How Transparency and Thought Leadership Attract Investors Can collective intelligence outperform traditional market…
Transforming interactions in sales and marketing. | Kelly Wright
Using Thought Leadership to Transform Sales
An interview with Kelly Wright about transforming the way salespeople and companies interact with customers and clients.
Is it possible to transform the world of sales through thought leadership? And if we could, how would we change and improve sales culture?
While many industries and positions change and evolve at high speed, the world of sales is often seen as foundational. Companies educate their salespeople about their product or service, and send them to sell as many units as possible. That’s the way the game is played, right? But what if things could be different?
Our guest today is Kelly Wright, Founder of Culture Driven Sales, an organization on a mission to help companies create exceptional cultures. Kelly helps orgs drive sales by bringing all levels of the company together around a unified purpose, creating a healthier, more aligned culture. She is also the President and COO of Gong, a company that analyses customer-facing interactions to deliver the insights needed to close more deals.
We start our conversation by discussing how thought leadership and sales connect. Kelly shares her experiences, noting that many salespeople don’t realize how powerful thought leadership can be in selling and what a game-changer it can be! The competitive market no longer wants vendors who are just “going through the motions.” They want a partner that will challenge them, help them keep up with modernization, and work with them to create a better environment for sales.
Kelly is on a mission to transform the sales world. When companies spend more time educating salespeople on the why as well as the what (knowing the product, but also how it helps their clients), they can create a true partnership between sales and customer. Through storytelling, salespeople can connect with their customers, creating a unified mission and vision that can spur success and create growth for both sides.
If you want to transform the sales culture in your company this is the episode for you!
Three Key Takeaways:
- Thought Leadership creates, persuades, and “sells” a vision of the future.
- Many thought leaders have a gut feeling about how things work, but choices need to be based on research and data.
- Your thought leadership is not for everyone. Don’t spend time on people who aren’t interested in learning more about your core insights.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman How can a sales team make the most of thought leadership? If you’re a sales professional, how do you use your organization’s thought leadership to be more successful as a salesperson? And if you’re a thought leadership practitioner, how do you equip sales teams with the insights they need to sell off this quarter and into the future? In this episode, we’ll take a deep dive into the intersection of thought leadership and sales. I’ve invited Kelly right to join me. Kelly is currently the president and CEO of Gong, a technology platform that helps sales teams analyze customer interactions and unlock reality through data analysis. Earlier in her career, Kelly built and led the original revenue team at Tableau Software. Growing revenue from 0 to 850 million. And Kelly is also the founder of Culture Driven Sales, a thought leadership platform based on the proposition that culture leads sales. Today’s conversation will be about creating impact through ideas, both through culture and sales. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Kelly.
Kelly Wright Thank you, Bill. It’s so great to be here. I’ve been listening to this podcast for a long time, so it’s fun to be on it.
Bill Sherman That’s so nice of you. So you and I have had some wonderful conversations around thought leadership back and forth offline. And so I’m excited to be able to sit down with you today and share a little bit of the conversation around thought leadership. And I know that you describe yourself as someone who loves sales and culture and data. We’re going to touch on all of those. But I want to add a fourth into the mix today, and that’s thought leadership, because I know you have a passion for that as well.
Kelly Wright I do. You know all my passions. Well, Bill.
Bill Sherman So let’s start with thought leadership and sales. How do they connect in your in your mind? You come from a sales background. So is it this thing that sits on the side? Is it something that’s important for sales, how they connect?
Kelly Wright Well, Bill, I think a lot of sales people don’t really. Quite grasped how powerful thought leadership can be in selling. And it actually, if you look at the top sales leaders and then top sales people, they’re really great at thought leadership. Because if you think about what a good salesperson does is a good salesperson is able to tell the story of what is the status quo and then be able to articulate what are the challenges with the status quo and why there is actually a better desired state, which is different. And to be able to crack that narrative and to do that storytelling, to say, Hey, this is where you are now, and here are the challenges with the now, but there is a better way and it’s over here. That’s what salespeople are doing. And sometimes people get so focused on their stock track. There’s the playbook. I’m going to push our features and functions. That is what salespeople often do. But that’s not the top best way of sales. The top best way of sales is cracked. The story about how there is a better way and that, in my opinion, is almost one of the same as thought leadership.
Bill Sherman So the way that I describe thought leadership is around seeing around the corner into the future, figuring out what’s important, and then bring that idea back to people today who need those insights and guiding them on what they need to do. And I think you can make a very similar sort of framework to thought leadership is sales in some way. It’s selling a vision of the future.
Kelly Wright Yeah. It’s selling a vision of a future and it’s challenging the status quo. So it’s not only selling the vision of the future, it is. Sometimes people will have an ally view of the future, but they think they’re on that path already. And if you’re going to sell something, you need to drive someone to actually do a change and to evolve and to transform. And that’s what salespeople are doing. So that’s kind of on the first. The second part is, is when you think about. Great salespeople in what customers are looking for. Things have evolved over time. It used to be that companies would just go to a company or a vendor because they want something very specific. But now the world is so competitive and there’s so many different options that companies don’t want to work with the vendor who’s just going to sell them a widget or a service. They want to work with partners who they see as thought leadership partners who are going to challenge them, who are going to make them better, who are going to teach them, who are going to lead. And thought leadership helps to create this framework to lead, to transform, to challenge, to up level. It’s not just about, hey, this is what I do. Let me show you my features and functions. It’s about, Hey, we want to partner with you together to take you to someplace better, to help you transform and improve. And thought leadership is one on one with how we work on that sales journey.
Bill Sherman So let’s talk about in terms of developing sales and sales culture, which I know is something you’re passionate about. How do you make that connection to sales folks who are just starting out on that journey to help them realize that their responsibility isn’t the feature and function, but that storytelling and perhaps even the three stories they need to be able to tell.
Kelly Wright Yes. Well, if someone’s early in their journey or even early with the new company, the first things that a salesperson will be interested to know is, hey, what what are the features and what are the functions. But if that’s we as sales leaders or as company exacts or sales managers or enablement, whoever, that’s all we give the salespeople, that’s what they’re going to go sell the features and the functions because that’s all that they’re equipped to have. So I think that the responsibility is on everyone who’s equipping those new sales folks to be able to be really thoughtful about what is the mission, what is the vision of the company, what is the strategic narrative that we’re trying to tell and to make that a bit more pointed? Companies spend so much time focusing on the what in the hell? What is it that they do? What are their features, what is their product? What are their services? How does it work? How can you integrate it? How can you launch it? How can you implement it? And that actually is the easy part because it’s very tangible and tactical to talk about how to do that. The much more challenging part is to be able to tell the story of why does this matter? Why do customers even care? Why is this important? And because that is hard and everyone’s moving so fast. Sometimes companies will skip that part. And so then new employees come in and they’re just given the what and how. But if we can give everyone and frame that story around the why, why does it matter? Why should companies care? What is the set of beliefs that you must have to actually be able to transform and change in the way that’s really important to you? Not only does that help in terms of our selling, it also really helps to create a unified sense of purpose for our employees, for our company, and for all of our customers who want to be part of our journey with us. And so that whole unified purpose, mission, vision that needs to come first before we focus too much on the wet in the house. And if you think about with thought leadership, that’s what thought leadership is doing, is saying, hey, what is this new story? What is this narrative? And then you fold everything else underneath it.
Bill Sherman I like how you prioritize that understanding of the story and communicating your vision and the way you’re describing it. It’s not only a story to the customers, but it’s the story to the organization. Your front line salespeople, everyone in the organization so they know what journey are we going on together and why?
Kelly Wright Absolutely. And I think there’s so much in the world now where people are talking about culture and creating great workplaces. And sometimes people think it’s just hiring a bunch of great people, which is really important. We should do that, too, and throwing them all together. It’s just what fuels people is having a unified sense of purpose and knowing how can they contribute to that purpose? How can they have a meaningful impact? And just like customers want to associate with companies and vendors that have a shared sense of belief about where they’re going and to help them solve their challenges and do that all together. Employees want to do that internally. They want to be able to be part of a company where they believe in what the company’s mission is. They believe in the journey that you’re going on. And so this mission and vision creates a great culture not only for the way companies are interacting with their customers and partners, but also really important for how companies build great cultures internally and create really sustaining and positive places to work.
Bill Sherman So if I hear you correctly, one of the things I hear you saying is that culture and thought leadership really are fundamental building blocks to growth.
Kelly Wright Yes, I think that’s what I’ve said.
Bill Sherman Okay, cool. So let’s talk a little bit about Gone and Dive into the world of Gong. So how is Gong as an organization using thought leadership? What are you trying to achieve?
Kelly Wright I love that. And actually, one of the reasons that I joined Gong, I started at going first on the board and then joined as full time in an operational capacity. And as you know, Bill, I’ve been working with you for quite some time on thought leadership. I love Gong’s approach to thought leadership because at Gong we are trying to transform the world of sales and transform the way companies think about interacting with their customers and getting the most out of all their teams. And that requires a quite a bit of thought leadership. Why is that? Because the world of sales hasn’t been disrupted and transformed for a very long time. Which is crazy if you look at it, because so many of the other functions have been transformed. You look at especially using technology, technology has transformed how product works, how marketing, how the marketing function works, how H.R. Works, and you go through all the different groups but hasn’t so much in sales. And this we’re in the middle of this transformation right now. And so at Google there’s a few practical ways that I’ll talk about how we’re using thought leadership and then we can dive in more. The first is we’re trying to create a new category of how transforming the world of sales of revenue and customer conversations. Well, how do you transform? You transform through thought leadership. And so first we have our strategic message, our strategic narrative that starts again as our with our mission. Our mission at Bon is we unlock reality to help people and companies reach their full potential. Well, what does that mean and why does that actually even matter? Well, our view of the world is because, remember, thought leadership is helping to align with customers and prospects that have similar beliefs that you have and some you’ll be able to move along the journey they maybe don’t fully believe now, but then they go there. Others are already there. But our belief is, if you think about what is going on in the world of sales, running a business is can be really challenging. And why is that? Well, our belief is and this is what our customers are telling us. So it’s not only our belief is that many decisions are made very opinion based because there’s all this data, but it’s hard to corral all of the data together. Second, is that ready business? Very labor intensive. There’s all of these mundane tasks that people need to do that is very time consuming and it’s not a good optimization of their time and productivity. And three teams can be really misaligned because everyone’s moving so quickly that sometimes you’ll have one team going one direction and different team going another direction, and that’s really disruptive to what gong we believe to unlock reality. We should have organizations. Should we really be focused on being reality driven, having fact and data driven decisions to being able to be autonomous? How can we have autonomous systems that help guide people of what to do to remove those mundane tasks and help them be able to get more done without having to lift a finger? And three, doing it in a way where it drives more alignment and teams are aligned driving better collaboration and communication and a unified voice of the customer. So one of the things I just did there is that was a hobby of like if people believe unlocking reality is important and those were challenges and now they want to go in this way, then that’s how we’re leading the conversation in the story to say, if you believe that you want a world that’s reality driven, autonomous and teams and people are aligned. Then we should talk.
Bill Sherman So what I love about that as well is that it is an inductive process and you’re leading people along and saying, Hey, are these things that you agree with? Are these things that you want? And with that, I think about when you’re talking about integrating that reality and unlocking reality. Right? Having a common language across the organization and say, what are we not seeing so that we can empower our people to perform better? Because to your point earlier, if you hire great people and then you bury them in tasks, that’s no good, right? You’ve got to allow them to shine and to flourish.
Kelly Wright Yeah, I think it’s absolutely is absolutely correct. And then there’s a side piece to this, too, Bill. So what is the big picture and thought leadership that we just talked about? Like if customers care and prospects care about unlocking reality, that’s the strategic narrative. That’s the story we’re telling. And salespeople should be really good at being able to communicate and tell that story. At the same time, though, that’s really can be high level. And so sometimes people say, okay, well thought leadership, is it always just about like head in the clouds and salespeople are doing this kind of pie in the sky thing? Like, what about when the prospect of the customer says, well, what do you mean by that? Like, how can I actually learn a benefit? So there’s there need to be tangible tactical ways to implement that thought leadership too. So I’ll give you another example of what we’re doing at Gong that that kind of shows how we take on like reality and then drive that down to mean something. So we have here at Gong Gong Labs and I love what we’re doing with Gong Labs because remember, I’m someone that cares about sales data, transforming technology companies and culture. Right? And Gong Labs kind of fuzes all that together, just like Gong does. But so we just made a post last week of four Gong Labs of what were the top five data back sales tips of 2021. So periodically Gong Labs goes and looks at all of the data that we’re learning from all of our customers, and they post some different pieces of insights. And so if you think about what Gong is doing, we’re saying our story is we unlock reality. We’re helping to drive autonomous insights to help people be better aligned and to make reality based decisions. That’s what we’re saying we’re good at. So what do we do? We go and collect all this customer conversation that we have in this huge data center and we can actually go and look at what’s happening in all the data. So one example that we had last week that we had hosted was Beware of selling with slides. Okay, so people go beware of selling a slide rule, but all sales teams sell with slides. Well, what Gong Labs did and this is an amazing part that we have a whole group on our marketing team that goes left. They looked at over 803,000 recorded sales meetings, almost a million sales meetings, and they found that there’s statistical reality based evidence that shows that when rates literally drop 17%, when reps use slides on discovery calls, discovery calls, it’s early on in the conversation. Now, some people might say, but everyone use the slides in discovery calls because that’s when you’re making your pitch. And the interesting thing is that might even be why. Because if you have salespeople that are presenting and only talking about themselves in discovery.
Bill Sherman Rather than listening.
Kelly Wright Yeah, Discovery is supposed to be about listening and interactive conversation about discovering what is their problem, Then you’re not going to be able to get very far on the sales call. So this was a very tactical gong labs of implementing our own thought leadership by showing data driven thought leadership that companies can go and learn and lead from.
Bill Sherman Well, and what I love and I followed a lot of the Gong Labs posts on this, is it’s sometimes quantifying things that you intuitively know and feel but haven’t been able to put a finger on. So there was another piece there that looked at the data about what you do towards the end of the year. And if a deal doesn’t close before calendar year, what is the effect of having to try and pick it up in the next year? I think every salesperson has wrestled with that and go, we’re going to go cold for a couple of weeks here. But they can’t quantify the impact individually, right? And so you put out the data from Gong Labs and said, no, here’s the effect. I think it was, what, about 40%, if I remember correctly?
Kelly Wright Yeah. Yeah. It’s so it’s a lot. We’ll have to go look at all the all the gong lab results. You know, the interesting thing though, Bill, what you just said is you actually just furthered our own thought leadership because what you just said is a lot of sales leaders have a hunch. They just intuitively know and this is one of the challenges with sales, is that many decisions are just opinion based. People have this hunch and now they want to back it up with data, but they don’t know how. And so Gong Labs is helping people to back up their own hunches with reality based insights, which is the whole thing of what we’re saying. Gong helps companies to do have reality fact. Based decision making to be able to. It’s okay to have a hunch, an opinion, but go validate it and be able to prove or disprove your hunch with actual data and reality.
Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast. Please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.
Bill Sherman And so I think this goes to one of the pieces that since you’ve been in sales almost your entire life and your entire career, right? And there’s a lack of sales training in terms of if you’re pursuing a degree, even in courses on go to market, for example. And I know you’ve tried to shape what does that look like and how do you look at this as a unified whole? You want to talk maybe for a little bit about the development of your own thought leadership based on go to market? Because I think that’s really an important piece in this story.
Kelly Wright Well, I did see, Bill, that there was a gap in terms of just how companies were operating and setting up their whole go to market strategy and a personal story of just how I came to realize and have this epiphany is I spent 12 years at Tableau as the first salesperson at Tableau in White. And I joined there one month before we launched version one. I had never been at a big public technology company before and the whole leadership team there. We were figuring out things on our own, like how do we go build this? And we had a very compelling mission or what we thought was a compelling mission there at Tableau was we help people see and understand data. And so we were trying to do this whole thought leadership before we even knew it was called leadership, frankly, of, hey, there is a way of people are so frustrated because they can’t tap into their data and they don’t understand how to answer their own questions and they don’t have the systems. They don’t know how to operate systems that can generate the answers to their questions. And so we realized that there was this world where people really wanted to tap into data to be able to do their own work, but they couldn’t. It was too complex and it was inflexible and there were very highly tailored people that were able to do it. So we realized, hey, this whole data democratization, how can we make people more self-sufficient with their data? And we crafted this whole story around it. And it all started, Bill, from this mission to help people see and understand data and this strategic narrative where we put these differentiated value propositions around that it would make people much faster and more productive. It would make them more self-sufficient. And as we told that story about why Tableau got started in the first place, it really resonated with people. And we built this story in a way. And while we’re building it, we realized two things. One is we knew we were committed to going and building a very. Fast growing company that created huge value for our customers and a great return for our investors. But at the same time, to hire people that worked at Tableau, we are in the mission of helping people see and understand. Data really resonated for them. They cared about that purpose. And we built this great culture around why people cared about data, why they cared about our core values, and it ended up creating a really special place where people felt that they could do their best work and be very authentic to not only themselves, but to be able to tell Tableau story and emotionally connect with their customers in a way that they really cared. And so you take that whole story and that just felt natural. That’s how we did it at Tableau. And then when I, after 12 years decided I want to do board work and do advising for other companies, a lot of these tech CEOs and I ended up meeting within the first like 18 months, about 130 technology CEOs of hypergrowth companies. And they’d ask, Hey, Kelly, how do we build a hyper well sales organization? How do we make sure our sales and marketing is aligned? How do we make sure our sales team is selling what product he wants to sell or wants to build? And when I ask these questions, well, tell me about your mission and vision and your values. It became very apparent that many companies focus so much on the what and the how. They didn’t focus enough on what was their aligned mission and where were they going. And it made me realize, everyone’s saying that they want a sales course and a go to market course, and everyone’s focused on all these operational details. But the alignment and being able to fuel a really fantastic go to market organization, it’s the thought leadership that is it needs to go all the way up the chain of do we have an aligned mission, vision and values? Can we tell our story in a way that’s really compelling and then layer everything underneath that? And that’s what my class is about.
Bill Sherman So when did you first have that moment that you realized, I’m doing something I could call for leadership? Because it sounded like you fell into it, like you said, a tableau. You were just trying to solve the problem at hand. When was your moment that you were practicing bold leadership?
Kelly Wright That’s a great question, Bill. I think what happened is in the first year when I was meeting with a bunch of tech CEOs, venture capitalists, private equity firms, and everyone was saying, hey, what is your advice for building a hypergrowth sales organization? And the questions that I was getting to and what I was hearing was, what do we do when sales is headed in one direction and marketing is the other? What do we do when we don’t have alignment? How do we build an enterprise sales team? How should we go international? And there were all these built tactical questions which just natural for me, I’d say, What are you trying to do? What’s your mission? What’s your why? And many times the CEO or the executives would really struggle with answering that. And then if I felt that there was something there, maybe I’d go ask another executive on the team. How would you describe the mission? And it became very clear when it wasn’t crisp and it wasn’t articulate. And then people wonder why they don’t have alignment. And to me, it was so crystal clear, because if you ask two different people on the executive team, what’s your mission? And you get two different answers. And then if you ask seven people, you’re going to have a different answer. That’s a problem. And so I started kind of poking holes on this in my conversations with all these CEOs. And actually a number of the CEOs would say, that’s interesting. Let’s dive into our why. And then there were a number of CEOs that bill had very different opinions that would say that’s not important. Kelly we don’t want to have a conversation with you about mission and vision. We want to have a conversation with you about operational efficiency. And that’s one of the things I realized is with that leadership, everyone’s not going to necessarily believe what you believe. And that’s okay. That’s why it’s called thought leadership. And everyone already believed it. There wouldn’t need to be a thought leadership around it. And I felt like, you know what? There are not tons of classes around how to do sales, but there’s many more classes on how to do sales and how to go light up the sales organization or how to do sales training. There’s a lot on how to go build a great marketing or branding strategy. And there was very, very little of how to set up an integrated go to market strategy that threads first from mission, vision and company’s core values to be able to create a compelling strategic narrative. And that strategic narrative not only helps sell, but it also creates just a positive culture with that unified sense of purpose. And I felt like this was a big gaping hole. And so decided, hey, I want to teach a class on it. And then that’s where it all started.
Bill Sherman So one of the things that I hope our listeners can hear is the energy and passion. When you start talking about these subjects. And I want to push a little bit further into that, how do these ideas and ideas are sort of the atoms, if you will, of thought leadership? How do these ideas around culture and culture driven sales impact how you how you lead?
Kelly Wright Well, let’s go back to these conversations with all of these different execs that I had when first thinking about this thought leadership. When people would ask me questions of, hey, Kelly, what are your top priorities for these different phases of a company’s growth? And everyone always had these preconceived notions of where they were headed. So they’d say, well, maybe it’s a pre-IPO company and we’re growing, or maybe it’s a bigger company. And what would be your priorities when we’re launching a new product or what’s your priorities when we’re going international or trying to drive more productivity? And I think people felt like I would have these different answers depending on what phase of the company they were in. And what I realized and this goes to answer your question of how I lead. I truly believe that regardless of what stage of company you’re at and regardless of what you’re trying to do or what your that your company strategic initiatives are, that the three priorities for me are always the same. So people would say, what are your priorities? And I’ll tell you what my priorities are because they never change. When someone says, Well, Kelly, what should the top three priorities be? I say, well, number one priority is people. Number two priority is people. And Bill, you’ve heard this before, but number three, priority. It’s not everybody. People. Yes, it’s people. And so I feel like it’s really, truly it’s people who are building products and services. It’s people who are interacting with their customers. It’s people who are driving those success of the customers. It’s people who are hiring other people on our team. And then it’s people who are leading those people. Overall, it’s people all the time who are making the decisions. And it’s people who build companies. And if you think about that tie back to this thought leadership and what I mean by culture driven sales, it’s people authentically connecting with other people. And that means people need to be connecting with other people when you’re hiring them internally because you’re your top asset. But it’s also how are our people interacting with our prospects in our customers, in our authentic way, where we can emotionally connect and understand their why and why they care? Not just the what and the how. And it all comes back to people, which is what puts culture at the basis of how we sell its culture and people at the basis of everything. Now, of course, for me, my focus is transforming the world of sales. And I truly believe that people and culture helps to sell better for all the reasons we’ve talked about. And I’m super passionate about data because data can help to validate that reality driven approach to be able to justify that. What you’re saying is not just a bunch of opinions, it actually has clout and facts and truth behind it. And so although I’m all about sales and I’m all about data, it literally all comes first at people and culture. And that’s the center of everything that I do. And what I’m talking about when I’m using my own thought leadership.
Bill Sherman And this is one of the things that I love about your work. Not only do you use thought leadership as a practitioner individually, but you encourage people within the organization to bring good ideas forward, to elevate them into conversations with colleagues, with customers. And that’s really what I see as a thought leadership driven organization as much as a culture driven organization. So as we begin to wrap up, I want to ask you a question that I ask most of my guests, which is one of looking back. If you were to advise yourself earlier on as you were getting into this world of thought leadership and starting as a leader, what advice would you give yourself to be more effective in the practice of thought leadership?
Kelly Wright That’s interesting because if I think about selling, one of the things that any sales leader and any great sales practitioner will know is as you’re selling a lot of it, it comes to making sure you’re spending your time on those that meet your ideal customer profile. Right. You know, not everyone is going to buy what you’re selling. And it’s important to know, well, how do you have conversations with those who believe what you believe and those who actually are interested enough to learn more and can maybe be swayed by that? And then there’s some people that they. Literally don’t care or they just are not buying what you what you’re selling. And I think with thought leadership, it’s very similar of so many people with thought leadership. They want everyone to buy off on their thought leadership because like for me, I’m super passionate. Someone says, I don’t want to put people first or I don’t believe in culture. I literally just I don’t understand where they’re coming from. But the thing is, is that they’re not going to care about culture driven sales or about anything of what I’m doing with my own leadership. If they don’t believe that people and culture is at the center and that salespeople aren’t meant to emotionally connect with other people and that they truly believe companies to just sell to companies because the feature functions, not because people buy from people. Now, all that, to me it just seems like it’s base level of truth. But it’s okay. I mean, with thought leadership, everyone’s not going to buy what you’re selling. And I think that it wouldn’t be thought leadership if everyone did. If everyone already believed that it was just the de facto truth, then why would you have anyone have thought leadership to try to change it or to up level the conversation? So I think for me it was part of my learning is I need to put the same lens on my own thought leadership as I have always in sales leadership training, the sales team of it’s okay if not everyone believes what you believe. Because thought leadership wouldn’t exist if everyone already believed, if everyone had the universal beliefs.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s a great way to close out is thought. Leadership is the art of becoming deeply relevant to a very small part of the world and deeply irrelevant to those who aren’t tuned in.
Kelly Wright Hey, I will challenge you a little bit on that with the leadership to the Thought leadership advisor to become deeply relevant to a small percent of the world and not relevant to those where it’s not. I will just say sometimes thought leadership can become deeply relevant to a very large percentage.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, you have.
Kelly Wright To be a small sliver. But we should focus on those where they actually do believe what we believe.
Bill Sherman And you can create impact.
Kelly Wright Yeah. Yeah.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kelly.
Kelly Wright Thank you, Bill. And I think for all of the listeners out there, Bill, I just wanted to say thank you to you and to Thought Leadership Leverage for being just a phenomenal partner and pushing the envelope of how companies and individuals should be thinking about thought leadership and putting some framework around it. I think it’s super helpful.
Bill Sherman Thank you. If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website. OrgTL.com and choose join our newsletter. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.
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