EPIC Leadership Development Tools with TOM the Octopus
While customers give you volume, leaders will give you growth, thus, resulting in duplication and unstoppable momentum. So how do you develop leaders in a leveraged manner? By using multimedia content on demand. It is about providing personal growth content your field can access to help them to achieve success.
0:30 Why You Need to Know About Leadership Development – Acquisition and Retention
1:56 What is Leadership Development? Growth and Mindset
2:32 Creating Leadership Development Tools – TOM the Octopus (The Octopus Method)
3:14 On Demand – Paid Vs. Free Content
4:01 Producing Content – What Exactly Are You Doing to Produce Your Content?
5:35 Tips for Optimal Content Length for Video and Audio Length
7:16 Invest on Planning, Recording Content, and Leadership Development – 24/7 Production Rate
7:46 Leadership Development Review
Why Do You Need To Know About Leadership Development? So why do you need to know this? Well, there’s a saying that it costs 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. So, it’s no different to the direct selling industry. With us working with different companies, we found most companies focus on acquisition of new customers and consultants, rather than developing field leaders. Without a proper leadership development strategy, what ended up happening is that all these new distributors come in, they try to work for a while, and then they don’t quite get the success and then they leave. We’ve talked to companies where their retention rate is less than 10%. So that means over 90% of the people that come into the business, leave within 12 months and that is a really high drop-out rate and this can become a very tiring and vicious cycle. In direct selling, customers give you volume, while leaders give you growth. When you get leadership development right, your company will get into momentum and experience massive growth and this is some of the things that we see with companies that are in momentum right now. Leadership Development is one area that they pay a lot of attention to and that they have mastered. It is important to get leadership development right.
What Is Leadership Development? So, what exactly is it? What exactly is Leadership Development? Well, basically leadership development is about personal growth and mindset training. It’s about raising the awareness of the consultant as they go through the different ranking of their business. Everything that we want is outside our comfort zone. So, it’s not easy to get out of our comfort zone, and neither it is for our consultants or our leaders. And it is our role as the company to provide them the tools and resources to help them grow as individuals and leaders.
How Are We Able To Create Leadership Development Tools In A Leveraged Way? At the DSA conference in 2014, we did a keynote presentation and introduced TOM the Octopus, which stands for The Octopus Method. You can find this presentation in the show note where you can listen to the presentation and also see the PowerPoint presentation. When you start creating content with videos or podcasts, you can then repurpose that content into text and images, and this will give you more exposure through different social media platforms such as YouTube and iTunes. There are more people moving from free to air TV to paid TV such as Netflix. Well, why is that? Why are people rather pay than to watch something for free? Well that’s because the content is on demand. People want it at their schedule, not the provider’s schedule. We as a direct selling company can learn from this. What we can now do with technology is create our own Radio Show and our own TV channel that our field, our consultants can access it when they want. Imagine when they need the content but is not available compared to it being available in your own Radio Show or your own TV Channel.
What Are Some Of The Ways You Can Produce Great Content? Let’s start with looking at what you are already doing. Do you run regular webinars or live training sessions already? Well, record them. You don’t need to have a full production team. It can be as simple as micing the presenter up with a lapel mic and recording the audio into an iPhone. Voila! You have just got a podcast episode. At the corporate events, are the presentations recorded? Well, this is another excellent source of leadership development content that your field can access later. Another thing that you can do is to get the field leaders involved. Put a topic calendar together. If you are doing one per week, you only need 52 topics, break it down by the quarter or what we call the 90 day sprints, then you only need 12 pieces of content per sprint. That’s it. It’s easy to come up with 12 Leadership Development topics. Then what you do is you allocate each topic to each of the leaders. Simply interview them around that particular topic. You can do a recording over Skype, just a conversation and then you have created a piece of content. Now this is a really easy way to create engaging content. Because it’s a two-way conversation. Because you’re getting the leaders involved, they’re going to get excited to promote the content with their team.
What Would Be The Ideal Length For Your Content? With videos, if it’s a tutorial – study have shown the drop off point for video is around 12 mins. Whereas if it’s a quick tip, then you would want to keep it under 2 minutes. With audio, the beauty with audio is that people can consume the content while they are doing other things, such as commuting to and from work, driving, or working out at the gym, cooking. This means you can have a longer piece of content, and go more in-depth with the topic. It also means the file size is a lot smaller compared to video. File size is important, especially if your office also looks after countries in Asia Pacific, like the Philippines, where the internet connectivity might not be as good, you want something quite light weight. So audio is an excellent way to create content. With audio, the optimum length is between 30 minutes to up to an hour. You can have some really high quality in-depth conversations. In terms of presenters, I’ve already briefly touched on this, is getting the field involved but also mix up the presenters. You can use international presenters, both from corporate side as well as the field. You can also use seasoned leaders, as well as new and upcoming leaders. What we found is that when you interview a new consultant, this excites not only that individual, but also their enroller or their up lines, as well as crosslines. So mix up your talents. Now I know it is easy to focus your marketing effort on acquisition but if you invest some resources in planning and recording your training content and leadership development material, over time you will have developed a library of resources that works for you 24/7. When a consultant goes through his/her challenging times, when they have doubts in themselves and the opportunity, the library could mean the difference between them staying and keep going or quitting.
So, what’s the next step? Review your leadership development material. Do you have one? And if you do, how old is it? Do you have a strategy to consistently produce mindset development content? Are they in multimedia format or is it just in text? You want it to be in a format that is easy for the field to consume and that is engaging. Identify the gaps. Review some of the ideas that we’ve talked about on this podcast. Find out where the gaps are and put an action plan in place to bridge these gaps. Your leaders will thank you for it. If you need any help in either the strategy or the content creation for leadership development material, feel free to reach out for a chat. We’ll be more than happy to help. Have fun with TOM the Octopus!
