John McDougall: Hi, I am John McDougall. Welcome to the Authority Marketing Roadmap. Today, I’m here with my father Dan McDougall, founder of McDougall Associates and McDougall Fine Arts. We’re going to be talking about sales and marketing madmen style. Welcome, Dan.

Dan McDougall: Well, I’m glad to be here John. Also, I’m very excited about your business and where you’ve taken the digital marketing company. Starting out in marketing, I went to school for marketing at Boston University and took a job as a marketing director.

After that and through my experience in marketing, they asked me to take on the sales responsibility too, which I did, which taught me an awful lot in terms of what it is to build sales and what will do that.

What I’ve learned, primarily, is that you’d better build a relationship with people in order to get business, because if you do that and you have a strong relationship, it will not only maintain your business, but if you go through a period that’s difficult for some reason, they will trust you and hold you and keep you as their marketing person. From that, I’ve learned a little bit about developing a business.

On the side, I started a business called McDougall Ship Models and Nautical Antiques with high-quality museum quality pieces. It developed as a casual thing that actually overtook my marketing director job. I resigned that, sold my McDougall Ship Model business, and my brother and I founded McDougall Associates, which was an advertising agency. We started basically from scratch and built it to a point where we sold it to Interpublic in New York 30 years later, but we had quite a long experience.

One of the things I learned in terms of developing a business like that is, as I said, relationships are very important. We hired a lot of people with MBAs. One of the things I used to notice when we’d be pitching an account is that they would be showing off their expertise in terms of marketing and everything else. Afterwards, I’d tell them, “The one thing you forgot is to ask to look at their baby pictures”, because what you’ve neglected to do is incorporate the things that are important to them and those things are their business or their personal relationships, their family. How many kids they have? Do they like golf or sailing? Because these are clues that are going to give you leverage in the future, in terms of developing that relationship, which is going to be important to you in keeping that business in the future.

As a matter of fact, one client I had at the time asked me one day, he said, “I just got a new helicopter. Would you like a ride in it?” I said, “Yes, I would”. He said, “I can’t fly it yet because I don’t have my license, but I’ll have my pilot take you up for a ride”. I went up for the ride, and when I came down he said, “What do you think of that?” I said, “I loved it”. Well, unbeknownst to me, he signed me up for a ground school both for fixed wing and then for helicopter. He asked his pilot to teach me how to fly. Well, when I saw the commitment was going to be about 25 hours a week.

John: For how long?

Dan: For over a year.

John: I remember you studying. It was quite a challenge.

Dan: I came back, and said to my wife, “Do you think this is something I should do?” And then I said to myself, “Why not?” Because it did two things. One, it just increased my interest in something new, but also it developed a stronger bond with my important client. You have to be open-minded, and follow the directions as they come into view. They’re not always planned.

John: You can’t just jam people with, like you said, the MBA-level smarts that you have. And if you push that you’re the smartest person in the room, that doesn’t always go over well.

Dan: Right. I had of a lot of experiences. People say to me, “Well, do you watch Mad Men?” I said, “No, I lived it”.

To cite a few examples, they talk about “three martini” lunches. Well, I never really did that, but clients wanted that. I remember one day I said to one of my creative directors on the way out the door, I said, “Gee, I just got a call from the Salem Chamber of Commerce”. This is when we were smaller. “They’d like to have a slogan for the City of Salem”. Instantly, he looked at me and said, “Stop by for a spell”. That made the Reader’s Digest and has been a bond for the city ever since. So there was that type of experience that you have.

John McDougall: As a 1970s ultra-creative zone, just right in the spur of the moment, you’re going to lunch and you get the tagline of the century.

Dan: Right. It was that way. These people, the way they thought was a very good experience. He was going out. He probably did have three martinis for lunch. But the important thing is when they’d come back, they would be working till eight or nine at night developing new programs, and always amazed me how they did that.

John: What are some of the larger clients that you sold and worked on?

Dan: Well, I think one of the largest was Tyco International which we went from handling one of their divisions to handling all of their companies worldwide which was a $100 million budget. We did all the Marriott Hotels from Canada down to the islands. We did all of Dunkin Donuts nationally for a while.

John: I remember, I was in a few commercials as a kid.

Dan: We did TD Bank. Also, one of the other big ones we landed was monster.com – also in the $100 million range.

John: Nice. What about in terms of retaining customers, you mentioned a little about how having that relationship can help you as an agency when times get tough. Can you just elaborate on that a little more?

Dan: Well, I think that’s one thing that I’ve always advocated to the account executives that I have, that you better reinforce and build the relationship you have with a client and build his or her trust, because without that you won’t have a client. When you do that and you get into a problem for some reason, the client will stand by you instead of saying goodbye to you. It’s very important to continue that relationship. It can be built on a lot of different things; whether it’s family matters, whether they have children that are similar to yours, they go to the same schools, whether they’re golfers, or whether they like sailing.

One of the things I found which was quite interesting when I would pitch a lot of new business is that in trying to develop a relationship I’d win the business. And I’d say to this client, “Well, how about if you go sailing with me?” They’d look at me strange and say, “Well, how about golf?”

Well, the problem is if they played golf with me, I would’ve lost the client. However, my brother was a good golfer, so he ended up going to the golf of course. I went back to the desk. However, I did sail on weekends.

John: You had a few clients who liked sailing here and there, but if golf was one of the more common bonding things, Mike would take them out a lot.

Dan: Yes, he would.

John: What do you think in terms of how much advertising has changed over the years with digital? It’s quite a shift.

Dan: Well, I think it’s very significant. I think that back in the latter part of the ’80s, we saw that web was coming in, and we developed the web division. We were the first agency locally to get on to computers with our art directors, and people thought we were nuts.

John: I think you had the first Mac network in New England or something along those lines. I think Mike said something along the lines of you had the first Mac network so…

Dan: Yes, we did. As a matter of fact, when Mac first came out, we were the first ones to put that throughout the whole agency. It worked out very well. From there, we got into the computers for design and other things.

John: I remember as a little kid in the ’70s, there were magic markers and paint brushes and poster boards. That was really the agency experience at the time.

Dan: What we’re seeing now too is as we went through this beginning of the digital age and had to develop that. We also saw we peaked with the media and everything else that was changing. It hurt the agencies for a while until they started getting into the digital age too. Now, we see within the digital age that things are evolving and changing and going through a metamorphosis that you have to quickly grasp and change from a moth into a butterfly if you can.

John: Well, banking, for example, a lot of the banks are somewhat timid and maybe moth-like, if you will, but I think they’re starting to realize that whether it’s a digital branch or an online only bank, they’re realizing they have to get with the times and agencies need to be prepared to take them through that experience.

Dan: Well, I think it’s been a double-edged sword for banks because with the last eight years where things were pretty strong, in terms of adding more and more restrictions to what they could do and also reporting, it not only held back their profits, but held back their ability to market.

I sense, going forward, we’re going to see a much better environment for these banks to develop new clients and new ways to market. I think that the online banking is the way to go, and there are a number of things that are driving that. First of all, to develop a new branch and look at the overhead involved in terms of building or renting a facility and maintaining it where you can – I know McDougall Interactive had a lot of experience in this, in terms of digital marketing for banks. I think that you’re going to see more and more banks gravitating towards this.

Just as you’re seeing Macy’s, Filene’s or these other stores that are finding tremendous pressures with the way the people react today, in terms of how they do business. Whether it’s paying bills, making deposits, savings accounts, all this is changing and the banks have to recognize that and be as quick as they can to get on the track, so that they can keep and develop new and better market share.

John: The easing of regulations that may be coming down the pipe here could really help.

Dan: Well, it looks like that will be the case. I’m just hoping that the banks will recognize that sooner than later.

John: Yes, me too.

Dan: But I think that you’ve had – I know McDougall Interactive had experience in [creating] the second best internet bank in the nation.

John: Yes. Right after Ally Bank, the Bank Five project. That all started back from 1995 or ’94, when I was a media planner at McDougall Associates, and then starting to sell websites in ’95. We’ve come a long way.

Dan: You certainly have. I’m very proud of that.

John: All right, Dan. Great talking to you today. This has been the Authority Marketing Roadmap. Stay tuned next time for another edition of Internet Marketing madman style.

John: Hi, I’m John McDougall, and welcome to the Authority Marketing Road Map. Today, my guest is Jim Poage, the author of Flair, co-authored with his daughter, Jennifer Poage. Jim has been consulting as JLP Performance Consulting for many years. Welcome, Jim.

Jim: Thank you John so much for having me here, and giving me an opportunity to talk about Flair, and how adding a little pizzazz to what you do, but making it sincere can help you along in your sales and career.

 

Inspiration for Flair

John: Absolutely, what inspired you to write your book?

 

 

Jim: I have a technical background. I originally studied in College Electrical Engineering, and then did graduate work in Applied Math. I started eventually to work on integrating technology and humans in the workplace. I did that in sophisticated kind of things, like air traffic control, for example. When I started looking at the human side of it, it of course gets you into human behavior, motivation, and human factors. About 15 years ago, I started incorporating storytelling in presenting my work. Instead of just presenting the recommendations that I would come up with, or my analysis results, I would tell a story about how I would work and create value for the client.

I moved on to creating an experience for the client in presenting my results. In terms of presenting it, in the context of work they would do, they were using the results I did, or their customers were using them. I started to think about other ways I could add some flair into what I was doing. My daughter works in fashion design. After college, she went to the Parson’s School of Design in New York City. She’s worked a number of years for Reebok, in designing fashion for the sports teams, pro teams, and college teams, and fan gear that the teams would sell.

She’s currently in London, pursuing a degree in Fashion Design Management, at the London College of Fashion, which is why she is not here joining us today. We started talking together about this. She was coming at from a creative type doing fashion design, and they deal with that every day. I had come from technical work to considering the human side of work, and how can I energize people in how I construct my work. We explored, and thought we could write a book about this. Flair really has a much broader application than you might think of in such things as graphic design, how you lay out a webpage, or in fashion design that it really applies to lots of things. Everybody, in some way, is trying to sell.

You may be trying to convince clients or your colleagues to do something. In some way, we’re all selling today. If you energize people, they’re more likely to follow up with you.

“Flair” Defined

John: What is “flair,” and what are some of the examples of companies that have it?

 

 

Jim: Okay. Flair, you might say is pizzazz, or style. Anything that connotes that you’re trying to connect with people emotionally, and energize them. There’s a saying in marketing, that people buy on emotion and justify the buy decision rationally. Many people tend to forget that. If you’re giving a briefing in your work situation, or presenting work to colleagues, or a serious operation like the bank, you try to be serious and rational. But people want to have some kind of emotional connection with you, whether it’s trust or they enjoy dealing with your tellers, or with your loan officers.

Flair is about connecting emotionally. We like to use the word, effective flair, because it energizes people to act in some way that you desire. They’re going to follow up with you, remember you, buy something from you, etc. For some examples of flair, most people are familiar with the Beats by Dr. Dre Headphones. Many people have them, and they’re heavily advertised on TV, especially during sporting events and such. They came out in about 2004. Rather quickly, they became the hip, trendy way to listen to music if you wanted to listen to it on high-end headphones. One thing they did, is they took the bass part of the music spectrum and enhanced it, made it louder than the other spectrum. Pop and rock has always been about a driving dynamic bass beat and they took advantage of that in their headphones. Previous to that, all the high-end headphones had amplified all the notes equally across the music spectrum. Beats came out as being a way that was very energizing for listening to rock and pop. Instead of having headphones as had been around before, where they would be black and gray and a strap over your head, they used bright, shiny plastic in bright colors, so it became a fashion statement, as well as, instead of just a tacky thing you’d wear on your head. That’s an example of several ways of flair.

John: In result, they captured a huge market.

 

 

Jim: Yes. By 2014, they captured two thirds of the high-end headphone market and they were sold to Apple for three billion dollars.

 

John: Apple is another great example.

 

 

Jim: Yes. Apple, of course, is another great example.

 

 

John: I think you can even say the poster child, right? For flair.

 

 

Jim: Yes. One of the things we like to talk about is the Apple iPod, their first consumer device. There had been mp3 players before that you could store music on and play them as a portable device, but they were bulky to use, as what Apple and Steve Jobs realized. Steve Jobs focused on what we call the essence of whatever you’re offering or your message. It wasn’t, “This is a device that play music”, it’s that, “The music listening experience is the essence of them.” Steve Jobs used to call the iPod a thousand songs in your pocket. Jennifer, my co-author and I, think that you could go more fundamental. In iPod’s essence is, the joy of music is always with you.

John: Yes. That’s a nice line.

 

 

Jim: We make the point that you want your essence to be meaningful and joyful. Meaningful is sort of a rational argument. People want it and people want to play music, but the joyful side is that it was very easy to use, the iPod. You wanted to get the music out, and you could do it very easily. On the other side, example of a company that hasn’t seemed to understand flair is Microsoft. When the tablet computers were coming out, Microsoft came out with their Surface RT. It was their first combo tablet and laptop. They thought that this would have a good essence in that you combined two kinds of computer devices in one, but when you look at the way it was realized, the screen had all the electronics in it, so you could separate it from the keyboard and it would be a tablet. But since it was a rather powerful computer and with the size of a keyboard, it was large and bulky to use as a tablet, and the keyboard itself, to be very thin, had an awkward typing experience. It wasn’t too much better than typing on a table. It didn’t do very well at all in the market. It didn’t have any flair to it. It wasn’t easy to use, either as a tablet or a laptop. They later made it a powerful machine and it’s had some tractions now as a Surface Pro, as high-powered combo laptop and tablet.

John: Right, but the first one was the RT, [and was] really terrible.

 

 

Jim: Right. That’s a good way to [explain it]. They had what they thought was a good idea, but in reality, it didn’t engage people.

 

John: I still don’t really feel a powerful emotional connection to the Surface product.

 

 

Jim: No, they still haven’t quite got it, unless you want a very powerful combo computer, but that’s a rational argument. It’s not emotional.

 

 

John: The funny thing is though I do. I did buy a Lenovo Yoga, which I like, but I keep going back to the iPad, because it’s just so simple and fun.

 

 

Jim: Yes. Right. You have an emotional connection and that’s what you want with flair.

 

 

Flair vs. Selling

John: How is flair different for selling products versus services?

 

 

Jim: First, let me say, I think we alluded to this before, and then in some way today we’re all selling. We may not be all selling products, like trying to sell a TV, but we’re trying to sell our ideas and our thoughts, whether it’s to colleagues or to managers, but also we have services that we’re trying to sell.

The flair within products is probably more understandable, like we’ve talked about the iPod. It’s very nice physical design, very good operationally. Whereas the Microsoft surfaces, they don’t look as cool and they don’t operate as well. Okay, if we get over to services, what we’re trying to do is engage customers to buy our service. You’d like to make their experience with your service enjoyable. You do want to address it rationally, that they’ll get something out of it that they want. But, you like them to also enjoy your service in some way, or at least and this is usually enough, your service [would] remove some problem they had. It cures a headache. In that sense, you’re making them feel better.

We talk about our Flair book, is about baking the marketing into the content of your offering. Now, whether that’s a product, or a service, [you’re] baking it into your content. Now, let’s just say for example, you’re a bank. The emotional connection with a bank could be [that] they trust you to treat them right and be ethical. Not like we had troubles with banks a few years ago, where they did things like, if you took money from your ATM, it wouldn’t tell you’re about to overdraw it. Would just give you the money and charge you $35. That’s not a very trustworthy kind of thing.

You need to be sure that the customer doesn’t feel they’re taken advantage of. That there’s this element of trust. When they go into your bank, is the interior inviting to them? Are the lines not excessively long when they deal with the tellers? Do they feel that that’s a pleasant experience? When they’re talking to loan officers, or doing some more business banking, is that all understandable?

We’re going to get into it in a minute. I know some of the techniques of doing flair. The storytelling, if you express your service in what you’re talking to a customer [about] and create an experience of what it’s like for them, when they use your service. Those are the kind of things we’re talking about.

Six Elements of Effective Flair

 

John: Yes, why don’t we dig in to that a little more? You describe this six elements of effective flair. Let’s start with number one story. How does that work?

 

 

Jim: Yes. The book Jennifer and I wrote called Flair, and the subtitles [correlate with] designing your daily work, products and services to energize customers, colleagues, and audiences. The important thing about flair is to engage emotionally and energize people. If you energize people, they’re more likely to act [and to] follow up with you. Energy tends to overcome inhibitions they might have about acting, and help spread the word and message about what you’re offering. It helps move it and propel it around among others.

How Stories Play a Role

John: How does a story bring out that energy?

 

 

Jim: A story, we all like stories. We get caught up in stories. It’s a much easier way to listen to something. If you’re presenting a message, or facts about your service, [it’s more engaging to tell a story] instead of just listing the features of your service. If you present it as a story, it illustrates how it’s used. It’s a much more powerful way to do that. For example, I had a project as a consultant with NASA for an air traffic control research program they had, where they had a number of different projects. They wanted performance majors for this projects, which would tell them and their stakeholders like Airlines, the FAA, aircraft manufacturers, avionics manufacturers, what these projects would do to make air traffic control more efficient. How much time they would save, or how much fuel you could save, or how many planes you could land in a congested airport.

They had a list of these majors, but they just kind of listed them and have like basket-full. They weren’t sure how to use them and they weren’t doing a very good job connecting with their stakeholders. I said, “Well, you just have this basket of majors. You’re not using them to tell the story of your research program. Okay, your research program has high level goals of decreasing flight time for the airlines and travel time for passengers. For example, increasing predictability of when aircraft will land, which benefits, of course, airlines and passengers and fuel savings.

Instead of just having these majors, some of which are very specific kinds of things, like how many more planes will land at this particular runway at this airport. Let’s start with laying out your individual projects and majors for them. But then let’s group your projects around where they’re going to have impacts, like on the surfaces of the airport, in the terminal area where airplanes take off and land, where they travel between cities. Then roll that up to the overall benefits. Now we can see the role of each project. Previous to this, they would say, “Well we tell people about this project.” And they say, “Why are you doing that, it’s got a little benefit.” The reason you’re doing that project is that what’s necessary for the follow up project, which is going to have a big benefit. You need to tell the story of how the projects work and how they will create benefits for the stakeholders, instead of just listing the projects.

John: Those are great tips, yes.

 

 

Jim: I come back to the bank if they’re talking about a loan or particularly maybe a complex business loan is, tell the story of the process the customer will go through to get the loan approved and the story of what the loan will do for them.

 

John: You can make that with number two, a little bit entertaining.

 

 

Jim: Yes. Right.

 

 

Making Products and Services More Entertaining

John: How do you do that? Is there a system for making products or services more entertaining?

 

 

Jim: Entertaining. First, if it’s easy to understand and easy to use. It’s entertaining in the sense that it’s not a negative experience. You want it to be a pleasant experience and people come in to a bank for the loan and they say, “Oh my God, they’re going to hand me all these forms and I’m going to have to fill these out and I won’t know what some the things I should put down on these forms are.” You want to make that a very easy experience and the forms more self-explanatory, first of all. Then, you use a little bit of welcoming, like you and I. You introduced yourself and me and I thanked you for being on the air, so we established a rapport between us, but that goes over to the audience who’s listening to this. Take some time if you’re a bank to talk and get to know the customers. What their business is in, if have they had problems with loans before, what they would like to see [as far as] an easy experience for that [goes]. Some ways, particularly if you’re giving presentations or briefings to clients, is of course you can use some humor. It needs to be relevant to your particular product. I listen to satellite radio to one of the comedy channels and I’ve collected some comedy routines off that that I’ve adapted into my work. I give credit to the comedian, but then I adapt it into my work. One comedian has a five-minute University because he says, “At 10 years after you get out of college, all you’ll remember is five minutes’ worth of what you’ve learned.” When I summarize my briefings I say I’m going to give you a five-minute University course on what I talked about.

John: That’s great. I like that. Somewhat true.

 

 

Jim: Use props, I have little thinker dolls put out by a company called Unemployed Philosophers Guild. They do dolls of famous characters like Socrates, they have Darwin, Shakespeare and such, and I’ll use those as props in a talk. If I’m talking to you about using care in your writing, I’ll hold up the Shakespeare doll. If I’m talking about entertaining, I’ll hold up the Charlie Chaplin doll. They’ll tend to more remember what I’m talking about, because they’ll connect it with something visual.

The Experience

John: That’s great. What about at number three, the experience?

 

 

Jim: Okay, I think that’s one of the most important ones that can be very powerful. People tend to understand storytelling and being entertaining. If you have a product, you’d like to make the experience of using the product very pleasant and very easy. That’s what Apple is very good at, the experience of using of it.

John: When I went from a Blackberry to an iPhone, it was just life changing.

 

 

Jim: Right.

 

 

John: Just so pleasing.

 

 

Jim: Yes, and any appliance in your house or your car or such, the experience of it. I like to tell people I bought an Acura TSX, because of the turn signal. When I first drove it out of the parking lot on the demo tour with the salesman, I clicked on the turn signal to turn right out of the dealer parking lot. I was so impressed by the feel of it and the sound the ticker made. It wasn’t at all the harsh ticking noise of other cars.

 

John: The subtleties and again Steve Jobs was just a master of them — some people would even say being a little overbearing on his staff to get things just right — because he knew that those fine details of the total experience made a bigger difference than you might think. Like you said, you bought a car based on just the sound of the turn signal.

Jim: Yes. It gave me a clue that they paid attention to quality.

 

 

John: Right.

 

 

Jim: Okay, in terms of services, there’s a couple aspects there. One is when they’re engaging with you in the service using the service that it’s a pleasant experience. We talked about a bit then with banks, getting a loan very easy. Car dealerships still have a problem with the experience in the car dealership, in the buying experience and all. There could be a lot of improvement in that. The other part of the experience is when you’re giving a talk or writing a paper, create an experience for the reader or the listener of what it will be like for them if they use what you’re offering. In my work, I worked with the team and we developed a computer based tool for the FAA to use when analyzing the performance of air traffic control equipment in the sense of how often was it failing [and] how much maintenance did it need. When we put together the prototype of that, I thought, “Well most people would get up there and list the features of this that can do analysis.” But I said, “I’m going to do an analysis ahead of time of a piece of equipment I know they’ve had problems with and then I’m going to present what this tool can do by showing them how I analyzed this piece of equipment.”

I started out by analyzing how often they were having failures with it and was it a particular model type or the generic kind of equipment. I showed them the results of this and then I showed them results of analyzing the causes of the failures. Then I showed them the results where we would analyze the location of this equipment, because FAA has equipment all over the country. It turns out they were having problems mainly in one region of the country. That helps you narrow down. Maybe it’s the weather causing problems or maybe the training of the maintenance technicians and such. I created an experience for the FAA if they were using this tool to do actual maintenance analysis. They were very pleased with the prototype and continued funding with the project. When you’re presenting some ideas to somebody, present them in a way where you’re creating an experience for them using it.

Flair and Sincerity

John: Okay. What about sincerity and flair?

 

 

Jim: Sincerity. The reason we put that in is, it’s not about just adding a coat of paint to something.

 

 

John: Right.

 

 

Jim: You want your flair to be sincere to the offering. An example, I’m sure we’ve all come across, is you go to restaurants nowadays and they’ll ask you several times while you’re there, how is everything. One time my family and I were exiting and paying the bill at the cashier at a restaurant in Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. The cashier who turned out to be the manager of the restaurant asked how was everything and I mentioned, “Well, the meatloaf was cold in the center, it hadn’t been warmed up enough.” Instead of saying, “Oh, thank you for giving me that, we’ll be more careful next time.” He actually got angry at me. He obviously just said that as a [rhetorical] thing. “How was everything?” and I’m supposed to say “fine.” He became angry with me. What really stunned me is the customer behind me became irritated at me and when he paid the bill, he said, “Everything was fine.” It’s not sincere if you’re not writing to follow-up.

 

John: Right, yes. That’s a great example.

 

 

Jim: I used to say that if you’re giving a briefing or a talk and you wear a red suit, that’s flair, but it’s not sincere. I subscribe to the Financial Times newspaper and they have a weekly magazine. In one issue of the magazine had a picture of somebody in a red suit on the cover and I says “Oh, what’s this? I’ve been telling a red suit is not sincere.” It turned out he was the head of Ferrari and the Ferrari sports cars. He was surrounded by red Ferrari cars. Ferrari signature is their red sports cars, so it was sincere. People tend to say, “Well, we’re sincere.” But just check all the points that you are sincere, all the parts of your offering.

 

John: Otherwise it’s more the whole system.

 

 

Jim: Yes, people will see through it.

 

 

John: And excellence.

 

 

Jim: Well that’s a bit like sincerity is. Everybody likes to think, “Well, we’re excellent.” It’s really, again, they’re checking that all parts of your offering have excellence. Someone we both know, Kim Lizotte, went to a talk one time and he said that the talk was great, the speaker was dynamic and the content was very interesting and useful. The speaker had a DVD available for sale of another talk he’d given. Kim bought this DVD and when he was watching it, he was really turned off because it was very boring, the speakers droned on and on, the topic was uninteresting, the speaker was standing in front of a blank blue background. Kim turned the DVD off before he finished the talk and he says still to this day, even though the talk itself was memorable, he has a negative view of that person. Because they didn’t carry the excellence of the talk over into an excellence of what they had on their DVD. My message there is to look over everything, all the parts, pay attention to all the little details.

Energize and Energize to Act

John: Okay. At number six, energize and energize to act.

 

 

Jim: Yes, that’s what flair is all about. Is connecting emotionally with people as well as rationally so that you energize them. If people are energized, they’re more likely to act. I think we said before, energy overcomes inhibitions people have to do something.

 

John: Right, that’s a huge point.

 

 

Jim: It helps them spread the message and tell other people about it. Some products which just have really good energy for people is, of course, Apple, as we’ve talked about before. I don’t know if you or your audience have spent much time on the West Coast, but there’s a burger chain they called In and Out Burger. I grew up in California in Pasadena where they were founded and they just have a very excellent product. It’s just burgers and fries and shakes, but it’s so good that it energizes people. When they opened their first In and Out Burger in Texas, people lined up at 4:00 PM the day before to get a burger.

John: A burger, yes. That’s an energizing burger. You work with companies in your consulting to go through these six steps elements of flair to improve them?

 

Jim: Yes. What I’ve been consulting on is integrating technology and workers in the work place. Not just on using smartphones or tablets, but more complicated things on the workplace is as some cases safety is an issue. Such as in medicine or in transportation and other cases, you just want people to work more efficiently. That’s what got me into the other parts of the connecting with people in the flair and emotion.

Now I also deal with, how do you put sincere effective flair into your services or products and how you present those kinds of products and services.

John: Okay. And how can people get a hold of you? Your website?

 

 

Jim: Yes, I have a website with a very simple title. It’s just http://www.jimpoage.com/. You’ll find information in there about me, you’ll find information about our book Flair and about my consulting. I’m starting to blog now, and so you’ll see different information there about pieces of flair I’ve observed or some tips on doing flair. Our book is available on Amazon and other online booksellers. I’ve seen it in some Barnes & Noble stores and a few other bookstores. I just like to finish up by reminding people that in some ways, whatever we do, we’re all trying to influence people or sell to people in some sense and that if you connect emotionally with them, you’ll energize them about it and adding a bit of flair. It may sound a bit frivolous, but it’s very serious and if you look at Apple, if you look at target with their flash designer sales that they have and some of the new restaurants today that use different kinds of plates for the food service. It helps provide a more energizing and more engaging experience.

John: You’ve seen it practically?

 

 

Jim: Yes.

 

 

John: Flair is, believe it or not, practical. It sounds very intangible.

 

 

Jim: Right.

 

 

John: But they’re real.

 

 

Jim: It is practical, right, and in our book we talk about four basic steps of understanding a meaningful and joyful essence of your offering. Then, how to create flair that reinforces that. Then we have how to validate that your flair is effective, that you’re not going to irritate people by asking how is everything, and if they have a complaint, you don’t know what to with it.

One important thing is to iterate among all these steps while you’re doing it and then we talk about the six building blocks of flair. We have lots of examples in the book. We did interviews with people. When we did the interviews, they would start to explain what they do and we would ask them, “Well, could you take us through a specific project or something you design so our examples have the specificity so you can see how it’s done.”

 

John: Yes, that really stood out to me a lot of the specific examples and companies like Target and Apple, just really impressive.

 

Jim: Right. If I had a concluding message, as I’ve said, realize that you want to engage people emotionally and try it out. If you do something and it doesn’t work, people are not going to remember, just go on to the next thing. Try something else, don’t be afraid to try it and have some fun. Fun for you and it will be fun for you when you see your customers responding with a smile on their face.

John: I’m definitely going to give it a try. Thank you for being with us today Jim.

 

 

Jim: Thank you so much John and thank you for providing some flair in the interview.

 

 

John: Yes, absolutely. Make sure to check Jim out at jimpoage.com. Check out Flair on Amazon and other places. I hope you enjoyed today’s discussion, check out workingdemosite.com/authority for more interviews and information on Authority Marketing. Subscribe and review our podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. I’m John McDougall, see you next time on the Authority Marketing Roadmap.

John McDougall: Hi, I’m John McDougall and welcome to the Authority Marketing Roadmap. Today my guest is Ken Lizotte, Chief Imaginative Officer at Emerson Consulting Group where he helps turn professionals into thought leaders.

A thought leader in his own right, Ken is the author of The Expert’s Edge and The Speaker’s Edge. Welcome Ken.

Ken Lizotte: Well, thank you. I’m glad to be here, John.

Why Speaking to Groups Is Important 

John: Yes, absolutely. And why is speaking to groups so important and how can it help us build our businesses?

Ken: I think there’s nothing like getting right out there in front of real live human beings and being able to make an impact on them so that they understand what’s inside of you and what needs to get out. What your expertise is all about. Your products, your services, etc.

You know, many, many years ago, decades ago, literally, there was a best-selling book called, Megatrends, and a guy named John Naisbitt had written it. At the time, with TV running so strong – this is the 70s if I recall exactly when this was. [Editor: Megatrends was published in 1982]

There were predictions that we would stop going to the movies. And this is like 40 years later with on-demand and Internet entertainment and all of that, one would – first of all, wonder why it hasn’t happened already – but still make that prediction.

But he said that will never happen because it’s very important, no matter what the technology, for human beings to be with other human beings. So that’s the impact of speaking, and webinars can do it and blogging and social media can do it, but there’s nothing like human beings being in the same room with each other, like I’m here with you.

John: Absolutely, it makes a difference. We were going to do this over the phone and you came in person and we were just saying how it deepens the relationship and your connections.

Ken: Yes, absolutely, yes.

How to Find and Obtain Speaking Engagements

John: In your new book, The Speaker’s Edge, you explain how we can all locate and obtain lots of speaking engagements. What are the primary avenues for doing that?

Ken: Well, the primary avenues are – they seem pretty obvious when I say them – the formal or the informal.

So the formal is, say that you targeted some conferences, big conferences or business events that you would love to speak at. They generally require you to make a formal presentation, or rather a proposal, and that takes place typically online and there’s a form to fill out and if you’ve filled out a lot of these, you’ll find that they’re all different, but you’ve got to spend some time making a formal proposal for yourself.

The other is the informal, and that’s when we might know somebody who is always looking for speakers for a group that we’ve been involved in, or we ask around our friends and our colleagues if they know about some groups that are looking for speakers, and that sort of thing.

Those things can just happen. I actually was at what’s called a launch party for a client of mine who’s got a new book out the other night and one of the people who was attending works for a company called Fitbit. Everybody I think has heard of Fitbit because it’s really getting very, very popular and very strong and does a lot of commercials on TV and all.

Anyway, she said she works in the Fitbit office in Boston and they often bring in speakers and just by being there without planning it at all, she was impressed with the book and impressed with my client, the new author, and she told him that she would try to see if he can be brought into Fitbit to do some speaking in-house there.

So that’s the informal. The formal. And those are the two major ways that one goes about looking for speaking engagements. 

John: Okay. What about – have you heard of the Association Executives, the big master book of all the meeting planners?

Ken: Yes.

John: I bought a copy of that a ways back and man, that thing is massive.

Ken: It’s overwhelming. It’s so complete. Yes. That’s the directory of trade and professional associations. There’s one for the national association. There is one for states. State by state. It’s also got an online version. I think it called –

John: — TheAssociationOfExecutives.com or something like that. [Editor: https://www.associationexecs.com/]

Ken: Yes, that’s what it is, yes. They got an online version as well, which is probably going to become the main version, but that’s how you would do your research. You would go to a resource like that to find national organizations, conventions, events, expos, things like that. And what you want to do, if you’re in business, is to look for those that are going to have the target audience that represents your market that you want to speak to, and you can find what looks like the right match, that’s when you’d go on their website and make a formal proposal.

John: Yeah, it’s amazing — there’s a group for everything, albino mini horses, you know, it’s everything.

Ken: I spoke a few years ago at an annual convention. I think it’s called The New England Mystery Writers, or Mystery Novelists, or something like that. There were probably three or four hundred people at this meeting at a hotel in, I believe it was in Dedham, Massachusetts, and the atmosphere was so high-spirited. People who are writing mystery novels were so happy to be together and I was on a panel about getting your book published, and it was just jammed. So, you just never know what kind of groupings there are.

John: What kind of niche little group could actually turn into a great client list for you.

Ken: Yeah, exactly.

Keynotes Aren’t Everything

John: And, you say in your book that keynotes aren’t everything, that people mistakenly presume that a keynote is always the prize to shoot for. How is that a mistake?

Ken: Well, it’s not a mistake to shoot for it. It’s a mistake to overlook all the other possibilities in terms of speaking. There aren’t that many keynote spots, obviously. Usually a conference has one keynoter, maybe two if it’s really large. So, you really limit yourself if you assume that being the keynote, being the star of the show, is the only way you really can get enough attention.

For example, I just mentioned this New England Mystery Writers group — I was on a panel. As I said, the room was jammed. So, you’re going to get a chance to display your expertise and to make comments and offer your opinions and insights in a way that’s going to get the attention of the right audience.

So, overlooking the fact that you don’t have to be a keynote is important so you don’t just spend your time spinning your wheels, and maybe you’re lucky to get one keynote a year and that becomes the only speaking engagement that you get.

Other Mistakes When Looking for Speaking Engagements

John: Are there other mistakes that people make when looking for speaking gigs, and also when actually speaking? In other words, what will work against you in terms of building your chances of speaking frequently?

Ken: Well, the biggest thing that I learned when I did research for the book and talked to event planners, in particular, is trying to sell yourself on stage. Trying to sell your services, or a product you have, or a book you have, or whatever.

Get up there, and give your audience the best of your knowledge, the best of your insight, answer questions in the Q&A period, be giving. That is important. As soon as you shift into a sales person, rep, whatever, you start to lose your audience and you lose the event planner’s recommendation.

The event planner will then say, “I will never have this person here again, and I will never recommend this speaker to anyone else.” So, don’t try to sell yourself. I once saw a very, very, stark display of that at the CEO Club of Boston, which typically will bring in two speakers every other month here in the Boston area.

Of all things, there was a speaker whose expertise was, how to get past the gate keepers in order to sell to – what do you call it – VIPs. Very Important Persons in a company; high level, C level executives, the CEO, the highest executives. And this guy knew what he was talking about, and he had written a few books on the subject, and he was giving great advice and great information and all of that.

At the end of his talk though, he shifted. He pointed over to a table behind him where he had all his books and his tapes lined up and he said, “I just want you to know, that I’ve brought books and tapes for sale here for you, and if you act now, for a three hundred dollar set of tapes or some books, I can give you guys some special CEO-club price of $259 and then if you want the other package–” and he went on and on like this in the hall and then he waited — he waited for somebody to say, “That sounds great. Yeah I’ll take one,” and no one did. It was amazing.

John: Awkward, the way it was presented.

Ken: Oh, one guy did raise his hand and said “I’ll take one.” And you had the feeling that this guy felt sorry for the speaker and was willing to buy this just because it was an awkward moment. You know the irony was this was an expert on selling and he did this, and I talked with the director of the club later and he said to me “Yeah that was bad.”

John: But at the same time there is a whole audience of people, Dan Kennedy for example, has quite a routine of managing to sell quite an incredible amount of stuff from the back of the room so there’s a way to do it and build up in your talk this excitement of what you do and then have that available, but how you do it, you have to be — if you give a walking sales speech the whole time, that is just…

Ken: That just turns it off, I don’t know personally how Dan Kennedy — I know who you’re talking about but I don’t know how he does it — but I certainly can believe that there’s some people who have learned how to sort of integrate it and to do it subtly and this and that. But if it’s blatant, and if it feels as though all the speaker — you the speaker — are here to do is to sell me in the audience, I’m gone as an audience member and that’s blowing it.

And see, the important thing about that point is that when you are asked the — if you are asked the other question which is how do you get — what’s the best way for one to get more and more speaking engagements? Because that’s the focus of my book, how to land lots of speaking engagements. The way to do it when it really came down to it in terms of what the experts had to tell me was go out and speak, speak as well as possible, deliver a great a presentation as possible, just be there and do your thing on stage, not sell yourself. Just give of yourself and be good at it.

Practice, practice, practice so you’ll be a better speaker and what will happen then is someone in the audience perhaps might see you and come up after or contact you later and say, “You know I saw you give your talk, and it was fantastic, and I actually know of a group and I am part of a group that needs someone to give a similar talk and would you be interested”? That’s what will sell yourself.

The More You Speak, the More Engagements You Will Get

John: So some of the best ways to get more speaking gigs is to just do as many as you can in a sense?

Ken: Yes. The more you speak, the more likely you are to get more speaking engagement. That’s what the experts who are successful at it tell me.

John: At the same time if, from that advice, you then go and say, “Okay I’m going to speak always for free, does that also, maybe in a way, shoot yourself in the foot because some experts say you should put on your website a minimum $5000 speaking fee to let people know you are of some stature and then you hope that they say, “Oh geez, we don’t have $5000 but we have $500.” What do you think of that whole routine or game or whatever you want to call it?

Ken: Well it depends on what your goal is. Now there are a lot of good reasons to speak pro bono, and two of them are, one, if there’s some sort of charitable event or some sort of group that’s a good cause where you know they can’t afford to pay you but you would be in front of maybe a very influential audience that could lead to business at some point.

The other is if it’s a target audience of yours that really, again there are potential prospects, and you could even see the point of, for example, paying your own way to fly to an event somewhere else and pay your own expenses and your accommodations and all. If it was quite possible that that was — if it was likely that that was a good match.

But having said that, what you are alluding to is very significant thing to do also and that’s to set a certain value for yourself, whether it’s $5000 or $8000 or $10000 or whatever so that you can then negotiate it down. I, for example, once gave a talk at a conference in Washington D.C that was on the topic of diversity in business, and I have to confess to everybody that at the time in my career when I gave the talk, I was not a diversity expert but what this was, was that there were a number of speakers already on the agenda. There were about eight speakers on the agenda and they represented all sorts of the diversity spectrum. There were people who were black, there were people who were Hispanic, people who were gay, there were Native Americans, etc., and I happened to run into the conference organizer and he said to me, “You know what I don’t have; I don’t have a white guy.”

John: [Laughs] You were the minority.

Ken: Yes. I said well, I could do that. So I put a proposal together for him and my topic, I called it Workplace Diversity: What’s In It for White Guys, and he said, “okay”. He brought me down there and I looked at the other speakers and they really were diversity experts and when it was all over, I was curious about the fee that I got because I did give them a proposal and it did have a fee structure on there and they did decide to give me a fee. It wasn’t a whole ton of money — to be frank, it was years ago and it was $1500, but they did agree to it and paid expenses and all that.

When it was all over I asked them about that and said, “I’m just kind of curious, where did my fee stack up against the other speakers?” Take this note; there were two keynoters at that particular event. They said, “Well, you are number two behind one of the keynoters.” I said, “Wait a minute, one of the keynoters got less than I did?” “Oh, yeah, sure.” “And what did some of these other people get?” because they seemed like quite strong…

John: Knowledgeable, professional crowd.

Ken: Yes, well, some got maybe $500 and others didn’t get anything. I said, “What was the difference?” They said, “You asked for it.” That’s all it was. “You asked for it”. So, put it out there but do know — again the premise of your question is important to keep in mind — don’t be rigid about it, put it out there. Let the person say it’s good or that’s fine or let them say, “Well I don’t know if we can afford that,”  and then start to try negotiate it down. You might still end up with a fee that’s a good one for you.

Publishing a Book Helps Get Speaking Gigs

John: Absolutely. You and I share a similar philosophy about how businesses can stand out from the competition, specifically by offering a book among other tactics. How useful is publishing a book in the search for speaking gigs?

Ken: I think it’s really important. I don’t think you’d never get to speak without one but I think it’s really important partly because of what happens. Not only that a lot of event planners want to see a book, that you are an author of a book, it doesn’t have to be a best seller but they give you certain credibility with that. Also, I think your audience gives you credibility.

Once again, if you think about what a speaker is like that does not have a book. Typically we will see speakers with diagrams or PowerPoint or whatever it might be and they don’t particularly have — they might have some handouts and they are not even published articles, they are just handouts, they’re handouts of the PowerPoints or they promise to email you those the next day or whatever. There’s just nothing like having a book for the credibility, that you really are an expert or a thought leader or guru. You really stand out from the crowd, even of public speakers.

John: We were joking earlier, if you want to show off your book a little bit then have some weight to it. You kind of drop it on the table when you come into a meeting.

Ken: That’s the way your book is. You drop it on the table and…but I noticed there’s nothing on the pages inside. [Laughs]

Does the Size of the Book Matter?

John:  I did get a book like that once, but they did that on purpose. Someone has told me there’s some philosophy around the size of your book, not necessarily the volume or the decibels when you drop it on the table but the size of your book matters, the length of it, when you are getting a speaking gig in terms of the amount of fee that you get. Do people take a more comprehensive book more seriously or what’s the rule of thumb, or does any book help you get [speaking engagements]?

Ken: I think it depends. I think it’s always the topic, when you get down to it. Or if you are a really big name like Malcolm Gladwell or something, then that will always draw but below that upper tier, I think it’s the topic, I think what matters is the topic. Remember two of the biggest, best-selling books of all time had almost no words in them. One was called Who Moved My Cheese and another was called, before that, The One Minute Manager. So those are thin books, both of them, but the authors who did those are still in the speaking circuit many years later.

John: Yes. Those are actually great examples; I had, way back, the cassette tapes of Who Moved My Cheese. My father got it and he just turned us all on to it; and that was short.

Ken: Well look at that, the cassette tape, yes. So that’s how it gets expanded. I don’t know how much the size of a book is important, but certainly the topic is going to be important, and it’s not just the topic because it can’t be a dry topic, it needs to have a certain pizzazz to it, or panache or flair; so that helps as well.

Other Important Steps to Win Speaking Engagements

John: What else is important? Your book includes a checklist of essential items for ensuring you’re fully equipped to search, find and win lots of speaking engagements.

Ken: There are a number of items on my list — the one that pops out at me is, you asked the question, a video. It used to be, years ago, that if we were on a program planning committee, if some speaker’s name came up somebody might say, “Woah, is there any chance we could go see him or her speak?” 

John: And you go in person. There was no YouTube.

Ken: Yes. It sounds incredibly archaic now, but now we can go on a website and we can see a one-, two-, three-minute, fifteen-minute or whatever, video, and we can get a sense. Not everybody has that, but it’s a good idea to have that, so that’s really important.

I put a book on the list, having a book. Again, I think that’s very important. I think there’s also something I have in my book, The Speaker’s Edge, that I call an “info sheet”, and if you’re really going to do a diligent search for speaking engagements, this info sheet is something that you could use so that before you start, you can have, right in front of you, all the various information that you might be asked for, so you don’t have to start from scratch every time you’re filling out a formal proposal.

You wouldn’t be asked for all of it because they all are variations of each other, but I found it really helpful to have everything comprehensively in front of you, so you just copy and paste and that would make the filling out of the formal proposals go a lot faster.

John: Much quicker, yes. And you have to be somewhat rigorous about finding gigs, you have to maybe, several or ten times a month fill out these forms, or how often do you recommend your clients to pursue it?

Ken: It’s funny because we were talking about a book being important. You and I know both know that doing a book means hiding out or squirreling your time away or carving out time, this kind of thing. Looking for speaking engagements is similar, you’re going to have to carve out some time, discipline yourself and set aside a certain amount of time. It’s not necessarily fun, but you can embrace it and try to make it fun.

The other way to do it through the informal method is to integrate it as much as you can in your day to day actions. You could, for example, get an email from somebody about something or other, and it occurs to you that that person maybe does a lot of speaking and you might say to them in an email, “By the way, I’m trying to do more speaking right now and I’m looking for executive groups to speak to, would you have any suggestions?”

How long would it take to bang out that question on your email? So you could do that; having lunch with somebody, maybe it would come up. I don’t mean bug everybody at every chance you get, but keep it in mind. This is a fair question to ask and you’d be willing to do the same for that person as well. So integrate it, in other words, with your normal networking.

The One Thing People Can Do To Get Speaking Engagements

John: When all is said and done, what is the one thing that people can do to locate and land lots of speaking engagements?

Ken: I think we’ve already discussed it. I think that it really is, go out and speak; try to do the best you can, don’t try to sell yourself blatantly, shamelessly on there. And then maybe the last piece, though, that we haven’t discussed is the follow-up. A big mistake a lot of speakers make is to just, no matter how great they do it, to get off the stage and cross their fingers that somebody in the audience will come to them, “I’ve done everything I can.” Well no you haven’t done everything you can.

Try to get all the business cards from the audience that you can, maybe raffling off a book is one way to do it, and then send a follow-up email to everyone thanking them and saying you appreciated their coming to listen to you. And then put them on an email list. Now I didn’t really talk about that but again that’s one of the follow-up techniques you should have.

You should build an email list adding any audience that you speak to and then sending something out from time to time that will be a reminder, in some way, of the expertise that you have. That way you stay in contact with them over time; and too many speakers, it seems to me, just don’t bother to do this, and I think it’s kind of like getting off the stage and saying, “Well we had a good time today that’s the last we’re going to see of each other so good luck everybody.”

And I think that’s a mistake. But that’s a way to extend of what we might call your speaking community, or a fellowship is what I used to call it in the book, and stay in contact. So that they’re going to be able to come to you, invite you to do a speaking gig sometime in the future when the time comes for them to have that occasion to come to you. Don’t become a speaker that was great that I saw two years ago or three years ago and I can’t remember the name of the person anymore.

John: Yes, I like the insights of the people that just saw you speak, to pitch to them. They just saw you speak, if they were happy, a good audience…

Ken: Yes exactly, make sure that it’s more than just a one-time gig with all those people.

John: Absolutely, thanks for speaking to us today, Ken.

Ken: Great, this is a speaking engagement too, for me, you know.

John: Yes, absolutely, a podcast.

Ken: That’s actually that’s the last thing I would say is that when we were talking earlier about keynotes, and don’t forget, the panels, as we said earlier, can be a speaking engagement. Don’t forget that what they call breakout sessions can be a speaking engagement. And frankly, those dreaded elevator speeches that we’re asked to do frequently at networking events, if you create the best elevator 20-, 30-second elevator pitch that you can create — and by the way I have a great exercise in the book that will help people do that — those 30 seconds could be the most impactful speaking engagement you’ve ever done if you do those right. So there’s always an opportunity for doing speaking engagements, not necessarily the star of the show.

John: Great and tell us how people can get in touch with you, what’s your website address?

Ken: So my website address is thoughtleading.com, that’s T-H-O-U-G-H-T, thought as in thinking, L-E-A-D-I-N-G, leading as in leadership, thoughtleading, it’s one word, dot com. This is the way I have to say it when I’m on the phone with Comcast, thoughtleading.com, they can find me.

John: No dashes, that’s good.

Ken: No dashes, no underscores, nothing else.

John: Okay, I hope you enjoyed today’s discussion. Check out workingdemosite.com/authority for more interviews and information on Authority Marketing and review us on iTunes and Stitcher. I’m John McDougall — see you next time on the Authority Marketing Roadmap.

John: Hi. I’m John McDougall and welcome to the Authority Marketing Roadmap. Today my guest is Ken Lizotte, Chief Imaginative Officer at Emerson Consulting Group, where he helps turn professionals into thought leaders. A thought leader in his own right, Ken is the author of The Expert’s Edge and his forthcoming book The Speaker’s Edge will be published in July. Welcome Ken.

Ken: Thank you sir, I’m glad to be here. And yes, I want you to know I’m the chief imaginative officer, or as we refer to it in my company, the C.I.O.

John: Nice, the creative type. Creative thought leader. So Ken, in your book The Experts Edge, you outline the five pillars of thought leading, what are these five pillars?

The 5 Pillars of Thought Leadership

Ken: The five pillars are broad categories I’ve created that I’ve attempted to use as umbrellas for all the various marketing and promotional publicity techniques that one can employ. I also think [that] of the five pillars, some [are] more important than others in the sense that if you use these five pillars effectively, you will really separate yourself from your competition.

So the five pillars are these; number one and by far the most important to my mind is publish your ideas. And what that means is maybe publish your book, maybe you publish more than one book, maybe you publish articles. We could include writing and publishing your blog and lots of different things, but the main thing is get our ideas out there.

The second is speaking to groups, and that’s the topic of my next book The Speaker’s Edge. It’s very important to also get your ideas out there so that you are right there right in front of people and they are really seeing you out there on a stage or a platform as the thought leader in the room.

The third I call fresh thinking. And all that means is, what kind of data do you have that might be new? What kind of insights do you have that might be new? This might occur because you have taken a survey or done a study or something like that, or it may just be pulled out of your day to day work your clients.

The fourth is creatively leveraging the internet and this is something I know is near and dear to your heart, John. Using the internet in such a way that it’s going to effectively get the word out about your ideas. So it could be actually publishing online or it could be engaging in LinkedIn or chat rooms or whatever it might be, but creatively leveraging the fact that the internet is extremely important these days.

And finally the fifth one is called vigorous use of the media and that’s your traditional PR, your traditional publicity, kind of the old age way of promoting yourself, maybe by getting yourself quoted in a newspaper or magazine article, maybe getting a guest spot on TV or radio or even a podcast like this. That is not necessarily the most important of the pillars and I say that because [if] any of you or your listeners have ever been quoted in the media for example, that cannot always be a happy occasion, sometimes they can misquote you, sometimes they can spell your name wrong or pronounce your name wrong or not mention your company or your book or whatever it is. So that one you have to be a little more careful with and so for that reason, I make that pillar number five as opposed to number one.

Why Publishing is the Pinnacle of Thought Leadership

John: And why is publishing number one?

Ken: Well, I think it establishes your credibility. If you have a business of any kind, if you look around at your competition, you probably don’t see your competitors publishing articles or publishing books. Now, anybody listening to me is saying they might have somebody as a competitor come to their minds [who] does that. And usually if somebody does come to your mind, that’s somebody that is going to be high up in your particular area.

So there’s something about publishing your ideas and establishing your credibility that rises you above the competitive pack and puts you forward as a guru, as an expert with an edge, or as an authority as you mentioned John. It’s authority marketing.

John: Absolutely. And I think we both we agree that publishing a book is one of, if not the best way to establish yourself as a guru, an authority, or a thought leader, but what about people who don’t have a book now or maybe they don’t even want to write one? Does this mean that they can never become a thought leader?

Ken: You and I were having this conversation earlier today. I believe that sometimes if you haven’t written a book yet, you may not yet be ready for it, because it is a formidable undertaking. But publishing article is a fantastic way to become a thought leader as well, because in order for you to publish an article, you have to have a publication, whether it’s online, or a traditional print publication.

You have to have them decide to invest in you and your ideas, to validate your ideas. They’re going to put aside some space for you, or they’re going to help [with the] graphics or layout that is going to put you in a great light. They’ve got resources and staff that goes about that sort of thing. So publishing articles, to me, are just as valid as publishing a book. Get your ideas out there. Don’t just keep them to yourself.

John: And get in front of a large audience.

Ken: Yes, and get in front of a large audience. Exactly. What I found over the years is that a lot of time people come to me about getting themselves better known [and] they say, “I do a lot of great work with my clients, I know I do and they tell me that I do. But I’m kind of a best kept secret.” And so the idea, whether we call it thought leading strategy like I called it, or authority marketing strategy like you called it — what we’re talking about is getting that word out so that you’re not a best kept secret, anymore.

The Importance of Public Speaking in Thought Leadership

John: And pillar number two, you advocate public speaking and you’ve called one and two, “the one-two punch of thought leadership.“ How is that?

Ken: Well, again I feel like those are two of the most powerful techniques that one can utilize, and I think they’re also underutilized by most businesses and business experts. [It’s powerful to speak] to audiences with the additional credibility of having published an article, which you could pass out as a reprint to everyone, or having a book that you can hold up. Or even if you’re able to, [you could] arrange something nice, like each member of the audience [gets] a copy of your book. It really separates you from the typical speaker who has only PowerPoint slides.

That’s why I think those two are the most powerful techniques of all. But I have to say, I tend to speak this way but even as I’m saying this right now, I’ve got to skip over to number four, creatively leveraging the internet. It continues to grow and its impact, it’s power, and all of that stuff. So I’m going to say it’s a “one-two-three punch.”

John: Nice.

Ken: I don’t think I’ve ever said that before this moment, but I think it’s making sense as I start talking out loud about this.

The Power of Fresh Thinking in Thought Leadership

John: Yes, things evolved. And actually it’s a good lead to pillar number three, what you called “fresh thinking.” Tell us more about that.

Ken: Again as I said before, a couple of obvious ways to do that is to do a survey or some sort of research. One of my clients, which I consider one of the top thought leaders that I’ve frankly ever met, is based in the Netherlands and his name is Andre De Waal. He has actually published about 27 books. But the important thing about him is that [the books] aren’t just knocked out of his head, they’re the basis of research that he will study, literally hundreds of research studies in order to come to conclusion about his thoughts and his insights. You can do that kind of research, really hard core research, or you can just look at what is true about what you do day-to-day with your clients.

I would contend that all of us in business are thought leaders, just that again, it’s that “best kept secret” thing. So you could be doing what you think is just the same thing as your competitor. But most likely your company, whether it’s you as an individual or you’ve got a large company, you are customising your services to your clients. We’re all different people, it all comes out of us and it gets expressed in a different way.

We are all thought leaders. And for that reason, you can draw from your day-to-day work with your clients and it that sense, if you reflect on it a bit you think about it, maybe brainstorm with your staff and you can see what kind of work you do [that] could be fashioned into a book, into speaking, into something on the internet, et cetera. With this it’s just, how do you embody let’s say, fresh thinking?

How to Use the Internet for Creative Thought Leadership

John: Yes. Pillar number four, back to creatively leveraging the internet.

Ken: That’s three of the one-two-three punch by the way. Remember that?

John: Yes. Well, there are three W’s in internet.

Ken: Right.

John: If I have my spelling right. Are you talking about blogging and social media? What creativity are you talking about?

Ken: Yes, I think all of that and it seems to me because of my own personal experience, that Twitter is becoming more and more used by people of all sorts, but businesses as well. I would say all of it; blogging, posting articles on LinkedIn, being involved with groups online and even Facebook to an extent, depending on your business. I [do] have to tell you this — beyond all of the social media that I’ve just mentioned and all the rest that are out there and that continues to develop and that didn’t even exist seven or eight years ago, [ask yourself] what did exist seven or eight years ago?

That’s email. And I have a very strong belief in the power of email marketing in addition to the others, or maybe the others are in addition to email marketing. I have been sending out what I call e-blasts based on the work I do for years and years, and I can tell you the power of that continues to be enormous for me. I always am getting referrals from people who are on my email list or past clients, or colleagues, or whatever it might be.

And as much as Twitter and LinkedIn and whatever has grown and grown, you can point to a lot of people [who] only occasionally go to those sites or maybe they go on them every day, but they go on them once or twice a day and they check in with the Tweets that they follow, but beyond that, we all check our email at least once a day. That almost makes me laugh because hardly any of us check it only once a day. Twice a day, three — I’m checking it personally all the time, I can’t even count how many times and I just think that’s still the most direct online vehicle that we all have. So I encourage everyone to build an email list and to use it and in addition, to use the social media as well.

John: I couldn’t agree more. I just had a great chat with Danny Iny today of Miracee and I did a little consult with him, where he was giving me ideas on guest blogging which within digital marketing, you can always get better at. I’m working on improving that. And he was talking about the idea that when you get featured on other sites, you really need to think more about the amount of subscribers you get than the amount of traffic you get. So when you build your email list, you have control of that audience. We were joking earlier about MySpace.

Ken: Yes, exactly,

John: Facebook is now 1.59 billion, I think it is, active monthly users so it’s not likely that Facebook’s just going to disappear. But if it did, wouldn’t you like to go to your hundred thousand email subscribers and keep getting those referrals that you talking about? So yes, I couldn’t agree more [that] the top experts out there are very passionate about that.,

Ken: Yes, your email subscribers, I think we should also say are not people on a list that you purchased, they are permission marketing generally and they are people that have gotten to know you in one way or the other. They become your greatest advocates, some greater than others, but nonetheless they are people that know you. So for example, when you publish a book, a lot of people forget about their email list or they don’t even have an email list and they go right to trying to get let’s say, radio interviews or trying to get a speaking engagement here and there.

And that’s all well and good, but what that does is bypass people who already know you and are natural advocates. So you should be getting the word out there if you don’t want to be a best kept secret. You should be getting the word out there to those people who know you, and those people who know you are the ones on your email list, if you have one. Not everybody has one. What I’m saying is, everybody listen to me, get one. That’s my big advice for the internet in terms of leveraging the internet.

How Publicity Augments Thought Leadership

John: And what about publicity and PR? Some people might view that as the most important but you’re saying, it’s not the first step.

Ken: It’s not the first step. If you got interviewed by, say the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, most likely you’ll get maybe one quote in there [and] maybe if you’re lucky, a couple of quotes in some article that’s about a larger topic and not just about you and your business. So it’s wonderful, it’s exciting and it does have a certain impact, but it’s not enough.

If you write a book, obviously that’s enough in the extent that you can really expand on who you are and as I said earlier, sometimes to get quoted. Sometimes you can only do like a five or a ten minute radio interview when you’re doing a radio interview and you just can’t really get it all out there. So to me that’s a supplement as opposed to a one- two-three. I wouldn’t call it a one-two-three-four punch.

John: Right. So those other activities are supporting and building your personal brand around your book and [then you can] do a top article [that will be] featured in larger places.

Ken: Exactly. That’s how I’d see it.

Believing In Your Ability to Be a Thought Leader

John: Okay and what about people who feel they just do their jobs every day in the best way that they know how and they don’t interject anything original or new into the grand scheme of things. Does this mean that they have no shot at becoming a thought leader?

Ken: I’ll go back to what I was saying before. People tend to think that way, that we’re not really doing anything that special. We kind of get used to it. But that’s probably not true. Every individual expresses him or herself differently and every organization expresses itself differently.

So all you really need to do is record what it is you do with your clients or what your clients tell you you’re doing well for them and any kind of innovative thought you had here or there, like a client project or developing a product of yours or whatever. An exact replica of that is not happening elsewhere in your competitions’ headquarters. It’s happening with you. So give yourself some credit is what I’m saying. You are a thought leader; you’re just not believing it yet. You’re not getting the word up.

How Refining Your Niche Plays a Part in Thought Leadership

John: So with a little bit of discovery and maybe narrowing your niche so you can stand out, [you can position yourself as a thought leader]. I mean, you’ll stand out just by the fact that so few people, at least your competitors, have a book with this level of thought leadership building. But how would you say refining your niche plays a part in that?

Ken: Well you know, refining your niche sort of develops naturally if you get into this process. Your question is actually making me think about [something else]. Consider if you’re in sales, [maybe] you have an article idea about how to close the sale. Let me use as a premise for this that everything you say in that article has been said before.

There’s nothing new. You’re just saying the same thing [as others in your industry] and we do a scientific study and we find that’s true. There’s nothing original about your article, but it gets published anyway and here’s the thing. Many, many people who will read that article have never read an article on how to close a sale, no matter that there’s been hundred thousand of them written before.

John: They might not think its original but you saying it, you’re probably going to add something.

Ken: Well you’re going to add something of your own, but even if I use the premise that you didn’t, there is still always going to be a market out there of readers who have not actually ever looked into this before.

John: Right. So you’re unique to them, right?

Ken: Yes, exactly. I like to say when I’m up on a stage talking to a group, you know I’m here to tell you about how to become a thought leader today and I bet you that nobody else has ever done this before. But even if they have, I’m the guy that’s doing it today, and so today in this room, I am your thought leader. That’s how it works.

Well Known Thought Leaders

John: And what are some examples of thought leaders? I know in your book you mentioned Henry David Thoreau and Emerson. Can you tell us a little bit, from Emerson to Trump?

Ken: Well, you know my book, The Expert’s Edges [that] you mentioned in the introduction, I wrote over seven years ago. I do mention some well-known thought leaders like Tom Peters, Susie Orman, Harvey Mackay, and people like that. Mr. Trump is in there too. Of course, I don’t know if he’d be in there now, if I was writing the book now. But he was in there then. Like it or not, he is a thought leader.

My company’s called Emerson Consulting Group, and I’m based in Concord, Massachusetts. Your listeners may know that in the mid-19th century, a lot of famous writers and thinkers came out of Concord or lived in Concord. People like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. Living in Concord, when I started my business 19 years ago, I thought about naming it after one of them. And I came to the conclusion that although all of them were successful and became famous, Ralph Waldo Emerson was the closest to being the model of a thought leader.

The reason is that, first of all, he was well known as a publisher of ideas. He was well known for fresh thinking. He would sit and reflect and he’d go to walk through the fields and the meadows and ponder, and he would be thinking about things. He liked to discuss things. This and that. And then, he would formulate his ideas and he would write essays or books.

The other thing that he did that a lot of people don’t know, is that he did a lot of public speaking. And the reason he did a lot of public speaking is that even as such a successful writer as him in his time, then as now, writers don’t make a lot of money. If you’ve ever been up to Concord, we have his house restored and you can take a tour and it’s a beautiful white colonial house. But to support all of that, he had to go out and speak in public.

So he would get on a stage coach or a railroad train or whatever in 1848, 1850, and he would be gone for months. Going to all these little towns in Illinois and Pennsylvania and whatever, and he would be speaking night after night. It wasn’t the competition of the Internet, TV, radio, [or] movies back then. So the whole town would turn out to hear him.

Believe it or not, they’d pass the hat, and he would collect all that money. So, anyway the point is, what’s the one-two punch? Publishing ideas and speaking to groups. He did that. And when I think about the internet, one-two-three punch, I like to say that the internet of his time was to write letters. And he did that. He did a lot of that. Writing back and forth, especially to other famous thought leaders of the time. So anyway, I chose Ralph Waldo Emerson for that reason.

Henry David Thoreau, as much as I am inspired by his writings and all, he was way too much of an independent soul to be considered a thought leader. He did speak, he did write, but he did it on his own terms, when he felt like it, and he much preferred to hunker down and walk and ponder, and watch ants — literally, this is true — watching what they did for hours at a time.

John: So he was public speaking, but he was speaking to ants.

Ken: But that was his fresh thinking. He would write this down, and he’s considered one of the founders of the environmental movement. He’s got so much, in the end he became the most impactful thought leader of all, actually, when you really get down to it.

John: But if you want to do it in this day and age, you need to be more social. You just can’t hide under a rock and write a book, like I did for three years, and come out and say, “Everyone’s just going to buy it on Amazon.” It doesn’t really work that way.

Ken: Unfortunately when you write, you need a platform. As you and I know, you do have to hunker down though and hide out a bit, but, I don’t know, it can happen in different ways. There’s not just one way to do it. But, again, when we go back to my five pillars, that’s what I was attempting to do. Categorize all the different things that you could do. And I don’t think you have to engage in all five pillars, but I really think number one is the most important one — publish your idea.

Basic Ways to Get Started With Thought Leadership 

John: What’s the first step to get started in a basic way?

Ken: I think the first step for some people is get past this idea that they don’t have anything original or special to say, and then the second step I would say is to think about publishing something, even if it was a blog, or if it was one article, or whatever. Get yourself onto that track so that you then are branching out over time to all of the pillars of thought leading.

John: Okay, thanks for speaking with us today Ken, that was really engaging. Tell us how people can get in touch with you. 

Ken: They could look up my website which is thoughtleading.com. That’s thought leading as opposed to thought leadership. We found when we were looking for a domain name, thought leading, I-N-G, as opposed to thought leader; thought leader was the only thing that wasn’t taken. When I wrote The Expert’s Edge, I transformed thought leading into a verb or an adjective, and thoughtleading.com is my website, you can take a look there.

John: Fantastic, I hope everyone enjoyed today’s discussion. Check out workingdemosite.com/authority for more interviews and information on Authority Marketing, and subscribe and review our podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. I’m John McDougall, see you next time on Authority Marketing Roadmap.

 

John McDougall talks with Clint Arthur of Status Factory about his method for becoming an authority and celebrity by booking yourself on TV shows around the country, including local TV vs national TV, the biggest mistakes that people make, and what makes a good TV guest.

John: Hi, I’m John McDougall. And welcome to the Authority Marketing Roadmap. Today my guest is Clint Arthur the CEO of Status Factory.

Clint is a leadership and performance expert with an entrepreneurial management degree from the Wharton School of Business. And number one bestselling author of Breakthrough Your Upper Limits on TV and many other inspiring books. Welcome Clint.

Clint: Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, all put together cannot have as much enthusiasm and excitement to be here today as I do.

 

John: Nice. That’s great. Even Donald Trump? Lot of enthusiasm lately out there, up and down.  Yes, well thanks for being with us today Clint.

 

Clint: Right on, man. Let’s rock it.

 

 

John: Okay. So what inspired you to get yourself on TV?

 

 

Clint: Okay. Back in 2010, I was planning out a seminar I wanted to do for my personal growth experiences and I was putting it all together and the pricing and where it was going to be. And I noticed Tony Robbins was having a seminar the same day in another city in the same area. And I realized my competition was Tony Robbins. People were going to have the choice, should I go to this one with Clint or should I go to this one with Tony. They were about same price. And I realized, who the hell was going to go to mine when they can go to Tony’s. Who is I compared to Tony Robbins? I needed to do something about that. And it’s really my belief that everybody has this same issue. I mean, who are the celebrities who are competing in your space and how the hell are you going to compete with them? The only possible way to start competing with the big dogs is to start becoming a big dog. And how do you do that? There is only one way to become a big dog. And that is to become a celebrity. It really is the only way to do it. And how do you really become a celebrity? How do you really become a celebrity? You go on TV. And that’s when I started doing. I started out in 2010, I had a publicist. I paid her $1500 each time she booked me on a TV show. I did four shows my first month working with her. So that was $6000 that I paid to get four TV appearances. And they all sucked — I was no good, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t have any preparation.

I said, “what am I supposed to say”? She said, “You’ll figure it out.” Yes, I figured it out over the next 25, 30 TV appearances I finally figured it out. After the first four appearances, I said to my wife, “What do you think?” And my wife said, “I think you suck.” And she was right. So I said, okay, great, I’m going to have the publicist book me on ten more shows. And my wife goes, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Why do you keep paying that lady, why you book yourself on those shows?” And I thought to myself, “Can I do that? Is it good?” I mean, do you have the authority to call up a TV show and book yourself, how do you do that? Isn’t that actually bad positioning? Doesn’t that make you look like a loser, if you call it the TV shows and try to book yourself on the show? How do you make them book you? And it took me months to figure out the answers to those questions. Literally months, of waking up at 2:30 the morning, going to my home office, getting on the phone, calling these newsrooms all around the country, most of the time nobody would answer, leaving messages, not having phone calls returned. Sending emails, not having any emails returned. It took months of trying to figure this out, until I finally booked my first show which was in Biloxi, Mississippi.

And that was the beginning. The first year I book seven shows. And my second year, I booked another 20 shows. So if you do the math, that was 31 shows in two years, my 32^nd appearance was on NBC New York and my 57^th appearance was on the Today Show and I’ve since done another ten appearances since then — I was just recently on…last week I was on Fox Business in New York City at their studios on Avenue of the Americas. It’s big deal. It’s a lot of fun and along the way I’ve totally become somebody. Now I’m not Tony Robbins. But in the world that that you and I live in, John, in the expert industry, in the authority marketing space, I have become somebody. And I’ve won awards from Dan Kennedy. I’ve spoken on the same stage as Dan Kennedy. I’m speaking at his Super Conference in a couple weeks as a matter of fact. And all of this was created, accelerated and made possible by my – really prescience — I hate to use a dollar word there but it was really some smart insight on my behalf that, “hey, I’m competing against the celebrity, the only way I’m going to ever be able to compete against celebrities is to become one”.

And it’s my business philosophy that really that is every entrepreneur’s situation, every single day. And the sooner you realize it, the sooner you begin to chip away at that impenetrable wall of attacking the celebrities in your category, the sooner you are going to start making progress and start working your way up the ladder of success, celebrity and becoming a real, potent business and entrepreneurial force in your career.

Starting With Local TV

 

John: And did you start with local TV?

 

 

Clint: It’s the only way anybody smart is going to start. I had a student, she did two appearances on local TV and then got a call from Good Morning America and was on Good Morning America for her third appearance. Over the past three plus years that I’ve been teaching — I’ve been teaching students, other authors, speakers, coaches and entrepreneurs how to book themselves on TV — my students have booked themselves on more than 2424 television appearances that I’m aware of, so far. And of those I’ve had three on Good Morning America, three on the Today’s Show, CNN, Dr. Oz, The Doctors, HLN, etc. Anybody who gets on any of those shows, gets into my hall of fame except for that girl who went on Good Morning America for her third appearance, because she had no business being there. She wasn’t good and if you go on a big show before you’re ready, it’s really detrimental to who and what you are.

And you know the biggest way it’s detrimental is it makes you think you’re good, it makes you think you’re somebody, it makes you think you’ve accomplished something, when really all you got was lucky. And that’s not how you get in my hall of fame. And that’s not how you make real progress. There are people, like there’s a pretty famous guy who wrote some article about a letter to his divorced wife. And his first appearance was on the Today Show. I haven’t seen him on anything else. And it’s been, I don’t know how many years. That’s not the way you build celebrity. That’s not the way you become Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins has done hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of television appearances. And that’s how you become somebody good. That’s how you become great on TV, that’s you become a real celebrity. And it’s not about luck, it’s about persistence, dedication, paying your dues and learning the craft of being somebody who goes on TV on a regular basis to create celebrity, positioning, marketing assets and deliver important messages to audiences in an effective way.

How Local TV Differs From National TV

 

John: How is the approach of getting on local TV different from national?

 

 

Clint: Local TV is one of the most beautiful things ever created by God on this earth.

 

 

John: Yes. That’s awesome.

 

 

Clint: It really is because you can get on local TV. You can. There is an actual formula. I call it my Magic Messenger Formula. If you put certain elements in your proposal, they cannot resist. You can deliver to a TV producer a package, a one page proposal on a PDF, of what you’re going to do on their show for four minutes and you can expect with some degree of certainty, and achieve on a pretty reliable basis, bookings on TV shows. I had a student on my coaching webinar last night. Every Wednesday night, I do a coaching webinar for my community. And one of my superstars Joyce Joya, she’s a grandmother of five. She started out a little over a year ago with my celebrity launch pad. And yesterday she did her 35^th television appearance, in a year.

John: Wow.

 

 

Clint: And she’s booked more than — she came to Launch Pad and booked ten of them. So she’s booked 25 of them without even being at my implementation event, just on her own. And seven of them were just in the last week off cold calls. I have discovered through trial and error, hard work, process of elimination, the exact procedure of how you call up a TV producer and get them to book you over the phone. What’s involved in that? What are the elements that you need? And what are the supporting documents that you need to make that happen? It’s what I call a Segment Proposal, that’s the one page PDF. You need that in order to be able to book yourself off cold calls. And even grandmothers can do it.

The Importance of Positioning and the Hook

 

John: Nice. How important is the positioning, the hook or angle, when you’re pitching ideas to journalists?

 

 

Clint: Positioning is everything. You have to be positioned as a credible guest. They have to be able to believe that you are the right person to come on their show and talk about that topic. So I believe that positioning is the number one task in all sales calls. Whether it would be to a journalist, selling yourself on being on their show, or being interviewed for their publication or a radio show or podcast or whatever, positioning is key. If you’re talking to a client or prospect, you must be properly positioned as the one who can solve their problem, and the one they look up to. So for example, I believe that the most important job of any entrepreneur is to position themselves as being higher status than their customers’ prospects and competition. People are only going to give you a lot of money for your products services, consulting, seminar tickets, books, whatever — they’re only going to give you a lot of money if they believe that you are higher status than them, and certainly in the topic in which you are trying to get the money.

If you want to be paid a lot of money as a consultant, you have to be higher status than the person who’s going to pay you. And you have to be higher status than your competition as well. There is no shortage of money in the world right now. Money’s plentiful. What’s not plentiful is time. What’s not plentiful is the opportunity to make mistakes. People don’t want to waste their time, they don’t want to make mistakes, they want to hire of the top person. They’re happy to pay them a lot of money. They actually feel better about paying you a lot of money because they figure, if I’m paying a lot of money, he must be worth it, he must be the right choice and he must be — it’s a reinforcement of their decision being the right decision. “Well, it was a little more than I wanted to pay but at least he was the right guy.” Because they don’t want to make a mistake and they don’t want to waste their time. So that’s all about positioning.

And then, you asked about hooks. Hooks are part of what I perceive to be as relevance. They have to decide, if you’re going to be on TV, say, in Las Vegas, why are they putting you on TV in Las Vegas next Thursday. Why Las Vegas and why next Thursday? You have to answer those questions because otherwise it’s not relevant. TV is about what’s happening today or tomorrow. So if you’re on TV next Thursday, what’s happening next Thursday or Friday, which is the reason why you’re on TV next Thursday? If it’s not, if it happened on Wednesday, it’s old news, they’re not interested, it’s bad positioning. If it happens two weeks from Thursday, that’s not relevant yet, we could all be dead two weeks from Thursday.

The real reality of it is the TV producer could be fired two weeks from next Thursday, especially if they put a segment on the air about somebody who’s only relevant two weeks from next Thursday. It’s not important to have a guest on, unless there is relevance. So that positioning plays into the hook, the hook is about relevance. Why does this matter to the audience in Las Vegas who’s watching the show right now? That’s about relevance.

Reaching Busy Journalists

 

John: And are the journalists just so over inundated with requests that you really don’t have much of a shot or do they need content, need your story potentially?

 

Clint: So, we had Celebrity Launch Pad last weekend in Los Angeles. And we had 14 participants, it’s a small group event. We only have 15 maximum. One guy didn’t show up. He was a doctor. For one excuse or not, I won’t go into all of his excuses but some people don’t show up because they just chicken out. And this is what happened with that doctor. He basically just chickened out. And it’s really too bad because he was perfectly set up. April is Arthritis Awareness month. And his topic is about Arthritis. He was going to rock it. But for whatever reason he didn’t show up — we had 14 instead of 15.

So during the course of my small group training program, Celebrity Launchpad, I bring in producers from local TV news and talk shows around the country to speak with my participants via Skype video on what we call the Producer Panel. So I’ll interview them about their station, I’ll ask them about which guests they’ve had, what do they look for, how important are local hooks etc. All important questions, and one of the questions I always ask is, how many emails you get every day or every week? And most of them are getting hundreds of emails. Some of them are getting a thousand emails a day. So are they overwhelmed? Well, it depends how bad they want you, it depends on if you know how to send emails and know how to get them opened.

So one of my participants is a guy named Damian Pelliccione, he is your gay media guru. He not only has a very good topic talking about LGBT apps and tech but he’s also a great performer and very charming and he knows how to play the game. And so this was last weekend. Here we are on Thursday, we just ended Sunday, he is already been confirmed with appearance dates for seven out of the ten shows that have invited him to come on their air as a result of meeting him at Celebrity Launchpad, including the Los Angeles Station.

John: That’s a lot of bookings, right away.

 

 

Clint: I mean, everybody gets booked. When you come to Celebrity Launchpad, we guarantee you’re going to a booked on at least three shows or else you get all your money back plus $500, and everybody gets invited on at least four shows. We’ve never had anybody get less than four shows. And even my hardest cases usually get five. But then what’s left is, you need to confirm an appearance date with the producer. And for some reason that’s where the emails, that’s where you’re talking about, do producers get overwhelmed by having so many emails. That’s where this email becomes an issue. But I’m telling you, if you are persistent, if you have the goods, if you know how to pitch, if you know how to create a proposal, if you know how to not take no for an answer and just make it happen; even within a week, you can get confirmed appearance dates on seven of ten shows and he’ll get them all.

And I’ve done a really great webinar for my membership on this very topic. I had a two hour webinar training. I said I do these weekly webinars for my community — I did a special two hour webinar about a year and a half ago with 12 of my most successful students. When you learn how to book yourself on TV, you’re no longer a messenger. You’re what I call a Magic Messenger. Because it’s magic to be able to book yourself on TV. So I had 12 of my Magic Messengers on this webinar, talking about their Ninja strategies for getting emails opened, voicemails returned and appearance dates confirmed. And man, there’s no magic involved. It’s about work, it’s about strategy, it’s about making it happen and I have this two hour webinar of 12 different people who have come through my program, just those people right there are responsible for about 12 — each of them has done, oh my goodness, probably about 400 or 500 bookings just for the 12 of them.

John: Whoa.

 

 

Clint: Yes. That’s part of what my people get in my community but are they overwhelmed? No, they’re not overwhelmed when it comes to having the goods.

 

 

Biggest Mistakes People Make When Booking TV Shows

 

John: What are the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re just getting that going and getting started?

 

 

Clint: The biggest mistake people make is trying to get on big shows first. That’s just stupid. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for the TV show that you’re trying to get on. It’s not good for your clients, because ultimately it’s not going to be the most productive way for you to learn how to be a great guest on TV and how to get your message out in an effective and powerful way. That’s mistake number one. Second mistake is, thinking that speaking on TV is the same as speaking in regular life.

A lot of times you go to these shows and they’ll say, don’t worry, don’t be nervous, just have a conversation with me and it will be great. Okay, great. There is some truth to that. But the bigger truth is that when you’re really, really great on TV, you’re not just having a plain conversation with a person. It’s a performance. And when you learn how to be a great performer on TV, the beauty of that is that, it’s a skill that can be transferred into the rest of your business career. I honestly believe that business is enhanced by show business. When you add some show to your business, your business is going to get better. You’re going to get more successful. You’re going to engage your clients and prospects more effectively and more powerfully. And when you engage them more, they will be more interested in what you’re doing and they’ll take your messaging in more. They’ll buy more. They’ll pay more. They’ll get better results. That’s for sure.

So I’d say that’s mistake number two, is thinking that there’s nothing to being on TV, you can just be your own regular self and beyond TV. I don’t believe that that’s true for most people. I believe that it is a skill that is developed and learned. I believe anybody can learn it. But I do believe that it is something that should be trained and developed and matured for everybody who is in business.

Overcoming Fear of Public Speaking on TV

 

John: And does fear or lack of confidence hold many of your clients back and how do they get over the fear of public speaking on TV?

 

 

Clint: It does hold a lot of clients back. I mean here’s a doctor who paid – I’m not sure if he was five installments of $1995 or if he was one payment of $8800. Okay, that’s what it costs to come to invest in Celebrity Launchpad. That’s the investment. And the guy just didn’t show up. And I’m telling you it’s because of fear. And fear masks itself in all kinds of circumstances and excuses. But the number one reason why people don’t enroll is because there’s some kind of fear. A lot of them have a fear of looking foolish or fat on television. And as a matter of fact, I just got an email from the grandmother last night because she was on the webinar. And I’ll read you the email from the grandmother. This is just so delightful. “PS — I also reached my weight goal. It took a year of ups and downs. People should not wait to take Celebrity Launchpad because of weight. Seeing yourself on TV is a great motivator. If you have anyone who is on the fence because of weight, have them talk to me.”

John: Nice. The grandmother’s going to kick your butt. I need to talk to her, I need her number.

 

 

Clint: A lot of people are afraid of looking foolish or not as good and not being as good looking as they want to be on TV. A lot of this came out of my work in the men’s groups. When I graduated from the Wharton Business School, I moved out to Hollywood to pursue the Hollywood dream. And that resulted in me driving a taxi for six years, to pay my rent and child support. And during that process, I eventually was able to extricate myself from that deep ditch of failure that I had created for myself in pursuing this dream and not having a mentor, thinking I could do it all by myself. Well, 13 years later, I was still behind the wheel of a taxi. And the way I got out of it was working with men’s power circles and going to men’s power events and rituals. And among the men, we had a saying, “is it your ego or is it your commitment”, which is it? Because you have to put your ego behind your commitment. Otherwise, you’re an addict. And a lot of people don’t want to go on TV because they don’t want to look foolish. Or they don’t want to look fat. That’s ego. And if you’re really a messenger, if your real goal is to help people with what you do with your product or service and for many entrepreneurs, fortunately, that’s what makes America so great is that we believe in our products and services. And we know that they will make people’s lives better.

If you really believe in your product or service, then get your ego out of your way and focus on your commitment of helping people look better or be better or live better or have a better life. However, get your ego out of your way and put the commitment up front and get on TV and start really making a difference in your career. Because your competition is Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Phil, Bobby Flay. All these people, these are your real competition. If you’re in Las Vegas and you have Mexican food stand, your competition is Bobby Flay because he’s got a Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas or in New York. You have to understand, you are competing against celebrities in every industry. And the only way to compete is to become one. If you can’t beat them, you’ve got to join them.

And the good news is that local TV can take you there. You start out on little shows like Biloxi Mississippi, you work your way up to medium sized shows like Las Vegas, San Diego, then you go to large shows like Phoenix. Then you go into the top ten markets. Like Chicago, LA, New York. If you can get on in New York, that’s almost like national TV and then you can start going on national shows.

John: So it’s a more reasonably comfortable way to do it. You have to get over your fear and go do it but you don’t have to and you shouldn’t even start at the top.

 

Clint: By the time I got on the Today’s Show, I’d been in every TV studio in America. It was as close as possible to being just one more day in one more TV studio. And if it hadn’t been that way, when I was sitting five feet away from Brooke Shields and she was asking me questions, from viewers that were not rehearsed – a viewer from Long Island has this question Clint, what do you say to this? I would have peed in my pants if I hadn’t been on so many TV shows, I promise you, it was a lot of pressure.

John: You probably don’t want to do that next to Brooke Shields.

 

 

Clint: You don’t, you don’t. It’s not the way to get the date with your dream girl. I’m telling you there are a thousand lights in the ceiling of that studio right there. Why do they put so many lights? Because of energy. Lights are energy. You have to learn how to handle that kind of energy. And it’s a process. It’s not easy and it’s not natural. It’s very interesting. I think Dan Kennedy is the one who says that it is natural behavior in completely unnatural circumstances. And that’s what they need. They need you to act natural, in a circumstance that’s completely not natural. It’s the opposite of natural, it’s completely contrived. A thousand lights in the ceiling, eight TV cameras from all different directions and angles, all kinds of technicians, a hundred people standing around in silence watching you, another 150 people outside the windows waving and trying to get on TV themselves, holding signs. All this stuff is going on and you’re trying to figure out, a viewer from Long Island wants to know how do I deal with the pain of a broken relationship? What do I know about that?

John: You need to stay undistracted despite the waves and beautiful Brooke Shields next to you and all that.

 

 

Clint: It ain’t easy.

 

 

John: Right. So, you’re saying that all of the practice and experience is critical because nobody can — maybe one in a million would just be natural in that experience?

 

Clint: I don’t think anybody would be natural in that experience. I don’t think anybody has a chance. The only chance you have to be outstanding and to be awesome and to get a piece of video that you like, a piece of video that’s going to deliver all kinds of marketing assets. Let’s take a look at what do you get from a video like that what are the assets that you get? Well, first of all, you will be meet people who’ve actually seen you on the big show and that’s incomparable value. Those people are looking at you in a whole different way than everybody else. Then what else you get? You get a marketing video, you take the clip of you on the Today’s Show or any TV show and it’s a video. There are services that you can pay to send you a downloadable file of that video in HD, that’s your marketing video. And you can then take out pieces of it like my business card is one of the frames from my appearance on the today show where I’m smiling, I’m using my hands, it says my name, it says my book title, it says the Today Show behind it. I mean, how awesome is that? That’s my business card that I hand people. Then what else can you do with that? Then you can take that photo and put it on your website. You take the clip and embed it on your website. You can use it like, I have taken that photo and I will include that as an image in an email that I’ll send out and write a story about that experience or talk about how that was part of my journey. There’s so many ways to repurpose these videos. And the value is incomparable, especially when you consider how they last forever.

Like I was on the Today Show December 31^st 2013. I’m still talking about it today. I’m still using the images today. I’m still using the video today. It’s never going to get old.

John: Just a story from, literally just yesterday, one of our paid search customers where we’re running their Google ads for them, said, “this is going good but I’m expecting a little more and I wanted you to give me even more conversion tips”. And so I went back to an email that I had had sent him and conversations we had had in person. And I said, “look, here is your competitor”, and I’ve told this person this several times and kind of, to be honest, gave up a little bit, because I said “here’s your competitor, and on the home page of their website it has about eight or ten logos of media where they’ve really been featured from local to national and a lot of other credibility factors, video testimonials of their customers and things”. But the media and the mentions on TV and in the media is such a powerful way to increase the value of when you’re buying clicks from Google ads or you’re doing the ever changing and complex routines to do search engine optimization to get yourself up at the top of Google, if you’re doing all of that and when they get to your website and you’re not credible, you’re killing yourself right there.

Some of our customers don’t quite get it when we say either you can pay us to do PR or can do it yourself, but you need some of that to be credible, otherwise you’re throwing a good chunk of your paid search dollars or SEO dollars away.

Clint: It’s credibility and it’s going back to that question that you asked me at the beginning, “how important is positioning”? That’s positioning right there and there’s no better positioning that you can possibly have than celebrity positioning. You need that. You 100% need it.

 

The SPEAK Formula

 

John: And you said you have — you mentioned one formula, you have other formulas like SPEAK – I don’t know if you still use that but I like that in your book on getting on local TV.

 

Clint: Thank you. I’ve done numerous TV appearances on my SPEAK formula, where S is Stories, tell stories. P is practice, you have to practice and rehearse. E is energy,  television is all about having energy, television is energy. A, awareness, this could be the last TV appearance or podcast appearance or stage performance of your entire life, and you have to give it everything you’ve got. And then K stands for keep talking. No matter what happens, people don’t know that you made a mistake as long as you just keep talking. If you focus on the fact that you made a mistake then that becomes the thing that they remember but if you just keep talking, then they’ll pay attention to what you say and your message, and not what you think might have been a mistake. There is no mistake there is only what there is and how you react and perform. And that’s the Speak formula. And that was a really great formula.

But here’s the interesting thing, I have another formula. I recently released a book. It’s available now for preorder, it’s called 21 Performance Secrets of Donald Trump. And love him, hate him, whatever you think about Donald Trump, he has changed America and may even change world history because of his performance skills as a speaker on stages and on television. And what I’ve done is I’ve gone through and I’ve analyzed, “what are the secrets that he uses? How does he do it? What are his tricks techniques, methodologies and favorite little tweaks and hacks that he uses to be a great performer?” And so I was just on Fox Business Channel in New York with that.

Here’s the interesting thing, I have the SPEAK formula and the SPEAK formula is great. And it’s got me so far on TV in Phoenix — that’s the biggest city I’ve gone on with that. However, once I started talking about the Performance Secrets of Donald Trump, I’ve already done two national TV appearances and the book hasn’t even come out yet. So it just shows you the value of adding celebrity to what you do, and tying in with timely, relevant news angles.

John: Yes, absolutely. Trump is a master of the media. In fact I saw this funny little meme the other day, it had a picture of Donald Trump in front of a wall and it said “think I can’t get Mexico to pay for the wall? I got the media to fund my campaign.”

Clint: [laughs]

John: Again, love him or hate him, he has mastered and manipulated the media. He has found a way to get on every show constantly. Anyway, I will leave it that or we’ll probably spiral into a whole another zone there. And so how do small businesses get started booking themselves on local television and finding the TV stations to go after?

 

Finding the TV Stations to Target

 

Clint: Well, first of all, the last show you want to go on is in your own hometown. Unfortunately, that’s the easiest show to get on.

 

 

John: Interesting.

 

 

Clint: That’s the easiest show to get on because you’re local. And one of the things that people don’t know about local TV is that they consider themselves a public service of the community. So if you’re a CPA in Podunk Iowa and you call up ABC affiliate in Podunk Iowa and say, hey, I’m a CPA and I have ten tips, I have five tips for the community about how they can save money on their taxes, they’ll put you on TV one time because you’re local. But if you’re not good that was your one time. Thank you very much. Never again. If you’re great, then you can come back. So my philosophy is don’t go on your local hometown until you’re going to be great. Until you’ve already done your same exact segment 10, 15, 20 times in other cities. They don’t open Broadway shows on Broadway, they open Broadway shows in Fort Lauderdale, in Cincinnati. And they take them on a national tour to perfect them and make them better and better and better. And that’s exactly what you should do with your show which is your three minute segment on whatever your tips are. So the last place you want to go on is your own hometown.

Then I say, all right, how do you determine where you want to go? Well, take a look at Southwest Airlines route map and see where they fly too cheap and start calling the cities where you can get to inexpensively, either by car or bus or on Southwest Airlines, because they’re the predominant low cost carrier. So that’s how I figured it out, that’s how I planned my media tour, according to the route map of Southwest Airlines. And I advise my students to do the exact same thing. Where does Southwest fly to that you can get to cheap that you don’t care, you are going to go there, you are going to spend one $197 on round trip airfare, 100 bucks on a hotel, 50 bucks on food and transportation. There you go, for less than 400 bucks in costs, you now have an appearance on ABC or NBC or CBS or Fox. And you don’t pay to go on the shows. All you pay for is hotel and accommodations and travel and food. And there you go. So that’s how I advise my students to do it.

Alternatively, you can rent a car and do a little regional media tour. You do whatever you want. How do you find the stations? Go on the internet, everything’s on the internet.

John: And those are typically three minute segments or what is typical?

 

 

Clint: Yes, generally, a segment would be three, three and a half, four minutes long, generally.

 

 

What Makes a Good TV Guest?

 

John: And then what makes a good TV guest?

 

 

Clint: Great guests, first of all have high energy. TV is all about energy. And you need to have a lot of energy and like I said earlier it is not about a regular conversation, you need to be a performer. A great TV guest understands that this is not a conversation, its showbiz. So you want to try to have costumes, you want to include celebrities and have appropriate local and timely hooks. You want to have props and demonstrations. All of these things go into having a great segment. And what’s the most important thing about a great TV guest? A great TV guest understands that this is not the last TV appearance you ever going to do, it’s probably not going to be your “big break”. It’s just one of many in a long series of performances that you’re going to do you want TV. And you’re just dedicated to the process of being a great TV guest.

John: And what are you working on lately?

 

 

Clint: My big push is with the 21 Performance Secrets of Donald Trump. It’s going to be available to download on Kindle on April 15^th. You can preorder the book as a paperback or on Kindle. That’s my focus. I also have Authority Building and Status Enhancing events, where people can come and speak at Harvard. We did one in December and everyone was so thrilled with the Harvard event. And Harvard was so thrilled with it that they’ve asked us to do another one. So I’m very excited to be enrolling people to come to our entrepreneurial, mastermind and speaking events at the Harvard Faculty Club, it’s called Business Expert Forum at Harvard Faculty Club and it’s going to be July 29^th and 30^th. That’s basically my main focus is the book 21 Performance Secrets of Donald Trump. And enrolling people to come and change their careers and their status, and raise their status forever by masterminding with other great thought leaders. And speaking at Harvard.

John: And I can confirm your events are top notch and well run. What’s the event site or your main website?

 

 

Clint: statusfactory.com

 

 

John: Yes. So again, there are events for getting into TV and local and national TV and speaking at Harvard and places like that so I definitely suggest people check those out. And thanks for speaking to us today, Clint. Much appreciated.

 

Clint: Rock on, man. This was awesome. And I encourage you and everyone who is listening to this, to keep in mind, who’s the celebrity who’s eating your lunch?

 

John: Nice. Well, I will definitely go on April 15^th and download the 21 Performance Secrets of Donald Trump, I can’t wait, it sounds awesome.

 

Clint: Thanks man, you can preorder it right now.

 

 

John: Oh really, yes. You can go right now, do you want people to buy it on a specific day or just preorder any time?

 

 

Clint: Go ahead and preorder it, it’s on Amazon.

 

 

John: All right, good. I will definitely get that today. And I hope everyone enjoyed today’s discussion. Check out workingdemosite.com/authority for interviews and information on Authority Marketing and subscribe and review our podcast on iTunes and Stitcher. I’m John McDougall. See you next time on the Authority Marketing Roadmap.