Clarity Win$ with Steve Woodruff
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
We are at the age of information that it becomes too chaotic to ever come out of it and offer something that stands out. Helping you to cut through the noise is the King of Clarity, Steve Woodruff. He lays down the three ways that can break through in a world where everyone is listening to so much information, allowing you to log into their brain and memory; he breaks down having a story, a symbol, and a snippet of information. Proving how, as his book is called, Clarity Win$, Steve shows the importance of arriving a clear identity, focus, and message in order to be heard, remembered, and referred.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Clarity Win$ with Steve Woodruff
Clarity Win$: Get Heard. Get Referred.
Our guest is Steve Woodruff. He’s known as the King of Clarity. In a world full of noise and distraction, he helps businesses craft a message so clear that they can be heard, remembered, and referred. With over 30 years of business experience, he has consulted with companies ranging from solo startups to the top five pharma and he’s got a book called Clarity Win$. Steve, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me, John.
Take us back as far as when you started to realize that communication and clarity was something that was not happening and that you wanted to own this niche.
Several years ago, I’ve had an interest in marketing and branding for a long time. Working with a couple of small companies, I got to wear a sales hats, some marketing hats, and branding hats. Many years ago, I started my own business which was a matchmaking referral business in the pharma training industry. What I was doing was helping my pharma commercial training clients find the best and the optimal outsource training vendors out of a selection of dozens and dozens of agencies, companies, providers, and consultants. A lot of these providers did not have a good brand message at all. They were throwing the bullet points against the wall and seeing what sticks. The biggest complaint that I would hear is they all sound the same. I don’t know which one does what. That’s why I started my matchmaking company was to help deal with that problem.
I started sitting down with these companies and spending some hours, sometimes a half day, sometimes a full day. I found that within that relatively short time, I could help them arrive at a very clear identity and a clear focus and a clear message. Sometimes these are companies that had been in business for decades and never had a clear identity. I could fix that in a few hours because I was an outside voice looking in. That began my fascination with achieving clarity. At first, I called what I was doing brand therapy, but I realized I’d be competing with every ad agency on the planet if I emphasize the word brand. What I was helping people do, not only companies but also individuals, was to get clarity, get a clear understanding. That’s why I embraced the word clarity and decided that I’m going to own that term.
You and I were having a chat about how some people resist being pigeonholed. I always like to say that the riches are in the niches and it seems like you agree with that.
[bctt tweet=”Clarity is snippets, symbols and stories.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I quote that in the book. One of the things that I put forward and is probably my most provocative thought in the book is that you’ve got to learn to love your pigeonhole. Most businesses and people have this instinctive default resistance. We don’t want to miss any opportunities. We don’t want anybody to pigeonhole. The problem is that we will be pigeonholed. People only have a limited memory slot for any given amount of information. No matter who you are, every listener, every customer, everyone’s going to pigeonhole you. Your choice isn’t whether you’re going to be pigeonholed but whether you’re going to define the pigeonhole and whether you’re going to be in the right place. A lot of what I cover in the book is how do you design the words around your identity, your focus and your message so that you can occupy the correct memory space in people’s minds, the pigeonhole, with especially this wonderful benefit to it. That means they can accurately refer you because they know what you do and who you do it for. If they’re confused about what you do, they can’t refer you.
The confused mind always says no and people won’t even tell you they’re confused. They will go, “Uh-huh,” and all the excuses come up. For me, I’m the Pitch Whisperer and I’ve used that enough and even trademarked it. If you google that, my name, website and book come up without you having to remember my name or the name of my book. This niche of being known for one thing and it also ideally generate some curiosity. People go, “I know what a horse whisperer is but what’s a Pitch Whisperer?” You’re often running explaining what that does and how that expands beyond just an elevator pitch to giving keynote talks on sales and all kinds of things. You talked about in Clarity Win$ that there are three-word packages that deliver results. Can you tell us what those are and maybe give us the story around them?
I see the best way to deliver a message is once you’ve got a clear understanding of who you are and where you’re going and what you do, you have to communicate that in three things. I call it snippets, stories, and symbols. Snippets are very brief. Typically, one sentence phrases that sum up precisely and clearly in human ready language exactly what you do, who you do it for, why you are differentiated. Those snippets are incredibly important for explaining yourself in any networking situation, in any sales pitch or in any circumstance. A lot of businesses do not have clear snippets. In fact, one of the biggest problems with that is there’s a lack of clear communication and alignment internally in the company because employees don’t know the snippets either.
Everybody’s saying different things and it’s like looking at an elephant blindfolded from the front and the back and the rear and getting different descriptions.
That’s incredibly common and that stories are crucial as well. I know you have an affinity for stories because the human brain is hardwired for stories. People are not hardwired to memorize bullet points, but we are hardwired for stories. When we tell illustrative stories that show what we do and who we do it for, that’s far more memorable than if we try to give factual explanations. The most powerful thing ultimately is the symbol and the symbol is that shortcut into memory. It’s usually a metaphor or a simile or some word picture. Pitch Whisperer is your symbol, King of Clarity is my symbol. When I was starting out my matchmaking consultancy in pharma, I’m having some difficulty explaining it to people until I finally said, “I’m the eHarmony of pharma training.” Lights came on immediately. I didn’t have to spend two hours explaining it. They know what the eHarmony is. When we can come up with these little brief things that hang on the memory hooks in people’s minds, we win. If we use vague, foggy and jargony language, we lose.
I have two examples I’d love to get your opinion on. One is I’m a cofounder at a startup that’s involved with a real estate in the blockchain. As the CMO, trying to get their messaging out to internal, external investors, the press and everything else has been a bit of a challenge because each of those industries is fairly complex. What we’ve come up with is, “QuantmRE is all about equity freedom where we helped turn homeowers into homeowners.” People go, “I don’t understand what that means but I’m intrigued and I want to know more because I have a mortgage. I am a home ower because I don’t own my house outright.” That little buzzy thing that’s slightly new with one letter being different, ower to owner.
Those little phrases, those little suggestive things, if we can get into people’s interest level, get into something that’s relevant within 30 seconds. If you started with blockchain, it would all be over. You have to move to something that people understand. I do something similar when people ask what I do with this clarity stuff. I say, “They call me the King of Clarity and I help individuals in businesses with the two moments of truth.” The first moment of truth is what we’re in right now where somebody says, “What do you do?” In a very short time, you’ve got to explain it in a way that makes perfect sense and that somebody gets it. If you do it right, that leads to the second moment of truth. When tomorrow I’m talking to my neighbor and they say, “I need someone to help me with my pitches,” and I say, “I know the Pitch Whisperer,” I can make a targeted referral if we can win at the first and second moments of truth. We can win because referrals are the best way to build business and the way to activate it is to get those word pictures into the minds of others.
[bctt tweet=”If you want to be known for 3 things, you are known for none.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You and I love doing that for people. I was on the phone with a client that’s hired me to come to speak to their sales team and they’re in the healthcare business. They had this new product that gives the best pricing of all the equipment that they have to buy. Before this product existed, I got them to describe what was life like before? They said, “We would just hope that we were getting a good buying discount, but we weren’t sure what the industry standard was and all this stuff.” They were trying to explain to me this. I said, “Just tell your prospective clients that imagine a surgeon was trying to operate in the dark. The lights went out.” That’s what it’s like trying to guess if you have the best price or not, “Our product comes along, the lights are on and you can clearly have laser beam focus on exactly where this price is compared to what other hospitals are paying.” They went, “Now we understand stories, analogies and symbols and how we need to start talking in our presentations with those as opposed to how it all works.” The other thing that I am interested in is you have a brain science practicality of why we need to be pigeonholing and that there are four marketplace dimensions. Please talk about brain science and the marketplace.
The brain science part is what is crucial to understand because our audience is the human brain. We’ve got to play by the rules and there are certain rules that the brain works by. One of those rules is that the human brain has to filter through a vast amount of sensory input every moment of every day and it’s growing. The amount of noise and distraction and input is growing every single day. It’s exponential. The thing that keeps us sane as human beings are this wonderful function called the reticular activating system, the RAS. When I give a talk, I often ask people if they know what that is and almost nobody ever does. I think, “What an opportunity we have here,” because once you know what the RAS does, you have the key, the secret to get in.
The RAS filters for anything that’s new, anything that’s relevant and anything that’s funny or exciting or scary. It’s a fight or flight thing. This has to be great or it’s filtered out. Unless we can rise above the background noise, unless we can show very quickly that we have something new and interesting and relevant, we’re noise. That’s it. We’re not coming up against either a neutral or a sympathetic audience. We’re coming up against a filter that doesn’t want us, unless we can show that we’re worth listening to. That’s why the first fifteen to 30 seconds on a website or in a pitch or anything are crucial as we got to get through the RAS. That’s why I talked about snippets and stories and symbols because those are the shortcuts.
Those are the ways through the filter that get us into memory and that’s how the little guy can have the advantage over the big companies. They’re spending millions and millions of mass marketing dollars but are just plain making noise. Understanding a little bit of how the brain works, its filtering, its processing in a storage system. I tell people, “You can expect to get one pixel, one memory slot.” People aren’t going to remember five things. That’s why you’ve got to make it one thing. Even if you can do four other things, you pick the most important thing. Nobody can walk around and remember five different things about John, “He’s the Pitch Whisperer, but he’s also a copier repairman. He makes tires for large trucks. He also manufactures tissue paper.” If you’re trying to get known for three things, you’ll be known for nothing.
Clarity Win$: People aren’t going to remember five things. That’s why you’ve got to make it one thing.
If you try to be known for three things, you’ll be known for nothing.
James Carville’s advice to President Clinton was something like that. He said, “If you try to say three things, you don’t say anything.” The big temptation in all businesses is they want to say, “We do this and we did this and we did this.” That’s the worst thing you can do. You’re now a commodity. You’re now forgettable because nobody has the memory space for that.
People want to work with experts and specialists these days.
I want to do what I’m best at. What clarity is strategically saying is, “This is my sweet spot.” The pigeonhole is my sweet spot. It’s where I do my best work, my most profitable work, my highest impact work. That’s the work I want and I’m going to say no to the other stuff. That’s the hardest thing for people to do, to say yes and no.
Someone said, “Who you say no to is more important than who you say yes to.” When you’re taking on new clients. Most people are like, “I knew I needed to say yes to everybody,” and I’m like, “No.” I remember I was talking to a graphic designer and he was like, “I can do pitch decks, speaker decks, websites.”
I don’t know how many of those websites I’ve seen and collaterals where, “We do this, or our specialties are,” and then there are twelve things. Nobody can specialize in twelve things.
It’s the same thing with actors. The joke is when an actor would go to an audition and they say, “Can you skydive?” “Yes.” “Can you roller skate?” “Yes.” “Archery?” “Yes, no problem.” “Ride a horse?” “Yes.” They go, “I’ll figure it out once I get there.” That’s not the way to make yourself get referrals. That’s for sure. What my big takeaway so far from what you’ve said is when we have clarity, not only do we get the brain space but we get people to log us in as a potential referral because it’s easy to remember.
This is one of the things social media has been good for is it introduced the concept of hashtags. Hashtags are what we call metadata, information about information. It was a software term before it was a social media term. The hashtag is simply the associated texts that describe something. What I’m telling individuals and businesses is if you’re going to be put in a pigeonhole, you’re going to be stored there with hashtags. People are going to remember you with a certain number of words and impressions and feelings. Those are part of the hashtags. What you want to do is very clearly understand exactly what hashtags you need to own in the marketplace. Those are the words and the concepts you talk about. Can you do some other things? Yes and I tell people, “I operate on my very arbitrary 85% rule.”
If you’ve got something you want to do that’s maybe 85% of it, that’s what you talk about. You don’t talk about anything else. This is you. This is your identity. This is what you’re seeking. You keep the 15% in your back pocket. Once you get in the door and you’re talking to somebody about your main thing and they’re now feeling comfortable with you. They’ve moved up the ladder that you’ve defined of the five I’s to where they’re more intrigued by you now. If they say, “Can you do that?” You say, “I’ve got this in my back pocket.” If you try to make the back-pocket stuff equivalent to the 85% and add a few other ingredients in there, now you’re totally forgettable.
[bctt tweet=”The confused mind always says no.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the other chapters in your book that grabbed my attention was finding your superpower. Can you describe what a superpower is and how we can find it?
A superpower is the thing that we uniquely do best. I believe on an individual level, that we all have superpower. I believe that most businesses have certain superpower. Something they are peculiarly good at because of the types of people that they have, the track record of what they’ve done. One of the most crucial things we can do is get in touch with our superpower. It’s one of the difficult things because we assume too much about our own selves. We take for granted what our strengths are and we often miss the boat. One of my favorite pieces of artwork says, “You can’t read the label of the jar you’re in.” When you’re in the jar, either your own head or your own company and you’re seeing the forest and the trees. Many times, I have found people and companies underestimate what they’re best at. They don’t realize what their sweet spot is.
Maybe they think because it comes easily to them, it’s not valuable.
That’s what happens. I’ve sat down with countless people and we’ve talked for a couple of hours to surface their strengths and surface their capabilities through telling stories. I have had to say many times, “Do you realize how rare this combination is? Do you realize how phenomenally awesome it is to have somebody that can do operations the way you do?” Inevitably they go, “No, I just do it.” Many times, you have to have somebody from the outside walk you through and sit down and work through what it is that you can do best and then how does that relate to market opportunity. Sometimes there are things we can do great but there’s no market opportunity. Sometimes we’ve got some great stuff but we’re not aiming it at the right market or where we need to be in an adjacent market. That’s where our outside perspective can be incredibly valuable in opening up these new opportunities.
One of the things that you do that is so helpful for people is to talk about facing the enemy. The biggest enemy is all the noise that you were talking about. You’ve given us some tools with the stories, snippets, and symbols to break through the filter of the noise in our brain. Identifying and putting your empathy hat on, what are the two or three noisy distractions that keep you out of your particular customer’s minds? Can you give us a story of how you work with a client on that particular question and what insights came out of that?
There’s a commonality of noise that the main noise that we’re up against in at least the corporate business is the plain flow of tactical busyness. It’s the endless demands. You might have something that can help people but for some reason, you’re not in front of them at the right time and the right way. They’re not feeling that pain. There’s so much stuff going on. That’s the hardest thing. What I have found and I have changed my way of communicating.
Given the volume of information, the hundreds of emails that people are trying to process each day and all the other demands, I’m trying to keep my communications, whether it’s phone or email or whatever, down to one very simple point. I’ve made the mistake of being too comprehensive in the past. “Here are five things you need to think about.” Nobody’s got time to think about five things, even if they’re supposed to think about five things. Joining a very small piece of information with a very clear call to action is one of the best ways to break through and get some response. For a salesperson, that’s crucial. We all, as salespeople, tend to try to say too much and we become noise inadvertently. Everything we say may be great. It may be very valuable but it’s too much. More is less.
It goes back to the concept that people buy emotionally and back it up with logic. Many salespeople think, “If I give them enough information, they will buy from me.” I’ve even seen salespeople get a yes and then still keep talking about three more things the product does. I’m like, “Stop talking.”
I’ve seen that many times on Shark Tank, which is one of my favorite shows to demonstrate what it means to learn to speak human, to translate whatever your stuff is into human language, business language, and to differentiate. A lot of them can’t differentiate well. I’ve seen exactly what you’ve talked about. “Stop pitching. We said yes already,” they keep on going. Every single person that comes on Shark Tank should probably have a two-hour clarity session before they go on there.
[bctt tweet=”Everybody’s saying different things, it’s like looking at an elephant blindfolded from all sides and getting different descriptions.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You’ve given us so much great information about how to break through the filter in our brain. How to do that with stories and symbols and snippets and get it clear and concise. These two moments of truth, that’s what gets us referrals when we’re that clear. The book again is all about clarity. Clarity in fact does win the day. Is there any last thought you want to leave us with?
It’s easy to get the book. I’ve made a direct link. ClarityWins.org goes right to Amazon, where people can order the book, either download or order softcover. I can be found at ClarityFuel.com. If people want to talk to me about having clarity sessions, half day, full day sessions for businesses and for individuals. What we do for businesses is the same thing that I do for people in career transition. It’s personal branding. It’s articulating a good message. It’s all the same process. Some of my best clarity sessions that I’ve done have been with people looking to change careers, who need an outside voice to evaluate their identity, to figure out their focus, and to figure out their message. I have seen remarkable results in a half a day with people that have walked in feeling utter despair. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Nobody’s hiring me. Nobody’s interested. Nobody’s reading my resume,” and walking out and saying, “I know what I’m supposed to be doing now.”
You find their superpower for them.
Find their superpower, narrow the focus and say, “You need to pursue this exact position.” Not fish on the whole pond. Go to this particular place where the bass are and throw this particular bait out that they like.
Clarity Win$ is the book. Steve, thanks again for helping us all get a little clear on this episode.
John, thanks very much. It was enjoyable to talk to you and to hopefully help your audience.
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The Speakers’ Spotlight: Using Complementary Skill Sets As Leverage with Martin and Farah Perelmuter
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
When two skill sets match, it would definitely be an unstoppable joyride to success. It is the awesome secret sauce of entrepreneur couple Martin and Farah Perelmuter, Founders of Speakers’ Spotlight – a speakers’ bureau on a mission to change the world by helping clients put the right speaker in front of the right audience at the right time. Having taken the leap of faith to entrepreneurship, the power couple shares how they came up with their business, the value of complementary skill sets, and the concept of due diligence. Firm believers of building a business on trust, Martin and Farah tip us with the lessons they learned from the success of their first business and how they were able to apply it to the Spotlight Agency.
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Listen To The Episode Here
The Speakers’ Spotlight: Using Complementary Skill Sets As Leverage with Martin and Farah Perelmuter
On this episode, I have not one but two guests, Martin and Farah Perelmuter. They took an entrepreneurial leap of faith back in 1995. They started Speakers’ Spotlight with a strong belief that the needs of conference organizers, meeting planners and speakers could be served in new and better ways and that speech can be a catalyst for positive change. They also believe that if they built this business on a foundation of trust, then the strength of relationships with clients and speakers would ultimately determine their success. They literally started in a spare bedroom in their apartment where they shared a desk, a phone and a computer. They had no clients, no experience, no staff and no money, but they had a clear vision and a strong belief that with a lot of hard work and a little luck, they can make it a reality. Since that time, Speakers’ Spotlight has grown into the world, one of the world’s largest and most respected speakers’ agencies. With the best team in the industry and an incredible roster of speakers, they are proud to have raised the bar of professionalism, service and integrity to a new level. Welcome to the show, Martin and Farah.
Thanks for having us, John.
I love to ask people their story of origin and I just hit the tip of the iceberg. Let’s start with what came first, the romance or the business idea?
I fell in love with Farah long before the business was even a seed of thought in my head.
Complementary Skill Sets: People who have complementary skill sets are the best cofounders.
How did you guys come up with it? You have your own separate careers, but you were together as a couple and then said, “We want to work together?” Tell us how that all came about.
Martin was practicing law and I was in advertising and marketing. One day my uncle came to me and he told me that he wanted to be a speaker. He asked me if I would work on his promotional materials. If I can help write them and design them. I said to him, “I would love to, but what’s a speaker?” I was in my early twenties. I had never seen a speaker. I didn’t realize that there was a whole world out there of professional speakers who spoke and got paid for it. I said to him, “Before I start working on your materials, I really need to go see a speaker.” I ended up seeing a whole bunch of them and I got involved in the speakers’ world. Martin and I ended up doing a year of research in our spare time. We recognized that there was a real opportunity out there to start our own business and that’s how it all started.
Was it easy or hard to convince Martin to leave his legal career and do this?
That’s the easiest decision I’ve ever made. I had already made the decision to leave the practice of law. I decided it wasn’t for me and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next. We were experimenting, doing some research on the side while we were working and trying to understand the industry. Then it got to the point where we needed to get married first. Farah’s the oldest of three daughters and the first in her family to get married among her siblings. It was a big wedding in Farah’s hometown of Winnipeg, and there were about 300 people at the wedding, 293 on her side, seven on my side was the final count.
[bctt tweet=”Love what you do and who you are spending time with, and you will be happy.” username=”John_Livesay”]
She grew up with a very big family. I grew up with a tiny family and her parents, I think had probably told all of their friends and relatives that she was marrying a nice boy who had a good job as a lawyer. I had to stay in the practice of law until after the wedding so that at least we could keep that charade going through that. A few weeks after we got married and came back from our honeymoon is when we both quit our jobs and started full-time doing this business together. It was a bit of a scary moment because we went from two incomes to zero basically overnight, but we had put a lot of thought and planning into it and off we went.
It really is a leap of faith and faith in yourself.
In a very short amount of time, we got married, we moved into our apartment, we quit our jobs and we launched Speakers’ Spotlight.
If you ever look at one of those lists of most stressful things to do, a change of job is one, change of relationship status and moving is one of the most stressful things. We did them all basically at the same time.
If we can survive this, we will survive anything.
That was our mantra.
We were so happy. We hated our jobs so much and we were so excited to start our own and start the whole entrepreneurial journey.
What’s so fascinating is people who have complementary skill sets are the best cofounders in my observation and experience. The fact that you have this advertising and marketing is a big part of making sure your own website and how you present the speakers comes across. A big part of your business are contracts and making sure that’s all done properly and everyone is living up to what’s promised in the contract. If the client promises to have a projector there for the slides and there isn’t one, that can be a problem and vice versa. Your legal background comes into play on both sides there.
[bctt tweet=”Take the high road and be a good person.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Complementary skill sets are the key thing. It took us about six months of working together to figure out what our relative strengths were and create our roles so that they were quite distinct. I think for the first six months or so, probably 90% of what we did overlapped and then after that, it was probably less than 10% where we realized that we both had separate strengths and we started playing more to those strengths. That’s when we started to see things, I wouldn’t say take off at that point, but progress in the right direction.
Anyone who started their own business knows that one of the keys to success is getting clients and selling yourself. Especially in this industry that you’re in, there’s a lot of competition, which is fine, but you have to come up with some things that make you different and you’re able to articulate them so clearly on your website. I want to go over them because I think everyone is going to be able to say, “How can I apply this difference that’s working so well for Martin and Farah to my own business?” Ideally, people will understand your own branding better and what you’re bringing to the table. Let’s talk about the first one, which is this concept of due diligence and how do you decide who’s going to be fortunate enough to be in your roster because your reputation’s on the line as well.
I can say that when we first started, we found eighteen speakers who felt sorry enough for us to let us market them and represent them. It was tough going in the early days. Even those eighteen were all excellent speakers, we really tried to identify who some of the top speakers were in Canada at that point and try to work with them. Over time, we got to the point where in a typical year we would get over a thousand speakers a year approaching us, sending us either by email or phone or in the mail their packages or reaching out about representation. We realized early on that our reputation is everything. One of the most important things is making sure that the people that we’re representing and recommending to clients are going to be outstanding, not just in delivering a fantastic presentation, but all aspects of the engagement from the time that they secure it themselves right through and after the event. I can mention a couple of things that we’re looking for. Farah probably has things to add as well. Obviously, speakers need to be experts in their field and have some expertise, a point of view and have very good platform delivery skills.
Those are all a given, but I always think the ultimate test is if you are going to introduce that speaker to a room of say 500 of your biggest clients. It was an industry-type gathering or a client event, how would you feel about making that introduction? Would you be incredibly proud to introduce them and excited to unleash a speaker on that audience or would you be introducing them and may be heading for the exits because you aren’t exactly sure how it was all going to go down after that? If the answer is the latter, then they shouldn’t be on the website. They shouldn’t be on the roster at all. I really believe that we’ve got to be incredibly proud of people that we represent and feel passionately that they can make a difference with that audience. That they can move the needle and help an audience with whatever the objectives are, whether it’s professional growth, personal growth or whatever that may be.
Complementary Skill Sets: Integrity means walking your talk and doing what you say you’re going to do.
In terms of their topics, we need to make sure that it’s a topic that’s being requested by our client. It’s something that’s important now. It’s something important for attendees to hear about. It’s something that is perhaps newsworthy. We’ve worked with a lot of publishers so we know beforehand what will most likely be a big book in the marketplace. We know where the buzz is going to be. We often get to read those books first and we can sometimes get a heads up on those big authors and speakers. Also, many of our speakers are authors too, so we know what books they’re going to be working on. We can let our clients know this is going to be a topic that you’re going to be interested in and you may want to think about the speaker ahead of time. Also, if we know that a big book is coming out and we know the seats are going to go up, we’ll try to secure that speaker before that happens to our clients. It’s about relationships. It’s about knowing our speakers and our clients well. It’s a partnership.
You both have said so many great things here. Martin, the thing that jumps out for me is this nice alliteration about proud and passionate of what you’re offering. Farah, your insights are fascinating about the inside scoop of a new book that’s about to come out and then how you can capture that trend for your clients and possibly even get them at the current rate before all the buzz and demand comes when the book comes out. There are really fascinating strategies there. Then this other difference that you have, which I think is very interesting is no-commission sales agents. Your team is incentivized to do what’s right as opposed to the most expensive thing and that must pay-off a lot with going back to one of your cultural words of integrity. Do you have a story around that where you put your clients’ best interest in mind first and how that’s paid off for everybody?
I don’t know if we even have a specific story because it’s truly something that we do every day. The early days of the business, when it was just Farah and me for the first several years and then we hired our first employee. In terms of client-facing sales point of view, it was mostly Farah and me on the marketing side for the first few years. We knew we were going to do the right thing and we were really playing the long game. It was all about building trust and long-term relationships. When we started to hire salespeople, one of the things we wanted to ensure was that this culture that we had already been building around long-term relationships, trust and integrity was maintained.
It wasn’t really a brilliant brainstorm. It was, “How do we compensate people fairly but also ensure that they’re doing the right thing?” I’ve always had this belief that the most expensive speaker for an event is not necessarily the best speaker for the event. You want to listen to what the client is looking for, what their objectives are and make a recommendation based on who you think will have the biggest impact regardless of fee. We don’t even call them salespeople here because I don’t love the term, but when we started hiring people to work directly with clients and making recommendations, it’s one thing if we say, “Recommend the best speaker for the job, not the most expensive.” If they get compensated differently based on the fee, there’s a disconnect.
[bctt tweet=”Put the time in. There is no shortcut to success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Even though I think the best sales professionals will still do the right thing and not be motivated by the size of the commission, it really disconnects. It can create a bit of a problem if we’re saying one thing but then compensating people on something else. Essentially we decided from the time we hired our first salesperson that what we’re going to do is incentivize them based on the number of engagements that they booked, but not tie it to the fee. Everybody has a target of the number of engagements that we hope and expect that they can book in the year, but it doesn’t matter what the fee is. A booking is a booking. That way, the incentive is to help the client find the right speaker because we know that if we do that, then the chances of that speaker working with us again in the future goes up significantly.
It wasn’t a brilliant brainstorm. It’s just the way we do things from the beginning. It made common sense to us, but the surprising thing is in speaking with a lot of people in the industry. I’m not aware of anyone else that does it that way. In fact, I’ve had people in the industry say, “How does this exactly work? I don’t understand how your salespeople are motivated if they don’t get a commission.” It is unusual, which is one of the advantages of starting a business when you have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t know the right way to do things, so you do things based on what makes sense, based on your values and so forth. That’s the way we’ve been doing things since day one.
Another thing is our team is very collaborative, so they work together quite a bit. If someone’s working on a client and they’re not quite sure what the right fit is, they’ll often ask other agents in the office and they’ll come together. They’ll talk about similar industries and other clients within that industry. There’s a lot of brainstorming and collaboration going on. It’s very much a team.
You really have defined what my definition of integrity is, which is walking your talk and doing what you say you’re going to do. The fact that you’ve set up your sales team not to be commissioned for the highest fees because you said that’s not your goal. Your goal is to get the best speaker regardless of the fee, then you’re walking your talk. That’s a big point of difference for people and then it leads right into your third big difference, which is this collective experience. When people are engaging with Speakers’ Spotlight, they’re not just getting one person. They’re getting the collective mindset of everyone there, that the team is collaborative. That comes from, “If I win, we all win,” and creating a culture of that, which I think is so important in whatever business you’re in.
Your fourth one, which I’m really fascinated with, is you manage the details and mitigate the risk. For everyone, many times when you were talking about what makes you different than everybody else, you’ll just state facts or features. What Martin and Farah have done here is they talk about the benefit to their potential client of mitigating the risk by managing the details. That is such a great example. Are there any stories of where a speaker’s flight got canceled or delayed and how you didn’t depend on the speaker to figure it out? Do you guys help the speaker?
I’ve got one that comes to mind. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen very often. We’ll book on average in the last few years about 2,000 engagements a year. Unfortunately, we can probably count on one hand a number of times that something happens. It could be a serious illness. It could be unforeseen travel delays, but it doesn’t happen often. One of the things that we tell our clients is over 99% of the time, the speaker’s going to be there. Everything’s going to go smoothly and it’s all good. You don’t have to worry too much. However, one time out of every 300 or 400 engagements, something does happen. If that’s your one event, then it doesn’t matter. It’s a rare occurrence, it’s your event.
The one that comes to mind for me is the blackout that happened maybe ten or twelve years ago, where the entire Eastern Seaboard lost power and everything was shut down. We had a situation where there was no power in the office. There was no power anywhere and our computers were down, everything was down. We started flipping through files and tried to see if there was anything coming up that we needed to notify a client about. It was in August. Fortunately, it wasn’t a super busy time of the year in terms of conferences. It turned out that we did have a conference and we had a speaker booked for the next day at about 12:00 noon. When we looked in the file, we saw that at that moment when literally the lights went out, he was on a plane from the Western part of the country flying into Toronto.
We didn’t know where this plane was going to land, if it was going to land to Toronto or somewhere else. We immediately called the client on his cell phone and it was chaos. I could hear on the other end of the phone. They were in the hotel. The power had gone out at the hotel. We let them know that we were monitoring the speaker’s flight. However, we probably needed a backup plan just in case. I reached out to another speaker that I knew that was local and was available and I let the client know that the client was familiar with his work, so they were very happy with him as a backup plan. Long story short, the speaker’s flight was diverted and he landed in a place called Thunder Bay, which is about a twenty-hour drive from Toronto. He was hoping to get on a flight later that day or perhaps the next morning, but there was no guarantee he was going to make it.
[bctt tweet=”One of the keys to success is getting clients and selling yourself.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We had speaker number two, his name’s Mike Lipkin and Mike was on standby. He talked to the client, the client briefed him and he was ready to go and he said, “I’ll be at the event, ready to go. Even if the other speaker is able to show up, don’t worry. I’m happy to be there.” Mike showed up at the hotel the next morning. I went down there as well. I was on the phone with the other speaker who was still not sure if they were going to make it or not and they were still stuck in Thunder Bay. I lost touch with the speaker and I didn’t know where he was. We couldn’t reach him. We were counting down, there were maybe 30 minutes until the speaker was supposed to go on.
Fifteen minutes and they were getting ready to introduce him and the first speaker came running through the door. He basically had been able to practically parachute in and made it. We got the situation where we had two speakers ready to close this conference. Mike said, “I’m happy to back it, but why don’t we let the other speaker catch his breath and get ready? I’ll go out, I’ll do 20, 30 minutes if you want, just to get things going and then I’ll hand it off.” The client’s next question was, “Are we going to have to pay for the both of you?” Mike said, “No, I’m happy to do this. I’m here anyway. I’d love to do it.” He did the first twenty minutes or so, handed it off to the second speaker, his name is Alvin Law who has an incredible message. His message is, “There’s no such thing as can’t.”
If you ever meet Alvin and have a chance to see him speak, you’ll know why. He’s an incredible person. It was ironic if the person whose message is, “There’s no such thing as can’t,” can’t make it to the engagement but he did. He made it. He proceeded to get a standing ovation. It was just an incredible way to end the conference. The nice thing was on the spot the client hired Mike to keynote their conference because they were so impressed with the first twenty minutes. It all worked out. Things don’t always work out perfectly. That was an example where we thought afterwards if they hadn’t worked through an agency who was there partnering with them. Pulling on all of our resources and collaborating with our own team with our speakers and so forth, then it would have been a very different situation. That to me is my favorite story about mitigating risk, managing details, collaboration and so forth.
It says a lot about the team that you have, not just the team working for you, but the team of speakers and that willingness to do what it takes to make the client happy and that trust. That’s my big takeaway. Plus, I love any kind of story. I have a big emphasis on storytelling myself, on a little bit of drama and the way you described running in at the last minute and almost parachuting in. All that is what makes a good story and there are a lot of takeaways besides mitigating the risk and the details. If the quality of the speakers we have would go that extra mile even if they weren’t being paid and even if they had to back off at the last minute, that’s collaboration. Sometimes with two speakers sharing the stage, if they haven’t rehearsed or practiced together to have that be cohesive, it doesn’t always work. The big resolution of that was the other guy getting hired, but the irony of talking about there’s no such thing as can’t and, “I can’t make it to the event,” of course, he got a standing ovation.
Complementary Skill Sets: The great speakers are the ones who are really focused on the client and the audience and not just on themselves.
He made it. That was the amazing thing. In the back of my mind, I was thinking, “What if he doesn’t make it?” One of the things that you asked me in terms of what we’re looking for in speakers and the due diligence part is, we are looking for team players and people who are good people. Not just great speakers, but we’re fortunate that I think everybody that we work with, we feel we can count on. They’re good people that care about not just themselves looking good on stage because that’s not what they’re there for. It’s really about making the client look good, putting the client first, putting the audience first and being there to serve. That that’s what the great speakers do. There’s always a little bit of ego involved. You can’t get up in front of a large group of people without having a healthy dose of self-confidence, but the great speakers are the ones who are focused on the client and the audience and not just on themselves.
I also want to mention that one other thing that makes us a little different is we don’t have any contracts with our speakers. When we sign on a speaker, we fully talk about what the relationship entails, what the objectives are and what we both want to get out of it, but then it’s all on a handshake, integrity, honesty and transparency. There’s no contract.
That goes back to not paying salespeople commission for the highest paid. It’s all that mindset of trust. Before the show started, Farah, you’ve mentioned that you and Martin have started a second business, which is complementary to Speakers’ Spotlight. It’s called The Spotlight Agency. Tell us a little bit about how you decided. Did you see a problem that needed to be solved and you said, “Let’s start a separate business from that?”
We saw an opportunity that could be filled. What happened was we represent many high-profile personalities and celebrities. Over the years, aside from hosting and speaking, other opportunities came our way. In about 2006, we started a division at Speakers’ Spotlight called the Celebrity Division. Within that division, we started doing these extra types of projects. There were celebrity endorsement projects and spokesperson roles and some TV. What happened was that division started getting bigger and bigger and we realized that it was a slightly different target market. We felt that in order to grow that part of the business properly, we should really separate it. We started a new corporation called The Spotlight Agency. That is a separate entity from Speakers’ Spotlight. It’s growing quickly and we have part of our staff looking over that business and it’s exciting.
[bctt tweet=”You have to come up with some things that make you different.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s some of the same staff like Lucy, the Paw-sonal Assistant, your dog comes to the office. Lucy gets to work on both businesses, I’m guessing.
Lucy does whatever she’s asked. She’s very busy.
She’s very busy keeping everyone’s emotions on keel during any snow storms or delays.
Growing a business in the first place was not something we intended to do. When we started Speakers’ Spotlight, we did not have a huge aspiration. Much of it was a lifestyle change. We saw each other in our previous jobs and we wanted to do something together and take control of our careers and our lives. We thought the best case scenario is one day maybe we’d have three of four people working with us and we would get it out of the apartment. It organically grew. We’ve got about 34 employees now. It grew beyond what we had expected. With Spotlight Agency, it wasn’t something that was initially planned, but it fit really well. I’m sure you’re familiar with Simon Sinek’s work around Start with Why.
Our why with Speakers’ Spotlight is this idea that a speech can change the world. If we get the right speaker in front of the right audience at the right time, that’s when the magic can happen. I’m not so naive to think that people are going to walk out of a speech and their entire life is going to be changed, but I do believe that it can plant the seeds that are necessary to make some small differences, whether it’s at work, at home or in their community that can lead to positive change. That’s the goal behind Speakers’ Spotlight. With The Spotlight Agency, the businesses are similar in that they’re matching talent with organizations or brands.
One of the things we realized is that you can affect positive change in other ways too, not just through a keynote. It might be a marketing campaign. It might be a spokesperson campaign. Those kinds of things can have a profound impact as well. That was what made it an easy decision once we decided to move forward was it really fit well with our core beliefs around Speakers’ Spotlight. It’s similar businesses yet as Farah mentioned, very different in the sense of who the clients are, the whole process of putting deals together is quite different. The companies are quite distinct and yet share common values and beliefs.
I think it’s brilliant. It’s a nice use of skill sets and connections while expanding your brand that allows you to still stay to your core business and then have a brand extension that allows other skills to come into play and possibly different talent. Some people crossover and some don’t. It’s what I would see happening.
It’s interesting to have one business that’s 24 years old and another business that’s pretty new in some ways and it’s in rapid growth. It’s really interesting to watch.
[bctt tweet=”You owe it to yourself to find something that’s going to be meaningful and fulfilling.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That was going to be my next question. What lessons have you learned from the business that’s been around so long that you’re applying to this new business that people could say, “I need to be sure I’m doing this because I’m growing my business fast?”
One thing that I find that makes us really different from a lot of businesses out there is that we never borrowed any money and we never went into debt. Also, it’s the type of business we have, but it’s a service-based business and we had it out of our apartment. We didn’t hire people until we needed people and we grew it slowly. We bought what we can afford. We never borrowed from the bank or from our parents. We didn’t have that huge stress on us. We’re in some ways within the same with The Spotlight Agency. The Spotlight Agency are the same offices and we didn’t hire a ton of people out of the gate. We share some of the same staff and we’re doing it slowly and properly.
What a great takeaway. You’re not under stress with the decisions you make because you do not have to pay back a debt in the culture you created and not living beyond your means or spending beyond your means as a business. All these startups that get millions of dollars and then they blow through it because they have it as a very different mindset. That’s what allows you to work with top clients whether it’s Coca-Cola or McDonald’s or all kinds of people. Are there any last words of advice or thoughts that you want to share with the people?
I think this applies to anyone but particularly younger people. The two most important decisions that people make in their lives are the choice of career or job. One is what you choose to do for a living and the second is who you choose to spend your time with whether that’s your spouse or partner or someone who doesn’t have that close friends. I really believe that if you get those two decisions right, your life’s going to be pretty good. If you love what you do and you love the people that you spend the most time with, things will be great.
Complementary Skill Sets: It’s important to be not just happy but to be challenged, to be fulfilled, and to feel that we’re making a difference.
If you love your spouse and you hate your job, you’re probably not going to be happy all the time. If you love your job and hate your spouse, you’re probably not going to be happy. I believe that if you get those two decisions right, there are no guarantees or anything, but that puts you on a great course. I really think that those are two decisions that we have control over, in particular on work and in quitting. Having gone to law school, putting all that time in, getting hired at a prestigious firm and walking away from that, wasn’t an easy decision at the time, but it was the smartest decision I made because I knew that it wasn’t for me.
It’s for other people that might want that life and that’s great. I have a lot of respect for people who do that work. I think knowing yourself and knowing subjectively what is going to get you out of bed in the morning and want to go. We spend a lot of time at work and it’s important to be not just happy but to be challenged, to be fulfilled and to feel that we’re making a difference. That is critically important. If you’re doing something that you don’t love, I really think people, if they can, you owe it to yourself to try to find something that’s going to be more meaningful and more fulfilling.
The first one is that to achieve success, there aren’t shortcuts. You can’t beat the system in creative ways. You have to work hard work, you have to grind it out and you have to work and make it happen and then hopefully it will become easier. They have to put the time in.
Those are two wonderful tweets. Love what you do and love the people you’re spending time with if you want to be successful and happy. There are no shortcuts to achieve success, put the time in.
[bctt tweet=”The two most important decisions that people make in their lives are the choice of a career and who to spend their life with.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One last thing is to take the high road and be a nice person.
That is an amazing secret sauce. If you’re easy to work with and people like working with you on and off the stage, then they’re going to rehire you, refer you, all that stuff. People just assume that everyone takes the high road and as a good person, but if you are, it can be the difference between who they pick sometimes. I can’t thank you both enough. What a pleasure to get a sense of your relationship, your business, your family, your dog, the people working with you and the stories. It was all great. These are very useful information and I know that you’re going to be as successful with The Spotlight Agency as you are with your business, the Speakers’ Spotlight. Congratulations to you both and thanks for being on the show.
Thank you so much.
It was really a pleasure to chat with you.
Links Mentioned:
- Martin Perelmuter
- Farah Perelmuter
- Speakers’ Spotlight
- The Spotlight Agency
- Start with Why
- Speakers.ca/
- https://www.TheSpotlightAgency.com/
- Quantmre.com
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Digital Leadership with Erik Qualman
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Technology has greatly changed the dynamics of the world. Great leaders know how this impacts the business and therefore, learned to adapt with it. Taking the two together is best-selling author and keynote speaker, Erik Qualman, as he talks about the concept of digital leadership. Known as Equalman, the Digital Dale Carnegie, and The Tony Robbins of Tech, Erik shares how he has grown in his life by changing his mindset along the way and starting to look at how life happens for you and not to you. He believes that even failure has to be done right. Erik gets down into his work with Digital Leader, the superhero concept he has created a brand around, and why you should set a laughable goal. He reveals his secrets on what it means to give digital hugs especially in a world where it is easy to become impersonal.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Digital Leadership with Erik Qualman
Digital Leader: 5 Simple Keys to Success and Influence
Our guest is Erik Qualman, who’s often called a Digital Dale Carnegie and the Tony Robbins of Tech. He is a number one bestselling author and a motivational keynote speaker who’s spoken in over 50 countries and reached 30 million people. His Socialnomics work has been featured on 60 Minutes to the Wall Street Journal and has been used by the National Guard to NASA. His book, Digital Leader, propelled him to be voted the Second Most Likable Author in the World behind Harry Potter‘s JK Rowling. Qualman was formerly a sitting professor at Harvard and MIT labs and he’s also the owner of an animation studio. Erik, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here.
I always love to ask my guests to take us back to some point with their own little story of origin. Did you know that you wanted to get into tech at a young age? Was there a moment in time you went, “This is for me?”
I fell into it backward like a lot of people. I’ve been in the tech space for many years. I grew up in Detroit. Like a lot of kids in Detroit, you go and work for the automotive industry. As an intern, I was working with Cadillac. Part of my job as an intern was to write the meeting notes. I go to the meeting, write out the notes, print them, put them on people’s desks and they had a thing called interoffice mail which had a little red string on it. We’d send that out. Each meeting took me about two hours to produce this. Crazy enough for a lot of your audience out there, email was brand new at the time. I said, “I wonder if I can send an attachment instead of printing these. Can I attach this to this thing called email?” There wasn’t Google. It took me a while to figure it out, but I did. Instead of taking two hours, it took me five minutes. I sent out the note and then the next thing I know, the CEO of Cadillac is standing right next to me. I’m going, “This guy is super pumped. I’m going to be in the executive suite here soon.” I quickly realized it was my time to explain why I should keep my internship. I went, “To save two hours of my time,” but I could tell by the look on his face he didn’t care how I spent two hours of my time. The second thing I said was, “This saves the environment. We don’t have to print the paper.” Remember this was the ‘90s. No one cared about the environment. Last but not least I said, “I can track this if someone saw it.” He goes away. I saved my internship.
A couple months later, they come out with these things called websites and the CMO is talking to the CEO going, “We need this thing called the website.” Try to explain that before they exist. It’s a mission impossible so the CEO goes, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but go talk to the kid on the first floor.” Keep in mind that your email address is normally your first initial and last name. As Erik Qualman, that becomes EQualman. He goes, “Go talk to the kid on the first floor that thinks he’s a superhero. Maybe he can get us this Cadillac.com thing you’re talking about up front.” It’s been a long ride. I love it. That’s how we fell in it backward, a kid born and raised in South Detroit. We went from there.
[bctt tweet=”Things happen for you, not to you. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
That superhero concept is something that I want to explore because you’ve created a whole brand around it. Tell our audience what the significance is about being Equalman and the colored glasses that you wear and how that makes you memorable and unique.
For those not familiar with me, I wear these bright green glasses. They’re Clark Kent-like glasses. For the beginning of my career, the first many years I hated being called Equalman. Imagine if you’re an intern or a junior associate walking into a meeting and they go, “Don’t worry, Equalman’s here. He can save everything.” I fought it, which a lot of us do. We fight what’s at our core, who we are a lot of times. For some reason, we fight who our true self is. I fell into this a little bit backward. Things happen for you, not to you. I was doing an article with a magazine when the book started to take off. Digital Leader started taking off. They did a magazine article. They wanted to have me on the cover and they go, “Your website’s Equalman since your email address is Equalman, do you mind wearing Clark Kent-like glasses?” I go, “That sounds fun. Let’s have fun.” They go, “Do you mind if they’re green because it’s going to be the Saint Patrick’s Day? It’s coming out in March.” I go, “Whatever helps.” They bring them out and I go, “Those are bright green glasses.”
We do this shoot. I don’t think much of it. A couple of weeks later, I go to Kenya to speak. The night before I’m going to adopt a baby cheetah at a rescue shelter, not to take home but to support the local community. Ironically enough, the day before, Usain Bolt the Olympian, the sprinter had adopted from the same litter. As we drive over to the rescue shelter, the lady that’s with me says, “If you don’t mind, we’re going to film a lot of this because it’ll help promote the shelter. We had Usain Bolt here yesterday and we filmed him. We’re going to splice all this together. For the video, we’d like you to have your green glasses on.” I looked at her and I said, “I don’t wear those green glasses every day. I look like an idiot walking around wearing green glasses like that everyday day.” The look on her face was that of disappointment. She said, “Everyone in Kenya, that’s what they think that you look like.” I never wanted to see that look of disappointment again. Over time, we’ve started to wear them more. Almost all the time I’m wearing them because it’s turned out to be good for business. We lose some business. We don’t want that, “That guy looks a little quirky,” but then we gain a lot more.
Crazy enough we’re in the business of producing these green glasses because I’ll go and perform. There are 2,000 people in the audience and they go, “We want to have some fun. We want to have a big photo opportunity. Can we get some of those green glasses?” Originally, we pushed them to Amazon. Over time, Amazon can’t handle these large orders. Now we’ve become producers of these bright green glasses. It all works out for you in the end. We completely have stepped into being my true self and it’s been learning and a journey for me that help my audiences to say, “You got to step into that discomfort.” Every day I now walk in discomfort wearing bright green glasses. Sometimes I forget I’m wearing it and then people are looking at me strangely. I go, “That’s right. I’m wearing these bright green glasses.” It’s a very long story to say that my cheetah is much faster than Usain Bolt’s cheetah.
The entrepreneurship of making the glasses for your audience is a fantastic full circle there. You said, “Things happen for you, not to you.” Did I hear you correctly?
A lot of us wake up and there’s going to be this challenge every day. With time, it might be a couple minutes, it might be a couple of minutes, a couple of days, sometimes it might take fifteen years, but you can look back and go, “It’s happening for me. It’s not just so I could be made fun of. This thing happened for me, not to me.” Once you change that lens and mindset, your day-to-day is going to be much better.
[bctt tweet=”Evaluated practice leads to progress.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Another example was the disappointment on that woman’s face when you said you didn’t want to wear the glasses. You thought, “That’s not happening to me. It’s happening for me if I embrace this.” Now you’re selling glasses. You don’t need glasses to see. They’re not prescription? Are they plain glass?
Here’s a tip for everyone that’s out there that’s a speaker. Everyone’s a speaker, whether it’s the size of one or size of 10,000. I do wear corrective lenses. I normally have contacts in. I do also wear glasses. The bright greens, we’re trying to figure out how we get bright green glasses and high-end glasses, but that color is hard to come by. It’s only replicable in plastic. On stage, I wear my contact lenses for a couple of reasons and a lot of this is to learn the process. I didn’t know this until we started doing it. Number one, you don’t want to reflect the light back on the audience because it’s going to refract off your lenses when you’re wearing glasses. Secondarily, if they’re taking photos or video of you, it’s a lot crisper when people can see your actual eyes. They can relate more not only the audience there but also the audience that’s abroad when you’re being filmed. Last but not least, as you exit the stage and you’re doing a book signing, there’s going to be in this day and age a lot of selfies being taken or photos being taken with the people that are getting their books signed. The picture is much better when you don’t have the lens in your glasses.
I want to ask you a few questions about your book, Digital Leader. You have something in here that I love, an acronym. Fail forward, fail fast and fail better. Can you give us a little sneak peek on what that means?
Fail fast, another synonym for that is to fail cheap. If you’re going to fail, you might as well do it in an hour. That’s much better to do it than six months and it’s going to be cheaper. If you’re going to fail, which we all should, it’s all part of a learning process. The misnomer, because everyone’s like, “Fail, fail, fail.” You’ve got to do it the right way. That’s why I always say, “Fail fast, fail forward, fail better.” The second one is to fail forward is to evaluate that failure. For those that are into music or have grown up doing sports, there’s the old adage that practice makes perfect which is completely false. Evaluated practice leads to progress. If you don’t evaluate that practice, then practice leads to permanence and probably permanence in the wrong way. It’s about evaluated failure. Fail fast, which makes sense. Fail better is you got to evaluate the failure, which for most of us that goes against their DNA. You want to sweep it under the rug.
With teams at work, they’re not your best buddies. They’re friends. It’s uncomfortable to be like, “John did this or Jim, Kelly, this totally didn’t work,” and what you do is you don’t evaluate it because it’s uncomfortable. If you evaluate it then you can fail better, meaning you’re not going to repeat the same mistake twice. The key though is the first two tenets then they lead to the third. That’s what it’s all about. It’s being fail fast, fail forward and fail better. Failure does lead to learning. Failure’s a part of the process but you’ve got to do it the right way.
That is the secret there because I know there’s a lot of fear of failure and I tell people to look at it as feedback. Your concept here of evaluated practice leads to progress. When there’s death in hospitals, the medical community has a process where they will have a meeting to see what went wrong without pointing fingers. To see if they did something in the surgery that caused that patient to die. A lot of sales organizations could benefit from this concept of failing forward. If they could create a safe enough environment where people were not pointing fingers at what caused a sale not to happen. They can learn from it so they don’t keep making the same mistakes when they pitch. You mentioned the willingness to have fun and with the glasses. One of the chapters in your book is to set a laughable goal. Can you tell us an example or two of what a laughable goal is and how we might be able to do that?
I will tell you my laughable goal because the more I repeat it, the more likely it will become an outcome or it’s reminding me too that, “This is what we’re trying to do.” My laughable goal is to create the next Disney World. It’s to have an actual park, a physical location. Families come in there. It’s more educational-based. There’s still entertainment, but when they leave they’ve been educated. It’s taking that Disney 2.0. I love Disney. I love Disney Parks. If Walt Disney were to arrive, come back and walk around Disney he’d go, “This is all you’ve changed? This hasn’t changed much.” It’s a wonderful place. It’s the happiest place on earth. It’s about taking the amazing stuff that they do and doing it 2.0. Whether in the marathon we may get to Mile 11, Mile 14, it’s about getting to hopefully that 26.2. As it relates to that, the other laughable goal is that we want to entertain, educate and empower seven billion people this decade. In our minds, that is setting the bar low because there are more than seven billion people and there’ll be more than seven billion people when we look out many years from now. It’s about setting it out there. That goal has to be laughable that most people you’d tell, the first reaction is that they laugh. Those that don’t continue to laugh are the ones who are going to help you get there.
Digital Leadership: Those that don’t continue to laugh at your laughable goal are the ones who are going to help you get there.
Sometimes when we have a goal, we’re afraid to share it because people will think we’re crazy or who do you think you are to have that goal. I remember the first time I said out loud to somebody that I wanted to give a TEDx Talk I did a little bit of a gulp. Instead of saying, “That’s never going to happen or you’re crazy,” the person I happened to mention it to said, “I know someone who organizes the ones in San Diego. Let me put you in touch with him and he can give you some tips.” It’s that willingness to be laughed at when you state a goal, however big or small it is that is important in your career. Whether you’re running your own business or working for someone else. It allows people to align with you and that’s how it becomes a reality. The other thing that intrigued me about your book, Digital Leader, is a digital hug. What is that? I’m guessing it’s more than an XO at the end of your email.
More and more now with everyone adopting the emojis, but it’s about understanding that these digital tools are not designed to replace face to face. There, one time and distance is an issue. The beautiful thing about these digital tools is they allow you to scale more than ever before. As much as you are able to are you can give out digital hugs? How do you promote someone else digitally? How do you shine the light on some cool stuff that people are doing in the community? It’s about giving that love out there as much as possible. One thing, for example, is let’s say you’re going to write a thank you note. You write a handwritten thank you note. The digital hug version of that is you take a picture of that thank you note and also send an email in case it gets lost in the post office. That person gets it real-time and they’re more active to respond as well. If they get a note in the mail, it’s great. It makes them feel good, but they’re probably not going to hand write a letter back to you. It’s about understanding that you can’t replace a physical hug, but as much as you can get to scale with the digital hugs.
[bctt tweet=”Give digital hugs.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Certain words and the way you frame things in your emails convey warmth. You certainly do that. I noticed that the people on your team do that. Do you have any tips on how people can not make email cold and impersonal?
We’re not perfect at this and I wrestle with it all day. Keep in mind that sometimes I have to pause and go, “Am I being a jerk here on certain things?” You get wrapped up and you’re like, “Why isn’t this moving as fast as we’d like?” What helps me is I constantly try to take pauses and ask myself, “If I were to receive this, how would I like to receive it? What is interesting?” A lot of the readers out there in sales, what’s intriguing is can I make this person feel a kid again? Can I ask them a question that will provoke thought within and it makes it more fun? At the same time, can I give them some personality? It could be the holidays are coming up. What was the favorite toy you ever received from Santa Claus? I’d sit back and there’s probably one that pops in their mind and they immediately come back. Even if they don’t respond, it’s caused them to think. They’re going to think about that question and then you tell them what you enjoyed it. It’s like, “I’ve got the Millennium Falcon,” whatever it is or, “I’ve got this Playmobil set.” Whatever it is you received, then you’re sharing a little bit of personality. They can relate to you.
I remember mine vividly. Waking up Christmas morning and seeing a shiny red Schwinn bike all assembled in the living room somehow magically, an outdoor thing inside the house in the suburbs of Chicago in winter. Your mind was like, “How did that happen?” I can’t even ride it yet because there’s snow everywhere. Those memories come flooding back. What a great question and an example of pulling that together. Since one of your goals is to become the next Disney World, you’re well on your way with this animation studio. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about and the kinds of clients you’re helping? I know you’re working with Disney ironically as well as Cartier.
It’s been such a blessing. How it occurred is that for my first book, Socialnomics, I go, “I’ve been talking to a lot of these CEOs for an hour.” This was when social media was first big is when Myspace was big and then it was overtaken by Facebook, fortunately and got that right. In the book, Socialnomics, we said, “Facebook is going to be the killer here.” I’d sit there and the CEO goes, “I got it,” but they weren’t taking action. I go, “I need to do something different,” and the book’s coming out. I need to hit them over the head with a three-minute video about here’s why it matters and to scare them a little bit. We put this together. I was in Cambridge at the time. I grabbed some of the folks from MIT Media Lab. We put together this, this animated video. It also goes massively viral. Most importantly, it started getting people’s attention. People started using it to any meeting they went to go, “This is why this stuff matters or why it’s going to change the world with the way we communicate. Why it’s going to affect elections. Why it’s going to change the way we do business.” That’s how we got started.
I started getting phone calls from these big companies and they’d go, “We love that video you produced or the videos that you’re producing for your books. We’d love if you could do one for us. Can you do that for us?” I go, “No, I do it for myself.” I didn’t think anything of it. By the third knock on the door, the proverbial knock on the door. For all the readers out there, don’t do what I did. You’re not going to get three knocks sometimes. I was fortunate to get that third knock. Finally, I said, “We have a whole studio. We’ll rock it out.” Even though it scared me to death, I go, “Can I deliver on something like this for a client?” and then away we went. It’s been great. Ironically enough, here’s the story with the green glasses. I was about to give a talk in the afternoon. I was in Nashville having breakfast. There’s a guy sitting across from me and kept looking at me. They finally came over and goes, “I saw you speak a couple of months ago.” I got, “Sit down.” We started talking about the Cubs. I’m a big Chicago Cubs fan.
Long story longer is he’s connected to Disney. All of a sudden we got a call from Disney and they go, “We love your videos. We’d love for you to do a video for us.” I even said, “Why don’t you have the Pixar guys do it?” They go, “We like your story writing capability and it’ll be a little faster for you to do it. It’s a little different look. We want you to do it. You get from an outside perspective what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to showcase that Disney is a digital company.” I go, “Fantastic.” That’s how that transpired and it relates back to those green glasses. It’s been a wonderful ride. We take on clients like Disney, Cartier and smaller businesses sometimes. Even speakers, we’ve started to help some people with their speaking reels.
[bctt tweet=”Digital leaders are made, not born.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s hear about what that looks like. You animate speaking reels. You’re bringing 2D or 3D animation into a speaker’s sizzle reel?
For the speaker’s sizzle reels, what we found is that, “There are a lot of speakers out there that need this and we can help them out.” We take a lot of the footage that they have. Sometimes we have to go shoot real footage. We’ll layer in the 3D and 4D animation as well as if they need a voiceover, if they need music, and then that storytelling capability to help them from an outsider perspective, “This stuff, I know you love it. No one’s going to care about it. Let’s hype it up.”
Are you creating any of these kinds of videos for authors?
They’re almost one and the same when you think about it. Almost every speaker is now an author. Usually along those lines when it makes sense. We’re fairly expensive. We still primarily work with the Fortune 500, but we do small business as well. We’ve found it fun to work with a lot of these speakers as well since we’re in the business.
You’ve given many wonderful keynotes around the world. You’ve met Barack Obama. Can you tell us one of your favorite talks and what made it one of your favorites?
What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube
One of my favorites and one of the most interesting are one and the same. I was invited to present on digital leadership in front of 3,300 counterterrorism FBI agents. Not only was the background check interesting and I’m glad I cleared. It is intense. At the time it was Director Comey and it was during the middle of the election, during the middle of all this Hillary Clinton. A couple of things. One, we’re blessed to have all these agents. They’re amazing. To be on the ground and talk with them on a human level, because I’m scared to death like, “What are they looking up? What do they know about me?” I wrote a book, What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube. I go, “These guys are probably digging.” Comey spoke on leadership and then I spoke on digital leadership.
Can you give us the distinction between leadership and digital leadership for people who may be wondering? What’s the content different in a talk like that?
The genesis of digital leadership, I’ve been doing this and I’ve been speaking over a decade. I’ve been paid to do it for over a decade. I’ve been fortunate to meet Malcolm Gladwell in the green room and Jim Collins. I started to see a pattern that the top three business books that everyone uses are The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I started to ask myself, “All these books are fantastic and these authors are amazing, great people. They’ve all been written before the iPhone existed, before Facebook, before YouTube, before Snapchat, before Instagram.” The world has changed. We live in exponential times. I’m sure leadership has changed, but the core is still probably there. We wanted to figure out what’s core? What’s still in is by 80% is still the same? Digital leadership is that slight twist knowing we live in a hyper-connected world and that the communication is much different. That’s digital leadership.
We profile a Howard Schultz. The good thing is digital leaders are made, not born. Howard Schultz came back as the CEO of Starbucks when their stock dropped to 2% during the great recession. He comes back from Chairman to be the CEO to run it day to day. He quickly realized that the world has shifted while he was away and he’s back in a day to day. He had to figure out how to become a digital leader. He takes that step and then by the time at the end of his tenure, all of a sudden Starbucks has taken the most mobile transactions of any company in the world. They are a digital company that happens to sell coffee. He was able to transform himself and that’s what digital leadership’s all about. He’s a good example of what it looks like.
I remember the first time I went to Starbucks and I saw somebody buying their coffee with their phone and I thought, “Are they getting a discount? They want to do that for the convenience or the cool factor or the up?” It took that whole vibe of, “I’m part of the club and loyalty and all the things that make how people interact less friction.” The time flies by with someone like you who’s involved in many wonderful things. The insights have been tremendous from giving digital hugs to realizing that things happen for us, not to us and that we can learn to fail forward, fast and better. Any last thoughts you want to close with?
[bctt tweet=”Listen first, sell last.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A lot of the readers out there, they’re trying to figure out probably how to sell better. Everyone’s in sales no matter what you’re trying to do. Whether you’re trying to ask your boss if you can work from home on a Friday, whether you’re a kid trying to get a snow cone from your parents is that all of us are in sales. When we look at it in the digital world, people when they jump in need to understand it’s not about you first. It’s not about the selfie first. It’s about the unsolved. It’s about listening first, digitally. All of us in our DNA, I included, you jump on. Here’s why you need to get me. Here’s why you need to get my product. Here’s why you need to get our service. We’re the best. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work offline and it doesn’t work digitally. When you think about the offline metaphor is if you went up to four people at a cocktail party, they didn’t know when they’re laughing. They’re having a good time. Maybe it’s a networking conference and they’re laughing, having a good time. You wouldn’t go up to them and tap on their shoulder and go, “Do you mind if I interrupt you and tell you why I’m great for the next five minutes?” We would never do that in the offline world, but when there’s no barrier digitally, almost all of us make that mistake. It’s about listening, interacting, reacting and then selling. It’s to sell last, listen first digitally.
That’s a great reminder of all of us. Listen first, sell last. The analogy I always use is if you met somebody on a first date, you’re probably not going to ask them to marry you. A lot of us make that mistake in selling. We don’t do it in our personal life. Somehow we think, “You just met me. Would you like to hire me or buy my product or whatever it is?” without building a relationship first. The website is Equalman.com. We all know where that comes from. There’s even a logo that goes with it with the equal sign inside of a shield. There are the green glasses and great stuff. I’m sure people are going to be intrigued to look at your animation studio, hiring you for more keynotes and buying your wonderful book. Thanks again for being on the show.
Thank you, John. It’s been an honor.
Links Mentioned:
- Erik Qualman
- Socialnomics
- Digital Leader
- Cadillac.com
- What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- Good to Great
- The Tipping Point
- https://EQualman.com/
- Quantmre.com
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