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Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 7 – Shep Hyken
Thought leaders need a broad base of knowledge and insight, and few have a better foundation than this week’s guest!
In this episode, our guest is Shep Hyken, American customer service expert, author, and speaker. His book, “The Amazement Revolution,” was a bestseller, and he’s here to talk to Peter about everything from customer service to finding your niche!
Shep and Peter also discuss how thought leaders can diversify their products and manage complex product offerings. This episode is filled with great tips about content marketing, customer experience, and essential skills needed to grow a thought leadership business. 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, the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. This is podcast number seven of leveraging thought leadership. And I am delighted today to have Shep Iken with me. Say hello, Shep.
Shep Hyken Hey, it’s great to be here. And by the way, number seven is a very cool number.
Peter Winick There you go.
Shep Hyken And all tell you why. I still play ice hockey at this old age. And number seven is the number on my back because it was my favorite player growing up. There were actually three number sevens that were all the number sevens on the St. Louis Blues. But Gary Ungar and Red Berentson was the first number seven at the St. Louis Blues. And that’s why. And now we’re doing podcast number 7. Not that anybody wants to know this, but I think it’s kind of cool.
Peter Winick It could be the seventh knee replacement. Right.
Shep Hyken Oh, no. Oh, no. Hopefully not.
Peter Winick Anyway, so let me just kick off by giving everybody Shep’s sort of official bio, because he’s an impressive fellow that will have something to add to the conversation of leveraging content here. So Chep is a customer service and experience expert. He’s the chief amazement officer, HFA Shepherd presentations. He’s a New York Times and a Wall Street Journal best-selling author. And he’s been inducted into the National Speakers Association. Hall of fame. He’s a former NSA president. He’s the author of Moments of Magic, The Loyal Customer, The Cult of the Customer, The Amazing Revolution. The Amazement Revolution. I’m sorry, amaze every customer every time. Be amazing or go home. And he’s also the creator of the customer-focused customer service training program. So welcome. We’ve known each other for quite some time. So let me just start by asking you to share with us Shepp World. So you’ve got your core content to touch briefly on. You know that the essence of customer experience and then how you’re getting it out to the world.
Shep Hyken Sure. And let’s go back to really long time ago. Nineteen eighty-three is when I started my business and I decided to become a professional speaker. And I saw Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. I said, I can do that. They made me feel like I could do anything that night. I bought a book called How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins. That night I launched the audiocassettes. Remember cassette tapes? Yeah. Was it Ziegler’s? See you at the top. I went back home, and I listened and read and came up with a plan. I went to the bookstore because I knew if I had to be a speaker, I had to have something to talk about and it was going to be business. And I started looking for books. And by the way, in that time, the bookstore in the business section was one shelf long. That was it. It wasn’t like there was a big area of business books.
Peter Winick Well, let me add to that, Shep. For those of you out there at that time, there were bookstores.
Shep Hyken Yes, There were bookstores. I went to B Dalton’s bestsellers. I remember that’s what I was going to B Dalton’s at the mall. And they had a little bit of a business section, maybe a shelf or two. And all the books that I gravitated toward were books that focused on customer service. And I figured out why, because this is what I grew up with. I had my own business back even as a teenager. And I grew it through being amazing for my customers when I worked in retail. And I just knew you’d take care of people. I used to work in gas stations when I was in college. And even though we were self-service of an elderly woman came into the or a man came into the station, I would run outside and pump her gas. So didn’t have to get out of the car, even though we were self-service that service. So that’s where it all. That’s where the interest came. So I read everything I can get my hands on. Back then, it was primarily booked and maybe I saw an article in a magazine, maybe as I was working with a client. And by the way, my first clients, I simply just pick up the phone and say, hey, do you ever use speakers? And they would say, yes, I go, great. This is what I do. Are you interested? And I talk about this thing I call creating a moment of magic for customers. And so I’ve been pretty I’ve kept that in I guess I’ve been in that lane now for 30 plus years. And I’ve been talking about moments of magic for that long. But anyway, that’s where it all started. And before I know it, today, we have the Internet. And I don’t remember how long ago it actually when I think it was. Did Al Gore invent the Internet? He George Bush calls it the Internet’s Al Gore enough. So there I nailed the Republicans and the Democrats in one set.
Peter Winick You’re an equal opportunity offender. We love that. Look, I wish to add one comment to what you said there. Check back in that. There’s some insight there that you might not be aware of. Right. So one is it’s all customer experience all the time for 30 years. So there’s probably many other things in your world that we talk about hockey a moment ago. But when it comes to the content and what you’re getting out in the world, that’s the signal. So there’s not a lot of noise in your world.
Shep Hyken I stay in a lane and I live in that lane and I’m known for it. Just the other day, somebody called me and said, you know, I’m taking a gamble on sticking to one concept. What do you think of that? Go. That’s not taking a gamble. It’s clarity and confidence-building with your clients because now they know who you are and what you’re about. If you said, hey, I do leadership and I also do customer. Orients and I also do some sales work, so manage. Highfields Manage. Like what do I hire this guy for all of it? One of.
Peter Winick Exactly. Yeah. Great. So that’s the essence of the content. Give me a sense of what your world looks like. And what I mean by that is, is I’m the ideal client. Tell me what that looks like and tell me how easy you’ve made it for me to give you money. How can I pay you to do what?
Shep Hyken I love that. So there’s three ways. Three more, I guess, three models within my company. Number one is you can hire me to speak. You can hire my firm to deliver onsite customer service, customer experience, training, or we can do it all online or a combination of any of those three, obviously. And. But again, all the content is the same.
Peter Winick So let me read you that it’s in-person by you. The thought leader, I’m assuming that’s the premium product because that’s limited. That’s going to have a high price point. Then it’s in person.
Shep Hyken Well, it is for a single moment type of event, like a one hour show. But we have contracts for training. There are far in excess of my Mike’s keynote.
Peter Winick No, it will. Yeah. So let me just go backwards and their source number one on an hourly or time basis. The most expensive thing is to bring you in for a keynote. The second thing is bringing others in to deliver your IP and content. But the expectation is it’s not cheap in front of the room. And that could be, you know, 10 to 20 times speaking fee over time to an organization. And then the last piece is you have a digital element.
Shep Hyken Correct. So the online and what’s really fascinating to me on the training side, which are the, you know, second, third options, the clients when they’re calling some of them, you know. Yeah. Boy, it’d be great to get Shep, but when they find out that they get all the content that I’ve written, it’s just being delivered by a couple of people that have been working with me for years. That’s great. And number two, I tell him, you still get access to me. You’re not going to need access to me. And maybe on our first call, you’re going to realize real quickly that the guy who put you with. It’s gonna take such good care of you. But I am always available to talk to my clients anytime. And even if somebody is not a client, I talk to them. Nobody’s yet to truly take it taken over. I guess an overt advantage of me to the point where I just want to hang up the phone. But, you know, I just make it clear to the client, you know, you’re working with us even though you’re primarily dealing with one of them.
Peter Winick Got it. So. For the sake of brevity here, keynoting, we all get what that is, right? You get there, you get up on stage, do your thing, whatever, feigning a training face to face. I think we all get what that looks like. Well, let’s talk about the digital, because ultimately I think that’s where the highest leverage, the highest scale and ultimately the highest net contribution profit-wise once you amortize the cost of building something. So tell me what you’re doing in digital that’s working and how folks are consuming it, how you’re selling it. Give me a sense of what that looks like.
Shep Hyken Sure. And I’m going to tell you something that’s probably going to surprise you. I’m not going to say it’s going to blow your mind, but it’s going to surprise you. So what I did back in 2001, right after 9/11, I realized that we’re one terrorist attack away, another terrorist attack away from the annihilation of being hired. You have a keynote speaker. If that happened, people would start having meetings. That’s how I got into the training business. Now, online training, there was a company I was on the board of this company. If you wanted to have an online training program, a learning management system, LML says it’s called you would back in that time, it would have cost you, gosh, tens of thousands, if not one hundred thousand dollars to get a halfway decent one. And even then, it was cumbersome and complicated for the user. Well, over the last oh, I’m going to say seven years or so, maybe five to seven years. It’s so easy. And the costs have come down. And there are organizations and companies like Kajabi or Udemy, as is very inexpensive resources where you can use their platform to place content.
I went a different route. I went with another company, Lightspeed Virtual Training. I know them well. And I created five courses. And while expensive to create those courses because I paid a lot of money to have my content put into video, it wasn’t me doing it. You know, homegrown, beautiful studios. It paid for itself rather quickly. So that the concept is most of the time we have a monthly fee based on how many people are going to be using it. Many times larger clients just assume pay for the whole thing at once instead of spreading it out over a year. For our thought leaders, let me tell you the importance of having it spread out over a year is because when you can create a contract where there’s ongoing recurring revenue, that sounds nice for you as the thought leader. Oh, that’s great. But no. What’s nice is its automatic payments that are made from a company in our contract state that 60 days out you’ll renew and it will continue on month to month until you give us notice to stop it. If you follow me. So I don’t want a one-time payment for a one-year contract that I have to go back.
Peter Winick So that’s a great point that you make, because let’s look at the flip side of this, which is a little bit further down the road. And you’re a former National Speakers Association president. So you can confirm this factoid I’ll put out there. No one in the history of the speaking industry has ever sold their speaking business. That would you concur?
Shep Hyken Well, out OK.
I don’t think is a straight up as a keynote speaker. You can sell your keynote business, right, that it just can’t happen. I sold a workshop seminar that I created back in the 90s and did quite well with it. But they were interested in the content and how we delivered it, which, by the way, is why the training company, if the sales get high enough and especially the online, if you have renewals, are in the 80 to 90 percent range and you build up several million dollars a year in ongoing revenue.
Peter Winick You can sell that well. And that’s exactly where I was growing up. Nobody is going to come to you and say, check, check. You know, here here’s you know, you did 50 speeches last year. I’ll pay you 10 times. But after the speaking and then just the role of Shepp will be played by Meldon. Not gonna happen. Right. But if you’ve got subscription-based revenue. Exactly. On the digital piece, it’s not dependent on you. It’s a subscription-based revenue model. The EBIDTA on that is nice. You could actually exit that business for a nice multiple. And I think oftentimes, particularly on the speaker side, they’re not thinking long term that it’s transactional business. I want to get my fee. I want to do more events, maybe raise my fee. But I think sometimes having that longer view and playing the long game and coming up with the product solutions and offerings that can actually have an exit could be a phenomenal game-changer.
Shep Hyken Right. And so here’s the part will that will surprise you. I promised I was going to not all your mind, but surprise you. Number one, I often wonder whether I should have not I should have hired somebody to go in and be the star of the training program, be online, because it doesn’t matter if it’s me or a spokesperson and man, a woman doesn’t matter. It’s the content that counts. That’s number one. Number two. When I went to lightspeed, Bradley, the owner and I sat down and talked. He says your lowest hanging fruit, meaning your best opportunities are going to be your existing client. Those are the clients that are hiring you for speeches. Well, I’m not. I hate to say he was wrong, but he was dead wrong. I have hardly converted a keynote speech into a training product, be it on-site or online. The percentage of my clients to go that route very, very small. That said, anybody who’s doing onsite training is interested in the online for sustainability. And so what we’ve done is we’ve created a completely separate Web site for my training. And people when they do their Google searches for customer service training, many times they land on this. And guess what? They don’t even know who Shep hiking is. But once they start reading and they learn who I am and what I’ve done in the past. Sure. Well, that’s huge credibility that starts to tip the scale in my favor. I go up against great companies like the Disney Institute or the Ritz-Carlton training program, their leadership program. I mean, they’re hard to beat and they’re awesome programs and it’s great stuff.
Peter Winick So let me ask you this. Is it because what you said was quite surprising is that the conversion rate on speaking to training, which is one path that people take. But I think actually that makes sense to some degree because if you start to dissect the buyer profile of someone buying a speech, forget the audience for a moment. I’m the buyer of a speech. I have an event. It’s in Scottsdale on, you know, June 17. Well, hopefully not Scottsdale in June, but February or whatever. And here’s your price. Are you available? Here’s what you do. That person is probably not tasked with ongoing learning and development and sustainability of behavior change and all that in the organization unless they can make that connection for you. It’s hard to get an immediate upsell from. Yes, my speech is X and then for a couple extra dollars or some whatever, you can get all the video training. So it’s interesting that you’ve totally segregated the way that you market and position it because there’s two buyer profiles.
Shep Hyken Right. And by the way, I didn’t want it to be that way. I was thinking, gosh, you know, 50 speeches a year. If if if just half of them would take the training program. Wow, wouldn’t that be great? But I’m telling you that and I don’t know why it doesn’t happen, but maybe it’s because when I’m brought in the keynote, I’m brought in for I have a role in a meeting, not a change in the company. By the way, it is frustrating, in my opinion, as a thought leader, speaker, whatever you want to call me to go in and know that some of these clients are one and done because, you know, it’s you know, they want that thought leadership on stage. They want me to give them the information they can use. And then they’re on to the next concept. Next topic.
Peter Winick Right. And then there’s a lunch break and then everybody’s rushing to the airport. Right. So you been you’ve been at this quite some time and you’ve seen some trends come and go and see some things work and not work. If you were to talk now, we’ll go into the time machine for a moment. Make a special sound effect noise or something out there today. There we go, right on cue. Out there today is sharp hike in, you know, 15, 20 years ago. Who’s smart, who’s aggressive, who’s thoughtful has something to say. What advice would you give him on the business side in terms of how to make this a sustainable, a longer-term profitable business that has an impact on lots and lots of people.
Shep Hyken Sure. And. I’m going to give you how I get business. There are two ways that we get business, and the first way I’m going to share with you is the way I started from day one and I already mentioned it. I picked up the phone and I called somebody, you smile and you dial. And I don’t care how successful we are, the phones when you know it’s not efficient, when the fish are jumping into the boat on their own, you know, we ride this wave of success. Maybe a book has come out. Maybe the economy has been fantastic and people are buying it. But what happens is when it doesn’t work, you’ve got to pick up the phone and start calling again. So we never, ever stop calling. We just don’t call us frequently. So we stay in that practice. But a number of years ago, well, 2009, not quite 15 years ago, about 2009, almost nine years ago, Twitter came about. And I remember coming back to my office and saying, I need to learn about this Twitter thing. And we started posting quotes from my books, lines from my books. And people started following I. OK, this is cool social media. Well, what else can I do? I always did a newsletter every single month and eventually every week. So here’s what I’m going to share with you, my content marketing schedule, because I believe that anybody that wants to become recognized for what they do, content marketing is there’s no way around it. So we’ll start with Sunday on Sunday. I have an article that comes out in Forbes. I’ve been hired to do a minimum of 52 columns a year. And that’s once a week on Sundays. And it’s always on customer service or experience in Spiga share strategic level. I’m gonna go through this real quick. I’m going to try to do it in under three minutes. Under two minutes. Not on Monday. I post a blog of the five favorite articles that I read from last week. Of all the dozens and dozens of articles I read throughout the week, I use Google Alerts to send me all the articles Tuesday. I do a podcast called Amazing Business Radio. I do that really for them. Of course, recognition is great. There’s a little bit of money that I make off of it because people listen to it. They hire me. But the big reason is I get to interview people like you interviewing me. It’s like we get to pick the brains of people we want to learn from. And I get great people. Wednesday, I send out a newsletter. My list is pretty good. But I also posted on my blog it gets picked up by at least 12 to 15 publications every week. So it’s kind of syndicated in that sense. Thursday, I do a video. I actually do my newsletter. I go into a studio and I’ll do four and five at a time and I create short three minute videos that go on my YouTube channel. By the way, Shep.tv will take you directly to my YouTube channel. There’s over 600 videos. It’ll show you what I’m doing on. That’s Thursday on Friday. We have a guest post on our blog site. And I usually set it up with one or two, three sentences. Why we’re bringing this thought leader in. Saturday, we usually post another video or we just continue there. We try to activate something. What can we share throughout the whole week? We’re doing Facebook posts and Twitter and some Instagrams. And by the way, here’s something we’re just starting to do on Saturdays because I like to do something every day if I can on Saturdays. It’s now Instagram day. We found out recently, not that long, maybe the last month or two that Instagram now allows for video up to 60 seconds long. So I have taken 52 of my favorite quotes from my books that I know they’re my quotes. They’re not other people’s quotes. Fifty-two of my favorite quotes and I’ve written a 150-word script with that quote because it comes out to write about 45 seconds, which allows me to leave my Web site address up at the end. That’s we’re going into production with that in the next week or so. So we’ll have another year’s worth of content, by the way, that will take me less than four or five hours to do the whole thing. Not the writing part…
Peter Winick So I love it. So the content marketing and I used the term thought leadership marketing. But tomato, tomato. It’s relentless. It’s persistent. It’s on a schedule. There’s processes, it’s multi-modality. You’re constantly experimenting with new things because, you know, I agree with you. Eight, nine years ago when Twitter came out. Omma, what is this thing? You know, fast forward to today. For some reason, we’ve got and it’s not random. It’s by design a significant number of followers indirect business that comes in the door through Twitter. I would not have taken that bet eight years ago. Darebin Other things that have failed, you know, Vine and some others along the way. But I think thinking about it in terms of an experiment being consistent in terms of the messaging, trying different formats and then having the rigor, because one of the things another I don’t know if you’ve had the same observation job that I’ve noticed is people dove in, they go crazy with something and then they stop. It’s almost like the New Year’s resolution where all of a sudden I’m going to pretend I’ll be at the gym six days a week. Right. So if you’re gonna do Twitter or do any of these things. A. have a strategy and then stick to it. Right.
Shep Hyken Right. Make it consistent.
Peter Winick Consistent. I love that. That’s fantastic.
Shep Hyken Real quick. A metaphor is if you think of content marketing as you have this bucket. And you’re going to drip water into it and you going to put seven drops of water a week into this bucket. It takes a long time to fill that bucket. It could take two, three years to know that bucket. And here’s the point. Content marketing doesn’t immediately get you recognized it’s content marketing or thought leadership marketing over an extended period of time. You constantly drip. What happens when you stop dripping the water? What does water do eventually? It evaporates. You cannot stop dripping.
Peter Winick Good advice.
Shep Hyken That’s my metaphor. And then you combine that with, you know, once somebody gets in our system and they say they’re interested, we have a really good system of fouling up and keeping in touch with them. And of course, if times are to get tough in the economy starts to turn and people are losing confidence, we just start to create lists of people that we think might be hiring speakers or have training still. And we just go to.
Peter Winick Sure. And I love the fact that you keep falling back to systems and processes because this can’t be dependent on you. You’re busy, you’re travelling. You’ve got to be on top. You know, we have people literally you have people that but you also have people following systems and processes that work.
Shep Hyken And by the way, all the things that I’ve talked about, people say, wow, that’s overwhelming. You’ve got a seven day a week schedule. My job is to do two things. Actually, three things. It is to create content. It is to deliver the content on stage. And it is to talk to clients about either hiring me or using, you know, the other things that we do in a company. That’s it. My job is not to activate the content. Anybody can be posted on Facebook. Anybody could post it to Twitter. So I have somebody in her office. Her title is Director of Reputation. And she tells me exactly what I need on schedule. I need five tweets. I need you. And by the way, twice a day she sends me an email. Here are all the comments that I have that I need to respond to. I don’t know if that’s going on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever, but I respond to every one of those. And then she turns around and post them forming up. So I receive. I know it’s very personal, but I don’t need to. I don’t need to actually activate the technology. Let somebody else do that. I need to create the content.
Peter Winick Well, I love that you’re staying in your lane of that content creation, the delivery and the customer service or that customer interface because that’s not the stuff to outsource. That is absolutely the place where you’re going to add the most value and where it’s your perspective and your thought leadership that matters the most. So as we start to wrap it up here, you’ve shared a lot with us. You’ve seen a lot over the years. Any two or three quick tips you want to share. And then let folks know where they can find you and how they can find you. And if you leave the back door open, if they can sneak into the house or grab a cookie or something.
Shep Hyken Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of things I. A long time ago I had a mentor and I will I guess I’ll dumb down too. What do you spent a lot of time talking about to one simple sentence or actually two. The job is not doing the speech. It’s getting the speech. The job is not doing the consulting contract or, you know, doing the work for the consulting contract. It’s getting the contract. So always keep in mind what your real job is if you don’t have a client. I don’t care how smart you think you are, you’re not in business. So that’s probably my biggest thought. Off the top of my head. The second thing is in managing relationships, you know, you need to always do what you say you’re gonna do. I think one of the reasons we create we get business is we create confidence in the way we do it is when an inquiry comes in. We don’t wait a day or so to respond. We don’t even wait three or four hours.
Peter Winick I love it when somebody fills out a form on my Web site and then it pops up in our inbox and by the way, goes to everybody. And I hear them, you know, they’re gone.
Shep Hyken And by the way, I position myself with a little bit of distance between the client and myself. Not that I’m inaccessible, but I’m not the one that’s going to share Fauja. So one of my people are going to pick up the phone. And if we can do it with literally within a minute, people go. I just push the send button. That’s just the way we roll. And we tell them, you know, can’t expect that every time, but you can’t expect within usually within an hour you’re going to hear from somebody. Within a business hour, you catch us at seven o’clock at night. You don’t hear from us first thing in the morning. But if you catch us anytime during the normal day and we’re not the kind of business that’s expected to be open 24/7. So I think create credibility with.
Peter Winick But it’s a differentiator. Right. It’s I mean, oftentimes I hear stories all the time where, you know, these speakers are starving for work. And, you know, four days later, they respond to an email. What do you think that client did they e-mailed you and seven other people like. Seriously?
Shep Hyken Yeah. And by the way, we have received work because they said you were the first person to respond and in some cases, get this, the only one to respond. So anyway, we’re relentless on that. So I call that a major touch. And you need to manage all your touchpoints. And if you say you’re gonna do something and you’ll have something to somebody, by the end of the day, it’s always there a little before getting to the dip. If it’s by the end of the week, it’s always there on Thursday, not Friday. So we try to exceed expectations. We manage those touchpoints. And so those are two real big, big tips. And, you know, how do you reach me if gosh, my name Haken dot com. You can follow me on Twitter at Haken if you want to go to my YouTube channel just to see what we’re doing. You know, Sheptock TV, it’s pretty simple.
Peter Winick Great. Well, I can’t thank you enough. Grateful not just for the fact that you showed up, for the fact that you showed up. And this is chock full of information. I would suggest you listen to this one again. Thirty-five years or so of insight from one of the best in the game.
Shep Hyken Not quite. Thirty-five. Don’t make me older than I am. You said eighty-three. I think it is thirty-five. Oh, my goodness. We turned the new year.
Peter Winick Yes. Yes. Congratulations.
Shep Hyken It’ll be in August. That’ll officially be 30. Okay. Holy moly. So you’re thirty-four and a half and professional you go.
Peter Winick So thanks so much for being here today.
Shep Hyken And I encourage folks to reach out to shop and take what he what he says to heart. Thanks so much. Thanks, Peter.
Peter Winick To learn more about thought leadership leverage, please visit our Web site at thought leadership leverage dot com to reach me directly. Feel free to e-mail me at Peter at thought leadership leverage dot com and please subscribe deleveraging thought leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatic.
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