There’s a version of events that most speakers believe. You get good. You get known. Bureaux find you, put you on lists, and the phone starts ringing. The quality of what you do on stage is what drives the opportunity.
It’s a reasonable assumption. It’s also not really how it works.
Bureau conversations don’t work the way most speakers assume. The shortlist that lands in a client’s inbox on a Tuesday afternoon is not a ranked list of the best speakers on that topic. It’s a list of the speakers that bureau is confident putting forward — which is a different thing entirely.
What we’re seeing across the market right now is that the speakers who appear on shortlists consistently share certain characteristics. Very few of them are about what happens on stage.
The first is relationship. Not friendship. Not history. Relationship in the specific sense of: the bureau understands you. They know what you do, who you do it for, what kind of room you’re best suited to, and what you’d say yes to. That understanding doesn’t happen passively. It requires a speaker who has made the effort to create it — who has taken the time to be known in the right way, not just to be known.
The second is assets. And here’s where it gets specific: bureaux don’t all want the same things in the same format. A showreel that works for one bureau’s pitch process may be useless to another’s. A speaker who has genuinely thought about what JLA needs versus what Speakers Corner needs versus what a boutique agency needs — and has taken the time to provide it in the right form — has already separated themselves from the majority who send the same one-size-fits-all pack to everyone.
The third is something harder to name but easy to recognise. It’s the thing that gives a bureau something to say. Not just your credentials — your book, your professorship, your former title. Those are context. What makes a bureau want to pick up the phone and pitch you is something they can emotionally connect to, a story or angle that travels, something that makes the conversation with the client easier rather than harder.
If all you’re giving a bureau is your CV dressed up as a speaker profile, you’re asking them to do the work of making you interesting. Most of the time, they won’t. There are too many other speakers on the list.
Where speakers tend to lose momentum here is in assuming that the work is about the talk. The talk matters, but it’s the floor. Everything above the floor is about how you show up in the industry before you get on stage.
The speakers who consistently appear on shortlists are the ones who have made themselves easy to sell. That’s not a compromise — it’s an understanding of how the market actually operates.
There are specific ways that understanding translates into practice. The speakers who know what those are tend to find themselves on more lists, in more conversations, and in front of more clients. The ones who don’t are often left wondering why the quality of their work isn’t producing the results they expected.
The work starts earlier than the stage.
