TSE Speakers Audibles with Archie

Sometimes you have a client with their sights set on a speaker they must have, only to find out that the person is not available. This recently happened to me with a client who was looking to have legendary Chicago Bear Gale Sayers appear at a business meeting in New York.

Unfortunately, Gail just couldn’t make it work with his schedule as he had booked a prior commitment. We went back to the client and determined the best possible replacement options for their program. We came up with a list and narrowed it down to two candidates. Mike Singletary and Archie Manning.

At that point, we had to make sure they were both available and then weigh the options on who to select. The client — with our consultation — decided to go with Archie Manning as the fill in. Archie always delivers great speaking engagements and I knew he would be a hit with this group. It’s amazing but sometimes the second string speaker turns out to be the better fit for a group.

You often know the group demographics and you can determine your speaker with that in mind, but you can never know for sure who will hit home with an attendee. That is the relative unknown that you cannot prepare for or pre determine when picking a speaker. You can make an educated guess but you just never know who will work better.

I was glad the client was willing to look at another option. They could not move the date of their event no matter how much they wanted to in order to use Gale. In the end, they were able to keep their date and deliver the results they needed with Archie at the helm.