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MarketingJuly 14, 2026 · 4 min read

Speaking Is the Funnel

Every audience you stand in front of buys something, your kit, your class, your membership, your trips. Why stages beat ads, and how to claim authority in a niche nobody owns yet.

Claire B. Soares speaking at the podium

If I could only keep one marketing channel, it wouldn't be social media, and it wouldn't be ads. It would be stages. Every single audience you talk to buys your products, some grab the free resource, some join the class, some become clients for years. A stage is the only channel where authority, attention, and trust arrive already bundled.

Every single audience you talk to is going to buy your products.

Claire B. Soares·Travel AI Conference planning call, January 2026

Why speaking compounds

  • Borrowed trust: the event vetted you, so the audience starts warm, no ad can buy that.
  • One-to-many sales: forty-five minutes in front of three hundred right-fit people outperforms months of one-to-one outreach.
  • The assets multiply: every talk produces clips, photos, testimonials, and the credibility line "as presented at…", fuel for every other channel you run.

Claire's own numbers

The framework, step by step

  1. 1

    Borrowed trust

    the event vetted you, so the audience starts warm, no ad can buy that.

  2. 2

    One-to-many sales

    forty-five minutes in front of three hundred right-fit people outperforms months of one-to-one outreach.

  3. 3

    The assets multiply

    every talk produces clips, photos, testimonials, and the credibility line "as presented at…", fuel for every other channel you run.

Claire's own framework from this essay, in the order she teaches it.

Source: Claire B. Soares, from her own travel business and live trainings.

Claim the blank space

The deeper play is authority. I went looking for who owns the intersection of travel and AI, genuinely searched for the person conference boards would call first, and found the space wide open. If we want it, it's ours. That's true of your niche too: somewhere there's an intersection of your expertise that nobody has claimed from a stage yet. The person who starts pitching talks on it this quarter becomes its default expert within a year.

Build the talk, pitch the rooms where your buyers already gather, and put a resource with your name on it in every seat. The stage does the rest.

Common Questions

Is speaking a good marketing channel for travel advisors?

One of the strongest, because authority, attention, and borrowed trust arrive bundled. The event vetted you, so the audience starts warm in a way advertising cannot buy.

How do you get speaking engagements in the travel industry?

Build one talk aimed at a specific audience, pitch the rooms where your buyers already gather, and give every attendee a takeaway resource with your name on it.

What should you give a speaking audience?

Something they keep. Claire gives every attendee her free Travel AI Kit, which serves the room and builds her email list from every stage she takes.

Claire B. Soares

Written By

Claire B. Soares

6× Condé Nast Top Travel Specialist, Certified AI Consultant, and founder of Travel AI University. $3.4B+ in enterprise travel software sold to Google, IBM, Boeing, the federal government, and the DoD; $16M+ in luxury travel sales with Up in the Air Life.

About Claire

Put It Into Practice

Get the setup this essay assumes.

The free Travel AI Kit: privacy, my custom instructions word for word, and your connectors — the complete foundation, in one afternoon.