The professional speaking and consulting industry is indeed a unique one. My business for example, is in the business of disseminating intellectual property and vetting human capital or maybe that’s disseminating human capital and vetting intellectual property. 🙂 It doesn’t get much more unique than that. Humans, being the fluid, staccato, and evolving creatures that we are therefore, are always subject to some range however slight or minute of change. In addition, intellectual property is always subject to either improvement or being completely outdated at best, and obsolete at the worst.
The vetting of those professional speakers and consultants that are invited to join our roster, is ongoing. The vetting doesn’t stop, ever, and I mean that literally. We cant afford for the vetting to stop, because we cant afford to have your meeting or event ruined as a result of us not doing our job correctly or because we missed something offbeat that we just couldn’t put our finger on. Observation should be both subjective and objective, in order to be qualitative.
I will NEVER forget the time I had the opportunity to meet a corporate meeting planner during an MPI (Meeting Planners International) sponsored class that I took. Long story short, this meeting planner confided in me that she had in fact lost her previous job because the entertainer or speaker that she hired for her company’s event did some really off the wall, inappropriate stuff.
I’ll never forget her sharing that with me, because it made it crystal clear to me that this business of helping meeting and event planners select professional speakers and consultants was a high stakes endeavor. It’s serious business. For starters, meeting and event planners have ‘stakeholders,’ that they have to answer to. Can you say ‘Yikes!” Stakeholders have an outcome that they desire of the meeting or event that they are hosting. Thats why meetings and events are held in the first place. Sometimes the outcome is financial. Sometimes the outcome is the meeting of a particular objective. Sometimes it’s both or more than both combined. The bottom line is that I can’t sleep at night knowing that because I didn’t do my job properly, someone else may lose theirs.
My heart dropped for this woman. It really did and I will never forget her story. I needed to experience her story. That meeting planner had a family to take care of, and her income was lost due to the blunder of the speaker or entertainer that was hired. I remember thinking “That’s sooo messed up.” I made a promise to myself that day. I wouldn’t allow something like that to happen as a result of ME or my staff not doing our jobs properly. As a result, vetting at our agency is not only ongoing, its pretty detailed and thorough.
Here’s how it works: Each and every time we interact with a speaker or consultant on a professional basis, from the time we meet them in person or over the telephone, to the times we hear them speak LIVE or have lunch, either I or Bianca Brown, our Speaker Relations Manager picks up one of our speaker or consultant scorecards and we begin taking notes and writing down scores. On that scorecard are 18……yes I said 18……18 different yet relevant categories that the speaker or consultant is being rated on. These 18 areas are all relevant to gauging how their interpersonal skills will be when interacting with our meeting and event planner clients or buyers, and how they will ultimately deliver once they are on stage (platform skills). The speakers and consultants have not been told what they are being rated on in terms of what the 18 distinct categories are. In a nutshell: By the time we get to a meeting with you, the event or meeting planner, we have both qualitative and quantitative data to provide to you. In addition to being fair to our clients, it also keeps our beloved professional speakers and consultants accountable to a standard of conduct.
To learn more about our ongoing vetting system, or our 18 category scorecard, feel free to call me at (410) 299-9948 or you can email me at: candacec@theintelligentsia.co
