What is a speaker audit, and when is it worth it before your first submission?

A speaker audit is a paid starting point that gives you a written roadmap: where you stand as a speaker and which steps make sense before your first submission. A submission is the talk proposal you send to a conference in its call for papers, the public announcement through which it collects proposals for its speaking slots. At Stage Starter the speaker audit costs from €2,000 net, consists of two conversations and a week of preparation, and is credited against the agency fee if you hire the agency afterwards. This article describes what happens in the audit and for whom the step is worthwhile before a first submission.

What is a speaker audit, and what do you have afterwards?

A speaker audit is a stocktake for entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to speak at industry conferences and would like to know where they stand before taking the first step. At Stage Starter it is a paid offer and forms the entry point to working together. It gives you an overview of your starting position before you invest time or money in submissions, and it clarifies which stages come into question for your topic. You need neither knowledge of the conference world nor a finished talk topic to take part.

The result is a written roadmap. It contains the classification of your speaker persona and your current position, together with our proposal for topic and approach and the next steps. The speaker persona describes what organisers would invite you for and how you come across on stage, and the article Which type of speaker are you? deals with speaker types in general. The current position records what you already bring as a speaker and where we begin.

Putting the roadmap into practice is part of the agency service. 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. You supply your expertise and approve the talk and abstracts once before the start, and you deliver the talk on stage yourself.

How the speaker audit works

The audit begins with a kick-off of 30 minutes. In this first session we discuss your goal and the materials you send us for review. A week of preparation follows: we review your materials, classify your speaker persona, determine your current position and turn all of it into the roadmap. In the third step we go through the roadmap together, point by point, in 60 minutes and answer your questions.

For you this means two sessions totalling an hour and a half, plus the time you need for your materials. We take care of the preparation in the week in between.

Which documents do you need for a speaker audit?

For a speaker audit you need the documents that show what you stand for professionally and whom you want to win as clients. Typical materials are these:

• your website and your LinkedIn profile
• earlier talks, slides or recordings, if you have them
• specialist articles, white papers or posts in which you take positions
• a description of your service and your ideal clients, for instance as a client list or a list of sectors

If part of this is missing, that is no obstacle, because the current position then records the gap. You put the documents together once and send them after the kick-off, and we take care of the review.

Why should you get advice before your first submission?

Advice before your first submission pays off because a false start costs months that are hard to make up later. Many industry conferences award their speaking slots through a call for papers, while association and industry conferences more often fill them by invitation. The programme committee, the group that decides on submissions at a conference, reads the abstracts, the short descriptions of planned talks, and selects the programme from them. Anyone submitting for the first time is therefore sending a text to people who compare it with many other texts. How the whole route from topic to first stage runs is shown in the guide to becoming a speaker.

Our own submissions for clients show how selective this is. We have submitted 2,189 abstracts, of which 1,374 have been decided: 94 were accepted and 1,280 rejected, which gives an acceptance rate of around 7 per cent per abstract. At conference level the rate is higher, because we often submit several abstracts per conference and one acceptance is enough: of 433 decided conferences, 83 said yes. In our submissions for clients we reach up to 19 per cent acceptances per conference, whereas 5 per cent at most is typical in the market at this volume of submissions.

One consideration for the start follows from this. Most submissions end in rejections, and as a rule several months pass between a first submission and a first appearance. In our analysis of 2,415 conferences that publicly advertise speaking slots for 2026, the median gap between submission deadline and conference start is 50 days. A topic that is too broad, or a choice of conferences with no link to your clients, therefore shows up late, and the time is hard to make up because every missed deadline closes the conference until its next edition, for a year in the case of annual conferences.

The speaker audit places this clarification before the first submission. It answers what you would be invited to speak about and which steps make sense next.

What is the difference between a speaker audit and an initial conversation?

The initial conversation is a non-binding talk in which we check together whether the agency is the right route for you, while the speaker audit is a paid, worked-out stocktake with a written roadmap. In the initial conversation we clarify verbally what you bring and which stages come into question for your topic. In the audit we review your materials for a week and present the result in writing, so that you base your decision on a document.

When a speaker audit is worth it before a first submission

The audit is worth it above all in three situations. The first is that you have a field of expertise but no idea which talk topic it yields for conferences, and the roadmap then contains our proposal for topic and approach. The second is that you already own materials and want to know whether they are a good starting point for submissions. The third is that you are wondering whether a speaker agency is the right route for you and would like to base the decision on a written document.

The audit pays off most for experts with little time, a high order value and the ambition to address a professional audience, because the roadmap spares them false starts whose months are hard to make up later. Anyone whose topic and materials are already in place and who knows the target conferences goes straight to the initial conversation, in which we also clarify what you already bring as a speaker and where we begin.

Speaker audit, buying a slot or submitting yourself: three starting points compared

Before a first appearance there are three options: submit yourself, buy a speaking slot or first clarify your own starting position. When you buy a slot, known as pay to speak, the speaker pays the organiser for the talk, usually as part of a sponsorship package. That quickly costs €10,000 or more for a single speaking slot, and the article Sponsored talk and pay to speak explains when it is worth it.

The three starting points answer different questions: a bought slot delivers an appearance, your own submissions deliver answers from conferences, and the audit delivers a plan on which you then decide whether to submit yourself or to hire the agency.

What the speaker audit costs and how the credit works

The speaker audit costs from €2,000 net at Stage Starter. If you decide afterwards to hire the agency, we credit the price of the audit against the agency fee, so you do not pay for it twice. For the agency itself, the collaboration starts from €990 net per month. The article What does a speaker agency cost? describes which services such a flat fee contains and how pricing models differ on the market. The price of the audit covers the review of your materials and the written roadmap, together with the two sessions.

The first step

Because the median gap between submission deadline and conference is only 50 days, it pays to clarify your starting position before the next deadlines run. Whether the audit or the direct start suits you, we settle in an initial conversation.