Introduction
Booking corporate speaking gigs can be incredibly challenging. Especially if you’re just starting your journey as a public speaker, even knowing where to begin can be daunting.
Not only is the corporate speaking world competitive, but navigating the maze of decision makers and event planners, crafting a pitch and negotiating your rate each present unique challenges and questions that can overwhelm you.
And yet, the corporate speaking world is also extremely lucrative, paying the most out of the major speaking industries, and provides the most steady source of gigs and events. It’s important to get the process right from the start. Every step matters, ensuring that you don’t just land one gig, but pave the way for more speaking opportunities in the future.
Thankfully, you don’t have to guess what it takes to make a successful corporate speaker. During my extensive public speaking career, I’ve seen the same tried-and-true method that worked for me work for countless others. And if it worked for them, I know it will work for you too.
The Speaker Success Roadmap
I call this method the Speaker Success Roadmap. It’s an easy and memorable guide to achieving success as a public speaker. And it’s conveniently represented by the clever acronym “S.P.E.A.K.” See what I did there?
S – Select a Problem to Solve
P – Prepare and Deliver Your Talk
E – Establish Your Expertise
A – Acquire Paid Speaking Gigs
K – Know When to Scale
As simple as the acronym is, it covers a lot of ground, and that can be intimidating. But in this article, I’ll walk you step-by-step through each part of the roadmap, showing you how this process will help you clarify your message, book more speaking engagements, grow your speaking revenue and achieve a successful speaking business.
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Select a Problem to Solve
It may seem odd to start off with trying to solve a problem. Your impulse may be to start by picking up the phone and trying to get yourself booked at events, but if you don’t get this part right, you won’t get the rest of it right either.
This is something a lot of people miss: successful public speakers don’t get hired to speak about topics, or even provide information. They get hired to solve problems. Whether that problem is a lack of motivation, low self-confidence, poor work-life balance or something else, all public speakers aim to solve some kind of problem for their audience.
No matter how excellent your stage presence, charisma or humor may be, your audience will ultimately want to know what’s in it for them. If you want them to invest their attention in what you’re saying, you need to solve a problem for them, not merely provide irrelevant information.
By the end of this step, you need to have a clear vision of who you are as a speaker that can be expressed in the following statement: “I help group do topic so they can solution.”
Choosing Your Topic
To be a successful corporate speaker, you need a specific vision of who you speak to, what you speak about, and the benefits that come from listening to your talk.
Many public speakers try to cater to as many people as possible. When asked “What do you speak about?” your instinct may be to reply, “I’ll speak about anything you want!” Wrong answer.
When you tell an event coordinator that you’ll speak about anything, you’re not telling them anything about yourself. It’s impossible to be an expert at everything, and if you try, you’ll likely end up with no significant expertise at anything.
If event planners don’t know what you speak about, or why they should hire you to speak at their event, they are unlikely to consider you and have no context to refer you for other gigs.
To narrow your focus, ask yourself what you enjoy talking about. Choose a specific interest that lends itself to public speaking. Picking one interest can feel like it’s diminishing your opportunities, but in reality, it’s the thing creating them.
Maybe you’re great at interpersonal skills and want to speak about improved person-to-person communication; maybe you love productivity tips and want to help people get more out of their time.
Whatever your skills and interests are, choose something that will be important to other people too. Remember that you want to frame your topic as the solution to a problem that your target audience has.
Additionally, make sure your topic passes the five-year test. Will it still be relevant in five years? If not, it’s best to choose a different topic, as establishing expertise and becoming known for your topic takes time.
Prepare and Deliver Your Talk
As with the last step in the Speaker Success Roadmap, you may be thinking, “Why am I preparing a talk if I haven’t been booked and don’t know who I’m speaking to?” The answer is simple: you have to know what you do as a speaker before you can sell yourself to decision makers.
As I’ve already covered, trying to be everything to everyone is a mistake. You need to have a clear idea of what kind of talks you give, what topics you cover and who your target audience is before you can try to get booked for gigs.
Choosing the Right Kind of Talk
Within the corporate public speaking industry, there are several different styles of speaking gigs that you can choose from. Knowing which best suits your topic and style is an important part of the Speaker Success Roadmap.
Keynotes
Keynote speeches are talks that are the main focus of a given event. They are usually between forty-five and sixty minutes long. Keynote speeches are more polished and rehearsed, and tend to be given in front of larger audiences than other styles of public speaking. These speaking engagements pay the most, but keynote speaking is far more competitive and can be harder to break into at the start.
Workshop
Workshops tend to be given in front of smaller, but more engaged audiences. While keynote speeches require more entertainment and humor to keep audience engagement, workshops are primarily made up of teaching your core content. They can be anywhere from forty-five to ninety minutes.
Workshops do tend to pay less, if anything at all, but they can be useful in other ways. They can be used to get your foot in the door of the speaking industry, create relationships that lead to better gigs in the future, get free tickets to conferences you want to attend and test material for future speeches.
Seminars
Seminars allow you to go deeper on a topic. Lasting anywhere from hours to days, they typically involve speaking to larger audiences. Companies typically hire seminar speakers to train employees on a specific topic. Corporate seminars also require planning activities and audience interaction because of their extended nature.
Which Style is Right for Me?
The best way to know which of these choices best suits your speaking style is to try one of each. If you’re a new speaker and don’t feel ready for that, watching examples of each kind of talk online or in person can also be helpful in deciding.
You may like more than one (or all three!) and it’s perfectly fine to offer several options to event organizers. Just remember, be specific about what you’re offering, instead of saying something like “I can do anything you want!”
Organizing Your Talk
Now it’s time to create your talk. To prepare a speech that resonates with your audience, you should always keep two key questions in mind: “So what?” and “Now what?” These two questions are key to every experienced speaker’s talks.
You never want your audience to leave wondering what the point of your talk was or how it applies to them. By the time you finish, your audience should clearly understand what your message is and what they should do about it.
Structuring Your Talk
There’s a lot that goes into preparing a successful talk for corporate speaking engagements, but you should have a general overview before you start filling in the finer details. There are several ways you can structure a talk.
You can do it numerically, such as “7 ways to…” or you can structure it chronologically, such as covering past, present and future or structuring each point around a narrative. You can also present it in problem-solution form, either as one large problem and solution or a series of problems and solutions, but remember to keep your main point concise.
Develop a Rhythm
You also need to create a rhythm to keep your talk flowing. Personally, I use the following:
- Make a point
- Expand on the point
- Illustrate the point with a story
- Help the audience apply the point (remember: “So what?” and “Now what?”)
- Repeat
With your “So what?”/”Now what?”, an idea of how you want to structure your talk and your rhythm, you have everything you need to effectively organize your talk. Now for the details!
Expanding Your Talk
How exactly you should fill out your structure depends on your chosen topic, structure and format, but there are several elements that are key to every successful talk. I’ll cover two of them here.
Stories
Stories are among the most important elements of a talk. They take valuable insights out of the abstract realm of ideas and put them into relatable and understandable illustrations. This is an incredibly important tool to grab and keep your audience’s attention, and help them relate to your ideas.
Think about stories from your life and try to relate them to the idea of your talk. Always consider what emotion the story will produce and whether it fits your goal in sharing the story. And as I’ve said so many times you’re probably tired of hearing it, always tie it back to “So what?” and “Now what?”
Humor
Humor is among the most important parts of a speaker’s arsenal because of how effectively it can be used to break the ice with your audience, lighten the mood and drive home your points. Many speakers get intimidated because they think they’re not funny enough to use humor effectively in talks.
But you don’t have to be a genius comedian to use humor to your advantage (it helps, though). You can simply share a funny meme or quote to make people laugh. This has the same advantage of winning the audience over. As with stories, pay attention to the context you’re using the joke in and don’t say anything that might tick off the person who hired you.
Additionally, you should always take note of which jokes landed and which didn’t. The reason seasoned speakers tend to be the funniest is because they’ve had years and dozens of speaking opportunities to test material at. Always take advantage of that insight.
Developing Your Talk
Now it’s time to put pen to paper (or, more likely, fingers to keyboard). Write a list of bullet points with relevant stories and jokes without filtering yourself. Just write what comes to mind.
Next, organize those bullet points into a structure and cut any content that isn’t relevant or useful. Never marry yourself to a particular structure. Be willing to change things as needed. Once you have a final outline, you can write it all out into a manuscript filling in transitions and content.
Preparing to Deliver Your Talk
There are several important things to do from here before you can start to find speaking engagements and step on stage. First, practice makes perfect. Read your entire speech out loud, taking note of how well it flows, and any parts you think need more work. Revise and repeat until you feel comfortable with the speech.
Next, it’s important to internalize your talk. Don’t try to memorize the words, just focus on being comfortable with the flow of the material. Have a clear idea of why everything is laid out like it is. Do this in sections and don’t move on until you have grasped the section you’re working on.
There are several options for practicing your talk, but videoing yourself can be helpful in identifying problems with your delivery. If you choose to practice in front of others, make sure they’re people you trust to only give you constructive criticism.
The more you can deliver the talk without notes, the more genuine it will feel. If you need to, boil the talk down into a set of keywords you can use to remember sections.
Establish Your Expertise
Once you’ve put time into choosing your niche audience and topic and developing your talk, it’s time to move on to the third step in the Speaker Success Roadmap: establishing your expertise. This step is about setting yourself apart and creating a reason why event managers should hire you for speaking opportunities instead of other speakers.
This goes beyond simply preparing a talk; it’s about creating a brand around yourself and setting you apart from those other speakers. Standing out in a competitive field will lead to more paid speaking engagements from potential clients.
The two most important tools in creating a brand for yourself are a website and a demo video. These are areas where you shouldn’t try to cut costs. You want your brand to look professional and like you know what you’re doing. If you’re not knowledgeable enough to build a website on your own, it may be best to hire someone to do it for you.
Since you won’t have any sample footage to start with, creating a demo video can be a challenge. One way to get the footage you need is by accepting a free speaking engagement, such as a rotary club event, and having someone (either a friend, or hired videographer) get high quality footage you can use.
It’s also good to establish your presence on various social media platforms. Although not nearly as important as your website and demo video, a public presence can give event organizers a way to connect with you and establish brand recognition in the speaking industry. If you don’t have time to manage a bunch of accounts, try to choose social media platforms that have more people from your specific audience.
Acquire Paid Speaking Gigs
For an article about how to book paid corporate speaking gigs, so far, I haven’t said a whole lot about actually…booking paid speaking engagements. But it’s important to do it in this order. When you’ve successfully established a vision of who you are as a public speaker, you can effectively pitch yourself to event planners. Now that you’ve laid the important groundwork, you can start to find paid speaking opportunities.
Finding Paid Speaking Opportunities
Many new speakers invest the time in preparation and building their brand and wait for the business to come to them. In reality, this is a mistake. The best way for professional speakers to find paid speaking gigs is to seek them out.
There are several ways to do this, but the first (and easiest) is to simply Google corporate events. Modify the Google search to be specific to industry events in your niche and add your state or region to the search. Local events usually are on the lookout for an up-and-coming speaker (like you!) rather than an experienced speaker.
Reaching Out to Potential Clients
Find events that are at least four to six months out and try to identify who the decision maker on speakers is likely to be. If the event is a smaller one, it may be someone at the executive level. If it’s a bigger one, speakers will likely be decided on by conference organizers, event coordinators, or someone with a similar job title.
If you’re not sure who this is, it’s perfectly fine to ask. Next, compose a personalized email to them. It’s important to make it specific to the potential client and not a copy-and-paste template. Don’t make the mistake of “going in for the kill” immediately, so to speak. Your initial goal should only be to get the person to reply to your email.
Once you get to the stage where a back-and-forth is required, you should try your best to speak to the client on the phone. Not only is this the easiest way to exchange information, but it gives your client the impression that you will deliver direct and helpful customer service.
Obviously in such conversations, one of the main topics is going to be about your fee. When you’re new to the industry, setting a fee can be confusing and intimidating. It’s important to be reasonable about your level of experience and the budgets of event planners, but it’s equally important to not undersell yourself.
When you first start out, you may have to charge less than what you’d like, but the experience can be just as valuable as the money if it helps you land future gigs. While the typical fee for new speakers is generally $1000, there are factors that can make it reasonable to charge either more or less than that. In any case, make sure you have a good idea of what you’ll be charging and how flexible your price is before you pick up the phone.
This process will involve a lot of trial and error at first, but that’s okay. It’s important not to take it personally when you get rejected. In fact, if event planners tell you they’re not interested, you can try asking if there’s another event or contact they know of that might be interested in you. Referrals are also one of the best ways to get more speaking opportunities after your first gig.
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Know When to Scale
The final step in the Speaker Success Roadmap is knowing when to scale. For now, you don’t really need to worry about this. Down the line, as your speaking business grows, you may need to hire people to delegate parts of your job to. But for now, you should focus on what you can do to grow that speaking business.
Conclusion
As you can tell by now, there’s a lot that goes into becoming a successful corporate public speaker and it can be challenging, especially for new speakers. It’s crucial to break it down into manageable steps and lay the groundwork before picking up the phone. The Speaker Success Roadmap provides a structured path to success. By doing things in the correct order you will not only secure initial speaking engagements but also create a foundation for continued growth and success in the industry.
