Wednesday, May 7, 2025
I think the speaking business is one of the toughest ways I have ever chosen to make a living. Making sales calls to land consulting jobs or new coaching clients, I have always found easier than winning a speaking engagement.
There are so many reasons this business is hard:
The market is crowded – you not only have to compete against other professional speakers, but there’s industry speakers, team building experts and on occasion you even lose out the highly rated chocolate fountain.
Everything changes – audiences, meeting planners, and the economy all are constantly shifting – what topics they want, what style of speaker they need, the budget they’re willing to pay. Just when you think you’re hot in the market, you have this nailed, everything shifts.
Everyone takes your niche – you work hard on your brand, create your unique niche, and you do what it takes to dominate your market. Then just when all of your hard work pays off, you start booking more gig, other speaker catch on and your once unique niche becomes nothing more than a commodity.
Yes, it’s a tough industry.
But even with all those odds stacked against you, this is still one of the most fun, interesting, and lucrative ways to make a living.
So how do you make money in the speaking business? Well, it starts long before you ever hit the stage.
Before the Keynote
You have to remember, whether you want to or not, first and foremost this is a business. If you want to make money in this business, if you want to be around three to five years from now, you need to think business first, speaking second.
1. Make A Plan – before you even craft your keynote, shoot your first video, or make your first call, you need a plan. You need a clear vision of where you are headed, measurable goals you want to achieve, and a strong action plan of how you are going to get there.
2. Define Your Process – the strong part of your plan needs to be your sales process. Yes, like it or not, you have to sell strategically. Everything from your ideal prospect to your sales behaviors, to the number of proposals you plan to write each month. Sell, track, measure, sell some more.
3. Be Committed – a plan and a sales process are a great start, but they are worthless if you don’t have the commitment to consistently implement. Just like you brush your teeth or do your sit-ups you have to sell every day.
4. Remain Relevant – what you sell matters. You can be amazing, have the most incredible stories, and a strong sales process, but if your topic is not what the audience wants, or your prospect is looking for, you will never land the gig. Unless you are a celebrity, the best way to get booked is to be and remain highly relevant.
5. Diversify the Stream – the speaking business is a fickle business, and it tends to blow up every eight to 10 years. You need to offer more than speaking if you want to make it through the lean times.
During the Keynote
1. Be Solid – on stage that is. You need to realize that anyone can google the topic you are speaking about, so you need to work on your content and your delivery. You have to work on your craft until you get it to the point where you can get the audience to do the impossible – take action. And when you’ve mastered that – and everyone is talking about you – start over, dig deeper, and do it some more. The best way to make more money in the speaking business is to be so good on stage others want to hire you.
2. Lace the Keynote – your stories, your messaging, your case studies, they all need to ever so gracefully help the audience know this is not the only keynote you have, or the only line of business you offer. When you are solid on stage, the audience loves you, so you need to give them other reasons to hire you.
3. Make it Easy – take every single piece of friction out of getting in touch with you or hiring you. Do not make the audience write down your contact information, don’t give them a business card they can lose, and don’t make it their responsibility to get in touch with you. Whether you use survey tools, QR codes, or some other form of capture, just ensure you take every ounce of pain out of contacting you.
4. Get to Work – a conference is a gift full of people who can hire, recommend, and refer you. You need to work the opening party, shake hands, and kiss babies after your keynote, and capture as many testimonials as you can. If you do not leave every conference with a list of people to connect with then you’ve wasted the gift.
After the Keynote
1. Follow-up – before you ever step on stage, make sure you have the follow-up meeting set with your client. Don’t make the main point of this call about feedback – everyone does that. You need to use this as an opportunity to share what you learned at the conference, and how else you can help your client or their audience.
2. Refer to Your Friends – this is a business, where we at NSA help each other grow our speaking businesses, so you need to go first. For every speaking engagement you get, you need to refer another speaker for the following year. You refer them, they will most likely refer you, and before you know it you are making serious money in the speaking business.
3. Never Give Up – this is not an instant gratification business. You don’t make a sales call or send a referral and then your calendar is booked. No, it’s more complicated than that. You need to stay in the game, keep working the strategy and do this process over and over again. A rinse-and-repeat approach will create a domino effect that will eventually take hold and create traction.
Okay, that’s enough to get you started. While there is more I can share about how to make money in the speaking business, I will save that for a follow-up article.
For now, put these strategies to work and you will not only fill your calendar, but you will also turn all of this uncertainty into your greatest competitive advantage.