Conference Talks for Your Leadership Team: Corporate Speaking as a Programme

A leadership team reaches conference stages as a programme when each person gets their own topic and abstracts and the topics together form a profile. Corporate speaking describes the planned effort by which several people from one company speak regularly at industry conferences, as part of a thought leadership strategy, that is, building a reputation as a recognised authority in the market. The workload grows with every person, because each needs their own topic, their own abstracts (the short descriptions of a planned talk) and their own conferences. This article shows how to coordinate topics, how many submissions a team needs, how to measure success and what a speaker agency takes on.

What does corporate speaking bring a company?

Corporate speaking brings a company contacts with several members of the same buying group, because each executive speaks to a different group in the audience. Complex B2B purchases are decided by several people together, and on large projects representatives of several functions up to senior management sit at the same table. For conference talks, this means the audience includes people from specialist departments and from management, and each group prefers to listen to someone who knows their questions.

A single speaker reaches one of these groups, while a team from the leadership level covers several. Over a conference season a pattern emerges: someone who heard the CTO in spring meets the same company's CEO in autumn, and the two talks reinforce each other. The reputation then rests on several people and holds when an appearance falls through or a person leaves the company. Corporate speaking is thus the stage part of thought leadership, which also includes articles and studies, as described in what is thought leadership in B2B.

How does a leadership team coordinate its topics?

A leadership team coordinates its topics by setting out on a shared map which field lies with which person and which market question each talk answers. Every person in the leadership brings experience from their own field. Take as an example a software vendor with three people in its leadership: the CEO speaks about market change, the CTO about operations and architecture, the sales director about how clients make decisions. The company then appears at conferences with three topics for three target groups, and the talks refer to one another.

One risk in coordination is overlap. If two people from the same company submit similar abstracts to one conference, they compete with each other, because the programme committee, the group that decides on submissions at a conference, compares all proposals side by side. The map therefore includes a clear separation of topics before the first submission goes out.

From the map, each person gets a talk with its own title and its own examples from their practice. How a topic becomes a finished talk is described in having a talk developed. The examples and the stance come from the person themselves, because a programme committee recognises abstracts that sound like a company brochure, and a professional audience quickly hears advertising. Whether the CEO speaks or sends specialists is decided by the audience: in front of decision-makers the CEO has the impact, in front of practitioners the person with the deepest hands-on experience does, and a programme uses both.

Assigning conferences: which person on which stage

After the topics comes the assignment of which person submits to which conference. The audience of the conference is the deciding factor. A conference for technology leaders suits the CTO, an industry conference with decision-makers suits the CEO.

Conference research (finding and assessing conferences with an open call for papers, the public announcement through which a conference collects talk proposals) is therefore worth doing for the whole team together. From a shared list, the right person can be chosen for each conference, and it becomes visible which conference is an option for two people with different topics. More than one person submits to a conference only if the topics are clearly distinct.

How many abstracts does a team need for twelve talks?

A team needs around 170 submitted abstracts for twelve talks a year by calculation. The volume follows from the acceptance rate. Stage Starter has submitted 2,189 abstracts for clients, of which 1,374 have been decided, and 94 were accepted, around 7 per cent per abstract. At conference level the rate is higher, because several abstracts often go to one conference and one acceptance is enough. In our submissions for clients we reach up to 19 per cent per conference, while 5 per cent at most is typical in the market at this volume of submissions.

As a planning value, one to three talks per person are realistic in the first year, later four to six. Four people with three talks each would make twelve talks, and for that a team needs around 170 submitted abstracts at 7 per cent. With finished, standardised abstracts, 15 to 20 submissions can be sent in one day, which means nine to eleven days of sending alone. Research and topic coordination come on top, and the follow-up stretches over months. The example shows the order of magnitude a team plans with, and it makes visible how quickly the leadership's working time becomes the deciding factor.

Anyone who wants to solve the volume with purchased slots calculates differently. Pay to speak means that an organiser sells speaking slots, usually as a sponsorship package or for a speaker fee, and that quickly costs €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. Twelve talks would mean twelve such slots and add up to €120,000 or more. When a purchased slot makes sense is set out in sponsored talks and pay to speak.

Who approves talks within the company?

Talks are best approved by the person who also owns the topic map, usually the CEO or the head of marketing. At Stage Starter, each speaker approves the talk and abstracts once before the start, after which we submit in their name without each individual submission coming back again. Each person holds the conversations after a talk themselves, and the company decides in advance where these contacts come together, for example in a shared list in sales.

How do you measure the success of a corporate speaking programme?

You measure the success of a corporate speaking programme per person by the conversations, meetings, proposals and assignments that can be traced back to a talk. To do this, every contact gets the conference as its source in the sales system, and after each season management sees which stage and which person generated pipeline. As an experience value from our work, a talk in front of the right audience brings around five serious conversations, these lead to two meetings, and every third meeting turns into paid work. Because B2B decisions take months, a team assesses the programme over a year. Which metrics count is described in measuring the success of conference talks.

What an agency takes on with several speakers

The work behind a programme is the sum of the work behind each individual speaker, and that is why it pays to hand it over. This is the work Stage Starter takes on for you: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it. For each person we develop the talk and abstracts, submit in their name, follow up and, after an acceptance, accompany them to the stage. The person contributes their expertise and the one-time approval before the start, and within the team the process runs per person with the topic map as a shared framework.

Your own marketing team can handle deadlines and forms, but usually lacks experience with programme committees and the time for follow-up over months. The collaboration with Stage Starter starts from €990 net per month. How the services, costs and process of a speaker agency fit together is shown in the guide to speaker agencies.

The part the company decides itself

Corporate speaking spreads a task that would otherwise rest on one person across a team, and coordinating the topics is the part a company decides for itself. Research, submission and follow-up can be taken over for each person using the same process. To find the right scope for your leadership team, talk to us in an initial consultation.