How to Book Paid Speaking Gigs Before Developing Your Talk with Erick Rheam
The Speaker Lab Podcast
The Speaker Lab
4.8 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2024
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"You can get rid of that limiting belief that you have to have a talk fully ready before you sell it."
One of the hardest things for new and aspiring speakers is putting together a compelling talk. It's hard to move forward until you feel like everything is perfect — but what if you could sell your talk before it even exists?
Your best marketing is a great talk — but you don't necessarily need to have that talk fully developed before you pitch it to event organizers.
This week, Erick Rheam is back to break down the four main reasons developing your talk first can actually be problematic, along with advice on how to test the market, why prospecting is a superpower for successful speakers, and much, much more!
If you're feeling stuck or you're not sure how to get things rolling as a new or aspiring speaker, this is the episode for you.
"When you're on the phone with an event planner and you're discussing what their needs are, if you're too rigid and you have this talk already developed, and you've got too much time invested in it and too much energy, it's harder to adjust and a little demotivating if you spent all this time building something that the event planner doesn't exactly want."
Looking for the highlights?
- 02:58 Four reasons why speakers shouldn't finalize talks before selling them
- 03:54 How to adapt your presentation to meet the event planner's needs.
- 07:00 How to draft a rough idea and adapt it based on feedback
- 10:10 Why you should be flexible with your topic and develop assets around it later
- 13:29 Why it's easier to pivot when you're already in the game
- 18:47 Why you don't need a dramatic story to speak
- 25:51 Why consistent daily prospecting beats sporadic efforts
- 28:05 Why success in speaking requires aligning passion with demand
- 33:01 How deadlines will force preparation and commitment
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, Fran, Graham Baldwin here. |
| 0:01.4 | Hey, what if I told you that there was a single marketing asset that you could use to book tens of thousands of dollars in paid speaking gigs before you even have a website? |
| 0:10.2 | Well, that tool exists. |
| 0:11.4 | And Dan Irvin, one of the speakers on our team, used it to book over $36,000 in speaking gigs without a fancy website or any social media presence. |
| 0:19.6 | Even better, we're going to teach you exactly how |
| 0:22.1 | to create that tool for your speaking business in under an hour. For a limited time, we're going to |
| 0:26.9 | be offering a free live training on how to build and use this marketing asset to start booking |
| 0:31.9 | paid gigs in just a few weeks. If you want to hear more, go to thespeakalab.com slash marketing. |
| 0:38.5 | That's what you got to do is go to the speaklab.com slash marketing and we'll see you there. One of the mistakes that I see |
| 0:45.0 | speakers make is they create a solution and then they go out and try to find a problem that |
| 0:49.9 | that solution is going to solve. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of the Speaker Lab podcast, and today we're going to |
| 0:55.9 | be bringing you another conversation with the one and only Eric Ream. |
| 0:59.7 | Now, if you're someone who's just starting out in your speaking business, maybe you're thinking |
| 1:03.1 | that speaking might be something you want to do, you really need to listen to this episode. |
| 1:07.8 | Eric and I are going to be talking about some of the biggest misconceptions that new or aspiring speakers have, one of which is the idea that you need to master your talk before you can book paid gigs. And so Eric and I are going to walk through four reasons that you shouldn't always focus on your talk before you sell it, how to avoid procrastinating while your early marketing assets don't need to be perfect. And also how sometimes |
| 1:27.8 | you just have to dive in headfirst, get started, even if you don't feel like you have all the |
| 1:32.0 | pieces in place. If you've been waiting for a push to jump into the world of paid speaking, |
| 1:36.4 | start making your dreams a reality. This might be the episode that you've been waiting for. |
| 1:41.0 | So let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with Eric Ream. Enjoy. |
| 1:47.0 | Hey, what's our friend? I'm Grant Baldwin-Baldon here. Welcome back to the Speaker Lab podcast. |
| 1:49.8 | Hey, really excited about today's conversation going to be having maybe our most frequent guests, |
| 1:54.6 | Dr. Eric Ream. I don't think he's actually a doctor, but we'll go with that for now. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Speaker Lab, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Speaker Lab and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.