Hidden Value of a Speakers Bureau

Most people understand some of the obvious reasons organizations work with a speakers bureau. We provide access, recommendations, knowledge of speakers, insight into an organization’s culture and audience, negotiation assistance and event logistics support. But there’s another part of our job that isn’t particularly glamorous and rarely gets talked about: procurement efficiency. Getting a large company and a keynote speaker to agree that they want to work together can actually be the easy part. Making it possible for them to actually do business together can be considerably more complicated.

Then comes vendor onboarding, contracts, legal review, compliance, insurance requirements, payment setup, tax documentation, purchase orders and corporate invoicing systems. Occasionally, there are dozens of emails between multiple departments just to get everyone properly established. When a company works with the same speakers bureau repeatedly, much of that process can become routine. The bureau can become an approved vendor, and a master agreement can establish terms that have already been reviewed by the company’s legal department. Everyone becomes familiar with the language and process, allowing future speaker bookings to move considerably faster.

Without that relationship, booking speakers directly may mean starting portions of the process over with every new speaker and every new speaker’s company. The planner has to learn how that particular speaker does business, while the speaker has to learn how that particular corporation buys services. Neither party necessarily wants to spend time doing that. The planner wants to produce a successful event, and the speaker wants to prepare and deliver a great keynote. A bureau that understands both sides can absorb much of the friction in between.

There’s another side of procurement efficiency that speakers, particularly independent speakers, don’t always consider. Most speakers want to speak. They don’t want to spend their afternoon negotiating contract language with a Fortune 500 legal department or trying to understand why their invoice was rejected by a corporate payment system. I’ve worked with independent speakers who didn’t have an agreement of their own to send a company, while others had agreements that simply weren’t detailed enough for a large corporate engagement. Then come questions about insurance coverage, vendor requirements, invoicing platforms, payment terms and tax documentation.

For a speaker who may only work with that corporation once, that’s a lot of administrative work surrounding one keynote. For a bureau that may work with that company for years, investing in that relationship makes much more sense. I’ve sometimes had dozens of emails back and forth with multiple divisions of a company just to get properly established as a vendor, so I understand how challenging that first engagement can be. Once the infrastructure is in place, however, subsequent engagements can become significantly easier. That’s a benefit for the planner, the corporation and the speaker.

Celebrity engagements are probably the best example of the bureau serving as a bridge between two very different worlds. Celebrity contracts can look dramatically different from corporate contracts, and both sides often have terms they consider important or completely non-negotiable. Our job is to bring those two sets of expectations together, minimize risk for everyone and find an agreement that works. If we already know a client’s contractual hot buttons and non-starters, we can communicate them quickly to the speaker’s representatives. Likewise, if a speaker has rigid deposit requirements, AV specifications, green room requests or other rider requirements, we can get that information into the planner’s hands early so there are fewer surprises later.

Likewise, if a speaker has rigid deposit requirements, AV specifications, green room requests or other rider requirements, we can get that information into the planner’s hands early so there are fewer surprises later.

Sometimes the best example of this value comes from work the client never sees. Several years ago, a client asked us to book a specific entertainment act for its conference. This wasn’t one of our regular speakers. It was an approximately 15-person group, including their manager, and they weren’t particularly easy to find. It took me three different communication channels just to track them down, and that was only the beginning.

The group’s agreement required the client to arrange and pay for round-trip airfare for the entire group, along with Mercedes van transportation in the event city. I could have simply handed those requirements back to the meeting planner and asked them to take care of everything. Instead, I collected everyone’s passenger information and loyalty numbers, booked every flight and arranged the ground transportation. It was hours of work that the planner never had to deal with. I’m not even sure our client knew how much work went into making the engagement happen, and that’s probably the point.

They told us who they wanted, and we figured out how to get them onto their stage. That’s an underappreciated part of what a good speakers bureau does. The value isn’t only access to speakers or knowing who might be a good fit for your next meeting. Sometimes it’s taking a complicated transaction and turning it into a routine process. The more familiar we become with a client’s culture, contracts and procurement requirements, the easier it becomes to do business together again and again.

There is a benefit on the speaker side as well. Contracts should be executed more efficiently, terms should be fair to both sides, and speakers should have clarity around when and how they will be paid. At Capitol City Speakers Bureau, once an engagement is successfully completed, we don’t make our speakers wait through the client’s Net 30 or Net 45 corporate payment cycle. That helps independent speakers with something that’s very important to any small business: predictable cash flow. Meanwhile, the planner doesn’t have to worry about navigating the speaker’s individual payment process.

None of that work will ever receive a standing ovation, and most of it happens far away from the stage. But it helps the planner spend more time planning the event, allows the speaker to spend more time preparing the keynote, and makes the entire transaction easier for everyone involved. That’s one of the hidden values of working with a speakers bureau. We don’t just help you find the right speaker. We help make that speaker easier to buy.