“Let me think about it is not an answer. It’s a placeholder. And there’s almost always something that’s real underneath that.”
Welcome back to The Speaker Lab Podcast! In this episode, Dan Irvin is flying solo — just you and Dan, one-on-one — to talk about one sentence that has probably cost you more bookings than you realize: “I need to think about it.”
You’ve heard it from event planners. Great discovery call, proposal sent the same afternoon, then: “This looks really great. Let me think about it and I’ll get back to you.” Weeks pass. Around week three, hope turns into “maybe I read it wrong.” Dan says almost every speaker he coaches has a folder full of polite maybes. But here’s the part most people miss — speakers say the exact same sentence to themselves. “I need to think about raising my fee.” “I need to think about my niche.” For months. Sometimes years. Dan breaks down what a planner actually means when they say those words (there are four things it could be, and each one calls for a different response), shares the one warm, curious question that gets to the real answer, and walks through his Friday rule — a simple framework for making the decisions you’ve been sitting on. He also talks about two types of speakers he sees all the time: one who walked into burning buildings for a living but couldn’t bring themselves to send one email raising a fee, and another who’d been “thinking about” picking a niche for a couple of years. Two different problems, same sentence holding them back.
Whether you’re staring at a planner’s “let me think about it” right now or you’re the one who’s been saying it to yourself, this episode gives you a concrete way forward.
You’ll learn:
- The one sentence that quietly costs speakers more money than anything else a planner can say
- What “let me think about it” actually means when a planner says it — four possibilities, four fixes
- The single question that turns a polite stall into a real conversation
- Three follow-up rules for keeping a “maybe” from dying in your inbox
- Why the same sentence shows up on both sides of the table, and what to do about your own version of it
- How to give a planner an easy way out (and why that makes them more likely to reply)
- Dan’s Friday rule: a four-step process for making decisions you’ve been putting off
- The real cost of “thinking about it” when you already know your number is too low — with example math that might sting
- What it took for a speaker who ran into burning buildings to finally raise a fee
- How a speaker stuck on niching for two years made the call in fifteen minutes of looking at past gigs
- The difference between thinking and stalling, and how to tell which one you’re doing
And much, much more!
“Your message does not help anyone while it sits in the drafts folder. There’s no impact being had while you continue to stall and wait and not make a decision. The people who need your talk are not waiting on a perfect version of you. They’re waiting on a decision.”
Been “thinking about it” for a while now? Book a free Speaker Business Assessment — a 15-minute session where somebody who does this every single day looks at your business, where it’s at right now, and what decisions are actually in front of you.
