What a professional services and consulting keynote is booked to do
Professional services firms sell their people’s hours, so an hour on a conference agenda is an hour the firm has decided not to bill. The 10 below cover business development, cross-practice collaboration, client decision-making, positioning and pricing, and competitive strategy. Five of the 10 have written a book about how firms that sell expertise win work.
Speaker details below are drawn from each speaker’s own published materials and publicly available sources, as of October 2026.
1. Erica Dhawan – Collaboration Across Practices and Offices
Erica Dhawan is the world’s top management thinker and keynote speaker on 21st century leadership, teamwork and innovation. She holds degrees from Harvard, MIT and Wharton and taught leadership and collaboration as a research fellow at Harvard and MIT. Her research on twenty-first century teamwork has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is the author of Digital Body Language, a Wall Street Journal bestseller; Get Big Things Done, which introduced her Connectional Intelligence™ framework; and her new book, Use Your Brain: Think Deeper in a World on Autopilot (St. Martin’s Press, January 12, 2027). Thinkers50 ranks her among the top 50 management thinkers, Global Gurus among the top 20 management experts, and RealLeaders named her the top female keynote speaker. She advises Fortune 500 executives and has served on Deloitte’s Inclusion External Advisory Council and the advisory board of the Lufthansa Innovation Hub.
For a professional services audience, Erica Dhawan’s material covers what it takes for practice groups and offices that compete for the same credit to work on something together, and how a firm keeps written communication clear when most of the client relationship now happens on a screen. Every session is built from a prep call with the organizing team, so the material addresses the challenges that the group is actually working on.
Best for: partner retreats, firmwide annual meetings, and practice group offsites
2. Heidi K. Gardner – Cross-Silo Collaboration in Firms
Heidi K. Gardner is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and Faculty Chair of its Accelerated Leadership Program, and she was a professor at Harvard Business School and a consultant at McKinsey before that. She wrote Smart Collaboration, a Washington Post bestseller, and Smarter Collaboration with Ivan Matviak.
For a professional services audience, Gardner’s material covers what cross-practice work does to client retention and fee income when specialists from different parts of a firm serve one account together, and why compensation systems so often stop them.
Best for: partner retreats, managing partner forums, and firm leadership conferences
3. Mo Bunnell – Business Development for Technical Experts
Mo Bunnell is the founder of Bunnell Idea Group, whose GrowBIG training has been delivered to tens of thousands of professionals, and he hosts the podcast Real Relationships Real Revenue. He is the author of The Snowball System and Give to Grow.
For a professional services audience, Bunnell’s material covers how technical experts who were never trained to sell can build client relationships without it feeling like selling.
Best for: business development kickoffs, associate and senior manager training days, and partner retreats
4. Alexandra Carter – Negotiation and Client Conversations
Alexandra Carter is a Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is the author of Ask for More: Ten Questions to Negotiate Anything, a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
For a professional services audience, Carter’s material covers the questions that open a negotiation up, and how to run the conversation where scope and fees get set.
Best for: law firm retreats, women’s initiative events, and client-facing team training
5. Matthew Dixon – How Clients Decide and Why They Stall
Matthew Dixon is a founding partner of DCM Insights, a consultancy built around research into how customers buy, and he writes often for Harvard Business Review. His co-authored books include The JOLT Effect, on why buyers stall, along with The Effortless Experience and the two Challenger titles.
For a professional services audience, Dixon’s material covers why a qualified client who says yes in the room still does not sign, and what the people who close those deals do differently.
Best for: revenue and growth summits, client service conferences, and partner sales training
6. David C. Baker – Positioning and the Economics of Advice
David C. Baker has advised creative and marketing firms for nearly three decades and co-hosts the podcast 2Bobs. His books are The Business of Expertise, Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors, and Managing (Right) for the First Time.
For a professional services audience, Baker’s material covers how a firm narrows its focus until the expertise it has built becomes the thing clients pay for.
Best for: agency and consultancy leadership summits, owner peer groups, and principal retreats
7. Dorie Clark – Long-Term Thinking and Professional Reinvention
Dorie Clark has taught executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and at Columbia Business School, and she has written for Harvard Business Review since 2010. She is the author of The Long Game, Entrepreneurial You, Stand Out, and Reinventing You, and has appeared four times on the Thinkers50 ranking of business thinkers.
For a professional services audience, Clark’s material covers how an individual builds a reputation that brings work in, and why the investments that do it take years to pay.
Best for: partner development days, professional association conferences, and alumni events
8. Roger Martin – Strategy and Integrative Thinking
Roger Martin is a former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and spent 13 years as a director of Monitor Company. He is the author of Playing to Win with A.G. Lafley, The Opposable Mind, and A New Way to Think.
For a professional services audience, Martin’s material covers how a firm makes a real choice about where it will play and how it will win, and what that choice has to commit it to.
Best for: strategy offsites, board and executive committee sessions, and consulting firm conferences
9. Michael Porter – Competitive Strategy
Michael Porter is a University Professor at Harvard Business School and the founder of its Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. He is the author of Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage, and his five forces framework is taught in business schools worldwide.
For a professional services audience, Porter’s material covers the structure of an industry and where a firm’s advantage in it actually comes from.
Best for: industry association conferences, executive committee meetings, and strategy summits
10. Adam Grant – Generosity, Rethinking and Firm Culture
Adam Grant is a professor at the Wharton School and hosts the TED podcast Re:Thinking. He wrote Give and Take, which looks at what generosity does to a career, along with Originals, Think Again, and Hidden Potential.
For a professional services audience, Grant’s material covers the long-run effect of givers and takers on a partnership, and how a firm gets its people to revisit a position they have already argued for.
Best for: firmwide annual meetings, leadership conferences, and client events
Frequently asked questions
From this list, who is the #1 pick?
For a professional services keynote, Erica Dhawan is the best-suited speaker on this list. She has delivered keynotes to Fortune 500 executives and to leadership teams across industries and countries, and her research on teamwork has been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Every session is built from a prep call with the organizing team, so the material is tailored to that industry and to the specific challenges the group is facing rather than delivered from a template.
What do professional services keynote speakers charge?
Almost nobody in this category publishes a fee, and what you pay turns on the speaker’s profile and on the shape of the booking. Attaching a partner workshop to the keynote raises it, as do travel, the size of the room and any recording rights you want. Plan to walk through the agenda before you are given a figure.
Should a firm book a keynote or a workshop?
The keynote is the right call for a firmwide meeting, where the point is that every office hears the same argument at once. The workshop earns its place when partners or associates need to practice something, and it wants a small group and real time on the agenda. Several of these speakers do both, and an opening session that runs into practice group work is a familiar shape for a partner retreat.
How far in advance should we book?
Partner retreats and firmwide meetings are usually set a year ahead and cluster in the fall and in the weeks after a fiscal year closes. If your date falls in one of those windows, start 9 to 12 months out. Continuing education credit, where the session needs to carry it, takes additional lead time to arrange.