This post was created from an NSA Speakernomics™ podcast interview with Barb Betts. Want to hear the full conversation? Click here to listen to the episode.
Barb Betts spent 14 years building a real estate speaking career before she ever stepped on a corporate stage, and she brought exactly one strategy with her: relationships, ranked and worked on a schedule. Five years into full-time keynote speaking, she says it’s outperforming everything else in her business.
“There is nothing more profitable than doing business through relationships,” Barb says. “Period.”
Her new book, The Relationship Advantage, lays out the full system. Two pieces of it are worth trying first.
Rank Your Relationships Like Stars
Barb teaches a five-star system for the people in your professional orbit. Five stars are advocates, the ones talking about you in rooms you’re not in. Four stars are champions, deeply connected and quick to use your name if asked. Three stars are connections, people you’d recognize at a conference. Two stars are acquaintances, and one star is a contact sitting on a list.
Most speakers never sort their network this way, so every relationship gets roughly the same amount of attention, which in practice usually means none. Barb pairs the ranking with a frequency formula: five-star relationships hear from her every 30 days, four-star every 60, three-star every 90. Below that, she doesn’t chase it.
Five Messages, Five People, Five Days a Week
The mechanism behind that cadence is what Barb calls the five-by-five method. Five messages a day, to five people she cares about, five days a week. Run the math and it comes out to roughly 1,300 messages a year, none of them asking for anything.
“Not an agenda, not asking for business, not asking for anything for you,” she says. “Just pouring into someone else.”
The payoff shows up later, when Barb reaches out for something real: a rebooking, a referral, an introduction. Because she’s already made the deposits, the ask doesn’t land as an intrusion. It lands as, there she is again, checking in like she always does. Barb calls it a trust account, and four years of silence followed by a booking request reads very differently than four years of small, consistent contact.
She points to research behind the hesitation most people feel before reaching out at all. The University of Pittsburgh ran 13 studies on why people don’t message someone they’re thinking about, and the answer keeps coming back to a fear of bothering them. Barb’s counter is direct: a text message rarely bothers anyone, and the data from her own tracking backs it up, showing a real lift in the recipient’s mood after an unprompted check-in rather than irritation.
Speakers Are Not Your Competition
Barb also reframes a tension a lot of speakers carry quietly, the sense that other speakers in your topic lane are competitors. Barb speaks on relationships and communication, a crowded lane with plenty of overlap. She doesn’t treat the overlap as a problem.
Her reasoning is practical. Speakers don’t all charge the same fee, don’t all fit the same date, and most events don’t rebook the same speaker two years running. That means the person who beat you out for a gig this year likely isn’t competing with you for it next year, and that same speaker might refer you for something outside their own range or calendar.
Barb tracks this literally. Halfway through the current year, she counted 37 referrals from other speakers, not all of which converted into bookings, but each one counted, because another speaker chose to put her name in front of a client. She treats speaker relationships the way she’d treat any other part of her pipeline, worth building on purpose rather than something that happens by accident between green rooms.
Where to Start This Week
If your relationships have drifted, Barb’s advice is to skip the apology. Don’t open with “I should have reached out sooner.” Just say, it’s been a while, how are you. Look at someone’s recent social posts for a real point of connection before you message them, and if a podcast, a book, or a mutual contact reminds you of someone, that’s the value-first follow-up: send it along, no ask attached.
The system sounds almost too simple to move revenue. But run the five-by-five method for a year, and you’ve made 1,300 human touches nobody else in your topic area bothered to make.