Smiling & Dialing 

Building a Speaking Business One Connection at a Time

Waiting for the phone to ring is not a prospecting strategy.

Referrals are wonderful. Repeat business is even better. But if you want a speaking business you can build, predict, and grow, you need a reliable way to find the right prospects, start conversations, and stay visible long enough to get hired.

When Lisa Ryan launched her speaking business, she didn’t have a huge marketing budget or a calendar full of inbound leads. She did have years of sales experience and a willingness to pick up the phone. Smiling and Dialing became the foundation of the business she has built since 2010.

The tools have changed considerably since then.

Today, speakers have access to AI that can research industries and organizations in minutes, LinkedIn that puts decisionmakers within reach, databases and CRMs that make prospecting easier to manage, and automation that can handle work that used to eat up hours. Those tools can make you dramatically more efficient. They can also make your outreach sound exactly like everybody else’s AI-generated outreach.

That’s where the human part still matters.

In this practical, roll-up-your-sleeves session, Lisa will show you how to combine smart technology with actual human connection to build a prospecting system you will use.

You’ll learn how to:

• Find better prospects instead of simply finding more prospects, including associations, companies, conferences, chapters, and industries where your expertise solves a problem people will pay to address.

• Use AI as your prospecting research assistant to identify opportunities, understand organizations, prepare for calls, personalize outreach, and uncover angles you might otherwise miss.

• Figure out who actually hires speakers and get beyond generic contact forms and info@ email addresses.

• Use the phone without sounding like a telemarketer, with a simple conversational structure for getting past gatekeepers, reaching decision-makers, and opening the door to a real conversation.

• Build a multi-touch outreach strategy using phone, email, LinkedIn, video, referrals, and other approaches so your entire pipeline isn’t dependent on one channel.

• Follow up without becoming annoying, including how to give yourself legitimate reasons to reconnect instead of sending another dreaded “just checking in” email.

• Use AI and automation without automating the relationship out of your sales process, so technology handles the grunt work while you remain the person prospects want to hire.

• Track the activity that leads to bookings, because staring at your inbox and hoping somebody needs a keynote is difficult to enter into a CRM.

You’ll also see the prospecting approaches Lisa uses in her own speaking business, what has changed as technology has evolved, and what still works remarkably well because most speakers simply aren’t willing to do it consistently.

You’ll leave with a practical system for deciding who to contact, what to say, how to reach them, when to follow up, and where AI can save you time without turning you into another automated message in someone’s inbox.

Because AI can help you build the list, research the prospect, and prepare the approach.

But eventually, somebody has to start the conversation.

Meet Lisa Ryan, CSP, MBA

Lisa  has been a full-time professional speaker since 2010, delivering more than 1,000 programs for corporations, associations, and industry groups across the country. But those bookings didn’t magically appear in her inbox.

Lisa built her speaking business the old-fashioned way: by picking up the phone, starting conversations, following up, and staying connected without becoming the person prospects dread hearing from.

As the founder of Grategy, Lisa has spent more than 15 years turning conversations into clients, repeat business, referrals, and long-term relationships. Her sales background spans industrial sales, healthcare continuing education, executive recruiting, and professional speaking, giving her plenty of experience hearing “no,” getting ghosted, navigating gatekeepers, and figuring out what actually gets someone to call you back.

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