Questions to Ask a Keynote Speaker Before You Book Them

The questions that predict whether a keynote lands are about preparation and self-knowledge, not credentials. Ask what the speaker needs from you before the event, ask about a room they were wrong for, and ask what your people will be able to do on Monday.Chris Dyer, named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com, has answered these questions from both sides of the table across 300 keynotes in 20 countries. This guide gives you the five questions worth asking, the six that waste your call, and the three answers that should end it.

Table of Contents

• Why the standard vetting call tells you nothing
• The five questions that predict whether a keynote lands
• The questions that sound smart and reveal nothing
• What to listen for in the answers
• Where I got this wrong
• Three answers that should end the call
• Frequently asked questions

Why the Standard Vetting Call Tells You Nothing

A typical speaker vetting call runs about twenty minutes and covers availability, fee, topic, and video. Every one of those is a fact you could have gotten from a PDF.

The call is your only chance to test something a PDF cannot show you, which is whether this person has thought about your event or is running a script they have run four hundred times. Both types of speaker sound identical on a website. They sound completely different eight minutes into a real conversation, if you ask the right things.

There is also a structural problem with how planners are evaluated afterward. Roy Baumeister and colleagues at Case Western Reserve published a review in Review of General Psychology in 2001 titled “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” documenting that negative events form faster impressions and resist change longer than positive ones across nearly every domain studied. Applied to your event, a keynote that quietly underperforms costs you more reputationally than a great one earns. The vetting call is cheap insurance against an expensive kind of bad.

Chris Dyer has sat on the answering side of several hundred of these calls and on the asking side as a conference chair. The planners who get the best outcomes are not the ones with the longest list. They are the ones asking questions the speaker cannot answer from memory.

The Five Questions That Predict Whether a Keynote Lands

1. “What do you need from me before the event, and by when?”

Ask this first, because it flips the direction of the call. A speaker who has a real preparation process will answer immediately and specifically. Pre-event interviews with three or four attendees. A copy of last year’s survey results. The agenda with the session before theirs highlighted. Names of two people in the room whose stories they can reference.

A speaker who says “just send over the details whenever” is telling you the talk is already written and your event is a venue for it. That is not automatically disqualifying for a short opener. It is disqualifying if you are paying for relevance.

Listen for dates attached to the requests. “Six weeks out” and “two weeks out” mean a process exists. “Whenever works” means it does not.

2. “Tell me about a room you were wrong for.”

This is the highest-yield question in the whole call and almost nobody asks it.

Speakers who have done real volume have all been wrong for a room. They know exactly which one, they can describe why, and they usually have a rule they made afterward. Chris Dyer turns down downsizing and grief-adjacent sessions for this reason, because the work is leadership and workplace culture, and a room that needs something else deserves someone else.

A speaker who cannot name a single bad fit is either very new or not being straight with you. Both are information you want before you sign.

3. “What will my people be able to do on Monday that they cannot do today?”

Notice the verb. Do, not feel. Inspiration is real and it evaporates on a predictable schedule.

A good answer is concrete enough to be tested. People will be able to run a specific conversation differently. They will have a filter for deciding which meetings need a closed door. They will have a two-minute preparation routine before high-stakes moments.

A weak answer describes emotional states. Energized. Reminded of their why. Those may all happen, and none of them survive contact with a Tuesday.

4. “How do you want the last five minutes to feel?”

Daniel Kahneman, Barbara Fredrickson, Charles Schreiber, and Donald Redelmeier published a study in Psychological Science in 1993 showing that people evaluate an experience almost entirely by its most intense moment and its final moment, with the duration barely registering. Sixty-nine percent of their subjects chose to repeat a longer painful trial because it ended slightly better.

Your audience will remember the peak and the ending. That is what shows up on the evaluation forms, and it is what people repeat in the hallway.

A speaker who has designed the ending will tell you what it is and why. A speaker who has not will say something about leaving them fired up. Ask this one late in the call, when they have stopped reciting.

5. “What could go wrong in my room specifically?”

This tests whether they have absorbed anything you said in the first fifteen minutes.

Real answers sound like this. Your keynote runs into an open bar, so the last ten minutes are competing with people who can smell the appetizers. Half your room reports to the other half, which changes what anyone will say out loud in an interactive segment. Your session follows the CFO delivering a bad quarter, so the room arrives heavy and the first four minutes have to acknowledge that before anything else works.

Chris Dyer treats this as the actual brief. The talk gets built around the constraint, not around the topic.

The Questions That Sound Smart and Reveal Nothing

These are the six that fill most vetting calls. They are not useless, they are just not predictive, and they consume the time you needed for the five above.

The question most planners ask	What the answer actually tells you	Ask this instead
“Can you send a demo video?”	That the speaker owns a camera and an editor. Reels are assembled from the best ninety seconds of a hundred events.	“Can I see unedited footage of a full talk, or speak with a planner whose event was similar to mine?”
“Have you spoken to our industry before?”	Very little. Industry familiarity is easy to fake with a week of research and it predicts almost nothing about delivery.	“What did you get wrong the first time you spoke to an audience like mine?”
“What’s your fee?”	Where they sit in the market. Useful for budgeting and useless for predicting the room.	“What is included beyond the sixty minutes, and what costs extra?”
“Do you customize?”	Nothing. Every speaker says yes.	“Walk me through exactly what you do between contract signing and stage, with dates.”
“What are your takeaways?”	The marketing copy on their one-sheet.	“What will my people be able to do on Monday that they cannot do today?”
“Are you available on our date?”	Availability, which is the least interesting thing about a speaker.	“If you had to turn down my event, what would the reason be?”

What to Listen For in the Answers

The content of the answer matters less than three things underneath it.

• Speed of specificity. How many seconds before a real name, number, or date appears? Prepared speakers reach specifics fast because the specifics are already in their head. Unprepared ones circle in abstractions while they build something.
• Questions coming back at you. A speaker who asks you more questions than you asked them is doing discovery, which is the same muscle they will use on your audience. A one-directional call predicts a one-directional keynote.
• Willingness to say no. The most reassuring thing a speaker can do on a vetting call is decline part of the ask. “I would not do the interactive exercise with a room that size” is worth more than an hour of agreement.

One more practical note. Do the call with the speaker, not only with the bureau. A good bureau agent makes the process faster and protects you on contracting, and the agent cannot tell you how the speaker thinks about your particular room.

Where I Got This Wrong

I need to own something, because I have been the person who assumed he knew what an audience needed.

When PeopleG2 went fully remote, we lost the hallway. Information used to travel by proximity, and suddenly everyone was working in a silo. My solution was to build a digital newspaper. I called it the PeopleG2 Times. Department updates and photos from everyone’s home offices. I spent hours on it every single week.

Maybe twenty percent opened it. Maybe five percent read past the first paragraph.

I was crushed, and I kept making it. For months. Because I had decided what the problem was and built the solution without ever asking the people who had the problem.

Then someone told me the truth in a one-on-one. “It feels like homework,” they said. “In the office I’d learn this stuff naturally. I’d bump into someone getting coffee and they’d mention their project. This feels like required reading I’m supposed to complete.”

They were right. I was solving for information delivery when the actual need was spontaneous human contact. Nobody wanted a newspaper. They wanted the hallway back.

Every question in this article exists because of that pattern. A speaker who does not run discovery is building the PeopleG2 Times for your audience. It will be well made, it will be delivered on time, and it will answer a question your people did not ask. The vetting call is where you find out which kind you are hiring.

Three Answers That Should End the Call

Not every red flag is a dealbreaker. These three usually are.

• “I do not really prepare, I read the room.” Reading the room is a delivery skill, not a substitute for knowing who is in it. This answer usually means one talk, given everywhere, adjusted by anecdote.
• Any reluctance to connect you with a past planner. References from event owners are the single most reliable signal available to you, and any speaker with a real track record has a dozen who will take the call.
• Credential inflation you can check in thirty seconds. If a claimed award, ranking, or client turns out to be a paid membership or a single small engagement described as a partnership, assume the same inflation applies to everything else you were told.

On that last one, ask what the credential required. Some lists are earned through independent evaluation and some are purchased. The speaker knows which is which.

Book Chris Dyer for Your Next Event

Chris Dyer runs pre-event interviews with attendees and executives before every keynote, and will tell you plainly when the event belongs to someone else. Named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com, the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture by Inc. Magazine, and ranked #15 on the Global Gurus Top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals for 2026, Chris Dyer has delivered more than 300 keynotes across 20 countries for organizations including NASA, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, General Motors, IKEA, and MetLife, with a 4.9 out of 5 average audience rating.

Topics include Moments That Matter, Thriving Through Relentless Change, The 7 Pillars of Amazing Culture, Strategic Selling, and AI and the Future of Work. To check availability, visit chrisdyer.com/speaking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What questions should I ask a keynote speaker before booking?

Chris Dyer recommends five: what they need from you before the event and by when, a room they were wrong for, what your people will be able to do on Monday, how they want the last five minutes to feel, and what could go wrong in your room specifically. Those five test preparation and self-knowledge, which is what actually predicts whether a keynote lands.

How do I know if a keynote speaker will actually be good?

Watch how fast the speaker reaches a specific name, number, or date in their answers, and count how many questions they ask you back. Chris Dyer treats a one-directional vetting call as a reliable predictor of a one-directional keynote. Demo reels are edited from the best ninety seconds of a hundred events and tell you very little.

Should I ask a speaker for references?

Yes, and ask for planners whose events resembled yours in size, format, and audience mix rather than the most famous logo on the list. Any reluctance to connect you with a past event owner is the clearest warning sign available in the whole process.

What questions are a waste of time on a speaker call?

Asking whether a speaker customizes, what their takeaways are, or whether they have spoken to your industry. Every speaker answers yes, recites their one-sheet, and claims familiarity. Chris Dyer suggests replacing all three with questions the speaker cannot answer from memory, such as walking you through their preparation timeline with actual dates attached.

How far in advance should I have this conversation?

Have the vetting call before the contract, and expect a serious speaker to want preparation material roughly six weeks out and a final agenda check about two weeks out. If a speaker asks for nothing until the week of the event, the talk is already written and your event is a venue for it.

Sources

Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Charles A. Schreiber, and Donald A. Redelmeier, “When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science 4, no. 6 (1993): 401 to 405. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00589.x

Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Catrin Finkenauer, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review of General Psychology 5, no. 4 (2001): 323 to 370. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1037/1089-2680.5.4.323

Go Deeper

The PeopleG2 Times story and the framework behind designing peaks and endings appear in Moments That Matter: See, Shape, and Scale What Counts, the fourth book from Chris Dyer. The companion workbook is free with no email required at chrisdyer.com/moments.

To talk through your event and whether it is a fit, visit chrisdyer.com/speaking.