TRP 338: Earning Client Trust with Thought Leadership with Bill Sherman

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by legal dealmaker, author, and professional speaker, Scott Love. You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, and my name is Scott Love. Thanks for joining me on the show. Our special guest today is Bill Sherman. He's the lead co-author of the book, The Thought Leadership Handbook.

[00:00:38] I've read this book. I'd highly recommend this. If you're a professional where you've done some thought leadership, you need to read this book. If you're a professional that has done a lot, this book will help you as well. This is an intellectual approach to digging deep into thought leadership, not just how to do it, but why to do it and more. Our topic title today is Earning Client Trust with Thought Leadership. Bill Sherman is a consultant that has been working with professionals in a wide variety of organizations

[00:01:07] with different intentions and goals to reach those goals through thought leadership. He brings a sophisticated approach, and I think he's someone that can help you. If you're interested in ordering Bill's book, which I'd highly recommend, go to the show notes. You'll be able to connect with him directly and order his book today. Get started. You're going to enjoy it, and it's going to stay on your bookshelf for quite some time.

[00:01:29] As always, this podcast is sponsored by SurePoint Legal Insights, formerly known as Leopard Solutions, turning legal intelligence into opportunity. And the show is also sponsored by The Rainmaking Magazine, now entirely complimentary, no fee required, no subscription dues needed. For the intellectually driven and results focused professional who wants to be the number one professional services provider in their niche. Start your free subscription today.

[00:01:58] Visit therainmakingmagazine.com to set up your access and chart your course to greater rainmaking success. I hope you get some great ideas from my conversation with Bill Sherman today. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love with The Rainmaking Podcast. Our special guest today is Bill Sherman, and I'm excited to have Bill here today. We're talking about thought leadership, and we're talking with Bill who is the leader author of the book, The Thought Leadership Handbook.

[00:02:25] Bill, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Scott, great to be here. This is great. I know that we've had a lot of guests who are business development consultants, coaches. I don't think we've had anybody that's written a book as robust as yours. And this book actually fills space on the shelf in stores that's empty where you never really see a handbook. So I wanted to say props to you. I've read your book. I'd highly recommend it. And let's kind of dig into it here.

[00:02:52] I wanted to kind of set up our conversation because we've got experts who are professional services providers that are true experts in their field. How do you think these experts can use thought leadership to migrate away from expert to a thought leader? What do you think about that, Bill? How's that for a good start? Yeah, that's a great start, right?

[00:03:14] So professional service in many ways has two functions, deep expertise, and then that relational building, understanding the client, understanding the next opportunity. But you're constantly making sure that you stay relevant, right? Okay.

[00:03:33] If you think about thought leadership, thought leadership is a way to get expertise out into the world, not only among current clients, but prospective clients as well, so that you can influence their thinking before they're ready to make a buying decision, right?

[00:03:54] So the way I typically define thought leadership is create impact through ideas, often without positional authority. So how do you get the ideas out there? How do you get people thinking about something they might not be thinking about yet or looking around a corner that they're focused on today rather than next quarter, next year and help them prepare?

[00:04:21] When you do that consistently and you're on message, you build a deeper relationship rather than, hey, can I take you out for dinner again and let's catch up? I mean, those conversations are lovely. But at the same time, if someone sees you as deeply relevant to their personal success or their business's success and growth, you're on speed dial, right? Yeah. That's a good way to set that up. And I like the deep intellectual perspective that you brought with that, that it's more than just posting on LinkedIn.

[00:04:51] I think I like the way you set that up, Bill. It's just fantastic. Let's kind of dig into that a little bit. When we look at thought leadership, what I see, because I do recruiting, I recruit corporate and finance partners for big firms. I do law firm mergers. I read a lot of partner bios and there might be on their law firm partner bio. Here is a section of thought leadership. They spoke conference this year. They did a panel last year and a panel two years ago, and they wrote two articles. And that was it.

[00:05:20] There's a lot more that people can do. But my sense is that they're saying, I don't have time for that. Kind of give us a sense. What is kind of the robust library of content that you've seen is truly effective for thought leaders to focus on? So, and let's stay here for a second because I think there's a lovely tension in professional services as well as legal. And I know your main beat is legal, but also professional services. We often live to the billable hour, right?

[00:05:50] We may be on project, but it's a question of how much are we billable? How much time are we serving clients directly that we can tie to value creation in some way, right? It is hard to say, oh, let me take time to write a book or write an article or go travel to speak unless you can make the justification not only to yourself,

[00:06:18] but to your peers or your leadership team, hey, this is a good investment and here's why, right? But thought leadership really works when you invest over time. You can't pop up at one conference, say one thing one time and expect people to remember. Similarly, and I've seen lighter versions of this, but I'm going to say it playfully.

[00:06:43] You can't post once on LinkedIn and expect your expertise and genius will magically reach the right people, right? You have to be willing to take this as a journey, have a piece of expertise that you deeply care about, not only at the really deep nuance level, but also be willing to share the 101 level for the beginners.

[00:07:09] Because if all you want to do is talk about the deep nuance with other experts, that's great. There's a lovely place for that. But it's not thought leadership, which is saying, hey, here's something you might not have thought about. Let me explain it to you. Let me break it down in ways that you'll understand. And I stumbled into thought leadership because I wanted to understand how do ideas move at scale? And more importantly, when you have a good idea, how do you create impact?

[00:07:39] That's great. I like that depth that you bring, Bill. Let me ask you this. When you go under your book, and for reference, I'm looking on page 51. You talk about the four elements, core ideas, platform identity, the content library, and your market offerings. I've never seen it laid out that way, Bill. Can you talk a little bit about that? What are those four elements of thought leadership? So I'll give a little bit of a preface on that, and then I'll dive in.

[00:08:07] I stumbled into thought leadership from a professional services perspective. I was doing organizational development consulting, mostly with Fortune 500. I had to close deals, find opportunities, et cetera.

[00:08:20] Through network, I got a phone call from a former Fortune 500 CEO exec of a large professional services consulting firm who had written a business book, got it on the cover of magazines, got hundreds of thousands of copies sold. But the problem was, the book wasn't written to scale within organizations. People were looking, going, this is great.

[00:08:50] I want it on my shelf. Leaders were looking at it and saying, what if our people were like a little bit like this? How would that change the business if they were thinking relationally rather than transactionally? And I had to stop and look and go, okay, how does thought leadership work? Because I got pulled into this project and I looked for a book. I looked for a framework.

[00:09:15] I looked for tools, found no real clear description of how thought leadership works from a practitioner's point of view. So the four elements you mentioned are ones that I and my colleague Peter Winnick have created over about 20 years looking through the intellectual libraries of many, many world-class experts, as well as people starting out in thought leadership. First, you need a core idea. And what is a core idea? It's not a book. It's not a chapter.

[00:09:43] It's a couple of sentences. It's designed to be provocative. We all scroll through social media incredibly fast. We are constantly deciding, is this for me or not? Let me ask you this. When you say a core idea, is that a core idea that is unique to that professional or a core idea related to what's on the mind of clients and prospects? What does that mean exactly?

[00:10:08] So a core idea needs to be something that is provocative to your audience and gets their attention, right? So it could be a topic that advances the conversation that's already going on. Or it could be, hey, none of us are talking about this topic, but it's worthy of attention and here's why, right? The core idea, and I can give examples in a moment. Provocative, generous, distinctive.

[00:10:35] It sounds like you rather than someone else in the field or AI. You're bringing your voice, your authenticity, your expertise, and your perspective. It's not pre-chewed, right? All of that has to be done in less than 20 words to get someone's attention. Because for most of the time, 99% of the people who will see you in social media scroll, you're not for them. You're not their flavor of ice cream. And that's okay.

[00:11:03] So is this something then, this idea, let's say I'm a professional services provider and there's several conferences I want to attend. And this is one thing that's on everybody's mind. And in fact, I know some of the vendors I've talked to in that niche, it's on their mind. I think I might be able to take that as a concept and promote it as a panel presentation at that conference. Write a series of white papers and do research on it and maybe have a more fulsome body of work.

[00:11:33] Is that kind of what you're talking about, Bill? So the core idea, I'll give you an example from our world and then I can give other examples from thought leadership as well. So in our world, we strongly believe one of our core ideas that expertise in your field does not equal skill and thought leadership. However, you can learn. So that's distinctive. We're probably one of the few that are saying that. I don't know of others.

[00:12:00] It's provocative in saying, hey, you spent years, maybe decades developing expertise. But there's this whole body of skills that you need to turn from expert to thought leader. And it's not like you're doomed about this. It's not like you had to be born with a magical set of skills. You can learn them. OK, how do I do that? Tell me more. The whole purpose of a core idea is to elicit tell me more.

[00:12:30] Once we have that core idea and we've thought through that and we know we might need to make adjustments as we go forward, but we think this is where we think we can make a difference. This is what aligns with our expertise, our ideas, what we think we can offer to our clients, et cetera. Then where do we go from here? Are we then building out the platform? You're going down to the content library. Oh, content library. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll go counterclockwise around the diagram.

[00:12:53] So the core idea is designed to get someone's attention, to get them to lean and go, hey, I don't even know if I agree with you, but tell me more. Right. The content library is your collection of stories, data, examples, case studies, data, research you've done, research you've collected from other parties. All of the persuasive material that when someone says, tell me more, you've got everything lined up.

[00:13:20] Now, if you're talking to a senior executive team, for example, and you're bringing your unique perspective and telling them this isn't on your radar today, but it needs to be great. How are you going to talk to that executive leadership team? Similarly, if you're taking it down to a level or two lower, you're probably going to use different stories and examples and guidance.

[00:13:45] And so your content library could live between your ears, you know, and just in your memory. It could live in presentations and reports and decks and white papers. But I think of a well-organized content library as your quick scan file so that if you know, hey, I'm going to be talking to this group. I need a couple of persuasive stories. What are my current best? You can grab them.

[00:14:14] Similarly, if someone says, hey, we need an article for you to write to this audience on that topic. You go in. You got it already organized rather than, oh, you know, there was this great story. I was at a dinner after a conference and somebody told me something. But you're trying to recall it from memory who and what they said, right? If you don't have a content library, it's hard to respond quickly in the moment. That's great.

[00:14:43] So it can be something that people actually, would you say somebody's writing down on a sheet of paper? These are some of the different, not necessarily core ideas, but topic areas. Or where do you think somebody should start in building this content library? So with the content library, very simply, you can start with sticky notes and put them on a wall. You can do it with three by five cards. But what are your best stories?

[00:15:07] And I think all of us have good stories or examples or that research report we pull again and again. Lay them out on the table. Lay them out with also what you think your core ideas are and go, okay, which ones sort to which idea? So which stories support which ideas? Got it. Great.

[00:15:29] And then if you have your core ideas in your content library, it's easy to think about market offerings. How will you get the ideas to your target audience? And I'm not favoring one modality over another. I'm not saying post 20 times on LinkedIn. I'm not saying you have to write a book. I've had a client who said, if you tell me I read a book, I'm going to be upset with you. But if you tell me I can do a documentary film, that would be fantastic, right?

[00:15:59] So how will your ideas travel without you primarily? Okay. It could be with you like speaking and being present or a workshop, or it could be something durable. It could have a price tag. I will come in and do consulting, or it could be free. I often argue that market offerings, you need the majority of them to be free rather than come with a price tag.

[00:16:29] You've got to put your knowledge out into the world and let people experience it and kick it around a little bit before they're going to come to you. And then you get the longtime listener, first time caller effect. Yeah, that's great, Bill. So what does platform identity mean? So platform identity is simply how people talk about your ideas when you're not in the room. Okay. We're used to thinking of corporate brands.

[00:16:58] How do people talk about Nike or Apple and what do they describe? We're used to thinking even over the last couple decades of personal brand. How do people describe you? Are you responsible? Are you timely? Are you insightful? Are you curious? All of those adjectives attached to you. Here's the question a platform identity asks. How do people talk about your ideas when you're not present? Okay.

[00:17:27] Can they explain it to a colleague? Can they explain it to a senior leader? Can they signal in language that you would agree with rather than garbled in a telephone game sort of way? Can they explain it to a person? Yeah. Yeah. Here's the idea. Here's why it's important. And here's what we should do.

[00:17:47] If you're the only one who can amplify the ideas and get them out in the world and everybody else garbles them, you have limited time, resources, and capability. You want other people and other systems to amplify those ideas. And the stronger your platform identity, the easier it is for people to explain those ideas, the easier it is for those ideas to travel fast. That's great.

[00:18:16] People like sharing content that's useful. And when you can get other people sharing your ideas, I can see how that propagates success. What do you think the pitfalls are that most people face as they're developing their thought leadership, Bill? So I'll describe two general ones, and then I'll describe one that's specific to professional services. One is imposter syndrome. Oh, I don't have anything to share. I'm not good enough.

[00:18:45] I don't belong in that room, right? Professional services pushes you to get over imposter syndrome pretty quickly, especially if you're in business development. Content insecurity is a little bit different. It's like imposter syndrome's cousin. Content insecurity is, I'm good enough. I know this. But those ideas, maybe they're not strong enough for an article or for a presentation at a conference.

[00:19:12] Other people talked about something like that, right? You belittle the insight, okay? The third piece as professional services, specifically on business development, is we can't give that away. Because, and I would say even we were guilty of it having been in thought leadership. Every organization develops its processes, its tools, its frameworks.

[00:19:40] And that's hard-earned through blood, sweat, and tears on knowledge, right? And if you think about, well, if we put that out into the public, will our competitors grab that and use it? Will AI absorb it? And will people not come to us? And there's a paradox here. We've seen it over centuries, not just over the last few years.

[00:20:08] But the faster that ideas travel, the more people will come back to the people who are advocating them. So, if you put your ideas, maybe not the crown jewels, maybe not the secret, secret sauce. You know, Coca-Cola still hides its recipe. But you put the majority out there. Then people start knowing and associating those ideas with you.

[00:20:34] And often, and you know this to be true, you can have the idea and then realize implementing it is going to be hard. And that's where it's like, well, let me get an expert to do this. Yeah, that makes sense. And tell us about your book. I've read the book. I like the fact it's entitled The Thought Leadership Handbook. And that's exactly what it is. And in your book, you even mention that you can use this book in several ways if you're an experienced thought leader, turn to this chapter, things like that.

[00:21:01] But what was it that motivated you to write this with Peter Winnick and Naren Ariel? And let me just start with that. What motivated you to actually write this book, Bill? So I'd say a couple things. One, the book that you're holding in some ways is the book I wished in 2005, 2006 I could have found on the shelf as I was stumbling into a consultant role in the world of thought leadership.

[00:21:29] How do you operationalize thought leadership? How do you have an intelligent discussion about how it works rather than just say thought leadership is what thought leaders do, right? That's not helpful. So when we were consulting, we were guilty of that keep it behind the paywall, Peter and I. So we've been doing full-time consulting in thought leadership for many years, Peter and I together since 2013.

[00:21:58] And we developed many of the frameworks that were in the book. But the only way to access them was to work with us on a strategy session, engage us in a project, and we would walk you through them. Then we had 700 and some episodes of a podcast, and AI came out, and my colleague Peter came and said, you know, we could synthesize this, and we could do a book, and it looks like it would be easy.

[00:22:26] Those were incorrect words. Easy was not in this process. We had over 2.6 million words of podcast transcripts, which if you stacked in single space would be about three feet of printed paper. Okay. So the AI, I learned quickly about context windows and tokens and all of that. But we had to find the stories that brought this to life.

[00:22:54] And more importantly, we had to make the choice of do we take our knowledge out from the paywall and put it into the knowledge commons. And it was funny. Our podcast producer, Chris, when we told him, hey, we think we're writing a book, he said, you know, you've been doing this podcast since 2018, Peter and Bill. I have audio tape of both of you saying never, ever, ever will either of you write a book.

[00:23:23] And we're like, fantastic. Let's use that when we launch the book and announce the book because, yeah, we should eat our own words for this. We were wrong for keeping it behind the paywall. Yeah, it's fantastic. This is a book that if there's a busy professional listening to this and you don't know where to start, start with this book. If you are experienced in speaking on panels at conferences, writing white papers, all that, I think this book will help you deepen your strategy behind all that.

[00:23:51] And I like the fact that the overarching reason is, like you mentioned, Bill, it's to build trust with clients, prospective clients, to be different, you know. Yeah. So go ahead, Scott. I was going to say, so let me ask you this as we're bringing our conversation to a close. If you could give us three action steps for people to take to really implement these ideas and really see that impact and how they amplify their message to the world. Tell us those three action steps, Bill.

[00:24:19] So the first one I'm going to say is a mindset. The difference between being an expert, studying and knowing a lot about a field versus making the conscious choice to share what you know. And it can be a business informed choice. I'm not saying you put everything out into the knowledge commons, you share what you know, and you will never see a penny back. The paradox is when you give knowledge generously, it comes back.

[00:24:49] And so that is a foundation. If you want to learn more about how thought leadership works, I'd suggest order the book, the Thought Leadership Handbook, from wherever you want to purchase books. It's designed with tools, worksheets, things that you can use to organize. We talked about the frameworks of the four elements.

[00:25:12] We go through the impact equation and it's really designed for emerging thought leaders, experienced thought leaders, and even experts to be able to figure out how do I do this better? Right. So change your mindset, then order the book. And the third thing that I would encourage you to do is get in the habit of sharing.

[00:25:36] Find ways to give value generously to your target audience without putting the paywall or the immediate pitch with it. Okay. Earn that trust and that respect and know that you are playing the long-term game rather than, oh, I shared that white paper with you. Now I'm going to follow up with you in three days. And guess what? Let's talk about an SODOT. Right.

[00:26:05] Bill, thank you so much for being here. Before we go, and to everybody listening, we're going to put the link for Bill's contact information also for his book in the show notes. Just go to the show notes. You'll be able to order that directly. And like I said, I'd highly recommend this. But tell us about your offerings. You mentioned it a little bit earlier, but tell us more about what you do, what you have that you'd like to share with our listeners, Bill. Absolutely. So my day job, if you will call it that, is not podcast host or author.

[00:26:30] I stumbled into the world as a thought leadership consultant specifically on strategy. Okay. So we often do strategy sessions with clients. We're over a six-week process. We go through their materials, their intellectual attic. What have you written? What have you published? What's unpublished? What are you thinking about? And then what are your goals? What are you trying to achieve through thought leadership? Is it revenue generation?

[00:26:56] Is it paying it forward because you're looking to retire, but you don't want ideas to leave the conversation? Do you want to replace revenue from being a road warrior with passive revenue? Those are all strategic questions, right? Some of them tied to a business and large organizations. Some of them tied to individuals.

[00:27:17] And over the process of six weeks, we craft a strategy with the person and then lay out what that roadmap would look like over the next 12, 18 months so they have clarity. The other piece that I do is for some of our clients who have gone through the strategy work as well. We represent them when they go and sell into enterprise.

[00:27:39] So I carry a pipeline as well doing business development work on behalf of my clients as they sell into Fortune 1000. That's great, Bill. This is fantastic. Bill, I want to thank you for sharing the generosity of your expertise with us. Thank you to you and your colleagues, your co-authors for writing this book. This is a book that every professional needs that wants to build their thought leadership. Thanks for being with us today, Bill. Thank you for having me, Dr.

[00:28:09] Thank you for listening to the Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com. To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com.