Best of 2020 | John Jantsch, Jonah Berger, Tom Peters

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A look back at a few of our favorite guests of 2020.

Clips from John Jantsch, Jonah Berger, and Tom Peters.

Join us as we start the New Year by looking back at a few of our best guests of 2020.

We start with John Jantsch, the Founder of Duct Tape Marketing Consulting Network, and the author of The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. First, John discusses creating his consulting networking. He talks about packaging the content to be delivered by others. Then, explains how he maintains quality control over the process of those that join the network.

Next, we chat with Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and internationally bestselling author of Contagious, Invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. Jonah shares the challenges and joys of being a keynote speaker, how price can help you narrow down which engagements to take, the relationship you need to develop with the speaker’s bureaus, and why it’s important to add value off stage to your bookings

Last but not least, we finish with the incredible Tom Peters. Tom is the co-author of In Search of Excellence in addition to seventeen other books that have sold more than 10 million copies combined and recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award.  In addition, Tom discusses writing about Brand You. John shows how it is misinterpreted. Then, he reveals the evolution of how we see personal brands and intellectual property.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. And today, my guest is John James. John’s a rock star in the space. I’ve been I’ve been following John’s work for longer than I could or at least 15 years, maybe longer. So I’ll give you his official bio and then I’ll give you some more accolades. So John’s a marketing consultant. He’s a speaker, and he’s the author of Duct Tape Marketing, Duct Tape Selling the Commitment Engine, SEO for Growth and Referral Engine. He’s the founder of the Duct Tape Marketing Consulting Network. His latest book, The Self-reliant Entrepreneur Through 66 Daily Meditations To Feed Your Soul and Grow Your Business is a daily reminder to entrepreneurs that a better you makes a better business. So Jon, sort of a legend in the business, and I’m really happy that he is choosing to spend some time with us today. So welcome aboard, John.

John Jantsch Well, thanks, Peter.

Peter Winick So, Jon, you’ve got a bit of a different model than most where you’ve got a network of consultants and lots of speakers speak in order to generate direct consulting business. But you’ve now packaged sort of the, the models, the frameworks, the methodologies underneath your consulting process and have others doing the delivery through the networks. Tell me sort of why you made that choice, how that works for you. The good, the bad, the ugly.

John Jantsch Yeah, well, well, it works on a couple of levels. First off, I kind of backed into it. In other words, I was selling a course, I was doing some consulting, but I was also doing a lot more speaking and writing and so not really finding the time to do the consulting. I didn’t want to build a large organization, right. People started independent marketing consultants and agencies started coming saying, Hey, we want to use your course, your methodology, your materials to work with a business owner. So I like I said, I kind of backed into that and created the Duct tape marketing consultant network from about 150 consultants around the world today that are that are now working with, you know, at any given time, you know, thousands of small businesses. So in a lot of ways, it did allow me to kind of further my mission of helping small businesses. But then it also kind of took us out of building a, you know, a consulting organization. The good, the bad, the ugly, the good is I mean, I’ve got, you know, ambassadors. They support the mission. You know, they actually, you know, working with small business owners are great, great people that love collaboration. So in a lot of ways, it’s been really fun to build a network between you and me is less about me now than it certainly was because now you know, they contribute and they’re starting to create their own IP and things of that nature.

Peter Winick So it’s what’s interesting about that is the classic model of, you know, John the rock star, John’s the author, John’s the dude, right? And then you book John, you pay a whole bunch of money for that because you get a premium for that is different than when they have the trust and faith in the network book, you know, Fred and whoever, and realize that as being part of your network, the burden is on you, John, to have screened and validated, make sure he’s quality, make sure there’s some consistency in terms of following a framework and methodology. So what’s the, you know, any of the challenges in terms because I’ve seen other folks do this with coaching networks where there’s like me business good and bad, but, you know, finding the right people to follow in the right way and deliver a way that satisfies clients.

John Jantsch Yeah, I think you hit those are some of the key points. But it also I think for us, we learned that we’ve got to build infrastructure around it. I can’t guarantee that somebody is going to deliver exactly like I would, you know, in every situation. But the more training, the more connecting, the more real in-person event support we do, the more support we can get. It helps maintain the quality of what our point of view is or how we would do it kind of thing. But obviously the, you know, that takes that takes willing to invest in days, you know, of in-person events and things. So it in some ways it comes at a price. And the other option certainly is that there are people out there that, you know, sell the weekend certification training course and good luck. Where I think those have a bigger challenge is I think it’s harder to build true momentum with those. But also, you know, you really give away, you know, there is no quality control. You’re not putting your name on that necessarily.

Peter Winick Exactly. Exactly. And I would also say from an organizational perspective, you need to change your focus and say, yes, we care about the end user. Right. The guy that’s got the mid-cap company in Denver, we’re going to help. But actually, we’re of service to these consultants to make them successful and we have to support them. So you have to sort of change sort of what you’re doing and how you’re doing and what their needs are and how you can help them from a marketing branding and making them.

John Jantsch Completely. And between you and me, that’s, you know, that’s a lesson we had to learn, you know?

Peter Winick Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who’s the customer?

John Jantsch That came over time? Because, you know, when I first started the network, as I said, it was kind of like, sure, here’s another arm of the organization, but we’re still out here promoting our products and services. And, you know, it’s almost like we’ve got this channel, but now we’re competing with the channel. And so, yeah, that’s a yeah, that, that causes a little bit of grief. But, but you’re absolutely right. The network, the members of network, if we can make them successful, you know, our job of getting more of them and all those things just gets a lot easier.

Peter Winick I’m really, really excited today to speak to our guest. Our guest is Jonah Berger, who sort of needs no introduction, but I’ll give him a brief one anyway. So Jonah is a marketing professor of Wharton. He’s an internationally bestselling author of Contagious Invisible Influence and the Catalyst. Contagious was meant in a different context than the coronavirus world we’re unfortunately living in. He’s a world expert on change, word of mouth influenced consumer behavior and how products, ideas and behaviors catch on. He’s published a bunch of articles New York Times, Harvard Business Review, etc.. And without further ado, I’d like to welcome Jonah with us today.

Jonah Berger Thanks so much for having me.

Peter Winick So let’s talk about speaking just for a couple of minutes there, because that’s always a topic that’s of interest to people. So, you know, speaking to some that haven’t been there yet is, you know, it’s appealing, it’s sexy, it’s profitable, it looks glamorous, etc., etc.. And well, let’s be easy to just get up on stage and get paid a whole lot of money to do. Talk about what you love for an hour. Is that exactly how it looks?

Jonah Berger I wish it was that glamorous. Just let me know when it’s that glamorous. I’ll sign up. It sounds like an advertisement for speaking. Almost like when you see an advertisement for an airline. Everyone looks happy, the bags are on time, and then your real life experience is quite different. Yeah. You know, there are there are a lot of really fun parts about speaking. I love meeting and working with different industries. I love answering questions. That’s actually my favorite thing to do. Yeah, because you really get to connect the material to where people are and what they’re wrestling with. But there’s also a lot of less fun parts. You know, the travel is not particularly fun saying the same thing sometimes for not the first or second time can get old a little bit. And I also think it’s a different style of presenting ideas. It’s really about thinking, you know, how can we be both entertaining and engaging but also really provide valuable information in a short time slot? You know, sometimes some will say, we have 30 minutes. You know, can you both entertain people and give them, you know, five key takeaways that they can, you know, transform their business tomorrow? And that’s a big ask in 30 minutes.

Peter Winick Yeah. No pressure. Yeah. And by the way, there’s 4000 of them and they were out till two in the morning last night. Drinking alone. Yes. Good luck with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go.

Jonah Berger Go for it. And so, yeah, there’s. There’s a different time as you as you just pointed out, different time slots are more or less challenging. So I think there are a lot of really great parts and there are also some really challenging parts. But I think the fun for me has been learning that new skill. It’s made me a better teacher presenter in other contexts and it’s been fun to kind of get better at that area that I wasn’t necessarily as good at to start with.

Peter Winick So talk about sort of two pieces on the the business side of speaking. Number one is a sort of deal origination sort of bureaus versus direct. And then the second piece is. The weirdness of speaking in terms of the economics, where it’s interesting, you know, theoretically when you buy, you know, a six figure Mercedes, you intuitively know some of the major differences that it has between a that a $20,000 Hyundai, not so much with speaking like sort of the supply and demand rules are a little goofy.

Jonah Berger So yeah you know I’ll often get an email where someone will say, hey, can you can you come speak at this event? And I say something along the lines of, you know, I’d love to, I’d be happy to. You know, here, unfortunately, can’t do so much travel. You know, here’s the sort of standard rates. And some would say, but we, you know, found someone else that was willing to take, you know, one tenth of that amount. You know, can you can you speak for that? And it’s like, well, you know, first of all, I’m honored that you reached out. Like, I would love to help. And if you were, you know, my next door neighbor and all I had to do is walk out my door, walk to your house, I would be happy to do that event for free. Right? I mean. Right. And I think this is actually and probably many people have talked about it. I think this is the challenge where I feel really bad about turning people down because it’s not about the money. Right. But in some sense, you can’t do everything. And so the money ends up being a way to choose. You know, if you have a limited number of time, you know, there’s teaching, there’s research, their family, you can only be on the road so much time. And so you kind of have to prioritize those events that either pay more or that are closer to your sort of own beliefs. And so I certainly take on some events for free. And it’s not something projects for free pro bono if they fit with kind of my my worldview. But the challenge is, you know, when someone reaches out and you’ve kind of tapped out that bucket and they say, well, you know, why should we take you rather than someone else, you kind of say, Well, it’s really up to you. You know, I think I have a lot of value. And I and my clients believe I had a lot of value talk to them. But at a certain point, you know, if you think that someone that’s one tenth of the cost is going to provide this amount of value, you know, it’s really up to you.

Peter Winick Well, and I think the other side of that is, is and this is where I was alluding to before, the higher your price point gets due to market forces and credibility and all that, the easier it is. I mean, you know, someone says to me, hey, Peter, what’s the easiest way to generate $50,000 worth of speaking revenue and find a speaker that’s worth 50 K and sell them once this is a $5,000 speaker and have to sell that ten times just in terms of the level of sophistication of the buyer, the associations that, you know, like you said, you know, you go to your dentist and you need services done. You wouldn’t say to the dentist, but you know, there’s a guy down the road that’ll do it for you. And what do you think, Doc? Yeah, it just it just wouldn’t happen. So. But go back to the the Bureau versus Booking Direct. What’s your experience been? Is it changed sort of what the deals originate from?

Jonah Berger Yes. So most deals originate through the bureau. I get some direct that I can manage and then kick them back a portion of that and you know, have been generally happy with them over the years. Obviously, any relationship can be a little bumpy. There are better patches and there are worse patches. But I think that the one thing that I’ve seen loud and clear is that they have to understand you and the value you’re providing and how you can help clients. And I think that’s really on you as as a speaker. You know, I think early on I had this notion of, you know, I’ll just be on their list of folks. And yeah, if I have a good relationship with the management team, that’ll get events. But, you know, you may have a great relationship with the management team, but it’s not the management team that’s selling it, right? It’s the individual salespeople.

Peter Winick I think that’s a key piece because people you know, to me, one is the market’s changed and more and more business is being booked. That’s just that’s just the market. Anytime there’s an intermediary involved, the Internet’s going to sort of make that job more difficult. However, the bureaus are important, but I think you have to look at that as sort of AA12 punch is step one, invest in building that sales channel for you, you know, getting the listings, getting up there, etc.. But then underneath that, if you’re just going to sort of be passive and say, but I’m you know, my smiling face is on websites that must be doing the work right underneath that. How many agents do they have? And it’s where the rubber meets the road to say, can you develop an actual real relationship, like pick up the phone and call and talk to and communicate with the agent and help them help you? I mean, it sounds a little soft, but like teach them the bullet points that they need to bring to the table to explain to a client when they see these things, Jonah’s the right guy to pitch right. And that’s where the difference is made in my mind.

Jonah Berger Yeah, certainly. And you know, I teach marketing at the Wharton School, so I think a lot about the customer. Yeah. This is again, a situation where, you know, understanding the customer, understanding what those customer needs are. You know, even as a speaker, I always assumed, you know, really where you add value is giving a great speech on stage. And I soon learned that, yeah, that’s some of the value to the attendees. But your other customers, the meeting planner and the meeting planner cares if you’re X number of hours. They are an advance in travel delays. If they know where you are, if they can reach you at any time of day or night, their anxiety is allayed. And so that’s another customer that has a different set of needs. And so you may give a great talk. But, you know, I think one person said it to me nicely, you know. They love booking a certain speaker because that person’s spouse comes with them and attends all the events and that’s their favorite part of booking that speaker. And you know, sometimes it’s what you do on stage, but sometimes it’s all the other things that really add value.

Peter Winick 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.

Peter Winick I’m absolutely honored to have our guest on today who needs no introduction, but I’ll give you a brief one anyway because I found some interesting nuggets on Tom. So today our guest is none other than Tom Peters, who’s the author of Among, amongst other things, in Search of Excellence and a brand called You. And I’ll give you just one little snippet from his bio other than one of the quotes I liked, which is Tom Peters is the Red Bull of management thinkers, which is a great quote. But let me give you just a sense of the span and scope of the and the depth of Tom’s work. So in over 40 years, he’s done over 25,000 speeches in 50 states, 67 countries in front of about 5 million people. 7500 flights. Remember flying? That used to be fun. 5 million models, 17 books, numerous e-books, over 10 million books sold, 3000 blog posts, 75,000 tweets. It goes on and on. So it is an absolute honor and a privilege to have you on today. Tom, how are you today?

Tom Peters I’m good, But I am going to correct one thing. Okay? I am not quite bionic, man. It’s 2500 speeches, not 25,000.

Peter Winick 2500 speeches. Okay. Well, that’s a zero.

Tom Peters I mean, no, when you said 25,000, I suddenly got exhausted and tired and I thought, my God, that would be that would be that would be about two and a forever.

Peter Winick Where you check your bank account and said where the money go. Right?

Tom Peters Yeah.

Peter Winick So pre-COVID, it used to be that you really, really, really needed the bureaus for most speakers. So you’re in a different echelon because pre Internet, they had the clients, you know, sort of supply and demand. They were the market. Then obviously things changed and the intermediaries got busted up in travel in many other places. And there’s been over the last several years, ten, 15, whatever, less and less of a real need both on the buy in the sell side. And most speakers today have been booking 70, 75, 80% of their stuff directly because why wouldn’t you like the media area to make up the sale? What have you seen changing in the in that world? And again, pre-COVID, because I think we have a whole well, we have unknowns right now.

Tom Peters I think I don’t have anything to say because you nailed it. Okay. Basically, the tools became available and the people were able to sell themselves and the buyer was able to do that. So it really did become the speakers bureaus were to a significant degree, taken out of those transactions. Yeah. New York at my bureau. The Washington Speaker’s bureau that. Yep, that’s true. Except for the big dudes. Sure. Because I cannot imagine Tony Blair.

Peter Winick Yeah. Or the Obamas.

Tom Peters Sitting over is his Apple computer hunting for speeches to get but no other than heads of state. For those of us who are mortal, you know, that’s become a big part of it.

Peter Winick I want to move to sort of the progressions and the evolutions that you’ve made so clearly in search of excellent seminal book, game Changer, etc., etc.. But many people put out sort of one thing and beat that drum in perpetuity. You have been clearly prolific. Probably an understatement, right? And you have moved from genre, not genre, but different things have interested you and you’ve gone big. So I remember when the cover of Fast Company landed on my desk and it was a magazine. If you’re under 35 Google magazine, and they used to come in the mail and it was the brand you and it was this big, bold sort of look like Tide. And that was a game changer. Totally different than in Search of excellence. So how did you know, fast forward, whatever the kind of 15, 18 years, how did you birth that? Because that was a huge success in and of itself.

Tom Peters The honest answer is I don’t have a clue. But here’s what I will give myself. Well, a couple things. Nothing ever has an easy answer. All the people who did what I did for a living back in 82 wrote about manufacturing companies. And it was manufacturing. Manufacturing, manufacturing. And when I was doing the work for Liberation Managed, published in 1992, I woke up one morning and I had read an article somewhere. And 80% of us worked in the service sector, and 80% of the people who work in manufacturing worked in service sector jobs.

Peter Winick Right, right, right.

Tom Peters Nobody had written anything. Is the ringing phone in the back? Nothing I can do about it. And so, you know, I in liberation management, I did things I had never done before, like I wrote about the advertising agency China Day. Yep. Wrote stuff about nobody had ever said a word about professional service firms. Right. And then I was watching what was going on in the marketplace. And the point of brand you was that the. The way I described it to somebody, you will not be able to survive any longer being known as badge 125, if you will. Yep. You know, people have abused brand you, which I’d be delighted to talk about. Yeah. You’ve got to stand for something. Yeah. I will tell you, there were three books that came out at the same time. We did a trio, The Wow Project. That’s the brand new 50 and the professional service firm 50. The best by far in that set was the professional services firm 50, the worst seller of the three. And this is the most arrogant statement you will hear this week or this month. If people had read the damn professional service for 50, we could have saved several million jobs. Because what it said was that the purchasing department can’t just be a bunch of people wearing black suits. Right. And you need to stand for something. And sure, if you’re in an H.R. Department and you’re running training group, hey, you got to turn that training group into a super professional service firm where 60% of your revenue is coming from outside the company.

Peter Winick And the only one that ever did that was Ritz-Carlton would turn their training division into a profit center.

Tom Peters Absolutely. But Disney did it too. Disney did it with Disney. Yeah, that’s right. The Ritz and Disney are the only two. But I mean, the thing that you can’t be you can’t be irritated as an author. When somebody goes in a different direction to your work because you wrote the damn thing. But the annoying thing. And I do get why people would make this interpretation. The annoying thing is people who think that brand new is about self marketing.

Peter Winick And that’s what I wanted to go with you today. That’s sure. So I think.

Tom Peters I said that somebody is going to do this and then I’ll come back. Yep. I said, It’s the antithesis of self itself marketing. But it’s not. It’s self marketing. Because I go to lunch with you. Yeah. And it’s. And, you know. And then you asked me to do something for. It’s who has the best network? Ah, yeah. And it’s not who is pushing their idea. Yeah. I said, you know, it’s the magic of self marketing is the quieter you are, the better off you are. Yeah, totally. You talk. You’ve got a friend, Bud and Bud’s starting a new project. And he. He’s talking to you about it. And there’s some little thing, and you think it matches up with what I do. And you said I work with them for two months, and he absolutely is the most unassuming, hardworking, intelligent guy around. And that’s the way it works. It’s word of mouth horizontally. And so people called me the, you know, the self marketing guy I want to punch. Even though it’s what I think.

Peter Winick So I have two thoughts I want to sort of play with you. I think there’s a group of folks that took that message and just didn’t get it. And their interpretation would call them the idiots, whatever was, that means I’ll wear a purple bow tie or green suspenders, or I’ll be the goofy guy that always brings donuts to the meeting. And that’s my brand. And that’s not a brand. That’s a shtick, you know?

Tom Peters Yeah.

Peter Winick And there was a lot of people that said, my personal brand will be I’ll hand out green pens at like, stupidity. Right? You know, and then and this is where I see it today and I’d love to get your take on it, I think personal branding because now that’s been 20 some odd years, has evolved and there’s been a path that has gone sort of the purple pen route and make it sticky. But where it’s evolved somewhat intellectually is into thought leadership, where people realize that the way to actually be known is having deep, deep expertise in a domain. And by the way, it’s transportable across your career. So you could be a junior analyst at Company X today and start doing interviews and writing in pocket, whatever. And that goes with you and that goes with you and that goes with you. So I think thought leadership actually stands on the shoulder.

Tom Peters No, I agree with that because, you know, when you first started talking and I held off and didn’t interrupt. I was thinking I wasn’t using the same language, but I was thinking the definition of a brand new is somebody who is busy as hell. But at the same time, they’re taking three online courses from M.I.T. to learn more about their trade and prepare themselves better. And they are reading everything they can get their hands on, but they are working on their intellectual schtick, if you will.

Peter Winick Exactly.

Tom Peters Really, really, really knowing something and knowing it cold and so on. And I think I think that’s I don’t think that’s you know, again, let’s not go wacko on this. I’m going to still sign you up to work for me because I find you to be a decent, honest. Interesting. So the personality traits stuff.

Peter Winick Is at least a tiebreaker.

Tom Peters Look, look, when I started this stuff, we started a little group at McKinsey around the. In search of excellent stuff. And it was, you know, it was organizational effectiveness practice because you thought about practicing accountancy or what have you. It’s now about 50% of McKinsey’s business. But my reason for saying that if you had said to somebody, Are you growing your IP, they would say, no, this year I’m doing daffodils. Nobody knew the term IP. Nobody talked about intellectual property. I mean, it was obviously there, but it but it wasn’t, you know, how’s it what’s happened with your IP? Your IP gone up. Yeah, right, right, right. That was that was not the, you know, the crux of the issue. And now if you’re intellectual capital or intellectual property or whatever, not going up your you’re toast.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website 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.