Alben W.
Barkley
The main reason you may be wasting money on a speaker, professional or
otherwise, is that conference organisers often don’t quite know what they want
to achieve through that speaker. Mercifully the conference speaking community
has been forced to mature and shape-up largely through the influence of the
National Speakers Association of Southern Africa (NSASA). The stringent membership
criteria ensure that if you’re booking an NSASA member or accredited speaker,
you get someone who has earned their stripes.
An excellent starting point when considering a speaker, should be to ask,
‘What’s our purpose or objective in having a speaker at the conference?’ Your
answer might be any of the following, in no particular order: a) We want to be
entertained b) We want an outsider’s perspective on the issue c) We’ve heard
so-and-so is a good speaker d) We need someone to fill the ‘graveyard’ shift e)
The speaker is a subject-matter expert f) We want someone to motivate our team
g) We need to start the conference off with a keynote talk g) It’s professional
to have outside speakers h) Leading organizations always have speakers at their
conferences. There will undoubtedly be other reasons.
The speaker fee, even for a top-end one, is usually a small percentage of
the overall conference budget. Unless you’re doing a non-residential, one-day
event, in which case the budget might be small and if numbers are low, the cost
per head investment in the speaker can appear steep. But if that speaker is
going to positively influence people into some new thinking or change process,
ask yourself whether that same investment per head could be achieved as
cost-efficiently, any other way. Probably not.
There’s nothing wrong with having an entertaining speaker. Indeed all
good speakers should be entertaining to some or other extent, or they’re simply
not packaging their material attractively enough. But if it’s pure entertainment you’re wanting, why
go with a speaker, unless that person is an utterly hilarious after-dinner
raconteur? There are cross-over entertainers – people who primarily entertain
but also embed a message of some sort, but they’re in the minority. So think
carefully: If you want entertainment only, then hire an entertainer.
I recall having been given my speaker brief by the FD of an organization
with an upcoming annual conference. It was packed with legit strategic
objectives and requests and I was pleased that they’d so carefully thought it
through. The day we finally got to meet with the CEO in order to agree
pre-conference finishing touches, I asked him the question I ask all clients:
‘What do you want to happen in the minds of your people when I leave the room?’
The CEO’s answer was ‘I want them to have fun’. That response, which was totally out of whack with what the
financial and marketing teams had envisaged, had us back at the drawing board,
revisiting the actual reason for the conference in the first place!
There’s a caveat built into this anecdote. You’d better be darned sure
that the person booking or briefing a speaker understands what the key players
in the organisation want from your conference speaker. I’ve had briefs (of the
non lingerie kind!) from PR ‘poppies’ as I call them, with one and half brain
cells. On getting to meet with the actual client, I find that said poppie has
the proverbial bull by the udder. There’s nothing more dreadful than the
hapless speaker revising talk or presentation material overnight before a
conference, because they’ve sat the previous evening at the Chairperson’s table
and she or he has a very different concept of what they’re all expecting from
the keynote speaker!
There are a good number of speaker bureaus in South Africa. Most run by ethical,
service-orientated people. They will listen to your need and try to match you
with the best person for the task. Listen to them at least. If you simply
demand an individual, they’ll try to get you that person. But sometimes that
speaker isn’t necessarily the best available for the task. The good bureaus
will know who is. So let them earn their speaker-fee commission by recommending
and then justifying that recommendation! You don’t have to accept who they
suggest, but you might be pleasantly surprised to find that you have options.
Next time you want to book a speaker, remind yourself that you’re about to make an investment. Make sure you know why you want to make that investment and what exactly you want from it in terms of both return and deliverables.
Posted by Clive Simpkins http://www.imbizo.com
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