Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 87 – Jill Schiefelbein

Peter Winick

Peter Winick chats with Jill Schiefelbein on Episode 87 of the Leveraging Thought Leadership Podcast

Modern organizations are moving more and more towards online training. Are the skills needed to be a speaker the same as those you’ll need to perform a successful webinar? Listen in, and find out!

In this episode, Peter Winick hosts Jill Schiefelbein, owner of the Dynamic Communicator and author of “Dynamic Communication: 27 Strategies to Grow, Lead, and Manage Your Business.” They also discuss how Jill moved from an educator to a breakout pioneer in the webinar industry.

Listen in as Jill shares advice about the skills she needed to learn to make the transition, and offers insight into challenges you might face while hosting webinars. Also, she offers tips and tricks about how trainers can be more effective, and the importance of volunteering your time.

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, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Jill Schefelbein. Hopefully I got that right, Jill. You did. Ah, good. Let me give you Jill’s bio because it’s a really interesting one. So she is a university faculty turned entrepreneur. She’s an award-winning business owner, author and recovering academic. We’re gonna touch on that in a little bit. She taught business comm at Arizona State for 11 years. Her latest book was Dynamic Communication, 27 Strategies to Grow, Lead, and Manage Your Business. And welcome aboard, Jill. She’s a fellow New Yorker, so I feel like I’ve got my peeps on today.

Jill Schiefelbein Thanks for having me, Peter.

Peter Winick So let’s start with Arizona State, nice warm weather, right? Very warm. And then you wake up one day and say, the academia is too stable, too confident. I’d rather live on a roller coaster. What was that?

Jill Schiefelbein I’ve always been a thrill seeker, you know. The reality is this, in the academic space, at many institutions, I’d probably say the majority, if you do not have a PhD, you are treated as a second class citizen. And I do not a PhD. I have a master’s. And I had a very unique circumstance where I actually started teaching right out of undergraduate as a graduate assistant, but I had my own classes, no help with me there. So you never left at some level. Yeah, you know, I did it and I taught public speaking because when I was in high school, I was traveling the country doing it and it was a really good lead for me. I fell in love with teaching then and then I also fell in the technology and started building out what were some of the first online education courses in the higher education system in the country. So I built my first online course over 15 years ago. And that combination led a full faculty position being offered very early. I ended up being a director of a massive online education office, which served more students than any other public institution in the country for a long time. And it was this, you know, interesting situation where I was bringing in literally millions of additional tuition dollars and was told at the age of 27 that Unless I get a PhD, I only have one promotion I can ever get. That was a little demoralizing.

Peter Winick Yeah, you think. So that makes that decision fairly easy, right?

Jill Schiefelbein It did, and I had planned on going out on my own at some point, but when you’re in your early to mid 20s and you’re offered a full-time salary with benefits, it’s hard to turn that down. And I didn’t, but I’m glad I didn’t because I learned a lot of lessons there in curating a department and setting up a new business essentially within a university setting that have helped me today.

Peter Winick So basically it sounds like we could tell this story a different way given your communication person that academia was just a detour from what you were always doing which was speaking because you mentioned you had a lot of that in high school so you just maybe took a detours into academia and then got back into that, right? That’s another way to twist it.

Jill Schiefelbein Yeah, we can look at it as a detour where you stopped at a rest stop and you’re like, wait, this is actually pretty cool. And that for me is a teaching element because speaking for speaking sake is one thing. But if I don’t see some transformation in audience members when I’m up on the stage, if there’s not that teaching moment, then I feel like I’ve failed. And so it’s kind of the combination of those two worlds that really happened.

Peter Winick Got it. So give me a sense now, fast forward to today. And you’ve been at this a while, meaning, meaning sort of the thought leadership, the authorship, the speaking draw for us a picture if you could of the different sort of legs of the stool of sort of Jill world in terms of speaking relates to authorship’s relates to, you know, magazine contribute. How does that all connect from a business perspective?

Jill Schiefelbein Really good question. So I have three, what I would call robust revenue streams. I could argue and say, well, I have five or six revenue streams, but in reality, those other streams could barely pay a month and a half of rent here in the city. So, I don’t count those. But the three revenue streams that could stand as a salary on their own are one speaking in person. So whether it’s a physical keynote, so workshops, the trainings, that types of thing in organizations, and that kind of has two sub areas that can get into if you want, but the second revenue stream. is all live virtual training. Some people may call them webinars, but there are things where I’m delivering the same type of content, but through virtual modalities. And that is something that I’ve been conscious about building up because for my own health, insanity and desire to have a social life, heaven forbid, I don’t wanna be on the road 60% of the time anymore.

Peter Winick So yeah, I want to get to that in a minute because in my experience, there are only two types of speakers, right? There’s speakers that want to speak more and then you finally get there and then there’s speakers that want speak less, right.

Jill Schiefelbein Right. I found my limit. I know my limit and now I can readjust. Okay. So we’ve got speaking virtual training and the third revenue is a project based things. So very selectively, I will pick a couple of people or organizations each year that I work with to help them build out their virtual training content. So companies, for example, who have been for decades doing in-person trainings and using that model, but now they know they need to get into the digital space. That’s not something I ever really advertise. It’s not on my website anywhere. It’s only word of mouth, but I keep that very limited because although that could be a full-time business, that’s not where my heart really is.

Peter Winick Cool. So here’s where I want to go for a minute, if we could. So many of our clients are speakers, right? And they realize that speaking at some level, when you think about what does the buyer, not necessarily the participant, what is the buyer of a speech looking for? They’re looking for an hour, plus or minus, they’re looking someone to be engaging, they’re for someone to to be entertaining, and they’re someone to throw out some nuggets that people might find intriguing or interesting or novel or whatever that they can chat about for a little bit and on and on. move that over to the learning side of the house, which is where, you know, you sit on both sides. This is why I’m asking this and have the learning background. When you’re selling into an organization, be that a mid cap or a fortune 1000 on the training side, the stakes are much higher because at that point there’s an expectation that as a result of whatever you’re doing, whatever that intervention is, whatever the teaching is, you’re going to change some behaviors at the individual level that at the aggregate move some business levers in a way that we can measure them that are positive. So. Could you give me a sense of sort of the one is either agree or disagree, but sort of give me a sense of the differences in terms of expectations around both of those formats.

Jill Schiefelbein You know, what I find fascinating right now is in that, you know, MidCat Fortune 1000 world, just like you’re talking about, is we have directors of training who are super smart and know their thing, but they’ve been working with speakers and trainers, working with antiquated models for some time. So when a person comes in with a newer innovative idea, they don’t know how to process it. And I’ve lost some business this year because I am very strict on this is my methodology. This is what I know works, and I know it looks a little different. but this is what we want. And they’re like, oh, we just really want a half-day training. I’m like, well, you’re not gonna get the results you want from that. And so for me, it’s all about setting up expectations right at the beginning. Because the clients that I do work with that follow my methodology, they know with certainty the results that they’re getting and they’re actually able to document that in a way that is sustainable. And so I believe within the next two to three years, that arm of the business is gonna grow exponentially just because I’ve created content around it, people are coming around to it. but the big difference is. you really have to know where the needle is going to be moved and you have to speak directly to that needle and you to have confidence that it’s going to happen. But what I find trainers often don’t do is they don’t have the next step in the system to me which is the personal accountability. I’m not talking about one-on-one coaching, I’m talking about how within a training session do you ensure that you get accountability from your audience in a way that you can communicate it and facilitate that long-term growth within the organization. and Right.

Peter Winick And therefore be able to articulate to your sponsor, to your client, hey, listen, don’t really care that these 20 people said this was the most amazing program, that’s really lovely to say, but look at the results. Look at the business results. You invested X in this, and I’m returning to you a multiple of X in value based on the impact of your business. A totally different conversation than, oh, let’s come in and do a fun half day or full day or whatever.

Jill Schiefelbein It is, I’m not a motivational speaker, and I’ll be the first person to tell them that. People are like, well, we want someone to be inspiring and entertaining, and I’d say, you know what? I am entertaining to smart minds who are actively looking to grow. I’m incredibly entertaining. If you want someone to make-

Peter Winick You don’t chuckle or breathe fire or unicycles or anything like that? I don’t.

Jill Schiefelbein I don’t, but you know, and if you want to make people laugh, maybe they’ll like my dry sense of humor, but that’s, you know. I know it’s important and I try to bring that into my program with intentionality, but at the end of the day, I know who I speak best to and with in terms of getting results and I think it’s not just having the program set up, but being very clear on who you know you serve best as well.

Peter Winick I love that. So let’s go under the hood a little bit, right? So oftentimes, this is sort of the path I see. Someone’s a speaker, doesn’t matter how they got there. They write a great book. They’ve got something interesting to say, whether it’s motivational or whether it on resilience or leadership or management, and they’re speaker, rinse, lather, repeat, right. Show up, do your thing, get a good response. You can see immediate feedback, you know, if it’s working, experiment, do new things, et cetera, et, cetera. And then a client says to them, well, that was really cool. How about some training? And in the speaker’s mind, and they mean well, they think, well, training’s just sort of like long speaking, right? So I’ll just create something that’s three hours or a day or whatever. Can you talk to sort of adult learning and the critical importance of solid instructional design that might be invisible to someone that doesn’t come from that world or that space?

Jill Schiefelbein Sure, a lot of people, when you think of, let me give you this analogy. When you’re looking at an esthetic design, whether it’s a magazine spread or a billboard or sometimes even a piece of art, the human eye, therefore the human brain, needs to see what’s called white space. And that is a space that is empty to allow everything else to come into real focus. The best speakers have white space in their presentation. The best trainers have white space in their training. But the difference in getting that transformation and that really, you know, the big difference is between sharing information and sharing stories versus applied knowledge within a learning context, that white space looks different. It’s not just a pause. It’s just a one-liner. It’s a stand and stare at your audience for a count of three before moving on. Timing is instrumentally important, in good speaking. But when you’re looking at it from a training and a learning perspective, it’s not about just white space for the individual mind, it’s also about white space for the collective mind. Because the people in the room, if you want your training to be really effective… have to come to shared understandings, mutual understandings and collaborative understandings on how they all fit together in implementing this within an organization, within a department, within a team. I know, Peter, you’re a fan of systems theory and Berta Lanphy is one of my heroes in the academic space. That’s how I started geeking out on reverse engineering. so many things in life. So anyone who wants to know what we’re talking about just Google systems theory and you can see the type of nerd you’re listening to Right here But it’s really about seeing how the white space and the change that you can produce for one person will then impact the others and How each person can bring their unique abilities to the table and the most effective trainers are not able just to reach the audience As a mass but to be able to reach them as individuals and then bring them together as a mass

Peter Winick Correct. And underneath that, without going too far down sort of the geek rabbit hole here, there’s adult learning theory, there’s different learning styles. And I think that much of the attributes that make a great speaker, they’re engaging, they are powerful, they’re charismatic, that they can carry a room, etc. It’s not those things that make one a great teacher, necessarily. So you’ve got to combine some of those elements. with well-designed content that has a specific target or objective in mind. The other thing I would say is I see a lot of speakers that will get some level of traction or success because their clients love them and they want more of them and they’ll bring them back. And then, you know, they, they sort of pitch to corporate or the mothership or whatever at the organization, Hey, let’s scale, you know, Jill across the organization or whatever. And there will be some training professional that will easily veto that because they’ll just take a look at your stuff and say, Oh, well, let’s look at the instructional design and all this sort of stuff that might not be there. And it’s easy for them to say, yeah, this doesn’t just cut the mustard. It’s not up to sort of, you know, Fortune 1000 standard.

Jill Schiefelbein It’s true and it’s the same thing as a lot of speakers and i see this and unfortunately hear this which is even more painful all the time is they asked to do a webinar or a live virtual training of some sort like well I can speak on stage I’ll speak online and most of them are horrific because it’s a completely different world and i tell people. Webinars are my superpower. If I’m like a 6.5 to 7 on a physical stage, I am a 9 to a 9.5 in a virtual environment. And that’s where I know my strengths are.

Peter Winick OK, so go there a little bit because tell me what are the strengths that you’re taking from the physical stage to the webinar, and what are things that are totally different that make that your superpower? Because that’s, by the way, that’s where the world is going in a large, not exclusively, but there’s a huge demand for virtual and distance and remote training in that way.

Jill Schiefelbein Yeah, I think, you know, the stage type techniques, you know you need to have the levity. You need to some white space, but white space in a virtual training looks incredibly different than it does on a stage. You need have some flow in the presentation. Your visuals in a webinar are hugely more important than they are on a big stage, simply because in most webinars, whether I like it or not, video is not being used. It’s still just a voice and some slides. The way you interact and engage is completely different. We need to have interactive and engaging speakers on stage, but how that manifests through a technological environment is a complete change from what you’re used to on stage. But the single biggest challenge I find people have when they start speaking online is when I speak. in person, I feed off of my audience, I see the energy, I know they’re getting it, even though you really don’t know if they’re getting it or not. Come on, it’s like a gated apartment. It’s a false sense of security.

Peter Winick But it’s real time. You know, you can see eyes light up or they laugh at your joke or they, you know, whatever you get an applaud. There’s that immediate instant feedback that sort of feeds itself.

Jill Schiefelbein It is, but you can have that in an online environment just in a different way. So it’s not only having to figure out how you engage people in an on-line environment, how do you get that almost real-time feedback, but how are you doing that, constantly monitoring for questions, navigating the technical landscape and making your presentation land, and that takes a significant amount of practice.

Peter Winick I love that, great. So I wanna talk a little bit on the business side again, on the connection that you’ve got between sort of speaking and your other work on the training side and all that stuff. Tell me a little about how you choose where to speak and then from a systems and processes perspective, what you’re doing from a business side to evaluate a speech against what the potential is for you moving forward with that organization, if any.

Jill Schiefelbein Really good question. So the majority of my business is based on referrals, word of mouth on one hand or on content sourcing on my other. So this year I actually did and I encourage any business owner to do this. I call it the root of the referral even though it’s way deeper than that. But we all need catchy names for things and that rolled off my tongue yesterday in a conversation just yesterday actually I’m like, Oh my gosh, that’s gonna be the name.

Peter Winick You’ve heard it here seconds

Jill Schiefelbein Yes, you’ve heard it here second. Actually, that’s only in a proposal, so you’ve already heard it first. Okay, great. So, when you’re looking at it, most people will trace back where they got their initial business. Like, oh, okay, so I’m working with this great travel conglomerate this year, and okay, this person introduced me to them, so this person is my referral. Well, that may be true, but how did you meet that person? And then how did come in contact with that person or that organization, and then how that person or organization find you? And so I went back, it’s kind of like root cause analysis in a way.

Peter Winick Reverse six degrees of separation or something.

Jill Schiefelbein Exactly. I went back to the root, to the seed, you know, the planting of every single piece of business that I have in my book. And I can put 85% of all my business, I have 15% that comes cold, where people just randomly found me online, through my website, through a Google search or something like that. But the other two areas, I can directly trace to one of two things. One. is a video series I produced in 2012 which then got syndicated and made me a partner at Entrepreneur Network which then made me columnist there which made me an author there and da da da. The second side is my involvement with and volunteering at the National Speakers Association Got it. When people say, oh, I join associations and it doesn’t do much for me, well, it’s probably because you’re not involved enough. And I’m the poster child of involvement to the point where I burn myself out, but with intention, because when you’re getting big revenue streams coming from those sources, it’s worth your time and it’s also your way of giving back to a community that of view.

Peter Winick Well, so I love that. And I think that, you know, on top of that, oftentimes speakers and thought leaders and such are overwhelmed. There’s so many invitations and so many things that you could be doing, et cetera. And if there’s a lot of activity there and business is good, you assume, well, all that stuff connects to that. But I love what you’re doing and analyzing and saying, well, actually, you X percent of my business came from root cause this event that I did and whatever, and my relationship with the NSA or whatever the case may be. So I should be doing more there. And then. The flip side of that are what are the things that I’m doing that don’t pay a return? So I’ve had, you know, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, you know, several clients that are proud when I start working with them. Hey, I’m a contributor at, you know, blank, Inc, Forbes, whatever. And I say, great. What does that look like? You say, oh, I do, you know, five blogs a month and I’ve been doing that three years. So we do some quick back of the envelope and go, oh great. So that was like, whatever, you know, two months of your time. What’s the ROI on that? Well, I am a contributor for no, no, no, let’s, let us track down the business. And if it doesn’t You know, if you can’t, then let’s stop doing that. Because from a branding credential, you know, cache gravitas perspective, check the box. You can still throw that up on your bio contributor too. But if it isn’t getting you the results that you want, let’s reuse that time and at least experiment and make some new mistakes or try something different or whatever. But people sometimes don’t want to take the effort to sort of analyze, you now, the return. And it can’t be that you measure it like I wrote a blog on Tuesday and on Thursday, you know the world change. but a period of time… your time, the investment that was made, and what you can directly attribute to that.

Jill Schiefelbein I can trace three legitimate leads and one small not full fee paid client to every article that I’ve contributed on entrepreneur.com. And that’s like a hundred articles or something. Now in looking at it that way, people are like, well, why would you keep on doing it because of the relationship it affords me because of that relationship, because of that credential, I know how to strategically use that relationship to get indoors. that i wouldn’t have otherwise gotten in and that has yielded a lot of business so a lot of times we think we’re gonna write these articles we’re going to put this content out build it and they will come and that does not happen it’s actively fostering every element of that credential to get it to pay off and most people aren’t willing to do that.

Peter Winick got it. So this has been great. I appreciate your perspective because it’s one that aligns with my thinking very much. What advice would you have given your, you know, you’re heavily involved in the NSA and I’ve got several clients there and lots of people that I know in sort of the NSA world. So if someone’s out there and they’re sort of Jill 10 years ago, right, and thinking about maybe I want to take this jump into this, you, know, wacky, crazy world of content and thought leadership and speaking and authorship, what would you tell them to consider and what would tell them to not consider.

Jill Schiefelbein What I would really say is don’t join lots of organizations. You can have maybe your foot in the door at some, be on their list, read their content, show up to a couple of meetings, but do not expect that to pay off. Pick one and really focus. For me, when I first started my business in 2011, where I was doing it kind of as I’m doing this, but I’m still teaching as an adjunct professor because I want to have a safety net, I joined my local chamber of commerce. I lived in Arizona at the time in Gilbert, Arizona. and I went all in. I was business of the year my first year and my third year and I was volunteer of the Year. I mean you can see my trend for volunteering here but I was able to very quickly within my first year build up enough business and revenue that it outpaced my salary at the university.

Peter Winick But you went deep, not wide. So you picked one or two organizations and really made yourself known, were able to contribute at a volunteer level, really took advantage of that, versus sort of spreading that peanut butter across seven, if you will.

Jill Schiefelbein Exactly. You know, we all know that if you spread your peanut butter too thin, that sandwich does not taste good. We like the peanut butter. So, you know, stick with it, get it in one, maybe two at max, but know your boundaries because if you serve at half capacity and as a volunteer, people are going to assume that you operate your business at half capacity too. So I pick one. I doubled down in that for the national speakers association. I’ve really only been involved for four years, but yet last year, headed up the most visible conference that the association has. And it’s how deep you go will directly impact the type of people you attract to you. And it will demonstrate at a high level what you are capable of. Because if you don’t follow through in a volunteer role, I will never refer business to you and so many people who volunteer and I’ve interacted with them who are actually talented at what they do, if they don’t fall through in the volunteer capacity, that is not the ethic that I am willing to put my name behind.

Peter Winick Right. And whether you’re getting paid or not, it’s about credibility and it’s about your reputations. If I say, I’m going to be on this committee and do the following, and I have a sort of half-assed follow through, it is logical that you can say, well, he’s not a good player. I don’t trust him or that doesn’t work for me. And it’s not a different set of rules if it’s a paid world. That’s how he operates or she operates. So that’s great.

Jill Schiefelbein It’s very true, and I think a mistake a lot of people make, and I don’t believe it’s a malicious or intentional mistake, it’s just something that we’re not cognizant of all the time is that anyone who you share professional connections with, even though you may call them a friend, unless you have gotten to a level where you can be non-professional or colloquial in your communication. Do not do it because you will ruin your chance of referrals fast. I always try to, you know, mirror the communication style. I will not use an emoji in the majority of situations communicating with someone until they have used one first.

Peter Winick That’s a beautiful role because it’s funny, I was talking to somebody about that yesterday where you meet someone now and maybe because I’m getting older, I’m 50, right? But all of a sudden someone, it used to be years ago on your business card when you gave someone your cell phone, that was sort of a wink like I’m giving you permission. And there’s this weird thing now of people that you meet casually, not friends and you know, clients, where they’re texting you, like an audit, you know. It’s not even in English, you know what I mean? It’s, and I’m like, whoa, whoa. That’s a little odd, but anyway, it could be mine.

Jill Schiefelbein It’s really interesting. I actually, so random fact, what people don’t know about Jill is when I was in grad school, I actually published my thesis was one of the first published papers in the country that really analyzed what we now call emojis. They were not called emojis back then. We used emoticons and signifiers and I’m really curious now if I redid that same study if the results would still hold. Now I need to dig that back a bit.

Peter Winick Thanks Peter, more work for me. Anyway, this has been great. I appreciate your time and your candor and a lot that we can all learn from your experiences. And thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Jill Schiefelbein My pleasure. Thanks for having me, 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 ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.