Leveraging Thought Leadership

Today's guest is Dan Lier a best-selling author of The 10 Minute Coach and Is Your Child Wired for Success, sales and leadership expert, and internationally recognized motivational speaker with the experience of presenting over 3,500 customized talks to companies around the globe. Selling your service as a speaker means serving two masters. Dan explains why you need to satisfy both the event planner that hired you and the attendees of the event. We discuss the competitive market, the things you need to provide to stand out, and why having video content is of the utmost importance. Over the last year, speakers have had to make incredible changes to the way they sell, attend, and deliver keynotes. Peter and Dan discuss how pricing has changed, the skills you need for success on camera, and what you can do to add value to your virtual speaking. Three Key Takeaways: Thought leaders must be aware of the needs of both the buyer and attendee of keynote speeches in order to truly be successful. Delivering thought leadership digitally means having to be charismatic in a box, and that takes practice. You can add value to virtual speaking engagements by adding on additional training of your thought leadership in workshops after the event.

Today's guests are from S3 - Strategic Speaker Services: Lori Zetlin (Rosmarin), the Founder, and Managing Principal, and Eric Zetlin Managing Director. S3 builds world-class executive visibility programs for global brands and dynamic startups - delivering the right speaking opportunities and the most desirable audiences to our clients. Eric and Lori explain the concept of Earned Speaking and how executives can go about gaining speaking engagements at conferences without having to pay to be a sponsor. They shed some light on what those earned speaking opportunities look like, the matchmaking process they through to line their clients up with the right conference. For the last year, speakers have had their careers turned upside down by COVID-19, Lori and Eric share their experience taking things virtually, why many conferences are getting larger turn outs virtually than they ever did in person and the benefits of not having to travel beyond just the time savings. If you are a speaker looking to increase your visibility and stay thriving in this virtual setting this episode is tailor-made for you! Three Key Takeaways: · Becoming an earned speaker as a thought leader means landing an engagement based on the content of your message and not the size of your wallet. · It can be best to pass on speaking at some conferences. You want to ensure your thought leadership is delivered to the right audience and not simply the widest one. · Virtual conferences are allowing thought leaders to attend conventions nationally and globally that would have been difficult to attend in the past due to time and travel.

Today's guest Becca Bycott, the Director of Thought Leadership and Engagement at FiscalNote, a technology and media company that provides information services and software that connects the world to their governments. Becca started her role at FiscalNote during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic working remotely and developing programs that would be offered virtually. Those programs are tailored to give executives an exclusive and interesting experience driving by thought leadership that allows them to interact with others across various roles and industries to identify what issues they are facing and solve problems. We discuss the challenges of creating virtual communities that have the same meaning and sense of togetherness that face-to-face meetings do. Becca shares she gets participants to go beyond attending a meeting to making them active participants in a personal way that will build solid relationships for years to come. This conversation tackles common issues like Zoom fatigue and how to move your social media away from being a one-way street of information into meaningful conversations. Plus Becca shares some great advice for anyone looking to develop thought leadership for their company or organization. Three Key Takeaways: Thought leadership aimed at executives needs to help them put the current news into a larger context of how they can be more proactive in their leadership. Building virtual communities for thought leadership needs to create a sense of belonging for people to share the ideas and problems that mean the most to them. Using social media to spread thought leadership is great but you need to be engaged in conversations and not just talking at your audience.

Today's guest is Francis Cholle, Founder and CEO of The Human Company, which designs, teaches, and implements unique ways to innovate and outperform competitors and achieve accelerated growth. Additionally, he is the Founder and CEO of the SQUIRCLE Academy and author of SQUIRCLE which is teaching a revolutionary method to make better, deeper, and more important decisions. Francis shares how he is helping clients bring their instincts into business to change the way we look at and solve problems. His unique system of gamification that mirrors business allows people to relax and stop overthinking, thus giving better access to the instinctual part of our brain. Having started his career in his 20s in publishing Francis shares his unique view of being an author having experience on both sides of the table. If you want to dig deeper into SQUIRCLE you can discover your SQUIRCLE score by taking this self-assessment. Just text SQUIRCLE to 484848 Three Key Takeaways: · Sometimes to solve unique problems your thought leadership will have to abandon the traditional and rely on your gut instincts. · The gamification of your thought leadership can be a new way for clients to relax and learn your content in memorable ways. · Thought Leadership needs to include concrete data but how you interpret it is what can make all the difference.

Today's guest is John Warrillow, the Founder of the Value Builder System and Best-selling author of Built to Sell and The Automatic Customer. John explains how the Value Builder system was inspired by the IP in his book Built to Sell and the errors they made trying to take the software directly to the consumer and why going for a niche audience was a better choice. We explore how a blend of traditional coaching and software tools can be merged together for powerful results and how John is supporting and training his coaches to ensure they are comfortable with both the product and working in this blended world where we cannot always be face-to-face. If you are planning to use technology to aid in delivering your coaching this episode might just help save you time and money by avoiding costly mistakes. Three Key Takeaways: · Taking thought leadership directly to the consumer can be expensive. · Thought leaders need to be able to break their content down into the smallest steps or work with an outside partner who can aid them in breaking it down. · When creating thought leader content to be delivered by others never underestimate the importance of training your advisors.

Today's guest is Helio Fred Gracia, the CEO of Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive, teacher of crisis communications and crisis management at the Stern School of Business and ethics at Columbia. In addition, he is the author of Reputation Management and Words on Fire. We start our conversation by discussing how trust is built, lost, and restored. Then how patterns that arise in these actions can be studied to help give us a predictive power to help anticipate how the outcome can change when we intervene in a minor or major way. Helio discusses his work in crisis management and why we need to prepare for a disaster before it happens to ensure a proper response. We wrap up with a deeply philosophical discussion on the works of Aristotle and how his three essentials elements for a speaker to influence an audience remain true more than a thousand years later. Learn what Ethos, Pathos, and Logos are, and why they are the cornerstone and the origin of the name of his company. Three Key Takeaways: · Thought Leaders can learn from studying the patterns that cause us to gain or lose trust, so we can make adjustments and avoid negative outcomes in the future. · The works of thought leaders from more than a thousand years ago are still relevant today. · Thought Leaders need to make plans to deal with disaster before they strike to avoid reacting with an emotional response instead of a well thought out one.

Today's guest is Rod Robertson, Managing Partner of Briggs Capital, guest speaker at forums ranging from the Harvard Business School and the Babson MBA program, and author of two books The Human Vector and Winning at Entrepreneurship. We start the conversation with Rod discussing how he uses thought leadership and authorship to drive business. Why having a published book can be important for clarifying your thoughts. We continue our discussion on authoring and publishing by talking about how a ghostwriter can help you put your thoughts to paper in a more timely fashion than a first-time author. Rod explains why the table of contents of a book is not only a forcing mechanism to give your book structure but as a marketing tool to draw in potential readers. In addition, Rod shares how he used an agency for his second book and why there were more capable of driving the book to the market for him. Our conversation concludes with Rod giving some great advice to the potential first-time author that might be listening. Three Key Takeaways: · Having a book is a great way to solidify your thought leadership and drive business. · Working with a ghostwriter can allow a thought leader to take their book to market much faster than writing it alone. · Books on thought leadership need to have a strong table of contents at least 30% of the chapters speaking to the potential reader.

Today's guest is Ron Crabtree, CEO of Meta Ops Inc | Meta Experts. Meta Experts is a global network of OpEx development experts ready to take on interim roles as advisors and executives to solve operational problems in fast-paced industries. Ron shares how he got his start in thought leadership at Disney in the late 70s creating training materials for complex problems so they could be understood by everyone. Over his thirty plus year career, he has worked for automotive supply chains, implanted Lean Six, Sigma and continues to be a lifelong learner. As we continue down Ron's career path we learn about his company Meta Experts. We learn what happens when an expertise gap occurs in a company and why their network of experts might be the best route to fill that gap. Ensuring any knowledge gaps you have are filled can be critical but how do you know when there is a gap that needs to be filled? What does that gap look like? Ron gives great examples for identifying the gaps and the process they use for vetting the talent you can hire to fill those gaps. Three Key Takeaways: · Thought leaders can find success with content that identifies a market that needs new solutions to ongoing problems. · When time is money, your thought leadership needs to help clients avoid days of lost profit. · People skills are almost as important as your knowledge. If you can't get your thought leadership to connect with people, it will all be for naught.

Today's guest is Melanie Huet Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Serta Simmons Bedding. We discuss with Melanie taking Serta Simmons, a 100-year-old brand, and transforming it for modern-day operations. How she came to understand the culture of the company, built trust and had clear communication to ensure everyone understood where the company was heading and what their role was. Melanie talks about separating the Simmons brand and repositioning it to be appealing to the Gen Z market, including having a hugely successful launch on Tik-Tok with Snoozapalooza. She shares the task of pitching such a new idea and platform to the board and how she got them on board. The success of the Tik-Tok launch wouldn't have been possible without proper research and creativity. Melanie gives us an overview of the work that went into ensuring marketing was in the right place with the right message to guarantee the campaign didn't come off force or fake. We conclude this great interview discussing where thought leadership fits into the Serta Simmons brand, how they find new ideas and ways you can measure the success of those ideas. If you are working with a well-established brand that is looking to update itself or find a new audience, get your pen and paper ready because this episode is full of great information Three Key Takeaways: · If you want your thought leadership to be effective you'll need to understand the culture of the brand you are working with. · Deep research is a must if you want your thought leadership to move your audience to action. · When developing content thought leaders should listen to ideas from anywhere, not just from the top of an organization.

Today's guest is Matias Obludzyner, a leadership and communications consultant with years of experience at the International Finance Corporation and author of Expanding Circle. Matias shares his experience working at the IFC helping leaders with communication and change management. He explains how his time working with incredible leaders there was a key influence in writing his book. We discuss how Matias has struck out on his own to help the leaders of other organizations with how they position themselves externally and how they influence others. Plus we chat about finding the first clients, developing price and scope without a known brand behind you. Finally, Matias shares the journey of writing the book which started before he left IFC and what the book brings to the table in the next phase of his career, how he uses it to his advantage, and how he promoted it. If you want to take your Thought Leadership out of a corporation and go it alone this episode is filled with great advice. Three Key Takeaways: * Thought Leaders can learn from the experience of the others they've worked with and include it in their own content. * If you are to successfully market your thought leadership you'll need to know who you are solving problems for and what the problems are. * Adding a book to your Thought leadership toolbox is a great way to start conversations with potential clients.