How To Become A Motivational Speaker (And Get Paid To Share A Message You’re Passionate About)

There are many people who want to become a motivational speaker, yet only a few create a successful business as a professional motivational speaker. In this article I’m going to cover exactly how to build a super successful motivational speaking business.

So, how do you become a motivation speaker who earns six or seven figures per year sharing a message you’re passionate about?

The most important thing you can do to become a motivational speaker who gets paid well to speak is uncover a very painful problem shared by a large group of people and help them solve that problem with helpful ideas shared in a way that inspires them to take action.

Actually, it is the same for ANY type of professional speaker whether you are, motivational, inspirational, educational, entertaining, persuasive or provocative, you must be able to solve a significant problem for the people who have paid to hear you speak.

In this article, I’ll share the most important elements of starting and growing a successful career as a professional motivational speaker, including:

• How to clarify is motivation speaking is right for you
• How to find a painful problem to solve that people will gladly pay you for
• How to find the right people to market to
• How to price your speeches
• And more…

1. Clarify Your Purpose & Make Sure The Speaking Lifestyle Is Right For You 

First, you will need to distill your thoughts until you have a VERY clear idea of what you are trying to achieve in your motivational speaking business.

1. What do you honestly want to accomplish through your motivational speaking?
2. What will your speeches or training offer that is different, unique and of REAL VALUE?
3. What sort of classes, workshops, and keynote speeches can you offer?
4. How much travel are you willing to do?
5. How much money you want to make as a motivational speaker?

Since I began my speaking career 28+ years ago, my schedule has taken me on the road 150-220 days per year. I’ve traveled to just about every state in the United States and to destinations around the world, including China, Poland, Japan, Australia, Austria, Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Aruba and the Cayman Islands.

Since my wife and I do not have kids, she is my business partner and travels with me to the best destinations.

My professional speaking has allowed me to create an amazing lifestyle business while making in the high six figures and some years in the seven figures.

It’s exciting achieve this level of success as a professional speaker, but you also need to be real about everything involved. You need to ask yourself how much and how hard you really want to work.

You need determine what price you’re willing to pay for success as a professional speaker.

2. Start Looking For Painful Problems You Can Solve

 There are several different types of “pain” that you can solve for your audience.

You can address pain either in their business life or personal life.  Then, in each of those two areas they can have pain around time, money, health, or people.

And, in each of those three areas you can either increase something or decrease something to remove pain.

Here are some examples.

Business Pain 

• making more money
• being more profitable
• saving time
• reducing costs
• reducing waste
• increasing market share
• decreasing turnover
• improve employee engagement
• generating more sales
• reducing business stress
• reducing burnout
• creating more work-life balance
• building high-performance teams
• reducing conflict within the organization
• working better with your vendors and partners
• delivering superior customer service

Personal Pain

• improving relationships
• reducing stress
• saving time
• improving health
• improving marital relationships
• raising healthy children
• saving money
• building a strong career
• learning mindfulness
• being better organized
• being better at conflict resolution
• creating financial security
• increasing motivation
• increasing discipline
• being more creative
  

The Bigger The Problem, The Bigger The Paycheck

If a person is only a little bit of pain they are only willing to pay a little bit of money to listen to a motivational speaker.

If the problem is huge, something that keeps them up at night and gives them anxiety and stress, or costs their business a lot of money, or keeps their business from making a lot of money, then they will be more than happy to write a check with a lot of zeros on it for you to help them solve that problem.

The Formula for Becoming A Successful Motivational Speaker 

The only way you will ever be truly successful as a professional speaker is to really LOVE what you do. It comes down to three key elements.

• Pick a topic you are deeply passionate about.
• Pick a topic you have unique and specialized experience in.
• Pick a topic highly valued in the marketplace.

If you do not have all three of these components, you will not be able to build a strong speaking business.

3. Find The Right People To Sell Your Services To

Who are the right people? They are potential clients who have a significant need for what you present and the resources to easily afford your price.

So, this means it’s essential for you to create a very detailed “target customer profile,” one in which you define the absolute best potential clients for your speaking business.

How do you do this?

Look at the people who buy those services now and build a database of potential clients who meet your key criteria. You need to read the blogs of successful speakers in your arena, see who they’re working with, look at the client list they post on their website.

Also, you can look at major conferences you might like to speak at and see what speakers they have hired and what topics they will be focused on.

It’s really a straightforward process:

• Define a target customer profile
• Create a powerful target message
• Get your message to the right people
• Deliver superior work
• Provide great customer service
• Watch them tell more of the right people!

Learn To Say “NO”

In my speaking bigness we have figured out who are the most likely to want, need and afford our services, and we focus ALL our energy on ONLY them.

We try hard not to invest a lot of time with people who do not meet “key client criteria.”

Those who don’t meet our parameters are usually just a nuisance to deal with. They will complain about everything – especially price. No matter what we do, we won’t be able to make them happy.

It is just bad all the way around. So, learning to say “No” to some people is just as important as determining who your target client is.

Create A Clear Value Proposition Tailored to Your Target Client 

You will need to be excruciatingly clear about WHAT you sell.

Make it super easy for your targeted audience to understand specifically what they are buying. They need to know what they can expect and how much it costs. You must take all the guess work out of it. Make it simple for them to make a buying decision.

People will not spend money on what they do not understand.

It is sometimes hard for people to get a feel for what we really do when we sell them a motivational speech because it is an intangible product, you can’t show them the picture of what they are buying.

Remember, there are plenty of people out there who claim to be motivational speakers, and, frankly, a great many of them are terrible!

Oftentimes, these folks have totally burned our potential clients, so we already have a hurdle to jump right out of the starting blocks.

Keep in mind the biggest block to making a buying decision about our sort of products is “FUD,” or Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. So, it’s your responsibility to remove as much FUD as possible.

You have to do this or people will not trust you enough to invest in your programs. You must create specific “products” (speeches, training or workshops) with concise deliverables and concise outcomes.

Your potential clients need to know precisely what they are spending money to accomplish.

Set Your Fee

I’m often asked how to set an initial fee for speaking.

Here is how I do it. I collect every single piece of competitive literature I can and scan all the websites to see exactly what everyone else is charging and then set my price at about 85% of the high-end of the market.

This way I don’t leave too much money on the table and my price a good value to our target customers when compared with the highest priced speakers at my level.

Here are some general pricing ranges for delivering a single motivational speech.

• Brand-new speaker: free – $1,000
• Speaking to a college audience: $1,500 – $4,000
• Initial corporate fee for a fairly new speaker: $5,000 – $7,500
• Established speaker with a good track record: $10,000 – $15,000
• Strong professional speaker the proven track record: $20,000 – $30,000
• World-famous professional speaker: $50,000 – $150,000

Your fees may differ, this is based on my specific track record as a professional speaker and I am currently at the $20,000 – $30,000 per speech the range.

Selling your Speeches

After you define your “product” and figure this pricing thing out, you have to be an evangelist for your programs.

You don’t want to be pushy or overbearing – and absolutely not a pest, but you must be a very professional and polished marketer and salesperson to anyone and everyone who meets your “ideal client” criteria.

Know what service you sell. Know who is most likely to want it, need it and pay for it.

Then, spend every waking moment getting in front of those people and help them get excited about how you can help them.

You’ll need to scan the papers, local and regional magazines, and the internet for possible leads. Send out highly customized and extremely well-written emails, letters and social media posts.

You will have to send hundreds of personal emails.  All should focus on telling a compelling and honest story about how you can be of significant value to your clients.

You must show them clearly how you can solve pressing problems that they desperately want to have go away. You must convince them you can help them achieve the great things they always wanted to achieve.

You Must Be Persistent!

When you are starting out, the close ratio is typically ONE new client for every 100 or so contacts.

Ten new clients will be the result of 1,000 well-orchestrated, professionally delivered sales efforts through letter, call, text, tweet, meeting or email. Wow! It REALLY is a lot of work for the first three years or so.

But now after more than 28 years of delivering speeches and training classes all around the world, 99 percent of my work comes directly from referrals!

Now, I do almost no outreach at all, and my close rate is nearly 100 percent.

This leads me to a discussion about another critical aspect of creating a successful motivational speaking business.

The Power of Networking

As part of your sales effort, you also will need a HUGE network of people who can recommend you, send you referrals, and give you leads.

Obviously, your past customers are the very best for this.

In fact, the client I delivered a class for yesterday sent me an email this morning. Because I got some of the highest feedback scores ever for the groups I presented to, they want to hire me for additional days next year and have already offered to pass my name on to several of their vendors and associations. THAT, my friends, is exactly how it’s supposed to work!

It is critical to understand your success will be multiplied when you have a bunch of “hubs.”

Hubs? What are hubs?! Hubs are helpful people who – by the nature of who they are and what they do – meet lots and lots of your key target customers.

Get a hub on your side, and they’ll tell 400 people about how great you are.

A regular person who loves your speech might only tell five or six people. That’s nice of them, but it’s not enough on which to build a future. Likewise, two or three hubs are great, but there

is simply no way they can send enough work your way.

You need a small army of hubs – key folks waiving your banner 24/7.

Personally, I have several agents, quite a few key hubs, and dozens of happy clients who send one or two new clients my direction each year.

Individually, this is not much, but when combined I get 30-plus solid and qualified NEW leads a year—more than enough to keep me as busy as I can handle.

Your Speech Is Your Best Marketing (So Make Sure It’s Awesome)

Live exposure is another key factor. People need to meet you and watch you present before they’ll trust you and want to hire you. That means for the first year or two you need to get out and do as many presentations as possible.

Try Rotary, Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce, business clubs and networking groups. Volunteer at a non-profit or any organization that will let you put on a program in front of the right people. You may have to do a lot of these for free or for very little money.

I probably did 25 free seminars in my first year. I still do some freebies for a very select handful of organizations.

The more exposure and practice you get, the more work you will eventually garner. With what we sell, decisions to hire us rest largely on whether people like and trust us. Many can’t make that leap until they have met you or seen you present, so make it easy for them. Find a way to let them see you deliver a superior program, and they will want to hire you right away.

Lastly, when you do land a client, you simply must dazzle them! Delight, enthrall and surprise them by delivering a level of excellence they had not imagined possible. It all must be amazing. It must encompass every aspect of your program:

• Pre-meeting coordination
• Responsiveness
• Flexibility
• Delivery style and professionalism
• PowerPoint slides and other media
• Customization
• Follow-ups and thank-you’s
• Follow Through. Follow Up.

After your presentation, stay in close contact with your host and participants. Become a real friend and trusted advisor. Nurture the relationships.

For example, I’m still on very good terms with people I did work for in 1994. I talk to them at least two or three times a year and send notes from time to time or an article or book. Then, out of the blue, I’ll get a call from one of them, asking for help or wanting to introduce me to a potential client.

Case in point, three of my current clients came from referrals from a business friend I have known since 1996. We have not worked on a project together since 2014, but he’s helped us land our top three clients that represent 40 percent of our current business!

Your loyal customers will build, grow and sustain your speaking business for the long run. I promise it.

In the End, It’s Up to You

The hard part of this line of work is that no one else can do these things for you.

People can help, suggest, guide and mentor you, and you can read books on sales, networking, referrals, and marketing (a very good idea), but to sell your programs and speeches, it MUST be you out on the street!

You need to be in the meetings, at the seminars, making phone calls, and writing texts and emails. YOU need to sit down with a company’s key decision makers and help them become excited about the services you offer – so excited that they book you and write a check for $5,000—$50,000 to get you to come help their team.

A great deal of motivational speakers know this is how to grow their businesses, but very few are willing to do the hard work to get it done.

Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

I get dozens of speakers and trainers asking me how I get so many engagements every year and how I garner such good fees. (I did 68 presentations last year!) The answer I give is straightforward.

It goes something like this:

“Do NOT worry at all about selling programs. Worry your ass off about being the best presenter you possibly can be. Worry yourself to death about always delivering maximum value to the client. Drive yourself crazy worrying about being incredibly well prepared and totally focused for every presentation.  Have a nervous breakdown worrying that your work is so good the client will be overjoyed they hired you.

Worry about all this stuff! And, you will never, ever, have to worry about being busy. Your clients will keep you booked for months in advance – at whatever reasonable price you want to request. Be fantastic with delivering a valuable message and making a great presentation. The rest will take care of itself. That is honestly the secret!”

Be Wary of Speaking Gurus

There are a ton of people who sell very expensive training programs on “How to be a Millionaire Professional Speaker.”

I would simply recommend you do a lot of research on these people before buying their programs. A good number of them have never sold major speeches to top-level companies and are not recognized in the industry as high-quality professional speakers.

They make their money selling programs and books about things in which they have no expertise, so be very careful before you put down a couple of thousand dollars to learn how to be a world-class speaker from someone who is not one.

However, if you can find a great training program on how to become a professional speaker from someone who’s actually been there and done it they can save you years of learning by trial and error, making costly mistakes and spinning your wheels in an area they know how to navigate easily.

If you’d like to see an example of a high-quality training and coaching program that I put together with my friend and colleague, Matt Tenney, another highly-successful speaker, feel free to check out this FREE video training which gives you our best ideas at a high level and will give you a good idea of what’s in the course.

Love Your Work

Well, here you have it. You asked me how it’s done, and this is pretty much how I think about my line of work. I feel VERY comfortable with this information, because it is EXACTLY what I had to do myself for the first five years to get my business in a position to finally get it where it is now… almost 30 years later!

Now that I have given you an honest and maybe somewhat overwhelming view of what it takes to do this job, I want to leave you with this thought: I LOVE to go to work! Yes, I am on the road for 200-plus days a year and the travel can be extremely challenging.

Yes, the job can bring a lot of pressure when there are 26,000 people in the audience, and it’s your responsibility to make sure they have a super time while you are talking for two non-stop hours.

But, at the end of the day, I would not trade my job for any other in the world. The work of being a professional speaker allowed me to travel across the globe, meet incredible people, make lifelong friends, and enjoy a very good living and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t say to myself, “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!”

 

Hope this helps you – John Spence