Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 195 – Joseph Michelli

Peter Winick

Whether you plan to self-publish, or take a more traditional route with your book, you’ll need an established platform to bring your book to market. But do you know how to best reach the audience you need?

In this episode, it’s our pleasure to speak with Joseph Michelli, an internationally sought-after speaker, consultant, and best-selling author of several books including Driven to Delight and The AirBnB Way.

Joseph shares his thoughts on writing books about globally recognized brands, while working with those brands to improve their business. We also discuss modern innovations in the publishing industry, how to thread the needle between your rights and your publisher’s contracts, and ideas for sharing book content through multiple modalities in order to reach a larger audience. Lastly, Peter and Joseph discuss how to deal with the pressures of international speaking engagements, and whether you need a speakers’ bureau to survive and thrive.

If you have a keynote or book that you want to move to other modalities, you’ll need to think about your audience! TLL has some tips for ensuring you find the right medium to make your message soar.

Transcript

Peter Winick And 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. I am super excited, almost giddy for today’s episode, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. My guest is Joseph A. Michelli, PhD, and a CSP. Dr. Micheli is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Nielsen Book Scan, and New York Times’ number one bestselling author multiple times. You’ll recognize. His books, some of them are Driven to Delight, World Class Customer Experience, The Mercedes-Benz Way. There’s Leading the Starbucks Way, Five Principles for Connecting with Your Customer, Your Products and Your People. There’s the Zappos Experience. I just finished reading the most recent book called The Airbnb Way. And then there’s also the Ritz-Carlton book, The New Gold Standard. So I mean, I don’t think there’s anybody out there with more expertise in customer experience. And it’s super fun for me when I get to talk to someone whose work I really just love and adore from. far for a long, long time. So I’m a little giddy today, Joseph. So thank you for joining us.

Joseph Michelli Well, you know, normally we say all kinds of great things about our hosts and sometimes you have to make it up. But for you, it’s so easy for me because I have been reading your newsletter forever. We’ve known each other for a long time. So this is truly an honor and I could not be more respectful to the host. So let’s do it.

Peter Winick Well, so I think we’re going to end there and it’ll be the shortest episode ever. So let’s, let’s just dive in. So you have written at least seven or eight books that I know of. You’ve been a professional speaker for a long, long time. You’re CSP certified, which to my speaker friends out there know what that means is the sort of the highest level certification the NSA gives. But let’s start with. Given that you’ve got the same content expertise on the customer experience, and then you dive deep, you sort of embed yourself into one of these amazing brands and out comes a book in news speaking. So how do you, what’s your process? How do you go about sort of creating all this cool stuff?

Joseph Michelli Yeah. So I think my model is to be first a consultant, right? So I’m in companies trying to help them improve their customer experience day in, day out. And then I want to take what I do in that consulting space and find my prime clients that people would be interested in learning about their journey and share that through books. So, you know, Mercedes is a pretty good example. Worked with them for multiple years trying to help them go from 22nd in the JD Power to number one in the JD Power. on customer satisfaction and while going through that journey I’m working with the CEO and I’m saying hey someday there’s a story to be told here about we think about signing a collaboration agreement and then I’ll sign a publishing agreement with my publisher and we’ll put it out there x number of years down the road and so that’s the model I use and then based on that I try to get speaking engagements and then speaking engagements avail me opportunities to try to help those clients think about bringing me in as a consultant and the circle goes on.

Peter Winick So when you’re selecting the brands to write about, I mean, one of the things that comes to my mind is I look at all the books that you wrote, the brands that I have some familiarity with, right? And it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the biggest brands in the world, but you’re not writing about Procter and Gamble, you’re writing about B2B technologies, Oracle, Cisco, they tend to be brands that the average individual can either have a relationship with or be that real or aspirational or et cetera. Is that part of the model as well?

Joseph Michelli Yeah, I think my model is pretty much this. They have to be a global brand. So we’re going to think about selling translations beyond the English version. So it’s got to be global brand, it’s gotta treat its customers well and it’s gonna treat its employees well. And if you do those things, I’m normally good, though I’m always looking for a slightly different take. So Zappos is going to be online retail. Airbnb is going be a marketplace that really has very little brick and mortar. And then there are going to be variations. I think of brands that, you know, we think of brand like Starbucks as a pure customer play, but they are very big B2B plays. There’s a lot of companies that buys Starbucks and corporate buys, and the same is true with Mercedes. They have, you now, many fleet relationships. So I like to have brands that are both B2b and B2c, though, you, I’d take on a global brand that treats its employees well and has great B2D experiences for a future book if the topic comes up.

Peter Winick Very cool. So, I mean, your model is quite different in that, I mean it’s a high bar. So there’s the select criteria on the type of brands you’ll write about. Then you serve as their consultant, right? So the client has to agree upfront, and maybe some wouldn’t, et cetera, that one of the outcomes of this engagement of our working together is not just that I’m gonna make your company better, but we’re gonna produce a cool book, which is a benefit to them. So how does that, how do clients react to that?

Joseph Michelli Well, you know, and I don’t hit every company up to say, when I’m consulting with them, you might be the subject of a book and when you agree upon that, a priori. What I frequently do is I think most people now, at least now in my career, they know there’s a possibility that if we really turn this around and if we’re interesting enough, Michelli might write a book about us. So I mean, I think they always see that as a potential value up. I mean it’s clearly their consulting clients and me that, you call will say things like… We hope that our partnership together will result in a book someday. And my normal answer is I hope so too. I mean, I hope we do great work and that we tell a compelling story and that people would be interested in it, but there’s no promises going in on the front end. And they also aren’t encumbered by the fear that we’re going to do a tell-all book about our journey, good, bad, or otherwise. So I think it’s really been one of those things where so many brands I work for that I never write a book about, but they’re those select few that really make for great books.

Peter Winick So what I was saying is, so you start as a consultant, which in many instances are multi-year relationships so you can monitor the outcomes and the benefits and the impact of your work, right? And then a story has to be put together in a way that makes a great book. That’s not easy, right? Nobody wants a story of just data of, you know, the NPS score went from A to B, thank you very much, right? There’s a richness to it, right. There’s something different about the way Rich Carlton deals with hospitality than Airbnb. There is something visceral around is sort of walking into the Starbucks. So you’ve got to create the book, then you’ve gotta create the speech. Most people on the speaking side sort of start with a speech to maybe experiment about what a market would like, or use speaking to find consulting gigs. What’s the ideal entry point in this cycle for you for a client? Because it seems like you have a different sort of model, if you will.

Joseph Michelli Yeah, I think for me, frequently what we see is people have read the book. So let’s take the Mercedes book. A number of my clients read the books and said, we want to be the Mercedes of our industry or we want do that kind of transformation because we’re really product oriented right now and we know we’re not going to be able to compete on product alone. So can you help us do it? And that could be.

Peter Winick And that could be in a different industry, I imagine. So it’s not that BMW. Oh, absolutely. So it not BMW calling to give me the secrets that you did for our friends across the street.

Joseph Michelli For some reason, we got a bunch of building industry clients after we did Mersey. Really? Okay. Yeah, there was people, I mean, there’s a Berkshire Hathaway company in the building space that hired us and said, come in and frequently we’ll do the consulting with them or sometimes they’ll test the water a little bit and they’ll say, let’s kind of see how you relate to us and come in and do a keynote. And so the entry point can come a number of different ways. It might be through a specific need for an event. Other times they’re kind of wanting the consulting and I bundle in some keynotes in the front end. But the bottom line is we kind of get in there and then as we’re doing it, it’s not unusual for me to say, you know, I really like to use some of the stuff we’re doing in some of these speeches I’m doing right now. Would you feel comfortable with that? And then I might modularize a couple of stories from my experiences with them, put them in the deck that I’m using with just general clients. And so yeah, it becomes a, and then if that builds up enough and it seems right, we’re making enough progress, I might hit them up and say, how about a book in a year and a half about you? And I’m gonna start tracking what we’re doing and incorporating what I’m learning and sharing that with you as we go forward in a book project and try to sell it to McGraw Hill, which is my publisher. And if they, you know, if their pub board says yes, then we start moving forward.

Peter Winick And I would imagine, obviously, it speaks well to the client that a McGraw-Hill, as well as you, lots of independent folks think it’s worth the investment of time and energy and that it’s a great book there. So sort of two big areas of the business that I want to talk about with you for a little bit. So first, let’s talk publishing, right? So for you, and I don’t want to make this sound easy, if you’ve already got seven or eight New York Times bestseller, getting to the ninth, tenth, and eleventh is a little bit easier than getting to the first, second, or third. Is that a fair? Absolutely. Right.

Joseph Michelli It’s totally true, and the process I go through to get a publishing agreement is a lot easier than it used to be. Okay, so step one, be Joseph and write seven best-selling books. Step one is be nobody and write your first bestselling book and figure out how to get that done. And that was a pretty miraculous journey back in time.

Peter Winick Yeah. Well, where I was going is tell me a bit. So you have a nice relationship with McGraw-Hill, but given how long you’ve been doing this, what you, you know, what you’re seeing that’s different in the publishing world, what’s the same? You know, you’ve stuck with the same publisher. So walk us through that one.

Joseph Michelli Oh my gosh, yeah, it’s all different. Yeah, it just changes based on what they can sell. I mean, I love my publisher, they are so good to me. But you can see the changes year in and year out. So it used to be the case, first when digital books came out, they wanted big royalties, and every boilerplate contract with a major publisher took giant royalties off of digital books, right? And they did not sell quite as well as everybody had envisioned, so they relaxed some of that. Nowadays, the big grab is audio rights. So in the old days, I could retain my audio rights and then sell them into another market player. Now, they don’t give you the option to keep your audio rights, that’s a standard thing they keep and then they give you royalties on the sale of yours, but they keep it in-house. So I think there’s a lot of platforms that change over time based on the economics of the thing and your deals have to follow suit. Other than that, I think we worried about the death of the published book. I don’t see it happening at all. I think there’s a lot of competition and the bookstores are gone and doing the book tours around the book stores is not so productive. But you’re seeing a lot more podcasting, talking about your book on podcasts, and a lot of digital marketing of the book journey.

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 Podcast and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com forward slash podcast. Well, and talk about, and again, you might be a bit of an anomaly because the air is pretty thin up there, but it used to be, it was a partnership with the publisher in terms of not, not obviously the writing of the book, making the book a success, the sales, the marketing, the distribution. What I’ve seen is more often than not, the publisher will do what they can, but its fairly limited and the author has to come to the table with not just a great story and great content, but loyal followers that they’ve been nurturing in between books.

Joseph Michelli Holy moly. Yeah. I mean, you know, everybody has a platform of some size or another, but when you’re going to a publisher today, you have to demonstrate that you have a real platform and that people are going to buy the books or that you’re gonna buy a bunch of books and distribute them to your platform. You got to have a plan that says, I’m going to do a ton of keynotes for free if people will buy the book. There’s a whole journey that new authors find themselves having to convince. And then sometimes you’ll get book deal, but they will give you very little of a. advance against your book deal. And if it catches fire for some reason, then they’ll start marketing behind you. But if it doesn’t catch fire, it’ll just drop off, they’ve kind of cut their losses.

Peter Winick So let’s talk about that catching fire. So to me, where I counsel clients is the burdens on you to light the match, right? So what can you do to stimulate demand? Like you said, through speaking through. your followers or people your fans right through relationships you have with other speakers and authors to get the flywheel going and then you know publishers you know it’s easy to make a conservative bet to go wow you know joseph’s books launched on such and such a date here we are three weeks later and he sold 30 000 copies guess we’ll get behind it right but to get from zero to whatever that x number is uh that’s some heavy lifting for most

Joseph Michelli Yeah, I think it’s building relationships with good quality content in whatever platforms you have before you ever go to the market with a book. I mean, I that’s blogs, that’s podcasts, that speaking, that’s nurturing all of your relationships. Because one of the things we do that even though we’ve established ourselves and I feel so blessed, but I work the heck out of my relationships to say we have a new book coming out and I really wanna give you these special deals if you’ll purchase in advance. And we had a client this year who just bought 1,800 books. And so when you can go to your publisher and say, hey, one of my clients just bought 1,800 books and the book will be released in a month and a half, that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking to be able to deliver real people who want your thought leadership content in the form of the book.

Peter Winick And they vote with their dollars, right? So for that company to say, we trust you, Joseph. We haven’t even read a word of it yet. We’re not waiting for the reviews or somebody to, the sales manager to walk into our company and say, hey, we got this. They have faith in you. They trust you. They know you’re gonna put out something that’s worth.

Joseph Michelli Yeah, and I think you’ve at least given them enough to be willing to play the trust card. I mean, you’re only as good as your last book, right? So, you know, they trusted you the last time, but this one wasn’t so good. Yeah, I think that’s it. You’ve got to be very consistent in delivering value through thought leadership. That’s it

Peter Winick So you touched on something somewhat quickly that I want to pull back on. So you said that your canvas, if you will, is the book, right? So you write these wonderful books. They’re a couple hundred pages. It’s not going to flow out of you in a weekend. But now you’re talking about sort of keeping folks interested in social and podcast. How do you sort of manage or deal with or what do you do tactically to take the essence of books and port that over into different formats and different modalities so that you’re not limiting the reach. to people who will commit eight hours to a book, because frankly that’s not everyone in it.

Joseph Michelli No, no, no. When I am dying, breathe. Yeah. Yeah, it’s totally true. But yeah, I think there are several things that happen. I blog every single week. It is a discipline of mine. It’s one of the few good characteristics of me as a person. I blog, every week, right? And then in regard to

Peter Winick Regardless of where you are in a book cycle. So whether you’re selling me something or not. I’m gonna get something from you

Joseph Michelli Yeah, so, and you’re gonna get that, that’s the free line. You get that free every single week. And then the goal is to, you know, put that in some other formats for my consumers. So my people are not on Facebook necessarily. They’re on LinkedIn. You know, I have some, I think, meaningful relationships through Twitter. But most, for the most part, we’re gonna blog. We’re gonna have that blog repurposed by others that we trust, you have customer, you know customer specific websites. And we’re going to push that content every single week. So that’s our large. strategy. We use some video. We’re kind of dinosaurs in that and we’re bringing more live video into that. But all in all, we’re trying to produce something every week you can reliably predict. Now the cool part of that is we’ll take pieces from the book and we’ll kind of anticipate the book in there. We’ll be blogging and then as I’m writing the book, I go back and look at stuff I’ve blogged about and then bring it back in to the content of a book and expand it out beyond what I might do in 500 words.

Peter Winick Right, so just because you touched on something conceptually in a thousand word blog post or whatever, doesn’t eliminate it from reappearing with a little more depth or texture or color, whatever, in a book a year later.

Joseph Michelli Absolutely. It’s kind of helps me write my books is to be constantly blogging.

Peter Winick So I want to move now, this is awesome, awesome stuff here, I want to move to speaking because you’ve been speaking probably almost as long as you’ve been writing and that whole world has changed. So let me just preface it from the standpoint of it used to be the monopoly of the bureaus and the bureaux are still great. I’m not anti-bureau, but they basically controlled the market for the most part up until, you know, plus or minus 10 years ago, where, you know, due to technology and the internet and disintermediation, etc. It’s easier for many clients, not all, to go directly to the author and the thought leader. So how does that, how are you contending with that?

Joseph Michelli Yeah, it was 50-50 for a large part of my career. 50% direct, 50% from bureaus. Bureaus loved it if you could not only hit a home run, but you could position them to get repeat business from a specific event. They really wanted to put you out there because you were not just fulfilling customer needs, you were a revenue generator to create new pathways into businesses for them. That today, about 20% of my business comes from bureaux. I love bureaus, I love working with bureaus I love that there are these door openers to clients that I can’t get. Sometimes it’s a little frustrating because someone will call a bureau directly when they’re really looking for you and they’re going to get their commission, even though they read your last book and they called the bureau because they found them before they found you. But all in all, I think for me, it’s important to maintain relationships with heroes. I just know about one in five of my speeches is probably going to come from that channel.

Peter Winick Got it, and that 50-50, even a while ago, that was higher than most, I would say, because you have such a large following due to the number of books you’ve sold in action.

Joseph Michelli Yeah, and I think that we were playing at a pretty big price point, and a lot of times the bigger companies would go to a bureau because a bureau could get them five speakers for a three-day conference, and those meeting planners kind of liked that and a good representative of a bureau knew them and vetted the right speakers.

Peter Winick And they might have a pre-existing relationship with the bureau that they trust as well.

Joseph Michelli Absolutely and anybody can call themselves a customer experience speaker or a leadership speaker or motivational speaker You know you can claim that on your website till the cows come home And if you’re gonna pay the kind of dollars that many of these speak these clients do they wanted somebody to vet them for them

Peter Winick Yeah. And that makes sense. So I would be remiss in getting ready for today. There’s so here’s where I’m going with this given, you know, I all I do is work with authors and speakers and thought leaders and people that put great content out there. And I’ve got the opportunity to have one of the world renowned customer experience experts on one of things I find deplorable is the customer experience that many speakers are unintentionally giving their prospects and clients.

Joseph Michelli Yeah.

Peter Winick You know, so there were, and, and again, I think it’s, they’re not bad people. I’m not saying that at all, but it’s unintentional. Like, you know, a bureau reaches out to you and says, Hey, you know, made the seven thing Cleveland, and then, you know, the speaker’s pissed at, you know, when they responded four days later. So tell me about, like, if I were to interface with you, either as a direct client, I’m buying a speech, what would be the experience you would hope I would take away as a customer of Michelle?

Joseph Michelli Yeah, so we want you and I might write a book about like a VIP. No, no, no. I have. I absolutely have this on my website. Our customer experience should leave you feeling like a V.I.P., which for us stands for valued, inspired and powerful. And so everything we do should make sure that you understand. We appreciate you. So if we don’t get back to you in, you know, four days, we are surely not treating you like a vip. We’re not treating like your value. In terms of inspired, we realize that in order to inspire you, we have to do all of the basics of service, plus we have understand you so much that we deliver a speech that has great content, but also has some emotional punch to it and causes you to say, I can at the end of it. And then finally, powerful, we want to give you some tools. We don’t want you to leave in the same state you walked in with, just like we don’t to have popcorn for dinner. We want you to have something substantive. and be able to go out there and slay the world. And so we want to give you some of that. That’s our really well-defined customer experience and we measure that. Every time we ask customers, how valued did you feel? How inspired did you field? And how empowered were you?

Peter Winick I love that. So you actually have, I know in your business you would, because you have to eat your own dog food, obviously. But talk a little bit to the speakers out there who, again, it’s unintentional. So maybe the front end of the experience, they’re great. They’re responsive. They’re giving folks the collateral, getting the pricing, getting the quotes, et cetera. And then comes post-contract or in my contract is my, you know, green M&M clause. I only stay at the top floor in hotels that are on the odd side of the street. I only fly first class on Tuesdays like. Again, I don’t think it’s intentional, but they’re putting out this vibe of, wait a minute, you hired me as basically a freelance gig employee to come in to work with your company for one hour and here’s a list of my demands, I just see so much of that, it blows my mind.

Joseph Michelli Yeah, I think sometimes people get thought leader and mentor and guru confused with prima donna, right? Like we, you know, it doesn’t have to be that way. I mean, in fact, I really think people want somebody who they have some admiration for who’s very much like them, right, like they don’t want people who are on a different social level that demands all this stuff. So yeah, no, you won’t see any of that in our contracts other than when I go international, I do kind of insist on business class travel, otherwise, you know, we have a very minimal travel stipend, no surprise costs associated with us. no green room sort of stuff. And I think that’s really the way it should be. I mean, if we’re really here to create value in people’s lives, we shouldn’t make it a pain in the rear for them to get that value.

Peter Winick Love it, love it. So as we’re starting to wind down here, any final thoughts or reflection of someone’s, you know, sitting out there listening now that is similar to Joseph minus 10 or 15 years.

Joseph Michelli All I would say is to follow you, Peter, and stay following you, because the content you’ve been… No, truly, I mean that. I mean, Chip Conley is a client of yours. The people that I admire and respect have been nurtured and loved on by you, and I think you’ve helped develop great talent. And so continue to consume your newsletter as I do. Think about opportunities to develop relationships with you that can propel your career. That would be what I would tell them. For me, stay humble. Stay humble. Truly, we are blessed every single day we get an opportunity to share a thought. to share a stage, to share page. It doesn’t matter how we get into the person’s life. We are fighting through a whole sea of clutter. And when someone takes the time, the graciousness of their time, we should be so gracious and celebrate that opportunity. And that’s the key for me in this business. And I love what I do. I can’t imagine doing anything better for a living. I pinch myself all the time. I have lots of bruises from that actually. Stop doing that. Exactly, please, enough.

Peter Winick Enough. Yeah, enough. You’ve got me speechless, which is rare for those that know me, but I very much appreciate the admiration and it’s mutual. And if you haven’t read Joseph’s last book or any of his books, I think I’ve read them all, but the first one, so that’s on my list, but you will take away something from all of them, irregardless of your business or industry or where you sit. So I would recommend that you do that. And he also has a reputation of being one of the most easy to work with and just value creating speakers and consultants out there. So I think, you know, it’s awesome to. be able to talk with somebody that watched the talk and isn’t in prima donna, as you mentioned. So I appreciate and I’m very grateful for the time you spent with us today, Joseph. Thank you so much.

Joseph Michelli Thank you, Peter.

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 thought leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.