Public or Professional Speaker?

What’s in a Name?

Jim Bearden, CSP, is a professional speaker, but since many people refer to Jim’s work as “public speaking”, we wanted to help you understand the differences—as we see them—between public and professional speaking. Jim will gladly respond to either label, but there really are some differences.

Public Speakers

Many people find themselves in jobs that require them to make presentations or deliver speeches. For example, salespeople may have to make presentations to decision-making groups (committees).  Their primary responsibility is converting prospects into customers, and making effective sales presentations is one of the many tools (skills) they employ for doing so. In order to be successful, they must make effective presentations, and since they make their presentations “in public”, we can certainly refer to them as “public speakers”. 

Likewise, corporate executives make presentations to their employees, board members  and other constituency groups.  Their primary responsibilities relate to the effective operations of their companies, and making effective presentations is only one of the tasks they perform.  Like the salespeople in our previous example, they are “public speakers”, but neither they nor the salespeople are professional speakers.

Professional Speakers

A key difference between public and professional speakers, is the role speaking plays in their work.  For public speakers, making presentations may be something they periodically do—and even do quite well—but it is not their profession.  Professional speakers must rely exclusively on their speaking ability to achieve their professional goals and objectives. Where public speakers may do presentations as a means to an end, for professional speakers, doing effective presentations is the means and the end.

Professional speakers must understand the objectives of the groups they will address and translate that understanding into relevant content, materials and delivery, relying exclusively on their professional speaking skills to read (understand), connect with and influence their audiences. If they’ve been around for long, you can be sure that they’re very good at doing all that, and that’s what makes them Professional Speakers.