Peter Winick discusses positioning Lightspeed learning platform to Chief Learning Officers at Fortune 1000 companies. The addressable market is just a few thousand decision-makers facing shrinking budgets and pressure to prove ROI. Success means building a narrative-driven content strategy that reaches them at CLO conferences and through specific influencer circles, not broad marketing.
Chapters
Using Lightspeed, let's use Lightspeed. If Lightspeed— and you're familiar with the platform? Yeah, very familiar. So it took me a minute to get you to see that there is a little bit of a difference between Lightspeed and everything else out there. Sure. How would we leverage thought leadership if I were to stop joking around and cussing and put on a suit again? Because I used to have one.
Just one?
Yeah. So if I all of a sudden shaved and became Mr. High level, Yale. I chose my words wisely, you know, didn't say a lot that I do, which would be the smart thing to do. How would I leverage thought leadership to blow up my business?
Well, so let's go back to the avatars. Your primary avatar now is you're selling to people that are selling to others.
That's one, right?
That's one. Okay, but let's go with that avatar. I would develop an avatar of who are the most important corporate buyers. And maybe, and I don't know, I might change my mind, but let's say it's the chief learning officer types at Fortune 1000 organizations. People that are spending— I mean, their job is to educate the entire population at Unilever, 400,000 people, at IBM, at like— that's what they do all day. They try to get them better at their jobs, not because they care about them learning philosophy or whatever, but What is it that I need to invest in my people to do their jobs better to drive business outcomes? So, I would be thinking about those as the client avatars. And then, the pain points that are in, we would have to find a couple of pain points. What are they struggling with? Well, my learning budget's consistently getting cut because the company wants to spend more money on marketing. Well, the CEO and the board is now requiring us to show impact and ROI studies more than we used to. Well, I'm not really sure how these millennials and Gen Zs and all that learn compared to how Gen X and boomers learned, right? Those are some pain points. And then I would say, well, the solution to all those problems are use a system like Lightspeed to more effectively teach your population more things more often at a cheaper price, right? And I would need to create the narrative and the storyline vis-à-vis thought leadership to tell that story and make sure that everything you did was about telling that story. So I'd shut down dropping bombs and all you would be doing all the time is creating content that speaks to those people about those things. So there's events that you'd be going to, that you don't even know exist today. Where are CLOs hanging out? I don't know. There's CLO conferences, there's learning events, there's PSYOPS, a conference, I think it's in Atlanta in a couple weeks. So we'd figure out where are these people that I need to influence? And they're not millions. If by definition there's 1,000 Fortune 1,000s, my math ain't that good, but that's the number, and they each have one CLO, there's 1,000 people and maybe they each have 2, 3, 4, 5 underlings that I need to influence as well. My whole universe is about how do I impact those 5,000 people? Period.
