Designing the Long Tail of Thought Leadership | Tom Ziglar | 682

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Tom Ziegler. Tom doesn't really need an introduction, but I'll give a brief one. He, his, his father was Zig Ziglar, who is a legend in the business. Tom's mission has— he spent 30 years inside of Ziegler on both the inside of the house and the outside of the house, sort of front of the house and back of the house as a thought leader in his own right, as well as what I'll call business operations CEO lead there. So there are very few people that have done that and done that as well as Tom has done it over the amount of years that he has. So thank you, Tom. Thanks for coming on board today.

Peter, it's great to be here. Uh, I like hanging out with thought leaders and people who understand the challenge of communicating from the front of the room and inspiring people smarter than themselves.

So love that, love that. So give us a brief tour down memory lane, right? So you've been around this space long enough to remember things like cassettes and DVDs. So everybody says, well, it's all different today, but I would argue it is but it's not. So give me a little bit of the history and, and the context by which the organization has operated and continues to do so.

Yeah, so the company, we are running in our 6th decade. So think about early '70s, Dad founded the company. He wrote his book, See You at the Top, came out in 1974.

Wow.

So 51 years now, uh, that that book has been out, just Amazing. And I, so I was 7 when that book came out. Uh, wait, I was 8. So it was '73, '74. And so I tell people I've been in the business 60 years cuz I was born into it, right? Going to all the events and, you know, hearing it.

And it's not the typical family business where like the dad's an electrical contractor and says, son, I'll teach you wiring, right? Like, so that's, that, that's a thing in and of itself.

Yeah. So, you know, going and hearing the legends that I didn't even know were legends speak, you know, Norman Vincent Peale and Paul Gabbey and Art Linkletter and all of that. And, you know, a corporation would have him come in and speak and I would go and we did. I remember I was a kid. This is, this is really memory lane. I was like 12 or 13 and I think the Queen Mary was docked in, is it Long Beach? Out in California. Um, and they have, uh, they had a ballroom on there. And so he did a presentation, and I'm 12, and he says, hey, I want you to run the product table. And so it was cassette tapes. Yeah, right. And this, there's a package, and it was like $100, and everybody paid cash back then. So think about that. Who pays cash now, right? I was 12 years old, and we're done. And he says, well, how'd we do? And I'm looking around, I go, well, we sold it all. And I pulled out of my pocket, I had like $9,000 $1,000 of cash in my pocket.

Wow.

When I was 12. And so what 12-year-old gets to have that experience? Went to college, started working in the business after college, really to support a golf habit. Uh, worked in the, in the warehouse, and then I was in cassette production and duplication. So we made our own audio programs, you know?

Yeah.

So the cassette tapes, if you're listening to this and you've got an old Zig Ziglar cassette tape, my fingerprints might be on it. I was, Putting— I was running the labeler machine.

But think, think about in those days, right? If you were a lifelong learner, if you wanted to consume content, not to sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but it's so easy today to get access to anything good, bad, and ugly, right? Like whether, whether it's YouTube or whether it's podcast or whether it's books or like the accessibility of information is amazing. In those days, you really had to be committed to your own development, right? And say, you know what? I'm going to not only invest my time, but my dollars, because, you know, $100, you know, you mentioned that story. There's a zillion dollars back then. But the people who are committed to it, and I could, I could see it in my eyes of people I remember driving around with, with you'd get in their car with them and oops, the cassette tape would pop on and it's, oh, hold on, let me pause that because they already had the plan. I'm going to get through this program this week on my commute or in between seeing clients and, and all that.

Yeah, Dad called that automobile university. So, right, you know, you plug the tape in and you're listening to it where you're going. Uh, and a lot of millionaires were made.

Yes.

Go university, right? Just sales skills. Just to show you how different it is, we've got a tool called Zig.ai, and all we did, we took like 15 of Dad's manuscripts, 50 hours of audio content, we transcribed, we put it all into Zig.ai. And so it's in a safe environment. It's, you know, so you can ask it, you can prompt it using an AI language, but it only gives you Zig answers. And so in the old days, right?

But, but stay there a second because the, in the old days to get to what you needed or what you wanted, you had to do it, you know, in, in the sequence of the cassette tape. You might have to listen to like whatever, 8 hours of tapes. And then you would ask somebody after, hey, what, what was most valuable to you from that? And you might say 5 things and I might say 5 things and they're totally different, but you're not right and I'm not wrong right now that the ability to take AI to go through somebody with a depth of a body of work and say, what I need to know right now is whatever the situation is with this client, how might I respond to that? Or how might I deal with that in a professional manner?

I'll give you a perfect example. Dad's goal setting system is legendary. The 7-step Ziegler goal setting system. Yep.

Yes.

And, you know, you could listen to a whole hour program and get all 7 steps and get motivated and inspired. Well, that's in our Zig AI. So, yeah, I went— one of our coaches went in there because our coaches use it. And this is the question they asked it. They said, could you give me Zig Ziglar's 7-step goal setting program, but in the language that an 8-year-old would understand? Wow. Because their client had an 8-year-old and the client said, my kid's starting to set goals. How do I teach them how to do this? And so, boop, it pops out like 2 seconds and it changes the name of the program from Goal Setting and Achievement. It changes it to How to Get What You Want. Wow. So isn't that perfect for an 8-year-old? Like, here are the 7 steps you got to do that you got to get what you want. So yeah, it's a, it's the same content, but our patience level is, is so much different now. You know, we want that little soundbite. And then I often wonder, is that really the best way to learn it? I want that quick information, but I've got to get the mind and the heart in the same place. And when you hear somebody like an author, a thought leader, or somebody like a Zig Ziglar, Yeah. And you get the context of the story and why it's important and some of the trauma they had to go through in order to get there to make that happen. And then some examples of people who did it and what they got out of it. Yeah, that takes 30 minutes, but you walk out of there with a totally different level of belief than if it just pops out the 7 steps.

Yeah. And I think I'd love your take on this. That it's not an either or, it's context. When I have time to sit with a, with a, you know, cup of coffee and, and as, as I try to do almost every day and read a, read a book for an hour or two, that's a different experience I have with that author. I'm getting their voice, I'm getting their tone. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm looking for the nuance, you know, I'm letting them take my hand and sort of guide me at their pace. Then there are other times I'm like, geez, I wonder what so-and-so, the world's greatest negotiator, would say about the situation I'm in and give me that recommendation. Or actually, let me get 5 of the best negotiators on AI and create my own virtual board or whatever. Like, that's the kind of cool stuff we can do. And it's not that I don't think one beats the other. I think you need to do both if you're, if you're an actual lifelong learner.

I 100% agree.

Well, that was boring.

Okay. Yeah. So my, the reason, the reason I question it isn't that that's the way to do it. It's just that I don't know if you notice, but people are lazy. Yeah, sure.

I won't tell if you won't, but yeah.

But I mean, it's human nature, you know? Oh, that's, that's what I need. That's all it is. And so I view AI as my thought partner.

Yeah.

And so I will often ask it a question and then say, ask me 5 more questions that you need to get the right context.

So stay there with the thought partner, because one of the things that you do and one of the things many of my clients do and many of the thought leaders we all follow do is speak, right? They're keynoters, right? And what's cool about being a keynoter, I think, is, okay, you've got your thing, right? So they're, this is my, this is what they hired me to talk about, blah, blah, blah. But it is ridiculous to assume that one day you're gonna be an expert and be able to connect to aeronautical engineers, the next day car salesmen, and the next day multifamily business owners in the manufacturing sector in the Midwest. So using that AI as a sparring partner and say, hey, How do I bring these 5 ideas to life in a way that would resonate most to a newly minted MBA in a consulting background? Is that, is that kind of what you're saying?

Yeah. So there's 2 things that I love to do. In fact, right after the first version of ChatGPT came out, yep, I was speaking to an association of homeowners associations. And of course, if you're part of a homeowners association, you just love homeowners associations, right? Because they're so friendly and kind and nice and They always do exactly what you want, right? Well, yeah, it's the opposite. So these are like 400 people who run homeowners associations, and so they're constantly getting grief from homeowners, right?

So they're, they're basically the school crossing guards of the homeowner community.

Yeah. And I'm just sitting there going, oh my gosh, what a tough, you know, that is a hard roll to be in. And so ChatGPT had just come out, and so I write in to ChatGPT, what are the top 10 complaints that people give to their homeowners association? Oh, that's cool. Yeah, right. And so I go in and I do research and I interviewed the host and, you know, who's the audience. Yeah, I have this whole thing of questions. So I walk in and I say, um, You know, normal standard intro, because I'm going to talk about what I want to talk about, but I want to be in the context of that room. And so I said, hey, you know, I'm just curious, do you know anybody who deals with this? And I had the 10 things on the thing, and the whole room— because this is when AI was new, right? People in that room, probably less than 3% of them even knew how I got the list, right? It's a little different now. And they're like, wow, that's amazing. Did you used to work in this industry? Where did you come up with? Yeah, I said, well, you know, this is how I did it. And I interviewed some other people here and here are the top 3 I want to talk about. Such a great way to do that. The other way that I bridge the room is, and this is because of COVID okay? When COVID hit, I ended up doing about 300 webinars in the first 4 or 5 months.

Wow.

All I was doing was calling all of our clients, uh, all the people we support and say, hey, do you need some energy? Do you, you know, do you want to get your team together? They're all kind of out there. And these were not complicated or long webinars. They might be 20 minutes, 30 minutes. They weren't hard. So I was, I was doing a lot of days, 3 or 4 of them, but that taught me the skill of presenting and reading chat at the same time.

Right, right.

And so just by incorporating all their chat comments into my presentation and say, hey Peter, that's great. I'd repeat what you said and say, you know, well, what do you mean by that? Let me tell you what I think it means, blah, blah, blah. And then, and now everybody's kind of leaning in because they could be next. And so I started using tools in my presentations like Mentimeter and other things where people could make comments and it would start popping up on the board.

Right, right.

Or if there were 20 tables in the room, I'd take a pause and say, each table, come up with one question you want to ask about that last thing. And then the tables would put it up. And it just let me know that as a presenter, a lot of it is different. If you're just, I got 30 minutes to do a keynote, you can't do it.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if you got a little bit longer and you give space for her to lay a foundation and then get people to interact, it's a lot meatier for the room, right?

And for me, well, and that relevance that, you know, makes it— because oftentimes you come in as the outsider and a lot of what you're presenting to them is in their mind theoretical, and they want to get to the applied. You're getting them to that applied much quicker now. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. I wanna move to the business of thought leadership. So again, 6 generations, you know, 6 decades. What are you seeing? What's the same and what's different? And where do you think the opportunities are? If you're a thought leader thinking, what are the business models I should entertain? And what are the ones I should probably give up on? It takes harder to get the same juice out of the lemon. Yeah.

I had a conversation with Roy Vaden on this, and I also had him— he said, you know, in the— he was talking about podcasts specifically, but I think it's even broader, you know, other platforms as well. He says, you know, uh, you're either an entertainer or you're an encourager or you're educational. And most of the airwaves right now are being dominated by the entertainers, and it's a rare combination. That is a hard skill. And so that's why the people, the authors who write incredible books that are really— yeah, you don't know about them because they don't have that entertaining flair. And then there's people who build a, uh, an audience and a following because they're such encouragers, right? They're just lifting up and lifting up. Uh, and then there's the education people who can go into a niche and really give people the tools and the insight on how to do what that is. Now the good news is the education niche has the long tail. That's— yeah, that's where you can build a business.

Yep. Yep.

And so when he said all of that, I said, So that explains it. And why was Zig Ziglar the force of nature? Because he was all three. Yeah, it was the ultimate. Like, nobody had more fun on stage than he did, and the audience had fun watching him, right? Just from an education— I mean, an entertaining and then encouraging. It's like every 5 minutes you were getting encouraged, right? Like, people would leave thinking he was speaking just to me. And then when they looked at their notes and they got the program, we had a, I think the guy was from Harvard. It was a Harvard professor and he wrote us a letter and he said, hey, I got your dad's program. Or he said, not, not your dad's. He said, I got Zig's program. I think it was How to Stay Motivated. And he said, he said, you know, I'm old school business academia and I was gonna, I was gonna listen to it and write a paper on it to tear it down. And he said, but as I went through it and I saw the psychological educational scaling and leveraging and ladders that were created, he said, this is like one of the deepest programs I've ever seen, and you don't even know it.

Right, right.

So, so Dad had that education ability there, and so that's, that's the home run, I think, for mere mortals. Figuring out the educational piece, even though it's a slower build, that's the, that's the best chance for long-term success.

Yeah, I love that. And I, I, I think that if people are honest with themselves, they fall into probably one of those buckets and then they need to say, what are the other ones I need to fulfill? Because, you know, I've been around some brilliant educators, but you know, it's like watching paint dry sometimes. The entertainers to me are interesting, but I'm not getting enough out of that. Like, like, you know, the woo-woo and the motivational and whatever. And then the engage, you know, the, the encouragers. There's a time and place for that, but I think if you're strong in one of those categories, how do you develop the other components of it? Right? And I think that's an interesting piece because I think the best thought leaders out there are actually educators. That know how to encourage and entertain. Because if you don't learn from them, I might as well sit here and watch Netflix, right? That's entertainment, right?

I'm friends with Seth Godin. Yeah, Seth has a concept, he calls it the scalability of trust.

Yeah.

And he says, you know, my priority isn't profit, it isn't revenue, it's the scalability of trust. And so he says every interaction I have, whether it's a speech, a phone call, a text, an email, anything. He says, I, I ask myself before I hit send, is that message scaling trust? Am I building a little trust with them in this? And so that's a huge goal, right? And that is a powerful thing. And so if you just do what you just said, and you said, you know what, my goal is to scale trust, to solve problems, and to be encouraging, educational, and entertaining in the process, wherever your strength is, that's going to be easy. But we all need to stretch into those other things. So I'm dry, I'm a nerd, so I've got a lot of nerd jokes. Uh, so my entertainment catches people by surprise and they like that.

Well, but that's interesting as well because, you know, Even the word entertainment is subjective. What I find entertaining is not what you find entertaining. So, but I think when you think about it in the, in, in the context of a thought leader, entertaining is high energy, charisma, whatever. You know, I like that the self-deprecation of, hey, I'm a nerd. Okay. Well, it doesn't mean you can't be entertaining, right? Doesn't mean that you can't be, do it in a way that is authentic to you, right? Because if you tried to be something you're not, people are going to get that. And I sometimes I see thought leaders. Actually, I wouldn't even be more, more keynote or motivational where they've in essence created a character that only lives on the stage. And as soon as the, you know, lights are off and you get them privately, it's like, wow, that's, that's just a role they play at a moment in time. That's not fun. I love the folks that are, you know, they might be a little bit more on when they're on stage, but it's the same whether you're having a, you know, having dinner with them after or on a conversation or on a text than when they're on, you know, on their A-game on stage.

Yep, I'm with you. That is in the industry of kind of the higher-end speakers and things.

Yep.

That was one of the things that frustrated my father, and we see more often than we like to, and that is it's not that they're just, you know, one type of personality on stage and one type off stage. It's actually that they teach one set of values on stage, but then they treat people different.

Yes.

That is, um, that's very disappointing and it happens way, way too often.

Well, and I think it's easy because the cadence of, you know, a keynote by very definition is transactional. And I think the really good keynoters, not from a, are they the best on stage, but as a profession, they're reaching out to that client saying, what can I do to make you successful? What are the points that you wanna make, want me to elevate? What's the takeaway? Because I know I can put on a good show, But what would the best performance that I can give to help you meet your objectives and your goals and get your people thinking differently? 'Cause you're just a, you're, you're of service to them. It's not about you. And I think the, the, you know, they're, they're, listen, there's certain egomaniacs that are attracted to this business for obvious reasons, but never forgetting that you're of service to the client and they're paying you a lot of money to help them get something done.

Yeah. So I'm going to tell a story, uh, about this exact scenario and love it. So years ago, like, like 30 years ago, uh, dad called Miss Lori. Miss Lori was dad's assistant. Still works with us. She's been with us like 47 years now.

Oh my God.

And he says, Miss Lori, can you count all of the testimonials that we've gotten? And this is really before email. So the vast majority of them were letters that were mailed in paper.

Yeah.

And so she called him back the next day, started laughing and said, Mr. Z, there's too many to count. We're going to have to weigh them. I mean, like, there were a bunch of them. But Dad laughed and he said, well, could you do me a favor? Skim as many of them as you can and find out what was it that changed their life?

That's a good question.

And for every person who said the keynote changed their life, 99 said it was the program or the product or the book or the course. And so this is like the first thing that we've got to understand if we're giving keynotes is we've got to ask ourselves, are we in the keynote business or the life-changing business? Peter Winick.

Yeah. No, and I think that's right. And I think the reality is, I don't care how good you are on stage, you know, in 40 minutes, you're not gonna change somebody's life. You might, you might awaken them to do things.

Right.

And then they'll take it on. But the programs are the ones that are gonna drive the behavior change that push the business outcomes and the personal outcomes. Right? Because you gotta do the heavy lifting.

So then here's another like sideways look. So let's say you've got a 40-minute keynote. Mhm. Some people might spend 10 hours preparing for that keynote, like honing it in, practicing, and customizing it. Some people might spend more. And then you have a call to action. And so the way it usually works is you spend 9 hours and 57 minutes on the presentation and then 3 minutes on the call to action, which is Oh, I've got a book at the book table, come see me.

Or yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or look, here's a QR code, I'll send you this thing for free. If you're in a life-changing business, it would probably be better if you spent 9 hours on the call to action, right, and 1 hour on that. And so I get invited both places. I get invited where I can speak and sell something from the front.

Yep.

Or I go into corporations Can't sell anything from the front, right?

Right, right.

But the call to action in either situation is so important because it's what people— we inspire them to take action in that keynote.

Yeah.

And the call to action is the direction for them to go take that action, and that action is then the life change. So yeah, I always, uh, when I'm talking with a corporate client, I'm like I always ask the question. So I come in, you get, you give me an A+, great job. What's different 30 days, 90 days, 180 days, a year from now? And then how do, how are you going to make that different? They don't have an answer. 90% of the time they don't have an answer. There is no follow-through program. I said, well, my, my goal is to be significantly different a year from now, can I show you how? Right?

I love it.

I mean, that's, that's what it is. But, but our mindset, that's why keynoters— the keynote is critical and you got to land it, you got to kill it.

Yeah.

But the next step is even more important because that's where life change happens. It won't happen exactly in the room.

Exactly. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you, uh, the trip down memory lane as well as your experiences and your stories. So thank you for your time, Tom. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Peter.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.