Key takeaways
- Work out what you want the session to change before you start looking at speakers. If all you hand people is a topic, you’ll have no way to judge afterward whether it was worth doing.
- Who’s in the room matters more than the subject. A talk that works for 60 executives often falls flat with 800 people from across the company, and the same speaker can be great at one and poor at the other.
- Don’t filter for industry experience. What actually matters is whether someone understands how your kind of room works, which isn’t the same thing as having worked in your sector.
- Ask what happens between signing the contract and the event. The answer tells you whether you’re getting a prepared talk or an off-the-shelf one.
- Decide what the session leads into before you book it. Otherwise people walk out energized and a week later nothing’s changed.
What a keynote is for
A keynote gets everyone in one room, usually once a year, and asks them to think about the same thing at the same time. That almost never happens otherwise, which is why companies keep paying for it.
The trouble is that most bookings start from a theme instead of a goal. Someone picks a subject, a bureau sends over names that match it, the speaker with the best reel gets the job, and the talk goes fine. Nobody can say afterward whether it did anything, because nobody said at the start what it was supposed to do.
Start with what you want to change
Before you look at a single name, write down one sentence about what would be different if the session works.
It might be that two teams who’ve stopped talking to each other start again. Or that a leadership group finally makes a decision it’s been circling for months. Or that a sales team coming off a bad quarter walks out believing they can turn it around.
That one sentence does most of the filtering for you. It’ll knock out half your shortlist straight away, and once the event’s over you’ll have something to measure against.
Who’s in the room matters more than the topic
Sixty senior people who all know each other is a completely different job from 1,200 people spread across six countries on a video call. Plenty of good speakers are excellent at one and genuinely bad at the other.
Three questions usually settle it. How many people, and do they know each other? What’s the seniority mix, and will junior staff say what they think with their boss sitting there? And did anyone turn up because they had to?
That last one gets missed a lot. A mandatory all-hands is much harder than a conference people paid to attend, and a speaker whose whole career has been conference stages may never have had to win over a room that didn’t want to be there.
Industry experience is usually the wrong filter
When you’re booking for a specific sector, the instinct is to look for someone from that sector. In practice the speakers who do well in healthcare, insurance, legal or financial services rooms usually aren’t industry insiders at all. They’re people whose subject travels, and who’ve bothered to learn how your kind of room works.
What they need to understand is the constraints. If you’re in professional services, your audience may need the session to count toward continuing education credit. In financial services, slides often have to clear compliance weeks ahead. Healthcare audiences sit through a lot of required training and will turn up assuming this is more of it. A speaker who knows all this will bring it up early. One who doesn’t will leave your team scrambling in the final week.
Check what the speaker actually works on
Speakers get booked for a topic and then deliver their subject. The topic is whatever your event needs this year. The subject is what they’ve genuinely spent a career on.
This has got harder to read, because almost everyone has repositioned around AI in the last couple of years. The ones worth booking already had a subject, whether that’s negotiation or team dynamics or how people make decisions, and they can tell you something specific about what AI changes inside it. The ones to skip have given the same talk a new title.
There’s a quick way to check. Ask what they were speaking about three years ago, and see whether it connects to what they’re pitching now.
Ask how they prepare
There’s a big gap between speakers who do their homework on a room and speakers who turn up with a talk they’ve given 200 times, and you can see which one you’ve got within about five minutes.
So ask what actually happens between signing and the event. The good answers involve calls with your team, questions about what people are dealing with, and sometimes interviews with a few attendees. The weak answers involve an intake form and a request for your logo in high resolution.
Watch a full talk before you decide
Every speaker has a highlight reel. It’s three minutes of the best moments from a dozen different talks, cut together to sell you, so it tells you very little.
Ask for 20 minutes of one talk instead, uncut, ideally in front of an audience that looks something like yours. The interesting part is the flat stretches. Can they hold a room when there isn’t a laugh line coming? What do they do when a question lands badly? Is the audience actually with them, or just being polite? If someone charging serious money can’t produce 20 unedited minutes, that’s worth noticing.
Plan what happens after
The part that usually falls apart is what comes next. People walk out fired up, get back to their inboxes, and a week later nothing’s different.
So decide in advance what the session leads into. Maybe that’s a workshop with a smaller group the same afternoon. Maybe it’s a set of questions the leadership team takes into its next meeting. Maybe it’s just agreeing that the speaker’s main idea becomes the frame for the next quarter.
Speakers vary a lot here. Some will push to be involved in what follows. Others see the talk as the whole job and will be gone by dinner.
Things that get settled too late
- Opening or closing. These are different jobs. An opener has to set up the days that follow. A closer is competing with an audience that’s already sat through them. Not everyone does both well.
- Virtual or in person. They’re separate skills. Ask what they’ve actually done lately, because everyone will tell you they’re happy to do either.
- Credits and compliance. If your audience needs continuing education credit, or your slides have to clear compliance, raise it while you’re contracting. Both take longer than you’d think.
- Anything they need on stage. Instruments, demonstrations, audience participation. Your venue will want to know early.
- Recording rights. Whether you can record it, share it internally, or cut clips for social. Much easier to agree before the event than after it.
Frequently asked questions
What should we send a speaker beforehand?
Anything that explains what your people are dealing with. The agenda, who’s on before and after them, the seniority mix, and an honest paragraph about what’s going on in the business. That last one matters most and is the one most often left out.
How do we know if they’ve handled an audience like ours?
Ask for two references from similar events and actually call them. Ask what the speaker did in the run-up, because asking whether the talk went well won’t tell you anything. Almost every talk goes well.
Who should make the call internally?
Someone who’ll be in the room and who understands what you’re trying to change. Events teams should handle the logistics, but when a booking gets decided purely on who’s available and what they cost, you usually end up with a session nobody remembers.
What goes wrong most often?
The brief was a theme and never a goal, so there was no way to tell whether it worked. After that, it’s speakers who were never told what was really happening in the business, and who gave a perfectly good talk about something else.