ETL 38: Mo Bunnell on Building a Relationship Ecosystem

Edited Transcript: Mo Bunnell and Bob Buday

Bob Buday: Mo, we met more than a year ago when I appeared on your podcast (“Real Relationships, Real Revenue,”)in February of 2023. That was about a year after I published my book. Now we’re reversing things. You just published your second book, ”Give to Grow,” and you’ve got podcasters like me who want to talk to you about the book.

It’s a nice role reversal here. It’s early days in the promotion of your book. But is it too early to see some of the impact in the marketplace? What have you felt?

Mo Bunnell: One thing that is cool about thought leadership books is that you can measure its impact: How many speeches did we get? How many people reached out to us? What’s the activity?

We’re six weeks in and we’ve already got 2½ times as many books in circulation as we’ve had in six years with our first book, “The Snowball System.” The demand for gift “Give to Grow” is bigger. I think the title appealed [more] to people. A lot more people are buying the book. I would guess that within a year, with all of our investment — both monetary and adding up people’s time, which is significant — we will be well over break-even economically. And then it’s just all rolling downhill after that.

So thought leadership works. Bob, as you know, if you do it right And we’re going to talk about the right ways to do it today, how about that?

Overcoming Doubts

Bob: Was there ever a moment in the life of this project where you had doubts? Where you said, “I’m not sure this is going to be a good book. I’ve spent a lot of time on it but I have a business to run?

Mo: I had a lot more in the first book because I didn’t have a model and I didn’t economically know what the payoff was. We measured our success with the first book. It made a step change in the business because it was so well-received. It won a bunch of awards and people love it.

The part in “Give to Grow” that was hard came in the middle of writing the manuscript about a year and a half ago. I took some time off in the summer and dedicated three weeks to finishing the manuscript. At the lowest point of that, the manuscript was almost 100,000 words, and I knew it had to be 40,000.

In the first draft of all these chapters, the writing wasn’t good. The thoughts weren’t coherent. The flow wasn’t as logical as I wanted. It was too wordy. I knew I had to destroy over half of what I was creating, but I didn’t know which half. That was massively hard.

My editor and I winnowed it down to something good. Once we got to around 50,000 words, I could actually edit and delete a paragraph, get at the sentence level and make a sentence crisper and in five words instead of eight. That’s when it started being fun.

The learning for me is when we’re building meaningful thought leadership, the bigger the project the harder this part is. You’ve got to get through the messy middle and keep visualizing this exciting outcome out there, where somebody’s going to read your book and it’s going to change their life. That’s what I kept thinking about — just focusing on that exciting outcome in the future.

Bob: I’m glad you stayed the course, because it’s a really great book. I see its applicability is more than just for business development people. I would give this to every young person starting out in their career, graduating college or going from high school to the world of work, and looking at careers through a different lens, through your lens. You can look at life as being a bunch of transactions, especially business life — but if that’s all you do, there’s a good chance your career growth is going to be limited.

Relationships Are the End Game

Bob: Tell us your concept for the book.

Mo: Well, there’s lots of mechanisms internally in an organization to teach the expert part of the business. Just doing the work makes you better at doing the work. But there aren’t a lot of systems to teach how to win the work. How do you develop relationships? How do you build an ecosystem that’s sending you referrals and leads and makes people predisposed to want to work with you?

Those are the skills we teach. Once you’ve got your core expertise, you need to build the expertise of winning the work, not just doing it. Then you’ve got two paths. As you point out, you can be transactional with this, which is sales. Or you can go down a different path, a path around relationships, a path that says I’m going to be helpful, but I’m going to do it very strategically in a way I help the right people in the right ways. This approach can actually grow a huge book of business. And the best part is, you feel great about it.

Bob: I think that’s great. Since 1987 when I got into this profession, I’ve worked with aspiring thought leaders and folks who are generally recognized as thought leaders. I’ve often seen, without mentioning any names, this belief that “My wisdom, my being famous, my big idea — that’s what’s going to attract a client to me. And I don’t really need to have or build a relationship.”

Have you seen the same thing in your career with thought leaders who just want to be gurus, because of their wisdom, intellectual capital, books, or Harvard Business Review article?

Mo: I do see it, and those people are not as effective as they could be. Anybody who’s ever had a massive impact on the world had two things. One, they had a deep technical expertise, something that no one else had. This gets to your point, but they also had the ability to positively influence others. And by influence, sometimes it can sound manipulative. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about developing relationships, figuring out and learning somebody else else’s priorities, to align your expertise with their needs, and to build a relationship ecosystem.

So if someone has only the expert side of it, either not enough people know about them, or they can come across as sort of an arrogant jerk, to be honest. But if we can pair the two things — a deep technical expertise with ability to build a relationship ecosystem – people will be your raving fans, and they will be running around telling others about you. That is the winning strategy.

Exemplary Relationship Builders

Bob: Some thought leaders fit this bill of what you’re talking about. One is Dave Ulrich, who is a guru on human resource issues, strategic human resource issues. I don’t know if you know Dave, but Dave has over 200,000 LinkedIn followers, and he posts a lot, and every time somebody puts a comment in one of his posts, he responds to those comments even if he disagrees, it’s also it’s always a graceful response, but he responds. He’s built an audience by showing he is truly interested in their ideas.

Mo: Well, That’s a great example. I think Justin Welsh is another good example – he’s like a friend that you may know, just he’s got 800,000 followers. He is more of an expert on how to use LinkedIn. He’s using LinkedIn to teach how to use LinkedIn. Similarly, he responds to everybody.

But most thought leaders see creating the content as the finish line. They published the client alert. It’s on the website. It went through all the reviews, and they feel they are done.

But this is actually right at the beginning of engagement. When you’re working internally with a thought leader, you want to set the finish line as a year after publishing the piece. So let’s think all the way through from a prospect’s perspective and figure, “How can we write the best content? How can we publish it everywhere? Which other people in your organization should see it? What other clients and prospects should know about this? How can we orchestrate ways to speak at conferences? That’s where the magic is, and all of this can be thought through from A to Z in the beginning. But it’s something that most thought leaders don’t think about at all.

Extending the Impact of Projects

Bob: I’ve seen a lot of thought leadership practitioners who approach working with the experts — getting them into HBR, or ghost-writing a white paper, or getting speaking engagement — as a transaction. They might work with one thought leader this week and another one next week, and may not talk to the first thought leader for a year or two. They see it as a series of transactions that help the thought leaders get known for their expertise.

These practitioners often hit a ceiling. Number one, people in the firm don’t really like them a lot, no matter how talented they are. People might see them as very competent, but don’t like to spend a lot of time with them.

Mo: My book points out that it would be helpful if the thought leader and the thought leadership professional mapped out a strategy — not only to create the content but also to get the thought leader in front of all the right people. This would involve not only things like being quoted in The Wall Street Journal or HBR or whatever, but also mapping out all the clients that you’d like to be introduced to, and other desired outcomes down the road.

Establishing and Deepening Relationships

Bob: And you would also think others’ perception of you would move from order taker to problem solver or trusted advisor. This is so important, especially for thought leadership professionals who are early into their careers or mid-career people with good writing and reporting skills who are hired by the big consultancies and smaller professional services firms.

Many of these new thought leadership professionals are veteran journalists who don’t know how to form relationships with these people. They are used to having adversarial relationships. But I think your advice is also on point for mid-career people who come into the thought leadership profession and just think, well, I’m going to wow them with my writing skills, and this is just a series of transactions. They will produce a great article, but they don’t put time into giving and growing the relationship.

Mo: In “Give to Grow” we talk about how thought leadership practitioners and thought leaders can practice one of the most powerful ways to deepen a relationship. It’s to ask some thought-provoking questions to learn the other side’s priorities in their own words, then to play that back to them, make sure you got it right.

That’s when the client feels like you get it. If I’m a thought leadership practitioner and I meet with a senior partner at a professional services firm, they may have this big idea that they want to write an article about something. It would be easy to just jump right in and start writing it. But we should pop up a level and ask, “What are your goals in this? Is it to earn a seat at the table? Is it brand building? Do you actually want to spin up a new practice area or are you trying to drive business to a certain functional area of the firm?”

Bob: I think it’s spot-on because a lot of thought leaders or aspiring thought leaders don’t know whether to trust the thought leadership professional, especially if they don’t know that person well enough. If you tell a thought leader that they should co-author an article or book with someone else in the firm, they may wonder whose interests you’re trying to promote. So unless you have a strong relationship, those kind of suggestions are probably not going to be taken well.

Mo: I think most people actually want sage advice. They want folks to help them see around corners. But many times, in a reactive mode, they’ll just knock on a thought leadership practitioner’s door and ask for help doing something. Most of the time they’re thinking too small. A thought leadership professional in an advisor role will hear what their goals are, and broaden their perspective on what can be accomplished. Everybody leaves happy – especially if you stress that they are going to do the same amount of work but get results that are massively bigger than they were thinking.

Thought Leadership and Business Development

Bob: Let’s talk about thought leadership and the Challenger sale approach. This is thought leadership selling: coming in with a very different point of view, reframing the customer’s problem, and offering a different solution than your competitors can offer because you’ve reframed the problem. The business developers in professional services firms like to be able to position themselves as experts, beyond merely understanding which services the firm sells. They want to bring different ideas to the client or prospect and help them think things through. But you still have to invest in growing a relationship for the client to hear your proposal.

Mo: It’s important for us to think through what kinds of experience we can offer the client or prospect.  For example, if they told us they liked our thought piece on a certain topic, we should ask them what would be most helpful to them next, and then give it to them without expecting to be paid. We call that a give to get. It’s basically like a very small, free project. This requires thinking backwards: first, what’s the work we want to get hired to do? Second, what can we offer on our dime to get the conversation started and give the organization an experience of working with us? And third, which thought leadership would drive the give to get? We have used this strategy on literally hundreds of clients, and it generates more revenue than any move I’ve ever seen in my life.

There are four ways to give to get. One is analytical, like providing benchmarking or survey responses. The second is mapping out a process, but applying it to the client situation — almost like an architect stopping by your home and learning about how you want to do the redesign of the house and starting to sketch things out. The third would be relational, meaning offering to introduce the person to people who have achieved great success doing this exact thing. The fourth is some type of brainstorming or ideation kind of session.

The Value of Compassion

Bob: It can also mean investing in somebody’s career, helping them move up or sometimes move out.

Mo:  Yes, sometimes it’s not tied to thought leadership. It could mean helping someone who wants to be more hirable to plan their next career move, or helping them think through a sticky situation with the subordinate, boss or someone else.

Compassion is the highest value thing you can provide somebody when they’re down on their luck. Maybe they have been laid off, or they don’t like it where they’re working, and they’re basically signaling, “I can’t hire you, but I need your help.”  If we respond to their call for help by going away — which, honestly, I think most people do — that person’s going to remember forever that all you cared about was their budget. If we lean in and we help them in that time of need, and we just put our own needs aside, people remember that forever.

Bob: Could give an example of that?

Mo: One C-level executive at very large company asked me to help him out after he was laid off.  We had a great relationship and I was happy to help. So we had a few calls, and I helped him out and I offered to waive the fees for him to come to Atlanta for our full three-day training that teaches every skill around growth.

Along with honing his business development skills, I told him he’d also meet 30 or 40 other people that might be interested in helping him too — a double win. We had dinner while he was in Atlanta. And honestly, Bob, I forgot that I helped him. I heard later that he had landed at a new job, and he called to thank me. Well, five years went by and I hadn’t talked to him, and then he reached out early this year to talk about my book. He told me he loved the book and wanted people around his organization to read it. By the way, he said that the small firm that he joined had grown to like 10,000 people. “We have a couple of thousand people who can use your help,” he added.

Later in the call I could sense he was tearing up, and he told me, “I don’t know if you even remember this, but you helped me when I was down, and I will never forget it in my life.” And then he replayed the things I had done for him. When you emphasize generosity and helping, then this just builds up this massive goodwill.

Bob: Word of mouth takes over, too. They might tell 12 people that you’re a great person who helped them through a tough time. Those people might view your LinkedIn profile and your company page, remember what you did for their friend, and want to connect with you.

Giving Strategically

Bob: Mo, you’ve written about the idea of being strategic on how to spend your time and developing relationships. Tell us more about that.

Mo: Yeah. I think at this point in the interview, a lot of people could think, wow, generosity sounds great, but it sort of feels like you’re running around the field throwing daisies. That’s not actually the case. Great research out of University of Pennsylvania places people into three groups: givers, takers (the opposite, and matchers. The givers give, without any expectation of anything return. Takers take, trying to get everybody to do their work for them. Matchers are like, I’ll do this if you if you do that for me, almost like a negotiation every time, transactional.

Well, the researchers actually thought givers would be the top of the heap, and that’s not what happened. A big chunk of the givers were the top of the heap, with matchers next and takers third, but then another big chunk of the givers were at the bottom. And the difference between the unsuccessful and the successful givers was that the people who were the successful givers prioritized what they were going to give and to whom. While they didn’t expect to receive something in return, they still sized “the give” relative to the expected value of what they would get in return.

As an example, a college student reaches out to you and says they went to your university and says, “Hey, can we go golfing? I would love to hear how you mapped out your career.” Or your boss’s boss reaches you says, “Hey, I would love you to do this project. For me, it’s really important, and so and so said you’d be good at it.”

Let’s say each of these would require a five-hour investment. Well, unsuccessful givers would just do both. They have no filter. But the successful big giver says, “Hey, I’ll help this college kid who reached out to me, but I’ll offer him a 15-minute Zoom call and ask him to look at my LinkedIn profile and send me three questions ahead of time.”

This five-hour ask from my boss’s boss? I might actually do some nights and weekends work and dial it up to 20. I got a shot here at getting to the C suite I didn’t have before. Givers actually do win. Nice guys and gals can also finish last. So we have to figure out which giver we are.

In short, we still need a filter, and to understand what we say yes to. Then we want to scale the give to the size of the expected value, while also not expecting anything in return.

Bob: Does the “Give to Grow” concept apply equally to entrenched thought leaders – people who are undeniably seen as experts in the world in their niche? And does it apply as equally to aspiring thought leaders — people with some deep expertise, but who are not really known?

Mo: It’s different for these groups. Aspiring thought leaders need to build a personal brand with their thought leadership. But they also have to get in front of prospects and clients and partners so that they can start rolling up their sleeve and helping them through generosity. And they should scale the size of that to the expected payoff when they’re farther down the road in their career.

In that give to get process, the aspiring thought leader needs to develop it so they can build a business. The top of their game thought leader needs to develop it so that they can get impact and scale and get other people doing the thing they already know how to do.

Bob: We didn’t talk about Adam Grant by name, but Adam Grant wrote the book “Give and Take.” He was the youngest tenured professor at Wharton. He is known to go out of his way for Wharton students to help them get internships and jobs, and to help with course work that they’re having difficulty with.

Mo:  Adam’s amazing. A million people must feel like they’re best friends with Adam. I don’t know Adam super well. We’ve been on a couple phone calls. But when I email him, he emails me back within like, 24 hours. He’s unbelievably generous. He will tell you no if he doesn’t have time, and he does it quickly, and you are grateful that you got a response.

Expertise and Empathy

Mo: Now I want to hear from you, Bob. I think a lot of times people think of thought leadership and business development in isolation, but clients or prospects don’t think of these as two different things. They might have read your book or listened to your podcast and reached out to you, asking for your unique expertise to help them solve a problem. The thought of meeting you might seem intimidating — but if we can break down those barriers to make it really easy for somebody to reach out and easy for us to start helping them, that’s when we get hired. What do you think is the most important thing to think through in that whole process?

Bob: I think arrogant thought leaders who show that they really don’t care about the client’s success don’t tend to last very long, even if they have brilliant ideas. And they might gain an audience for a couple years but fade into the sunset pretty quickly. Even though they keep publishing, they’re not followed as much. I’ve also seen thought leaders and thought leadership professionals who care about the client as much as they care about their own ideas, and show it by donating their time, and helping the client with personal or career issues. I’ve seen that, when the client moves to another firm, they also bring that thought leader or thought leadership practitioner along with them.

Those people get a lot farther in the profession. And they also feel much better when they look back on their careers, like I’ve been doing the last couple years. Having people come up unsolicited, to tell me I really helped them, brings so much personal satisfaction. I have a note on my wall from a client who died of pancreatic cancer last year at a young age. Many years ago, after I helped him publish his book, he wrote to tell me I had had a wonderful impact on him.  That note makes me feel as good as the things we helped him accomplish.

And that’s what I predict your book will do too, Mo. It will be a huge bestseller for business development people in professional services and other industries, but it will also be a book that I would tell every college graduate to read, because your advice applies beyond the buyer/seller relationship.

Mo: Typically, I hope people finish the book and they realize this is, yeah, this is going to help me grow my business, like way more than I’ve been doing. But I hope they put the book down, look at the ceiling, and just think this is going to help me with my family, with my life, with every relationship I’ve got. And that’s my little secret goal.