This post was created from an NSA Speakernomics™ podcast interview with Owen Fitzpatrick, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow. Want to hear the full conversation? Click here to listen to the episode.
Owen Fitzpatrick, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow, has delivered keynotes for Google, LinkedIn, Pfizer and Coca-Cola, spoken in 33 countries, and written 10 books translated into 21 languages. None of that is why meeting planners rebook him. It’s what he does on the sales call before the contract that matters.
Owen doesn’t pitch. He asks questions, and he keeps asking until he understands the problem better than the buyer explaining it to him.
“My job is not to sell me,” he says. “My job is to help them solve the problem they have.”
That distinction sounds small until you sit with it. Most speakers walk into a sales call with an elevator pitch loaded and ready, I’m this kind of speaker, I talk about that, here’s my bio, and Owen says none of it lands yet. Buyers care about their problem first. Only once they believe you understand it do they start caring about who you are.
So instead of pitching, he consults, digging into priorities and painpoints the way he would with an actual client engagement. One CEO told him after an event that he’d listened in a way other speakers hadn’t, that most of them had done the dog and pony show, but Owen had worked everything from the prep calls into the keynote itself. That’s what consultative selling produces. Not a slicker pitch. A better fit.
The Four Questions
Owen shared the exact questions he brings to a sales call:
- What would need to happen for you to be 100% happy with the result of this presentation?
- What do you want people walking away with, in terms of mindset, behavior, and skill?
- What have you not been happy with in the past when hiring speakers?
- Out of everything, what’s the one belief you want every person in that room to walk away holding?
That last question gets the most weight from Owen, who has spent two decades studying how beliefs form and change in boardrooms, in conflict zones, under personal crisis. His take: your job as a speaker was never just to speak. It’s to change something. If you don’t know what you’re trying to change, you’re flying blind on stage.
Belief Over Interest
Owen draws a hard line between an audience that found you interesting and one that believes something different by the time they leave. Interesting, to him, is what people say about content, and content is cheap now. ChatGPT can hand someone accurate information and a compliment to go with it. What it can’t do is make a room feel differently about who they are.
Cultivating belief means the idea has to feel right before it makes logical sense, and it has to fit the identity of the person hearing it. That’s why he builds talks around one specific, personal story rather than a sweeping career summary, a plane seat, a cafe in Paris, a single moment instead of 10 years compressed into a sentence. Specificity is what makes a story land, and a story that lands is what makes a belief stick.
Managing the Voice in Your Head
Every speaker carries an inner critic offstage, the voice that shows up in the car on the drive home and decides the set went badly. Owen calls it inner propaganda, the running commentary that convinces you something is true simply because your brain said it with enough confidence.
His fix isn’t positive thinking. It’s a one-word swap: not good enough becomes not good enough yet, which turns a verdict into a to-do list. He’s blunt about speakers who never hear that voice at all. Good for you, he says, but he also feels for them a little, because the discomfort is what drives the next round of improvement. The goal was never to silence the inner critic. It’s learning to use what it hands you.
Try This on Your Next Call
Before your next discovery call, write down Owen’s four questions and bring them instead of your bio. Ask what a win looks like before you explain what you do, and let the buyer’s answers shape the talk rather than the other way around.
And if you catch yourself replaying every talk you’ve ever given wrong on the drive home, try his swap. Not good enough. Not good enough yet. Small difference, and a very different Tuesday.