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As soon as you step off stage, you’re mobbed by a group of eager fans and audience members who shower you with praise. The line of attendees who wait to congratulate you almost reaches the back of the room.
A few weeks later, the event organizer sends you the results from the post-event surveys, and your speaker ratings are off the charts—4.9 out of 5! You’re in the top one percent of speakers from the event. Maybe you’re even the top-rated speaker. Way to go!
When you open the spreadsheet of anonymous feedback, you see positive comment after positive comment. Praise, compliments, and approbation galore.
Except for that one negative comment (there’s always one) that gets under your skin. But you ignore it and focus on the rest of the overwhelmingly positive feedback about you and your speech.
With results like those, you can’t help but think to yourself: “I am on fire! I’m absolutely crushing it.”
Your speech was fantastic. Your performance was incredible. You’re killing it.
Or are you?
Do speaker ratings, compliments, and positive feedback accurately measure the success of your speech?
Some speakers judge their speech’s effectiveness by audience engagement. In fact, it’s one of the most common ways to measure your performance. If people are participating, paying attention, and they look interested and engaged, you might be well on your way to crafting a great experience.
Other speakers look to post-event feedback from event organizers. Positive comments and testimonials from the people who book you for their events are a great way to know you’re delivering.
Some business owners and consultants who speak to generate business and attract new leads might use the number of business cards they collect as a way to rate the effectiveness of their session.
While these can be valuable indicators of a speaker’s performance, there might be a better way to judge your speech’s success.
You see, there are actually three problems with these types of audience-perception-based feedback metrics. These three hard truths reveal why these metrics can skew your perception and affect your overall progress as a transformational speaker or thought leader.
Hard truth #1: People usually won’t say negative things to your face.
Here’s the thing—the people who didn’t like your presentation usually won’t come up to you and tell you. It just doesn’t happen.
Now, during your speaking career, you’ll probably encounter a few public speaking “hall monitors.” These know-it-all gurus feel the need to criticize every performance they see, so they frequently (and usually unsuccessfully) share their unsolicited (and often unwelcomed) speaking advice. Take their advice with a grain of salt.
But most of the time, 99% of the comments you’ll hear after your speech will be overwhelmingly positive. While some audience members might think things like, “that sucked, it didn’t have any actionable takeaways I can use” or “that was boring, I just didn’t get it,” they’ll probably keep it to themselves.
Perhaps they remember their mother’s constant refrain: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” They certainly aren’t going to express their complaints—that would be impolite.
That’s why most of the time event attendees will tell you things like: “Thank you so much, you were great!” But that’s actually a huge red flag.
🚩 That’s a red flag.
“You were great” is NOT what you want to hear after your speech. Why?
Because this isn’t about you. It’s about your speech, your message, and your ideas.
What you want to hear is: “the speech was great.” Or, maybe even, “that was great.” (See the difference?)
When you have a truly transformational speech, after you walk off stage, people will compliment the speech. They’ll ask you questions about the content you shared. They’ll share similar ideas and you’ll see the excitement in their eyes as they share their thoughts with you. But, if their praise is about you, it’s unlikely your speech was transformational. And you can’t be a transformational speaker without a transformational speech.
Don’t seek approval. Don’t be star struck by the positive comments that are focused on you. What you want to hear is people talking about your speech.
But even then, that type of feedback is still not measurable.
Hard truth #2: Few people fill out the post-event evaluations.
When you look at the statistics, the percentage of people who actually fill out the post-event evaluations is fairly low overall. You might have even noticed this yourself.
On most of the feedback documents event planners send you, you can find in small print on the bottom the number of respondents and the total number of attendants. Usually only 20-50% of the event attendees fill out the surveys.
Of course, when event organizers incentivize filling out the surveys by offering a prize or reward, that percentage increases. But even then, often the quality of the survey leaves a lot to be desired. (They just want to win that $250 Amazon gift card!)
That’s why it’s important to remember that the audience feedback you receive from surveys isn’t an accurate representation of the audience in general. Usually, only a small percentage of the audience completes the surveys—and the ones who do are often the most engaged, enthusiastic, and participative audience members.
Hard truth #3: Executives rarely give feedback in surveys.
Perhaps it’s because they don’t have time to fill out surveys—most company leaders spend their extra time at events, networking and catching up with other executives. Or maybe they’re weary of the perceived value of event surveys—their advice could get lost among the other survey answers and be quickly forgotten.
Now, that’s not to say executives don’t give feedback. They do. But they don’t use event surveys to do it.
Most often, they’ll speak directly with event organizers to share their feedback (and most of the time it will be pretty brutal—and pretty honest). They want their feedback to have an impact and they want to be heard.
If you’re hoping the survey results will show you what CEOs and company leaders think about your speech…you’re probably out of luck.
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