How to Select a Speaker Who Will Rock an Event

These questions miss the goal of determining what would make the speaker rock the stage: the emotional connection that person should have with the audience.

Go for the jugular

To screen through the fluff and find out the truth about how skilled a speaker is at connecting with the audience, ask these questions:

How do you deal with technical difficulties that may come up while you’re talking?

There’s nothing that can kill a speaker’s confidence and destroy momentum more than the microphone not working. Major blow ups are rare, but the more keynote talks I do, the more I experience little blips here and there. It’s unavoidable.

The minute the speaker has to break with the audience by pausing or stopping the presentation, the iPhones come up and the talk is all but over.

How do experienced speakers stay connected to the audience despite these challenges?

I prepare myself for this by writing the name of the AV technician on a piece of paper that I leave at the podium. You can ask his or her name while they are miking you up. When the wrong slide appears or something goes awry, and I just make a joke out of it.

“Hey Dave, bail me out here before I get booed offstage. Fast forward to the next slide, would ya?”

I also make a point to ask the AV technician what I should do in case something goes amiss. They usually have their own protocol and it makes me feel way better knowing what I need to do to help him or her get the issue resolved as soon as possible.

What objections do you see the audience having to this talk, and how do you plan to handle them?

This is where you can tell who the really experienced speakers are.

Chances are that the speaker is going to be talking about something that isn’t 100% a new concept. They’re likely talking about the same idea as somebody else, but putting a new twist on it. Experienced speakers understand that the reason they’re called upon is to make a sale.

Now, I don’t mean the speaker is there to sell his or her products.

The speaker’s task is to motivate the audience to take a particular action, one that has not already been widely adopted. If it were that easy to convince people to do it, there would be no need for speaking. That’s why there are no keynote talks about why you need to brush your teeth every night or why you should take your kids to the doctor for an annual checkup.

The speaker is there to change people’s minds.

What makes an effective speaker is the ability to connect with the audience by understanding where their guard is up and how to make it come down in a way that they accept. If you don’t find out if speakers have this skill, you will wind up with someone who is fabulously entertaining but fails to actually change people’s minds.

How do you open and close the talk?

In the world of shortening attention spans, the speaker’s greatest competitor is the portable electronic device. People pay the most attention at the beginning and end of a talk and less to what is in the middle. It’s just how we work psychologically as humans.

I wake up the audience by starting off my talks with an interactive quick game. I get volunteers from the audience and award chocolates for the right answer and assign push-ups to those who get them wrong. The quiz questions pertain to statistics about the subject I’m discussing. For example, how many millennials use an investment advisor?

This does a few things right away:

• It appeals to people’s senses because everyone loves chocolate.

• It shows the audience that they don’t know as much as they think they know about the subject I’m going to discuss.

• It connects with them right away and sets an interactive tone for the entire presentation. They get the clue immediately that I’m not going to sit there and lecture at them the whole time.

Find out how they plan to do to start and end the talk with a bang!

How has your seminar/talk changed over time?

This is a very polite way of asking the speaker what the weak points of the talk are, and how they’ve addressed it in the past. The person should at least have something to say about how they’ve improved their speech based upon feedback from the audience.

A speaker who has nothing to say in response to this question is one who does not listen or care what the audience thinks, and has no real interest in improving the delivery of the topic for their benefit. Or, they are unwilling to admit that in the past he or she has made mistakes, which signals a lack of confidence.

How do you intend to gather information about this audience before your talk?

Speakers have different ways of preparing for a speech. Some like to interview the event staff to find out more about their members. Some will ask the target audience directly. Others will study past speaking engagements that have been held (e.g. last year’s conference keynote) to determine what went over well and what didn’t. I like to talk to the salesperson from the organizing company who has interacted with some of the audience members to get the real story on their likes and dislikes.

Preparation is the source of a speaker’s confidence. The times when my talks went over not so well were when I wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. When you don’t really understand who you are talking to, it’s painfully obvious in the eyes of the beholder.

Sara’s upshot

Selecting speakers for an event is a risky job. One wrong move and it’s clear where the blame lies. I’ve recently started a LinkedIn group called “Rock the Stage” that anyone involved with choosing speakers and organizing events can join (no speakers are permitted; just speaker selectors are invited to join.) We discuss topics like speaker selection and exchange ideas that will help you make sure your events will rock. This is a private group and if you’d like to be invited, please send me an email or message me through AP Viewpoint.

Sara Grillo, CFA, is a top financial writer with a focus on marketing and branding for investment management, financial planning, and RIA firms. Prior to launching her own firm, she was a financial advisor and worked at Lehman Brothers. Sara graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature and has an MBA from NYU Stern in quantitative finance.

Read more articles by Sara Grillo