Peter Winick outlines how thought leaders, speakers, and consultants must balance three competing interests: the audience wants engagement and education, the buyer wants business results, and the thought leader wants to promote their own services. He frames it as a riddle of keeping all three satisfied without compromising any.
Hi there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and here's the idea that I'd like to share with you today, and that's this: as a thought leader, a speaker, an author, an advisor, a consultant, what have you, there are 3 distinct parties that you're serving simultaneously, and this could get complicated. In fact, it could get overwhelming. So the 3 parties are, number one, the end user, right? So if you're a keynote speaker, it's the The proverbial butt in the seat, the audience that needs to be engaged, needs to be entertained, needs to be educated, needs to, you know, sort of interact with your work and enjoy it and have a great experience. There's the buyer, not to be confused with the end user, but the person or the entity or the organization that's actually paying your bill. They might have a different objective than an audience member would, but you have to figure out what are their needs, what are they looking to do. To present you and your ideas to a population to serve a business objective. How are you sort of aligning with those goals and making sure the buyer's happy? And then the last one, and this is the one that gets neglected the most, is yourself. As the author, as the thought leader, what is it that you're doing when you're putting your work out there that is self-serving but not at the expense of the audience or the buyer? What are the things that you could be doing so people understand all the other services that you have, all the other offerings you have, whether they be digital or whether it be advisory or whatever the case may be, in a way that is not salesy, in a way that's not tacky. But how can you— and this is the riddle that I'm asking of my thought leader community out here— solve the riddle of making 3 different communities happy? And those communities are the audience, the buyer, and yourself. Love to hear your thoughts. Thank you.
