How Humility and Hard Truths Shape Authentic Leaders In this episode, Peter Winick interviews Paul…
Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 14 – Bill Sherman
Want to know if your content will get you in the door with enterprise clients?
In this episode, Peter is joined by Thought Leadership Leverage’s COO, Bill Sherman, for a conversation about thought leadership strategy, and how to scale content for major enterprise clients. Bill’s expertise in the training industry shines as the conversation ranges from the importance of digital and accessible training programs, to getting around reduced training budgets, and facing higher than ever expectations from clients who need their problems solved.
Listen in!
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick and this is Leveraging Thought Leadership. This is our podcast. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And today I’m delighted to have my good friend, my long term partner, Bill Sherman, who’s the CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. So say Hi, Bill.
Bill Sherman Hey.
Peter Winick Great. So Bill’s role here is zero, which can mean lots of things, but it’s basically sort of one part grad school dean where ideas are debated and tested and refined. There’s an intellectual component there. One part research and development director who happens to see oversee all the product is Asian and one part practice leader at a consultancy who make sure that things roll out effectively at scale. So sort of an interesting mix there. So what I wanted to start on today, Bill, for folks that we’re talking to is sort of start on the things that you’ve seen over your long career in this space that prevent successful people from being successful getting into the organization. So my definition of a successful thought leader is they’ve got their book and their brand and those things are going well. The content is real. It’s not something they just pulled out of their nose. They’re speaking a lot. There’s a lot of demand, but that’s it, right? It’s a bit of a one trick. So what do you see there that prevents successful people from really being more successful?
Bill Sherman So I would divide it in a couple of areas. First. If you’re a keynoter, for example, you get off stage, you’ve gotten the round of applause. The client’s feeling great, you’re feeling great. And then there’s that moment of you want to tee up the next step. You’ve got a speech in hand. You can try and get more speeches, but the client’s looking and going and now what? Everybody’s jazzed. How do we implement this? Right? And so you’re looking in your toolkit and you don’t have anything there. Another situation that happens is you’ve got people who are looking to take a product and they’ve got something. They’ve worked on it for a while. They did their day round, but it’s not ready. It’s not break. It’s not it’s not enterprise level is the way that I describe it.
Peter Winick So to define for me what that means, because there’s you know, what we know is as a speaker and a thought leader, I can come up with an idea. I can be engaging and charismatic. I can get an audience to stand up. So why isn’t that good enough for the enterprise? What is it? What are they asking of me?
Bill Sherman So there’s a difference between a keynote, which is an emotional response. You’re designing a situation where you’re describing a pain point, you’re getting people to lean in and people go, Yes, there’s a better way. But on the other side, when you have a conversation with an enterprise buyer and let’s say they’re looking to make an impact on the behavior of 2000 people, 20,000 people as employees, that’s something that has to work in more than just a quick sort of sizzle, emotional rush. You have to be able to create a stimulus and a response so that it’s Tuesday, you’re in a meeting. You know what the right thing to do is, or you’re a leader or manager working with your direct report. How do you respond in that situation based on the content? And so you’re looking at not only something which works kind of in hand-to-hand coaching, but how do you teach people at scale? That’s a much more complex question, and organizations know that that’s tough to do because they’ve tried big rollouts before and they’ve seen it work and they’ve seen it fail. They’ve seen a lot of good content, good ideas in books, or they get their CEO come back from a conference and say this was a great speaker. And then when they go to implement it, it falls flat because it’s not designed to scale.
Peter Winick Got it. So the speech, even though it got the desired outcome of getting people emotionally to lean in, getting that standing ovation, getting people to really be jazzed and all that, what you’re saying is, okay, great. So now it’s three weeks later and I’m back from the event in Orlando or Las Vegas, and I’m a, you know, front line manager, I’m a newly minted leader, etc.. What am I going to do differently as a result of that speech? And the answer is probably not a lot because you didn’t give me anything.
Bill Sherman Exactly. So if you don’t give me mindsets and tools that I can apply and teach me how to use them either in a safe space or a way that I can build my skills slowly, then it’s more likely that I’ll go, yeah, there. That was that speech. But people respond different when they’re stressed, when they’re under pressure. And often the teachings that you’re trying to communicate from your content are not designed to be applied in ideal situations where we have plenty of time to think and strategize, they’re in the moment decisions where you have to pause. You have to short circuit your instinctive response and come back with a better response.
Peter Winick Got it. So this is this is outside of the skill set. My experience, probably yours as well, of most authors and thought leaders. Right. It’s hard enough to be intriguing. It’s hard enough to come up with original content. It’s hard enough to market and sell the brand. But now you’re telling me you’re holding me to a standard where I’m going to be able to change behaviors for 5000 people across an organization in a way that’s observable and measurable? You know this Holy cow, How do I do so? How do I do it?
Bill Sherman So how you do it is fortunately organizations really since the 1940s and 50s, when you saw large corporate enterprise start to tackle this problem, they look at fields such as organizational design, they look at instructional design, they look at organizational psychology. Because organizations have had this question of how do we get people across a single country like the US, let alone across the globe, working in a similar rhythm, using similar tools and mindsets. And this has happened in many different formats. So when organizations rolled out concepts such as Lean or Six Sigma or various processes and tool transformations, they had to get everybody onto the same page. It’s the same thing here in leadership development, soft skills development, but it requires a language and a set of knowledge that most speakers and authors don’t have.
Peter Winick Got it. So you’re a process guy to some degree, right? So walk me through the process. So I come to you, right? You are privileged enough or delighted enough or wise enough to work with Thought Leadership Leverage and I come to you. What are you going to tell me? Walk me through how you do this. How do you evaluate my content? How do you take a look at it? How do you figure out how to scale it? What’s what is your methodology?
Bill Sherman So when our team takes a look at content, we’re looking through a very different lens than a publisher might look for. What’s your book pitch or what? A. Buyer might look for a speech right there. They’re looking for Is this engaging? Is there a thought? Is there a story? Can we sell books or speeches based on this? Right. We’re looking for how does this transform behavior in measurable ways within organizations? And we’re looking to tie it to real world business problems that a organizational buyer, a division president, a C level executive would look and say, yeah, that’s worth investing money. It’s the problems that keep them up at night that they are trying to solve. And that’s really the bridge that a lot of thought leaders have to cross is not. Is your content engaging for an hour for a keynote or a couple hours for a book? But how does it solve a problem that an organization is willing to invest time and treasure to solve?
Peter Winick So when you’re when you’re working with a client, give me a sense of even though it’s the content successful, it’s engaging, we know people like it, etc., doesn’t mean that it met the standards of enterprise as we discussed. So you get in there, you roll up your sleeves and what’s the first thing that you’re looking for the first series of questions you might ask of a speaker or an author, a thought leader, to see if the if the foundation is there on which to build something that’s more scalable. How do you determine that?
Bill Sherman So we’re looking for more than anecdote to begin with because there are beats in the speech, for example, where you always know you’ll get a laugh or people will enjoy and they’ll remember and they’ll retell the story. That’s great. But it’s not scalable. So we’re looking for examples and we’ll go through blogs, we’ll look at copies of speeches, we’ll look at materials that you’ve done, if you’ve done any consulting with a client. And with that, we’re looking for do you have a process? Do you have a model? Do you have a methodology? Because without that structure in some way, it’s really hard to teach communicate at scale. And some clients, when they come to us, have thought about how do they organize their content from a teaching perspective into a way of thinking or behaving. Some have done that. We’ve worked with some scholars who have done fantastic work on that. Others, it’s really an assorted grab bag of ideas. And so the first thing that we have to do, once we decide there is a there, that there is a set of ideas which have relevancy to an organizational buyer. We have to sort out, sort it out and say, okay, how do we sort these ideas in a way that the buyer will see value? And more importantly, that the learner will experience value. And so it’s a sorting process to begin with, right? We go deep in content. We have to understand the content. And you mentioned the grad school Dean. I’ve got a team that will in sometimes it’s very much we sit down, it’s like grad school seminars and we’re saying, teach us this content, not at the book level, not the speech level. But we’re going to come with targeted questions to understand your content and organize.
Peter Winick So often intuitively. Let’s see where people fall down here. What percentage of folks that you’re working with right out of the gate. Have a model, have a framework, have that already done at a level that it should be done or needs to be done.
Bill Sherman So there’s a couple of things. In terms of models, I distinguish between do you have a model that you can put as like in a book or on a PowerPoint slide? Do you have it displayed as a visual or do you have some sort of framework for your content? I would say there you’re looking at 25 to 30% of clients come with some sort of model. They’ve organized the content in.
Peter Winick So right off the bat, the flip side of that, because my my math is okay, is 70% have now been disqualified out of the gate. Right. Because they don’t have. Right. Okay. So if I were.
Bill Sherman And that’s disqualified by the enterprise buyer that looks up and says, do we have a structure, do we have a model, something that will scale? And that’s almost a yes or no line decision for a lot of boards.
Peter Winick Okay, So here’s the scenario, right? So it’s every head of H.R. Head of training and development or learning and development, leadership development, whatever. Worst nightmare. Right. The CEO, the president, the CEO comes in with some big shiny book under his arm. Right. So. My God, I saw this guy and you know, this bad stock. Yeah. Bring him in and just give this to make sure everybody does whatever he says to do. Right. So the first thing that they can do to disqualify you because they’ve, you know, every two weeks, the CEO is probably coming in with a book du jour in an order like that. Does your is disqualify even a world renowned scholar, New York Times bestseller that can ask a few questions, realize there’s no model there and say, hey boss, I looked at their stuff really, really interesting. And I agree the book is good and they seem to be pretty entertaining, but there’s nothing there that that is teachable at this point. So thanks for the suggestion, But we’re going to we’re going to move on to the plan that we had developed for the last five years anyway.
Bill Sherman Exactly. They will fall back and say we had troubles because they don’t have a model. Aligning it with our talent development strategy or our competency model. They’ll lean on a couple of buzzwords in jargon from the H.R. world to be able to say nice, but I don’t see where it fits. And that’s the polite way to say.
Peter Winick It generally and later typically doesn’t happen. So number one is if 70% of the folks are disqualified right off the bat, I’m assuming for those 70%, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but you can help them get to qualification level, right? So you’ve got to meet, you know, what’s the prerequisite to have a model. Tell me, what does that entail? What does that take? Is it painful? Is it fun? What’s the outcome?
Bill Sherman So when we work with clients, it winds up being both challenging fun, I would say, because the challenging part is for most thought leaders, we push them to think about their content in a much deeper way than they have before. As I said, it’s the grad student experience where we’ve got a team that comes in and is trying to learn the content to a much deeper level, and we ask tough questions where clients will pause and say, That’s a really good question. I haven’t thought about it that way before. Give me a minute. Let me think.
Peter Winick And they usually haven’t had a sparring partner that could run with them at that level, Right. They have people telling them, this is cool, this is fun, this is shiny. Or I’m a book publisher, here’s how I would market it. But this is really getting down and dirty and being able to look them in the eye and say, no, that model does what everybody tells you is great, isn’t great. Or here’s something that you said that’s interesting and adding something to the mix.
Bill Sherman And the counter side of it is it’s also very fun. For most of our thought leaders, A, they enjoy thinking about their content. That’s how you become a thought leader in some ways. And then, B, they enjoy having someone who wants to go deep and explore their content with them because you might get questions after a speech or if you have a Q&A sort of moment. But the depth of those questions is very different than a 10 to 15 minute Q&A. Then when we go for two hours on a call, really diving deep into data.
Peter Winick So now let’s move forward and say, okay, great. So. So. Thought Leader X didn’t have a model. Came work with you. Now they’ve got one. Okay, cool. Now what?
Bill Sherman We organized the content and some of it is also then there’s two ways. If you’re trying to position your content into enterprise, you have to have a sense of what product you’re offering. How are you going to change those behaviors? Because you can’t just walk into an enterprise buyer and say, I have a model. And they say, Yes, we will write you a big check. That doesn’t happen. They say, great, based on the model, how are you going to work with thousands of people? How do you change behaviors there? And so that could be a number of different modalities. So the next piece of it is to understand what modalities of learning and behavior change you can use to achieve the outcomes that your organization buyer wants.
Peter Winick To show, whether the product or the offering or the solution is a consulting engagement or an assessment tool or an organizational diagnostic. It’s all coming from the DNA of that same model, right? So it all that gives you the right, the guardrails and the skeleton to say, Wait, here’s our model, and now you’re just pushing it out in the various modalities. But it all has to come back to the same to honor the same model. I would imagine it does.
Bill Sherman And one of the things that I would amplify here, Peter, is it’s a content model. It is the intellectual backbone of what you’re trying to communicate to the world. And so if you think back to Stephen Covey, he had seven habits. And those seven habits of highly effective people were the mantra that he used going out into the world. And it didn’t change from three habits one day, seven habits, another to nine habits. It was here the seven habits based on the work and study that I’ve done and people could learn and master them. So that’s one way of thinking of this. And then to your point on modality, it could be executive coaching. It could be interactive video. It could be, like you said, developmental assessments, all of those modalities, ways of creating behavior change, hanging off the model. And that content model also allows you to do things like reach out and do thought leadership marketing to outreach. But that’s the backbone of where you start.
Peter Winick Got it. So would it be fair to say you’ve got the content model is the base right? And then on top of that, all the modalities have a format. So you need to listen to the market. You need to understand what they want. But each of those it’s almost a three dimensional chessboard, have various business model nuances, right? Is it licensing? You know, executive coaching has its pluses and minuses. Every business has its plus, plus and minus and everyone has different requirements, some of which. May be within the sweet spot of that specific thought leader or author. Some might be equivalent to learning a foreign language, so you’ve got to now lay over the business models, right? Which each have their own nuances.
Bill Sherman Precisely. So. We’ve had clients come from the speaking business, from the book writing sort of passion as well as then workshop business. And there is a hurdle when you go from you are the physical embodiment of your content as a speech or as a workshop facilitator to be able to translate that into a situation where the content itself shines and is the star and you have a scalable vehicle, interactive video, developmental assessments. That’s a different shift that a lot of thought leaders don’t have, the technical or even the experiential knowledge.
Peter Winick Well, I think the reality is if the deliverable requires both the thought leader and the content to be together a speech, a workshop, coaching or whatever, then nobody’s really looking at the model because there’s sort of trust in the brand of the author and they can improvise or pull it out of their nose or do what they need to do. But that’s only going to get you so far. So going back to your point earlier, I’m a senior executive and I fell in love with your content. I’ve got 2700 people in 11 locations around the globe. That’s a problem, right? If you don’t have that model there, you’re almost guaranteed to fail to push content out there in a consistent way across a lot of people to get to the same desired outcome.
Bill Sherman Right. And if you think about organizational change, a large organization, whether it’s a division of 2000 people or that 20,000 person organization, they said they’ve got their strategic initiatives to grow the business. What are they going to sell? Are they launching new product going into new market? Their calendar for a year is already filled up with those things. And then when you look at the talent development side, how are we going to become better as individuals, teams or the organization?
Peter Winick How are we getting better?
Bill Sherman Right. There’s only a couple of slots per year. And so for that sort of activity, because everybody’s busy doing their day to day job to align towards the goals of the organization. So if I’m an enterprise buyer supported by a smart H.R. Team, I’m going to be looking to say what is the probability that if we roll this out to our team, it’ll be successful and it moves a number that I as a leader care about. And that’s high stakes because I need to hit performance numbers at my level and I’ve got to make bets that win.
Peter Winick And you and you moving from a speech which is largely serves the purpose of entertainment engagement, rewarding people for a job well done for the year to really moving a business lever, which is a totally different entire hill to climb.
Bill Sherman Precisely. Speeches aren’t measured by KPI.
Peter Winick Yeah, exactly. So. So let me ask you another. Different scenario. So now we’ve taken the thought leader that didn’t have a model through why you need the model and how that drives content development as well as product development. I know one of the things that you see a lot of is stuff that’s worked really, really well for a really, really long time and then it’s not working as well. And let me be specific here. So back in the stone ages of when I was in school, you know, or coming out into the business world, it was fairly common to say, all right, go to you’re going to go do a five day program, a three day program, a two day program, and people develop those. And they were really, really good based on a certain set of criteria that might have been the standard, you know, whatever, 1980, whatever. Talk a bit about how the how that type of thinking is getting stale and where it’s hurting companies that have really good stuff with a model that’s validated, that may have been top of their game, but they’re working a heck of a lot harder to fill up those workshop type events with those multiday events and what they need to do to get that learning out there and monetize it in different formats.
Bill Sherman Yeah. So let me jump back and say even if we look at the early 2000s, for example, all public workshops in terms of organizations would send their people to a three day, five day workshop. That was common. That was part of what you did. This is early in the days where email was out there, but the pace of business was a little bit slower as well as organizations internally would send teams of people to internal training sessions. Their learning and development department would be cranking out 3-to-5-day workshops, both on instructional design as well as training delivery. And so I can think of example after example in the 90s, early 2000s where you went to training for a week. Those days are gone partly because. The risk of being off line for 3 to 5 days in any learning program. You can imagine sort of the cringe you have. We have it now when we go on vacation. We’re constantly checking our email just to make sure that we’re not drowning, Right? Even when we’re on vacation. So the thought of trying to get someone to focus on learning new skills within a workshop environment is difficult. And then when you layer on to it, the costs of travel or flight and hotels, the equation started changing in the 2000s where it’s easier to build digital content and cheaper to build digital content than to bring most people together most of the time from workshop.
Peter Winick And the client is looking at their total cost, right? So they’re looking at the fee for the participant, plus the airline tickets, plus food plus hotel. So even though, you know, you might only be charging whatever, a couple thousand dollars per head, it’s probably double that. And that’s really the what’s getting hit on the budget. And from a business model standpoint. The business models that are largely dependent on workshops by their very definition can only spin off so much cash. They can only be so much so profitable, right? Because you have to have a facility, you have to have a person to, you know, if you can if you can run those things at 15, 20% EBITDA, you’re doing a great job in the world of digital today where people are looking for, from a business perspective, 40, 60, 70% EBITDA. You know, you’re disqualified before you woke up in the morning.
Bill Sherman Now, let me layer on to one other expectation from both the learner perspective and the organizational buyer perspective. Businesses have moved to a just in time sort of delivery method. You see that in logistics and supply chain where your Dell, you don’t have all of the equipment until you’re ready to build the laptop. That happened in the early 2000s. The same sort of thing applies now in the world of learning. Don’t teach me theory that I might use two years from now. It’s, Hey, we’re going into budgeting season. Give me a quick instructional refresher of how this works and how how to use that budgeting spreadsheet. Right. Very tactical, very applied. So if you think about the Ted Talk format, which is short form learning, we have changed how we produce content and more importantly, how learners consume content and ideas. We want things when we need them in small, digestible chunks.
Peter Winick And there’s a lot of business reasons for that. Right? Back in the old IBM days of the 70s, the quid pro quo was you’re going to start here and retire here. So I want to constantly make investments in you for the long term as the employer today. You know, depending on where you’re on the organization, where you might have an average tenure of two years, three years, four years, I really can’t afford to make long term investments in you. I have to give you what you need to do, the function that you’ve got on your plate now and then maybe be just a touch ahead of the curve. But I can’t be amortizing my investments in you over ten year periods if our relationship is only three. So.
Bill Sherman Precise.
Peter Winick So precise. Given that we’re almost out of time here. Talk to the author, the speaker that thought leader that’s out there listening today and give them 2 or 3 things to stop doing immediately and maybe 2 or 3 things that they should consider.
Bill Sherman Okay. So in terms of stop doing, I’ve seen a couple of things. One is when it comes to content, there are speakers and authors that wind up trying to throw many different solutions towards a buyer, but none of them are fully baked. And so instead of giving a wide array of solutions, narrow it down. Be specific and know the impact that you can produce and be confident about that impact. And you may need to have to talk to some of your existing clients and say, why did you lean in and how has it impacted your organization? How have these ideas created change to target attention? So stop trying to stop trying to go broad. Be specific on impact and the ways that you’re going to create impact. Additionally, things that I would stop doing is there are people who, as thought leaders, love thinking about their content and drafting out idea after idea after idea. So my recommendation would be develop one. If you have an attic full of ideas, get something out in the market and test it. But you don’t have to fully build it. You just need to have an idea enough that you can start having conversations with buyers. So you can test and expand. It’s a lesson that can be learned from this software world. In the world of software. The concept of minimum viable product and you build a product with a small set of features to see if buyers will lean in. If it’s if it works, you can always add more features. But I’ve seen and heard from thought leaders who have said, yeah, we built out this tool or we built out this series and we took it to buyers and it never happened.
Peter Winick And they’ve spent years doing that. So last thing is years.
Bill Sherman Or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Peter Winick Or both. What should I start doing more of?
Bill Sherman What you should start doing more of is being specific. Thinking about your content and really getting structured. A lot of speakers and authors are eager to go on to the next thing. How? What’s my next book? What’s my next idea? And they don’t go deep into content. There’s a lot of value in your existing book or your existing keynote that you have yet to turn into a product that can be monetized. And so even if an idea you go, that’s two years ago, that was the thing I was working on two years in the past, your enterprise buyers and your learners still haven’t digested that idea. So go deep build product on that because you’re probably leaving dollars on the table by moving forward.
Peter Winick The short form for that would be make sure you squeeze all the juice out of the lemon, right? Absolutely. This has been awesome. Chock full of information. I would suggest that folks might want to listen to this one again because there’s just a lot packed into a relatively short period of time. Bill, how did people get in touch with you? They show up with cookies or something at your doorstep or how do they find you?
Bill Sherman I’m Vegas, so we’re 24 seven, but I’m available at Bill Thought Leadership Leverage dot com or check us out on the site.
Peter Winick Great. Well, thanks so much for being here today and I know I will talk to you soon.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. Thanks, Peter.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot 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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