Three great ways (and three awful ways) to pitch yourself as a speaker
People pitch me on speaking all the time; here’s what works, and what makes me grouchy.
I co-founded an annual conference in Sun Valley, ID, called Dent, which has featured speakers like Indiegogo Co-Founder Danae Ringelmann, Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith and Obama campaign CTO Harper Reed.
First let me say: I love that I get speaker proposals. It’s awesome. It means our conference is being noticed. It means folks care about what we are trying to help people do (put a dent the universe, as Steve Jobs once said). And it means I get to meet and talk to tons of very cool people who are working on ambitious and captivating projects.
But there are good ways to pitch me and bad ways to pitch me.* We’re going to do the “good/bad” thing here.
Good
The best way to earn a speaking slot at our gathering (and probably many others) is to be recommended. Having an existing attendee or mutual friend recommend you as a speaker is a pretty big boost, and we also love finding speakers from within our own ranks.
Attendee recommendations are a particularly good filter because attendees already know the event, they’re familiar with the style of presentation, and in our case attendees understand how much we work to make sure the presentations are about the attendee and not the presenter.
It’s kind of surprising how many people pitch me on speaking from only their own perspective! “I think Dent is a great opportunity for me to tell my story” tells me you’re not particularly concerned with whether or not the audience will get any value from your story.
Bad
Did you speak at TEDxSomewhere? Awesome! Do not say you’ve done “a TED talk.” You have not done a TED talk (unless you have). You have done a TEDx talk. There’s a difference — you know it, and we know it.
You know what’s impressive? If you’ve done a TEDx talk that has 26 million views. You know what’s not impressive? Pretending a TEDx talk is a TED talk.
Good
Make it clear that you yourself are available to talk to if you’ve got someone who helps you reach out for potential speaking opportunities.
Your potential place on stage is a significant portion of my end product. If it sucks, Denters will notice, and they might leave. I need to know that this matters to you.
I don’t want to talk to your assistant about your speaking topics, or your areas of expertise. These are red flags. This means that to you, my conference is a “marketing opportunity,” recommended by an agency or a chance to “get to your talking points.” That does a disservice to the people in the audience, and I owe them better than that.
We’ll never put anyone on stage without talking to them first.
Bad
Don’t pitch a talk without first looking at the conference topics. Do your homework. At Dent, we like sessions that hit at least one of the six starting points listed on our site: Vision, People, Design, Process, Focus, Alchemy. But it’s clear that many of the folks who pitch us on speaking haven’t even bothered to read through the web site.
Take a look — is the phrase “Social Media Marketing” in there?
No?
OK, just making sure. ☺
Good
If you’ve done something awesome, and it’s been profiled in a publication most people would recognize (The Economist — yes! Free-iphone-accessories.info—no!), send a link! Your popularity can work in your favor.
Bonus points: do a little research on our past sessions from the 2013 and 2014 events, and maybe make a case for why what you’re doing is related to a topic or theme we’ve shown a tendency to like.
Bad
If you think a clever way to try and finagle a speaking gig is to respond to an invitation by saying: “I only go to conferences where I am speaking,” then you are part of a very large club.
I will say this: I am sympathetic to this one.
I also don’t like going to conferences. Most conferences suck. Most conferences create a two-class system with speakers and non-speakers. Most conferences have a speakers lounge. Most conferences have a speakers dinner. I would only want to go to most conferences as a speaker, too.
But the experience at Dent is so crazy different it’s hard to explain. Since you don’t know this, I cut you some slack. But it’s still not a good way to pitch me on speaking.
It just tells me you think you’re too important for us, and that’s not a great indicator for how you’d mix with the community anyway. (By the way, I’d take this treatment from Mr. Obama and still let him speak. Just sayin’.)
The Closer
There is another route to our stage, and it’s worth mentioning. About 50% of the people we have presenting at Dent are folks that we go recruiting ourselves.
We’ve brought some pretty interesting people to the stage, including the Co-Founder of the Daily Muse (Kathryn Minshew), the former President of USA Today (Cathie Black), Redfin’s Chief Economist (Nela Richardson), the CEO of DreamBox Learning (Jessie Woolley-Wilson), the CEO of Twitch (Emmett Shear), the CEO of Makerbot (Jenny Lawton), and the engineer of the original iPhone (Andy Grignon — Jobs nicknamed him f**kchop).
The experience of speaking at Dent is really quite cool. Sometimes we call this a “user group” instead of a conference. Last year, Jeremiah Owyang, the founder of Crowd Companies said he had “found his tribe.”
Speaking is comfortable, because everyone is holed up in Sun Valley for four days, together. And the folks in the audience have just as much to contribute as you (the speaker).
Andy Grignon, the iPhone engineer? He was a last minute speaker we added from the audience.
I think it’s partially because we pull together such a unique group of people, and create such a comfortable but stimulating environment, that we’re lucky enough to be able to find and bring in some really great folks who are truly denting the universe.
When asked about his rise to fame and success, Steve Martin — the comedian, actor, director, writer, and banjo player, for those who need the reference—once answered Charlie Rose:
“Nobody ever takes note of [my advice], because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear,” Martin said. “What they want to hear is ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script,’ . . . but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”
So take a page from Steve Martin’s playbook: be so good we can’t ignore you. Make a dent.
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* All of this advice applies to pitching me. I can’t always speak for other event organizers, or even my co-founder.
