Are you leaving money on the table as a paid speaker?
I’ve been talking with a lot of paid speakers about money, lately. There are two key questions that keep coming up: “I’m not creating enough opportunities via my time at events”, and “I’m not confident when it comes to my pricing.”
Event opportunities
Whether you’re speaking at an event or not, many events take anywhere from half a day of your time upwards of 3 to 4 days for larger events. The opportunity around online and in person events is tremendous: you often have the right people in the right place (assuming you’re at the right event) and the potential relationships that you can form with these people can represent millions of dollars or more over the lifetime of the relationship.
One of the more painful examples I discussed recently: a speaker had 500 ideal customers in the room and did no planning or preparation to build a strategic approach to the event, other than doing the keynote. To their credit, the person did get eight leads, but I suspect with more preparation and effort to structure a proper strategy around this event, they should’ve had at least 3 to 4 times that amount. Maybe more…
If you’re not preparing strategically for events, you are leaving money on the table. Show up and hope for the best is costing you money.
If this sounds familiar and you’ve been wondering how to turn events into actual pipeline, I work with speakers to develop systematic approaches. Here’s how the event strategy coaching works.
Pricing and negotiation confidence
I’ve spoken with many speakers over the last number of months and a significant majority of them are always wondering “I feel like I’m leaving money on the table when I negotiate.”
Depending on how you got that customer, they either came to you from a speakers bureau, a marketplace website, a personal referral or direct through your own sales and marketing efforts. Great! Hopefully you have a good fit customer sitting across the table from you, and you’re trying to create an opportunity in the short term and hopefully if you do this well, it will lead to more ongoing opportunities (i.e. more revenue later).
The key insight: ideally, you know the right price before you engage with this prospect. You know where you want and need to land.
You can get to this from a few different perspectives:
Benchmarks (competitors and market)
What are others in the market who are either direct competitors or who would be viewed as substitutes for you charging? You can get this information from primary research (talking to certain people who are informed) as well as secondary information. Of course, there is often legal liability here for people to give anything that is covered under the scope of a non-disclosure agreement or a contract, but often there are ways that you can do the math to understand approximately where they are (or, at least, where they have been: that can be useful, too). Who you’re trying to gain information from will also dictate the availability of the information: in my experience, there are always ways of getting at least a good approximation. Sometimes it just takes some digging and persistence.
In terms of broader benchmarks as well, there is information available online and from other speakers. If you’re a brand new speaker, before you get hit with the cold reality of expectations versus reality, just know that you’re not likely going to charge $100,000 for your first keynote. It’s not impossible (depending on who you are and your background), but generally unless you’ve been a C-level executive in a big company or you’re a celebrity, this is probably a bit unlikely. If you did get $100,000 for your first keynote, I would love to hear how you did it!
Getting clear on your market position and pricing confidence is exactly what we dive deep into in my Strategic Speaker Growth Program
Insights from the customer and about the customer
There are many ways that your customer may help you understand where they are. From their journey of completing an onboarding form or an inquiry form on your website where they disclose their ideal spend, to publicly available information, information from speakers that they’ve hosted in the past: there are many people and sources that can help you understand if their stated budget is real or not.
In some cases, it can be as simple as asking them, and then watching their body language. If they look a bit uncomfortable as they’re answering the question, it may be that there’s something that they’re not disclosing. It might also be that they ate too much for lunch: so when you’re meeting in person or in an online meeting, pay attention, but context matters too.
How much this depends on the people and culture involved. If you’re negotiating with someone from the Nordic countries, cultural modesty around money discussions might factor in. Meanwhile, North Americans tend to be more direct. The key is understanding the individual across from us, not just generalizations.
The value that you bring
Many people forget about value-based pricing, but it is an option. Here’s what happened to one speaker recently: they work in organizational transformation and were confident they’d save the company millions of dollars. When they mentioned value-based pricing, the client did the math and realized the percentage would be way higher than the speaker’s standard $25,000 fee. So they just took the standard rate instead.
This is an interesting example of the decoy effect: if the value that you bring can save a company millions of dollars and you say “I just want a percentage of those millions of dollars,” in many cases that number will be significantly higher than the standard price that you may quote for your keynotes. But depending on the client and what they want and need to accomplish, I suspect a value-based engagement might be much more complex for them to manage both for themselves, as well as with other internal stakeholders, so they took the simple path.
That said, if you’ve got the right person on the other side of the table, they may be much more agreeable to value-based pricing. It’s worth a discussion, depending on your expertise and what you can bring to your clients (obviously this doesn’t work for large industry events but it works for internal clients).
In some cases, value-based pricing can present interesting challenges, especially on the client management side. “You said through your speaking engagement that you were going to save us $100,000 and we’ve determined that you only saved us $50,000.” Or, “We actually saved over $250,000, but we’re not comfortable paying you the full percentage that we agreed to now because it’s such a big number.” I’d be curious to hear from you: do you use value-based pricing when you are pitching to clients?
A word of caution
One thing to watch and be mindful of: not every client that shows up at your door and offers you your expected fee is going to be a good fit. Having very clear customer criteria, paying attention to who they are and how they treat you, understanding who they are as a person, and other factors are pertinent to understand.
Years ago, a friend of mine was approached to keynote at a sales conference: it was going to be a nice trip, held at a nice venue, and it was going to pay him what he wanted. What he didn’t realize was that the organizer may not have had the sparkling reputation that he perceived, and so while the event still went OK, it was not the raging success that he first expected. It’s critical to understand who you’re doing business with and to make sure it aligns with who you are as well as your business goals.
Do you have any lessons to share that you’ve learned about pricing over the years? Any cautionary tales or tips that you would give to others as they try to do a better job with pricing? I’m happy to share these with direct attribution, or to anonymize them: whatever you like. Send me a note via my website or connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram and say hi.