The Speakers’ Spotlight: Using Complementary Skill Sets As Leverage with Martin and Farah Perelmuter
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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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Emotional Sobriety with Bill Stierle
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Bill Stierle, founder of Corporate Culture Development and a dynamic and commanding thought leader in emotional intelligence and thinking styles, gives an interesting perspective on how we can communicate in business. Bill spills the secrets on how to resolve conflict while giving us a peek into his new book called Emotional Sobriety. He talks about how to become a communications lifesaver while laying down the differences between criticism and critical, empathy and sympathy, and truth and trust. Bill provides great examples that present situations where we can apply effective communication amidst tension where people become defensive in one way or another. He gives a great formula to handle the very common objection of, “I have to think about it.”
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Listen To The Episode Here
Emotional Sobriety with Bill Stierle
Our guest is Bill Stierle and he is a dynamic and commanding thought leader in emotional intelligence and thinking styles. His impact has been felt everywhere from the top business schools to Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and even government institutions around the world. He’s the Founder of Corporate Culture Development and has a unique knowledge of how to create successful training programs. We’re going to ask him to open up the secrets on how to resolve conflict and what happens after he comes in is people have more productivity and performance and are generally more effective. Bill has a book called Emotional Sobriety that we’re going to talk about and he also speaks on the topic. Bill, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me on. This is going to be a lot of fun.
I always like to ask my guest to take us back to their own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school, college. Nobody starts off as the expert on emotional intelligence. Where would you like to tell us of how this whole concept came about for you?
It came about when I was teaching high school anatomy and physiology many years ago. It started with a very simple question that my brain couldn’t let go of. The simple question was, “Why do people think the way they do?” That’s where it started. At that time of the mid-‘80s, there was a lot of brain research being done from the ‘70s and the ‘80s. They were having the tools and the abilities to stretch into what’s happening in the brain. How does thinking work? How does thinking works with certain jobs? I fell upon a good mentor. His name was Ned Hermann who worked at General Electric. He came up with this thinking tool called the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument that he used at General Electric in management leadership training as well as human resources. This tool is a 120-question survey that talks about why people think differently. That tool allows us and gives us an insight into the differences between an engineer and a social worker. Those are two different people, as well as an artist and a drill sergeant. Those are two other different people. Those are extreme or focused thinking types.
Engineers are spending a lot of time in logic and rational thinking, whereas social workers are spending a lot of time in interpersonal and connection style of thinking and dealing with human interaction. Artists are in the visual space and drill sergeants are in the organized space and they’re into implementing things. An artist is into creating things. This is the start down the path of why do people think the way they do. I get a lot of work here in the corporate space when I do strategic planning or team analysis. When the start process takes place of here’s what a person is listening for and here’s what a person’s brain is shutting down or shutting off when you talk too much about a certain type of topic. The brain will shut off if a marketing person and an operations person are in the room at the same time because the marketing person is talking about risk and trying to catch as many eyeballs as possible. Whereas the operations person is, “How am I going to manufacture, implement or distribute what that guy over there is trying to sell?”
[bctt tweet=”What can I say or do to meet your need for truth? ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Those are two different brains that are working in different places. An executive team is much like The Avengers. The Avengers are a group of superheroes and they all are sitting in different thinking styles and they’re approaching the world in different ways. They’re doing that in different ways, they have to come together as a team in order to defeat the enemy. The same thing has to happen in an executive team. They all have to come together. The finance person, the CFO, has got to have an honest discussion with the VP of human resources about how much staffing it’s going to take to get certain work done and how much the cost is going to be. That’s called an honest executive discussion. The VP of sales has got to have an honest discussion with operations because whatever they’re selling, the operations person has to be able to distribute or deliver to the person’s doorstep. Those two people have got to talk because if the sales get too big, the customer service and the operations can’t deliver it. Can you see how that one works?
A lot of finger pointing and blaming. You talk about how to become a communication lifesaver. I used to be a lifeguard, so I’m interested to hear how you can help people become a communication lifesaver when those conflicts come up.
That’s the second part of my origin story. I noticed that this work on the brain and thinking only took me so far. Whenever emotions show up, a person’s brain will activate into a protective strategy. Being a communication lifesaver is that if the brain is communicating in a protective way, what winds up happening is not hearing what the other person is saying. As a lifesaver, I’ve got to throw them a communication life ring in order to keep them in a conversation that’s productive and healthy versus one that is safekeeping and reductive and one that puts people at their poles.
Do you have a story of how that would work? What does it look like when someone throws a communications buoy to somebody to keep them in the conversation?
What it would look like is if an engineer or somebody that’s thinking in a logical and rational way quotes a fact or an inaccuracy that another person has said in the room. It’s a critical accuracy piece. The problem is the rest of the room doesn’t hear it that way. The rest of the room hears it as criticism, not critical. A life ring in that moment would be, “Joe, it looks like you’re stating the accuracy for everybody in the room and you’re pointing out how it’s not 39% but it’s 41% when you consider these other data. Is that the accuracy we’re going for?” He wasn’t telling the other person that they were wrong for not knowing the number. He was stating the accuracy piece because his brain needed to express it. Criticism and critical are mixed up. Three-fourths of the people can’t tell the difference between critical and criticism.
Let’s underline that distinction one more time. Criticism sounds like versus being critical.
The distinction would be like this. Criticism is, “You should have known this answer already.” Critical is, “Here’s the fact I would like the whole room to know.” That’s different. The second thing that I need to throw a communication life ring at is the word defensiveness or the construct of defensiveness as a protective strategy. Defensiveness is when somebody is trying to create either order or safety and it’s not considering that the order or the safety or the sequence that they’re doing needs to change. They’ll become defensive and say something like, “That’s not the way it’s done. I’m just following procedures. It takes too much work to rewrite that procedure. We have to keep doing it that way. I’m following the letter of the law.”
All of those are and can be heard as defensive sentences that usually a person points out, “You’re being defensive.” It’s like, “I’m not. I’m just stating what the rule is. I’m just stating what the procedure is. If you want to write the procedure and you want me to retrain people on the procedure, I’ll be glad to do that for you. Right now, I’m trying to follow the procedure.” A drill sergeant is following a procedure. Why? They need to get 30 people to act as one person, to rely on the same set of rules and the same set of procedures. When you have a procedure that’s effective, it creates a lot of stability and a lot of trust. Everybody’s on the same procedural page.
People like structure but the flip side of not becoming defensive, I see that often in selling or pitching. Let’s say you’re pitching to investors to get your startup funded and they ask you some questions. The minute the founder gets defensive as opposed to collaborative then they don’t get funded. If you’re presenting to a customer your product or service and they give you an objection, if you become defensive you don’t get the sale. Do you have any tips on what people can do in those situations where they don’t become defensive?
I do. This one’s going to be a little bit difficult and we have to stretch this one a little bit because this one is a toughie. I’m going to start with a quote that I live by. This quote is valuable. If you can get it in your noggin and do it, it will save a month to two months of time over the next year. Get this sentence and apply it. Here’s the sentence, “Empathy before problem-solving.” Here’s the first problem you have to deal with. The problem is most people have a junkie or an ineffective definition for the word empathy. They don’t know what it means. Here’s the difference. What most people use is a form of sympathy. They don’t do a form of empathy. A form of sympathy is, “I understand what you’re going through.” That’s sympathetic. It’s not empathetic. Here’s another sympathetic sentence, “I hear that happened. That was too bad. I wonder what you can learn from this.” That’s sympathy. That’s not empathy.
[bctt tweet=”Empathy before problem solving.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the things that I do in my training on emotional intelligence for executives is I get them to practice real-time empathy and how it takes place. The guideline for a real-time empathy and to know that it takes place is to follow this definition. Empathy only occurs when a feeling word and a need word are connected and agreed upon. You’ve got to have those two fill in the blanks. There has to be a feeling word and there has to be a need word. Let me give you an empathetic sentence to the expression that you gave me. “Huh,” you said. The empathetic sentence would be, “John, could you be feeling inspired because your need for awareness or learning is being met?”
The feeling word is feeling inspired and it’s a question. It’s not an assumption. Could you be feeling inspired because of your need for awareness and learning?
The two of them worked in there and you’re going like, “Something’s moving across from Bill Stierle to John.” You got the jolt and you became a little inspired. Your eyeballs and eyebrows went up a little bit. You leaned in a little bit. Something significant is coming. You got to move across the plate. I better pay attention and my audience better pay attention. This is going to be helpful to the people that I’m working with. Immediately, it’s generating this quality of contribution that people experience on your podcasts. They experience the knowledge transfer and the wisdom transfer and that they can have helpful tools that can enrich their life and their life experience.
Nobody loves the formula and the step-by-step process more than I do. I love that concept of a feeling word and a need word and I totally get it from even a nonverbal response that can elicit empathy. Let’s take it one step further in a real-life scenario. Let’s say you’re pitching someone to buy your product. You’ve gone to all the steps and you’re getting ready to ask for the order and then the person goes, “Your price is too high,” which is a common objection to anything. Instead of trying to solve that problem or even active listening, the empathy factor combines active listening skills but in a new way of that. Let’s try to use this feeling word and need word around, “Your price is too high.”
Let’s do that in real-time. Pretend you’re the buyer and I’m the seller and say, “Bill, your price is too high.”
Emotional Sobriety: Whenever emotions show up, a person’s brain will actually activate into a protective strategy.
Bill, I like what you’re offering but your price is too high.
John, a part of you likes the product that I’m offering. Another part of you is feeling doubtful because you see the value is not at the same level as I see. Is that correct?
Yes.
Notice I got the word yes out of your mouth. That’s how you know empathy has taken place is when the person says yes to the feeling word doubt and the need word value. That’s what I did. In real-time, I filled in the blank of you giving me the objection.
Part of you likes what I’m doing but a part of you is also feeling doubtful that your need for value is not at the same place that I perceived it.
[bctt tweet=”Empathy only occurs when a feeling word and a need word are connected and agreed upon.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The person can’t help but say yes. You’ve actually removed the emotion from the discussion because you got the doubt out of the room. Now with lightning speed, I can say, “John, what do you think might be the value that would fit the product that I was offering?” I’m not trying to justify the value. I’m trying to find out what is in this person’s brain called the value or is it a red herring that they’ve used in the past? It’s too much money. “It’s not too much money, but it might be too much money, but not really.” The person could have a red herring. Now watch this and say, “Bill, it needs to be priced at $250, not $375.” Let’s try that.
Bill, it needs to be priced at $250, not $375.
John, I’m hearing that you’re feeling more confident that the $250 price would work better for you rather than a $375 price that would work in the marketplace. Is that correct?
Uh-huh.
You still gave me the “Uh-huh,” which is good because I’m still connecting with you and your objection. I still haven’t given in and I still haven’t become defensive. I still haven’t brought up criticism or justification. I didn’t bring out spreadsheets to show you that you’re wrong. I didn’t say, “The marketplace has already proved this.” I’m not interested in making them wrong and I’m also not interested in solving a problem that I don’t need to solve. Empathy allows us to get around this particular nuance of communication because the person is using their belief structure to fight my sale, not the reality. The reality is, “If we’re able to get the value or demonstrate in the marketplace that the $375 would work, would that be better for your investment?”
Emotional Sobriety: Empathy allows you to not solve problems that don’t need to be solved.
Yes.
Do you see how that, “Yes,” trickled out of your mouth? You go like, “How did Bill get me to say yes three times?” I’m not working yes on the deal. I’m working yes on the obstacle. This is particularly important in a slide deck. I did an investor slide deck for a workforce educational program. During the slide deck, I said to the guy, “Give me the top ten objections. I want to type them all up.” I typed all the top ten objections, it costs so much, etc. I’m like, “We do not need to prove any of these because I already have the data that proves all these. What we need to do is design empathy sentences for all of those.” “Empathy sentence?” He looks at me. I go, “If I got to get the person’s emotion to change before I get them to buy, not in the place of.” If the sale happens too soon, either they’ll have buyer’s remorse and kick out later or they will develop resentment on the money they spent.
I love what you said that empathy allows you to not solve problems that don’t need to be solved. That’s a big distinction between doing it before solving a problem. Sometimes another big benefit of it is we don’t even have to solve a problem because it may not be what the real objection is.
That’s a great catch there. That’s helpful because people come in with all or many or most, talk about many things that kill a business right now, this sentence here. People work out all the obstacles and overcome all the obstacles and wonder why the person doesn’t buy or refer the product. The reason why is that you did not allow the purchaser to be on the journey with you. You solve the journey before they could discover it themselves. People do not want to buy things that are done. They want to buy the journey of getting it. The sale is a mythic journey. It’s a journey of the hero. Who’s the hero? The person that’s buying it, not the person that’s selling it.
This is a big part inside of the investor pitch deck that I was working on. I told them, “We need to follow this investor, this person” and we’re looking for high net worth individuals to fund this that are looking for a legacy project. We’re looking for them to come in. It’s like, “We cannot solve this thing, it’s got to be a seven-slide slide deck. You’ve got to inspire them to get on that their money is going to get there and we’ll work out the details later.” If we come with all the answers solved, they’ll walk out. There’s no emotional connection. I have to build the investment inside their body before I can take the investment out of their pocket.
[bctt tweet=”People do not want to buy things that are done. They want to buy the journey of getting it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I say there’s something similar. You have to tug at people’s heartstrings to get them to open their purse strings.
The heart string piece here, the way I see it and especially in the world of conflict is people are going to do something to meet a need of theirs, not to satisfy an emotion of theirs. They’re going to take the action towards the need. If it meets their need for trust, then they’ll invest. If it meets their need for certainty, then they’ll invest. If it meets their need for respect, then they’ll invest. If it meets their need for identity, then they’ll invest. If it meets their need for connection, then they’ll invest. The investment doesn’t come from how much money they’re going to get back. In fact, when surveyed, return on investment is number seven in the list before they invest. The question then is, what is the number one need of the investors that are at the top of the list before you can even get them to move? What do you think that number one is? I’ll push this one to you so you and I can have a little fun.
I would say that somebody has to trust you first.
You are right on top. Number one at the top of the list is the need for trust. That’s the number one need that needs to be met during the presentation, during the content, during the delivery. The weird part about it around the need for trust is you can’t get trust through over solving their problem or over presenting your product. You need to leave the mystery in the journey.
That’s what good stories have. I’m fascinated by the image that you created of how many times have our audience said, “It’s like whack-a-mole. If you got four objections and I whacked them each down, then for sure you will buy and not have four new ones pop up after I leave.” That is valuable. Few people have that awareness that you have, Bill, which the reason is you’re not taking them on the journey. The goal is not to just keep, as Maslow said, using your hammer over and over again looking for nails. It’s this empathy tool versus a hammer tool.
Emotional Sobriety: The feeling of doubt, most of the time, comes from the need for truth not being met.
That whack-a-mole metaphor is exactly right on target because if you empathized with the objection that comes up, you do not have to swing the hammer at all. You’re feeling skeptical and you need some more trust on this. “Tell me what trust looks like? I need to trust that your CFO runs the numbers correctly.”
Let’s do another one because besides money, the other big objection that everybody gets is, “I need more time to think about this.” Either I need to talk to somebody else or we’re not ready to make a decision yet. That’s a common objection, whether it’s an investment or selling something. How can we use this great formula of yours of feeling and a need, so that we can handle that common objection?
I usually empathize with the time objection with the following empathy sentence, “Could you be feeling hesitant because you might need more information or more clarity? Would you be willing to tell me which one is it? Is it more information or is it more clarity that you might need?” These need time. This is the fantasy that not just the investor has, but also the seller has is that they need more time and they’re going to start thinking about it, and then do what? The answer is once they’re walking away, they’re not thinking about your project anyway. What emotion they’re walking away with is skepticism.
Even relief that they didn’t get pressured into something.
I want to know what need is causing skepticism. It could be two or three or four, but watch what happens when I ask the question, “Could you need more clarity or do you need some more information? Which one of those two are you looking for?”
[bctt tweet=”You have to tug at people’s heartstrings to get them to open their purse strings.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s valuable because most people assume it’s the same thing. You’re saying, “Do you need more clarity on the information I’ve already given you? Is there something that’s missing for you to understand?” and then it goes back to because you don’t see yourself in the story.
What happens is that they’re looking for a way to get out of the journey. They’re looking for a way to use the great power of doubt and skepticism. Doubt and skepticism as feelings because both of them are two very different feelings. The feeling of the doubt most of the time comes from the need for truth not being met. The feeling of skepticism most of the time comes from the need for trust not being met, but it also could be clarity or it could be information that causes skepticism.
If something sounds too good to be true and you’re like, “I don’t trust this guy or gal.” Let’s double-click on the distinction for people between truth and trust because a lot of people go, “You’re trustworthy if you’re truthful.”
This is the best discussion ever. The reason why it’s such a vibrant discussion is that people don’t know how much power words and language have. Words and language change our physiology instantly. There’s a big difference between saying the word spider and the word ice cream. The same difference is between truth and trust. Truth is that there is either something factually inaccurate or informationally inaccurate or there’s something omitted. I don’t have some truth about something. When something’s too good to be true and I’ve solved all the problems and I don’t have any skin in the game, I will even manufacture doubt because this is all the things that have been answered. There might be something missing. What is the thing that’s missing? Doubt shows up in their body because what happens is they don’t buy the thing, they don’t make the next call, they don’t follow up. You chase them around and they start running. Trust, the reason why truth is a fact thing.
Trust has to do with, “I don’t have any memorable history with you. I don’t have a memorable history with someone that has vouched for you.” There’s no trust because there’s no experience that when the going gets tough, you’re going to be there with me. When the going gets tough for this product, you’re going to be there with the product and be there with my investment. You’re going to treat my investment as if it’s your money, not my investment. As if it’s my money that you get to spend any way you want like a seven-year-old because that’s going on in their mind. Somebody that’s an investor most certainly either has a family member that is not really good with money that they have to keep bailing them out.
They made bad investments before. They’re trying not to make that mistake before.
Truth and trust have a very different frequency to them and also a very different way to establish them. The key question then is to ask this question to the person that is sitting with doubt. It might sound like this. “What can I say or do to meet your need for truth in regard to this product or service that we’re looking to have an experience with? What could I say or do to meet your need for truth?” To the skeptical person, it’s going to be similar, “What can I say or do to meet the need for trust between the two of us?” What that does is that brings us closer together and puts us in the same tribe because now I’m listening and I am ready to repeat back what the person said to me. For example I said, “What could I say or do to meet the need for truth that the $375 would work a little bit better than the $250 thing that you recommended? What can I say or do to meet the need for trust that this number will work a little better?”
What happens there is we’re trying to extract the belief thought that is driving and pushing the button of truth or trust in their consciousness. We want that out in front of us not to solve it but to empathize with it. If I have an investor that’s been burnt before, I do not want that past relationship being in my relationship with him or her. I’ve got to pull that out. Let it air out. Create a new moment between me and that person. I’m not the same guy as that guy. That guy and that product had a whole another set of problems to it. It’s not to say, I don’t have the problems I’m going to have.
We’ve hit the reset button basically.
It’s a reset button because once I’m on truth or trust, once I’m on clarity or information, once I’m on respect or acknowledgment or the need for connection. Once I’m on that need and I know what it looks like to that person, the quality of relationship and the quality of connection deepens.
[bctt tweet=”People are going to do something to meet a need of theirs, not to satisfy an emotion of theirs.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Once you’ve got that connection deepened, then they’re on the journey with you as opposed to you jumping ahead to the end without them going on it. They feel that’s not for them.
They want the experience of incremental moments of success with our product. They are not as much interested in, “Give me the money back with my 30% in the next 60 days,” because they already have the money. They’re interested in the journey that the money’s going to provide them.
This is incredibly insightful and useful. I could talk to you forever. I can’t thank you enough. The book is Emotional Sobriety and there are all kinds of nuances. What’s the one thing you want people to know about your book?
The thing I like them to know about the book is it is the step by step way to diffuse the emotions that come up inside others, as well as the emotions that come up inside ourselves. We’re able to reduce the emotional load that we carry because many folks are carrying a lot of anxious, nervous doubt, some hesitancy, some depression, some anger. We want to be able to diffuse those things on our side and not make it to the outside world that’s doing it to us but it’s how we’re taking it.
We can control our reactions and when that happens, we’re free from walking around with all this anxiety and resentment. I’ve heard somebody say once in personal relationships, “As long as one of you stay sane at any one given moment, you’ll make it through it. We both can’t be crazy at the same time.” That’s the gist of what you’re saying here. If you’re walking around with anxiety of needing, a quota is met or whatever, a fear of losing your job if you don’t sell something. The buyer has got their own level of, “I can’t make a bad decision here,” that anxiety is never a good recipe. Whereas your book, Emotional Sobriety, can help people diffuse that. The buyer’s anxieties can be dealt with in a much cleaner way.
The thing that I like to say about what Emotional Sobriety gets you is with practice. This has been my experience when in the past I’ve been called to come into a city council meeting where people are screaming and feuding or other conflict situations. Usually, it takes me about somewhere between seventeen and 23 minutes to get everybody to calm down and to be on the same page and start working together even though they’d been feuding for months or sometimes years. That’s what it gets you.
What a great outcome. The book is Emotional Sobriety. If people want to reach you for seminars and workshops, what’s the best place to find you?
The best place is CorporateCultureDevelopment.com. You can also do it through my name, BillStierle.com.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom on how we can get people to have more empathy connection with us and get out of solving problems that don’t need to be solved.
John, anytime you want to do other topics and things like that, have me back. I’ll be happy to contribute.
Thanks again, Bill.
Thank you.
Links Mentioned:
- Bill Stierle
- Corporate Culture Development
- Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument
- CorporateCultureDevelopment.com
- BillStierle.com
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