Meeting planners take great pride in the quality and selection of the speakers they hire for their events. After the grueling hours of searching for the best fit (let alone the venue, the food, the themes, and everything else), their final speaker selection is like their own autograph on the event.
And with the ever-increasing volume of speakers in the marketplace today, just beginning the search for the best speaker for the next event is a feat itself.
Every meeting planner has their own system of finding speakers for their next event, but we wanted to know the best tools and resources they use. So together with our speaker Jay Baer and our friends at Speak, Inc., we surveyed 150 meeting planners asking for their insight on how they source speakers.
(Spoiler alert: their methods aren’t as digital as you might think!)
The key theme of the data underscores that despite the fact that we are in 2020, with numerous channels of online resources, less than half of meeting planners said they used Google, videos, podcasts and social channels to find speakers. Non-digital methods, such as seeing the speaker in person, and getting a recommendation from speaker bureaus, other speakers, or others, is the number one way meeting planners find speakers in 2020.
We found the responses to, “What Are All The Ways You Find Speakers?” to be very revealing:
Another surprising finding was the power of YouTube and speaker demo videos among planners with tremendous experience: 42% of planners with 21+ years of experience say they sometimes rely on those videos to find speakers, compared to only 23% of planners with 11–20 years of experience and 28% of planners with zero to 10 years of experience.
Download our full [free] report for the results and analysis of 150 professional meeting planners surveyed to get a better understanding of how they are sourcing keynote speakers in 2020.
