How to Find Your Audience and Get Booked 600 Times as a Speaker

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Lisa Reed.

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She is a very accomplished speaker who has done over 600 speaking gigs over the past several years.

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She booked them and she gave over 600 talks so very remarkable in itself, and she has an organization called Get Speaking Gigs.

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Now Welcome to the show.

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Hi, eric, thanks for having me.

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So, before we jump in, why don't you share a minute or two of context for people about who you are and what you do?

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Sure, I live in Orange County, california, love California, but I was raised in Fairbanks, alaska, so I figured that I gave plenty of time to the cold weather and now I deserve to be in sun.

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But professionally, what I do is I'm the founder of Get Speaking Gigs now and the CEO of the International Speaker Network.

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So if anyone's psychic senses are going off, yes, I work with speakers and people who want to be speaking.

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That's what I do.

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Entrepreneurs who want to use public speaking to market their business that's who calls me.

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And what made you passionate about getting into this doing the 600 speaking gigs yourself and then helping entrepreneurs get speaking gigs.

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What made you choose to focus on this?

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Probably lots of things if we look back far enough, but I will say I find public speaking to be one of the most fulfilling ways to market yourself and market your business, especially for people who are like myself, who are actually more interested in teaching, right Like I.

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Actually love the aspect of providing value to an audience or somebody that is really going to change their life or change the results in their life, and we all have to market our business.

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If we're entrepreneurs or sales and marketing, why not do something that you find really fulfilling?

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And for me, public speaking is that.

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Yes, it is fulfilling.

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So it's fulfilling and high impact for people.

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Yes, yeah, it's a quick way to bring in cash to your business without any fancy schmancy.

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Any of you have a computer, or you have a phone, or you have your voice.

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You can do this.

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You can do this.

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All right, so let's jump right into your story.

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Tell us a story about some of the best marketing you've done, the marketing you're most proud of.

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I thought about this question and there's many ways I could explain that, but I'll go back to the beginning of when I became a speaker, because I think sometimes, if we've never done something before, we can think, oh, I can't do that, or oh, it's too late for me, I'm too old or whatever.

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We have a bunch of excuses that I call speakers kryptonite creep in.

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When I was 40, which was over 10 years ago I was hired by a personal development company to present to groups, basically speak right about mindset, in order to fill their workshops.

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I wasn't afraid to speak, so I'm not really speaking to the people right now who are like I would rather get a root canal than speaking.

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That's not what I'm talking about.

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There's definitely a group of us who love the idea of speaking.

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It's a deep calling and I always had that.

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So I was hired by them and I was given a talk.

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I was given an offer.

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I was given like this is what you're selling, that kind of thing, and I was given a list.

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Here's where we've spoken before.

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But I, but that was pretty much it.

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Okay, go do that now, go get speaking engagements.

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And I thought, oh, all right, sure, I wasn't scared to do it, but I didn't really know what the industry was like.

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I call it ignorance on fire, which is better than perfection on ice any day of the week.

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And that first year I booked 83 speaking engagements in my local area and filled up their workshops and sold the thing and had people come in and just was busy doing that.

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And to me that wasn't like a big deal because I didn't know, I didn't have anything to compare it to.

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I had no idea that was amazing results.

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Right, I just did what I was told because, also, I thought it was a good idea too.

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And about six months into that process, I had formed a network of speakers because I thought I can do this, but it's a little lonely.

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It's lonely to be scrambling, hustling, struggling, cold calling, reaching out, doing all the stuff by myself.

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So I thought why don't I hang out with some other speakers, get some tips?

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I can give them tips and we can all collaborate together.

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And this was back in 2013.

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What I wasn't expecting was for them to ask me how did I get so many speaking engagements?

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And I kept getting that question over and over again.

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Because I've, each year, I'd book about 60, 70 a year and I still do.

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I still do about that Not in person, though Now I do, mostly just virtual and so that organization, which is now the international speaker network, that really inspired me to create my company.

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So I actually had the network before I even had a company called get speaking gigs.

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Now I was like, wait, why is everyone asking me for help with this thing?

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I don't have time to help them, I don't have time to share that.

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But when I realized that it was a need, if you're a speaker, you do need an audience.

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Now we have Facebook Live, now we have YouTube.

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Things have changed and developed over time, but to me, the real fulfilling part is when you're actually engaging and interacting with the people.

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So for me, that was a huge thing.

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And now I teach people how to use that gift, that marketing strategy of speaking to attract their ideal clients.

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But have fun doing it.

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And even if I think sometimes, eric, people think, oh, then I'm going to have to sell or I don't want to be one of those salesy, creepy, weird people which I mean I hear that a lot and I don't think you should do that either, like I don't want to be one of those people either.

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So it's a way of like.

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How can you really attract the people who know that they should be working with you, the people whose problems you can solve?

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And I've given I'll end the story if you will.

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Years later, I was booked to speak at a women's event that I was not quote unquote allowed to sell at and I wasn't being paid a speaker fee, but I knew it was my ideal audience.

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These are some nuggets I'm dropping here.

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Right, I knew it was my ideal audience and I knew that there were probably people in that room who could use what the skills that I had to get their business to another level.

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With that one talk, I sold over $30,000 worth of coaching work.

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I say that because sometimes there's just a lot of myths that go on in the speaking world and people think they can't do it.

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And I'm telling you, if you have a desire to do it, you absolutely can and you can really find your people.

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So I do think it's pretty remarkable booking that volume of speaking gigs every year and over the longer period of time.

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The high number of 600 is just amazing, remarkable indeed.

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And so what is the number one secret on how you did that?

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Because that's just not normal.

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It's not normal, it's great.

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It's not normal, though.

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See, the thing that I did in the beginning was a very I was just like super diligent, consistent, deliberate, determined, right.

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It was those boring traits, right, that that really kept me on the path of that level of volume.

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But I found an easier way because I thought, gosh, this isn't super fun.

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So the easier way to me is finding what I call your speaker soulmate or soulmates.

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And if you think about it like a best friend, like we have friends, we have contacts and we have friends, then we have really good friends, then we have our best friends right.

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So there's a natural inner circles that we create in our lives and with speaking it's no different.

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When you find someone who speaks at a similar frequency as you, who they're playing the same game as you, right, and trust them, and that's going to develop over time.

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It doesn't mean you have to know them for years, it just means, hey, I want to get into this type of relationship with you, and then you actually speak to similar audiences, but you're not competition.

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That to me, is an ideal speaker soulmate.

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I stopped cold calling for speaking engagements nine years ago.

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So I don't scramble, hustle, go down Google rabbit holes anymore because of that methodology.

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So we actually bring that into the international speaker network where I'm like find your speaker soulmate.

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I think of it as like being on the playground, like you do not have to play with all the kids on the playground, but you got to find a couple of buddies, right, who's your buddy, who is your friend out on that playground?

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And that can make that recess or the speaking world a lot easier and more fun for everybody.

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Yeah, it's more fun to flock together, right?

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Yeah, it's more fun to flock together, right?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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Especially as entrepreneurs, we're often head down doing things, creating stuff by ourselves.

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You got to get out and shake some virtual hands once in a while make some relationships.

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So the whole process of becoming a speaker in my opinion is in years past and I don't know that it's necessarily gotten that much better.

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It's just a very messy process because of a couple of things.

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Number one, everyone seems to do it a little bit differently.

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Number two, it's not really an automated process.

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It's more manual, tedious of you go to Google, you find things like you were saying and then you message people and you cold call them and everyone has a different sort of process for their call for speakers and it just seems like one of the most manual, messy, tedious processes in business that I've seen.

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Am I wrong?

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Tell me if I'm wrong.

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You're wrong, eric.

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You're wrong, but you're not wrong in that.

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That is the experience a lot of people have, and that was where I was when I first started.

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I was like, wow, okay, I'm just going to Google rabbit hole myself to death.

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Right, there's an easier way.

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And so that's what.

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When I, when people work with me in the speakers training academy, we literally figure that out Like how do we turn one organization or one speaking engagement into 10, into 20, into 50?

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Like how can we make it easier?

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It's not about how many speaking engagements a person has, it's what.

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It's that combination of quality, quantity.

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Are you getting out there enough to get the goals, to meet the goals that you have?

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Are you finding that fulfilling?

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Where's your balance in your personal and professional life?

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I am not a burn the candle at both end kind of a trainer.

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I'm like let's figure out what's the easiest way you can get to where you need to go with the least amount of effort and the most results.

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That's my philosophy.

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It seems like the one thing I have seen that does work for people is if they put together a great talk and they give a great talk and people see it, then I think the word gets around and it picks up momentum that you can give a great talk, because a lot of most of the time it's not that someone is famous, it's that they gave a great talk and people walked out of the session going, wow, that was fantastic.

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Lisa really rocked that session.

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We should have her come to our talk.

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I think that that does work.

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I've seen that that work for people who are great speakers.

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So if you give one really great talk like that and it's a group and there's people in that group who would also hire you to speak, like that makes sense.

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I'm sure that happens quite a bit.

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One thing that is nice is that speaking does tend to get more speaking and when you are thinking of it as a long game instead of a short game.

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Sometimes I know as entrepreneurs we want results like right away, I want it right now.

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Now you can have that in speaking.

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Like I said, my my first speaking engagement with back over 10 years ago was to a group of 10 women.

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It was I was given the opportunity to speak because she knew me.

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She did not know that was my first time giving that talk.

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Thank God, she just believed in me and said sure, come on in that one talk.

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10 women in the room, three of them registered for the workshop that I was selling for $300 and then spent thousands of dollars after that initial workshop and I quote unquote didn't know what I was doing.

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So when I say that it can, don't worry too hard about if you're yes, if you have something of value to offer people, that is contagious, that is translatable.

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Now, if you just go and you talk about something that you're a mismatch to the audience and you don't give an offer, you don't give them anywhere to go after, it's probably not going to work out so well.

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I do get a lot of people come to me going.

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Oh, I'll tell you one example A gal, a client of mine, she was out there speaking and she liked it, but she wasn't getting results.

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So she was at the time we met and she started my speakers training Academy.

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She was about to give up.

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She's I don't know if this is really worth the effort.

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This isn't really working.

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And I'm like okay, let's take a look, because I know that means there are some holes in that boat and we got to fill them quick, because even a small hole, your boat is going to sink.

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So I looked at her slides show me the process.

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What are you doing?

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Send me your recording.

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What like?

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What's going on?

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Why is this not working?

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Because it should have been working.

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She was speaking to the right audience.

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Once I was able to take a look and see what's happening, we started patching holes real quick.

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The next time she gave that talk, she emailed me back right away.

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She said oh my God, people signed up for my strategy session.

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I had the most engagement I've ever had in my life and I'm like thank you.

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Yes, it's a lot of things, but when we do it the right way, with our right intentions, it does work out really well.

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So, and looking through your websites and my past experience in the events industry, it seems like there's at least three really critical things that you help people do.

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The first is you help them create their talk.

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What are they going to talk about, and is it a talk that people want to have?

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The second thing you help people do is create a sheet that markets each person as an amazing speaker a profile sheet, if you will, speaker sheet.

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And then the third thing is that you show people how to pitch on why they should hire you as a speaker.

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Right, Are those like the three main big poles in the tent?

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Those are some of the three.

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I think even speaker sheet nowadays it's it we still have.

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We still I still recommend people have one, but it comes in so many different formats.

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What in that speaker sheet process you're actually identifying who you are as a speaker.

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You're putting your stake in the ground of what you speak about.

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That is very powerful.

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You can get booked without a speaker sheet I.

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You can get booked without a speaker reel.

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You can get booked without a book, right, there's all these things I.

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You can get booked without a speaker reel.

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You can get booked without a book, right?

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There's all these things that you can do.

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So I would say, eric, what if we're reading between lines?

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Yes, those are definitely strategies that I help people with and we're going to get those dialed in.

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But when we read between the lines, it's really uncovering what's keeping you from, say, a person's.

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I really had this dream of speaking, but I've just been still working on it in the sidelines and I haven't actually pulled the trigger Like what's going on.

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Why are you not doing it yet?

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Because it's probably because you're not sure what you should speak about, you're not sure who you should speak to, you're not sure how you would actually get on stage, like how would you actually get clients, how would you make money?

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Those are the questions that stop people in their tracks.

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So we start to figure all that out and I do not think that's cookie cutter, I think that is definitely depends on the person.

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Like your personality, your ideal audience is going to be a little different, what kind of lifestyle you want a little different.

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So when we get clear as entrepreneurs I don't know if you have this experience, but when I'm super clear, I move really fast.

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If I'm cloudy, I start to slow down and then nothing's happening.

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So my goal is let's figure out what's your speaking strategy, what's gonna work for you, and you can rinse and repeat that for years, not just the next 90 days, but then you can just go speak for however long you want to speak, and then that's part of your revenue stream.

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And so I assume there's a decent amount of nuance or finesse and likely pitfalls in each of those areas.

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I'm not suggesting that all those things are easy.

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If you will Not all rainbows and unicorns no.

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It seems simple when you just say it or read it on your website.

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I think what goes into creating a great talk where people will be like wow, I really want to have that presentation done in my event, of course, to get to that point, to make people feel that it requires a good amount of focus and work, like you're saying right.

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When I help people get their talk ready to rock, what we do is it's more about really uncovering what is your soul's wisdom.

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Trying to tell other people like what's coming out, what's that brilliance that each person has that they know would help other people.

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I think when we get really clear on that's translatable.

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When what's not super helpful is when we try to tell people what we think they want them to hear, or what's the right way or how should I do it.

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When we get stuck there, then it starts to get really bland and boring and doesn't really move the needle, in my opinion.

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Yeah.

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So finding your true voice within is very helpful.

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Much more than, oh, I've got to have my hands perfect or my tone or pitch perfect.

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It's really about is really where the rubber meets the road, Because if people go into a presentation, they want to come out of it with some actionable insights or takeaways, right, and so if they're not the right people and you haven't thought about how you can help them, then they just don't come out of it with that.

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I think sometimes people just fill the time for lack of a better word because they don't necessarily take the time to think through those things, and then it's just not really great for anybody involved, but I think when you do, it is really great.

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Like you said, yeah, you want to have a win, of course, and I think that's where one of the pitfalls is.

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For newer speakers or people who are out there just trying to get anything that they can, I'm like, no, that's going to be horrible for everyone.

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Make sure you're clear on who your audience is, and then that will make it easier for the planner to say yeah, that's actually what you're speaking about is a huge fit and it's going to be a huge benefit for our members.

00:19:15.779 --> 00:19:17.768
They're really going to be interested in that topic.

00:19:17.768 --> 00:19:19.424
Then you deliver what you say.

00:19:19.424 --> 00:19:21.029
You're going to deliver that already.

00:19:28.700 --> 00:19:29.280
Now you have a win right.

00:19:29.280 --> 00:19:29.682
That's important.

00:19:29.682 --> 00:19:30.403
That's what gets you asked back.

00:19:30.403 --> 00:19:30.663
That's great.

00:19:30.663 --> 00:19:46.027
And I'm just curious because some of the other speaking pros who have come on the show have given their opinion on what percentage of speaking opportunities are paid versus unpaid, and they had a view about why it strategically might make sense to market your business to do some unpaid and they had a view about why it strategically might make sense to market your business to do some unpaid speaking opportunities.

00:19:46.027 --> 00:19:47.069
What can you share about that?

00:19:47.940 --> 00:19:54.500
Oh my gosh, I, if I had a nickel, for every time I got a question like this yes, so here's how I look at it.

00:19:54.500 --> 00:20:02.115
I look at what makes sense for my client or me, right, cause I'm a speaker too.

00:20:02.115 --> 00:20:08.962
For my client, or me, right, because I'm a speaker too.

00:20:08.962 --> 00:20:18.548
I love waiving my speaking fee and going and speaking to an audience that I know is going to be my ideal prospect of clients and making money that way, because I make a lot more money and it's easier for me.

00:20:18.548 --> 00:20:19.169
I love it.

00:20:19.169 --> 00:20:32.683
I have clients who go keynote speaking, which would be more the paid upfront speaking like a speaker fee model, and do the same speak to seller, speak to get clients model, and they mix them.

00:20:33.405 --> 00:20:35.329
There's different strategies for different things.

00:20:35.329 --> 00:20:45.148
What I find as a warning sign is when someone says I'm going to speak for free to get my name out there, or I'm going to speak for free to get some experience or get what did they say?

00:20:45.148 --> 00:20:46.090
Yeah, there's a certain phrase.

00:20:46.090 --> 00:20:47.513
They'll say, oh, to pay my dues.

00:20:47.513 --> 00:20:48.624
That's what they say, pay my dues.

00:20:48.624 --> 00:21:02.813
And I'm like, no, what we want to do is make sure you're monetizing when you're speaking all the time, whether it's a fee upfront, whether it's getting clients in the room or soon after.

00:21:02.813 --> 00:21:08.351
We want to make sure that you are super clear on your monetization strategy and what game are you playing?

00:21:08.351 --> 00:21:24.121
That is actually way more important question than should you do a paid or should you do free, and that's what we want to get clear on, because I want my clients to know that's a no for me, that's a yes for me, and that is an individual decision everyone needs to make based on their business.

00:21:25.163 --> 00:21:42.673
I think there's like hundreds of thousands of events in the US out there and, if you think each event needs to have some number of speakers, some are much bigger and have hundreds, but even smaller events have 5, 10, 15, 20 speakers.

00:21:42.673 --> 00:21:46.786
So there's probably millions of speaking slots out there per year, right there?

00:21:46.885 --> 00:21:53.101
are, and so there's lots of opportunity right so much opportunity so.

00:21:54.945 --> 00:22:02.426
I think you had an offer you wanted to share with those listening about if they want to try to get going and get speaking gigs.

00:22:03.911 --> 00:22:22.230
Yeah, if you're an entrepreneur listening and you're like, oh my gosh, this was a sign I was waiting for, you can just go to getspeakinggigsnowcom slash tips and I think it's going to be in the notes as well and that you can get free five top tips to get more speaking gigs and there's some tips on there, stuff that I still use to this day.

00:22:22.230 --> 00:22:25.763
And no lie and knock yourself out, get started.

00:22:26.865 --> 00:22:27.227
Awesome.

00:22:27.227 --> 00:22:31.104
Thank you very much for being with us today for sharing these insights.

00:22:31.104 --> 00:22:33.750
I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends.

00:22:33.750 --> 00:22:39.303
They should hear these great ideas and the opportunities out there to be a great professional speaker.

00:22:39.303 --> 00:22:42.747
And thank you very much for being with us, Lisa, we appreciate it.

00:22:43.367 --> 00:22:43.969
Thanks, Eric.