Sure, you want the best possible speaker for whatever your budget might be. A dynamic or informative speaker is generally a stellar investment in the success of your meeting. But sometimes your budget is not enough for the speaker you want. What’s the solution? Hire a less expensive speaker, squeeze the speaker you want for a better price, or think beyond conventional wisdom?
Thinking beyond conventional wisdom might mean limiting the number of speakers at your meeting. It is always less expensive to have a single speaker do several sessions than to have more than one speaker each present a single session. Even if these unpaid speakers drive in — thereby eliminating their airline travel expense — they will still want a free hotel room for the conference and free registration. Perhaps they were going to come anyway? Now, you’re missing out on the registration fees you would have received otherwise. Sometimes, the true cost of non-paid speakers is staggeringly hidden.
Let’s explore the difference between a professional speaker presenting the same program multiple times and presenting more than one program. The big difference for the speaker is preparation time, including research, handout development, and PowerPoint preparation. Unfortunately, few meeting planners consider this key issue with time. Speakers are selling both their knowledge and their time. The latter is finite, so the more you consume, the more you should expect to pay. In paying for a speaker’s time, you need to consider their presentation time, travel time and preparation time. Unless, of course, you want a canned speech, then the preparation time is not an issue. Before you jump on the cost savings of a canned speech, remember that today, few attendees will find value in something so depersonalized.
This idea of a single speaker presenting multiple presentations for a single fee is gaining popularity in the world of professional speakers but is counter to standard procedures for most speaker bureaus. If you like this idea, you might have to abandon the ease with speaker selection that you have enjoyed when working with bureaus.
The Bureau Conundrum
Speaker Bureaus provide a valuable outsourcing service for meeting planners who are time-squeezed. A planner can contact a bureau, give their budget and the bureau will take it from there. For planners who need to fill numerous session slots and do not have sufficient staff to do so — bureaus can be their solution. Yet, many more speakers are under or non-represented by speakers’ bureaus, than there are speakers that they recommend. Most bureaus only have a small corral of speakers that they can easily sell and therefore will generally recommend them first. Many of the underrepresented speakers are quite good and are of tremendous value.
Another component to consider is that some bureaus serve two masters. What I mean can be illustrated by a conversation I had with a planner from a very large biotechnology manufacturer at a meeting industry trends summit. We were chatting at the event’s evening cocktail party, and the planner was bemoaning about a request for a speaker that she submitted to a very large bureau. The planner went on to tell me that the information sheets for the speakers they sent had no relationship to her submitted request. The planner was upset that the bureau didn’t pay attention to her request. I explained to the planner that a particular bureau specialized in speaker exclusives — meaning that the bureau was the only place through which a particular speaker could be booked. As such, the bureau would recommend their exclusive speakers first, and if none were selected, would then recommend other speakers — even when a non-exclusive speaker would have been a better fit. Unfortunately, this trend is spreading through the speaker bureau industry.
For most speakers, speaker bureaus are but one of the many channels by which they go to market. Speaker bureaus need to be viewed as one would view any distributor or sales agency. If two-step distribution serves your needs, and there are several reasons that it might, then select that method.
The conventional marketing message espoused by most bureaus is that for speaker X, you’ll pay the same price through us as you would booking speaker X directly. That is a nice idea that frequently may be true. Yet, in a supply chain where a distributor or manufacturer’s representative sales agency receives 25–30%, the reality is generally not quite ideal. There was a reason behind Sam Walton championing the idea of Wal-Mart working directly with manufacturers, thereby eliminating the distributors. This was a necessary strategy for him to continually deliver low prices to his Wal-Mart customers.
