Speaker agency reviews: how to recognise real results

You recognise the real results of a speaker agency by evidence you can check yourself, such as a conference with a date and an acceptance rate with the numbers behind it. Anyone searching for reviews of a speaker agency mostly finds testimonials with a photo and a company logo on the agency's own pages, and nobody outside can verify them. This article names four pieces of evidence that can be checked, puts reviews on Google and Trustpilot in context and uses the figures of Stage Starter to show what a complete statement looks like.

What do reviews of a speaker agency prove?

Reviews of a speaker agency mainly prove how satisfied clients were with working together. Anyone looking for them wants to know whether someone in a similar position has won clients through conference stages, and on agency websites usually finds a quote with a photo and a company logo. Such a quote leaves open which stage the talk took place on and how many submissions it took. A submission is the talk proposal that the agency enters in a call for papers, the public announcement with which a conference collects proposals.

A client can be satisfied for many reasons, such as quick replies or a friendly team, which reveal little about whether the work led to talks. A good rating on a review portal therefore usually describes the experience of working with the agency, and it proves a result only once it names a conference and a date. On Google and Trustpilot, companies can invite their clients to leave a review, so a high average rating shows how the invited clients experienced the work.

Real results share one property: a third party can check them. That gives four pieces of evidence, which this article takes in turn: the conference with its name and date, the programme page, the volume of submissions and the acceptance rate with the kind of conferences behind it. Further criteria for choosing an agency, from who pays it to the length of the contract, are covered in how to find a speaker agency, and the guide to speaker agencies gives an overview of services, costs and process.

The conference with a name and a date

The result of a speaker agency is a talk, and every talk has a place and a time. An agency that wants to document its work therefore names the conference with the year and the title of the talk. With these details you open the conference website and find the talk in the programme without asking the agency.

An agency cannot always name a client, because some experts prefer to stay unnamed, and the evidence loses little as long as the conference and its programme are publicly visible. If these details are missing as well, you are left with the agency's word.

The date also reveals something about the sequence of events. Months often pass between a submission and a talk, as the article on the timeline from call for papers to stage describes. If a named talk took place only a few weeks after the collaboration began, it is worth asking when the submission was made and who wrote it.

The programme page and the question of a bought slot

The programme page of a conference shows who speaks when and about what, and some organisers sell part of these slots. With pay to speak, the speaker pays the organiser for the slot, with a sponsored talk a company buys a talk as a sponsor, and sponsored sessions are often not labelled in the programme. The article on sponsored talks and pay to speak explains both forms.

A bought slot is a real talk, and the programme page proves it reliably. As evidence of an agency's work it is worth little, because money decided the admission. In an open call the programme committee decides, the group that judges the submissions at a conference, and a talk it has selected shows the audience that experts considered it good enough.

Then there is the cost side, because you can easily pay €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot. At Stage Starter, working together starts from €990 net per month for the whole operation, from research to accompanying you to the stage. For every talk an agency names, ask how the slot came about: through a call for papers, through an invitation or through purchase.

How meaningful is an agency's acceptance rate?

An acceptance rate is only as meaningful as the volume it comes from. The figure of 94 accepted abstracts sounds like a great achievement, an abstract being the short description of a planned talk that a programme committee reads before deciding on its place in the programme. In our own submissions for clients, the 94 accepted abstracts stand next to 1,374 decided ones, and only this ratio gives a rate of about 7 per cent per abstract.

Of 2,189 submitted abstracts in total, 815 were still waiting for a reply, because many conferences respond only weeks or months after a call closes. An agency may leave open submissions out of the denominator as long as it says so. If it names only the acceptances without telling you how many decisions lie behind them, you cannot place the figure.

At conference level the rate is higher, because we often submit several abstracts per conference and one acceptance is enough. There 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. Both values describe the same work from two angles, and an agency should say which one it means. How such rates come together across more than 2,000 submissions is worked out in the article on the acceptance rate for calls for papers.

Finally, every rate belongs to a kind of conference the submissions went to. A consultant in mechanical engineering or logistics asks every agency for examples from their own sector and how it selects conferences where their clients sit.

Which result you can expect from an agency

An expert who wants to win B2B clients through conferences is aiming for a paid assignment. The agency steers the volume and quality of submissions and the choice of conferences, the programme committee decides on admission to the programme, and so no agency can guarantee acceptances or talks. Based on our experience, one to three talks are realistic in the first year, and four to six a year later on.

The choice of conferences determines who sits in the room, and the conversations, meetings and the deal then lie in the expert's hands. An example with experience values shows the stages: one talk leads to about five serious conversations, two meetings follow, and every third meeting becomes paid work. A credible report assigns acceptances and talks to the agency and makes clear which part lay with the expert, and if you read that an agency won clients, ask which stages it took on.

How does Stage Starter prove its results?

Stage Starter proves its results with its own figures and their denominators, as this article asks of every agency: 2,189 submitted abstracts, 1,374 of them decided, 94 accepted and up to 19 per cent acceptances per conference. 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. From you we need your expertise and your approval of talk and abstracts, which you give once before the start, and you hold the conversations after the talk yourself.

The model pays off most for experts with little time and a high order value whose clients sit at professional conferences, because for them every verifiable talk is worth more than the working days that running submissions yourself ties up. Working together starts from €990 net per month, and if you want a written plan first, you begin with the Speaker Audit from €2,000 net, which is credited when you book the agency. The four questions in the box above apply to us as well.