How To Refocus Your Life and Start Living In The Moment (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Spencer Snakard discusses how to refocus your life and start living in the moment instead of constantly running towards a moving finish line. Spencer Snakard is an executive transformational coach, trainer, and speaker.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Spencer Snakard’s background and expertise in helping people focus on the moment
Questions to ask yourself to improve your life right now
The constantly-moving goalposts we’re trying to reach

Difficult Times

Many people feel very stuck right now, with so many things out of their control. We’ve lived through COVID, we’re going into recession, and there are all sorts of other things going on. Therefore, people feel powerless and do not consider this a very good time to go on a journey of transformation in their lives.

Instead, people tend to remain in the status quo for the time being and choose to delay their big decisions for some other time. Spencer Snakard specializes precisely in helping people break out of this mindset.

Questions to Ask Yourself

Life and business are happening now, and they’re not waiting for anybody or anything. There will always be something that will prevent you from making changes in your life, so one of the first things Spencer tries to establish with anyone she works with is understanding what they want.

She encourages us to ask ourselves: “What is my vision for my life/business?” “What do I want?” and “How can I start getting what I want from life right now?” Sometimes there are good reasons to put something off, but more often than not, it is a good idea to start leaning towards your goal even if there are things along the way that may create challenges for you.

Shifting Goalposts

Many of us who go into business are go-getters and high achievers. Some of us even consider this part of our identity and become defined by what we accomplish. Many of us in business seems to be running a race in which the finish line is constantly moving, so we can never get there.

This is where we should begin looking at what we can do now to improve our lives. We keep focusing on a goal that we think will ultimately make us happy, but it never works out that way because the finish line keeps moving. When it comes down to it, the finish line is death, so what are we trying to run towards anyway?

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.

What is a press release and how do they work? (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Mickie Kennedy discusses press releases. Mickie Kennedy is the CEO and Founder of eReleases.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

What a press release is and why it is still relevant today
How modern technologies can help your press release get coverage
The most strategic types of press releases and how to use them

Press Release

A press release is an announcement written in the third person. It may have some quotes, but the headline and the opening sentence are the most critical parts. It is primarily written for the journalist as opposed to the audience – the journalist is meant to turn it into an article or write it in a way that’s structured for their audience.

It is straightforward to write a press release – they are not particularly sophisticated. However, you should be sophisticated about what you choose to write about, which has to be strategic. When sending out a release and going over a wire, you want to ensure you get coverage from it.

Relevance

If you look at it from a journalist’s point of view, publications have slow days like everyone else, and they’re always looking for exciting things to highlight. If your press release isn’t interesting or newsworthy, it will get overlooked. However, the appetite for a good press release is still there.

Journalists are always looking for the next story. They’re always on a deadline and have to come up with content. This is why press releases still work very well. Most journalists start there, looking for something to inspire them to write a story. When they look on the wire, they are generally at their industry feeds, and with today’s search and keyword technology, they can easily find relevant headlines. You can benefit if your press release is there to be found.

Strategic Topics

Choosing what to do a press release about is very important. So, what are some of the things you should consider when publishing a press release? How do you ensure it is strategic and the right one to do?

In Mickie Kennedy’s professional opinion, the most strategic type of press release is a survey or study. So, if you do a survey or analysis in your industry, you will get cited in the article and the opportunity to link to all the results. In this case, the press release should focus on the most interesting or compelling things that your survey or study came up with.

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 Tech Company Can Stand Out From The Crowd (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Matthew Stibbe discusses how a tech company can differentiate itself and stand out from the crowd. Matthew Stibbe is the CEO of Articulate Marketing, a writer, marketer, pilot, entrepreneur, and computer games geek.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The commoditization and differentiation of companies within a sphere
How CEO’s passion for their industry leads to commoditization
Examples of how different companies use differentiation to stand out

Commoditization

There’s a particular perception among customers today that tech companies are all interchangeable. Customers believe that technology companies are all the same, and because there are so many in the marketplace, it is tough to differentiate between them.

The widespread perception is that you will be okay if you get one tech company, whatever it may be dealing with. Therefore, perception-wise, tech companies tend to be somewhat commoditized regardless of what technology they deal with. This raises the challenge of differentiation.

Passion as an Obstacle

Commoditization results from undifferentiation, but it is not why companies are undifferentiated. If you trace this whole situation back, tech company founders and the people who decide a business’s culture, brand, and identity are interested in the technology because that’s what got them started in the first place.

The problem is that people who buy your software, whatever that software may be, are not interested in how to create this technology. They’re interested in solving a problem, making something better, or dealing with an issue and achieving their goals in business or life in general.

Examples of Differentiation

In the old days, while other PC manufacturers were talking about speeds and feeds, faster processes, megabytes, and so on, Apple had the slogan “Think Different.” They were talking about something that was connecting emotionally and imaginatively to their buyers – for the most part, creative types who were willing to pay more for the product.

This is a classic example of differentiation. In the PC world, everybody was mirroring the competition and trying to be faster than one company and cheaper than the other while ultimately looking the same as everyone else. Eventually, this turns into self-commoditizing.

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.

Errors in Sale Business Structures that Keep You From Being More Efficient (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Joel Stevenson discusses the most common errors in sales business structures that keep you from being more efficient. Joel Stevenson is the CEO of Yesware, a leader in sales productivity software.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The importance of efficiency during difficult times
The different ways to improve efficiency
The way adversity forces businesses to go back to the basics

Efficiency

Efficiency is increasingly becoming a mantra among businesses. In better times, people get lazy and allow inefficiency to creep in because they can throw bodies or money at it. But when we enter periods like this, inefficiency can destroy a business.

If you think about how you can grow your revenue, there are two basic ways: you can either put more stuff into the top of your funnel, or you can have your funnel convert more effectively. In the good times, we tend to emphasize putting more in the funnel, spending more on marketing, opening up new channels, hiring more reps, and so on. However, when times become a bit leaner, we tend to focus on making our funnels more effective.

Making the Most of Your Funnel

The upside of living in difficult times is that they force you to take a closer look at your sales process. If you have fewer prospects in your funnel, you better have a higher rate of closing those prospects. This means spending the time to do higher-quality outreach to a more qualified set of people.

You can achieve efficiency in multiple different ways. If you’re doing a good job qualifying and spending more time on the right set of customers, that’s one way to drive efficiency. Another way would be to save more time by not doing the same activities repeatedly but using technology to help you automate some of them to spend more time on the right set of actions.

Back to Basics

When times are good, we begin to forget about the fundamentals; we get a little lazy and ignore doing everything as well as we could.

Times like this force you to refocus and perhaps go back to the fundamentals, making sure you’re walking through all the steps and preparing correctly because each opportunity that comes your way is like gold right now.

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 Transformative Power of Getting Stuff Done (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Jason Scott discusses the transformative power of getting stuff done. Jason Scott is a leader who jumps in to take care of people and get things done. He went from being a navy rescue person to spending over two decades as a CEO of 12VC, leading global transformation efforts for companies like DIRECTV, Trader Joe’s, and Blizzard Entertainment.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

How the different neuro-chemicals contribute to our sense of well-being
How Jason Scott got into the business of helping people get things done
Why teams fail to get results despite working overtime

Power of Dopamine

We tend to feel very good when we get stuff done and check things off a to-do list. The primary reason for this is that four neuro-chemicals are in charge of making us feel good and opening up our memory and learning centers. These are dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins.

When we get something done and check it off our to-do list, our body rewards us with a shot of dopamine. Once we know this fact, we can use this biological process to our advantage and turn our life around.

Jason Scott’s Approach

Jason started in the project management business, then got into product management, organizational change leadership, and team demand management. Somewhere along the line, he realized that leadership is a change-focused discipline in and of itself. Nobody hires a leader because they want their organization to be the same in a month, six months, or a year.

Jason had to develop an efficient operational management approach to running his business. In other words, he needed a system to get things done within his company, not just helping his clients get things done.

Helping Teams Deliver

Ultimately, Jason realized he was in the business of helping people get things done. He was often parachuted into situations where the leaders in the organization didn’t feel that their teams were delivering the outcomes they needed.

In these situations, he always found that both teams and leaders were stressed out, working during dinner, answering emails and getting phone calls at night, working weekends, and so on. Essentially, their quality of life was terrible, and their economic prosperity was not assured. In working with them, Jason’s job was to make them a team that delivered the necessary results.

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.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming an Inclusive Workplace (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Deanna Singh discusses her latest book, Actions Speak Louder: A Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming an Inclusive Workplace. Deanna Singh is described as a trailblazer and dynamic speaker at the forefront of social change. She’s an award-winning author, educator, business leader, social-justice champion, and Founder and Chief Change Agent at Flying Elephant, an umbrella organization for four social ventures dedicated to shifting power to marginalized communities.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

What prompted Deanna Singh to write her latest book
Company reputation is a driving factor for hiring the best talent
How to step away from the status quo by asking yourself the right questions about your hiring process

Genesis of the Book

In her day-to-day life, Deanna has the opportunity to work with amazing organizations worldwide. One of the big themes she’s seen in that work is that there’s nobody who wants to create an exclusive working environment – a place where people don’t feel like they can thrive, where they’re sad when they go to work, and can’t wait to go back home.

These are not the characteristics business owners describe when discussing what they want in their companies. So, there’s no lack of desire to create more inclusive workplaces, but there is a lack of understanding of how to get there. This was the source of Deanna’s motivation to write this book.

Company Reputation

How a company attracts people depends on the culture and life experience of the people it is trying to attract. Today’s job market is highly competitive, and almost every company in the world is trying to get the best talent.

Interestingly, what we used to think of as the fundamental driving forces of hiring great workers, such as compensation and location, only work to a certain extent. One of the critical driving forces nowadays is the company’s reputation within the larger community. People want to know that they can trust a company to provide opportunities for growth and healthy collaboration.

Reversing the Status Quo

We can sometimes get into these status-quo biases because we’re so comfortable doing what we’ve always done.

This is why we don’t ask ourselves some basic questions that would allow us to check why people from different backgrounds don’t seem to be applying for positions at our company.

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 Mindsets, Traits, and Behaviors That Create Sales Success (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, David Hoffeld discusses his latest book, Sell More with Science: The Mindsets, Traits, and Behaviors That Create Sales Success. David Hoffeld is the CEO and Chief Sales Trainer at the Hoffeld Group and the author of The Science of Selling and Sell More with Science.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Sell More with Science
Science Behind Mindsets
Link Between Mindset and Success

Sell More with Science

We’re always reading scientific journals in a number of disciplines, looking for insights that we can apply to sales. In The Science of Selling, David Hoffeld focused on how buying occurs — how our buyers’ brains form a buying decision and how to align sales with that process.

While writing his first book, he found that there was so much research on what we as sellers can do from our mindsets, traits, and even certain behaviors that can help us get better. In this new book, Sell More with Science, David focuses on us as the sellers and what we can do to get better faster and speed up our ability to grow our sales through science.

Science Behind Mindsets

Certain mindsets have been proven to bring success over thousands of scientific studies across numerous disciplines over numerous decades. These mindsets have been shown to be preemptive of success. In other words, a particular perspective is a foundation you build on to achieve the results you’re looking for.

Therefore, from a scientific standpoint, not all mindsets are equal, and how we think determines the results we produce.

Link Between Mindset and Success

It is easy to be dismissive of mindsets. Everybody thinks that attitudes are somewhat important, but what matters is what you do on a sales call.

However, the research shows that if you don’t have the right mindset, it sabotages what you do on a sales call and makes it very challenging, sometimes almost impossible, to succeed. All of this suggests that attitudes are mission-critical to our success.

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.

Why Businesses Need To Stop Ignoring Their Google Business Profiles (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Darren Shaw discusses why businesses need to stop ignoring their Google Business profiles. Darren Shaw is the founder of Whitespark, which takes care of local SEO, search rankings, and search ecosystems

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The advantages of having a high-quality Google Business profile
Why the Google listing is essential for local SEO
What conversion signals are and how they impact your ranking

Google Business

If your business has been around for some time, you probably created a Google listing in the beginning and ignored it since. However, over the last five years, Google has made many changes and enhancements to the Google Business profile dashboard. There are all kinds of amazing things you can be taking advantage of in that dashboard, but most businesses don’t do anything with it.

For example, there are Google Posts, which are similar to Facebook posts, in which you can talk about your specials and offers. The funny thing is that many businesses are paying for Google ads but not taking advantage of the free advertising space in their Google profiles.

Local SEO

If you care about ranking in your local community, the things you put on your Google Business listing have a significant impact on your success. The #1 thing is the primary category you set on your listing.

You can define what category your business belongs to and align that primary category as closely to the keywords you want to rank for as possible. The additional categories are also valuable because when you add these, you’re telling Google which other terms your business should be eligible to rank for.

Conversion Signals

Interestingly, a lot of the other stuff doesn’t impact ranking directly. Instead, these could be described as conversion signals.

If you’re getting lots of clicks and engagement on your listing, this could positively impact your rankings. But stuff like keywords in the description or keywords in the product/services section is not considered a ranking factor by Google.

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.