How to Understand Customer Problems and Position Your Product (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Gen Furukawa discusses how to better understand prospect/customer problems and provide a solution that meets their needs. Gen Furukawa is part of the Prehook team and loves helping entrepreneurs build awesome e-commerce brands.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

What it takes to understand your customers and prospects
How to get prospects to share information willingly
The trick to coming up with the right “hook”

Understanding the Customer

Understanding the customer is a perennial problem when it comes to sales. There are many issues when it comes to getting to the heart of the customer’s problem, and Gen Furukawa says that the solution to most of these problems is asking questions.

Asking prospects about their goals and challenges is the key. Once you understand this, you can think about how your product and brand can take them from their current state to their future aspirational state.

Adding Value

Salespeople are geared towards understanding customer pain points, but when it comes to e-commerce, marketing, and other scaling endeavors, understanding these customer challenges becomes far less intuitive because it could be any number of problems they’re trying to solve. That said, asking a few questions can help you quickly get to the bottom of the problem.

The crux of it is about adding value. Most consumers are willing to share their information, but there has to be some value in the exchange. That value is often translated to personalized experiences. If you can better understand your customer, you can offer more relevant messaging, content, and more relevant offers.

Asking Questions

Part of the challenge is constructing your offer to make sense to your customer and build upon itself. Prospects should see the value in giving you additional information. The trick is to get the right “hook” in there, targeting the things that help your customers learn more about themselves or pique their curiosity enough to click through, whether on a homepage or a paid ad, to eventually land on your site.

The end goal is to ask a few questions and gather data that the customer willingly shares so that you can understand what they’re looking for, why they’re on the site, and what problems they’re looking to solve.

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.

Sales and Selling Strategies for Small Businesses (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Gary Geiman discusses sales and selling strategies for small businesses. Gary Geiman is a business growth expert, public speaker, author, and founder of DMN8 Partners Inc.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

How technology has hampered sales for small businesses
Why the phone is still the number-one sales tool
Why small businesses need to understand their audience and diversify their approach

Choice Paralysis

Today, there are so many tools and platforms available to small businesses that it can become overwhelming. Despite all the tools, small companies lack strategy and take a scattergun approach to sales. Technology has become overwhelming, mainly because small business owners often try to become experts at everything, which is impossible.

The easiest thing to forget is that sales are about communication and touch. The more you have your message in front of someone, the more often you can communicate what you do, the more successful you can be. Technology can help, but we often miss out on simple things.

The Phone as the #1 Sales Tool

According to Gary Geiman, the phone remains the number-one sales tool. The telephone has been a sales tool for a long time, but we want to make everything sexy today. A phone call, text message, or instant message that is poignantly placed and isn’t interruptive in a way that puts people off can give you better conversion rates than almost any other type of medium.

Gary spends a lot of time helping other business owners focus on utilizing this approach in their sales process and strategy as much as possible.

Understanding Your Audience

Marketers and salespeople often say that phone calls are outdated and people don’t want to be called anymore. Still, the truth is that for small businesses, in particular, the number-one thing is identifying your audience and figuring out how they like to be communicated with.

We get caught up in doing a single thing — sending emails, texting, snail mail, calling, whatever it is, and we think that all of our prospects will respond to this single channel. Thinking about the phone itself, you can almost hit every mode of communication via the phone and, at the same time, figure out how a customer responds.

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.

How to Lead Your Client Communication Through Education (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Colby Flood discusses how you can lead your client communication through education. Colby Flood is the Founder and CEO of Brighter Click, an eCommerce paid social agency with a mission to be Education First in all things.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Client communication vs. client education
Your role as the expert and how to help your clients in the best way
What determines a successful client call

Client Education

Many people think that client communication is all about providing information, but that is not the same as educating clients as they go along. You can focus on providing your clients with information on what is going on with their accounts, but you should instead focus on trying to educate your clients on why the results are happening, what you can do with that in the future, or how you can avoid it.

The folks at Brighter Click want to see how they can educate their clients to understand what is happening in the landscape and how they can continue growing.

Embracing the Expert Role

Part of the issue today is that people are so overwhelmed. There is so much information out there, so many products and services. We talk about the prospects and customers being so much better informed than ever, when in fact, this is not really the case because they’re often so overwhelmed that they don’t even know how to move forward with the information they have.

This is where the education part becomes even more critical. When you’re working with a client, ideally, you are their partner. You’re helping them understand the best thing to focus on to move the needle. They brought you on as an expert to help them through the particular landscape you’re focused on, so help them understand where their time, energy, and resources need to go.

Catching Up

There are a few ways you can do this elegantly and systematically, building on things as you go forward, not just helping the customer but also drawing them in. First, you should be aware that the sales process never ends, even when you sign someone on as a client.

A successful client call is marked by the feeling that you’re getting on a call with an old friend to catch up and learn about their business.

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.

How To Get Into Professional Speaking And Build Your Personal Brand (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Steve Lowell discusses how to get into professional speaking and build your personal brand. Steve Lowell has been speaking and performing live on stage since the age of 6. He is an award-winning global speaker, training and mentoring executive thought leaders and professional speakers worldwide to deliver high-impact keynote speeches, drive revenue from the platform and build wealth through speaking.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Finding your purpose as a speaker
Figuring out what type of speaker you want to be
Transforming yourself before you can transform others

Finding Your Purpose

The first thing we need to do if we choose to get into the speaking business is to identify what our purpose is. Why are we even there? What is it that we want to share with this world? What is the change or transformation that we want to make? What is the wisdom we wish to impart?

We need to know what our desired outcome is first. Without that, we’re just hitting in the dark and not serving anybody. Choose what that desired outcome is for you and run with it.

Types of Speakers

We also need to decide what kind of speaker we want to be. Do you want to be a motivational, inspirational speaker with powerful stories which excite and motivate people? Do you want to be an educational speaker; do you have the knowledge, skills, and wisdom that you wish to transfer to an audience so that they would know something they didn’t know before?

Finally, do you want to be a transformational speaker? This is a category Steve Lowell thinks highly of and recommends to all aspiring speakers. Being a transformational speaker means taking all the wisdom, experience, knowledge, and creativity you have curated over your lifetime and using it to transform lives.

Transformation

Usually, speakers can belong to all three categories if they plan the messaging properly. Still, the most powerful way to get into the speaking business is to do more than motivate, do more than inspire, and do more than educate.

Steve Lowell believes that you need to transform yourself before you can help transform others. Just as we all have a book within us, we have a speech within us too, but it is all about understanding the purpose of it rather than simply doing it for the sake of doing 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.

How Selling is 95% Mindset and 5% Mechanical (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Rhonda Petit discusses how selling is 95% mindset and 5% mechanical. Rhonda Petit is a sales and business peak performance coach with 35 years of sales experience in corporate America and Fortune 500 companies. She wrote The Spirit of Selling: Using Universal Laws for Sales Success.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Where Rhonda Petit got the idea to write The Spirit of Selling
The concept of psychic income and how it relates to monetary income
How to approach sales as a service and become a top-notch salesperson

The Spirit of Selling

In 2019, Rhonda attended a Matrix event with the late great Bob Proctor. She was starting her coaching business, and the Matrix was a place where you could network with different people, build your business, learn about multiple income streams, etc.

Bob Proctor was always talking about these universal laws, and the more she studied them and understood them, she realized that she wished she had known all that stuff when she started selling at 21. This is what prompted her to begin writing The Spirit of Selling.

Psychic vs. Monetary Income

We often don’t understand that money is energy and comes when a service is appreciated. When you’re selling, you have to get the meaning of money clear so that you can expect that you’re going to receive money. Sales are a service, so you should expect that there will be money coming as a result.

There are two forms of income: your psychic income and your monetary income. Sometimes if people’s beliefs towards money are negative, they can do a lot of services just for psychic income, meaning they’ll feel good because they helped someone. Still, they’ll block the monetary gain, which is a big problem if you want to be successful in business.

Sales as a Service

When you’re selling, you’re making composites with people. The sale will naturally evolve if you’re in it for the other person’s interest. However, there are many cultural misconceptions about sales, and we often equate salespeople with con artists.

And indeed, great sales professionals and con artists are both very good persuaders, but the difference is where their focus lies. The top-notch sales professional is wholly focused on the client, ensuring they get what they want from the deal. On the other hand, the con artist only cares about what they’re going to get out of the deal, thinking about themselves.

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.

Leveraging The Art & Science of Personal Mastery To Create Real Life Results (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Joey Klein discusses his book The Inner Matrix: Leveraging the Art & Science of Personal Mastery to Create Real Life Results. Joey Klein is the author of The Inner Matrix and the Founder of The Inner Matrix System. He’s here to help you discover what’s holding you back from your lucrative career, vibrant health, fulfilling relationship, or anything in between, and more importantly, what to do about it.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Where the idea for The Inner Matrix book came from
How ancient wisdom tradition can help us improve our lives today
Why it is crucial to own up to who you are in any relationship

The Inner Matrix

The idea for The Inner Matrix came to Joey quite organically. It all started when he was a bit younger, in his late teens and early twenties. He was a bit of an out-of-control teenager who didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. At some point, he realized that if he continued to live the way he was, there was a good chance that he would not be alive the following year.

He remembers thinking he was put on this Earth to live for something more. He realized that he wanted to know what peace and fulfillment looked like. He met a mentor and studied ancient wisdom traditions in temples in India, Thailand, and Japan. This helped him find the tools and training systems to manage emotions.

Ancient Wisdom

Back in the day, before we had all the science and technology helping us measure the human body’s inner workings, people could only rely on their perception of what made them feel good. If a particular type of breath made you feel good and gave you more energy, you were inclined to perform that breath more, for example.

So, trial and error were the only means of improving the human condition for generations, with wisdom getting passed on and repeated. The fundamental understanding of nervous-system management is an aspect of traditional wisdom that carries incredible value.

Owning Who You Are

Another lesson to be learned from ancient wisdom tradition is that who you are, not what you do, produces the outcomes and results in your life. What positions you to succeed in any aspect of life is what you bring to the table as yourself.

If you bring frustration, agitation, overwhelm, etc., into your romantic relationship, you will break that relationship down, not to mention induce stress on your own body. It all boils down to owning who you are in any relationship and understanding how you can align with the vibrant, loving, connected relationship you aspire to.

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.

The Power of Making Decisions and Why it is Difficult for Some (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Allyson Chavez discusses the power of making decisions and why it is so difficult for some people. Allyson Chavez is a prosperity and success coach for ambitious God-centered women who want phenomenal success with ease, to bend time and space, achieve their goals without hustle or grind, and reshape their reality and feminine energy.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

How Allyson Chavez got interested in the science of making decisions
What happens if you put off making decisions
Deciding whether you want to live in a hostile universe or a friendly one

Allyson’s Journey

Allyson Chavez became interested in the science of making decisions because she had difficulty making decisions for a long time. She second-guessed any big decision that she wanted to make. Being in that back-and-forth place put her in a spin, and it was mentally exhausting to be indecisive about everything.

As she learned more about what decisions are, she realized that she needed to share her message with people, giving them a different perspective about decisions and taking the angst and agony out of making decisions with just a tiny tweak in their viewpoint.

Postponing Decisions

If you continue to postpone making decisions, the difficult ones will get even harder and the opportunities will disappear. Whenever Allyson had a decision to make about joining a program, learning a new skill, or anything else, she would remain in the indecision phase until the opportunity passed, and she would feel relief that she didn’t move forward with it.

Later on, she would realize that she had missed an opportunity to change the entire trajectory of her life, and here she was, relieved that she had let an opportunity pass her by because she was so hung up on making a wrong decision.

Hostile vs. Friendly Universe

The biggest thing Allyson learned about decisions is that they don’t always have to relate to doing something. Instead, decisions are most often about something. For years and years, Allyson chose to live in a hostile universe, so every decision she had to make was hampered by this fear of messing up.

Once she decided that she lived in a universe designed to support her, one that was friendly to her desires, it helped her get into the driver’s seat for the first time in her life. She then understood that everything would always work out and it would be okay.

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.

How Text Messaging has Evolved for Businesses (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Aaron Weiche discusses text messaging and how it has moved on from its infancy stage and evolved into a viable two-way communication channel for businesses. Aaron Weiche is the Co-Founder and CEO of Leadferno, a business messaging solution that helps create delightful conversations at speed for businesses through messaging.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The infancy of text messaging in business
How text messaging has evolved into a two-way communication channel in business
The advantages of text messaging over other communication channels

Growing Pains

Text messaging has become a tremendous personal channel of communication. As is the case with any new invention, it took some time for us to adapt and find ways in which this channel can benefit us and make our lives a little easier and more efficient. Over time, these changes pushed text messaging into the business world, and the pandemic accelerated that push.

Businesses are always looking for better ways to communicate with their customers. During the pandemic, this was compounded by them having to change service, delivering, and communicating models they’d been using for years.

Two-Way Communication

Two-way texting has been the most significant recent shift in business-focused text messaging, which is what Aaron and his company focus on most. Instead of simply sending out marketing blasts, deals of the day, sales promotions, and so on, businesses are now looking at text messages as a great way to have a dialogue with their audiences.

Nowadays, customers are looking to interact through this channel, asking questions and getting answers. They also want to get reminders, follow up on orders and deliveries, and communicate with their favorite brands.

Advantages of Texting

The first and most significant advantage of text messaging as a marketing channel is that it offers the smallest amount of resistance from customers. It is an excellent lead capture because customers like to know they can simply send a text to start interacting with you and get something set up or clarified.

This beats a phone call, which may result in a call tree, requiring customers to leave a voice mail and wait for a return call. It also beats e-mail, which comes into an e-mail inbox that’s likely already throttled with all kinds of messages, spam, and so on.

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.