How to Prove You’re a Thought Leader (Instead of Just Saying It) This episode unpacks…
300 episodes of Thought Leadership
Celebrate Leveraging Thought Leadership’s 300th Episode!
A look back at highlights from episodes with Scott Miller, Mark Victor Hansen, Jeff DeGraff, Dorie Clark, Melanie Huet, and Mike Kleinemaß.
Over the past three years, Peter and Bill have interviewed hundreds of guests learning their stories, sharing advice, and expanding each other’s understandings of the various facets of the thought leadership market. Today we celebrate our landmark 300th episode by looking back at a few of the many great guests that we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing.
We start with Scott Miller, Executive Vice President of Thought Leadership at Franklin Covey, the host of On Leadership with Scott Miller and co-author of Everyone Deserves a Great Manager. Scott explains how he helps clients get up to speed on mixed platforms. Also, he discusses why you need to have one established before publishers will seriously look at you. In addition, we talk about the art and science of speaking.
Second, from the best-selling franchise Chicken Soup for the Soul and author of other best sellers such as The Power of Focus, The Aladdin Factor, and Dare to Win we sit down with Mark Victor Hansen. Mark shares how he has harnessed the power of licensing for books and beyond.
Next, Peter speaks to the “Dean of Innovation” Jeff DeGraff. Jeff is the founder of the Innovatrium, a professor and is the bestselling author of The Creative Mindset. We discuss forging your own path as a thought leader and how creativity and innovation come from positive deviance.
Afterwards, Peter talks with one of the Top 50 Thinkers in the world Dorie Clark. She is the author of Entrepreneurial You and Reinventing You as well as a business professor at Duke and Columbia University. Dorie shares how she has transformed her standard offerings to the digital world during COVID-19 and how she continues to deliver value in this new medium.
Organizational Thought Leaders
Then, we shift gears to our Organizational Thought Leadership series where Bill interviews Melanie Huet. the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Serta Simmons Bedding. Melanie shares how she helped transform a hundred-year-old company by understanding the culture, building trust, and helping others realize their role in the change.
Finally, we wrap up this great compilation episode with Mike Kleinemaß, Digital Marketing & Communications Expert at ThyssenKrupp, a company that deals with engineering and construction of plant technology. Mike explains why building and maintaining a relationship on Linkedin means having two-way conversations that help others solve their problems and provide value.
We want to thank all of our guests and especially our listeners for being part of our podcast journey. We hope you’ll continue to listen, share, and learn for years to come.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. We can help you implement marketing, research, sales and other aspects so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick Hi, this is Peter when I wanted to take a moment and thank you all for being part of the podcast community that we’ve been able to create together over the last three years. We launched this in 2018 as an experiment, and here we are three years later coming up on episode number 300. We have been so fortunate in the quality of guests that we’ve had. Dan Pink, Tom Peters, Rita McGrath. Sharlene Lee, Marshall Goldsmith. Stephen M.R. Covey. The list goes on and on and on. Everyone coming on to share with us their stories, their trials, their tribulations, how they see the world, how they’re operating. Your thought leadership business. However, without you, the listeners, none of this would be possible. So I appreciate your ongoing support. I appreciate your comments and I appreciate you downloading us a couple of times this week and sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues who you think could benefit from what we have to say. So thanks again. Honored hope you enjoyed this compilation episode number 300 that we put together for you.
Peter Winick Today. Our next is Scott Miller. I’m really excited about this episode. I’ll give you a brief highlight of his bio and then we’ll dive right into. Scott is entering his 24th year with Franklin Covey. He’s the EVP of Thought Leadership, which is the coolest job in the world other than mine. He’s the host of the Franklin Covey, sponsored on Leadership with Scott Miller. He leads Strategy Development, a publication of Franklin companies bestselling books and thought leadership. And he has been the EVP of Biz Dev and chief marketing Officer. Plus, he is also as if you need another box to check the coauthor of Wall Street Journal bestseller, Everyone Deserves a Great Manager. The Six Practices for Leading a Team. So welcome, Scott. Don’t even know where to start. So I think the old model and by old, I mean maybe 15 years ago of the path of a thought leader, whether there was someone at your organization or outside. Right. Would be they’ve got this expertise. Then typically they get a book deal. Magic happens right? They get a book deal, then they write a book. Right. And then they probably would start speaking. And then there’s a lot of other problems, right? Today, the book is more important and less important. Right? So number of books sold times dollars made per book is not the formula. If this was any other business and I was in the pen business and I had a new pen and you and I invested in the pen company, we’d say, okay, great. How many pens did we sell? What’s our margin, what’s our contribution? How we’re growing? It wouldn’t be well, for every pen that we sell, 40% of the people that buy a pens buy these other things from us. But that’s really what this is about. I want to touch on it. Typically fairly easy for a thought leader to go from writing a book to speaking. With some exceptions. Today, the modalities are just limitless, which I find exciting in terms of possibilities. But there are many thought leaders that choke on that Meaning, you know, if you’re more of an academic, if you’re someone that’s more deliberate, more introverted. Tik Tok might not be your jam. You know, you know, your point of going from call to call to call to call, doing five minutes soundbites and then, you know, doing things that are visual. You’ve got to have this mixed modality. So how do you how do you support folks in that? Because doesn’t mean they have to be experts in that. But how do you how do you support the folks that you work with and getting them up to speed?
Scott Miller Yeah, not just mixed modality, but really mixed platforms. Writing meaning that publishers won’t even touch you right now if you don’t have, you know, a half million YouTube subscribers or, you know, 500,000 Instagram followers. Unfortunately, social media or fortunately is a big, important medium on distribution. Now we look for a couple of things. We look for credibility. First, performance, you know, how do you have credible experience? Sorry, you can’t write a leadership book. And Franklin Covey, if you’ve been a consultant for 20 years, sorry, but you have to have like hired and fired and performance planned and metatarsal and run a business for 20 years. So you don’t have any 23 year old life coaches. And we don’t we don’t see how that works. It’s why a lot of our authors are right are, you know, maybe in their mid-forties. Most of them are 50s and 60s because you got to have the credibility, you got to have the character, you have to align to our brand, you have to have the reps. I tell you, I think some of our best thought leaders are the people who can stand up in front of an audience virtually or physically 100 or 10,000 and share stories of their journeys like real stories. This happened. And since she said this and then I did that and that he did that. And then together we all went and did this right. We took nothing and turned it into something. And here’s all the mistakes that we made, right? It here’s the insight from that. I think that storytelling ability is so important. The ability to really reduce your words into thoughts and writing and speaking, you’ve got to have some charisma. You’ve got to have some exact age ability, related ability. I think it’s all.
Peter Winick And what translates. And that’s not a requirement for a great author. Not at all. No. You could be the most into. Very quiet, shy, whatever that writes the most amazing, brilliant book. But you’re not going to win in this game, right? Just and it just it’s fair or not, doesn’t really matter. It’s going to be really, really difficult to win. And the flip side of that is I’ve seen plenty out there that are, you know, all charisma, no gravitas that we’ve seen them. We we’ve seen them. Right.
Scott Miller You know, go to the World Business Forum in New York City for year and there every year. Yeah, right. I mean, I go every year for 15 years and you see, you know, some of the flash in the pan that have no credibility, but they’re funny and engaging. You would hire them to come to your own company conference and then use people that are, you know, Nobel laureates or, you know, economic experts like it was a narcoleptic sleep or they had 40 PowerPoint slides and they put you into an hour club to sleep. So there is this art of authenticity. And also does this person had the chops. I mean, when someone is becoming a thought leader in our firm, I rigorously put them through the sausage grinder. I mean, we fly them to some of the biggest theaters in the nation. And so, you know, Aerosmith was on stage last night, literally Aerosmith last night. And then today we have the stage with one person and spotlights and a coach sitting way out, like in seat, you know, 6000. Right. With a blow horn. No start walk back on. Why are your hands in your nose? What do you do with them? Right. I mean what is your pacing? It’s an art. Yeah. It’s also some science. So we work diligently on your presence, your physical presence. We work on your authentic voice, on your social media, curating your stories, making sure that you can speak credibly to different audiences, that you can master podcast radio interviews. Yep, Webcast that you’re both good on video and on audio, right? I mean, we go through all those things we have to train.
Peter Winick I think you implied it, but there’s a style piece where it’s not prescriptive, but some folks want to be more transparent and more casual. Some folks are more buttoned up, some folks it’s more logical where you’re doing a short form video in the back of a you know, in Uber talking about things for others that would be awkward. And there is no you have to do all of true. That’s true. I think some of it is experimental because there’s nothing worse than without naming names, you see certain folks that have been out there buttoned up, whatever, and all of a sudden they hit, you know, like 55, and now they’re wearing hoodies and you’re like, what the heck is that all about? Yeah, yeah, we that just like that just doesn’t work.
Scott Miller You see it in political candidates. You see that. You see what they tried to do to Sarah Palin, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Cindy McCain, who’s obviously a phenomenal person, did not succeed. You know, what am I what am I best stories is Stephen M.R. Covey. Dr. Covey’s eldest son wrote a phenomenal book called The Speed of Trust. Right. Great pinnacle of the game. A few years ago, I was sitting down. I was not as wise or as mature as I have grown older to be. I sat Stephen down and I said, Stephen, I want you to do this and this and be this and be this and be this. I was coaching him on his personality and he looked at me and he said, Scott and I can only be myself.
Peter Winick So today is one of those rare days I get to interview a legend. So weird I start. So Mark Victor Hansen is probably best known as the coauthor of Chicken Soup for the Soul, which is a book series. It’s a brand. He has sold over 500 million books. So I think on most week you probably beat the Bible. Not that it’s a competition, but that’s a lot of books. You built an empire in this space. Some of your popular books have been the power focus, the Latin Factor, Dare to Win. The list goes on and on and on. So I don’t want to waste time talking about your accolades because we only have 20 minutes and that would take hours. So let’s just dive in. So there’s so many ways we can go, but I want to go back to licensing, right? So, yeah, so my world with my client base is traditionally B2B, so authors, thought leaders, academics selling business content into businesses. So totally different business model. You’re more in the B2C where it’s selling valuable, you know, providing value in exchange to individuals paying with their own dollars. So very different cadence, very different sort of rhythms and things in that business. But licensing is licensing. So I push a lot of my clients to consider licensing from the perspective of, Hey, you know, you’re given a you wrote a book, you’re giving a keynote, you’re doing some advisory work with big company X, they would love the rights to a sliver of your content to be used in a well-defined way internally in their organization. Right. And people, you know. Yeah. So people don’t realize that they get so enamored with the book. Very, very few people you’re one of them actually make money on books, right? The book is the entree into other things like licensing. Give me how did you first discover or what was your first sort of foray into licensing Good, bad or ugly? Because you’ve obviously figured out how to do it properly.
Mark Victor Hansen I’m going to you’ve asked two questions at the same time. So let me go to that second and the first. All of us that are in B2B, which I’m in, a lot of B2B, I can sell to a lot of big companies or consulting, and I’m not allowed to use the name because we’re about to come out with a commercial. They want it to be a surprise. But one of the three biggest companies in America agree with that, that, okay, an Arab B2B company and they’re there. Their market is going to help because the supply chains in America are dead. Now, I’ve heard them twice on two of their mastermind podcast. And what they did is they came to Chris Clark and said, look, you guys are some of the best thinkers. You’re leading Edge, you’ve done the best selling capes ever, taught how to think bigger, never thought you could think. Do you see a way out of this? I said, Yeah, yeah, we got to go B2C and here’s the products we can go to Key because Amazon is killing your business in case you guys don’t have it. Shipping 50% of everything sold in America to go, What are we going to do? And I said, You’re going to license my thinking. We own the trademarks. We own the IP, by the way. I did that seminar is you know, I wrote a book, A11 Minute Millionaire with Bob Dylan, and we built ways of IP that you ought to be making money. In other words, B2B is one way. You’re exactly correct. But there are 38 ways. There’s a lot to this thing, and most people don’t study the full market. And go back to how I got into licensing one weekend, because as you and I have talked, that we’re both omnivorous readers. I’m reading Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’s book at the time, what, five kids and six grandkids. But at the time, a little girl was watching E.T. call home.
Peter Winick Yeah.
Mark Victor Hansen So you see how all this is. And when I came to the licensing, it’s probably 1990, not any. I read it and they made $800 million with it. But. But the two boys made it. Their partners, as you know, made a billion and a half in licensing. And I went into Jack’s office on Monday and I said, Jack, we’re going to go licensing. He said, what they’ll do, you know, I said, Nothing. I ship a buck. He taught me everything’s a system and it’s a circle. So you’re either inside or outside. We’re outside. But in a year, I will know everything there is about lighting. I go to the natural lighting. So I will master this thing. I’ll find out who the 3 or 4 best people are and we’re going to partner with them. And, you know, two of them turned me down and one took us in. And we just did we did keep licensing. The fun one for me was when I’m nine years old, I sold greeting cards for American Greeting Card Company. I sold 376 boxes in one month because I wanted to buy a bicycle and we sold on consignment. It was a Boy Scout Life magazine. 40 years later, they come to my office, they come in their little Gulfstream and say, Hey, we want you guys to write greeting cards. Jack said, What do you know? I said, Nothing. But it’s another part of the license, right? We sold 897,000 boxes of Christmas cards. The first year that I wrote, Jack okayed them because he said There’s no better editor in the world of Jack. I mean, sure, he knows Latin, he knows English, he knows Chinese is Chinese. All right. They sure did not. And he’s brilliant. You know, I’m teasing with you in the audience because everyone knows Dr. Camp. So the point is, we got into licensing and it just went crazy because nobody had ever licensed books. And I guess why? I mean, that’s where we are today. If you got to being in the end, the crisis equals opportunity with the biggest crisis. Peter So we got the biggest opportunity. And ladies and gentlemen, I’m telling you what I really want you to catch. The first thing I said in answer to Peter’s two questions was be to be you’ve got to be awake to be to see. And you take a piece of whatever the company doesn’t be to see for like in cash and in stock is it I’m now going into company after come in all by zoom and are having the same problem because they can’t think.
Peter Winick Today my guest is Jeff DeGraff which I’m really excited about today’s episode. Jeff is an advisor to Fortune 500 companies, A professor at the Ross School of Business at U of M, has simultaneously creative and pragmatic approach to making innovation happen, has led clients and colleagues to dump him. The Dean of Innovation. He’s written several books. If I went through all the titles, we’d be halfway out of time, probably 7 or 8. And he’s appeared pretty much everywhere. Ink, Fortune, Psychology Today, ET cetera, etc. If you don’t know who he was prior to this, you will after. And you should have. So here we are. Welcome. Welcome aboard, Jeff.
Jeff DeGraff Thanks for having me. I’m Peter.
Peter Winick If you and I were to go to the dentist and ask our dentist how we got here, we can predict the answer to the story. Blah, blah, blah. Went to dental school, blah, blah, blah. I’m a dentist. If you ask any of my clients and friends and colleagues how they got here and they gave the answers just like you did, if my dentist gave me that, I’d be out of that chair so quick. Right? But in this world, it’s part of the beauty. And the amazing part of it is that there is no logical linear. You’ve got to do Abcde if like.
Jeff DeGraff There is no career for people like us. You have to make your job. You have to make your career and you’re making it up as you go along. And so those very skills that are get you in trouble when you’re young are the very skills that separate you when you when you enter the workplace, because there is nobody. Giving you the problem set, you have to figure it out.
Peter Winick Well, so let’s go to the four minutes. So part of that is I would argue that you would be a horrible employee at a Fortune 500. Right. Because you’re questioning things, you’re innovating, you’re creating, you’re pushing back or whatever, All the stuff that makes you the best at what you do would make you the worst at something else that lots of other people do. There are many people who think I’m a terrible employee at the University of Michigan. Well, thank God for tenure, right? Yes, Right, right.
Jeff DeGraff Yeah, but that but that’s the whole thing. The whole aspect. I was just on a call this morning with the government of Singapore is I’ve been advisor to government of Singapore. And one of the things that I was talking to this one guy and it was just amazing. He talked about how he created his lab. And here I am in my lab across the street from the University of Michigan. I build it with a partner and my own money. And it’s exhibiting a lot of self authorizing behavior. And he talked about the same thing. And it was really funny encounters the same issues with bureaucracy because innovation is a form of positive deviance, correct? It is created by deviance. I don’t know how to put this. So what happens is in the institutional mode, bureaucracies love to pull things to standardization, and innovation requires the more deviant the innovation is, the more valuable it is. Assuming that it works. Sure. So you can imagine that all bureaucracies basically try and assimilate innovation. That’s why innovation doesn’t happen at the heart of big companies. So this is why I get called into all these big companies, right? That happens at the boundaries. And only people lived at the boundaries of where, you know, there’s a lot of white space, you know, but with the big companies have the balance sheets and the systems and the processes to acquire the innovative and give them more leverage and scale their theory, many times, no, no. And that’s part of the growth mechanism. If you think about this for a minute, there’s kind of a pyramid here, and it’s but it’s a pyramid that starts at the bottom and then goes all the way to the top with startups and it works the other way around. So if you think about innovation for a minute, the bottom of the pyramid is always going to be research. There’s 21 research universities in this country. I’m lucky enough to teach at the second largest one that, you know, unlocking the secrets of nature. It’s very you know, you live a kind of a monastic life, and I do, too. Then it has to go to where you have to be there technology transfer. And that can happen with companies. It can happen with institutes. Then, of course, finally it goes to either a startup that’s willing to take a chance, you know, and eventually that has to sell out to a larger company. It’s got channels of scope and scale. That’s the least that’s the American system you’re talking about. Singapore is going to be different. But that’s our system. And so the real challenge of all of this is living with people who have very different skills and very different views of the world and making those hand-offs work. That’s where we get yeah, I love it.
Peter Winick So I’m really, really excited about today’s guests, which is Dorie Clark, because her and I can talk for hours on thought leadership. So I’ll give you a just sort of I was reading Doris Bio earlier today and I’m totally depressed and feel like an underachiever, so I would like all of you to feel the same. So I’ll share it with you. So Dorie has been named one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by thinkers, 50 recognized as the number one communication coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Award. She’s the keynote speaker. She teaches at Duke at the Fuqua School of Business and at Columbia Business School. She’s been recognized as a branding expert. I want to fast forward to like the cool stuff that people probably don’t know. Harvard Business Review written a bunch of bestsellers, but at age 14, you went to the college program for exceptionally gifted kids. And in 18 you graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College, right? 18 I was trying to figure I had open a beer with my teeth. So there’s a bit of a difference between us. And then of course, a couple of years later you got a master’s in theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. So without further ado, let’s just sort of dive in. So break down for us sort of what you see as sort of traditional opportunities that are still working well for thought leaders and maybe some new and creative and innovative ways thought leaders, because there’s still messages to get out. There’s still people that love to hear your stuff. This intermediary phase of getting from people on a stage in Vegas that’s temporarily sort of on hold. So what are you seeing? What are you doing that’s different?
Dorey Clark Yeah, sure. Certainly. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, so I’m glad you asked. This was actually the topic of my of my most recent book, which was called Entrepreneurial You. And it’s basically a book about how to create multiple income streams in your business. So I’m pretty attuned to this for a while. So certainly you’re right, a lot of people in the thought leadership space, including myself, made a significant chunk of money from keynote speaker speeches, which has been hit the hardest. But there’s a lot of other areas that I have been trying to build over time and encouraging other people to as well. I would say that probably the most notable standout has been. Online courses which have performed like a champion during Covid. So for me personally, I started experimenting with it in 2014, and I did a course for first for Creative Live. Then I did a course for a company called Learning Li, which was partnered with The Economist. Then in 2016, I started working with LinkedIn Learning and also began launching my own courses independently, and so have been doing a lot with that. And that has really. Just there was a dramatic uptick in terms of what has been possible with Covid for my flagship course, which is called recognized expert. I would typically get about 50 people per time to register for it. And, you know, it’s a $2,000 course. So it was, you know, a decent moneymaker. But I decided I wasn’t sure if it would be a great success or a terrible failure. Shortly after Covid, I’m like, I really don’t know what the what the pulse is here.
Peter Winick Sure.
Dorey Clark But I did a launch in May and 125 people signed up for it. I mean, it was just by far more interest than I had experienced. So I think there’s a real hunger for that. So I think that that’s definitely a key thing. I’ve also shifted to masterminds that I run online as well.
Peter Winick So I want to unpack the courses though. So, so I’ve seen many of your courses and they’re really well done. And what I mean by that are people that are speakers, consultants used to delivering value to their clients in a face to face environment or consulting environment or as a professor or whatever they hear, well, everybody’s doing an online course, so I’ll just take my iPhone and hit record and blabber, right? And because that sort of works for me when I’m in the room and I think people I don’t think they do intentionally, but I don’t think they have a level of awareness or respect for instructional design and what it really takes to produce a quality course. It’s not just about the video and the slick graphics and the handouts and all that stuff, but really being able to chunk something down into sort of it’s in almost the elements and say, okay, I the curse of the expert is I just know, right? So if someone, someone wants to ask you a question, you just sort of know right off the top of your head because you’ve seen it before. But if you have to decompose that so that it’s teachable, that’s not an easy thing to do. So did you get help from a learning efficacy and structural design standpoint in terms of breaking your think like how did you how did you conquer that? Because you’ve done a great job at it.
Dorey Clark Yeah. Thank you, Peter. I did not I did not hire an instructional designer. I was, you know, partly because I was I was too cheap to do it because I just didn’t know if it work. I didn’t know if anyone would be interested. So I certainly wasn’t going to shell out a ton of money for something that, like, nobody cares. So I was really committed to like, All right, what is our minimum viable product? Like, how do how do we test this sucker? So I think one of the things that was extremely valuable for me in April of 2016, I launched a pilot for the Expert course. So I, I decided that I would test it with a small group of people. I capped it at 40 people and I did it at a steep discount. I offered it for 500 bucks. And I, you know, hey, we’re testing this out. Who wants to basically be the guinea pig? And so for 500 bucks, people were willing to take a chance. And so it was actually it was great in terms of validation for the premise because in 4 or 5 minutes it sold out. I sent the message and, you know, less than an hour later we filled it. But I created the course in real time with those participants. So okay, it’s kind of part of the bargain. I surveyed them relentlessly. And so before it was like a six week program and before every week I would say, okay, the topic this week is finding your breakthrough idea. What are your questions? What problems have you had? What have you tried before that didn’t work, etc., etc. And I’d ask them all these questions and I would create the material based on their feedback and what they wanted to know. And then at the end of every week, I would say, What did you think of this session? What did you like? What did you not like? What was confusing?.
Peter Winick So what I love about that is I have found in my work with clients that that there’s sort of there’s a continuum. There’s people that are you know, it takes them 11 years to write a book because the, you know, polished, polished, polished, polished. And, you know, ultimately it’s a fear of ship. It it’s a fear of failure. It’s a fear of, you know, I just got to tweak that one more thing. And then there’s the other folks that throw it out the door. Right. And it sounds like you’re closer to that, but in a in a more deliberate and thoughtful way, Right? Meaning you are transparent with this population and said, listen, I’ve got more than a hypothesis here. It’s not going to be perfect. And the bargain is you’ll get a financial discount. But I need the data. If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on. All major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.
Bill Sherman Today I’m pleased to sit down with Mel Heut. She’s the executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Serta Simmons Bedding Company. Welcome to the podcast, Mel.
Melanie Huet Thank you.
Bill Sherman So you’re serving on the student leadership team as chief marketing officer. I think you shared with me there’s been a transformation and you’ve shared some of that story. How do you take a company that has been around in various forms for over a century, almost a century and a half now, and start bringing it into new forms of telling stories and engaging with customers and partners in new ways. Talk a little bit about that transformation.
Melanie Huet Yeah, it’s been a tremendous journey and a lot of learnings for myself personally in growth. And when you think about how to drive a transformation, a couple things that I’ve learned in this job is one of the first things you have to do is you have to understand the culture that you’re operating in. So there’s a period of learning and listening and just understanding where you are. And during that time, it’s really important to build trust. So making sure that the people that you’re working with understand what your motivations are and they feel like they’ve been heard. And once that trust foundation is there, then you can start to bring in all the elements of a transformation. So here’s the place where we’re going to disrupt, here’s how we’re going to act differently, here’s how we’re going to behave. And I have found that specifically at this company, people are really willing to follow. As long as they understand where you’re going. So an important part is to communicate, communicate, communicate. Where are we headed? And then help them understand what is their role in delivering that transformation. And then you can actually move pretty quickly.
Bill Sherman Well, and I think this is one of the places where thought leadership connects is there’s a responsibility when you see a vision for the future to share that back and make it accessible first with your own internal team so they understand. Where are you going? How is this changing? But also how does it relate to who we’ve been before? And I want to ask you about an example of that. So I know that one of the projects that you sort of were instrumental in was recognizing there was a need in the market for young buyers looking for their first bed. Talk about that process and that transformation process within the organization and then how that led to product and also telling that story to a new audience.
Melanie Huet Yeah, that was a fun one. So we realized that the Simmons brand was virtually unused. In fact, it was just on some promotional product because we had separated Simmons from Beautyrest several years prior because consumers get confused. Serta, Simmons, Sealy.
Bill Sherman All right.
Melanie Huet Right. And so we said, let’s do the recipe address. And that’s a little bit easier to remember. So Simmons Brand is sitting out there and we understood there was an untapped whitespace in the market that nobody was really going after this first purchase, this first bed for the young consumer entering the marketplace with not a lot of disposable income. And so we said, okay, this is an opportunity for us. So we were the first company to have a variety of Gen Z insights. We took those consumer insights and understood that what they wanted was a hassle free crash pad. So just a place to crash and also a place to surf and watch movies and do the other things that are part of their lifestyle, because most of them either live in some type of bedroom or apartment or small space. And from there, I walked into the boardroom with a lot of men in their 50s to two 70s and said, We’re going to launch Simmons on TikTok’s 150 year old brand. And they’re like, What’s tick tock? And it’s going to be Gen Z and it’s going to be completely different. And I showed them the advertising and the look and feel of it. I think they thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. But they trusted me and off we went. And it’s been a huge success.
Bill Sherman So let’s unpack that a little bit further, because this is a wonderful example of not only having to tell a news story within the organization, but then also reach a new audience. So let’s look at them separately. Let’s start with the board. How do you did you prepare and present that in a way that if they’ve not encountered Tik Tok before, you know how did you make this accessible to them?
Melanie Huet Sure. It was part of my larger overall strategy, which is I had laid out a house of brands and said, Here’s the role of each brand in our house of brands and how we’re going to go attack the marketplace with unique and differentiated products. Because one of our issues was our products had become too similar. So I laid the groundwork of the overall strategy and then showed this this whitespace and our ability to move quickly. And from a business perspective, that was a pretty easy sell in for them. And then they just had to trust on the creative. And I mean, that’s what I do on the right.
Bill Sherman Right. But at the same time, the question of what is Tik Tok and do people make purchasing decisions based off of it is a hurdle for some people because if they haven’t made purchasing decisions based off of other social media, then you’ve got to leap to tick tock in that format.
Melanie Huet That’s right. Yeah. And so I did explain to them who’s on Tick Tock and what it means and how it’s one of the fastest growing platforms. And they were like, Well, I don’t understand how a bed would integrate into Tick tock. And we had a really great. Advertising agency, the Burns Group, which we are still engaged with on Simmons, and they came up with snooze a palooza.
Bill Sherman So that’s a great phrase.
Melanie Huet It had it was very culturally relevant because all of the concerts have been canceled and basically all of the outings and events that young people do have been canceled. So we said, you know, we know you’re here, has been canceled, but you can join snooze a palooza. And so the idea was you fall down backwards onto your bed and then you make a chick talk about being at a concert or doing something fun. And it generated 5 billion impressions. Now we have some money for 1 billion, and this thing just exploded.
Bill Sherman Today I sit down with my client, Imus. He’s a digital marketing communications specialist for Tizen Industrial Solutions, specifically in the mining technology business unit. Welcome to the show, Mike.
Mike Kleinemaß Hi, Bill. Nice to meet you. Happy to be part of your Thought Leadership podcast.
Bill Sherman You’re in a business where the sales cycle is long. It’s a big ticket sale. No one is jumping out and saying, okay, we need to do mining engineering today. Right. It’s a deal that takes a while. And I’m assuming there’s also a trust component to those relationships as well, that you don’t want to just show up once and say, hey, buy from us. It’s about nurturing a relationship. Is that correct?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, definitely. It’s all about establishing a social relationship. It’s all about engaging with your contacts and prospects and the people on Linked in. It’s not just one directional communications where you just pushing out messages or trying to hot sell something. It’s more about maintaining a relationship there and demonstrating that you are helpful to your network. And if you’re capable of doing that, of demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about and that you are tackling the challenges of your contacts, then you just become the thought leader of a relevant person to them in order to talk about also business problems.
Bill Sherman And I think you key into something that is very important. Old school thought leadership was. You stood on stage and you gave a speech or you wrote a book or a white paper. You put information out there and then people read it. Now it is two directional, right? You’ve got to listen. You’ve got to ask questions and you’ve got to respond to what others care about. If you’re simply putting content out there and hoping others read it, it’s a busy, noisy digital space and you’re unlikely to get noticed, right?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And this is really interesting is that kind of paradigm shift that is actually disrupting the whole media industry because years ago the journalists were the gatekeepers and were just writing articles and maybe got some feedback by post analog messages. And now they actually are receiving feedback comments within seconds. They are on the digital channels and this also gives them more possibilities. But is also more work actually a more democratic approach to the media business and also to communications? And this is really interesting because you have a thought leader you need to be yeah, you need to engage with your with your followership and be reachable also for potential questions and comments. And yeah, everything got so much more dynamic you’ve gone through.
Bill Sherman We’re just in a bit of a transformation and helping people because learning these new digital skills isn’t something that happens overnight. Let’s talk about that journey and some of the work that you’ve been doing, because there’s some stories that you’ve shared with me that I think are really applicable for others who are trying to guide either a sales force or sales engineering team. How have you been helping people through this digital transformation? What have you been doing?
Mike Kleinemaß Yeah, well, first of all, it’s important that everyone in the organization understands that the customer journey has been shifted from the traditional journey to a more digital journey, especially since Covid 19, but also before, and that the classical platforms like trade fairs and magazines and brochures and also in-person meetings have become less relevant and limited. So it is important to understand that the touchpoints have become much more digital, even in B2B. And that it is important to be there. And it is a journey that has an especially in me to be has more than one touchpoint. It’s not like, okay, people are Googling something and then they are buying something. It’s like, okay, they maybe they see an advert on LinkedIn and they click on it and see, okay, this group is doing this and that, and then they get another impulse and then they are fading away. The interest is fading away. And then a week after they remember, okay, this group is doing something interesting, like they have something about decarbonization and then mining some kind of solution there. And let’s Google on it again. And then they reach a landing page, maybe then a reading through it and then they’re fading away because they have some other things to do. And then maybe they go into YouTube or to research again. And in the end, they got in touch because they are convinced that maybe it’s just an. Might help them to solve this problem. So it’s a multi multi-touch journey.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage. Please visit our Web site at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com to reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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