Employees as Thought Leaders. The Future of B2B Marketing. Guest: Bill Sherman

TRANSCRIPT

Michelle J Raymond: Welcome everybody to the Good for Business Show. I'm your host, Michelle J Raymond, and I am thrilled, and that's a new word for me. Instead of excited as a podcast host, I'm thrilled to have Bill Sherman here with me today as we talk about mastering thought leadership. And there is no one better to talk to.

Welcome to the show Bill.

Bill Sherman: Thank you Michelle. Lovely to be here.

Michelle J Raymond: And I'm grateful to Ashley Faus because she's the one that introduced us and I had a conversation with her a few episodes back about the difference between, subject matter experts, influencers, and thought leaders. And I want to continue this conversation and look at thought leadership specifically.

But before we dive into that, for those that don't know you, who are you, what do you do and who do you help?

Bill Sherman: So I'm Bill Sherman and I am the COO of Thought Leadership Leverage. I've been in the field of thought leadership now for about 20 years. Stumbled into it somewhat accidentally and have stayed there most ever since.

And in terms of who we help, we work with individuals and Fortune 500 organisations who want to take ideas to scale. So people who are practicing thought leadership, either on the individual or the organisational level.

Michelle J Raymond: Now that means you were doing thought leadership before It was a cool word, right?

Because for me it was a word I didn't learn about until I started, hanging out on LinkedIn 24 7. Have you seen it change in that 20 years? Is it more prevalent now? Was it called anything different when you first started?

Bill Sherman: It was thought leadership, back in the day, but that was one word used.

It could be Book Author for business, book author. It could be keynote speaker, it could be academic. It could be an executive of a large company who wrote a book, or it could be a solopreneur who was trying to get an idea out there into the business world. But the word thought leadership always bubbled around, but it became a consensus term, I would say in the two thousands.

Michelle J Raymond: Now lots of different, definitions that I had a quick look out there, but I wanna hear, based on your experience, what's the, your idea of what a thought leadership, what thought leaders are, How do you define it?

Bill Sherman: You're right, there's a lot of definitions out there. Some of them helpful, some of them not so helpful, right?

One of my favourites that I found online was thought leadership is what thought leaders do. Okay, great. What am I supposed to do with that, right? Or thought leadership is your smartest content marketing. Again, good luck with that. How do you figure that out? And do I get a gold star on certain pieces of content marketing?

What happens, right? Instead? Thought leadership can be used by individuals, midsize organisations, large organisations. Similar ways, different resources, but similar ways. But it's about taking an idea to scale, to produce impact for your organisation as well as a target audience. And so it has to be an idea that's worth investing the business's time, energy, resources, and effort as well as be relevant to someone who's gonna pay attention to it and say, Yeah, that's worth my time. I'll listen.

Michelle J Raymond: Yeah, it's the upscale piece that I think for me has stood out the most in your definition because I think sometimes there are people that use that word thought leader pretty interchangeably with someone that just posts content on LinkedIn, and I think there's a very big difference.

 But I think for us to establish what some of those differences are, I love going to your profile because on your LinkedIn profile, you have in your featured section. I'm gonna call it the Bill Sherman's Four Elements Thought Leadership Framework. Now rather than me try and recap that, I'd love it if you could step us through, because it was something that I think was really clearly articulated what these four elements of thought leadership were. So can you step us through that one today?

Bill Sherman: Sure. Absolutely. And so let me set the context before I dive in. What the four elements do, and there are other frameworks out there and they address different things in terms of, some people ask, how do I become a thought leader? Or what areas do I need to work on?

This framework is designed to answer the question, what is thought leadership and how do you make good, better. Right? I've looked at bodies of content over my career of individuals practicing thought leadership, organisations, and often we go through a discovery process, which means I go through their intellectual attic and I'm looking at everything they've created maybe over the course of their career, and they're like, what are my gems?

What are the really good ideas and insights here, and they're looking for an expert opinion. They're also trying to identify who would care about them, right? And so that's the entry point for the four elements. So we talked about thought leadership as taking ideas to scale. Ideas are, if you will, the atoms of thought leadership.

They are the building blocks. If you don't have ideas, then you don't have thought leadership. So the question becomes, what's an idea? An idea is something that causes people to stop, pay attention and say, Huh, haven't thought about it that way before. Tell me more, okay? Now, If we expand on that, an idea could be provocative, it could be timely, it could be counter to prevailing wisdom, but at its heart, an idea is not a full book.

It's not a full chapter. It's a sentence maybe two. It might be a sketch on a napkin at a cocktail party where you say, So I got this idea, and you scratch it down and someone says, tell me more. Great. You've got that invitation to say more, whether it's on a LinkedIn post or a face-to-face conversation, whatever, the medium.

How you persuade someone that idea is a good idea? Well, you need to explain it and support your idea, and therefore you need content. Now, I use the term content a little bit different than a content marketer would use cause a content marketer would look at each individual asset and say, Oh, that's a piece of content.

Here I think about content differently. Each person who practices thought leadership effectively builds what I call a content library. Now, it may be on a shared file on their drive. It may be in between their ears and solely in their head.

But content in thought leadership is the collection of stories, data, examples, case studies, everything that you would use to persuade someone about your insider idea. Now, you might have a different conversation depending on who your audience is, and so you go into the library, you pull out a case study or two, or an example or an anecdote, and you say, Here's how I'm gonna support the idea.

So if you're giving a speech, you might use a certain set for one audience and a different set of content for another. Okay. Content doesn't rely on, is it on LinkedIn or is it in a speech? Content is independent of where people encounter it. Make sense?

Michelle J Raymond: It sure does. And I love that you distinguish that again, there's so many definitions out there that are contrary to each other, depending what perspective you take.

So a thought leader looks at content one day, one way, and a content marketer looks at it in another way. So I appreciate you kind of making that distinction.

Bill Sherman: So let's jump from content to offerings. So if content is the thing that comes inside the Amazon box that shows up on your doorstep, an offering is the Amazon box.

It's how you get the idea to someone. Okay. And how they experience it. So it's the container, if you will. Now offerings can be paid offerings where individuals buy your thought leadership. And there are people who are in the profession of thought leadership where they're selling their ideas. But there are many people who use thought leadership for the purpose of giving insights and ideas away, either as individuals or on the organisational level. And so, What I say is, regardless of whether or not you charge a fee for your ideas, there is always a transaction at the heart of thought leadership. You are asking someone for their time and attention, and you've gotta be worthy of that full stop.

And it's a challenge because you think about LinkedIn, I think the last data that I saw was about 800 million users on LinkedIn. I don't know how to be deeply relevant to 800 million people. Heck, you know, I need to scale that down several orders of magnitude to be able to choose the right stories to, to find the right audience, to speak to them, right?

So whether you're offering is a LinkedIn post, whether it's a podcast, a LinkedIn live, a white paper, you know, A tweet. All of these things are offerings that you can use to get your ideas out into the world and for people to start recognising you.

The final category is the platform, and the way that I think of a platform is individuals have personal brands, right? And we learned about that in the nineties. Tom Peters wrote about personal brand. Organisations have brands as well that they manage the health of the brand and the style of the brand and the impact.

Ideas also need brands, and I'll explain why. If an idea doesn't have a brand, then it becomes like a toddler that will be dependent on either the personal brand or the organizational brand. So imagine that toddler that sort of goes off into the world, maybe 10, 20 steps giggles, comes back laughing and latches entirely on your knee, right?

If the idea doesn't have its own brand to go out into the world, so that others can describe it when you're not in the room, that they can help evangelize the idea to spread it, then you either become the chaperone, taking it everywhere, or the organisation has to take it everywhere. So the platform does a couple things.

It explains who this idea is for. And why they should pay attention because going back to that whole, we're scrolling through the social feed, we've all gotten really good within, two, three seconds deciding whether or not scroll past or stop, right. See more or go on. And so that is the purpose of building that brand so that others can help you take the idea to scale.

Cause nobody, not even in a large organization, can do it on their own.

Michelle J Raymond: And the worst part is we're up to 875 million members on LinkedIn.

Bill Sherman: Oh, my data is out of date. It's even worse.

Michelle J Raymond: We are almost nudging that 1 billion mark and I believe probably this time next year we'll be sitting there.

So, trying to stand out in amongst all of that. The hardest thing for me back when I first started out and I didn't have an understanding of branding, like you've just mentioned, was you end up trying to be everything to everyone and you don't own your little piece, and I think that for me is the piece that I had to learn most in my journey over the last two years as a business owner. Because I've had to learn a whole bunch of new skills to add in to be good at what I do.

Do you ever buy into all the distinguishing features between a thought leader and a subject matter expert and an influencer, or are they all thought leaders in their own way, or does it come back to those four points?

 It's something that I've gone round and round. Trevor Young Ashley, you know, Danielle Guzman, we've all had this conversation and I wonder, are we like picking pieces to try and pull them apart, or do they all have an element of thought leadership in them?

Bill Sherman: They may. Okay, but they don't have to.

So a subject matter expert can practice thought leadership. There's a Venn diagram overlap with an influencer as well, but an influencer doesn't necessarily need to have ideas. Some influencers do, right? Others are talking about experiences they've had, things they find interesting, they review songs, et cetera all of that in terms of a social construct.

Subject matter expert and influencer really just talks about who their audience. And how large it is and the engagement, the type of engagement they, and interactions they have. Right. So I would look, and the first thing that I would say is, do they have ideas?

Do they have a platform? And are they trying to create impact in some way for themselves and their organization at scale? If the answer is yes, they're practicing thought leadership. If not, they're influencing, they're being a subject matter expert, etc.

The power of brand that you said there. And I've never thought about an idea needing a brand, even though I've just finished writing The LinkedIn Branding Book where we look at personal brands and business brands and bringing those two things together.

And you know, it's not something that I've ever considered, that an idea also has a brand, so that it can go out there and live in the world. I think that's obviously how you get momentum and keep it alive because I can imagine a thought leader needs a certain level of persistence, because I don't think when you are going out with original ideas in the very beginning, or maybe they're contrarian in some way that it's not an easy win, it's something that happens over time.

 Is that something that you would agree with on that space or is it something different?

Absolutely.

So if you make the claim, and I think you would agree with me, that, hey, I posted this one genius idea on LinkedIn once, I shouldn't repeat myself, ever. Yeah, that's not going to work. You've got to use repetition because people aren't always paying attention.

Even if they are paying attention, the idea may not sink in or be relevant at the time, and so in my experience, the people who are effective at the practice of thought leadership have the gift of staying on message and knowing what their lane is, and even have a delightful way that regardless of what question they get asked, they can always circle back to their point, right?

And so that ability to be relevant within the language and know what you know, and be willing to repeat it. I think of a friend of mine who, he had just published his book, which I know yours is just about to launch, and we were, talking and he said, Man, I finally got this book out of my head. This will be fantastic.

 I'm done with it and another friend said, Huh, you're gonna be on book tour for the next 60 days and then another author who'd been added for most of his career, looked and says "oh yeah, you'll be talking about this your entire career." If you've defined your platform right, it is evergreen. It evolves as the conversation evolves in business, and more importantly allows you to open doors that you wouldn't have been able to open on your own.

Michelle J Raymond: I cannot agree with that more. When I launched Business Gold the book last year, I grossly underestimated how much I would be talking about that and there's an element you have to be passionate about, whatever it is, this idea, because if you are not passionate about it, you are gonna burn out or get bored of it, and then it's just gonna end up in the bin.

And I don't think that's what a thought leader is. I think that's just someone that had a few ideas with some content for a little while.

Bill Sherman: One of the ways, if when I get asked, how can you tell someone who's practicing thought leadership? It's the bright spark in their eye when they're talking about a topic and you know they've talked about it hundreds of times and they still bring that energy and life to it because it's what they love, right?

It's the same gift as an actor on stage who isn't doing the performance just by going through the motions, but they're fully in the performance.

Michelle J Raymond: And they're my kind of favourite creators on LinkedIn and last week I had the opportunity to speak to AJ Wilcox, who is best known as the LinkedIn ads guy across LinkedIn globally.

And it was my first time to actually talk to him, and it's something that I've followed his content for around two years. We've had a few clubhouse chats here and there, but it was the first one on one and I realised listening to him just how easily he could articulate the ideas. How easy it was for him to simplify those and make them, I guess adapt to the audience that he was presenting to and I've seen him present to all kinds of different audiences.

I just think that when you are known for that one thing and you just keep going with it, that's been me with company pages if you don't enjoy it, if you don't get lit up by it, it just falls by the wayside.

My favorite creators are the ones that always stop me in the feed. Because it's something that I know I'm not gonna have seen before. There is so much of an echo chamber on LinkedIn that those people that are original thought leaders, to me, that's the way to stand out in amongst these 875 million people.

 It's something that I personally strive to do in my own way, and it's something that I'm still developing my own frameworks or how I articulate other parts outside of just company pages. Like that's my subject matter expertise, and then I wanna develop my own ideas.

And so it's been fun to grow into this and learn more about it. But you know that I come from a sales background and I love social selling. That's where I feel most comfortable . And you and I on your podcast had a discussion about how social selling can help thought leadership. Now what about if we flip this one around the other way?

How can you use thought leadership in social selling to generate revenue? I'm gonna set this with the tone that I read a post by our common friend, Steve Watt the other day that I'm gonna paraphrase. Sorry Steve, this is a quick summary. He said stop trying to make sales people thought leaders. It's just a distraction, let them sell. I'm gonna see what you have to say about that.

Bill Sherman: So I would say a couple different things. I know that it is a stressor. To tap someone on the shoulder and say, Congratulations, you're now dubbed a thought leader. Go forth and do things right? And any organization that does this really needs to provide support and make sure that what they're asking the individual to do fits their skills, their passion and curiosity and that takes work.

But let's stay on sales, right? So, The ability to be deeply relevant, okay. To someone means that you have the ability to look around the corner into the future and identify what signal and what's noise, and bring that insight back to someone and say, here's what's coming up ahead, and here's something you can do now that will make your life easier then.

Okay. One of the things that I find is if you are having a conversation with someone and you're not selling directly, you're not talking product, you're not talking specifications, but you understand them, you've listened, you've shown that you understand their challenges, and you can help them prepare for things ahead, that's incredibly powerful.

Right? The next piece of that is, If you think about selling from the perspective, and I'll use B2B sales cuz I know a, you've got a background in that, and this is sort of the focus here, but in B2B sales there are often long sales cycles, right? And big ticket complex sales that involve multiple people.

You can't, as a salesperson ring them up every two weeks and say, Hey, wanna buy because you sound like Bart Simpson in the back of the car going, Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? And you're just annoying. So you have to figure out how do you create value, nurture a relationship, and sustain that relationship when they're not in a buy cycle.

Because most buyers are 95% of the time not in a buying cycle. Yeah, you can take 'em to lunch, you can wine'em, you can dine them, you can do all sorts of cool stuff, but even that gets old. But if you become a source for insight and for helping them think through problems, you're on speed dial, they will stop and see what you put out into the world.

They will also come to you with questions. Now, let's go back to you, Steve's comment. I would make a distinction. Sales people don't have to be thought leaders. They don't have to come up with original ideas, but there's a responsibility for the organization to help sales people understand the ideas that will help them sell, not only in the current quarter, but going into next fiscal, right?

And so, a salesperson in my mind isn't gonna talk about anything they don't understand. Why? Because that could blow up a deal or they could lose respect to the client, and they don't want to do that. So instead what you do is you equip them with good ideas, you help them have good conversations, and you make that part of their sales tool.

Michelle J Raymond: I remember when I first started in sales, to that point, there were people going out in the senior sales team that were out on fishing trips, long lunches, going to the tennis, you name it, they had tickets to everywhere. There was budgets unlimited for that kind of nurturing of relationships. And then over the two decades that I was doing sales, by the time we got to the end, even most recently, you are lucky to even be able to go out and visit a customer in the current climate with COVID. It has been such a big change. For me. I fell in love with, LinkedIn specifically social selling and thought leadership, because I grew a B2B community around beauty, which is the industry that I come from and people would come to me because I was the go-to source.

What events were happening. I knew where the industry was going with trends, new products, you name it. I had it all covered and I became that one source for the industry to come and see, oh, what's Michelle found? Because let's be clear, I was spending a hell of a lot of time doing my research.

 Of which most people aren't prepared to put in that much effort because it's not my job. I wasn't getting paid to do stuff on LinkedIn. It was just something that I discovered over time and obviously fell in love with. But if I'm a business, because I think a real opportunity for businesses is to really turn their internal teams into evangelists. This is something that I wanna keep exploring even more.

 How do you spot an employee that would make an ideal thought leader? Do they have to put their hand up? Is there something you can keep an eye out for? What do you think helps within a business to find these people?

Bill Sherman: A couple things. First, it doesn't have to be someone with the highest title, right? There are people who have expertise and insights at any level in the organization. Well, the first thing that I would do is I would ask the CEO who's responsible for curating thought leadership inside of their organization, Who's the person who's making sure that good ideas flow through the organization and to the right external audiences?

And that's not a content marketing task. That's not a comms task. It is truly its own task. Doesn't have to be someone's full-time role. It can be calm as you grow, but you start with someone who knows, Hey, I gotta pay attention to ideas and make sure they're getting into the right places. And that people with the skills and the potential to be the advocates for ideas have the support that they need.

Maybe that's a person needs some time to think. Maybe it's someone to write a white paper, speak at a conference, they wanna do a podcast, pay attention to what people are doing already. And what I find is one of the things for thought leadership is you're looking for an inherent curiosity because that's very, very hard to train into someone.

Also passion for the topic. Don't ask people to talk about something that they aren't excited by because in thought leadership, your audience will never be more excited than you are for the topic. So why set a low ceiling for yourself? Right? But look for someone who has curiosity and passion. They may sort of be dabbling in thought leadership activities on their own.

Maybe they, they put in a paper proposal for a conference, or maybe you see them having been a guest. Those are all signals, and then you can support them. If they wanna write, but they're not a great writer. Get 'em a writing coach or a ghost writer, you know? If they want to speak, you can get them a speaking coach.

There are all sorts of opportunities to find how to scale the idea, and I would say start small. Don't expect that you're gonna change the world without leadership in 30 days. Don't expect the inbound demand. Don't expect, you know that the phone will ring, the email will ping. It's not gonna happen. . It is a long term cultural investment.

The way that I think of it is, not only is it building consistency and repetition of the idea, but your audience, your customers are seeing that your organization is healthy enough culturally and financially to be able to support sustained thought leadership.

Michelle J Raymond: I love all of that. It doesn't happen overnight is the key message that I think absolutely not another takeaway.

It's time to set some realistic expectations and also from that, I think it takes an investment by the business. Like it doesn't happen by magic. And I think there's too many people that just go, Oh, we've done some training. Go and post or go and create this or write this or do that and they don't realize just how much support it takes to get people out in front of them.

Bill, you've been doing this for a long time now. Does thought leadership change? What are your predictions for B2B thought leadership in 2023?

Bill Sherman: So a couple predictions. I think one base trend line that has been going on for the last six years will continue, and that is more and more organizations are creating a dedicated function or partial function for thought leadership. They're recognizing that someone needs to own this and watch this, and then they're trying to figure out how do we measure it?

How do we make sure it's tied to the organization's goals in a way that people understand. There's also a lot of folks who have been hired in to do thought leadership work in the last couple of years, and those folks are going to continue explaining to peers how they create value across the organization.

One of the things that I think is happening on the offering side, and it's been happening for a while, shorter form modalities and easier, instead of a white paper with the big aha on page 23, put the big aha on the cover page. Because if you only have five seconds of attention, hit them with the best that you've got.

And if they want to read more, let them read more rather than lead with filler. That doesn't make any sense in this environment. The other thing, I think organizations that practice thought leadership will have to do is be very clear on who they're trying to reach, because if we do encounter a recession or budget tightening in 2023, you're not gonna be able to reach everywhere.

So you've gotta be very strategic around whom are you trying to reach, what's the message you want to communicate? And then how does that tie to your business goals? What are you measuring for success? The organizations that do that will be far more successful than those that don't in 2023.

Michelle J Raymond: Thank you for all of that great information.

I am going to be going back and listening to this one myself, because there were so many things that I wanted to write down as we were going because I think your experience shows through, obviously you've been doing this for so long and it's given me so many areas that I can start to think how can I improve myself in that space.

So I wanted to say thank you, Bill, for your generosity and sharing everything that you did. It's just been amazing. My mind is just like running overtime right now because you've planted so many seeds and I think that's what genuine thought leadership is. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Bill Sherman: Absolutely. And I look forward to continuing our conversations. Michelle.

Michelle J Raymond: It's not gonna stop. And next week I'm gonna be talking to my LinkedIn Besty, the other half of Michelle Squared. Michelle Griffin and we are going to be launching the LinkedIn branding book next week. And we're gonna be talking about our Brand Squared System.

 It's our new idea that we're launching out into the world. And like you say, I better get used to talking about it 'cause I can't wait to explain it to people about how we bring personal brands and business brands together. So thank you for joining us Bill, and thank you to everybody else that's listening.

 We will catch you next week. Cheers.