Stop Selling The Story. Start Solving The Problem.

Forbes

18-07-2025

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The speaker industry isn't broken. It's bloated and, perhaps, only getting worse.
Every week, event planners are getting bombarded with pitch decks, promotional sizzle reels, and vaguely inspirational bios. The volume of noise is a problem, but the lack of substance is far larger.
Christa Haberstock has been on the inside of the speaker business long enough to spot the difference. 'One speaker is telling a story about how he overcame something,' she told me. 'The other one is giving the audience something to overcome themselves.' The second one gets booked, however, the first one makes it about themselves. Who is the more strategic speaker?
Haberstock is not new to the scene. As the founder of See Agency and Bookable Speakers, Haberstock spent decades serving as the conduit between the stage and the sale. Her new book, Become a Bookable Speaker , distills that experience into a single challenge: find your obvious advantage or be forgotten.
'You have to be so valuable they can't imagine their event without you,' she said. That means solving a client's actual business problem, not delivering motivational filler in a new pair of shoes, despite certain people's love of shoes.
If the client or the room is looking for ROI, your job as a speaker is to hand them a receipt.
This holds true in leadership, too. If the team, division, or function you are leading feels like a nice-to-have—rather than essential infrastructure—you're in trouble. Haberstock's concept of being bookable is relevance made visible. It's knowing your value and making it impossible to ignore.
Haberstock never set out to be a 'speaker whisperer.'
She started in 1997, working 100% commission, and sold keynote talent from a windowless office in Texas. 'I knew nothing about the industry,' she said. 'But I knew how to listen and I could smell desperation.'
What did she smell most often? Speakers who led with emotion and personal story, but couldn't tie their message to a corporate objective. 'There's got to be a hook,' she told me. 'What do you offer that clients don't even know they need yet?'
If that sounds familiar, it should.
Leaders often make the same mistake. Leaders anchor the vision in values or storytelling but frequently forget to articulate the strategic outcomes. Your job as a leader is not just to energize, it's to equip. Whether you're leading a function or running a department, your strategy should point to a hook: a defined, useful, and unexpected contribution.
She put it plainly: 'If a buyer can't repeat your pitch in one sentence to their boss, you won't get hired. The same goes for teams. If the CFO or COO doesn't know what you do, you don't get funded.'
Optional does not scale. Confusion is not clarity. Being obvious is a far better answer. From Coaching to Cohorts
After a long run representing speakers, Haberstock began to demarcate her position and role. In 2020, she moved into coaching individual speakers. She wanted to help more voices get clear on their value, but, in the end, she found that one-on-one coaching wasn't scalable.
'I got tired of telling one person at a time,' she said. 'So, I created a cohort to teach many.'
That's how Bookable Speakers was born: a community of speakers building their clarity together. No posturing or one-upping, just people gathering to do the hard work of refining their value with peers.
It's a subtle but powerful lesson for leaders: Individual coaching is noble, but community-based clarity might be a better option for you and your teams. Cohorts, cross-functional groups, and peer-led advisory councils are the modern architectures of scale. They take clarity from the individual to the collective.
And Haberstock's style is far from soft. 'If you're not willing to sharpen your idea and take feedback, you're not bookable,' she said. In other words, don't build a community to feel good, but make one to get better. Partnerships
A good speaker doesn't get booked once. These are the ones that build systems to make the next booking easier.
That's the logic behind Christa's emphasis on partnerships. Whether it's speaker bureaus, planners, or platforms, they all require one thing: packaging. 'If a bureau partner can't pitch you in a sentence that makes sense to a buyer, you don't get booked,' she told me.
Too often, we treat partnerships like passive channels. In leadership, it's no different. We build alliances across departments, but we often fail to equip those partners with the language, clarity, and outcomes necessary to effectively pitch our work up the chain. If they don't know how to explain your value, they won't bother trying. Purpose-Driven
Christa Haberstock Christa Haberstock
Haberstock is candid about her own 'push vs pull' driver. Many leaders share this tension: duty vs desire. But she's learned that when pull is aligned with obvious advantage—and repackaged through purpose—the grind becomes meaningful. Not just for her, but for the communities she builds.
She told me, 'I always felt like I had to push to make things happen, but the moment I realized that my work was being pulled by a bigger purpose, everything changed.'
Leaders need these skills, too.
Motivational urgency works in the short term, but its long-term impact emerges when teams wake up excited to identify their advantage, share it, and use it to fuel their purpose. When push is turned into pull. External Alignment
There's academic evidence that clarity and alignment impact buy-in and performance.
A recent McKinsey Organizational Purpose survey found that, in organizations where purpose is both activated and aligned with employees personally ('the sweet spot'), employee intent to stay was 87%, compared to 41% in organizations lacking this alignment. Similarly, the share of engaged employees was much higher (77% vs. 20%), with additional positive impacts on organizational performance and societal good.
Furthermore, a Harvard Business Review article found that companies with clear purpose and role alignment among teams have significantly higher employee engagement and team efficacy.
Positions backed by purpose, community, partnerships and internal clarity are hard to ignore.
That may explain why Haberstock's Become a Bookable Speaker reached #1 on Amazon and was named one of Forbes' '5 Must-Read Books for Personal and Professional Growth.' The Leadership Lesson
Christa Haberstock's four pillars—discover your advantage, build community, craft partnerships, and orient toward purpose—are essential leadership principles. They match the four leadership strategies we know work: clarity, collaboration, leverage, and meaning-making.
You don't need to be on stage to lead like a bookable speaker. You need an 'obvious advantage.'
If you start with clarity, build community that shares your advantage, design strategic partnerships that amplify it, and tie it all to purpose, you don't need performance metrics to prove impact. The results will follow the logic.
And you may find you're already bookable.
Watch the full interview with Christa Haberstock and Dan Pontefract on the Leadership NOW program below, or listen to it on your favorite podcast.