A unique panel of psychologists, counselors, and those recovered from traumas who have used their backgrounds to become successful business thought leaders came together to discuss the psychology of change.

This event provided practical insights into:

• How events like the recent pandemic impact the psyche of both individual and companies
• How the need for change can be identified and implemented both at a business and individual level –
• What it takes to turn adversity into opportunity
• Implementing and supporting long term change

Featuring:

• Marcia Reynolds PsyD, MCC President Covisioning
• Rachel Cipriano, CEO of Magnificent Resilience
• Sharon Hughes, Author “Girl In The Garage”
• Michael Diettrich-Chastain, Author “Changes”
• Eileen McDargh CSP, CPAE, CEO Resiliency Group
• Brad Bailey, Pastor, Family & Marriage Therapist

Hosted by John Golden & Nikolaus Kimla

Part of the Thrive & Prosper Series.

Shannyn Lee is the director of coaching at ‘Win Without Pitching’ with the mission of empowering creative professionals to have more confidence in the sale. In today’s interview hosted by John Golden, she will discuss ways of establishing yourself as the sales expert outside of the traditional pitching method.

This Expert Insight interview explores:

• The art of embracing the silence
• Mastering sales conversations
• Taking the initiative for the future

Embrace The Silence

Many salespeople struggle with engagement at the beginning, and that’s why they feel the need to use their pitch. In early conversations, the job of salespeople isn’t to sell. The goal is to see if they can help their prospects and then decide if they are going to take the next step together.

The problem is that some people struggle with the concept of facilitating the conversation. They are caught up by the idea that they need to fill up the silence when the ability to embrace it can be a superpower. It requires you only to be silent a little bit longer than your interlocutor. It takes some bravery, but there is so much learning that can happen in the process. Otherwise, you can miss out on a lot of information that would later be very valuable. Ask your question and stop talking!

Mastering Sales Conversations

The starting point is accepting the fact that sales conversations can be filled with a lot of messiness and tension. We sometimes force on ourselves the idea that everything has to go smoothly, but embracing and expecting the unexpected is a much better and healthier approach. We are all just humans, and people who can admit that they don’t know something are more trustworthy.

Getting in the right mindset before the conversation starts is critical, so taking a few minutes to restart and transition from the previous call is very beneficial. At the same time, having a moment to debrief and self-reflect after the conversation ends, helps with professional confidence, growth, and improvement.

Preparing For The Future

In times of uncertainty and difficulty, salespeople are the ones that need to continue to lead and check for new ways to help their prospects and clients. Once the crises ends, the competition will be huge, and there is going to be a lot of fighting for new projects. Now is not the time to sit back, but to get proactive, creative, and dig in for clients. Make sure to be on the top of their minds when we come out of this situation. It’s time to look at your positioning and strategy. The ones who manage to retool their businesses will be the winners at the end. Bad things will always be happening, so it is critical to find a way to react positively when everything around us is negative.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In the new Expert Insight Interview hosted by John Golden, the guest is Susan Meier, a brand strategy consultant. She brings together analysis and creativity to help her clients build better brands, and she will share her methods for managing branding during the crisis.

This interview explores:

• Brand reflection
• Audience assessment
• Building brands with promise

Brand Reflection

The world is rapidly changing, and many things are being disrupted or reinvented. While various activities are paused at the moment, it’s the perfect time to reflect on your business and brand. It is the first step on the road to finding the right strategy and determining the place of your brand in that new environment. Reflect on every aspect of your business, from your team, products, and offers to its purpose, values, and uniqueness. Think about what your brand stands for and what you want it to stand for, so you can assess what kind of future you want.

Audience Assessment

After the reflection, the next step is to put that information with who your audience is. It is critical to precisely define who your customers or consumers are, and to whom your offering is the most valuable. Elevate the way you think about customers, by focusing not only on what their practical needs are but who they are as people and what their aspirations are. Also, coming out of this situation, your audience may be changed or evolved. It is important to check if you are targeting the right people. You may need to find a new audience, switch markets, or explore customer group adjacencies.

Building Brands With Promise

In the future, people will be more sensitive to meaning and reasons for making interaction with brands. Your brand isn’t just a logo. It is a relationship and every interaction you have as an organization. That is where brands can differentiate because customers are looking for a more humane approach.
Every brand gives a promise of delivering something, and it is critical to understand how meaningful it is to make a promise and to fulfill it. That word connects well to the notion of the personal relationship between brands and their constituents. Define what your brand is promising, and make sure that you can deliver on it. Failed promises are the quickest way to lose customers. Building brands with promise is about exploring what their full potential is and how to keep expanding and broadening it.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Today’s guest in the Expert Insight Interview is Paul McGee, the speaker, and the best-selling author known as The SUMO Guy. He will present his SUMO approach and talk about how it can help you to achieve your objectives and ultimately become more successful and content.

The interview explores:

• The art of SUMO
• Advanced self-leadership
• The power of the inner circle

The Art Of SUMO

SUMO is the acronym for ‘Shut Up, Move On’ or the softened-up version ‘Stop, Understand, Move On.’ Essentially, it stands for taking some time to reflect and press pause. It means to shut down the excuses and stop moaning about the things we can’t change. Lastly, it urges us to shut down the voice of self-doubt that is holding us back.
Our world is very reflexive and reactive, which makes it even more critical to understand the power of stopping and reflecting. To enjoy the journey, we need to speed, but sometimes it’s necessary to step on the breaks. People are afraid that by taking some time out, they will be left out or marginalized. However, our outcomes are the results of our response to some event. That is why our response needs to be well calculated and thought through.

Advanced Self-Leadership

We are all leaders of ourselves. To be successful in it, instead of jumping into things and doing what everyone else does, we need to stop and think about the outcomes that we desire. We have to resist the temptation to react immediately in all situations. The quality of all good leaders is decisiveness, but making the right decision takes time and wisdom. Even though society tends to undermine them as signs of weakness, curiosity, humbleness, and open-mindedness are the key values of successful self-leadership. The circumstances we are in are the unknown territory for all of us. Leaders should prepare to experiment, adapt, and be open to new things.

The Inner Circle

In business, there are many people so paralyzed by the uncertainty of the current situation that they are unable to make any decision. That could be more harmful than making the wrong one.
The concept of two circles tells us that there is the outer one, the circle of our concerns, and the inner one, which is our circle of influence and the one that should be our focus. One of its most important aspects is making sure that we lead ourselves well. Self-care isn’t selfish. It’s crucial to both our success and our sanity. To be productive, we need to take care of our sleep schedule, day structure, and mental diet. Consuming too much information and negativity can be very draining, and we should be selective with the things our brains absorb. Ending and beginning our days with positivity, thankfulness, and focusing on our sphere of influence is the formula for leading a more productive, successful, and fulfilling life.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Does the software ultimately reflect the type of organization that builds it? In this Expert Insight interview hosted by John Golden, Sam Schutte discusses building a consulting business and sales and marketing automation.

This interview discusses:

• Recruiting
• Finding Niche

Recruiting

There is a lack of good management in recruiting the right team of developers to do the project. The key to the consulting and technology organization is to deliver a quality solution to the client. Even though people have become more comfortable in using technology, technology solutions in business have become more complex. There are a variety of core competencies that require specialized approach; thus, the companies need to hire niche experts for each of those core competencies separately. For example, getting a certificate in Python or Java does not necessarily mean that you will be successful in using those tools. That is exactly where consulting companies bring value due to the knowledge of methodology, best practice, and overall management. Just like in sales, the solution is in the human resource and not in the software. A good CRM system does not mean anything if the people who are implementing it do not know how to use it. The smartest developers can easily get burned out and unproductive if not hired right. It is important to determine which aspects make an employee a good fit for the specific organization. For example, high-end developers should not be hired for maintenance work when it would be more cost-effective for the maintenance work to be outsourced.

Finding Niche

Product knowledge in industry expertise can be intimidating for customers, thus there is training to learn how to talk with customers in a way that they can understand as well. Clients do not need computer science knowledge to work with the consulting company. But people usually do know money, therefore instead of overwhelming customers with the unimportant technology terms, it is better to simply explain what is more profitable for them moneywise. The formula is to have a good offering model which will bring trust and engagement with the client. With the rise of remote environments, more companies started to implement the model in which they hire full-time employees for the company’s core competencies only. Finding a company’s niche helps the company to invest its resources in the right direction and to receive better returns. Soap company will be better off if it invests in its product research rather than in its software. However, there still must be communication between business development and software development, and there is a consulting company that serves as a translator between those two.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

We are living through a crisis that is challenging everything around us and perhaps permanently changing the business world. Our new guest for today, Anne Grady, is the author, speaker, entrepreneur, and resilience expert that helps businesses all over the world to grow in times just like these.

In this expert insight interview, we explore:

• Building resilience
• Leaving the comfort zone
• The importance of self-care

Building Resilience

Change is the same as grief, in terms of the ways our brain processes it, but it is also the time when we build the most resilience, especially in sales. It is not easy, but it’s where the growth happens. Now salespeople have to figure out how to move on and not only survive, but find a way to learn from this situation. That is the only way to come out stronger.

People are still buying, but their reasons and motivations behind it are different. Assess your skillset, processes, and identify what you need to change to adjust to these circumstances. The sale isn’t about numbers, but connection, because you can’t influence behavior if there is no connection. It is why listening and understanding the buyer’s motives, needs, and problems that they are trying to solve is now more critical than ever.

Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable

There are a lot of industries that are thriving right now, and the key is to find ways to branch out to them. Resilience is built when you are exhausted, and your habit patterns have been broken. Our brain hates uncertainty and sees it as a threat, and that is why it needs to be retrained. To get the result that you need, you should cultivate new habits, avoid negativities, and eliminate distractions. The need is still there, but it’s just different. There are ways to get creative about problem-solving, but you can’t do that if you are operating out of a place of fear.

The Importance Of Self-Care

It is easy to become apathetic and use pandemic as an excuse, but it won’t do you any good. It is critical to accept the reality for what it is, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t still be solving people’s problems. The things may never get back to how they were before, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing for you. Embrace the opportunity, explore it, and see what happens.

At the same time, it is highly important to acknowledge stressors. Be as positive as you can be in your circumstances and learn to be aware of the thoughts and emotions that are serving you, and the ones that sabotage you.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Have you ever thought of using other people’s platforms to promote you out there in the market? In this Expert Insight Interview hosted by John Golden, Tom Schwab discusses podcast interview marketing why it’s the next gold rush.

This interview discusses:

The Podcast Interview
Post Interview

The Podcast Interview

Podcast interview marketing is leveraging other people’s platforms to get the marketing message to your ideal audience. The problem that many people face is that they undervalue themselves and overvalue others. People should let their expertise be heard and thus, diminish their obscurity. Sometimes the expert is a person with a PhD, but sometimes it is a person who spent 80 hours a week at his job for the last 10 years. The beauty of a podcast is that if done correctly, it is just a very natural yet digital conversation with another person in which you can promote your business. The key is to find the right podcast, and then to introduce and earn your invitation to talk. Not every podcast will make a difference for you. Find the podcast that your targeted audience listens. Furthermore, the important things to look at are the podcast itself and the website, the reach that podcast has, and the other guests. Even though the best podcast has the flow of casual conversation between people, it does require preparation. Lack of adequate preparation simply shows disrespect to both the audience and the host. Professional sounding equipment is a must-have so that there are no technical interruptions. The research of some of the previous podcasts is beneficial because they help to better understand the tone, questions, and overall atmosphere. The same way, an already prepared shortlist of your information such as bio, common questions, and social media links will take the pressure off the host as well.

Post Interview

Once the interview is done, another pool of possibilities opens. Promotion of the video by tagging the host as well brings new connections. The recording can be transcribed to text and used for writing blogs, or the short video clips can be made of the interview. The point is that the podcast interview is a raw material that can be used for many different purposes. Sometimes people are not even aware that some video they watched on YouTube is actually a podcast. In conclusion, people should be challenged to share their knowledge because what is ordinary to them might be amazing to somebody else. What we know can help other people and the digital world, in this case, podcast especially, allows us to share our opinions and knowledge independently of our location.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Expert Insight interview guest is George Papades, COO of the HOTH, a company that helps businesses grow with SEO, content marketing, and PPC. He will present HOTH’s very inspiring way of functioning and building relationships with their clients, something that is becoming increasingly popular with all the shifts that are happening in the business world.

This interview explores:

• Selling through culture
• Team recruitment
• The future of the customer service

Selling Through Culture

Selling through culture means sharing the culture not only internally, but also externally, with your clients. HOTH is the acronym that stands for Hit ‘em Over The Head, which is the perfect way to describe their work philosophy of going above and beyond for their clients to offer them exceptional service and results. To make the clients a part of their family, HOTH tries to include them in a lot of internal things and processes. It means bringing top clients to meet them, organizing conferences, going out with them to have some fun, sending gifts et cetera. It is selling through engagement, instead of tactics.

Many companies try this approach. However, if the culture is fake without any real infrastructure and processes behind it, it won’t work.

Team Recruitment

Smaller companies often start with that ‘personal touch’ attitude, but it slowly fades as they grow. If you want to have a culture that will endure over time, you have to actively recruit to the culture. The team has to be expanding all the time with carefully chosen and evaluated people. No one is going to stay forever, neither clients nor employees. The goal is to have all of them leave in a better position than they were in when they came. The key is in building bridges and strong relationships with people who will carry that forward and be excellent references for your business.

The Future Of The Customer Service

The current turbulences brought up the human element that people have been craving. That humanizing aspect is something that all businesses will have to develop. Clients want some authenticity, a genuine connection with people on a basic human level. They became more engagement sensitive, and the conversations with them are much more than simple service, now they are the exchange of experiences. In terms of sales strategies, this will be the shift in the upcoming years. The engagement will be at the front end of the relationship-building processes.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.