KEYNOTE SPEAKER • TOM STEARNS
Give your audience something they’ll use on Monday.
Visual, practical keynotes that turn fuzzy problems around sales, leadership and culture into clear decisions people can act on.
Explore the Keynotes
Inspiration fades. Clear thinking sticks.
A keynote should do more than fire people up for an hour.
It should give them a new way to see a problem, shared language for discussing it and something useful to do when they get back to work.
Tom Stearns uses stories, sharp visuals and simple frameworks to make complex business problems easier to understand, and harder to ignore.
No theory dump. No bullet-point graveyard.
Want to explore a possible session with Tom?
Schedule NowKeynote Topics
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Culture Is Built in the Hard Decisions
How leaders turn company values into behaviors people can see, follow and trust.
Culture is often treated as the happy byproduct of good leadership and nice people.
It isn’t.
Culture is deliberately built through the behaviors leaders define, reward, tolerate and confront.
Culture = Values + Behaviors + Hard Decisions
This keynote gives leaders a practical way to move culture off the wall and into the everyday decisions that determine how a company actually works.
The audience will learn:
- How to turn broad company values into observable behaviors
- Why different departments may need different behaviors to support the same value
- How policies, incentives and leadership habits can quietly contradict stated values
- Why values only become credible when leaders defend them through difficult decisions
- How to recognize, coach and correct behavior more consistently
Best for: Company summits, leadership offsites, growing organizations and teams navigating change.
“I hired Tom to Keynote our recent growth summit on the topic of culture, which is also an entire chapter in his book. He took the time to tailor the message to our organization, delivered it in a way that drove a meaningful discussion and provided us a framework to implement.”
— Adam Smith, President, Luxor Workspaces, an EBSCO company
The Playbook Problem
Why more activity, more tools and more AI won’t fix inconsistent prospecting.
Most companies don’t have a prospecting problem. They have a playbook problem.
When pipeline falls short, leaders usually ask for more activity. Reps get new tools, new sequences and new scripts. But the underlying problem remains: everyone is making the most important prospecting decisions differently.
A prospecting playbook isn’t a collection of templates. It’s a decision system.
Based on Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook (for Sales Leaders), this keynote shows leaders how to turn scattered tactics and tribal knowledge into a system the entire team can run.
The audience will learn:
- The three decisions behind effective prospecting: who to prioritize, what problem they may have and why now
- Why scripts and templates can’t compensate for weak thinking
- How to give reps structure without eliminating judgment
- How leaders can coach prospecting quality instead of merely counting activity
- Where AI improves a strong prospecting system—and scales a bad one faster
Best for: Sales kickoffs, revenue leadership meetings, GTM events and VC/PE portfolio gatherings.
Built for the room. Not pulled off the shelf.
Every audience has its own language, pressures and history.
Before the event, Tom works with organizers to understand the audience, the business context and what people should leave thinking or doing differently. He then adapts the stories and examples so the keynote feels like it belongs in the room.
Not like someone pasted your logo onto slide one.
Slides are the backdrop. The ideas are the point.
Tom combines visual storytelling, real business examples, humor and practical frameworks to keep people engaged without turning the presentation into entertainment for entertainment’s sake.
The goal is simple: make the idea clear enough to remember and useful enough to apply.
Keynote or keynote plus working session
Each topic can be delivered as a standalone keynote or expanded into an interactive workshop that helps the audience apply the framework.
Available formats include:
- 45–60-minute keynote
- Keynote plus interactive workshop
- Prospecting keynote with copies of Graphic Sales for attendees
About Tom Stearns
Tom Stearns is a sales consultant, trainer and co-author—with Peter Cleary—of Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook (for Sales Leaders).
He has spent more than 27 years helping companies determine why their go-to-market teams aren’t working, and what to do about it. His background across visual design, marketing, sales and consulting gives him an unusual ability to make complicated business problems visible and understandable.
Tom works primarily with leaders of scaling and struggling GTM teams, helping them replace guesswork with practical systems their people can actually use.
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Give your audience something worth talking about afterward.
Planning a sales kickoff, company summit, leadership offsite or portfolio event?
Let’s talk about your audience, the outcome you need and the keynote that fits.
