I’ve watched it from the back of the room more times than I can count. The lights go down, the speaker walks on, and ninety seconds in you can feel the room go flat. People reach for their phones. The event manager who booked them is standing near the exit doing the maths on what this cost.
Nothing has gone wrong, exactly. The speaker is polished. The stories land. None of it is about the people in the room.
Knowing how to hire a keynote speaker is not about finding a better speaker. It’s about asking better questions before you sign anything.
I’ve spoken to more than 980,000 people across 40 countries. Before that I spent years as a management consultant at Deloitte, watching organisations spend real money on things that never stuck. I’ve also sat in the audience for a lot of sessions I didn’t deliver. The five checks below are what separate the events that change something from the ones that are just a nice hour.
They work whoever you end up booking. Including if that’s not us.
Start with the outcome, not the name
Most briefs begin with a name or a category. “We want someone inspirational.” “We want an adventurer.” That’s the wrong end of the problem.
Start here instead: what has to be different on Monday?
Name the behaviour. Your leaders avoid hard conversations. Your teams sit on decisions waiting for permission. Your managers are burnt out and nobody’s saying it. Write that down before you look at a single showreel.
In consulting, the first question on any engagement was what success looks like and how you’ll know you got there. Events almost never get asked that question. A brief that can’t answer it produces a talk that aims at nothing, and you can feel that from the third row.
If you can’t name the outcome, no speaker on earth can hit it.
Ask them what they’d want to know about your team
Get them on the phone and ask one question: what would you want to know about my people before you spoke to them?
The answer tells you everything.
A speaker who works asks questions straight back. Who’s in the room. What’s happened in the last twelve months. What’s the thing nobody says out loud. Whether there’s been a restructure. What the CEO wants and what the room actually needs, because those are frequently different things.
A performer says: “Just send through the running order and I’ll be there by eight.”
That’s the tell, and it costs you nothing to find it.
Check whether they customise, or just re-title
Every speaker on every website says they tailor each talk. It’s the most common claim in the industry and the least examined.
So ask for a specific example. Not the principle — the instance.
Tell me about a talk you changed for a specific client. What did you cut? What did you add? Who was it for, and why did they need something different?
A speaker who genuinely customises answers this in detail, quickly, with a real organisation attached. They’ll tell you what they took out, which is the harder half.
A speaker who re-titles will talk about their framework, their process, their philosophy of tailoring. Plenty of words, no example. That means you’re getting the same corporate event speaker talk everyone else got, with your logo on slide one. Here is how we build a talk around your team.
Watch the room, not the reel
A showreel is the best twenty seconds from five years of work, cut to music. It tells you the speaker has been on stages. It tells you nothing about whether they can hold yours.
Ask for unedited footage instead. Five minutes, one camera, filmed from the back.
Then watch the audience, not the speaker. Are people still? Leaning in? Are they writing things down? Or is there that low shuffle that means a room has quietly checked out?
Ask for two referees who booked them more than twelve months ago, not last month. Recent referees tell you the day went well. Referees a year out tell you whether anything survived it. Here are what clients say.
Decide who owns the follow-through
This is the one that gets skipped, and it’s the one that decides whether the money was worth spending.
A keynote speaker for a conference can open a door. Only your leadership walks through it.
So before the event, decide who owns what happens next. Which leader. Which meeting. Which week. What the first conversation is, and who’s in it. If the answer is “we’ll see how it lands,” it won’t land — not because the talk was bad, but because nothing was built to catch it.
I’ll say the thing that costs my industry work: a keynote on its own changes nothing. It shifts how a room feels for about a fortnight. What makes it stick is what your own leaders do in the month afterwards. If nobody owns that, book the speaker as entertainment, enjoy the day, and be honest with yourself about what you bought.
How to hire a keynote speaker: the five-minute checklist
Before you sign anything, you should be able to answer all five.
- What has to be different on Monday? Write it as a behaviour, not a feeling.
- Did they ask questions about your people before they talked about themselves?
- Can they name one specific thing they changed for one specific client?
- Have you watched unedited footage and looked at the audience?
- Who owns the follow-through, by name, with a date?
If you can answer all five, you’ll almost certainly get a good event. If you can’t answer three of them, you’re buying a showreel.
For what it’s worth, we include a strategy session with every booking, because the first four questions are worth having properly before anyone stands on a stage.
