How to Secure an All-Star Speaker Lineup and Sell Out your Conference

A conference lives and dies by its speakers.

4 min readOct 14, 2014

I’ve written before about how we launched and sold out our conference in 5 weeks. Now I wanted to dig in specifically to the speaker strategy.

Speakers sell the tickets. They are what define the quality of the event experience. Everything else can go wrong but if your speakers are great, people will forget about the little complaints and just remember the content.

Speakers are your event. So you need a really good lineup if you’re going to be successful in the conference game.

My experience with conferences is varied. I got my start running community for LeWeb where I learned a great deal from Loic LeMeur and the amazing LeWeb team. Now I run CMX Summit, the largest conference for the community industry.

At CMX Summit, the quality of our content is our top priority. It’s paid off, with over 98% of our attendees giving CMX speakers the highest rating possible in our post-event survey and planning to come to the next event.

We’ve brought together speakers from organizations like NASA, Burning Man, the FBI, Airbnb, Reddit, Buzzfeed, TED and Apple.

How do we go about finding and securing top level speakers? And what goes into a successful speaker lineup?

Here are 7 lessons based on my experience securing speakers for CMX:

1. Aim ridiculously high

Start by trying to get the biggest names in first. If you can get just one of them in, everyone else will be much more likely to say yes.

I’ve asked a lot of well known people to speak at CMX Summit. Jimmy Wales, Chris Poole, Chris Hughes, Sheryl Sandberg, Robert Putnam… if I dream of having them at CMX then I’ll take a shot at getting in touch with them.

Some of them respond and most say no but you have a better chance than you think. Most are actually pretty easy to get in touch with. Craig Newmark responded in minutes! Jimmy Wales took a few emails before his agent got in touch with me. I got in touch with Robin Dreeke by tweeting at him. Try different ways to get in touch.

Since you don’t have other important speakers yet, focus on explaining why the event is important.Robin Dreeke was our keynote speaker at our first event. He’s the Head of Behavioral Analysis for the FBI and usually charges thousands for his workshops. He decided to do CMX because after tweeting back and forth, I sent him a one pager about WHY we’re building CMX. When I got on the phone with him he told me he loved why we’re doing what we’re doing and that he was in.

2. Be politely persistent

Speakers are busy. They miss a lot of emails. And they have a lot of other commitments. Most of them are traveling a lot and probably speaking somewhere else on the same day as your conference.

Be politely persistent. Keep letting them know about your next event. Follow up on the emails if you don’t hear back 2 or 3 times. Keep at it. Most of them will take it as a compliment that you’re so dedicated to getting them there. I’ve never had anyone get mad at me for following up.

3. Expect to hear “no” a lot

The real secret behind getting really big names to speak is that behind each one, there are 10 others who said no. I get a ton of nos.

They say no because:

Scheduling conflicts
They’re busy with their real job
They want a speaker fee that we can’t pay
They just don’t want to (and usually make up an excuse)

The last one is rare. Usually, even when people say no, it’s a foot in the door for a future event.

4. Make it easy for speakers to confirm

Don’t make it a huge process for speakers to confirm that they’re in. All you need is a “yes”.

Once you get a yes, announce them right away. Things change and there’s always a chance that a speaker will want to back out but if it’s already out there, publicly announced, they’re much less likely to bail.

5. Ask speakers for recommendations

After you confirm a speaker, ask them for recommendations for other speakers. Great speakers know great speakers because they often meet at other conferences.

And make it easy for them to make introductions. Have your conference blurb ready with the why and who’s already committed to create social validation.

6. Create a good story in your lineup

A lineup shouldn’t feel like it’s haphazardly thrown together at random.

At CMX we focus on bringing a spread of unique speakers and perspectives to the stage. We don’t want it to be just CEO’s or just tech. We want the weird, the crazy, the outlandish. That’s our special sauce. This year in SF we have NASA and Burning Man represented.

All of our speakers are part of a larger story of building communities. A great speaker lineup is a story. If it feels like a bunch of random people thrown together into an event without a cohesive story, it won’t have the same effect.

Why are all these speakers here and how do their talks relate to each other?

7. Balance the gender distribution

Still needs to be said, unfortunately, in the tech world. There are too many events that are 90% dudes on stage. There are amazing, smart, talented female speakers out there. Find them.

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CMX Summit is coming up on November 13th in San Francisco. Join us.

Photo Credit: mrhappy