the first thing I ever did as an event marketer, and it was actually wrangling speakers for a summit that I was throwing. I was just out of college, I had zero money, no network, and I certainly didn't have a process for how I was pulling this off.

Recently, I got a call from an event marketer who was hosting a big user summit in London, and she asked me if I could help her and ping my network to wrangle speakers for her summit. As I dove into her process, I realized that she had come up with a process that I wish I had when I was first starting off.

And so, what we're gonna do today is I'm gonna share with you how she thinks about wrangling speakers -- procuring the best people to talk on stage at your upcoming summit.

Actually, I immediately Googled it, and, lo and behold, there were all sorts of job descriptions online for Head of Event Ops, Head of Event Technology and Operations, Event Technology Manager. Really cool job descriptions.

We're going to talk about that in a sec. But, first, let's talk about what this shift means. And, so, I've started to call this shift, the shift from EP, event planner, to VP, the VP, vice-president mentality.

You know, when we're talking about EPs, we're typically talking about people who are responsible for the project management, right? And so, typically, they're going…they're focused on the event: Hiring vendors, finding linens, getting the DJ. That was the old school. But, nowadays, they're still responsible for that stuff, but they're also responsible for the performance of the event. And, so, I talk about that, going from project manager to marketer. It also means that we're going from buying stuff, procuring stuff, to actually proving the value of that stuff, so, from procurement to proving.

Now, an event planner, an EP, is highly focused on the attendees in the room, right? Who's gonna be in the room? Is that gonna make a great event? And that still matters That's still something that we need to focus on.

But now, we also need to focus on, not just the attendee value, but the entire lifetime value of our customers and actually focus on the full sequence of what that person does and how it relates to actual money. And last but not least, even the way that our bosses are speaking to us has changed. We're actually seeing, you know, the old school of "high-five, great event, well done, I've had a blast" change. Now what we hear after events is, "Show me the data." Right? "Show me the numbers. What are the outcomes? How did this whole thing work?"

Actually, I immediately Googled it, and, lo and behold, there were all sorts of job descriptions online for Head of Event Ops, Head of Event Technology and Operations, Event Technology Manager. Really cool job descriptions. We're going to talk about that in a sec.

But, first, let's talk about what this shift means. And, so, I've started to call this shift, the shift from EP, event planner, to VP, the VP, vice-president mentality.

You know, when we're talking about EPs, we're typically talking about people who are responsible for the project management, right? And so, typically, they're going…they're focused on the event: Hiring vendors, finding linens, getting the DJ. That was the old school. But, nowadays, they're still responsible for that stuff, but they're also responsible for the performance of the event. And, so, I talk about that, going from project manager to marketer. It also means that we're going from buying stuff, procuring stuff, to actually proving the value of that stuff, so, from procurement to proving.

‌• Before the event: we use these lists to promote the event, and fill the room with the right people.

‌• During the event: we use these lists to prioritize our time, to know how to engage with people, when to engage with them, and how much energy and effort we should spend with that person.

‌• After the event: we use these lists to hone and craft personalized messages to re-engage and drive value from these attendees.

To better understand this, what we did was we analyzed all of the lists, all of the classifications and buckets that event marketers are using across the slash system, and we started to look for commonalities and try to understand how people are organizing their lists.

We did find that many people are using about 9 different types of lists. So I wanna share that with you and walk through the nine types of lists that we most commonly see. Let's rattle them off together.

1) Effectiveness

2) Efficiency

3) Brand Building

4) Speed

5) Expansion

6) Community-Building

4 Stages of Finding Speakers: Set, Search, Show, Sell

She breaks her process down into four different stages, and they're pretty easy to remember because they all start with "S." They are Set, Search, Show, and Sell. So, let's dive through each of those different stages now. And I think you're gonna agree, it's a pretty thoughtful way to fill out your speaking section.

1. Set the Theme: What Topics Will You Be Addressing?

The first step is to set a theme. And what that means is, you need to lay the foundation for the event's content. The best way to do that is to host a meeting with all the stakeholders. That means get your head of marketing, comms, all of the most important executives in the room, get your event team in the room, and try to leave that meeting by accomplishing three goals.

Number one: set a program theme.

Number two: set the topics that are gonna ladder up to that theme. So, what will the speakers be addressing that will be associated with that theme?

And, number three -- and this is gonna take the majority of the meeting -- try to mock an agenda, and I mean get really specific here. Go minute by minute of what that day is gonna feel like, and put it up on paper. Try to include all of the lunch breaks, the bathroom breaks. What is the attendee gonna experience as they take in all of this content?

So, this is a big deal for a lot of reasons. It means that events are no longer being seen as the stepchild of marketing, but instead, are being placed at the center of the marketing stack. People are understanding how effective, how efficient events are. They're also understanding that the people who host these events need to be rock stars. They need to be able to go cross-department, they need to be able to be mathematicians, and have huge EQs that will command the attention of our most important clients.

2. Begin Your Search: What Types of Speakers Are You Targeting?

Once you figure out that mock agenda, you'll be ready to move on to the next, and very labor intensive, process of search.

I usually leave about a month of searching here. And the way to do it is to build a giant spreadsheet. And as you begin your search, you're gonna wanna divide up each of these speakers into about four different sections and -- easy to remember -- we're gonna break them into the four D's of speakers.

The Four "Ds" or Types of Speakers

So, the first are "Dream Speakers." These are people that if you could get them to speak, oh, man, you would do anything to put them on stage.

This could be anyone from Michael Jordan to Oprah. Like, really throw some dream speakers out there. You'd be surprised, if you ask nice enough, you might be able to get them.

The second one is gonna be "Down the Fairway." These are gonna be people who, they might be a little aspirational, but they really fit this content. They really fit this theme and they're gonna get it, and they might come and speak at your conference. So, down the fairway.

The third are gonna be "DTP" (Down to Participate). They're kinda of like your safety schools. These are gonna be people who are already speaking at conferences, maybe they're promoting a book, maybe they go to a lot of trade events, maybe they have a reason to speak. You know that if you ask, they're gonna show up. So, you wanna fill those out.

And the last is gonna be "Don't." You know, I've had a lot of ideas for speakers and I definitely pitched my friend a lot of ideas for speakers, and it turns out that that person just spoke at too many conferences, or they were associated with a competitor, or they had a bad reputation. You do wanna identify them, and put them up there in the "Don't" section.

Now, as we built out this list, we realized that there was a fifth "D" that was super-duper important, and that was a "D" for "Diversity." You know, too many conferences have panels of five people who look a lot like me.

As you build out your panels, I hope you'll think about finding people from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different genders, and put them on stage. I think you'll find that your audience will really connect with the content more and it'll feel like a better event.

And this is what I'll say. As you're building out this list, you need more people on the spreadsheet than you think. I mean, by the time we were done with this, I think we had something like 293 speakers that we were targeting. It was a lot. So, as you go outbound, build a monster search list.

3. Show and Tell: Why Should Speakers Participate?

So, the next step is "Show." When we're talking about "Show," we're talking about showing the speakers the value.

One of the best ways to show value is to put it into a brief or into a one-pager that you can quickly email to a speaker. The faster that you can show them the value to them, the faster you're gonna get their attention and potentially lock them in as a speaker. As we started doing this we realized that there were really four reasons that people would actually want to participate in our event -- that speakers would actually want to get on stage.

So, the four things that we found really resonated with people started with "Ps."

1. People. We found that if we were able to say how many attendees there are, who those attendees were, who the other speakers are, people got other people excited. So, "People," is the first "P" that you can promote.

2. Prestige. Talking about how important your event is is a very helpful way for a speaker to understand the opportunity for them.

So, talk about past success, how many attendees you have, how many sponsors you have. Showing the prestige is a good reason to get somebody excited about your event.

3. Purpose. What is your event all about? Why are you even hosting this event in the first place? Is there a charity component to it? Are you speaking about the future of something?

If you can convey that purpose to your speaker, they're highly likely to join if that purpose is aligned with their purpose, their passions.

4. Perks. This could be things like pay, to covering their travel, to "You're gonna get an opportunity to meet this person." If you can convey the perks that they'll enjoy and you can show it to them fast, it's likely that you're gonna at least get their attention.

But getting their attention is really just the first step.

4. Sell Your Event: How Do You Lock Them Down?

The next step is "Sell." Once you get them even a little excited, you need to jump on that and become a salesperson.

Here are three things that salespeople do really well, that if you're selling your event and you're selling this opportunity, you should embody as well. And again -- you know it -- they all start with "P."

1. Persistence. Follow up, follow up, follow up. Send that e-mail, call them, get them excited about this. You'll find that if you stay in their ear long enough, you have a higher likelihood of actually getting them to become a speaker.

2. Personalize. You wanna make sure that your correspondences are clever, but they also speak to that person specifically. Nobody likes getting sent a templated email, or at least one that feels like that.

3. Phone calls. This was really effective as we went outbound and tried to wrangle these speakers. Get on the phone, call them. People have a much harder time saying no to someone over the phone or in person than they do on email.

So, that's her process, and I love it.

Great Speakers Means Great Content

Set the theme, Search for speakers, Show value, and then Sell.

Once you start doing that, you're gonna start to see some success. People are gonna start to confirm. They're gonna show interest. They're gonna start to reply. And what we found -- our secret weapon -- was once they showed even an inkling of interest, we immediately sent them a detailed speaker brief.

Now, there's a lot to that speaker brief so I'm gonna save that for a future episode. We're also gonna cover all sorts of things, like how to do onsite management of speakers, how to really get them to stay on message, how to extract that value and turn that into an entire content plan.

That's all coming down the road, but for the time being, I want you to focus on wrangling the top speakers that are gonna really build up the content for your event.

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4. The Super Power of Speed: "The Flash"

And that would mean that your sales cycle is shorter as a result of your events, so if there are fewer days that a seller is selling to a prospect whenever they go to one of your events.

That's a really important one and we call that acceleration. So funnel acceleration would be the effect of that super power.

Now, this next one would be my choice for most powerful superpower. And unfortunately, I don't have a great metric for how to measure this. But like Professor X, if your event is able to find great attendees and connect them, and build a community, your event's superpower might be community-building.

Compare Event Types

There are some really high-ROI superpowers in here, a lot to focus on. Now, I just want to recap why this is important. Now, as we said at the top of the show, a superpower and understanding that super power is our greatest weapon in the fight for what is right.

And, you know, as marketers, we're kind of almost like venture capitalists in that we have a certain amount of capital and we have to deploy it only on things that drive the right results. Now, every event does something different.

So when you start to understand that superpower, you start to be able to compare that event to other marketing channels and say, "Hey, we should throw this event instead of doing, let's say, a content activity or a demand gen activity."

But you're also able to compare that event to other event types. So you'll be able to say, "Hey, we should spend money on a VIP dinner instead of on, say, a trade show booth."

Double Down, Communicate Everything

Once you figure out what your event's superpower is, your next step is to do two very important things: it's to double down and do more of it.

And maybe the most important piece here is to communicate it, to rally your team around that super power, to set expectations and to beat those expectations, but to do so deliberately. Because as marketers, it's our job, maybe more than any other job, to communicate.

Okay. I hope that was useful in thinking about how to look at your event programs. If you have any questions, please leave me a comment. I know there's a lot in there. But, and I have to say this, Mike... I know you told me not to, but here we go: with great power comes great responsibility. Yes. Got it in. Okay. Thanks for checking in. Have a great rest of the week, and I'll see you next time.

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Did you know events have superpowers? Find out which superpower your event has and how to leverage it to optimize your entire events program.

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I've developed a three-step process to use reciprocity to drive the RSVP to attendance ratio. The three steps are: (1) get that attendee to invest, (2) confirm that they've made a good decision, and (3) lock it in.

The “Er” Moment

Note: If you're interested and you're gonna be pitching for partnerships soon, I included some of my best templates as a downloadable in the article with this video. So feel free to go download that and use my one-sheet template. But this is the general outline of what I think makes the best one-sheets. The point of a one-sheet is to communicate visually how legit and real your event is.

Are you hiring, feel free to copy some of their

Interested in seeing how the event planner has evolved?Download the following job descriptions:

1. Event Marketing Manager (Box)

2. Event Technology & Operations Manager (Metlife)

3. Event Operations Manager (Invisionapp)

So in some of the following episodes, we're going to talk about not just why surprises are so powerful, we're going to talk about how we can set, meet, and then beat expectations with every single action that we do.

We're going to talk about how we're going to use surprise before, during, and after the event. I believe that after a couple more conversations about this, you're going to buy-in like I have to the power of surprise and you're going to recommit like I have to "surprise."

We know when to send it now, but now let's talk about where you're actually promoting to. You know, it really is important to take advantage of Google Analytics and look in your analytics tab and understand where your traffic is coming from.

What we have found is that, finally, mobile traffic, when it comes to ticket purchases, has crossed over 50%. Now it's 56% of your attendees purchasing on mobile. What that says to me is: you better be optimizing your mobile experience. Make sure it's seamless, make sure it's easy to buy.

The Power of Social Clout

Last but not least, we found across all of these events that we're analyzing, there was one common denominator for the events that actually sold out. The events that put the attendees on the page and put the speaker pictures on the page, really promoting via social clout, had a nearly two-times higher likelihood of selling out their events than those that did not show the attendees or the speakers that were at the event.

Social clout is a really powerful mechanism, and I would urge you to take advantage of it. You need a market through your attendees and market through your vendors, market through your speakers, market through your sponsors. It's really the best way to sell out your event.

I hope you find that useful. We've got some genius data scientists in the back running regression analyses.

Consider These 3 Things Before You Comp Tickets

(1) Percentage of attendees-to-opportunities: Assume it is going to increase if you comp tickets. What I mean to say is, do you think you can fill the room with a better attendee list that are more likely to turn into actual revenue? If you think so, make an assumption. In this last formula, the scenario you saw, we assumed that it would jump from 10% to 25%. I'll leave it to you to determine what percentage you think you can drive it to, if you had higher quality attendees.

(2) What is your ACV? In our scenario, we talked about a 25K ACV, that's great. That's a nice ACV. Candidly, if you've got that average contract value, you have to comp tickets. It’s a no brainer. If you've got $100,000 as an average contract value, it is really a no brainer. But what we have found is that, if your average contract value is about $15,000, it might not make sense. You really wanna be above $15,000 for comp tickets to make sense for you.

(3) What is your Sales Cycle? Ask yourself, are you willing to wait for a good amount of time to actually see that revenue recognized? We've been looking at our data, and especially for some of these larger user conferences, you can see a sale cycle be about a year. That means that, from the time that person became an opportunity to the day that that dollar is deposited in your bank account, it could be a full year, if not more. So you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to wait that long, as opposed to getting the little dollars in now, with the ticket revenue? Can you wait for a much larger contract in a year or more?

3. Show that people are attending your events.

Last but not least, people get people. If you can show that people are attending your event, and they're telling other people, you can display that. That's the type of stuff that actually drives attendance.

So, you're gonna want to show and get RSVPs early and often as you can. Then get those people to commit and tell their friends about it. We found that that is the number one way to drive RSVPs.

Invest, Confirm, Lock it In

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.

Best of luck with your events.

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.

Best of luck with your events.

Bring Out the Urgency

Urgency is one of the most powerful techniques that I've seen in terms of driving ticket sales. You can use urgency in things like "Early bird sales end soon," or you can say something like, "We're almost full," or "This is going to be a really important event for you to attend." Drive that point home with frequency and urgency, and make sure, in all your communications, to go through that checklist, G-I-V-E.

After you've outlined every single step in the process, your next step is to figure out who the major players are. This might be someone who's actually at your organization, or an agency, or even a freelancer. You're trying to figure out who's involved. I find that a really great framework for figuring this out and defining it in a very visible and transparent way is something called the RACI model. It's a great model that I see some of the top event planners that we work with use.

How RACI Works:

RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.

❤️ Special thanks to our Tech lead, Guillermo de la Puente, for his hard work on this project.

author

Ben Hindman

Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.

About the Author

Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.