Without creativity and innovation, the world we live in would look a lot different. Have you ever taken a moment to consider how some of the most useful gadgets were created? One person, or a group of people, had an idea and put their creativity to use. It is creativity and innovation that is the foundation for all businesses today.

This expert sales interview explores:

• Creating a Creative Environment
• The Need for Change
• Unleashing Creativity and Innovation: Nine Lessons from Nature for Enterprise Growth and Career Success

Creating a Creative Environment

Creativity is unlocking a “how-to” problem. Creativity is simply put, the number of times people ask, “what if?” If you were to ask what the key to FedEx’s success, it is the “what if” culture. What if there were an express airline just for cargo? The nature of the mind is to think. If we can create the right conditions, we will be able to connect the dots and be able to solve problems based on our knowledge and experience.

The Need for Change

What keeps you awake at night? It is a known fact that you cannot continue to build a business unless you are constantly changing and growing with the times. There needs to be change. Of course, this is easier said than done, but whether it’s intellectually, or otherwise, there needs to be change. Change is hard because it is uncomfortable.

Unleashing Creativity and Innovation

Creativity and innovation are the keys to both organizational growth and successful careers. People understand this, but they do not know how to unleash their natural creative potential. Drawing upon his twenty-two years of first-hand experience helping FedEx grow into a global icon and the last ten years consulting around the world, Madan Birla provides proven and practical answers. Readers will learn

• How to build a reputation as a creative thinker and become management’s go-to person for innovative business solutions
• Four steps for unleashing their creative potential and generating creative ideas
• Four communication skills to gain acceptance of your ideas
• Two words that guarantee promotions
• How to minimize internal and external negative influences that obstruct creative energy flow
• How to stop self-censoring and how to confidently express their ideas
• How to trust that all the resources for germinating creative ideas are within them

To learn more about the customer experience, watch the entire expert sales interview. If you would like to read Madan’s book, it is available on Amazon.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Providing a good customer experience is key in customer retention. If you are treating your customers well, they are going to continue to come back to you year after year. It can be easy to get lost in the noise of following rules, but maintaining your core values while upholding the standards of a company is necessary. If the right people are hired, for the right reasons, success is unlimited.

This expert sales interview explores:

• Customer Experience
• An Exception to a Rule
• Would You Do That to Your Mother: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers

Customer Experience

Often times we go into work and we forget about how we should be treating our customers; the way that we would want to be treated. This happens because of the way that the organization is organized, we are forced to think inside our box around our KPIs because those individual KPIs are what we are going to be paid on. We get these blinders and inadvertently hire good people, but then lock them into policies that don’t let them act the right way. Or we don’t trust them with customer lifetime value that lets them blend golden rules, and do the right thing. This comes down to leadership bravery and deliberateness. You have to think ahead of this stuff happening to be able to say what you will and won’t be able to do.

An Exception to a Rule

A lot of times we inadvertently create boxes around rules that we wouldn’t normally do. Sometimes it can be easy to become afraid that if we make an exception, it will then become the new rule, instead of just taking it for face value as an exception. Take a warranty for example. If your warranty expired three days ago, there is essentially nothing that can be done about that if your item is broken, unless there is an exception made. Most rules, like a warranty, are not meant for people who’s items broke right after their warranty has expired.

Would You Do That to Your Mother

Customer experience pioneer Jeanne Bliss shows why “Make Mom Proud” companies outperform their competition. Her 5-step guide to customer experience and culture transformation makes this achievement possible.

Bliss urges companies to make business personal to earn ardent fans and admirers, by focusing on one deceptively simple question: “Would you do that to your mother?”

“Make Mom Proud” companies give customers the treatment they desire, and employees the ability to deliver it. They turn “gotcha” moments into “we’ve got your back” moments by rethinking business practices, and they enable employees to be part of the solution to fix customer frustrations.

Bliss scoured the marketplace seeking companies who excel at living their core values, grounded in what we all learned as kids. She offers a five-step plan for evaluating your current behaviors and implementing actions at every level of the organization

To learn more about the customer experience, watch the entire expert sales interview. If you would like to read Jeanne’s book, it is available on Amazon.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In sales, and in life, having good people skills is vital. If you have bad people skills, you will not be able to make connections with prospects, and you will not be able to close the deal. Having a strong understanding of yourself and others can help.  Improve your people skills so that you can thrive in your career, and outside of your career.

This expert sales interview explores:

• Understanding Yourself and The Enneagram
• Feel Connected
• The Art of People: 11 Simple People Skills That Will Get You Everything You Want

Understanding Yourself

People spend a great deal more time trying to understand others than they spend trying to understand themselves. A lot of us don’t realize that in order to be able to go out into the world and understand others, you must first understand yourself. Kerpen also discusses a personality assessment called The Enneagram. The Enneagram is a centuries-old personality assessment system that is far less famous than Meyers and Briggs. But Kerpen argues it is far more effective, reliable, and useful as a tool.

Feel Connected

As humans, we are bombarded with tools like Social Media and get snapshots of people lives that make us perhaps feel more inadequate. Social media is basically just a highlight reel of people’s lives and it is easy to lose sight of the fact that it is not always reality. In respect to our phones, we are the most connected we have ever been, but we are actually less deeply connected than we have ever been because our connections are very surface. When you can sincerely ask a deeper question to people and are actually able to listen and care about what they are saying, that act alone will differentiate you from every other people that just have the intent to reply or figure out what to say next.

The Art of People

What does it take to win success and influence? Some people think that in today’s hypercompetitive world, it’s the tough, take-no-prisoners type who comes out on top. But in reality, argues New York Times best-selling author Dave Kerpen, it’s actually those with the best people skills who win the day.

• Those who build the right relationships.
• Those who truly understand and connect with their colleagues, their customers, their partners.
• Those who can teach, lead and inspire.

In a world where we are constantly connected and social media has become the primary way we communicate. The key to getting ahead is being the person others like respect, and trust. Because no matter who you are or what profession you’re in.  Success is contingent less on what you can do for yourself but on what other people are willing to do for you. Here, through 53 bite-sized, easy-to-execute, and often counterintuitive tips, you’ll learn to master the 11 people skills that will get you more of what you want at work, at home, and in life.

For example, you’ll learn:

• The single most important question you can ever ask to win attention in a meeting
• The one simple key to networking that nobody talks about
• How to remain top of mind for thousands of people every day
• Why it usually pays to be the one to give the bad news
• How to blow off the right people
• And why, when in doubt, to buy him a bonsai

A book best described as “How to Win Friends and Influence People for today’s world”. The Art of People shows how to charm and win over anyone to be more successful at work and outside of it.
To learn more about improving your people skills, watch the entire expert sales interview. If you are interested in reading David’s book, it is available on Amazon.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Teamwork can sometimes be challenging because there are a lot of different opinions being shared all at once. The key to successful teamwork is creating a safe and respectful environment in which all people feel heard and validated, even if you don’t agree with their opinions. The powers of creative conflict and collaboration are unmatched when done in an appropriate way.

This expert sales interview explores:

• Collaboration
• Conflict
• Wired to Connect

Collaboration

Collaboration is often assumed to be a natural occurrence – you put a bunch of people together and naturally they mesh well and are able to collaborate. This is not actually the case. The term “collaboration” is often used instead of the word cooperation or coordination. Andreatta believes that it is important to first clarify which term they mean because when you do your part of the task, and I do mine, that’s actual cooperation. That is a very different skill set. Collaboration is an act of co-creation. This is when we are tasked to solve a problem and we are all working together to find a solution that would otherwise be different without the contributions of others. Collaboration can often cause tension, so it is important to create an environment where people can trust and respect each other while being creative and maintaining good conflict resolution.

Conflict

Creative conflict and regular conflict are not the same. As a community, we have become very against conflict because we don’t understand the creative power that can come from it. Conflict can be a healthy thing if it is not done in a way that demeans or undermines another person. Having passionate conversations with space for listening can be healthy. The key is listening and respecting the other person’s opinion, even if you may not agree with it. We have to find ways to find spirited conversations without taking a turn toward being mean, and for some, this means becoming more comfortable with this.

Wired to Connect

We are biologically wired to learn. It’s the key to our survival and the path to fulfilling our capacity to become or create something more. Wired to Grow reveals how the neuroscience of learning can unlock the fullest expression of our potential and shows us how to apply our natural wiring to positively transform our lives, habits, and organizations.

Apply this material to your own life immediately or help others and become a more effective manager, parent, leader, educator, or health care worker.

Drawing on her unique background in leadership, psychology, education, and the human sciences, Dr. Britt Andreatta has over 25 years of experience consulting with individuals, businesses, government agencies, universities, and nonprofit organizations. She creates powerful solutions to today’s personal, organizational, and global workplace challenges. Her books include Leading with Emotional Intelligence, The Neuroscience of Learning, Leadership Fundamentals, and Leading Change.

To learn more about team collaboration, watch the entire expert sales interview. If you are interested in reading Britt’s latest book, Wired to Connect, it is available on Amazon.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Prospecting can be a challenge for any salesperson, especially when you are having to cold call. The number of times that you are hung up on in one day can be overwhelming and exhausting. Rejection is never easy, but its par for the course in sales. That being said, without prospecting, sales would be impossible, so, unfortunately, it is a necessary evil. Here are some tips to help you prospect more successfully.

This expert sales interview explores:

• Prospecting, Outbound, Cold Calling
• Timing is Everything
• High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Prospecting, Outbound, and Cold Calling

These three things are more important than ever because the world is more cluttered than ever. There are so many message systems out there that unless you can really go one on one with somebody, you have little chance of succeeding. This is why outbound is more important than ever. If we truly believe in the outcome that we can help people with, or what we can deliver as a company, then you owe it to people to get in touch with them. If you are just sitting there waiting for someone to come to you, you will never be successful. Prospecting doesn’t have to be what you can’t do. There are so many tools that can help us now. Cold calling is more like informed calling, rather than an information dump. You no longer have to tell that person anything, you are engaging them. That is the biggest shift in the prospecting world.

Timing is Everything

People have said that you have to give the right message, at the right time, to the right person. Hunter argues that it’s really about asking the right QUESTION, to the right person, at the right time. When you are able to do that, it’s the sweet spot of prospecting. The right question engages the person right off the bat. Engaging a person means asking them a question that requires their opinion. Of course, this is not 100%, but you will definitely have a greater success rate if you are able to engage with the prospect.

High-Profit Prospecting

Buyers are evolving and so should your prospecting. As a salesperson, your pipeline is the key to your success. No matter what changes, that remains the same. Top producers prospect-and they do it ALL THE TIME. “But how?” you ask, “In the age of the Internet, isn’t cold-calling dead?” Now, in his new book, sales expert Mark Hunter shatters costly prospecting myths and eliminates confusion about what works today. Merging new strategies with proven practices, High-Profit Prospecting will help you: * Find better leads and qualify them quickly * Trade cold calling for informed calling * Tailor your timing and message * Leave a great voicemail * Craft compelling emails * Use social media effectively * Leverage referrals * Get past gatekeepers and open new doors * Steer clear of prospecting pitfalls * Connect with the C-Suite * And more The Internet won’t fill your sales funnel and you can’t rely on the marketing department for leads (not if you want to succeed). High-Profit Prospecting puts the power back where it belongs in your hands. Follow its formula and start bringing in valuable new business.

To learn more about high-profit prospecting, watch the entire expert sales interview. If you would like to read Mark’s book, it is available on Amazon.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

It is incredibly easy to set self-limiting beliefs for yourself. You can tell yourself that you aren’t smart enough, strong enough, skilled enough, etc., but the reality of the situation is that you can do anything you set your mind to. All you have to do is start with a dream, and work harder than you’ve ever worked before.

This expert sales interview explores:

• It Starts With a Dream
• Making a Dream Reality
• Planning for 2022
• The Courage to Succeed

It Starts With a Dream

At the age of 10 years old, Ruben saw the Olympics on TV and knew that he wanted to someday participate. As the slow kid in school, Gonzalez was always the last one picked in PE class. Gonzalez recalls that he had a lot of heart, but didn’t exactly have the body to go with it. It wasn’t until 11 years later when he saw Scott Hamilton win the Olympics and he thought to himself, “if that little guy can win, then I can at least play.” This was the first time in his life that he had belief. Nicknamed “Bulldog” for his perseverance, Gonzalez decided to choose a sport that maybe had a lot of broken bones, a lot of quitters, and he would just be one of the few that didn’t quit.

Making a Dream Reality

After deciding to try his hand a luge, Gonzalez wrote a letter to Sports Illustrated asking them where you can learn the sport and they told him Lake Placid, New York. After finding out that Gonzalez was born in Argentina, he was told that they would help him train, but he still had to qualify top 50 in the world, but he had a shot. 4 years, and a few broken bones later, Gonzalez made the cut. Today, he has made it to the Olympics 4 times, each time in a new decade.

Planning for 2022

After taking seven years off, Gonzalez decided that he wanted to try and make it to the Olympics one more time. Gonzalez is sliding better than ever right now but is more stiff than usual. His trainers have him doing a lot of yoga so that he has access to a whole new level of strength that he didn’t have before. With a new sled waiting for him in Calgary, he is ready to train again for his next big goal. Gonzalez will be 59 years old if he makes it to the 2022 Olympics in Beijing.

The Courage to Succeed

Four-time Olympian, bestselling author and award-winning speaker Ruben Gonzalez on how to develop the focus, discipline, confidence, and courage 
you need to achieve your goals. Take control of your life with the success secrets of an Olympic athlete and successful business owner.
As a four-time Olympian, peak-performance expert Ruben Gonzalez knows how to achieve success again and again. Now you can learn the keys to success from someone who’s been there.

Learn time-tested ways to:

• Build confidence and destroy fear
• Unleash your passion and drive
• Unlock your full potential
• Turn defeat into victory
• Achieve your life ambitions

Ruben wasn’t a gifted athlete. He didn’t take up the Olympic sport of luge until he was 21. Against all odds, four years and a few broken bones later he was competing in the Calgary Winter Olympics. At the age of 47, he was racing against 20-year-olds at the Vancouver Olympics. If these principles worked for Ruben, they will work for anyone, anywhere, anytime.

To learn more about how to dream big, watch the entire expert sales interview. If you would like to read Ruben’s book, it is available on Amazon.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

RECORDING OF PANEL DISCUSSION

Everyone dreads the end of Q4 because it can be incredibly slow. Unless you are motivated and constantly pushing to grow your pipeline at the end of the year, you could have a slow start to the first quarter. The key to starting off the year strong is to make sure you don’t fall victim to the end of the year slump.

Now you can view our latest Panel Discussion from December 18th 2018 to get actionable insight from Michael Altchuler, John Healy, and Ruth van Vierzen into how to start 2019 off strong.

Michael Altchuler – For over 2 decades I’ve been fortunate to have been able to help countless individuals and organizations achieve breakthrough results both personally & professionally. As a nationally-recognized expert on Leadership, Sales & Peak Performance, I help my clients accelerate and maximize their business success and live better, more fulfilled lives.

John Healy – John Healy is the Vice President of Sales for Factor 8, an award-winning inside sales training and consulting organization. He brings over 18 years of inside sales and sales leadership experience and a passion for developing people. John has traveled the world working with reps and leaders at all levels to maximize performance and sharpen the skills of inside teams.

Ruth van Vierzen – Founder of REVSquared Business Growth Agency. An expert in business management and growth strategies with focus on guaranteed sales solutions, marketing, operations and a public speaker. Grab her free online course The Ultimate Follow-Up System and email series Grow Your Sales with Email Marketing.

Storytelling can be an incredibly useful tool in sales, but have you ever thought about why this is? It’s simple – when you are telling a story, you can connect with people. Stories create a problem that your product or service can help alleviate, which ultimately can lead to closing more deals. Don’t let your storytelling get in the way of a successful business.

This expert sales interview explores:

• Increase the Probability of Closing
• Facts are Forgotten
• Rapport Investigation

Increase the Probability of Closing

As we get to the end of the year, there are a few things that we need to keep in check. First, the end of the year is not a time to start pulling back. If you want a strong first quarter, you need to maintain the momentum. Second, storytelling isn’t necessarily a fast close concept. Parsley explains from his experience, the sales professional’s goal is not actually to sell. The goal is to connect with people and make connections, and the other goal in sales is to manipulate people with good intent.

Facts are Forgotten; Stories are Remembered

When you load someone up with facts, statistics, etc., people are going to forget about that information because people don’t care about that information. This is one of the many reasons why infomercials are so powerful – they are establishing a pain through a story. They don’t talk about price, but they tell you a story and make you want the product.

Rapport Investigation

Before you can tell a story, you need to find ways to connect with people. Rapport investigation, or internet stalking is hugely important. That’s not to say that you blatantly let them know you have been investigating them, but letting out subtle hints to engage with them and connect with them are going to help you build rapport. You can act professionally all you want, but it’s incredibly important to talk like a friend.

To learn more about how to use storytelling for sales success, watch the entire expert sales interview.

About 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 is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.