Beads of sweat are beginning to show on your forehead. Your keynote speaker, Jack, is not on site yet and he is scheduled to go on in less than 45 minutes. Jack didn't show up for the sound check and you need to get his slide deck cued up and tested. He finally shows up with 15 minutes to spare but as he calmly walks backstage he mentions he needs to tweak one more slide. You feel faint. Jack does take the stage on time but seems out of sorts the entire time. Talking too fast and not really making the points that he told you he was going to make. You now feel nauseous. What a disaster.

Perhaps you’ve found yourself in this situation before. A friend of someone on your team said this guy was great and you watched his demo reel and felt he would fit the bill.  On the two calls you had with him, he might have even sounded convincing. So where did you go wrong? How can you really know if a professional keynote speaker is going to be the perfect fit for your event and your audience?

At SpeakInc, we have thousands of professional speakers in our database and there are thousands more out there that we don’t even know about yet. We are sent marketing packets with video links and DVDs from all of these speakers but until we actually see a speaker on a stage speaking to an audience, we simply can’t be sure.  Sure there are the tried and tested speakers that everyone knows will be a big draw and do a great job like Jason Jennings, Seth Mattison or Mike Mullane, but there are also many celebrity speakers who can draw an audience by virtue of name recognition but then they stand behind a podium gripping the sides and read from pages of notes the entire time, and your audience leaves disappointed.

Working with a professional speakers bureau will minimize your risk and when you are selecting a bureau partner to work with there are four things you need:

1. A bureau partner who knows you.


You have specific ideas for the event you are planning and you are putting your name on the final event when it is all said and done. You need to ensure you are partnering with someone who has taken the time to get to know you. When you say you want someone with "high energy," it might mean something slightly different from someone else who says “high energy.” Conservative to one group might be something completely different to you. Getting to know you and your style is a critical first step in the match process.

2. A bureau partner who knows your business.

Understanding your overall business goals and why you are gathering people together in the first place is a key factor to matching the perfect speaker to your needs. You need someone who takes the time to get to know your business, the history, and the leadership team. In essence, the speaker you select is going to represent the brand and messaging for your company.

3. A bureau partner that understands the audience that will be attending the event. 

What is the demographics of the audience? What is motivating them to attend? Do they have to be at the event (employees) or do you need to convince them to attend? (See our earlier post about whether to hire the celebrity speaker or the keynote speaker who is under $20,000). These are important factors to finding the perfect match.

4.  Lastly, you need a bureau partner who will only recommend a speaker they have actually seen speak…on stage. 

It is not enough to look at a demo reel. Those can be edited and manipulated to tell a very different story, and short sound bytes are not the same as seeing a speaker live. We also want to make sure we have seen a speaker in a similar situation. Speaking on a panel or meeting them at a conference where they are not speaking is NOT the same as seeing them in front of an audience delivering a message.

At SpeakInc we get asked a lot to define the qualities of a great speaker, but that is really hard to answer. There are so many qualities and each speaker we see is very different. When we see a great speaker, we work to get to know them and start making mental matches in our head. There are many times we see a speaker on stage and immediately know which of our clients they would fit right in with. You just can’t get that from a marketing packet. We ask them to please invite us to watch them when they are in a city we can get to, because until we see them speak, we don’t know them from JACK!