Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 37 – Dr. Tony Alessandra

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Are you ready to take your assessment product to the marketplace? There’s a lot more to it than hitting the “publish” button, and we’re here to give you a few great ideas!

This week, our guest is Dr. Tony Alessandra, CEO of Assessments 24×7 LLC, and a prolific author of best-selling books including, “The NEW Art of Managing People,” “Charisma; the Platinum Rule,” and “Communicating at Work.”

Tony sheds light on the importance of using instructional design to make your content learnable; why you should sell your assessment product on a small scale first; and the importance of keeping in constant contact with your industry so you can plan for a future filled with opportunity and change

Did you know that teaching videos need to be shorter than 8 minutes? Do you want to create an off the shelf assessment that thousands of companies will use? If you are already feeling overwhelmed, then stay tuned, and get the insights you need!

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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. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on our podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership with me. Today, my guest, I’m really delighted, really excited to have Dr. Tony Alessandra here with me today. I’ll give you a little bit of his bio because if I did his full list of bio and accomplishments, I wouldn’t have time to talk to Tony. So Tony is the CEO of Assessments 24-7. He’s written over 30 books and they’ve been translated into over 50 languages. Some of his books that you’ll probably recognize are The New Art of Managing People, Charisma, The Platinum Rule, Collaborative Selling, and Communications at Work. He was inducted into the Speakers Hall of Fame in 1985. He’s a legend in the speaking industry, obviously. He’s been on all the lists that one would imagine a world renowned speaker has been, and I’m really delighted and really happy to have you here with us today, Tony. So thank you. So let’s just. Dive right in, because we’re a little bit, as usual, limited on time. But your journey has been an interesting one from author to speaker to assessment tool, assessment tools, and other things. Where do you see the growth today? What’s out there in the marketplace that still has a lot of opportunity for folks that are in the content business?

Dr. Tony Alessandra Well, I would say anything digital, that’s been a big thrust. E-learning or virtual training is another big arena or distance learning, as you might call. So distance learning would not just be e-learning, or, or virtual training, it could even be doing webinars or even doing a speech via something like zoom or, uh, Skype, yeah, any, any platform.

Peter Winick So let me ask you this. I’m curious your take on this. So what I’ve seen folks do as they start to maybe dabble in some of these things, right? So they’ve got let’s say it’s a typical keynoter. They’ve got their keynote, they’ve written a book, they’re got the messaging down. And then opportunistically, they want to sort of move into video based learning, digital learning, eLearning, etc. So they figure, hey, I’m a good key noter, just get me in front of a camera, and I can do my thing, right. And it’s engaging, and it’s motivating. Can you tell me from your experience, the importance of solid instructional design, as well as what the buyer of a digital learning platform is looking for versus sort of a compare and contrast against the classic keynote.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Yeah, well, what people don’t want is simply a video, you know, so somebody who’s a great speaker who gets in front of a camera and just takes their classic keynote speech or speeches and videotapes them. That’s not good enough, not in today’s environment. In today’s Environment, what People want are short segments. And when I say short segments, probably less than eight minutes segments that have a point and possibly one or two test questions after that to make sure that the person has absorbed the material and then you move on to the next and the next to the next and maybe at the very end you have this one big final exam where people either do a pass or a fail. I have a virtual training program that does just that. In fact, I don’t even know if any of the segments are eight minutes. They’re probably shorter. Many of you will get a one-question quiz and you either get it, you know, if you get it right it tells you what you got it right and why and if you get it wrong it tells, you you got wrong and why. And then at the end, there’s a 20 question final exam, but that final exam of 20 questions is randomly chosen from a bigger set of questions so that.

Peter Winick Oh, interesting.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Yeah, so that if several people within a company are going through this, they can’t pass the answers on because, you know, you get different questions.

Peter Winick So let me ask you this. Obviously on the keynote side, the primary success factor or KPI or whatever you want to call it is really that level of engagement and entertainment, right? You have 60 minutes with an audience. You want to have some fun with them. You want them to sort of get to understand some concepts at a light level. When you move into digital learning, the key metric is really learning efficacy. So I love what you’ve baked into your model where you’re testing them along the way. And at the end, So therefore, you can go back to the client and they. you know, whatever 84% of your people have done really well in this program. And here’s the stats to back that up. So how do you how do you move as a speaker from sort of entertainer and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way to high level learning efficacy?

Dr. Tony Alessandra Yeah, quite frankly, I don’t know if you have to drop the quote entertainment part of it. I think, you know, these little segments can be segments of one of your programs, but you’re breaking it down into little key learning points. And if you have a story or an example that that’s funny you put it in there. So it’s at least engaging, you know, for the participant going through the program. So you know it doesn’t have to be dry material, but it is you had mentioned instructional design. It really is helpful to have somebody who knows how to take your material and break it down into specific learning points. And they may in fact reorganize your material in a different way than you presented in the keynote.

Peter Winick I was gonna say, and there’s an art and science, I always find it fascinating when we’re working with an author or a thought leader that hasn’t engaged with an instructional designer before. It could be a little, I wouldn’t say painful, but it’s a little bit different early on, but having someone challenge the expert on a better way to teach what they have created based on adult learning theory and all those sort of things. And ultimately, it’s the combination of great content pushed through a system of high integrity instructional design that leads to a better product. Absolutely.

Dr. Tony Alessandra When I did my first book, this was back, I was writing the book in 1978, came out in January of 79. My editor on that book was in fact somebody who had a degree in instructional design and really helped me reorganize my thoughts in that book. It certainly, you know, going back, my gosh, that’s 40 years ago, it really embedded in my mind the importance of having good instructional design. You know that’s one part of it, but another part is if you’re trying to sell I mean if you try to sell the individuals what we have just talked about is fine But if you are trying to cell to companies and the individuals within the companies Then you need to be on a learning management system and LMS Where a manager or managers can see how well And how frequently and how completely? their direct reports are going through the material, how long are they spending on the system, what are their scores in the quizzes or tests. So that really is important, that you’re in a learning management system.

Peter Winick Well, and what they’re looking for is a combination of, to your point, you know, are people using it, right? So learning, efficacy, usage, and ultimately ROI, right. So as learning people, we have to hold ourselves to not quite the standards that marketers have to do today, but we have follow their lead and say, yeah, if you’re investing, you know $500,000 to teach your people to be better X, whatever X is, Ultimately, you want to be in a position to have a conversation with the business leader at that company and say, here’s some data points and here’s from thoughts around what that return might be looking like for you.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Exactly. So let’s, let’s look at that. So one way to look at it from a real numbers point of view is you go to a company that may have a lot of salespeople. And let’s say that, you know, instead of selling the whole enchilada to the company, you say, look, give me a test group, a test, group of sales people that resembles in terms of longevity and, and sales results, the whole company. and let me put them through the system, and then over a period of time, let’s measure their results, their sales, against the rest of the company, and see if going through my program really did have an impact.

Peter Winick Well, let me amplify a point that you made there that you went through quickly that I think is critical. Oftentimes, I’ve been in situations negotiating on behalf of clients where they’ll say, oh, take this group of salespeople over here. These are the ones we want you to do the test with. And then you start to crunch the data and you said, oh my God, you’re giving me your bottom 5%. Like, this is not good, nor is it good to give me your top 5%. And I think it’s key to your point that it is at average, right? a typical profile.

Dr. Tony Alessandra representative sample, you know, so from the top to the bottom, you know, give me your top performers, your top 20%, your bottom 20% in the middle 60. You know, let me work with a sample of those people. And even on the management side, which is a bit more difficult to measure, what I would suggest, and this is one of the aspects that we do in my assessment business. And that is, let’s just take management, for We put the managers… through what’s called the 360 degree assessment. So it measures a certain number of behavioral competencies. How well does this manager perform decision-making? How well are they at communicating, delegating, et cetera. So we have these competencies, and the competencies are measured by a series of questions, typically five to eight questions per competency. And what we do is the manager goes, the managers who we’re gonna have in this test group, they go through the assessment, They rate themselves. They have their manager, their peers, and their direct reports, that’s 360. It’s all around them on top, same level and below. Answer the same questions, how they see that manager performing. Then we put them through the training program or the e-learning program. And then some time afterwards, maybe it’s a month or 90 days after they’ve gone through the training program, you repeat the 360 degree with the same raters as you did in the first one and see if the scores of this manager have improved. We can even do the same thing, Peter, with the salespeople. We have a 360 degree that measures how well the salesperson does information gathering, follow through, presentation, etc. And the 360 with them is their sales manager, their fellow sales people, and here’s the key, their customers. And then again, afterwards we put them through a retest and see if they have improved.

Peter Winick The beauty of that, Tony, is you take it, so let’s say you wanted to sell into Oracle and they’ve got 10,000 professional salespeople. You say, you know what, give me 500 and give me four to six months to assess them, have some sort of an intervention via digital, and then reassess them and show improvement. And then if you can go back to the client and say, wow, it took us six months and spent, you know, $30,000 or whatever it is. Look at these results now it’s easy for them to extrapolate the value that you present to them getting it across the organization of the date is there they can’t wait to jump on that and say sign me up and you know let’s start this intervention across the system because. You know we can see the improvements in you know client retention or account penetration or sales leads general whatever the case may be but they can actually see it and do the math on their own which is which is fantastic.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Right and let me let me add that there should be a control group because if you just have the group that you’re working with and you see improvement the company can say well maybe our whole sales force improved too you know not just your little group.

Peter Winick We were having a great quarter, or there’s a new product release, or whatever, yeah.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Exactly, exactly. So, you know, it’s great to have a control group, but even a control group, there’s an issue there. When people are being evaluated, they may in fact, you know, I’m trying to think what with that famous study, Westinghouse study, I can’t remember what it was, but it was many, many years ago where they were evaluating employees and things improved simply because the employees realized they were being Evaluated

Peter Winick Right, so there is a placebo effect.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Exactly. So when you have a control group, I’m not quite sure you should allow them to see their results.

Peter Winick That’s interesting.

Dr. Tony Alessandra If they see that they’re poor in one area or another, they may self-improve.

Peter Winick Right, they’re studying for the test on their own, and you’ve exposed a weakness to them. Yeah, that’s interesting. So let me ask you this. One of your core businesses, obviously, is the assessment business. I’m a big fan of assessments for a lot of reasons. It’s a great business model. Build it once, sell it over and over. It’s got real data and science underneath it that you can’t argue with. You don’t have to sell on the strength of charisma, anecdotes, personality, hyperbole. Tell me your take on assessments and what you need to be thinking about today to take your body of work and figure out how to extrapolate from it, validated assessments, not any of these sort of silly, unvalidated, somebody sat around with a bottle of wine and came up with 10 silly questions, but give me the scoop on what it takes and how to figure out what you can assess through the lens of your content.

Dr. Tony Alessandra All right, so there’s two things that somebody needs to make a decision about. Decision one, do I want to use an off-the-shelf assessment that’s already been created, such as Disk, which is a four-style model, dominance, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness, or motivators, which measures why you do what you do, are you more theoretical, economic, political, etc. So these are off-the-shelf validated assessments that are used by thousands of companies around the world.

Peter Winick So social styles, Myers-Briggs, right? Any of those that you can.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Or do you want to create your own true colors, you know, take flight learning that uses birds, those are already existing off the shelf assessments, or do I want to create my own based on my own content? And do I wanted to be a self assessment or a 360 degree? You know, if you want to create your own, there are certain things that should be done. I think you should hire somebody who has a PhD in psychology or psychometrics. who can do the whole concept of questionnaire design and also report design. What are the competencies you wanna measure? What are questions that you’re gonna ask for each competency? These are all things that are really important. And I would say that to create your own assessment, you’re looking at, not through us even, but if you go to a psychometrician or a company that does it. You’re looking at least ten thousand dollars up front and then to come to a company like us once the questionnaire and report Has been designed now. We have to program it into an assessment dashboard. Now, you don’t have to come to a company like ours. There’s other companies where you can actually, for much less money, have your assessment programmed onto their platform. But different platforms do different things. Ours has internal e-commerce. It creates dynamically generated reports, which simply means that based on the answer to either any question or any section or the whole assessment, it generates different content in the report, a different copy. That’s dynamic.

Peter Winick And let’s just let me let me pause you there because that’s critical right so you might have an assessment that has some sort of a roll up executive summer report it might have one report that’s at the manager level for their direct reports and one at the individual and the complexities of the report design and how that data is displayed and all those sorts of things that’s not easy stuff but it’s not something that you should be dabbling with and i i totally agree with you that you go to. Professional, yours is a good choice, obviously. But it’s not something that you look at something like Strength Finders and go, oh, I can write 12 cute questions. I’m pretty smart. It doesn’t work like that. I was fascinated when I first got into this area about 15 years ago. Really, it seems so beautifully simple when you take one, but the levels of complexity underneath in terms of the data and the validity is somewhat mind boggling.

Dr. Tony Alessandra It is, it is. And you know, you have to look even to validate an assessment, usually in the five, at least five to $10,000. That’s the validation part. So I mean, somebody really to create their own assessment. They need to say, hey, this is going to be a business for me. I am going to charge companies and the people within the companies money to do this. If you’re putting upfront 20 to $30,000 to create a validated unique assessment, you part of my business model.

Peter Winick Right. And how do you amortize that, that expense? And I think that’s exactly right is that besides the $30,000, whatever you’re going to invest in the tool. What’s your marketing plan? What’s you strategy? How do you create a line of products off of this, a line solutions? When are you gonna get the return on that? How quickly does that turn into a business that’s doing, you know, three, four, $500,000 a year so it makes sense because although it’s not a ton of money, $30,000, it’s a significant investment and I think you need to understand what your assumptions are relative to getting that return back and how you’re gonna market it and sell it and all those other sort of things. Exactly. Cool, so last sort of. little subject area before we run out of time here. Speaking, so you have been speaking for a long, long, long time, and I know from a conversation you and I had several months ago, you know, you’re doing less and less and less by choice. And I always sort of jokingly say, from my vantage point, I think there’s only two types of speakers, those that wanna speak more, and those that want to speak less. There are very few that say, I’ve got, you now, 37, that’s my magic number. So tell me the power for you of how you’ve been able to set up sort of the business side of the house that allows you to not have to be on the road 200 days a year at this stage.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Well, you know, for at least 25 years, I was averaging about 100 speeches a year and I was kind of burning out. I have over 12 million frequent flyer miles on American. So it’s been a lot of travel. So you know I had been thinking about this for a while, but in 2000, I finally went to my key employee, her name is Holly Catchpole. And I said, Holly, I’m going to spin you off and all of the employees and all of the equipment, the lease, everything into a new business, which was called and still is, by the way, very successful business called Speakers Office. And I sent them, I am going to sell you this business over a five year period. And if you hit these goals for me in terms of both, it really was total revenue, but it was a mixture of product sales and speeches. Every year you hit this goal, I will forgive. that 20% payment. And every year for five years, she hit the goal. And so the company is hers now. And you can look it up. I mean, it’s a very successful business called speakersoffice.com. So my goal was, and what I said to Holly, over the years, as I build up this assessment business, so I started really building this assessment business as a business in 2000, where I would bring other people onto that platform. And I say it’s luck. but it could have been something else, but my first customer was Ken Blanchard and that really, really helped.

Peter Winick Not a bad first customer to have.

Dr. Tony Alessandra That’s right. So we built that company, we started growing it. And as that company grew in revenue, I commensurately cut back on my speaking. But it really was about four years ago, where I said, you know, enough is enough, let me really, really start growing this business even faster. And that’s when I started hiring more people, I hired a key sales and marketing person, I hired an instructional designer. I hired more programmers. Here we are today. Now I have 11 full-time people.

Peter Winick That’s fantastic.

Dr. Tony Alessandra They always swore that I didn’t want employees. Now I have 11 full-time employees. But you know, I need them. I need programmers. I need client support people. I need marketing and sales people. I have two instructional designers who also do certification. So the business is growing by leaps and bounds. And as that grew, I just cut back. So here we are today. Today the business does more revenue than I ever made in products and royalties and product and speeches in my best year ever. I never have to give a speech ever. I don’t need the money from speaking. I make enough in my assessment business. So I pick and choose my speeches and I would say at least half of my speeches these days are either for prospecting for bigger assessment clients or for an actual assessment client. You know, like one of my big clients is Action Coach and I will go speak like I’m going down to Australia next in August to be with them. But you know, I don’t charge for that. They’re a big customer. I’m also going to Paris for another big customer to speak to their clients, but everything really my focus is around assessment

Peter Winick It’s much more strategic, integrated, and holistic when and where you choose to speak. The only loser in the process is American Airlines, so you’re not racking up the miles anymore, but it sounds like a better quality of life for you, not going from Cleveland to Milwaukee to Palm Springs or whatever, which is a typical week in the life of a speaker. As we wrap up, two things, if you would, talk to out there now is probably you know, the equivalent of you 15 or 20 years ago. Somebody that’s smart, somebody that’s coming up the ranks, doing the right things. Give them a little bit of advice and then finally tell us how we can get in touch with you.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Well, a piece of advice I would give. uh, the people who are listening, whether you are an author, a speaker, a consultant doesn’t really matter. One of the things that I think I did and still do by the way, is I, I’m on the phone a lot talking to my colleagues and what, what are you doing? What’s working for you? What, what, what has worked in the past that doesn’t seem to be working right now. What do you see really coming up? You know, three to five years from now, I like to, to gather this information to help me look a year or two years, five years out, and I think our listeners should be. uh, on the phone, talking to colleagues, you know, at least one or two colleagues every day just to say hi, stay in touch with them. Hey, since the last time we talked, what have you discovered that is either working or not working in your business? Or what have you heard about the trends? So that’s what I would tell the listeners to do.

Peter Winick Great advice.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Get on the phone, talk to people, see what they’re doing. You know, Peter, just like what we’re doing…

Peter Winick And I found the whole the speaker author community is so open to that because the work can be lonely, right? You know, it’s not like you’re an accountant and, you know, half your neighbors are accountants. This is an odd, not odd, like it’s unusual, but it’s it’s a unique career choice, you know, in a profession and talking to others there. I’ve always been amazed at how giving and generous and transparent. folks are to one another because the reality is you’re not, you know, unless you have sort of a scarcity mindset, we’re all in it together and we can all help one another and if a client picks you today and picks somebody else next year, that’s all good too. So that, great. And then finally, where do we, how do we get in touch with you if we wanna learn more about 24 seven assessments or any of the other interesting things that you’re doing, Tony.

Dr. Tony Alessandra Well, anything you want, you can either shoot me an email, AJA at Alessandra.com. So A-J-A at A-L-E-S-S A-N-D-R-A.com, or you can go to my website, Alessandra.com or assessments24x7.com if you wanna look into the assessment business. Or just give me a buzz, you know, call me, I’m in San Diego, Pacific time zone. Call me at 858-456-0028.

Peter Winick Well, thank you so much. I can’t thank you enough. I was so excited when I saw this pop up on my calendar the other day, because you’ve got so much wisdom. You’ve been at this for such a long time, and have done some really amazing pioneering things. And I thank you so much for sharing them with us. And everyone listening today learned, I would say, at least three to five things that you can go off and explore and dive a little deeper. But thank you, so much, for joining us today. And thank you for your time.

Dr. Tony Alessandra My pleasure, Peter. Thank you.

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 dot com and please subscribe to leveraging thought leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.