Tips for picking a great speaker (5)

via Wikipedia

In most cases, you want to achieve something by inviting a speaker. Those targets might be rather diverse. For an incentive tour it might be ok to entertain people, but when for example a speaker is delivering a key-note speech at a dinner of the visiting board of a Fortune-500 company, the task might be less entertaining.

Both kinds of assignments can be tough to fulfill. Explaining China to an audience that has little clue about the country is, speakers tell me, often harder than addressing an audience that has already a background in China or in an industry where you can relate to. But it is very important to set clear, rather measurable goals.

Measuring the success of a speakers is already tough, and our feedback forms are often forgotten when people rush of for dinner or other activities. But by setting a target before selecting a speaker we create a moment where we judge the feasibility of our clients’ plan. Every now and then we conclude we have to shift the target. Although, it does not always work.

An interesting moment was when a middle-sized company asked us for a speaker on innovation for an internal conference for their managers in China. It had to be somebody who would turn the heads of those attending the conference. We thought we were up to the challenge: we have some pretty famous people in our portfolio, although some celebrities do not want to be on our website.

We came with quite a lot of suggestions for speakers that would for sure turn the heads of the Chinese managers of this European company, but then we met a problem: the mainly foreign decision makers did not knew any of our famous speakers. The Chinese employees who were part of the decision making process were very enthusiastic when we discussed our proposals with them, but they did not call the shots and were actually not willing to challenge the opinions of their foreign bosses.

That selection failed, because we were unable to explain that the target that was set initially was very hard to achieve in a multicultural setting: very few celebrities in China are known outside China.

I'm not sure whether our client has draw the same conclusions, but for us this was a good lesson in setting sensible targets.