Is a speaker agency worth it? The calculation for B2B consultants and service providers

A speaker agency is worth it as soon as one single client won through it brings in more revenue than a year of working together costs. At Stage Starter, working together starts from €990 net per month, which comes to €11,880 net over twelve months. The other side of the calculation is the order value, meaning the revenue a client won through the stage brings you. This article works through, using labelled example assumptions, at what order value how many talks are enough, and shows for whom it pays off most.

Is a speaker agency worth it for B2B consultants and service providers?

For B2B consultants and service providers, a speaker agency is worth it when the revenue from orders that arise through talks exceeds the cost of a year. The agency in question works on behalf of the expert and gets them onto professional conferences. There, specialists from one industry listen to talks about their own field, so the audience consists of people with a concrete problem that you can solve. The example assumptions are labelled in the text, so that you can repeat the calculation with your own figures. The article What does a speaker agency cost? covers the pricing models and what a monthly fee should include, and the guide to speaker agencies gives an overview of services and models.

What does a year of working with a speaker agency cost?

A year of working together costs from €11,880 net at Stage Starter, because the collaboration starts from €990 net per month. Stage Starter takes this work off your hands: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it in your name, follow up and support you all the way to the stage. What is submitted is an abstract, the short description of a planned talk that a programme committee reads, meaning the group that decides on submissions at a conference. We need your expertise from you, plus one approval, which you give once before the start, for the talk and the abstracts.

If you would like a written roadmap first, you can start with the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net, which is credited against the agency fee when you book it. At a day rate of €1,000 (an example assumption), the €11,880 equals just under twelve working days. How many days a year of doing it yourself ties up is worked out in Submit yourself or hire a speaker agency.

Besides the fee, a talk costs your own time: a one-day talk in another city takes two travel days, three with a long journey. You hold the conversations afterwards yourself, because interested people discuss working together with the expert they have just heard. Travel and hotel costs differ from conference to conference and appear in none of the figures below.

How many clients does a conference talk bring?

In our experience a conference talk brings two thirds of an order on average, so three talks lead to around two clients won. The chain behind this is an empirical value: a talk brings around five serious conversations, from which two meetings arise, meaning arranged conversations about working together, and one in three meetings turns into paid work. A single such order is worth more to a consultant or service provider than any speaking fee, because beginners receive around €1,000 to €3,000 for a paid talk in the market, and professional conferences with an open call usually pay no fee at all.

The result rises with follow-up, and a window of two weeks applies: if you write to interested people within that time, you reach them while the talk is still fresh. The calculation therefore holds only if you hold these conversations.

The number of talks in a year follows from the number of submissions and their acceptance rate. In our own submissions for clients we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances per conference, while 5 per cent at most is typical in the market at this volume of submissions. Per abstract, around 7 per cent were accepted, and the rate per conference is higher because several abstracts often go to one conference and one acceptance is enough. At association and industry conferences, which often fill their programme through invitation, we approach the programme managers directly. No agency can guarantee an acceptance, because the programme committee decides. In our experience, one to three talks are realistic in the first year, and four to six in the years after.

How many talks does it take for a speaker agency to pay off?

At an order value of €12,000, a speaker agency pays off from around one and a half talks a year. The threshold at which revenue covers the fee follows from two steps. You divide €11,880 by the order value to get the number of clients you need to win. You then divide that number by two thirds to get the talks required.

At €6,000 the threshold sits at the upper edge of what the first year brings in our experience, at €12,000 in its lower half, and at €25,000 less than one talk is enough.

Two counter-checks test the calculation. In a year with four talks, as they are reachable in the following years, an order value of €12,000 gives €32,000 of revenue against €11,880 of fees. If you count the travel days at a day rate of €1,000, each talk costs around €2,000 of working time, the return per talk after travel time falls from €8,000 to €6,000, and the threshold rises to about two talks.

The same calculation gives the ROI, meaning the surplus in relation to the costs. In the year with four talks, €32,000 of revenue stands against €11,880 of fees and around €8,000 of travel time, €19,880 of costs in total. The surplus of €12,120 equals an ROI of around 61 per cent, and follow-on orders from the same clients come on top in later years.

Costs and revenue fall at different times. The fee runs from the first month, weeks often pass between submission and reply, and the talk often follows months later. Orders arise only after that, so part of the revenue arrives only in the following year.

Pay to speak against a monthly fee: the same calculation with a bought slot

With pay to speak you pay an organiser for a speaking slot, usually as a sponsorship package, and that quickly costs €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. At an order value of €12,000, a talk in the worked example brings on average €8,000 of revenue. A bought slot therefore costs more than its talk brings in even at the lower end, and every further booking widens the shortfall. Sponsored talk and pay to speak explains when a paid slot can still serve its purpose.

The monthly fee, by contrast, pays for the operation that keeps submissions running at open calls throughout the year. A call for papers is the public announcement with which a conference collects talk proposals. The fee is spread across many submissions and across every acceptance that comes out of them.

For whom the calculation turns most strongly

The higher the order value, the faster it turns: at €12,000 about one client is enough, and at €25,000 less than one talk. The model pays off most for consultants and service providers with a high order value, little time for research and follow-up and the ambition to appear before a professional audience, with capacity for new clients whose conversations they hold themselves after the talk. Whoever submits themselves is choosing the more laborious alternative and sets their own days against the fee.

The calculation with your figures

Anyone weighing up an agency's offer puts the fee, the order value and the number of realistic talks into this calculation and sees which of them decides the matter. We are glad to run it with your order value and your topic in a first conversation.