495-SYB-Solo-Thought-Leader-v2.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
When someone hires you to speak, what are they actually buying? You might say, well, they’re buying my expertise. What I can teach them, they’re paying me to come share what I know about leadership or communication or workplace dynamics or wellness or whatever my topic happens to be. An expertise is part of it. But think about it from the event organizers side, they’re putting together an event for a particular group of people and they have their own goals. They have a reason for bringing these people together, and they’re choosing you to help them accomplish something in that room. How well can you explain to them what that something is? I was reading an article about the speaking industry recently that got me thinking about this, because when we talk about getting booked and paid, we can spend a lot of time on how to get the invitation. Today I want to talk about what makes your talk worth the investment once someone is considering you as their speaker. Hi there and welcome to the Speaking Your Man podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. We’re concluding our Bookable Speaker series today with Y. Thought leaders get paid more as speakers. In the episodes we’ve covered, we’ve talked about the importance of relevance, reach, and relationships in the first episode of this series. Then we talked about how to use social media effectively as a speaker, not by chasing whatever is trending in the algorithms, but making sure event organizers understand what you talk about and you have the social proof visible to back it up.
Carol Cox:
And in last week’s episode, I shared three specific things you can do to help AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude recommend you to event organizers as a speaker. And all of these things we’ve covered can help someone discover you and understand what you speak about. But there’s another part of becoming bookable, and that’s knowing what you’re helping an audience do. What are they going to understand differently? How will the time they spend with you connect to something they care about? The article I mentioned is called the Speaker Industrial Complex, the 2026 report published by David Adler of Gathering Architecture. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Now, this report is largely written for the people hiring speakers by speaker bureaus, and it looks at different reasons an organizer might spend money to bring someone in. But the part I want to bring to you is relevant no matter what type of speaker you are, and no matter what types of events you speak at, whether you’re keynoting at conferences, you’re speaking at local associations and groups, or you’re presenting internally or on behalf of your business. And I want to be clear about today’s title, thought leadership can help you make a stronger case for your speaking fee. It doesn’t mean that every person who calls herself or himself a thought leader gets paid more than every expert or trainer.
Carol Cox:
There are excellent trainers who deliver tremendous value. What matters is the perspective you developed, how you turn it into a talk, and how that talk serves the audience someone is bringing you in to reach. The report describes four things events can be buying spectacle, marketing, learning, and networking. And that’s the author’s framework for thinking about the purchase that event organizers are making. The first one is spectacle. That’s the draw. The person or performance on the agenda that makes someone want to be there. Marketing is the association that the event gets with that name, the attention it brings to the event, or the value it has for a sponsor. The third one is learning. Helping people understand something or work through a problem. And then the final one is networking, giving people an opportunity to connect and learn from each other. These purposes can overlap, but there are different reasons. Event organizer select speakers and choose what to pay. If an organizer brings in a celebrity and they come with a hefty speaker fee, part of what they’re paying for is that people want to see that person. They want to say they were in the audience when they saw such and such celebrity speak. They take photos, they take video clips, and they want to share that on their social media.
Carol Cox:
So I don’t want you to compare what a celebrity speaker gets paid and wondering how you’re supposed to compete with someone like that when you’re not famous. And by celebrity, I mean anyone from a true celebrity, like an actor or musician who was well known in the mainstream to celebrities within an industry. Brene Brown is a celebrity on the speaking circuit. Most of us know who she is, but my mom has no idea who she is. She has no need to know who Brene Brown is. So my mom’s eyes. Brene Brown is not a celebrity, but in our eyes she is. But I want you to think about not competing with those types of speakers, but speakers who are your peers? What is the person hiring you need from you? Most likely, you fall into the learning and networking categories, not the spectacle and marketing categories. My marketing. I don’t mean that you’re teaching the audience marketing or your topic is about marketing. I mean that the event is getting a marketing boost because you are one of their headline speakers. For most of us, event organizers need someone like us who understands the challenges their members face and can help them work through those challenges. Your experience with those types of audiences, your perspective on the problem and your ability to engage the room are relevant to them choosing you to be their speaker. And I want you to think about the people attending who are in the audience.
Carol Cox:
They’ve taken time away from work. Maybe they’ve traveled, they have decisions they’re trying to make or something they want to get better at. How can your talk help them with that? How can your talk give them something new that they haven’t already heard a hundred times before? On a TikTok and Instagram reel, a LinkedIn post, a YouTube video, a podcast episode, or from an AI chat bot. That’s why this is the thing. Now that as speakers were up against, it is now so easy for anyone to get all of the information, all of the knowledge, all of the examples, the research that they want. Literally, it’s a prompt away and they, it can be contextually applied to them based on their chat history in ChatGPT are Claude. How can you compete with that? This is why I keep coming back to the essential shift from expert to thought leader. Your expertise gives you the material to draw from. You understand the field. You understand your industry. You’ve done the work and you can answer questions about it. But your thought leadership is their perspective. You’ve developed through that work. What have you noticed that deserves more attention? What have you changed your mind about? Where do you think the usual advice falls short? And then you have to make that perspective useful to someone else. You may have a very interesting idea, but your audience still needs help connecting it to their own experience.
Carol Cox:
They need examples. They need your stories. They need a way to consider what it means for them. And this is the part that can get lost very easily when we’re creating Meeting presentations. The expert trap comes in because we want to prove that we know our topic. So we put in everything we’ve learned. Then we get to the end of the talk, and we wonder whether people will remember the main point or even know what to do next. Now I talk a lot about the expert trap because I too fall into it, and I have to remind myself every time I’m creating a presentation or a talk to take a hard look at it and think about, does all this information need to be in here? Am I putting myself in here through my thought leadership, my perspective, and my stories? And how can I make this easier for the audience to understand and more relevant to them? The example I want to share with you is a presentation I gave at Makan, a marketing conference focused on AI. Way back in 2023. So this was about three and a half years ago. Chatgpt was very new. It had been out for less than a year. I think we were still on GPT model 3.5, not even four. So 3.5, of course, is very rudimentary compared to what we have now.
Carol Cox:
But it was very new. And as marketers, we were trying to figure out how can we leverage AI? But also, it wasn’t really that great at writing and personalization yet. So my topic at Macomb was about maintaining your brand voice through AI personalization and storytelling. I have a background in technology before speaking your brand. I had founded and ran two technology businesses, so when ChatGPT came out, I was using it right away and experimenting with what it could do. And like a lot of us, I was amazed even back then, you could ask it for ideas or an outline or a blog post, and it would give you something back almost immediately. But as I was experimenting with ChatGPT, I also realized that it didn’t sound anything like me or anything that I would actually put together. But I had years of podcast transcripts and email newsletters and other material, and I wanted to see what would happen when the AI could draw from that content. So we work with programmers to take all of what I have, my podcast transcripts and my emails, and build a way for ChatGPT to use that as the basis for what it was going to write for me. Now, again, back then we had to have programmers to build things to do that because it didn’t exist. And so as I was working on that, I submitted a proposal to speak at Macon.
Carol Cox:
And when it came time to create the presentation, I had all of these examples I could show. Here’s a prompt I gave ChatGPT. Here’s what came back. Here’s what happened when I had access to my material instead. I started putting all of these comparisons into the slide deck. Then another example, and then another one. Now, I don’t usually like a lot of text on my slides, but now I had all these screenshots with a lot of text because I was showing the prompts and the responses, and I was looking at the slides and I could tell that something was missing. The examples were useful, but the presentation felt really flat and it was lacking heart. I was getting stuck in the expert trap, which was especially inconvenient given how much time I spent talking about it, but I had the awareness of it. So I came back to the question we ask our clients when we work with them in that one on one VIP day. Why does this matter to you? For me, it was connected to the importance of women’s voices. I wanted to make sure our voices and experiences didn’t get blurred into what I call generic internet voice as we use these AI tools. The content can be professional and polished, but you don’t get much sense of the person behind it.
Carol Cox:
And I knew from my background in politics and being a political analyst on TV news, how much having a public voice mattered to me, and what a difference it made for other women. It was connected to the reason I started speaking. Your brand and the work we do with our clients. And once I came back to that, I could see how to bring the presentation together. Now, this was a mixed audience, both men and women, so I could share why this mattered to me, and then invite everyone there to think about their own voice. What did they want to preserve? What was important about their experiences and the way they saw their work? I also had a point of view about brand voice, not just literal voice. We often talk about brand voice in terms of tone and personality. Is it serious? Is it funny? Is it a little quirky? But there was more to brand voice that I wanted people to consider. It’s also about your mission, your expertise, your methodology, and your experiences. And so I put those four elements into what I call the brand voice canvas with the acronym meme, mission, expertise, methodology and experiences. Of course, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you worked with us. You knew that I was going to find a way to put an acronym in a framework into my presentation. But now people had a way to organize what I was showing them.
Carol Cox:
They could connect an example of a prompt and response to their own mission or methodology. They could think about which parts of their voice were coming through, or which parts weren’t, and the content they were creating. I ordered audience engagement with these paddles that I had created, with the robot emoji on one side and a smiley face emoji for humans on the other side, and they would raise their paddles one side or the other when I ask a certain question. I added humor and funny gifs, some video clips. I added some personal stories. The presentation went really well, so well that I had a line of people talking to me afterwards and even the next day at the conference, while we were getting our breakfast buffet, a couple of people who had been in the audience the day before in my session found me, came up to me and said, I just had to find you and tell you what an excellent presentation that was. The best one I’ve seen at this conference. And I, when I look at what changed, the technical examples were still there. The screenshots were still there, but they were now part of an idea people could consider in relation to their own work. I gave them a bigger picture, a bigger why. My experience helped explain why I cared. The framework gave its structure and the participation brought people into it.
Carol Cox:
That’s what I want you to look for in your own talks and presentations. What are you helping the audience recognize, and how are you giving them a way to work with it? Maybe you ask them to think of a decision they’re facing and apply your framework to it. Maybe they compare experiences with someone at their table or someone sitting next to them, or you give them a moment to write down a belief they’re reconsidering because of the story you just told. It can be simple. You don’t need an elaborate activity every five minutes. Give people enough room, enough space, and enough pause to connect your idea to something that matters to them. And this takes judgment. You choose what to include and how much people can work through and the time that you have. So think about a talk you’re working on now. Where does the audience get to make that connection? What will help them see how the idea applies to a problem they’re actually facing? I think back to my client, Danielle Hayden. She was on an episode 362. Also included a link to that episode in the show notes. She runs a bookkeeping agency, and she has hundreds of clients and dozens of bookkeepers who work with her. She uses speaking as one of her primary lead generators, and she had been pretty successful at it.
Carol Cox:
Her presentation could be better. She realized that there was something missing about it, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint it because she was too close to her own material. And what I realized when we worked together in her VIP day was that her presentations were trying to teach her audience who were women entrepreneurs. She was trying to teach them how to do bookkeeping, but they didn’t need to learn how to do bookkeeping. They needed to hire her company to do their bookkeeping. What they need to understand, what they needed to understand was much bigger than that. So I was asking Danielle some questions. We were talking about different ideas, and all of a sudden she said to me, you know, I look at all of these reports from our clients and what I see over and over again and, and including from talking with them, is that women under invest in their businesses. They’re so afraid of spending money that they end up not being able to grow. And all of a sudden, that’s when her thought leadership emerged that there’s a sweet spot of spending and saving, and that women entrepreneurs tend to under-invest and so they don’t grow. And then that became the through line of her entire talk. She went and delivered it a few weeks later at a conference, and she said she got the most leads and clients than she ever had before because she flipped it.
Carol Cox:
She was no longer trying to teach her audience how to do the thing. She was trying to get them to change their perspective about the problem they were facing. Back to that report about the speaking industry that I started off with. Another thing that’s helpful is to think beyond a single keynote slot. When we work with you in that one on one VIP day, we are creating what we call a signature talk. And that signature talk can be used for one specific speaking engagement. It tends to be about a 35 to 45 minute talk based on the amount of content that’s on the poster board laid out in our signature talk canvas framework. But you can expand and contract that. You can expand that to a two hour workshop. You can contract it even to a ten minute Ted style talk. And we help you to do all of those things in our Thought Leader Academy. So it can be a keynote, a workshop, a panel contribution. You can use it for podcast interviews, for Ted style talks, for lead generation presentations, and more. Because when you develop a signature talk, you’re creating material you can continue using. You now have a clear, cohesive idea. And through line, you have a framework. You know which stories and which examples are the best ones to use and how to change them out based on the particular audience that you’re talking with.
Carol Cox:
A couple of months ago, we did an episode number 486 called Stop Creating Every Presentation from scratch. Bill one talk. You can adapt for any audience. That’s a great episode to listen to because Aaron Mark, she shares how she has her one keynote that she developed with us and our Thought Leader Academy, and how she is adapting it to different speaking opportunities that she has, whether it’s a full 60 minute keynote, it’s a longer workshop, it’s a hybrid speaking engagement where some people are virtual and some people are in person. So that’s how adaptable the signature talk that you create with us becomes. So when you think about what your speaking is worth, consider what you actually want it to accomplish. Getting a speaking fee may be part of that. There may also be value in how effectively you communicate your work to the people you need to reach, like Danielle. You may be focused on lead generation and attracting clients for your business, because that’s the best ROI for you for speaking. And then like Aaron, she is focused primarily on getting paid as a keynote speaker. So that is her focus. Understanding what your goals are will help you to understand the types of events and audience that are going to be the best fit for you, and what type of speaker fee makes the most sense. Have a conversation with the event organizer.
Carol Cox:
Ask them why. Ask them about the event. What is their goal for the event? What is the purpose? What are they hoping the event accomplishes for them and for the people in the audience? What do they want participants to take away? What happens before and after your session? Then connect your recommendations to these answers. Explain the perspective you’ll bring, how you’ll engage people with it, and what they’ll have the opportunity to work on. You also need evidence of your ability to deliver testimonials from audience members and event organizers, and video of you speaking is becoming more and more important because event organizers have a lot of choices of speakers to pick from, and they are getting a lot of submissions written by AI. They need a way to differentiate who they want to hire as a speaker, and having great video where you’re sharing a story, having the audience laugh, interacting with the audience, sharing your framework is really important. This is why you should come to our three day speaking retreat happening in February 2027 in Orlando, Florida. You’re going to craft your signature stage segments like storytelling, humor, audience interaction, and your framework. You’re going to practice it on our stage with our expert coaching and feedback. We have a lot of fun to get you really comfortable on stage and developing your stage presence. And then on the third day, we have a professional videography team that will film you.
Carol Cox:
You get the edited video and a speaker reel, which is exactly what you need so that you can get booked and get paid. You can get all the details about our retreat at speaking your brand.com/live. Again, that’s speaking your brand.com/live. Here’s what I want you to do now considering everything that we’ve talked about. Look at a presentation you already give or when you’re working on. And consider this. After my talk, the audience will be better able to blank. They’ll be better able to recognize a pattern they’ve been overlooking. Evaluate a decision using a different set of questions. Have a conversation they’ve been avoiding. Whatever you choose, make it specific. Then look at your talk and see where you actually help them to do this. Is it an example that makes the pattern clear? Do you give them time to try those questions? Does your story help them recognize why that conversation has been so difficult? If you know you have something valuable to say but you’re having. If you know you have something valuable to say, but you’re having trouble finding the message in all of your expertise. I understand, and this is exactly why we do the work that we do, because it’s very hard to do this for yourself. And our Thought Leader Academy, we work with you to develop that message and build your signature talk.
Carol Cox:
We help you identify the idea, connect your stories, and organize the material using our unique and proven signature talk canvas. We do that work with you one on one, and then in the small group calls is where we help you to build those speaker assets and your visibility plan and outreach. And you don’t need to have the talk figured out before you come to us. Developing it together is the work. You bring the ideas and the stories which you already have in your head. Trust me. And then we help you to extract them and make sense of them. You can learn more at speaking your brand.com/academy. The best thing to do is to schedule a call with us so we can talk about your speaking goals and answer your questions about the Thought Leader Academy and about that three day speaking retreat in Orlando. So go to speaking your brand.com/academy. To do that, as we wrap up this bookable speaker series, I want you to think about the room you want to be in and what you want to contribute there. I want more women’s perspectives shaping the conversations in our industries and organizations. That includes paid keynotes, and it also includes workshops, panels, podcasts, and media. The work you’ve done and what you’ve come to understand can be very useful to your audiences. Give yourself the time and the support to shape it into something they can hear and use. Until next time. Thanks for listening.
About this transcript
This transcript was generated by Sonix in just a few minutes using online English transcription and mp3 transcription. Want to see how it works? Start with converting audio to text.
Before you pick a platform, do the homework: our automated transcription services comparison, Otter.ai alternatives, and meeting transcription software cover pricing, accuracy, and workflows across the market.
Want a transcript like this for your own audio or video? Try Sonix free and see our transcription cost guide when you’re ready to scale.
