In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner takes this question head-on and immediately starts digging down into what we really need to answer instead.
If you know you’re going to get new business after a keynote or other speaking event, should you also be getting paid for it? In this episode of Sequence Over Strategy, Michelle Warner takes this question head-on, and immediately starts digging down into what we really need to answer instead. Using listener Jay Acunzo's question as a case study, Michelle emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between when speaking serves as a marketing tool versus a paid product, and shares the tools you need to do it for your own work.
Check out the full episode at TheMichelleWarner.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome back to Sequence Over Strategy. I'm Michelle Warner, a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 years I've been doing this work, I have noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first when they need to be centering sequence.
Because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them are more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions rather than blindly following someone else's strategy.
Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
As you now know, in every episode of this podcast, I answer a real question from a real entrepreneur struggling with a real challenge in their business. Today's question is from the one and only Jay Acunzo, who helped me develop this podcast. If you don't know Jay, he helps creators, entrepreneurs, and expert-led businesses develop stronger IP, aka their premise, their storytelling, their frameworks, and their pillar projects like this podcast so they can differentiate easier and resonate deeper. As you can imagine, that means he is an in-demand paid keynote speaker, which led to this question.
When Should I Charge for Speaking?
Jay asks: I understand the value of trust transfers at the top of the relationship funnel. I know I should be writing guest posts or guesting on podcasts or participating in various communities of my target customer base as a trusted voice and teacher. Where I get stuck is public speaking. I typically charge a fee to speak both in person and virtually, but I see lots of value in doing way more virtual talks in particular.
Even my paid virtual talks have led to follow-on business. Clients come to me through those engagements with a ton of understanding already, plus they get some time with me to accelerate trust. I keep chasing my tail about how to vet virtual talks as purely free, purely paid, or case by case and how to navigate it if I approach it case by case.
Help me. You're my only hope.
Jay. I am not your only hope, but I'm happy to jump in here for you. There are a few reasons I chose this question. First, so many people get tripped up here, unsure if they should get paid to speak or not. I hear this over and over and over again. Many of you may, like Jay, be paid speakers, and so it's confusing when you hear me talk about relationship marketing and speaking for free, and I get that.
Secondly, we hear a lot about not giving things away and making sure that you're paid what you're valued. I support that 100%. I want you to get paid. However, I also want you to get paid for the correct thing. Listen to that again. Our goal is for you to get paid for the correct thing, and we're gonna come back to that over and over again in this episode.
The correct perspective on both of these things, of course, is to look at it through a Sequence Over Strategy lens because what actually matters here isn't the activity. It isn't the speaking, it isn't the pay or get paid, but the job you're asking that activity to do.
By the way, this applies to you even if you don't get paid for speaking because the lessons I'm gonna teach you here apply to anything that might have dual roles in your business as both a marketing activity and an actual product. I mean, I'm talking a sponsored newsletter, a podcast, a workshop that you give, even a keynote address.
But enough intro. Let's get into this and start breaking it down.
Resolving the Conflict of Marketing vs Paid Speaking
Before I break down how to answer this question, I'm gonna remind you of one of the main takeaways of this show. This question is only difficult to answer when you take it at face value. That's one of the main things I talk about over and over again in Sequence Over Strategy. 'Cause what do I mean by that?
If you're a paid speaker and you also sell some products and services that are best served by relationship marketing, you are going to be in a bind. That's just gonna happen. Those two things are gonna be in a conflict because how do we sell services from a relationship marketing perspective?
Well, you go and find ways to talk to people. That's how you kick off a relationship marketing funnel. You do what I call borrow audiences, and we've talked about this in earlier episodes, particularly in episode one. So if you're not up to speed on relationship marketing, go and check those episodes out and I'll break it down further for you there.
But what you need to know here is that I advocate if you are selling kind of high-touch, custom services, you know, consulting, coaching, or the like, you should be spending your marketing time getting in front of and talking to people, borrowing audiences, going where they're already at, and inserting yourself into that conversation.
And so that means that on the surface level, these two things are always going to be in conflict. You are a paid speaker, and therefore, you expect to be, you know, paid to speak because you're a speaker. That is an understandable way to feel, but you also have an identity as a consultant who sells high-touch packages to clients or maybe as a coach or maybe as an agency owner who provides high-end services.
And that means speaking to the right people in the right spaces is also a marketing activity for you. And therein lies the dilemma. You're hardwired to be paid to speak, but where else do you get paid for your marketing activities, right? In fact, marketing is usually one of your biggest expense line items.
And so we have this thing in conflict. You're used to getting paid for this thing, but sometimes it's doing a marketing job where normally that would be an expense. So, do you necessarily expect to get paid for it? It's a hard call to make. And so all of this means you are in for a losing battle if you attempt to answer this question as it is presented.
Going Back to the Basics…The Five Whys
Jay didn't do anything wrong in asking the question the way he did, but if we answer it right at that surface level the way he asked it, we're never gonna get to an answer that seems obvious or comfortable or correct, and so I'm gonna say it out loud. This is an unanswerable question. If we don't find a way to reframe it to give us more information.
How are we gonna reframe it?
Well, in this case, we can go back to our old reliable Five Whys to find the reframe. You might remember the Five Whys from Episode Two, and I promise we'll return to this over and over again 'cause it is one of the best frameworks you can use in order to find your best sequence over strategy.
Here, we'll use it in a similar way, but we're gonna answer Jay's question in this episode instead of the question we answered for Kristen in Episode Two.
And hint: I suspect we're not gonna need all Five Whys to get to the question we really need to answer in order to find that appropriate decision-making framework for his dilemma.
Before we get into that and before we start running the Five Whys, let's do a quick reminder on what they are. The Five Whys is a quick and classic root cause analysis.
What does that mean?
It means it's a way to quickly find the root cause, the foundation of what you are trying to solve. The idea is that when you only ask why one time, you're gonna get a surface-level answer and, therefore, a surface-level solution that's not gonna stick around. Or it's not gonna feel satisfying the way Jay feels like he's in this big pickle. Should I get paid? Should I not get paid? That's not an answerable question.
And that tells us you're hanging out at too high of a level of the why. You haven't asked why enough times yet to figure out what the actual question you should be asking is. But if you were to ask why five times, you'll get to the root cause of your challenge or question and be able to address it in a sustainable and final way.
Five Whys and Manufacturing Example
Here's a quick example. Before we get into Jay's, I'm gonna share a quick example with you that was shared with me in business school and that I always repeat because it really helps bring the Five Whys to life.
This started as an operations framework, so it started on manufacturing floors, and for some reason, I always picture this happening in auto manufacturing.
I'm not sure why. I think maybe because my grandfather was an engineer and we lived in the Midwest growing up, and so he always made me tour auto manufacturing plants, which did not really resonate with me as a child, but now I really remember that whenever I think about manufacturing. I think of those endless walks around factory floors with my grandfather but stick with me.
Here's a great example of a Five Whys.
Picture yourself on that manufacturing floor, and somebody has to pull a cord to stop a machine from running, right? The assembly line needs to be stopped. Well, we'll say that Joe is supposed to do that, and one day, we notice that Joe is never pulling the cord on time.
So we try to figure it out. If we were gonna solve that in an unsustainable way, we could just fire Joe and say, Joe's being lazy and not getting the job done. So Joe's out of a job.
Guess what? That's probably not gonna solve the problem. 'Cause whoever you put in to replace Joe, I'm gonna imagine is gonna have the same challenge because I'm guessing the reason the cord is not being pulled is not because Joe is lazy.
So instead we want to ask why five times. What's the first one? Why was the cord not pulled? Answer, Joe wasn't there on time. Okay. Why wasn't Joe there on time? And here, if Joe really was being lazy, we would arrive at that conclusion, and it would be reasonable to dismiss him. But I'm guessing we're gonna get a different answer.
I'm guessing we're gonna get an answer, something like because Joe was also supposed to be across the floor doing something else at the same time. Oh, that's an interesting answer. Sounds like Joe's been set up for failure, right? So then we can ask why was Joe also asked to be across the floor at the same time?
Maybe our answer is because we didn't realize he was supposed to be pulling the cord or because we were short-staffed or because, because, because, who knows? But whatever the answer is to that, we can ask why. Let's say it was because we were short-staffed. Why were we short-staffed that day? Well, because we have a bunch of open positions, or because it was a holiday, or because there was graduation happening and a lot of people took off.
Who knows, but guess what? We get to something that's solvable at that point. We can solve the breakdown on the manufacturing floor. If we ask why three or four or five times, you start to get to an answer that gives you that moment of aha. Like, oh, now this actually makes sense. This is something that I can solve for.
Right at that first why, you're getting an answer that does not feel satisfying. You know that there is probably something else there. Once you start digging down, you're gonna get that answer that starts making a lot more sense. And when you have that experience, that's when you know you have found the root cause, and you can start fixing that root cause, then everything else is gonna take care of itself.
So we can do that with this question. And again, a lot of times when you are presented with a question that just doesn't seem to have a good answer, doesn't have a satisfying answer. Most often it's because you haven't asked why enough times. It's because you're trying to solve something on the surface level.
And a lot of times, surface-level questions are not answerable in any kind of rational or satisfying way. You know that you're just kind of flipping a coin. And we don't wanna flip coins. We want to ask the right questions. And so again, how do we do that? We do that by asking the Five Whys so we can identify the right question, the right frame.
Using the Five Whys to Answer ‘Should I Charge to Speak?’
So now that we're refreshed on the Five Whys, let's break down Jay's question. Use it here and see what we find out. Jay first says, “I understand the value of trust transfers at the top of the relationship funnel. I know I should be writing guest blog posts or guesting on podcasts or participating in various communities of my target customer base as a trusted voice and teacher.”
Correct. I'm gonna insert myself in here. What Jay is repeating at the start of this question is the dilemma I mentioned at the top of the show. He knows that in order to market his consulting services, he should be going out and borrowing the audiences of and accepting something I call ‘trust transfers’ from folks who are already talking to his ideal audience.
That's how you market consulting services efficiently.
However, I sense a but coming in his question because he stated something as fact. So if he understands that, you know, what's the other side of the coin? What's missing? What part of the story do we not have yet?
And here's the but, he continues, “Where I get stuck is public speaking. I typically charge a fee to speak both in person and virtually, but I see lots of value in doing way more virtual talks in particular. Even my paid virtual talks have led to follow-on business as clients come to me through those engagements with a ton of understanding already, plus they get some live time with me to accelerate trust. I keep chasing my tail about how to vet virtual talks as purely free, purely paid, or case by case and how to navigate it. If I approach it case by case. Help me. You're my only hope.”
I love this, and I'm going to point out what he says here: ‘I keep chasing my tail about how to vet virtual talks as purely free, purely paid, or case by case.’
What does he say right there at the beginning? I keep chasing my tail.
What does that tell us? That tells us he's not finding a satisfying way to answer this question.
And so there's the but, right? The But. I typically charge a fee, and so I can't reconcile this with myself. I can't figure it out. I'm chasing my tail right away.
That's gonna be a sign to me that we're not asking the right question. So, let's stop asking this question at the surface level. 'Cause I don't have a great answer for Jay if he's just asking me should I charge or should I not? I don't know. 'Cause it's not the right question. So, let's set up the Five Whys to get to a root cause and figure out what question we should be asking.
First why. Why, if ever, should I not be paid to speak because I am a paid speaker? My answer there when it's an audience that you want access to.
Second, why? Why would I want access to this audience? Answer? Because the audience is full of your potential consulting clients.
Third, why, but I'm a paid speaker. Why would I ever give that away for free? And the answer, 'cause drum roll please, because we have made it here within three whys, we didn't have to ask all five. The answer to, but I'm a paid speaker. Why would I ever give that away for free? Is, because in this case, the speaking is not the product. It is the marketing.
Did you catch that? As I said, I suspected we wouldn't need all Five Whys to get to our answer.
We got there on that third, and so I'm gonna repeat it using slightly different language.
The reason you would give away your speaking when you are a paid speaker is when the speaking is doing a different job than what it does when you are paid.
I'm gonna repeat that again. In this case, the speaking is doing a marketing job, and therefore it is not a product. It's a marketing tool, and marketing is generally an expense, not a revenue line, so there should be no expectation of making money in your marketing. Sure, sometimes you may get lucky. That's absolutely a thing, but if something is playing a marketing role, the last thing you wanna do is put up unnecessary walls and roadblocks to reaching the people you need to reach.
And one great roadblock you can throw up is to refuse to appear anywhere without pulling your full normal speaker's fee. This, my friends, is a separation of church and state that I see missed all the time. This is not a question of whether or not you're being paid your worth or being respected. I see that argument all the time.
People say never do anything for free because you are valued, and I 100% agree with that. To the extent that you are applying that maxim to things that your business should be paid for. But what people end up doing is blindly applying it across their entire business and making blanket statements that they will not do anything for free.
And my friends, if this is you, this is missing the forest through the trees. As I have said a couple of times now, marketing is at best a free activity. Most of the time, it is an expense, so it costs you money. So why in the world, if you are presented with a marketing opportunity that gets you in front of the right people under the right conditions, would you expect to be paid for that?
Instead, you need to be clear that while speaking may be a skill you have, that skill shows up in your business to do two different jobs. Sometimes, you apply that skill to a product, and when it is a product, you better be paid for it. This is where we wanna talk all day long about making sure you get your value.
How do you know when it's a product? It's a product when you have no expectation of anything happening afterwards. That's a little dramatic. Of course, there may be some knock-on business that comes out of a keynote address, but that keynote, that's the product. There's no formal pitch, no opportunity to formally connect and talk about next steps with your leads. It's just a product, and yes, you have value, and yes, you should be paid for it. It's the end of the line on the customer journey.
But when that skill is applied to a marketing task, then no, you should not expect to be paid. If you are a bonus, great, don't turn it down. Obviously, that's amazing. But if you're being given an opportunity to speak to your people and you're able to pitch or follow up with them as a marketing activity, well then it's a marketing activity and, again, you should just be grateful that it's not costing you money. 'Cause a lot of times, the biggest line item in an expense sheet is marketing.
Now with this strategy, you do need to be a little picky, right? There's some nuance here. Relationship marketing is all about the precision of inputs. So I'm not sitting here saying you should speak for free to everyone and anyone.
In fact, you can't do that 'cause you don't have enough time or energy. And so if you are following this model, you want to do your due diligence, and you want to do your experimenting so that you are very clear about which audiences are going to convert for you into paid clients, and those are the ones you should target to appear in front of, and those are the ones you should do for free.
You should not just blanketly say yes to anybody who asks you to do any kind of speaking activity, that is not what I am talking about, right? I do have some clients who try to overcorrect, and any opportunity that comes their way, they say, “Oh, well just experiment and see who's there.” You know, while we wanna have an experimental mindset, you're gonna start losing a lot of time and energy really quickly if you just appear in front of any random audience hoping something will happen.
And so, many people, again, fall into that trap of not taking the time to figure out their audiences with precision, and so they end up speaking for free as a marketing tool, and it doesn't convert because they're not in front of the right crowd. And that doesn't mean you should be paid though, right? Let's not overcorrect here. Let's recognize that for what it is, right? Because a lot of people after that experience, they get frustrated and they say, “Well, I'm only gonna speak if I get paid.”
And again, that's asking the wrong question. Instead, you should be asking, how can I improve my understanding of the right audience to speak to so that I can better vet the opportunities that are in front of me?
That's what you need to be doing in order to not feel like you're being used in the speaking process. And that is an experimental thing, right? You're probably gonna miss a few times, and you're probably going to speak to the wrong audiences a few times. That's very normal as you're figuring out your marketing.
But you wanna learn from each of those opportunities so that every time you get a little bit better at understanding which audiences are gonna convert for you, and therefore, which ones are worth participating with as a marketing activity. And if they are not worth participating in as a marketing activity, then it is a product and you either need to be paid or you need to say no, right?
When you have an audience, when you have an organization maybe that's asking you to come speak, and you know that that is not an audience that is likely going to convert into other products and services of yours. That's when you really take that stand and say, “Hey, I need to be paid” because you know that at that point it's the product 'cause there's nothing after it, right?
And so our bottom line here is that we don't wanna make blanket statements, do not make getting paid a condition of speaking in front of an audience that is perfect for your consulting or coaching products only make it a condition when the speaking itself is the product.
And so to loop all the way back to the top, when Jay asks how to vet whether or not to get paid, it's impossible to vet that question when you're trying to answer a get paid or not get paid question.
You'll never know the answer to that. It's always gonna feel like a coin flip.
But after we go through this Five Whys, it's very easy to answer when the question you're asking yourself is, is this a product or is this a marketing activity?
If it's the former, if it's a product, go get paid. My friends do not work for free.
But if it's the latter and it's a marketing activity, you are not devaluing yourself by doing it for free. You are getting in front of your leads for actually much cheaper than it usually costs to get in front of your leads. And so if you have properly understood your audience that you should be in front of, then that is actually a very cost-effective marketing activity to do, even though you're not getting paid, because essentially you're only paying in your time. You're not having to pay say advertising dollars or any of the other typically expensive marketing expense items that we would typically see.
Asking the Right Questions
Okay, let's take a breath and run this all the way back and remind ourselves what we talked about first. There is something to be learned from the question itself.
I love that Jay asked this about a this or that scenario, in this case, getting paid to speak or not, where on the surface level, it doesn't feel like there's an obvious answer, right?
There is something that does not feel satisfying about answering should I get paid or not. It's too arbitrary. You just know you're missing something there. You know that you're gonna feel like you're flipping a coin or make some, again, some arbitrary choice and maybe even in the process, devalue or even betray your own interests. We don't want that.
So whenever you feel like that, whether it's about getting paid or not, what product to promote between two different options, maybe which marketing channel to focus on between several. When you're choosing between two things, and there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to your answer, that is a very, very good indication that you are missing a step. You're missing a step in the sequence, and instead you need to go back, and try to find the correct question that you should be asking yourself.
And in this case, when we did that, when we got back to our sequence by using the Five Whys to identify the right question to ask, which in this case is not to get paid or not, but instead, what job is this activity doing? Because in this case, this activity speaking, it's sometimes doing the job of being a product and sometimes doing the job of being a marketing strategy.
So once we figure that out in the Five Whys, once we figure out that we have a differentiation between is this a product or is this a marketing activity, it's all of a sudden very easy to answer this paid or not paid question because it's no longer about some sort of moral standing or some sort of coin flip, or am I getting valued for my brain or for my knowledge? It's just about what job is being done. And this is why I love focusing on asking the right question, but also asking them in the right order. Okay? You know, sequence over strategy. Because when you figure out that right question to ask, and you're asking it in the right order, the answers are easy. They're not hard, and easy, my friends is exactly what I want for you, and I want that for you because when we find easy, that's when we find scalable, sustainable businesses that are stable over the long term. That's why I'm such a fan of the Five Whys and such a fan of just teaching everything that I teach on this podcast because it's all in service of making things make sense rather than feeling like you're throwing some spaghetti at the wall.
Before I sign off today, I wanna take a minute to thank each of you. Each and every one of you who has reached out, left a review or shared this podcast since it's launched. 'Cause while I've been excited to get it out into the world, I had absolutely no idea that it would be so well received. I've been blown away by the messages that I've received, and I appreciate each and every one of you for them.
I love bringing this content to you and being a resource you can trust to break things down in realistic ways, which means you're not getting rid of me. I will be back every other week with a new episode of Sequence Over Strategy. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss an episode. And if you found this episode helpful, I'd be so grateful if you would leave a review 'cause it helps others find it.
And finally, if you'd like to hang out with me live each month, head over to my website, themichellewarner.com, or you can go directly to themichellewarner.com/tiny-and-strong and register for my free monthly table talk. This is where I share even more advice like I do on this podcast, but we do it live on Zoom.
We get a whole group together, and I also answer a few questions live. It's one of my favorite things to do along with this podcast to connect with you and to help you. It takes place on the first Wednesday of every month, and it's completely free, and I would absolutely love to see you there. So again, if you wanna join us, go over to themichellewarner.com and look for the box on the homepage that invites you to the Tiny and Strong Q&A session, or go directly to themichellewarner.com/tiny-and-strong. You can sign up for free right there, and I would absolutely love to see you there.
Until next time, my friends, that is Sequence Over Strategy.