Call for speakers: how to apply when the audience votes too

E-commerce Berlin Expo 2027 has opened its 11th call for speakers and is awarding 24 speaking slots for its two-day trade fair in Berlin in February 2027, as the organiser announced on E-commerce Germany News at the end of August 2026. The submission deadline is 18 September 2026 at 17:00 CET, after which a public vote on LinkedIn and a group of industry advisors decide on the selection. Of the 24 slots, the advisors award 15 as wildcards, regardless of how many votes a submission has received. For speakers, this means that at this event a clear proposal with results of your own reaches the larger share of the slots, while your network helps you into the final round for the remaining nine.

The 11th call for speakers of E-commerce Berlin Expo 2027 in figures

The organiser announced the contest in a post of 31 August 2026 on E-commerce Germany News, which the industry portal Affilitizer reported on 4 September. For the February 2027 edition, the organiser forecasts 14,000 visitors, including C-level e-commerce experts from Germany and beyond, as well as 320 exhibitors at a fair with four conference stages.

Taking part is free of charge for contestants and winners alike. You pay your own travel expenses. Because the fair is bilingual, you can present in English or in German. A proposal may include at most two speakers on stage, and submissions with more people are not considered. You submit via the call for speakers page, which also lists the nine categories, from Growth, Acquisition & Conversion to People, Leadership & Organisation.

What a call for speakers is and how the public vote works

A call for speakers is the public invitation from a conference or trade fair through which speakers apply for a place in the programme with a talk proposal. The same process is often called a call for papers, and we explain how it works in general in our article What is a call for papers. In a public vote, the audience votes online on the submitted proposals before a jury makes the final selection.

E-commerce Berlin Expo has published a five-phase timeline for its contest:

1. Submissions from 1 to 18 September 2026, 17:00 CET.
2. Profile updates until 22 September, via a link you receive after submitting.
3. Public voting from 23 September to 9 October, 17:00 CET, with one vote per category for every LinkedIn-verified user.
4. Advisory voting from 12 to 19 October: the advisors receive the top five submissions in each category, select one winner per category and also award 15 wildcards.
5. Announcement of all winners on 21 October.

The announcement does not say exactly how the top five submissions per category are determined. Among the advisors, the organiser names Volker Harbrecht of Meta, Iskra Velichkova of PayPal, Rad Jha of flaconi, Christoph Sterkel of Kellanova and Fernando Veiga Fonseca of C&A. According to the announcement, they assess proposals on their relevance, clarity and practical value.

Call for speakers with public voting: 15 of 24 slots do not depend on votes

The published rules make it possible to work out how the slots are distributed. With nine categories and one winner each, nine slots go to submissions that made it into the top five of their category after the vote. The advisors award the remaining 15 slots as wildcards to exceptional proposals, even if these received no public votes at all. The organiser itself writes that a convincing proposal can still get you to a stage without the most votes.

The final round holds 45 submissions, five per category, of which nine win, which gives a chance of one in five if all finalists are equally strong. For your planning, this means that the text of your submission decides both routes, while votes only come into play on one of them.

How to write a call for speakers submission that convinces the jury

According to the announcement, the organiser is looking for sessions that address a specific, current e-commerce challenge and clearly communicate what attendees will learn and how they can apply it. In the organiser's words, the most compelling submissions show what you did, what happened, what you learned and why those lessons matter to others. The call page also states briefly that generic trend talks and product pitches have no place there, and neither do buzzwords without substance.

1. Choose the category by your project: Assign your talk to the category in which your project solved a concrete problem. Because each person has one vote per category, you only compete in the vote with the submissions in your category.
2. Write a title with a result: A title that names the problem and the result shows the advisors the practical value straight away. How to build such a title is explained in our article on the conference talk title.
3. Back it with figures from your work: The organiser explicitly asks for evidence such as data or case examples. A metric before and after your project is easier for the jury to check than any description.
4. Keep the talk free of advertising: A talk about your own product falls outside the rules of the contest. Where the line between an expert talk and a sales pitch lies is described in Expert talk or sales pitch.
5. Use the profile phase: The organiser writes that the more detailed your profile is, the easier it is to see why your idea matters. A speaker bio with your role and your project therefore belongs in this phase, together with previous talks.

Gathering votes in the public vote: a plan for 17 days

The vote runs for 17 days, and because the announcement does not say how many votes a submission needs for the final round, the following calculation is an example based on assumptions. Assume 300 people in your LinkedIn network see your post at the start of the vote and one in ten votes. Then you have 30 votes. If you also write personally to 40 contacts who know your subject and half of them vote, that adds another 20 votes, two thirds of what the post seen by 300 people brings in.

Three dates are enough for the schedule, and you can put them in your calendar before the vote starts:

1. At the start on 23 September, announce your topic with the link to the vote and say what the audience will take away from your talk.
2. Halfway through, around 1 October, write personally to the contacts on your list.
3. Shortly before the close on 9 October, send one last reminder.

Because every verified user has one vote per category, your request does not take anyone's vote away from a colleague in another category, and you can say so in your message.

Schedule up to the call for speakers deadline on 18 September

Nine days remain until the deadline. A schedule for this time can look like this:

1. By 11 September: choose the category and decide on the project you will talk about, with two or three figures as evidence.
2. By 15 September: write the title and description, showing what you did, what happened and what the audience can learn from it.
3. On 16 or 17 September: submit, with a day of buffer before the deadline at 17:00 CET.
4. By 22 September: complete your profile via the organiser's link.
5. From 23 September: support the vote with the three dates above.

Even with a good proposal, a single call for speakers remains an application with an open outcome. Our founder Marin Niehues started out below 2 per cent with his own submissions and now reaches around 10 per cent, and Sessionize listed him as Most Active Speaker in 2024 and 2025. Assume you submit the same topic to ten conferences in one year and also reach around 10 per cent. Then those ten submissions lead to roughly one appearance. If you are wondering how to get speaking engagements on a regular basis, the answer is to plan several submissions from the start, and our article on how many abstracts to submit for one acceptance works out how many.