Four predictable mistakes derail keynotes every year. Here is how to recognize each one and protect your event, your audience, and your reputation.
Meeting planners carry enormous responsibility. The keynote sets the tone for the entire event, and when it misses, everyone in the room notices. The good news is that the biggest risks are predictable, and every one of them can be avoided before you sign a contract.
After three decades on the main stage, Nicholas has seen these four risks derail more keynotes than any budget, venue, or travel problem. Here is what each one looks like and exactly how to protect your event from it.
It sounds obvious, yet it happens constantly. Many speakers spend fifteen minutes researching an event, often on the flight in. They do not live in your industry or its subsectors every day, and two bad things follow.
First, they lose credibility with the very audience you are trying to serve. Second, once an audience stops believing in a speaker's credentials and pedigree, it no longer matters what that speaker says. The keynote will never have impact.
The most impactful keynote speakers are subject matter experts whose future trends insights go well beyond what the audience already knows, even though the audience lives in the industry every day. Their credentials support their expertise, so the room respects them and is excited to learn from them.
Delivering an impactful keynote is not something anyone is born able to do. The idea of a born speaker is no more true than the idea of a born neurosurgeon. Someone may be born with the desire or a unique aptitude, but a great keynote speaker is made over well more than a decade of delivering keynotes.
Great keynote speakers share one superpower: the ability to blend engagement, and even entertainment, with novel and actionable insights. That combination is rare, and it is the only kind of speaker that will truly serve your event.
Too many keynote speakers take the stage in a paid engagement and then use that privilege to subtly promote their own products and services. It is a guaranteed way to damage your event.
Your audience does not want to feel as if they are sitting through a timeshare pitch. A keynote exists for one reason only: to serve the meeting planner who trusted the speaker with the event, and the audience in the room.
Great keynotes require a team. The best speakers in the world have their own logistics and production support to manage every nuance of the event, so the meeting planner never has to micromanage an amateur.
Your speaker should provide a client concierge, an AV team that builds graphic elements customized for your event, and the support services that make show day run smoothly.
Hire a speaker who is obsessed with your industry and its subsectors. Make certain their bestselling books and real world experience square up with the needs and opportunities of your event.
Make certain your speaker understands the balance between engagement and fun on one side and novel, actionable takeaways on the other, so your audience leaves with ideas it can apply immediately.
It is remarkable how many keynote speakers act like global celebrities. They make unreasonable demands, and on stage they are often extremely self promoting.
Great speakers present themselves as humble servants to the audience. That is the standard Nicholas holds himself to. He is honored to serve your event, and he arrives with no unreasonable expectations of any kind.
Call 530-782-2625 to speak with Michelle Lynn, your personal event concierge, or check Nicholas’s availability online.
Check availability
Share a few details about your event, and Nick’s team will get right back to you about availability, fit, and how he can make your audience and you look great.
Prefer to talk now? Call (530) 782-2625
Tell us about your event and we will follow up personally.
Prefer to talk now? Call (530) 782-2625