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How to take a strategic approach to speaking opportunities

Written by: Kim Harrison

Article Overview: Public speaking is a leadership role. Speeches are a powerful way to communicate directly with target audiences – and a speech can be leveraged by follow-up internal and external publicity. There are ways to ensure speech opportunities support your corporate goals, and you can strategically evaluate different speaking opportunities.

How to take a strategic approach to speaking opportunities

Public speaking is a leadership role. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to know how to make the most of public speaking opportunities and invitations. Speeches are a powerful way to directly communicate with and influence target stakeholders. They offer a rare, face-to-face opportunity to front up to a roomful of stakeholders such as shareholders, investors, financial analysts, share brokers, bankers, customers and even government.

To successfully influence an audience, you need to tap into their emotions as well as their intellect. And you need to understand the fundamental elements of successful speeches.

Speech making is a core capability for a CEO. CEOs of top US companies receive an average of 3-4 speech invitations a week, ie 175 per year, according to a 2005 survey.

The survey found that the most prestigious speaking opportunities in the world (‘most valued podiums’) are the World Economic Forum, the US Business Roundtable [of CEOs], the Detroit Economic Club, and events staged by US Fortune and Businessweek magazines. The companies use speaking opportunities at conferences as a strategic tool to differentiate their company from their competitors.

The survey also revealed that the main criteria for accepting a speech invitation are: whether it is an influential audience (87%), a strategic fit (86%), a keynote versus panel role (68%), a potential forum to demonstrate thought leadership (61%) or whether the forum has prestige value (56%).

How do top companies decide which invitations to accept? And what do they do about initiating contact for other desirable speaking events at which they would like to be on the podium?

Receiving frequent speech invitations is good for the corporate ego, but you should think strategically before agreeing to step up to the podium. Speeches are time-intensive and stressful. They take up valuable time. If you are writing your own speech notes, or paying someone else to do it, you should take into account the amount of time needed to research or guide research, to cooperate and develop the theme and objectives of the speech, to agree on the content and review it, fully rehearse the speech plus travel to the venue and the time spent in attending the event and delivering the speech.

A strategic speaking program means achieving a balance of proactive and reactive activities. It means weighing up the amount of executive time available to undertake such activities. It means deciding whether a speech is the most effective way of communicating a message compared with alternatives. It means considering the types of issues you can discuss to your advantage in public, and your objectives in airing such issues.

Your speaking program should be developed only after considering how the speeches could support the accomplishment of your organizational mission and relevant goals. Be specific. You need to know how each speech will support your mission and goals, preferably in measurable ways.

For instance, if one of the purposes of your speech is to announce an exciting new product, it is easy to show the link with your corporate goal that states, “…provide innovative and easy-to-use products and services."

Likewise, if you are the Chairman of Southwest Airlines, you might speak about the way the airline’s policy of introducing promising new services has increased customer satisfaction and profitability. Therefore your speech would truly support the corporate goal: “Creativity and innovation are encouraged for improving the effectiveness of Southwest Airlines.”

However, the first draft of a speech may just have an indirect, rather woolly link with key corporate goals. You would need to revise the text to bridge the gap. For instance, a recent actual marketing conference theme was: “Positioned for success.” Your speech would have to show (1) how your organization has had a successful marketing strategy, (2) how you suggest the members of the audience could use this shared information to position themselves for success, and (3) how this links with your corporate or marketing goals. For instance, the speech would fit well with a corporate goal of “maintaining a positive image in the community.”

The composition of the audience in each case is important. Where possible, you need to appear before influential audiences and you need to decide exactly why they are important to you, what call to action you want to give the audience, and, again, how their response can be measured.
Obviously some of the above factors are more important than others. It is up to you to decide which ones are the most important to you in each situation.

If you wish to go further than a simple “Acceptable” or “Not acceptable,” you can allocate a weighting to the factors you consider vital, say out of a maximum of 10 points, and then you can decide a score for the extent to which each factor applies, again out of 10. Then you can multiply the weighting points by the score for each factor to reach a subtotal for that factor. Then add up the subtotals of the key factors to reach a total score for that speech. In this way you can arithmetically compare the merits of one speech opportunity against another. This technique is used in market research. Again, a large part of this requires subjective judgment, but at least it results in figures that can be used for direct comparisons.

Some of the key factors that may influence your decision to take up a speech opportunity or not might be:

1. Composition of audience – is it sufficiently influential?
2. Is it a keynote speech or a panel discussion?
3. Does our topic sufficiently fit the theme of the overall event?
4. Is our topic a strategic fit for us, ie does it support our mission and goals sufficiently?
5. Does our topic allow us to demonstrate thought leadership?
6. Overall, is this speaking opportunity the best alternative for promoting our organization compared with other options?

You need to consider each speaking opportunity on its merits to determine whether it is a more effective alternative than other forms of communication and relationship-building. Only when the opportunity is a better alternative should you accept it. An exception may be if a low-key occasion provides good practice to hone your public speaking skills.

Leverage the opportunity

Ensure the content of your address has potential to influence opinion. Once you are satisfied about this, don’t hesitate to prod event organizers into promoting the speech.

Externally, you can target your key stakeholders with a summary of your main points (most people are too busy to wade through the whole speech). Publicize the speech through the media, in your external publications and in your website. You should send a summary of the speech with a personal note where possible to very important stakeholders such as customers, shareholders and bankers to demonstrate their importance to you. In addition, you can write a core article along the theme of your speech and offer it to business and professional journals.

Don’t forget networking opportunities at the venue. Ask to see the delegate list and make a point of catching up with suitable people you know and promising people you don’t know.

Many organizations tend to forget about the internal stakeholders. You should leverage the speech by publicizing the key points internally within your organization, which can be a valuable way of positioning your management with employees, managers and directors.

If the event is in another city, you can extend the value of attending the event by visiting your company offices there if they are nearby. If you don’t have a site in the vicinity, arrange visits to important stakeholders who may be located there. They will be pleasantly surprised by the courtesy.

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