FAQs: Wise Whisper Agency & Keynote Speaking
No. We are not affiliated with TEDx or the TED or TEDx brands.
We’re just passionate about the platform. We have a creative team that is here to help you distill your stories into the best talk of your life, and a booking team that is committed to helping you get booked on a big stage, like a TEDx stage. Other stages that we’ve booked for include World Business Executive Coaching Summit, Small Business Expo, C200, Monetize Your Expertise Summit, MGM’s annual event, People 1st, American Dental Association, Corporate World Intelligence, South by Southwest (SXSW), Coaching.com and more.
You can apply to work with us on this page, and we’ll get in touch with you within three business days to schedule a formal 30 minute consultation with our sales team to determine if we’re a possible fit to work together. During the consultation, our team will want to learn more about your brand (…and it’s okay if you haven’t built a big personal brand!), your focus and what you’d love to see happen if you take the leap and work with us to help you craft your signature talk and land you a spot on a powerful stage. If it feels aligned, we will send you our onboarding paperwork, and as soon as we receive it back from you, we’ll send you a welcome email with all the details you’ll need–your intake form, a calendar link to book your first brainstorming Zoom call with the creative team and info on your start date…
Usually we’re running about 6 weeks out, and we have clients whose start dates are delayed due to our capacity/waitlist.
*“TED” and “TEDx” are trademarks of TED Conferences LLC. Wise Whisper LLC is independent and not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by TED Conferences LLC or its affiliates.
After your consultation, you’ll set a start date that’s usually 4-8 weeks out from the date of your consultation. We’ll need your intake form from you at least 7 days before your 45-minute onboarding call. (Keep in mind, the form can take an hour or so to complete.) During your onboarding call, our creative director will listen to your creative ideas and go through the stories you shared on your intake form so that, together, you can begin to brainstorm which of your stories feels the most compelling as the opening story for your signature talk. You’ll get more into that on your four (4) formal Zoom calls, but we find it productive to start the brainstorming process on this onboarding call!
After the 45-minute onboarding call, you’ll begin to see the direction your project can go and learn more about your project team and how they will be able to help you craft your signature talk. We’ll then have you schedule your 4 Zoom calls with our creative team (90 minutes each) that will take place over two months. During those two months, our creative team will continue to brainstorm with you and use the transcripts from the Zoom calls as a guiding light for our content editors to distill your speech script down and turn your words into a signature talk that you’re incredibly proud to share.
Once you finish writing your talk, we’ll pass your talk to our booking team, who has successfully placed clients on stages, including C200, Monetize Your Expertise Summit and People 1st. … And, of course, we’re very proud that our booking team has helped more than 100 clients land their spot on big stages around the world.
Based on which stage you’re aiming for and what content guidelines come with that speech, we’ll devise an action plan to help you get your signature talk written.
If you want us to help you get booked, we’ll start by confirming your blackout dates (the dates you’re unavailable to give a signature talk, including any important events that prevent you from speaking on a specific date). We’ll also confirm your location availability, given that events for you to give your signature talk are happening all around the world.
Our booking team is proud to say that the fastest they’ve ever received a “yes” to secure a client a speaker slot on a BIG stage was 6 weeks after the date the speech draft was finalized. The slowest it’s ever been is 24 months. Even when you get a “yes,” to be booked on a big stage such as a huge corporate keynote or online summit, the events tend to run about 2-5 months out from when you’re accepted as a speaker.
So, the fastest we could imagine you standing on a big stage to deliver your signature stage is probably within 7 months–meaning from the date of your 45-minute onboarding call to the date you’re standing on stage. The slowest would be 24 months.
*“TED” and “TEDx” are trademarks of TED Conferences LLC. Wise Whisper LLC is independent and not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by TED Conferences LLC or its affiliates.
The process of helping you write your signature talk and getting you booked on stage works at its own pace. Clients see working with us as an investment in their personal brand that is not time-bound.
In fact, our founder Ashley Stahl was a speaker in 2019 at TEDxLeidenUniversity and her talk didn’t go viral unit 6 months after its release on YouTube. There was no reason or rhyme for this, no one in particular that we know of shared the talk– it simply went viral when it wanted to! For this reason, we advise clients against choosing topics that are tied to anything timely or trendy. If you have a book coming out or you’re eventually hoping to land a book deal, and you’re given the opportunity to speak on a stage with a large following on YouTube, needless to say that’s incredibly appealing to a book publisher!
*“TED” and “TEDx” are trademarks of TED Conferences LLC. Wise Whisper LLC is independent and not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by TED Conferences LLC or its affiliates.
Our booking team has helped get clients booked on stages like World Business Executive Coaching Summit, Small Business Expo, C200, Monetize Your Expertise Summit, MGM’s annual event, People 1st, American Dental Association, Corporate World Intelligence, South by Southwest (SXSW), and Coaching.com.
We scope our booking offer based on the time we invest. While we cannot guarantee that anyone will say YES to have you on stage as their speaker, we can commit to investing such a degree of time and effort that it feels unlikely that you would not get selected to talk on stage.
Our booking team has specifically helped more than 100 clients land a spot on big stages with a global online reach through YouTube with nearly 100% success… The fastest our team has helped get a client booked for their talk is 6 weeks. The slowest it has taken our booking team to help our clients find a spot on stage was 24 months.
All of this said, our sales team is committed to ensuring we vet our clients for success. We don’t take on clients we can’t help– that’s our integrity and our guiding light to keep our business thriving… We want our clients to walk away feeling that we’ve helped find their place on stage.
Plus, a lot of the booking success we’ve had is tied to our client providing our booking team with a standout signature talk.
Clients have gotten consistent product sales, book sales, podcast listeners and more from giving a signature talk on a big stage! This is why we strive to help clients land a booking on a stage that also has a large YouTube following, so that they can attract leads for years to come.
We believe that writing your best talk and stepping onto a stage leaves a legacy and impacts millions, but we also know that there is an enormous amount of opportunity on the table for them after they step off stage. These include book deals, TV shows, speaking agents, increased keynote speaking fees, keynote opportunities, spokesperson deals, brand deals and more.
After founder Ashley Stahl stepped on stage in 2013 at TEDxBerkeley and started going on more speaking engagements, she secured more than $1M in revenue for her private coaching practice that was directly related to leads generated from her speaking engagements–and she’s created twice the revenue from opportunities tied to her 2019 talk at TEDxLeidenUniversity alone.
Not always. In fact, TEDx does not allow speakers to pay or be charged in any manner, including production costs, recruiting sponsors, buying ticket blocks, or hiring coaches. We encourage you to research the TEDx website for up-to-date information.
Some of the other events we’ve helped clients get booked for are paid keynote speaking engagements. Others are uncompensated; however, they’re targeted to an audience of your ideal clients and also have a large YouTube or Instagram following. The sheer size of their audience has a massive ROI that goes beyond being compensated for that keynote.
We work with you to determine your blackout dates when you sign up for our signature offer to help you write and book your signature talk.
We ask you what countries and locations you’re willing to fly to in our paperwork! We help you get you booked within reach of your home, but we cannot guarantee it if you live in the boonies!
When you sign up for Wise Whisper’s signature offer to help you write and book your signature talk, you begin with a 45-minute onboarding and brainstorming session with our creative director to go through the very comprehensive intake form that you filled out with life stories that are meaningful to you. We work together to brainstorm which stories might be the best direction for you to take with your signature talk. From there we schedule 4 Zoom calls to work with you, our editors and creative director to distill your ideas into a signature talk you are proud to share.
Part of this process over the 4 Zoom calls is for our creative director to ask enough questions to pull your best thinking out of you, so that after each call, our editors can go through the AI-generated transcript and present you with content from your words and that they believe would be incredibly useful as the next step to help you craft your signature talk.
After the 4 Zoom calls, you walk away with your signature talk that represents your ideas and that has been distilled with the help of our editorial team.
Yes. In addition to helping clients write and book their signature talks, we also offer website design and development, keynote speech writing, webinar script writing, social media management, podcast management, brand photoshoots, book proposal writing, speaking coaching, speaking reel creation, online course creation and more.
Clients tend to come back for these.
