Have you ever felt like you’re not a big enough deal to land the speakers you dream of having in your summit lineup?

Pitching speakers is one of the biggest things I see holding people back from moving forward with their summits. The fear of getting rejected and hearing nothing but “no” when you start sending pitches is very common. And if you’re thinking about pitching speakers that feel a ...

Hosting a virtual summit is a powerful way to connect with peers that can lead to powerful collaborations, opportunities, and friendships down the road.

The connections you make with other business owners can be incredibly powerful and benefit your business in so many ways. Collaborating with 20+ experts in your industry by hosting a summit is an incredible way to quickly grow your network, ...

Lately, we've been talking more and more about using a virtual summit to launch a course, membership, or high-ticket program.

Using the momentum from your summit to launch on the backend has truly incredible results for you as the host... but what about your speakers? 

I've been asked a few times recently whether or not speakers care if you incorporate a launch into your summit:

• Do speak...

You've got the perfect speaker lineup and you're ready for your summit to happen...but then....someone drops out. 

Having a speaker drop out of your summit causes many first-time summit hosts to panic, but it happens more often than you might think. 

There are all kinds of reasons that speakers might drop out, such as...

• They got excited about the event initially and later realize they o
...

While a lot of summit hosts send all their speaker pitches at once, I like to break them up into groups and send my pitches in rounds.

This helps me get some easy yeses right away from speakers I feel pretty sure will say yes, and it also gives me a confidence boost before reaching out to people I don’t know as well. It also gives me some “social proof” I can include in my emails so my poten...

Believe me, I know how tempting it is to send out your speaker pitches as soon as they come to mind, but that’s not the best way to go about it. 

Last week I shared all about my speaker brainstorming process that I use to strategically determine which potential speakers to reach out to, but there are still a few more steps to go before sending out those speaker pitches.

Between finalizing m...

When it’s time to pitch your summit speakers, which approach do you take?

Do you…

1. Send your pitches on the fly as potential speakers come to mind?
2. Pitch the people you know will say yes and let that determine your speaker line up?
3. Strategically plan who to pitch based on the topics you want to cover and the transformation you want to create through your summit?

If you chose 3, congra...

Networking can have a big impact on the growth and reach of your virtual summit. 

That's because, having connections to reach out to when summit planning makes the entire process flow more smoothly, specifically when it comes to creating your speaker lineup.

While, a lot of the time, reaching out to speakers can feel transactional, forced, and awkward, it's totally possible to create a line...

One of the things that surprised me most about my first summit was how much went into the speakers.

Even the pitching alone has a ton of moving pieces and can bring up more questions than you expected. And that's just the beginning.

You might be asking yourself questions like:

• Have you had speakers drop out when you send an agreement?
• How can I convince speakers if I don’t pay them?
• Wh
...

In case you haven't experienced this yet for yourself, there's a pretty widespread strategy where summit hosts pitch you to speak at their summit, and then at the bottom of the pitch, they mention that you need to have 5000 people on your email list to participate.  

Let's break down whether it's okay to require a certain email list size from virtual summit speakers and why.

Virtual Summit ...