One of our initial posts last year covered the topic of “The 10 Most ‘Booked’ Corporate and Association Speakers”. We will be making a similar post later this year but today we reveal our list of the five most requested speakers in the world. In order to do this we must first differentiate between the concepts of “most requested” and “most booked”.
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- “Most booked” are those on the speaking circuit who actively seek paid speaking engagements and are in high demand as commercial speakers. Generally these speakers are scheduled close to 100 times a year, sometimes even more!
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- “Most requested” are speakers that may or may not be on the speaking circuit; however, they are requested by those looking to book speakers based on their name recognition and background.
These two categories are not mutually exclusive, and you would be pressed to find a speaker that qualifies for both lists. Frankly, those who are generally going to be the “most requested” do not have the availability to be the “most booked”, or the speaker market can’t support a speaking fee that makes it worth the speaker’s time. There have been a few anomalies to this postulate over the years – some examples would be General Colin Powell and General Norman Schwarzkopf.
The Speaker Experts came up with a list of the five most requested speakers in America based off the results of our Speaker Needs Analysis. When discussing a client’s speaker needs and desired outcome of a certain event, we cover a lot of territory including audience demographics, industry trends, past speakers, time allotted, etc. At the end of the analysis we always ask, “If you could book any speaker you wanted, with price and availability not being an issue, who would you book?”, making sure to keep track of all of these responses over the course of the year.
Here are the five most requested speakers over the past twelve months:
President Obama
He and the First Lady could be the highest paid speakers
of all time when they leave the White House.
Bill Gates
Microsoft founder, philanthropist and at the top of Forbes’ list of
the World’s Richest People. If every man has a price, we have
no idea what his would be!
Warren Buffett
CEO/largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway and philanthropist
(see Bill Gates re. speaking fee).
Elon Musk
The CEO of Space X and product architect of Tesla is a tough
get, but he will be speaking at the Edison Electric Institute
Annual Convention in New Orleans.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet
If you are fortunate enough to schedule him for a speech,
you will receive total consciousness.
Clearly there is no scientific or analytic formula to identifying the world’s most requested speakers. However, through our communication with a large sampling of groups looking for speakers, these are the five we are asked about the most.
Gary McManis & Jay Conklin
The Speaker Experts 