Speaker Agency for Consultants: Conferences as a Client Acquisition Channel

A speaker agency for consultants researches suitable conferences and submits talk proposals in your name, so that industry stages become an acquisition channel. Consulting is a trust good that clients can hardly test before they buy, and a talk in front of a professional audience shows how the consultant thinks before any conversation begins. The work behind it comes on top of running projects, and at Stage Starter the collaboration starts from €990 net per month. This article describes how the buying centre, the group of people who decide on a purchase at a client, connects to trust, which conferences suit consultants and what an agency takes over.

How does a management consultant win new clients through conferences?

A management consultant wins new clients through conferences by showing people from the target industry how they analyse a problem that those people have themselves. Consulting is one of the services a client can hardly test before buying. Anyone commissioning strategy work or organisational development buys a promise whose fulfilment they can only judge after months, and so they look for clues as to whether the consultant breaks a problem down the way they see it. References and recommendations provide such clues, but they only grow with the consultant's network, and for many consultants client acquisition has so far run almost entirely along this one path.

A talk at a professional conference reaches people outside that network. A professional conference is an event at which people from one sector hear talks about their field, so the room is full of people with a concrete professional problem. Anyone who approaches the consultant after the talk has already passed the first test. 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. Why this channel works so well in B2B acquisition is explained in why the professional conference works so well as a sales channel.

Compared with LinkedIn and cold outreach, the stage offers an advantage that neither channel provides: a programme committee or an organiser has selected you and introduces you to its audience as an expert. LinkedIn builds visibility only over months, while cold outreach reaches many people but starts every conversation without any advance trust. The channels work best together when a talk provides the occasion for posts and messages.

The buying centre is sitting in the room

In B2B, a single person rarely decides on an order. The buying centre is the group of people in a client company who take part in a purchasing decision, from the specialist department through procurement to senior management. For complex consulting services it includes representatives of several functions, and buyers spend only a small part of their buying journey in conversations with potential suppliers. How such a group works is described in the buying centre in B2B.

Most of the buying journey takes place in the buyer's own research and in internal alignment. A consultant who only appears in the supplier meeting therefore faces a group that has largely made up its mind, and a talk delivers the impression earlier. If a client company sends several people to the conference, they hear the same talk, and afterwards the consultant is known to several members of the group at once.

Which conferences suit management consultants?

Management consultants are best served by the professional conferences of the industries and functions their clients work in, and less often by consulting congresses full of other consultants. Anyone advising mid-sized engineering firms finds their clients at that industry's sector meetings and association congresses, and anyone advising HR departments finds them at HR conferences. The type of conference decides the route to the stage. In the technology and software world, many conferences advertise their speaking slots through a call for papers, a public invitation through which they collect talk proposals. Association and industry conferences fill their programme more often by invitation and personal approach.

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. For consultants in industry and in associations, we add direct approaches to organisers by email.

In this direct approach, the agency writes to programme managers with partly standardised letters whose opening is tailored to the specific conference. We send out ten to fifteen of these emails per week once the conference list is in place. Alongside them come two to three individually tailored submissions per quarter, mainly for the conferences whose audience brings together the consultant's most important target clients. A programme manager does not know the sender, and the email has to show in a few sentences why the topic matters to their audience.

What should a consultant talk about at a conference?

A consultant talks about a problem the audience has and about what they have observed while solving it, and only secondarily about their own offer. A programme committee, the group that decides on the submissions at a conference, chooses what helps the audience. For consultants, their own offer and the benefit to the audience are often two different topics, and a talk that reads like advertising loses weight with a professional audience, as specialist talk or sales pitch shows. You mention your offer briefly in your introduction and on the last slide, and the rest of the talk belongs to the topic.

What a speaker agency takes on for management consultants

A speaker agency takes on all the work between a consultant's expertise and the stage. This is the work Stage Starter takes on for you: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it. At the start we develop the talk and abstracts. An abstract is the short description of a planned talk that the programme committee reads before deciding whether to include it in the programme.

After that we research conferences, submit in your name, follow up and accompany you to the stage. That covers deadlines and forms, and after an acceptance come the organisers' questions and the coordination of technology and slot. From you we need your expertise and one approval of the talk and abstracts, which you give once before the start, and individual submissions do not land back on your desk each time. You hold the conversations after the talk yourself, because they are about your offer and your relationship with the people in the room. Which services an agency of this kind offers overall and how the collaboration runs is set out in the guide to speaker agencies.

What does a speaker agency for consultants cost by comparison?

At Stage Starter the collaboration starts from €990 net per month for the whole operation from research to stage, well below the price of a purchased speaking slot. If you run it yourself, you pay with working time, which has a clear price for a consultant. Pay to speak means that an organiser sells speaking slots, usually as a sponsorship package, and that quickly costs €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. At a daily rate of €1,350 to €1,950, as reported by the fee study of the German Association of Management Consultants (BDU), even €10,000 equals five to seven project days, and preparing the talk and the conversations afterwards still remain with you.

A Speaker Audit as an entry point provides a written roadmap in advance. It costs from €2,000 net and is credited when you book the agency.

Why an ongoing operation fits the rhythm of consulting

Consulting has peak phases in which all capacity goes into the project, and gaps in which the question of the next assignment becomes pressing. The talk often comes months after the submission, and anyone who starts acquisition only in the gap is too late. An agency keeps working during the project phases in which the consultant has no time for research and writing, and the first replies from conferences arrive just as the project ends. The calculation of when the fee pays off for a consultant is in is a speaker agency worth it?.

The model pays off most for consultants who want to win new clients, have little time between projects and achieve high order values. Anyone who wants to write every submission themselves chooses the more demanding alternative and does well to set the missing project days against their daily rate.

The first step for consultants

Anyone evaluating conferences as an acquisition channel for a consultancy starts with the question of which events the decision-makers among their target clients listen at, and then checks whether the conference has an open call or fills its programme by invitation. The answer determines the operation an agency builds for it. If you want to know which stages fit your consultancy, talk to us in an initial consultation.