‘ Nobody cares about you until you show that you understand their problem, their situation, and you care about them.’
As a former international speaker bureau owner, Maria Franzoni knows exactly what it takes to become a highly sought-after (and well-paid) speaker.
In this week’s conversation, she reveals what speaker bookers are really looking for, and you might be surprised to discover that how well you speak is only one factor in her brilliant Bookability Formula.
We talk about the interplay and overlap between being a speaker and being an author, and the way in which books support speaking so beautifully, and vice versa. (But it has to be the right book – Maria spent months of her life writing the wrong one so you don’t have to.)
If you want to land more speaking gigs, if you’re not afraid to hear what that takes, and if you want to write the right book to support all of that, you probably shouldn’t miss this.
Maria’s site: https://www.mariafranzoni.me/
Maria on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariafranzoni/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
Alison Jones: I am here today with Maria Franzoni, who is the creator of the Bookability Formula, a former international speaker bureau owner with over 25 years in the industry. She helps speakers get booked and paid by teaching the tactics that top bureaus use, turning expertise into income with practical proven and commercially focused strategies.
And she’s put all that expertise into her book called, you guessed it, The Bookability Formula, which I have a copy of, signed to me, which is always a real treat.
So thank you very much for that, Maria, and welcome to the show.
Maria Franzoni: You are very welcome for the book and thank you very much for inviting me.
Alison Jones: I want to talk to you about that Bookability formula because it is such an interesting, pragmatic approach, isn’t it? It’s not how can you increase your stage presence or project your voice? It’s really like, okay, how can you get booked and paid, which is actually what speakers really care about, isn’t it?
Maria Franzoni: I love the way you put that because that’s exactly, that’s all I’m interested in really, because I think there’s a lot of fantastic people out there working on the craft and working on the speech and that side of it, and I think the piece that’s often missing is the piece of, well, how do you actually monetize this now?
Alison Jones: How’d you make a business out of this? Yes, and it is a formula. I was looking at your table of contents and I was like, it’s interesting that she’s got all these letters here. Why? And then I read on, and there it is, it’s an actual kind of mathematical formula.
So, for those who haven’t read the book, yet, tell us what it is.
Maria Franzoni: Well, I love algebra, so I had to turn it into a formula, but it’s basically, I analyzed what the 1% most book speakers do or did, in the speaker bureau and came up with, identified four key areas and called it ‘bookability’ because it was really about why those particular speakers were the most bookable.
So bookability is the formula and the four key areas they excelled in were that they were relevant to a paying market. So that’s the R, K, which is known for one thing and by the market of course. Then you’ve got memorable. I almost forgot that one. Which is good, right? That’s the M memorable.
Alison Jones: That’s ironic, isn’t it?
Maria Franzoni: Memorable to the bookers and that the message is memorable to the audience. And then the fourth one is E, which is easy. That is easy to find, easy to book, easy to work with, easy to listen to. So those are the four key elements. And then in terms of the formula, what we did is we looked at, well, what else was there on top of that?
And if you add those four together, you can multiply those by V. V is value. That’s the return on investment a client gets, or the return on time as some of the speakers talk about, which I think is lovely. I like that. What’s the return on the time of our people sitting in listening to you speak?
Alison Jones: Hmm.
Maria Franzoni: And all of that is divided by little e, which you need a little bit of the little e but not too much.
And that’s why it’s a little E and not a big E. And that E is ego, which can absolutely destroy your career if it gets a little bit out of hand. So that’s the formula. Those are the six elements of the formula that get that make a speaker bookable.
Alison Jones: Yes, it makes perfect sense. I mean, I thought absolutely. No, you know, I didn’t, I would never be able to put it down like that. But when you, when I see it written down, I’m like, of course that makes complete sense.
When you talk to speakers about this, which, if any of those elements do they feel are counterintuitive or had they not really thought about before or had they not understood the significance of?
Maria Franzoni: I think the one they don’t realize the significance of, is that being easy to work with. And what’s interesting, the counterintuitive piece of that is that often the best speakers or the most booked speakers, are not necessarily the best speakers. They’re the ones that are the easiest to work with, especially if you are an organization like a bureau, a speaker bureau that’s booking speakers a lot. If you’ve got a fantastic speaker who is very difficult and a good speaker who is very easy, you’re going to book the one that’s very easy.
You are not going to put yourself out, and all of the bureaus, if you ask them, would have a list. Like, we all used to have a blacklist of speakers that were hard to work with, often because of the ego part of the formula being too big and you avoid putting them forward.
If someone asked you for them, of course you would book them, but you would warn that client about this ego and how difficult they were because you didn’t want it to come back on you. And yes, so you’ll find that the counterintuitive piece is not necessarily that you have to be the best speaker, but you have to be the easiest to work with.
Alison Jones: And it’s not just about being easy to work with and not being a diva, it’s also about just the really simple stuff you can do to make yourself easy to find and book and, you know, putting the forms on there. And it’s just a joy getting you on the podcast because, you know, here’s my headshots, here’s the links that you choose which pose you like. Here’s my bio. It’s just all there.
And I think if you are serious about wanting to be a speaker, that’s sort of the no brainer thing to put in place, isn’t it? Make sure people know that you want to speak and make it really easy for them to find the information they need.
Maria Franzoni: It’s the basics, isn’t it? And you’re absolutely right. I’ve got a page on my website that if somebody books me for a podcast or for a speech, that I send them straight there and they’ve got everything they need. They’ve got a short bio, they’ve got an introduction, they’ve got photos they can choose from, which I need to update actually because I’ve just had a photo shoot.
And they’ve got, you know, they’ve got technical requirements if it’s a speech, but they’ve got everything they need, even how to pronounce my name is actually on there, on the introduction, so if I
Alison Jones: just didn’t read it clearly enough.
Maria Franzoni: nobody knows that you’ve got it right.
Alison Jones: Yes, it’s brilliant and actually, we’ll come to your URL at the end and it’s such a great resource, not just for the resources that are there and there are many of them, but just as a model, like, if you don’t know how to do this, here’s a really great site to look at to see how to do it really, really well.
But I do have a bone to pick with you, which is that I’m looking at your book and here you are writing your book to demonstrate your authority and everything that you know about the topic, and you’re talking about how important it’s to be known in the space and to have credibility and so on.
And nowhere do you mention the importance of having a book alongside this. So let’s talk about that.
Maria Franzoni: That’s really interesting actually, because you are absolutely right. That’s an omission, so I might have to do an update now. Thank you so much for that. To be a successful speaker, you don’t necessarily need a book, but a book will raise your fee for sure. And, of course when you’re an author, you are an authority.
But yes, I should have mentioned books. Thank you for that.
Alison Jones: It’s not just the credibility and discoverability piece, although that is huge. It’s also just economically, they work together really well, don’t they? Because I know that our authors, when they’re speaking, will sell copies of books in the room because people can take away a little piece of them.
They’ve had that wonderful experience of sitting there, listening to them, and then they get to take a piece away, ideally signed. And often, you know, I’ve had authors say, well, there wasn’t a budget for speaking, but what they did was buy so many books and I came to sort of speak.
So it’s almost an alternative currency.
Maria Franzoni: Yes. It’s also a great way to leave somebody with that message so that you’re embedding that learning and they can continue to use it.
Alison Jones: Yes. And what really struck me as well was the parallel. And I’ve always, I think we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, between crafting a really good talk where you are thinking about what is it that this audience needs to hear and how can I present that in a way that will really land with them? And how you come at a book.
So what did you notice as you planned the book? Because the big difference, of course, is you’re not in the room with someone. And it’s a much more intimate conversation, isn’t it? So how did you find that difference between speaking and writing?
Maria Franzoni: I don’t consider myself a speaker. I do speak from time to time, but my background has always been booking the speakers as opposed to doing the speaking. So I wouldn’t consider myself a speech writer or a content creator in any way, shape or form. So this is, you know, my content is social media. My content is now finally a book.
So how did I find it? I actually, I made a mistake and wrote the wrong book five years ago. And it was only when a publisher approached me and said, look, you know, where’s your book? You’ve got so much content. You’ve got good followers, you’ve got credibility. Where’s the book?
And I sent it to him without saying anything. And he came back to me and said, it’s very good, he says, but it’s the wrong book. And it is interesting. He actually realized it was the wrong book, and we both of both of us knew it. And I then got him to come and spend a day with me to plan out the correct book.
So how I wrote it, coming back to your question, is I actually had somebody who was an expert helping me to come up with the idea based on my, which is what I do with speakers, is get them to realize what their real, you know, their real proposition is their real USPs because often they can’t see it themselves and I couldn’t see it myself.
And then it was like, you know, a real slap on your head moment, which is what I often do to other people. And I was having a slap on my head, and I thought, this is so obvious that this is what I should be writing about. He actually helped me structure it. We spent a whole day together and I’ve still got, you obviously can’t see this on a podcast, but I’ve actually got all the little cards that we wrote and put together, and he even gave me the number of words to write for each section. And we had different colours for where it should be, you know, some text, where it should be a new chapter, where it should be a story, where the stories would fit.
And so, it was then a lot easier to do because once you’ve got the structure, it’s so much easier than before. And it’s a completely different book to the book I wrote five years ago, which just sat in my drawer and never got published.
Alison Jones: We do need to know about the book that you wrote five years ago. We just need to know.
Maria Franzoni: I basically wrote the same book that everybody else has written about speaking. You know, it was literally a step-by-step explaining all of the different things that you need to do, rather than looking at it from a point of view of actually what are the most booked speakers doing? So it was a different lens, so that was more of a how to from beginning.
Alison Jones: And that really captures it, doesn’t it? Because often the material might be very similar or the big overlap in what you’re actually saying, but it’s the framing of it and the way that you use your unique spot in a Venn diagram, your own expertise and so on to write the book that nobody else could write.
Maria Franzoni: Yes, exactly. You’re absolutely right. And that’s the same when you’re sort of, when I’m talking with speakers and I want them to, you know, I want them to deliver the speech that nobody else can deliver. I want them on their websites to talk about what makes them completely unique that nobody else can say about themselves.
So it is very similar. There’s a lot of similarities to writing a book and setting yourself up, positioning yourself as a speaker.
Alison Jones: Yes.
And when you’re writing, what does that look like for you? Do you love it? Do you sort of gayly march to your desk with your coffee and your pen, or do you have to be dragged there kicking and screaming?
Maria Franzoni: I have to be in the mood actually, and it’s the same for writing posts on LinkedIn. And if I’m in the mood, I can write and write and write and I really get into it. I like to speak it and then transcribe it rather than, and then I sort of reedit it and write it, because I find it’s a lot easier. I speak faster than I write for a start, but also I want that conversational style. And that’s, for me, that’s important that it sounds like I’m, I want to be speaking to a person, to a speaker on the other side, if you like.
So that’s my approach. But no, I couldn’t be a disciplined writer who writes every single day for a living. That wouldn’t work for me because I’m not always in the mood.
But when I’m in the mood, like when I do posts for LinkedIn, if I’m in the mood, I can write six posts and then I can schedule them over several days. But if I have to force myself and do it on a daily basis, I can’t do it unless something comes up. You know? it is crazy.
And also, yes, keeping to a schedule, because of course I worked with a publisher and I needed to keep to a schedule because I wanted my book out for a certain date.
And that was tough because there were times when I thought, I don’t want to be going through this book again. And the number of times you go through it again and again and again, it’s quite painful.
Alison Jones: Yes, so sick of it by the end, aren’t you?
Maria Franzoni: I was absolutely sick of it by the end. I’ve fallen back in love with it now, but yes, if it had been a relationship, I would’ve ended it.
Alison Jones: But that, I think that point’s about speaking it and then transcribing it and using that as your first draft is a really great tip because it’s very easy if you start with the writing and you’re not used to it particularly, to find yourself becoming very dry and using words like hithertofore, and things that you’ve just never, one human being would never say to another one because you think that’s how you write and it’s really not.
Maria Franzoni: I think you’re absolutely right that when you write, you tend to write more formally and you sort of structure your sentences differently and you worry about punctuation and capitals and spelling. Whereas if you’re free to just speak, it flows naturally.
Alison Jones: I remember talking to Seth Godin on the podcast and he said that nobody ever had a talking block, which I thought was a great, you don’t get talkers block. So you can talk your way out of writer’s book, isn’t it?
Maria Franzoni: And I’m impressed that you can name drop because that’s usually my thing. I’m a champion name dropper, but you did very well. I do love Seth, so well done.
Alison Jones: He just, honestly, I could spend a whole episode just dropping in the pearls of wisdom from that episode. It was terrific. But yes, anyway.
So I always ask my guests for their best tip. So I am going to guess, and maybe I shouldn’t prejudge this, but I’m going to guess that you have tips that will be applicable for both writing and speaking, I’m really interested to hear.
If somebody’s starting off on this journey, if they did nothing else, what would you tell them they have to master?
Maria Franzoni: In terms of the speaking as opposed to the writing?
Alison Jones: Well, I was thinking in terms of writing, but actually both because everybody listening here is going to want to do both.
Maria Franzoni: I think in terms of the speaking, and the writing, it’s the first element of the formula and it’s the first element for a reason that you need to be relevant. It needs to be relevant to a paying market if you want to get paid as a speaker, and for your writing, it needs to be relevant to your target audience.
And sometimes people follow their passion and they think that an audience would automatically show up and that doesn’t necessarily ring true. So it’s about researching your topic and your market in the same way as you would with writing.
Alison Jones: I think that’s really interesting because you hear that so often, don’t you? Oh, you know, if you’re passionate about it, you write about what you’re passionate about. That’s all very well, but you’re not writing for yourself, you are writing for your reader, and when you’re speaking, you’re not speaking for yourself, you’re speaking to those people in the room and your story, your passion, is sort of the fuel for that. It’s the human engagement. It needs to be there, but it’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition, and it’s not where you start.
Maria Franzoni: Absolutely, absolutely. You’ve got to start with the market, especially if you want to get paid. If you don’t want to get paid, it’s no problem at all. If it’s just a passion project, which, which is why it’s called a passion project, right? It doesn’t matter.
Alison Jones: But I think that it really has a sort of relevance for people writing as well. Because often people have a really interesting life story, life experiences, and people will say to them, oh, you should write a book, this is so interesting. And that’s where they start. They start with their own personal story and it’s a horrible, you know, I have to do it really nicely and sort of say, nobody gives a damn, nobody cares about your life story.
They’re interested in what your life story can help them understand better about their own. And I think it’s the same thing for speaking, isn’t it? There are certain people whose experiences are so extraordinary that yes, absolutely we all want to know about them, but they’re very few and far between.
Most of the time your story is going to be used to illustrate the points you’re making and to make the book more engaging or make your talk more engaging rather than being the thing that you’d lead with.
Maria Franzoni: Absolutely. And I always say to speakers when I work with them is nobody cares about you until you show that you understand their problem, their situation, and you care about them. So you start with where they’re at and then you talk about you because, you are right, it’s always what’s in it for me, always.
Alison Jones: And we are being bombarded by so much. It’s more than ever, you haven’t got time just to hear some random person’s story for no reason. Yes, brilliant.
I also always ask my guests for their recommendation, so is there a book that you would recommend us, Maria?
Maria Franzoni: It’s interesting because I actually recommended 10 books at the end of my book, which were my favorite books that that would help speakers. But the one I have to recommend, because obviously it makes sense is the 80 20 Principle by Richard Koch, because that was the book I was reading when I thought, I wonder if the 80 20 principle.
Basically says that a really small portion, in other words, 1% of your actions can achieve over 50% of the results. And I wondered if that was true for speaking. And I discovered, in fact, in the Bureau that 1% of the speakers represented 80% of the bookings and over half percent of over 50% of the revenue.
Yes. For me it was a huge aha moment, which is why I went in and studied them and, and tried to understand the, the. The reason why. So it has to be Richard Koch and his name is pronounced Kosh. I asked him and he wrote a lovely recommendation for me on the book and the way he said to remember it says it rhymes with posh and with dos.
And I thought, that’s brilliant. I love that. So I’ll never forget. Now Koch rhymes with posh and dosh.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. And I’ve, I’ve learned something. I’ve been saying Koch all these years. That was great.
Maria Franzoni: Me too. I’ve been getting it wrong.
Alison Jones: in your bibliography, you don’t just list books. You give us a little bit of why you like them, why they’re important, why you should go and read them, which is a lovely tip if you’re putting together bibliography.
We should also talk about the resources actually that you make available on your website. So my final question to you is where should people go if they want to find out more about you? But do, let’s have quite an expansive answer to that question. because there’s so much there.
Maria Franzoni: Yes, it’s probably a bit too much. Isn’t there? Really? Probably a bit overwhelming. So the, the free resources, there are, there’s a blog, an article, newsletter, whatever you’d like to call it, which is also on LinkedIn and available to your email if you don’t want to go onto the website to read it.
There’s a podcast where I interview speakers and they share quite freely about their speaking business, which is wonderful, and give us some good, good tips. And originally that started as a podcast for my speaker bureau and where I was interviewing my speakers for. Obviously for, to get them booked.
And that changed when I started coaching speakers. So that now is about this for speakers rather than for bookers. And there’s also, there’s templates there’s downloads, there’s all sorts of things there under the resources section. So that’s probably the majority of, of things that, that people can grab and use.
And actually, I, I know several speakers who have said to me. I can follow all of your free advice and really move things forward. And of course now there’s the book as well, which really structures it. And then they come to me later on when they want to go to the next level. So I’ve sort of got rid of a lot of work there, which is quite.
Alison Jones: And it’s such, it’s such a lovely demonstrations well of how when you put your really good stuff out into the world, you know, often people are nervous that, that people then won’t come to them. Why would they have put, but it, it just increases your value in people’s minds, doesn’t it?
Maria Franzoni: But it also means that they’re earning by the time they come to you, so you’re in, they’re in a better position to invest.
Alison Jones: Hadn’t thought of that angle. That’s great.
Maria Franzoni: So what I’m doing is I’m making sure that people have the money so that they can pay me. Otherwise it’s no good, right? I never want to be in a situation where I’m getting somebody, stretching somebody ever that, you know, they’ve gotta be comfortable to, to work with me. And what I haven’t done is given you the website address, which is maria franzo.me.
Alison Jones: Yes, brilliant. I’ll put that link up on the show notes@extraordinarybusinessbooks.com. Do go there, I mean, I, I know I always say that, but in this case, there’s so much there. There’s so many resources and as I say, it’s such a great model for how you want to present yourself. If you want to be bookable, so bookable or booked.
There’s really joke that I should have made much earlier about those two, but nevermind. Fantastic. Maria, it was such a treat to talk to you. Thank you for your time today and for all that insight, that wisdom, that really practical stuff. I think it’ll have been really, really valuable to anybody listening today.
Thank you.
Maria Franzoni: Thank you. You’ve been a very generous, host.
