Free tool
What a keynote really nets after travel and prep
Enter the quoted fee and the true cost of getting to the stage, and see the effective hourly rate hiding behind a date you were about to accept.
Free tool, no sign up
How many inquiries it takes to fill your speaking year
Set the number of paid dates you want and your real conversion at each stage, and see the weekly inquiry volume that has to exist for that calendar to happen.
Speaking pipelines fail quietly. You have a strong spring because last year was busy, you stop reaching out while you are traveling, and four months later the fall is thin and the good association slots were assigned in June. By the time the gap is visible, the buying window for those dates has closed.
This planner works backward from the calendar you want. Every date that gets signed started as a held week, every hold started as a proposal or a submitted session, and every proposal started with an inquiry or an outreach conversation. Put in your own drop off at each step and the tool tells you what weekly volume the season actually requires.
Your result
Held dates you need
44
Penciled weeks required before contracts fall out at your usual rate.
Proposals or session submissions needed
109
Every quote, proposal and speaker submission you have to put out.
Qualified inquiries needed
198
Planner conversations that have to start for the season to fill.
Qualified inquiries per working week
5.0
The weekly number your marketing and referrals have to produce.
If the weekly figure looks impossible, the fix is usually a higher fee band on fewer dates rather than more outreach.
Why holds are the stage that lies to you
A held date feels like a booking. The program chair is enthusiastic, the week is penciled, and you start declining other inquiries for it. Then the sales kickoff gets moved to a different quarter, the association changes its education chair, or a budget freeze lands in November and the whole track goes internal. None of that is a reflection on you and all of it costs you a week you had stopped selling.
So track holds separately and be ruthless about the conversion you actually see. Speakers who have never measured this usually guess high. Once you have a real number, the rule that follows is simple: never stop working the pipeline because of holds alone, and tell a planner plainly what a hold means and how long you will keep it.
Turning the weekly number into a routine
A weekly inquiry target is only useful if you know where inquiries come from in this business. For most working speakers it is a short list: past attendees who moved to a new company, association chapters that talk to each other, program chairs who saw you on a panel, and the sessions you submit to conference calls for speakers on a deadline calendar.
Block two hours a week and spend them on those four channels in that order, because warm sources convert several times better than cold outreach. If your number says you need three qualified inquiries a week and you are getting one, the honest answers are to raise your fee band and cut the date target, or to change what is on your page so more of the traffic you already have starts a conversation.
Questions about this calculator
What counts as a qualified inquiry?
A qualified inquiry names an event, a rough timeframe and a real role behind it, such as a program chair or a learning and development manager. A message asking whether you do free podcast interviews is not one. Track only the ones with a date and a buyer, or the math flatters you.
I do not know my conversion rates yet. What should I use?
Start with the defaults here, which reflect a common shape for direct booked speakers, then correct them after one season of honest tracking. Even three months of real numbers beats a guess. The stage most speakers get wrong is holds to contracts, which is usually lower than it feels.
What if the weekly inquiry number is far higher than my traffic?
Then the calendar target and the fee band are mismatched. Either fewer dates at a higher band, or a narrower topic that a specific buyer type recognizes immediately. Doubling outreach volume is the hardest of the three routes and usually the least effective for an established speaker.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The speaker one sheet checklist
Twenty items that turn a page about you into a page a program committee can act on in one sitting.
The number is only half the work
You now know what this format really pays per working hour once the travel days and the deck customization are counted. The next step is making sure the planner who writes to you in March meets the band that reflects it, before her committee builds an expectation you cannot meet. Book a demo and we will set your bands and your availability on one live page in about twenty minutes.