Speaker agency for owners of marketing and digital agencies

A speaker agency for agency owners develops your talk and conference abstracts and researches the right conferences, so that speaking on stage brings you new clients. It submits in your name and follows up. At Stage Starter, working together starts from €990 net per month, and if you would like a written plan first, you begin with the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net, which is credited when you book the agency. For owners of marketing and digital agencies the model has a particular appeal: you sell visibility to others and rarely have time for your own acquisition, and a conference talk shows decision-makers live how your agency thinks. This article explains why talks at industry conferences work as a source of new clients for agencies, what work sits behind them, which conferences come into question and what the route costs by comparison.

Why is a conference talk a source of new clients for agency owners?

A conference talk brings agency owners new clients because decision-makers first experience them as experts and only then approach them as suppliers. Anyone who runs a marketing or digital agency knows the usual routes to new clients. Referrals arrive irregularly and can hardly be planned, and pitches cost weeks of preparation before any money flows, while other agencies sit in the same selection process. An analysis by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science concludes that at any given time only a small share of business buyers is looking for a supplier, about five per cent as a rule of thumb, and whoever stays in the memory of the rest is asked as soon as a need arises. At a professional conference, specialists from one industry listen to talks about their field, and whoever speaks there reverses that order. Why this channel works so well in B2B is described in Why the professional conference works so well as a sales channel.

For an agency there is a second point. Its product is judgement, which is hard to show in a brochure. On stage a head of marketing or managing director sees in forty minutes how someone takes a problem apart, which examples they choose and how they answer questions. A pitch deck rarely creates that impression, and the conversation after the talk therefore starts at a different level of trust from a first meeting after a cold approach.

What a speaker agency does for agency owners

A conference usually collects talk proposals through a call for papers, the public announcement of its programme. The proposal is called an abstract: a short description of the planned talk with a title, the benefit for the audience and details about the speaker. A programme committee is the group at the conference that decides on the programme slots. It reads many abstracts and makes the selection.

The work behind this falls into six stations. It starts with the talk topic, which has to be cut so that a programme committee sees a gain for its audience in it and does not suspect a sales pitch. Then the abstracts are written, followed by conference research, which is kept up to date because deadlines move and new calls appear. Next come the submissions through forms that differ from conference to conference, the follow-up with organisers and, after an acceptance, support all the way to the stage.

Stage Starter takes this work off your hands: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it. All six stations therefore sit with us. From you we need your expertise, examples from your practice and one approval: you sign off talk and abstracts once before the start, after which we submit in your name without every submission landing on your desk. Which client examples may go on stage is something you decide with your clients. You hold the conversations after the talk yourself, because that is where interest turns into an assignment. The services and models of speaker agencies as a whole are set out in the speaker agency guide.

Which conferences suit marketing and digital agencies?

Two kinds of conference suit marketing and digital agencies: marketing conferences, where the people who hire agencies sit, and the professional conferences of the industries the agency works for. At a marketing conference you meet marketing managers who commission agencies, but also colleagues and competitors next to them. At an industry conference you meet people who have a problem and want to hear about it in their own language, and an agency focused on industrial companies is often the only marketing talk on the programme there. Three criteria decide which direction gets more weight: how sharply your agency focuses on one industry, who signs off the budget at your clients and how many competitors stand on the stage in question.

Well-known marketing conferences show how differently access is organised. SMX Munich accepts talk proposals through an open speaker application and excludes pure sales presentations. DMEXCO in Cologne collects proposals through a call for speakers in which exhibitors and partners play a role of their own. At OMR Festival in Hamburg the organiser curates the main stages itself. An agency reaches conferences like these by approaching the organisers directly, as described in Writing to organisers directly.

In our own 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. Per abstract the acceptance rate is about 7 per cent, because we often submit several abstracts per conference and one acceptance is enough.

How does an agency speak on stage without advertising?

An agency speaks on stage without advertising when its talk draws an insight from several projects that someone who has never worked with it can also use. Programme committees reject talks that sound like self-promotion, and listeners file such talks as advertising too. For agencies this is a tricky position, because their knowledge is tied to client projects and is easily told as a project showcase. Client projects can go into the talk if the client agrees and the project serves as evidence for the insight. Where a professional audience draws the line is shown in Expert talk or sales talk, and the right angle for your talk is usually found by someone who looks at your topic from the outside and knows what programme committees select.

What does a speaker agency cost for agency owners?

At Stage Starter a speaker agency costs agency owners from €990 net per month for the whole operation. You can get a conference talk by three routes: if you submit yourself, you pay with working time, if you buy a speaking slot, you quickly pay the organiser €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot, and if you hire an agency, you pay a monthly fee. Purchased sessions are often not labelled as such in the programme, but a professional audience recognises them by their content. How paid slots work is explained in Sponsored talk and pay to speak.

Whether the fee pays off is shown by the value of a client. From €990 net per month, twelve months come to €11,880 net. Take as an example a new client on a retainer of €3,000 a month: they bring €36,000 in revenue in a year, three times a year of fees. This is an example calculation in which topic, conference and follow-up are the levers we set with you.

For whom the model pays off most

The model pays off most for agencies with a high order value per client, an owner short on time and the ambition to stand in front of a professional audience. A client won on a retainer like the one in the example covers a year of fees several times over. Owners who want to write every submission themselves choose the more laborious route and do best to value the days they keep free for it at their day rate. A speaker agency is an investment with lead time: weeks pass between submission and the conference's reply, and the talk follows months later, so the work starts early and the number of talks grows with the lead time.