What do attendees of your event want? They’ve come to you for news and inspiration and ideas and a view on how to advance the industry you serve. Oh, and they want to be entertained.
Live events are magical at the best of times. Organizers forget the immense effort and cost involved with putting on the experience if their attendees write rave reviews about their time at the conference. And if they like the speakers? That goes in the win column, too. That’s my job.
Insight, Action and Personable Humor
My role in your event is to mash the best of what I know against my research about your industry and conversations I have with your attendees, and turn it into something of value and action and fun. Look, I’m not a juggler or a magician but I am also not a stuffy suit. My job is to deliver value AND make you look good for hiring me.
Who am I?
Chris Brogan is an internationally sought-after keynote speaker, with over 1000 speeches delivered to everyone from company annual events like the Coldwell Banker GenBLUE conference and the HR Florida annual conference to the royalty of the United Arab Emirates. Each presentation is fresh and customized for the people in the room, with insights specific to your industry and the people you need Chris to reach. With a mix of candid humor and straight talk as well as actionable steps to back up any lofty idea he shares, Chris delivers a unique blend of inspiration as well as tangible performance-improving insight necessary for helping you own the game you most want to win. As the New York Times bestselling author of nine books and counting, you can rest assured that you will be entertained, enlightened, and empowered by his performance.
Who YOU Might Be
Past clients have included Oracle, Google, Coke, Microsoft, Coldwell Banker, Disney, Pepsico, Titleist, Comcast, GM, HR Florida, PRSA, and many more. I speak with small private groups as well as 3000-5000 people events. Contact me for more!
Right For Your Event?
I speak at leadership, marketing, and sales events mostly. I’ve also spoken for HR events, many dozens of professional association events, as well as private corporate team events. I’ve got speeches ranging from under an hour to a speech plus a workshop, and don’t forget the opportunity for book signings!
Topics
Here’s a brief sample of the many topics I can cover.
Leadership is Not About Perfection – The best way to build top achieving professional employees in your organization is to structure an environment and systems that promote growth, collaboration, and goal achievement, while also allowing for errors, bad days, and personal vulnerability. We have to celebrate people’s unique contributions and perspectives. This starts at the top. What does it take to strengthen your entire organization through developing more resilient and nurtured employees? How do you translate this to daily work life? And what keeps the brand’s reputation safe and strong throughout this process?
I Want to Be Here – Designing the Best Work Environment – Employee retention happens when people feel they are contributing to something of value, when they feel seen and heard and understood, and when they know that their imperfections are welcome at work. The pace of business is faster than ever. Most jobs bleed into our lives, but most workplaces don’t let employees’ lives spill back into the workday. With the lines being so blurred, how do we build the right tools for stress, anxiety, and depression support into the workplace? What helps sooth the onslaught of an “always on” workplace? How can we create a company culture that makes people want to show up?
Quit Better. Fail Faster. Do Great Business – People say “Don’t Quit.” But that’s not right. There are plenty of occasions where quitting faster saves the company (and everyone) time and money. “Failure is not an option?” Bologna. Failure is one of the best teachers you can have in business. As leaders, how can we equip our teams for success by showing them when to quit and how to fail? As contributors to a team, how do we make our failures hurt a lot less and recover faster? What must we do to ensure the company’s reputation while permitting for some level of imperfection?
Be Where They Are. Go Where They’re Going: Share, Sell, and Serve Your Customers From Their Side of the Story – We all want to reach and sell to our best customers, but people are more busy and attention-starved than ever. Your current marketing is still rooted heavily in “me me me” and “what we sell,” but it is only when a customer feels seen and understood that they’ll be willing to evaluate your offerings. This is why marketing must “move the camera” and build story support and tiny media to connect and serve people to help them succeed in their goals. To be where they are, your company will have to build more personalized digital and experience-based marketing designed to break through busy people’s cocoons and connect with their story.
What does it take to create and share brief, useful, connection-minded tiny media that earns you the right to sell and serve? What does this mean for your current marketing and media spend? And how do the principles and ideas here influence more than just the marketing and sales functions of your company’s future success?
Give Your Brand a Voice: The Package Approach to Marketing and Customer Experience – For years, the story of digital marketing has been told technology-first, even while we say “it’s all about the customer.” You’re being told to have a Facebook strategy, a Snapchat approach, start a podcast, and sprinkle in some automation, too. Tools tools tools. We need a better path.
The Magazine approach teaches you to design interactions that move a prospect to become a customer. By focusing on experience design first and tools second, we can craft an executable brand voice that reaches customers where they are and in ways that best suit their context. The goal is customer acquisition and retention and a “magazine” is how you’ll earn more customers. Join business advisor and NYT bestselling author Chris Brogan for a passionate walk through of a method you’ll want to try for yourself when the talk is over.
Spicy Content Marketing that Warms Up Cold Calls – You’ve been told for years to blog, make videos, take pictures, podcast, and all that stuff that sounds like it takes time, is annoying, and won’t be worth it. Here’s the thing: it’s only difficult if you don’t have an easy system in place and if you don’t realize the most important duty of this content marketing is to warm up your ability to sell and serve your prospective buyers. I started in this space in 1998 and have a LOT of stored up secrets to teach you on how to stand out, engage with the right prospects, and extend your opportunities beyond your current opportunities. (Covers blogging, podcasting, video, and email marketing.)
Blockchain: It’s Not About the Coins – Right now, most people hear “blockchain” and they think immediately of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. But blockchain is a wide-reaching platform technology that has implications in healthcare, logistics, food safety, identity management, security, government, and more. This technology’s a bit fuzzy to most people and yet many of us need to know more so that we can align our company strategies to account for this shift. (Hint: this is as big as the Internet.) My speech on blockchain is tailored to the specific industry who requests it and will help everyone get from 30,000 feet, down to “what do we really have to do next and when?”
AI, Alexa, Chatbots, and CRM: How Technology Must Empower Smarter Customer Experiences – You can talk to your lights, book a hotel room with a robot in a chat bubble, and hear eerily accurate recommendations for what you should buy next. But while all this gee whiz technology seems either daunting or cool, it won’t mean much to your customers until it makes some part of their life better. With all this big data and “smart” technology, there’s also the risk of people feeling invisible, unseen because your CRM wasn’t updated and lacks a “memory.” Here’s a human perspective on all these tech innovations and a path forward for your company to see the best possible outcomes.
Building a Company’s Identity: Relationship Building Beyond Branding – Marketing often falls back on “show them what we’re selling” and “remind them who we are.” But branding in any kind of business must push beyond this. Many companies have built media experiences into their marketing and sales. Some do video and have a podcast. Others are branching out into other means of connecting with the customers they most want to serve, and building customer experiences and interactions that earn more opportunities to sell and serve. Learn how to create and extend a trusted relationship that will lead to more sales and business opportunities.
The New Retail: Building Trusted Relationships Through Better Customer Experience – In a world where people can buy from anyone, why should they buy from you? How can you move your customer’s experience beyond the either/or of in-store and ecommerce? What will earn you the opportunity to serve customers and build an improved level of trust that outweighs the whims of price? The goal here is to improve retention and referral and keep you growing in these challenging times.
Leading in the Age of Fast and Far: Leadership for the Digital World – Technology strives to make everything faster, with less friction, and more connected. Companies now work with distributed workforces of permanent and “gig” employees. Everyone is customer-facing. How do leaders execute their primary role of distributing the organization’s vision and empower the right actions to match their intentions while staying on top of an even faster-paced landscape than ever before? And how will you distribute some of the responsibilities of representing the brand to your teams while still maintaining the ability to coordinate and steer?
The Database of You: Beyond “Big” Data and Into Mass Personalization – For many companies, the big opportunity (and challenge) will be in creating smarter and more useful personalized data profiles of your customers. Collecting data isn’t new. The vast volume of what’s collected might be new, but it isn’t entirely useful yet, either. At least not to the individual. What would it look like to build personalized data around your customers (alongside your aggregate numbers), and how will that drive even more potential business success?
Human Enough: Chatbots and Automation and Trust – Technologies like podcasting and YouTube channels allow companies to build a “voice beyond marketing” for companies. Chatbots and marketing automation tools allow for a better attempt at one-on-one interactivity with customers and prospects, even if that first touch is primarily not from a human. How can your company build a trusted experience through the use of technologies that extend those automated moments into real and valuable connections?
Your Topic Wasn’t Covered? – I speak to leaders and organizations daily, ranging from 6th grade classrooms (my aunt asked me) to corporate sales and marketing events, to 10,000 person mega summits. When I’m not onstage, I’m learning from some of the most amazing minds, everyone from US Navy SEAL Commanders Mark Divine and Rorke Denver to US Olympic gold medalist Joe Jacobi to the first female F14 Tomcat fighter pilot Carey Lohrenz and many more. If your topic isn’t explicitly here, or if you’re uncertain, just contact us and I’ll be sure to work it through with you.
The Process of Booking Me
I’m pretty easy to work with. Get in touch with me and we’ll figure out dates and rates and all that kind of stuff.
What You Should Know
If you really don’t know me yet, it’s tricky, I admit it. You’re worried: is he professional enough? (Yes.) Will he swear on stage? (He tries not to swear on stage.) Will he honor his commitments? (Every time.) Is he entertaining? (Oh, that I am. I mean, I’m no Cirque Du Soleil, but I’m fun.) Will he stick around after his speech? (Most times! I love mingling before and after. It helps me better tune the message to who is there.) Is he fussy? (Not at all. My requirements are rather simple. A couple bottles of water, a lav mic, a clicker, and I’m on my way. No trampolines. No smoke effects. No elephants.)
Okay? So, if you want someone to speak at your event, I’m your man. I promise!
