By Jaime Nolan, CAE
There is a version of this story every meeting planner knows, and most speakers have never heard.
A planner posts publicly that she needs a speaker. She is specific: contact info, program title, brief description, speaking sample link. Four things. The first response is two words: “I’m interested.” The second is several paragraphs of backstory, seven links, and an unsolicited diagnosis of the planner’s problem before a single conversation has taken place. Both speakers were written off immediately.
The two responses look like different problems. One was brief to the point of being useless, and the other was thorough to the point of being exhausting, but they failed for exactly the same reason: both speakers centered themselves instead of the buyer.
The Problem Nobody Names
What I hear from meeting planners, booking agents, and event professionals when they describe these interactions is not frustration about incompetence. It is frustration about orientation. Speaker after speaker arrives at an initial inquiry leading with their own story, their own credentials, their own read of what the problem is, before they have been invited to share any of it.
A marketing executive who works in speaker management put it directly: event organizers should not have to sift through incomplete submissions or lengthy self-pitches just to find the right fit. A former director of speaker engagement said that not reading a brief and providing far less or far more information than specified signals inattention, an inability to follow directions, or a calendar so full the event may not get the speaker’s full attention. That assessment happens before a phone call, before a contract, and before anyone has seen the speaker work.
The two-word reply says: I want the gig, and I expect you to do the work of figuring out if I am right for it. The several-paragraph essay says: I am going to give you everything I have and trust you to find what you need. Both put the labor on the buyer, and both treat the planner as an assistant to the speaker’s career rather than a decision maker with a specific, time-sensitive problem to solve.
What Buyer-Centered Actually Looks Like
It is not complicated. When a buyer tells you exactly what they need, give them exactly that. The brief is not a prompt to improvise. It is the answer key to the first test.
The speakers who build lasting careers in this industry are not always the most talented people in the room. They are frequently the easiest to work with. Event professionals talk to each other, and the reputations that travel fastest are not always about what happens on stage. They are about what happened in the inbox three weeks before the event, when the speaker either made the planner’s job easier or harder.
A booking agent in that thread said her core business value is simply being easy to do business with: fill out the form, hit the deadlines, follow the instructions. She said it is not that hard, and it sets you apart in a field where many speakers treat every buyer interaction as an opportunity to demonstrate how exceptional they are rather than how professional they are.
I have been in rooms where both kinds of speakers were being discussed, and I can tell you the conversation sounds very different depending on which one you are.
NSA exists to have these conversations openly, the ones about what it takes to build a real career over time. If you want to be part of that community, you can start at nsaspeaker.org.