Speaker agency guarantee: what an agency can honestly promise

A speaker agency cannot guarantee a talk, because only the programme committee of the conference decides whether a proposal is accepted. The programme committee is the group that reads the submissions at a professional conference and sets the programme. What an agency can honestly promise is its work, meaning how many talk proposals it submits, how carefully they are written and how openly it shows its results. Anyone who guarantees a stage is usually selling pay to speak, a paid speaking slot, and you can easily pay €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. This article shows how to recognise a guarantee that is none, and which figures let an agency work in a plannable way instead.

Can a speaker agency guarantee a talk?

A speaker agency cannot guarantee a talk through an open call, because it does not control the slot. Anyone who applies for a place at a professional conference usually does so through a call for papers, the public announcement with which a conference collects talk proposals. Each proposal consists of an abstract, a short description of the planned talk, together with a title and a bio. The programme committee reads the proposals and chooses what fits the conference's themes, and neither the agency nor the expert it submits for has a seat on that committee.

A guarantee would therefore be a promise about the behaviour of third parties. Committees often watch the mix of the programme and the topics that have already been taken, which is why several proposals per conference are part of an agency's craft. How committees read proposals is covered in What a programme committee looks for in an abstract.

Our own figures show how the road from submission to acceptance runs. Stage Starter has submitted 2,189 abstracts for clients, of which 1,374 have been decided: 94 were accepted and 1,280 rejected, which makes about 7 per cent acceptance per abstract. At conference level the rate is higher, because we often submit several abstracts to one conference and a single acceptance is enough, and of 433 decided conferences, 83 said yes. Per conference we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances, while 5 per cent at most is typical in the market at this volume of submissions.

Across many conferences, rates like these become a figure you can plan with. At an acceptance rate of 19 per cent per conference, twenty conferences give a calculated chance of 1 − 0.81^20, about 98 per cent, of at least one acceptance, while at the typical 5 per cent it is 1 − 0.95^20, about 64 per cent. That is a calculation of probabilities, and an agency that promises you a fixed talk through open calls is promising something a programme committee decides.

What lies behind a stage guarantee?

Behind a stage guarantee there is usually a slot the provider allocates or buys itself. Only someone who controls the slot can guarantee it, and at a conference with a call for papers that is the programme committee. A provider who assures you a slot anyway either allocates it personally, because it is the organiser or brokers sponsor slots, or promises something it cannot deliver. The wording ranges from a fixed number of talks a year to a "guaranteed" slot at a named conference and a package with advance payment.

The first case is usually pay to speak. An organiser sells speaking slots, as a sponsor package or for a fee charged to speakers, and you can easily pay €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. In this model the guarantee is real, but it describes a purchase in which nobody selected the talk for its quality. For an expert who wants to win B2B clients through talks, that is a drawback: sponsored sessions are often not labelled in the programme, and a specialist audience still quickly takes a talk that mainly shows the speaker's own offer for advertising. When a paid slot makes sense is explained in Sponsored talks and pay to speak.

What can a speaker agency honestly promise?

A speaker agency can promise everything within its own reach: the volume of submissions, the quality of the talk and abstracts, and openness about results.

Volume is the number of proposals that land at suitable conferences in your name, and it has the biggest effect because the acceptance rate lets you calculate. At 7 per cent acceptance per abstract, four to six talks a year take roughly 60 to 90 submitted abstracts, and an operation that reaches this quantity reliably works with considerably more. Stage Starter submits at least a hundred abstracts to around twenty conferences in the first month and at least fifty a month after that. An agency can commit to this number and tell you which conferences the submissions are meant for.

Openness means that the agency knows its own figures and shows them, from the abstracts submitted to the decisions and the acceptances. Of our 2,189 abstracts, 815 were still undecided, because many conferences only reply weeks or months after a call closes, and an open answer names that figure too. A rate of 100 per cent does not occur with open calls, and whoever quotes one has to explain how it came about.

Quality concerns the talk and the abstracts. They grow out of your expertise and are tailored to each conference, because an abstract that reads like boilerplate stands out to the programme committee. This is the work Stage Starter takes on for you: we find the right calls, write the submission and submit it, then we follow up and accompany you all the way to the stage. You approve the talk and abstracts once before we start, and we show what we submit and what comes out of it. The guide to speaker agencies sets out the services and process of an agency as a whole.

What does a guarantee cost compared with an agency?

A single bought slot easily costs €10,000 or more, about as much as ten months of working with Stage Starter from €990 net. Twelve monthly fees come to €11,880 net, and for that the whole body of work runs, from developing the talk to accompanying you onto the stage. The bought slot delivers one talk, while the monthly fee delivers hundreds of submissions a year and with them many chances of acceptances that a programme committee has chosen and that the audience therefore hears as expert talks.

A talk in front of a specialist audience turns into business when you use the conversations afterwards, and you hold those yourself. Based on our experience, a talk brings about five serious conversations, two of them lead to meetings, and every third meeting becomes paid work. If you would like a written plan first, start with the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net, which is credited when you book the agency.

How term, termination and commitments are set out in an agency contract is described in Contract with a speaker agency. This article provides an overview and does not constitute legal advice.