Most events that book a keynote speaker end up with someone who is perfectly competent. The audience listens, applauds politely, and moves on to coffee. A smaller number of events book someone who shifts something in the room. People leave differently to how they arrived. The gap between those two outcomes is rarely about profile or fee. It comes down to a handful of things that event organisers often overlook when making the booking.
Know What Type of Speaker You Actually Need
The first mistake many organisers make is conflating different types of speakers. As NMP Live's speaker type guide explains, a keynote is typically booked to set the tone of an event or encapsulate its themes, while a motivational speaker is there to energise and shift mindset. Booking the wrong type for your event is one of the most common and most avoidable reasons a speaker falls flat.
Relevance Beats Profile Every Time
A speaker with a huge following who gives a generic talk will almost always underperform compared to someone less well known who has prepared specifically for the audience in front of them. When evaluating speakers, ask directly how they tailor their content and what information they need from you to do it well. Speakers who ask good questions before the event tend to give better talks during it.
Balance Inspiration With Practicality
A talk that leaves an audience feeling good but gives them nothing to act on fades quickly. The most effective keynote speakers combine emotional impact with at least one concrete takeaway. Someone whose professional life is built around a specific subject, whether that is personal branding, leadership or entrepreneurship, tends to offer sharper insight than a generalist whose talk is a polished version of a single personal story applied to every context. Speakers like Bianca Miller, whose background spans entrepreneurship, personal branding and corporate consulting with clients including Google, HSBC and EY, bring genuine domain expertise to the room rather than a borrowed story stretched to fill an hour.
Check Fit Beyond the Showreel
Every speaker has a strong showreel. Very few tell you what it is actually like to work with that person. Asking for references from event organisers rather than just audience testimonials gives a much more useful picture. Speakers with consistently strong feedback from the people who booked them, not just the people who watched them, are a meaningfully better bet.
For events focused on specific themes such as resilience or leadership in corporate environments, a speaker whose expertise is genuinely aligned with those themes will land better than a well-known generalist. Jillian Haslam is one example of a speaker who has built her entire practice around that niche, giving her a depth of relevance for the right audience that a broader speaker cannot replicate.