if you don’t see what we do as competitive with clear
winners and losers, then speaking must merely be a
hobby for you. But it’s a business for me.
Us or
Them?
If meeting planners can afford it,
they will hire celebrity speakers for
their event. Real celebrities. Big
names, as in having been the U.S.
Secretary of State, written a New York Times No. 1 best-seller, worn the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. Unless our credentials are on a par with those, we’re not
going to be seen as a “celebrity” no matter how much
we spend on marketing or PR. To break through and
get noticed, we must position what the audience gets
above who we are.
As speakers, the majority of us focus our primary
efforts on selling us, and not what the meeting planner will get when they hire us. Our business is named
after us. Our book has us on the cover. Our business
card has a picture of us and when they go to our Web
site ( us.com), we smack them in the face with all kinds
of great stuff all about, well, us. In the process, all of
us get lumped into the category of wannabe celebrities working like fools trying to convince the meeting
planner that everyone else loves us and they should
become a fan, too.
Meeting planners aren’t stupid. In fact, by and large,
they’ve grown cynical. And who can blame them? They
know that you wrote your Web site copy, that you were
the executive producer of your video demo, and that
you post only carefully chosen quotes that say flattering
things about you. Is it any wonder that they place little
or no value on all of this self-aggrandizing fluff?
In an eye-opening experiment, assume the persona
of the most Simon-esque meeting planner you’ve ever
encountered as you review a half dozen or so Web sites
from speakers selected entirely at random (e.g., speakers who live in California, speakers whose last name
begins with R, or some other such random criteria) and
ask yourself a few questions.
• What is the core essence of the program
or presentation?
• Does this have any real take-away value?
• How will the people I’m planning this meeting for
think, perform or act differently than they did before
they listened to this speaker?”
• Would I look like a hero to my client for bringing in
this speaker?
If the answers aren’t obvious, do what every meeting
planner on the planet will do—click out and move on
to the next Web site as quickly as possible.
Time
Warp
Meeting planners don’t watch even
the first five minutes of your video.
You might get them to watch the first
two or three minutes, even if you
don’t blow them away in the first 60 seconds. If what
they see in that first 120 seconds is all stage-setting, self-promoting biographical background crap-ola, laced with
elaborate graphic effects and 1980’s stock-library, synthesized music, they are going to consider you a middle-
