Feb 28, 2019
Who do you serve as a keynote speaker? Today I'm in Abu Dhabi in the UAE and in this episode of The Speakers Life I explore why it's important to understand the different stakeholders in an event.
- Know your client
- Serve the message
- Do you inhabit your speech?
- Understanding the audience
- The client for your speech
- Event organisers
- Speaker bureaus
Artificial Intelligence Generated Transcript
Below is a machine-generated transcript and therefore the transcript may contain errors.
Hi, James Taylor, keynote speaker on creativity, innovation and artificial intelligence. And the founder of SpeakersU. Today, I'm in beautiful Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. I've just spoken an event here I was brought in to come and give the keynote at an event. And an interesting thing came up in the process of preparing for this speech and giving the speech yesterday, it was this idea that the lawyers often refer to, which is know your client. Sometimes when you're brought into speaking event, there will be almost like multiple parties, multiple stakeholders in any particular event. And this event was no different. So for example, you might have the bureau that initially booked you to come into speaking event like this one, you will have maybe an events company whose job is to ensure that the event is successful, looks great, sounds great. You will have the client people that are actually paying the check or paying your fee as a speaker, you will have the audience and then there will be different parties in the audience as well. And obviously there's yourself
Where do you use it as a speaker and all this? So this is kind of my order importance, I guess, on knowing your client who the WHO THE END client is, who you are you there to serve. And my answer might be slightly unusual. There's an expression in music industry, which is the singer should serve the song,
which means that as a singer, as a performer, your ultimate responsibility, especially if you're a jazz singer is to serve the song if someone wrote this song, your job is to really embody the message that's in that song was trying to get the emotion that you're trying to get across.
There was this great phrase where it says that people will forget what you say but they should never forget what what you how you make them feel. And when you go and give a give a speech I believe your first client almost is the message is the message that you're trying to
communicate to convey to the audience that message could be encapsulated by a field. It can be encapsulated by a mental thing that you just want them to leave, just remembering it echoing the next days and weeks and years. So I, I'd say number one client for me is the message in my case is about creativity and what I call super creativity. So that's, that's for me as a number one client after that, for me, the next client is yourself as the speaker. If you if you work up a speech and you can't even please yourself with a speech if you can't feel Wow, that's, that's, that's really good. That's really strong, then you probably shouldn't be up there on stage giving the speech you have to be able to be happy with the with what you're saying and the speech you're giving. And this can sound a little bit self confident or maybe arrogant or egotistical. And it's not meant to be that at all and the
The idea is you, you have to really embody what you're saying. And you're there to have integrity to have truth in what you're saying. So it's very, very important that when you get there on stage, first of all is the message that's number one thing you're trying to serve that message then you're trying to have integrity with what you're saying. So you fully embody that message as the next most important thing and then we have the actual audience themselves and it's an interesting thing the oldest is not always the same as the client so the audience of those people whose eyes are looking up at you whose ears a listening to you who are taking in this information that you're you're saying on stage. And so when whenever I'm doing my pre event calls and working at my speeches, after I knew I've got my core message there, and after I've kind of gone through it myself, but why I'm happy with this, then I have to do a check and feel well, based upon the conversations I've been having about what the client want and I also use things like artificial intelligence to look at this this set
The audience as well in advance, will the speech work for the audience will this audience enjoy it is enough interaction going on all the things that you should be learning as a good speaker. So you're looking to serve them next the audience that, but they're not that often the first. So you're thinking message and you're thinking yourself your own integrity, you serve as a speaker, then you're thinking about the audience serving that audience. And then after that, then you're thinking about the client themselves. Now, I put the audience about the client. And the reason I say that is because sometimes the client says, We want x y Zed, and they really feel that but as a speaker, if you've had enough experience speaking, you should be able to take the end triangulate it a little bit, I think what but what does the audience really want you have experienced on being on the stage of being there, you're the person with the microphone with the light on them. You have that responsibility for that 30 minutes, 45 minutes, however long it is to serve that audience. So you have to have real focus on that and after you have the audience you
have obviously the client themselves and the clients will be giving you lots of information about what they want. When you do your pre event call you probably going through a checklist, making sure there's key things they want you to say, maybe there's things that you, they want you to kind of avoid saying in the Middle East, just as there's certain things, you have to be quite careful about doing this cultural aspects as well. So after you've thought about the client, then it comes probably to the Bureau and the Bureau's speak of yours might not be happy for me saying this. But in the overall list of things they are, they are further down because if the audience is happy, then the client is happy. And if the client is happy, then the bureau will be happy. So you have to cascade it down like that. So let me just give you a quick recap again, number one is the message that's what you're there to serve. Number two is you you've got to be happy with your speech if you don't have that passion if you don't embody what you're saying.
Stage why you up there, then it's got to be the audience. And then we have the client. And then we have the bureau bureau this, this, this brought you in as well. And there may be between the Bureau and the client, they may be an event company as well. So they sit, they sit kind of between the client and the bureau. So hopefully that's been useful for you. knowing who your client is, as I say, it's it's complex, not complicated. So there's multiple parties going on something it's called stakeholder management and Matt in MBA type speak, but I hope this is served. You hope this is giving you some ideas for your next speech. When you sometimes you have those conversations and feel that the audience is wanting one thing and the clients wanting another and the beer is wanting another event companies wanting another thing. If you work your way through it in that order, then you're going to give a great speech. My name is James Taylor. Thanks for watching. How would you like to get paid to travel the world to share your message and expertise? How did it feel to get paid 5000 10,000
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