How Should I Set My Speaking Fees? (part one)

This is one topic you usually don’t hear people talking about – and yet it is one of the most important questions a professional speaker faces. For the new speaker, fee setting is mystifying and frightening…and for the experienced speaker, fee setting can drive you into a professional rut by keeping you from getting the gigs you want – or by putting you in front of audiences that don’t work for you.

As a speaker, your fee means something, but it does not mean what you think it does. Simply put, your fee represents what your client thinks your speaking will be worth BEFORE you give the speech. This value must always be evaluated from the perspective of the client. A speech can deliver value in several ways:

1. Draw value – you may, by your reputation or topic description, draw attendees to an event.
2. Entertainment value – you may amuse the audience
3. Information value – you may give the audience information they do not have
4. Process value – you may, in your speech, draw the audience through an experience than informs them or changes their thinking

The first value – draw value – is clearly worth something BEFORE the event. If you have this, your client may view your value as equivalent to buying a certain amount of, say, advertising, and you can think of your value this way.

The remaining sources of value are often part of the client’s product – that is, the event is often sold as a source of these values. The extent to which you deliver these values is the extent to which your client’s “product” gains quality from the raw material you bring to it. These values affect three things which are important to most clients:

1. quality experience for attendees
2. event reputation
3. repeat business/attendance at future events

Clearly, this assessment of value is most valid for public events, trade shows and conventions. In this type of event, the client will value all three “content” values highly, since the future commercial success of the client’s enterprise rests – at least in part – on delivering all three values to the audience.

In corporate meetings, the value of your speech may well be assessed by the way the audience applies your effect to the organization. You might be hired, for example, to assure that attendees who are franchisees understand how to use social media to promote their local business, or to teach employees how to be more productive on the road.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how to assess the value you create in each of the four core areas, and how to use that assessment to help set your fees.

Is your speaking business worth it?

I will be doing a SMALL event for speakers in Scottsdale (Phoenix area) AZ, on May 14. The program is designed to give each of the 12 attendees a chance to be in the "hot seat" and get valuable and actionable ideas about how to make more money speaking. As many of you know, some of my hot seat folks have booked hundreds of thousands of dollars in business after following the simple steps I've outlined - perhaps you could be the next!

This is going to be a super event, with some great speakers already signed up to attend and a guarantee of individual attention and ideas to grow YOUR speaking business!

If you are interested, you can check out the Facebook Event Page.

To sign up for my program, you can send me an email or register online at isleofprofit.com

Selling AFTER you speak

One of the keys to making money when you speak is to have something else that people can buy when they like your speech. It can be cheap - like a book or CD - or it can be expensive - like consulting or another speech. Not only does this keep your audience engaged with you long after you have spoken, but it gives you a shot at a much greater revenue stream by enabling you to build a list of happy audience members who really value your message.
One key to doing this well is NOT to sell from the platform. You can mention your product in a story (this is the best way) or give ONE product to the meeting organizer to raffle off (great for list building - have people put their business cards in a hat for the raffle). Just don't wast the audience's time talking about your product in a way that doesn't add to the value of your speech. You will find that the resentment this causes far outweighs any value you get from sales - and the classy soft-sell approach sells so much more.
What do YOU sell after you speak?

Call or be called

This sounds like a silly idea - all of us would rather be called than call, when it comes to selling our speaking services. BUT - how many of us are willing to actually do what it takes to be called? One of the secrets of many of the most successful speakers out there is that they do a LOT of work generating the market awareness that leads prospective clients to call them. In many, many cases, this means writing - and writing material that other people will read and value. Some speakers, like Jeffrey Gitomer, even go so far as to say they are primarily writers - and I would agree.

As a general rule, you can put time and money into marketing or selling - and writing is a very efficient means of marketing. What work do YOU do to get prospective clients calling you?

Why did you call me?

If you want people to call you - and I do, because I'm terrible at selling - this is the most important question you can ask any potential client who calls you: "Why did you call me?". It lets the client help you learn what marketing efforts are working, and in the process, also sell himself/herself on the reasons why you are the right person to be calling at that time.

Don't let it go with a simple answer, though. Many people who call say "I read your book.", which is cool, but I also get a lot of "I googled you." Now, this tells me my web marketing efforts must be having some effect, but to really get the most out of my marketing work, I need to know which efforts are working. A good follow-up question is "What, exactly did you google?". You might also ask what else your prospect found, since that will give you a good idea of the competitive group you are playing with.

Frankly, since I'm so bad at selling, I'd rather have lots of conversation about these questions. It tells me so much about the need that is in the caller's mind, and helps me connect dollars and hours spent on marketing with the resulting call.

Yes, I know a lot of my sales expert friends will point out that this is a great selling technique, but for me, it's really a marketing technique, since my real aim is to get the information necessary to get lots of potential clients calling me, rather than the other way around!

The Practice Effect

A speaker friend of mine was telling me how hard she worked to get booked at the NSA National Convention in July. “What did you speak on – the last 3 times you were booked?” I asked. Her response was not, unfortunately, unusual: “Teambuilding, leadership and work-life balance”. Three gigs – three topics. While this may seem ideal from some people’s viewpoints, it’s actually something of a disservice to the client. Why? Because the client wants a great speech delivered by someone who really knows their stuff. The very best way to know your stuff in speaking is to do it over and over and over. The worst way to know your stuff is to read a couple of books on the topic and then deliver a speech. There are countless ways you can mess up a speech on any topic – and you won’t find most of them practicing in front of a mirror or even a group of friends. There is an old Russian saying that “repetition is the mother of learning”. As speakers, we owe our audiences the quality that comes with learning our topic so that we can deliver it as no one else can.

My friend was having trouble getting booked because she has unwittingly become a “generic speaker”. She wants to speak so badly that she will speak on anything to anyone, and often ends up speaking on nothing to no one – because she has failed to take advantage of the practice effect. By contrast, another speaker I know does almost no work to get booked – her last three clients called her! Why? Because she speaks on the same topic over and over again, her audience knows who she is – and meeting planners consider themselves lucky to be able to book her. When I asked her how she does this, she told me “I write a ton of material on my topic and publish it anywhere I can. And whenever I am asked to do a speech, I ask myself – will I learn something from doing this speech that will benefit future audiences? If the answer is yes, I will do whatever it takes to book that speech. If the answer is no, I charge a stiff enough fee for the speech that I don’t mind if I get it – usually twice what I get otherwise.” It should come as no surprise that almost all of her bookings are on her topic of choice, and all of her articles, books and radio interviews reflect this, as well. This kind of focus is difficult – it can even mean passing up speaking opportunities - but it is the foundation of your reputation as an EXPERT speaker. The choices that lead to becoming and expert speaker are harder today, but will make it easier to succeed in the future, while becoming a generic speaker is easier today, but makes long-term success much more difficult. Do you make the kind of choices that will make you an expert speaker rather than a generic one?

Focus on your profession

“I’m a speaker.”

That one phrase says so much about you…and also, so little. Most people we meet react to this with comments like “Oh, you mean like a motivational speaker?”, because that is the easiest mental cubbyhole to put us in. But the reality of our profession is that there are more different kinds of speakers than most of us –even those of us who are speakers – would think exist.

Still, in that one phrase, we do identify many of the things we have in common. We are used to standing in front of audiences, and we do so for our living. For most – but not all of us – speaking also means a good deal of traveling, with the perks, and the headaches, that come along with that. Speakers with families have a special challenge, because the nature of our profession means that many of our families never know if we will be home on a particular date. But we also have a great deal of flexibility in our calendars, which means we can do things with our families that people with regular jobs only dream of.

Today, I want to reflect a little bit on the two-sided nature of the sameness of speakers. I say it’s two sided simply because there are advantages to our similarities…but there are also deep disadvantages.

On the plus side, in an association like NSA, we can find people who have similar hopes and dreams, similar trials and frustrations, and even similar issues to wrestle with. We even have developed our own arcane lingo to quickly communicate about some of the things we have in common. When another speaker asks about my “one-sheet”, I know exactly what he or she is talking about. Another great plus is that there are easy solutions available for many of our common issues. Want a to make a video? Talk to Ed Primeau, or one of the other folks who specialize in making them. Need to learn how to sell e-books? Go to Tom Antion’s Butt Camp. The list of people who help us do our work…and make money helping us do our work…is long, and fascinating. And because we all share these issues, an NSA meeting is a great place to compare notes about what is working – and what isn’t.

On the minus side, it is easy for us to believe what some people in the meetings industry would like to believe…that speakers are a generic commodity, with a certain level of sameness, that can be quantified, inventoried and scheduled like airplanes. Many speakers – and you may be one of them – participate in this process, as I do. A prospective client calls and asks for a video…and I send it. We set up our calendars online to make booking easy, automatic, and even impersonal. And many of us work with speakers bureaus who catalog us like videos in a Blockbuster store.

Don’t get me wrong…in many cases, this is a fine thing. It’s nice and convenient for a meeting planner to call a bureau and ask for a specific type of speaker at a given fee, and get it booked with a minimum of hassle, just as it’s nice and convenient to be able to grab a TV dinner at the grocery store. As someone who plans meetings – and hires speakers for those meetings every year – I understand the value of this convenience. As a speaker, I also understand the danger of it. You see, if I’m being booked “off the shelf”…I tend to become a bit like a TV dinner.

Here’s what I hear: “Oh, you’re a strategy speaker….we don’t get much call for that.”

What nonsense. What I speak about is how to do the right thing, in the right place, at the right time…how to turn vision into reality…and how to turn a me-too business into a world-beating success story. Who doesn’t get much call for that?

But the problem is…I am fitting myself into someone else’s cubbyhole. That is the danger of sameness. Because you see, once I fit into that cubbyhole…I’m going to have a heck of a time getting out. And if I want to charge more than the next guy who fits into that very same cubbyhole, I darn well better get out of that cubbyhole!

The key to getting out of the speaker cubbyhole…and staying out…is the opposite of sameness. When I talk to a meeting planner, I say – in the first minute AND the last minute of the conversation: “The reason you want to work with me is that NO ONE else is really focused on this topic…when I finish TALKING about strategy, I go out and do strategy, with dozens of different companies every year…and our 6 professionals – all former CEOs - have done nothing BUT strategy for nearly 25 years.” Why do I say this? Because…in the final analysis…this is the difference between an expert and someone giving a book report. When the meeting planner wants to know that you won’t stumble in the Q&A…that you have good, entertaining stories that will relate to your topic…and that your program will be fun and interactive…the EXPERIENCED meeting planner will look for that expertise. I also say this because it is truly the difference between my firm and other people who might do strategic planning. Others…John Morissey comes to mind…might claim a piece of what I say…but no one else can honestly say they even come close. And frankly, if I can convince a meeting planner of the importance of that one factor, I’ve made the sale.