Hiring the right Motivational Speaker plays a critical role during corporate events. A great speech can set the mood for further proceeding and a not-so-good-speech could demotivate participants where they become skeptical about the overall program too.
As a Motivational Speaker and after delivering hundreds of Motivational talks for companies in India and abroad, I could provide you an honest and open perspective based on my experience.
Expectations from the Motivational Speaker
First of all, it would be really useful to list down all the “Explicit & Implicit” reasons for inviting the Motivational Speaker for your event. It may sound simple, but different stakeholders in a company usually have different expectations from the motivational speaker. Just to give you an example of some of the “Explicit and Implicit” reasons I have come across:
- Owner/CEO/MD of the company keep an open mind that even if talk touches the lives of few, it would mean a lot
- HR Head may try to make sure that “People should not get Bored”. This is another way of saying that no one should come after him/her [:)] after the program to crib about
- Head of Department might like to push their expectation in terms of results to the team
- Sometimes companies are looking for a hire a Well known speaker (brand) so that people get a chance to click a lot of selfies and share it on their social network. Also, it would add the desired branding to the social media and coffee table book of the company
- Sometimes companies are looking for a highly focused and in-depth talk on the topic. And hence they tend to search for speakers with relevant backgrounds. For example, I was invited by PTC India (NSE:PTC) to deliver a keynote on “Digital Transformation” considering my background in Software Industry
Hence it would be great to list down all the expectations from the motivational speaker and it would help the company make better choices and different levels of selection.
The next step would be to find the Best Speaker or in other words “Who is the best motivational speaker“. I wrote this post that the definition of “best motivational speaker” would change based on your “Explicit and Implicit Requirements”.
To Hire a Motivational Speaker You may look for:
- Speaker Bureaus: Speaker Bureaus mostly have renowned speakers on their panel. I am on the panel of Speaker Bureaus in India like SpeakIn and International Speaker Bureaus like A-Speakers. But speaker bureaus usually engage for high range programs only
- Google Search: Google search is a good option, but it is seen that only a few speakers are shown during the results. Few of these speakers are actually renowned and most others are one who might have used paid SEO to bring up their google ranking. I have seen that many good speakers are not shown during google search results
- Various Lists of Speakers on different websites: Many websites are there showing “List of Motivational Speakers“. You need to keep in mind a few things like:
- Few of them would take you to their individual page instead of showing the actual list of Motivational Speakers.
- Few of them are paid blogs. Hence these paid websites would highlight some of the well-known speakers like Shiv Khera and Sandeep Maheshwari and in the end, they would have PAID offer and list to any speaker who is ready to pay the price
- Keep this in mind, I created List of Top Motivational Speakers and list of all motivational speakers in India covering 30+ speakers. In this post, I also shared why I created list of Motivational Speakers. Hence when you are doing a deeper check, it would be great to refer to their past videos to actually see the depth of their work
- Reference from someone: Till today, it seems referral plays the most crucial role. In my past experience, many a time I was hired as a motivational speaker when someone referred my name to the client during any formal/informal meeting and later they searched my profile on the internet
As shared this could be a long exercise, but considering the critical role played by Motivational Speakers during the corporate event, it would be worth spending these efforts. I have been glad to fulfill the expectations of my clients so far with my customized inspirational talks which could be high on energy for the sales team, highly strategic deep content for leadership for a mix of both. Here are some of the testimonials from our clients in the past.
