Finding the Best Professional Speakers for your Medical Meeting

Beyond booking the top professional speakers, putting on the best event possible involves a host of details, from the food to the topics to the venue amenities. But if you get that one huge detail wrong, like striking out on a keynote speaker, you might as well cancel the meeting. Finding professional speakers is essential for an engaging and informative event. It is imperative that you pay attention to and follow the tips in this post to find the best keynote speakers for your health care meetings. Finding an engaging speaker on podiatry or dermatology may be a bit of a challenge, but the payoff for your attendees will be huge. Before your begin searching for the best professional speakers out there, start by asking and answering these important questions: Really, what is a keynote speaker? And what is the overall purpose of my event? Once you get these down solid, you can start looking for the specific traits and aspects you want in a speaker at your event.

What Is a Keynote Speaker?

A keynote speaker is the fulcrum of your event. Or, a better metaphor may be the culmination of your meeting. What you need is an exciting presenter with informative and useful content. Your audience needs to feel both entertained and professionally fulfilled by the 30-45 minutes they spent watching this person up at the podium.You want your keynote speaker to offer something new. Something that can change the minds of your attendees or push them into new areas of thinking. Traveling to a distant city to network with other doctors or medical professionals is nice, but if you want your event to stand out, the usefulness of a keynoter’s content can be invaluable. The best medical speakers may be able to introduce an unknown paper that highlights new research on physical therapy techniques or antibiotic alternatives. Or, venturing outside the narrow medical disciplines, general business speakers or motivational speakers may have novel insights on team building or innovative ways to cut through the avalanche of information that people wade through in this digital age.

Force of Personality

Great keynote speakers can move an audience to action with just their words and performance. Look for presenters that can tell a story in their speeches and bring the audience on an emotional journey. This TED talk on training doctors is a great example of the information that can be conveyed in just 20 minutes.

What Is Your Event’s Purpose?

Are you holding a one day meeting on a specific topic, like medical billing or health care legislation? Find experts in those topics and work to unearth the most personable presenters.Is this for a keynote on the final day of a company's annual conference? That is when you pull out all the stops to find the best speaker, even if her or she does not have 2 medical degrees and a rep for publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine. Great speakers can make a meeting. Poor presenters can break a conference in half. Besides the food, what is the most common topic of conversation in hotel hallways and bars during a conference? How was that speaker? Did you like him? Wasn’t she a bit dry? If you can change that conversation in positive direction, than that is a home run.

Finding Professional Speakers

Watch TED talks. Poll your colleagues in the medical meeting space for under-the-radar presenters they may have seen at events in the industry. Your contemporary at another firm may have seen the best infectious disease pathologist as a secondary speaker on the third day of a conference blow everyone out of the hotel meeting room. Find those hidden gems by asking around.

Lock In Your Date

In-demand speakers will have a packed schedule. Once you have a date and venue set for your conference, start searching for speakers. Before you engage with speaker agencies or individual presenters, you need to have your ducks in a row. The best professional speakers are working on a regular basis and want to be able to have concrete dates to choose from.

Offer Great Perks

Speaking fees can get, shall we say, high. And on top of that, you will want to reserve some comp rooms for speakers and be able to offer them venue perks that members may not be privy to. That can seal the deal with some discerning presenters. It is important to spend a significant portion of your meeting planning time searching for and vetting professional speakers. And if you have a keynote speaker on your agenda, make sure he or she can knock it out of the park. It may be the detail that propels your medical meeting into the stratosphere.