How do you trust a recommendation for a keynote speaker? At a time when meeting planners have never had more information available to them when searching for a keynote speaker the chosen method is still the old fashion choice.
Speaker websites are sophisticated. Demo reels are professionally produced. YouTube provides access to thousands of presentations. LinkedIn lets you see what speakers are talking about right now. Increasingly, AI can produce a list of potential speakers in seconds.
Yet after hours of research, one of the most powerful tools meeting planners and speaker buyers trust most is the good ole fashion peer referral.
“Who have you seen lately that was really good?”
Our industry has polled thousands of meeting planners and we’ve learned that an overwhelming percentage trust peer referrals over any other method of finding speakers. The only method that trumps a peer referral is if one of the members of the meeting planner’s own organization sees a speaker and recommends them.
That’s worth thinking about.
If meeting professionals have access to all this information, why do they still place so much value on the opinion of someone they trust?
I think the answer is fairly simple.
Information and confidence aren’t the same thing.
A Referral Answers Questions a Website Can’t
When a planner asks a colleague about a speaker, they’re rarely looking for information they could find on the speaker’s website.
They’re looking for context.
Was the speaker as good for the entire keynote as they looked in the video? Did the audience respond? Did the content have substance? Was the speaker prepared? Did they understand the organization? Were they easy to work with? Would you hire them again?
Those are very different questions from “What does this person speak about?”
A trusted colleague who has actually hired or experienced the speaker can help fill in some very important blanks.
That’s why referrals are so powerful.
But there’s another side to this.
A Glowing Referral Isn’t Necessarily a Great Fit
Suppose a trusted colleague has a glowing recommendation, “She was absolutely fantastic. You should book her.”
That’s valuable information. It says that the speaker was a good fit for the collegue’s audience.
But there’s another question and it’s a big one:
Fantastic for whom?
Perhaps the colleague booked the speaker for a high-energy sales kickoff. But our speaker buyer is planning a leadership conference for senior executives navigating a merger.
Maybe the colleague’s audience was 2,000 association members. But our buyer is planning for 150 employees.
The objective may have been motivation. But our buyer is charged with helping drive a behavior change and the speaker needs to have expertise with that type of outcome.
The organization recommending the speaker may come from an entity whose organizational culture, audience demographics, event format, business challenges, and desired outcomes may bear very little resemblance to the person seeking the speaker recommendation.
The recommendation may be completely sincere and entirely accurate. The speaker may have been phenomenal.
That still doesn’t mean they’re right for your event.
Referrals Can Create a Very Small Universe
There’s another challenge with relying too heavily on recommendations.
We tend to recommend what we know.
When someone asks, “Who was the best speaker you saw last year?” we’re naturally going to name someone we’ve personally experienced.
But there may be another speaker who is a significantly better fit for that organization’s objectives whom we’ve simply never encountered.
This can create an interesting cycle in the speaking industry. A speaker gets booked. They perform well. The planner recommends them to another planner. That planner books them and recommends them again.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Great speakers deserve referrals.
But popularity and fit are not necessarily the same thing.
A referral tells you, “This worked for us.”
It doesn’t automatically tell you, “This is the best solution for you.”
Maybe We Need to Stop Searching for “Great Speakers”
After years of working with speakers and meeting professionals, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “Is this a great speaker?” isn’t the most useful question.
There are literally thousands of great speakers.
The more important question is:
“Is this the right speaker for what we’re trying to accomplish?”
That requires understanding the audience, the business objective, the culture of the organization, what’s happening inside that organization right now, and what attendees should think, feel, or do differently after the event.
A peer recommendation can point a speaker buyer toward an excellent candidate. A demo reel can help them evaluate presentation style. A website can help them understand the speaker’s expertise.
But the final decision requires connecting all those pieces back to the objectives of the event.
That’s where speaker selection stops being a search exercise and starts becoming a strategic one.
Perhaps that’s the real reason referrals remain so important despite all the technology available to us.
We’re not really looking for more names.
Meeting planners and speaker buyers are looking for confidence that we’re making the right choice and that can only be accomplished by establishing trust in the speaker—or trust in an advisor who knows the speaker’s track record.
