The Power of Following Leaders (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Ruben Gonzalez discusses the power of following the leader. Ruben Gonzalez is a professional speaker and author. He has competed in four Winter Olympics in the luge, despite having started at 21, when most competitors in this discipline are already in their prime.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

How he got into the luge and how resisting his coach’s advice held him back
Why and how he decided to change his focus and start listening
How being in control keeps us in our comfort zone and prevents us from improving

Resistance

Ruben got into the luge because he got excited about the Olympics despite not being much of an athlete. He decided to find a sport that fit his strength, which was perseverance. That hard-headedness and determination helped him stay in the game long enough to learn the skills even at a relatively late age.

On the other hand, the same hard-headedness hurt him because he always resisted following his coach’s advice. He kept looking for a coach or a mentor throughout his life but would always resist their guidance.

Changing the Focus

For three Olympics, Ruben resisted following the leader. It wasn’t until about two years before the Vancouver Olympics that everything changed. He was training for the Olympics, hoping to qualify and become the oldest athlete there at the age of 47.

The problem was that the number of participants was reduced for these Olympics from 50 to 40, and Ruben was usually ranked around #45 globally. He decided to try a new approach and start listening to his coach immediately. This enabled him to change his focus and improve his time enough to qualify. Changing his focus changed everything for him, and he was sliding better at 45 than he did when he was a kid.

Comfort and Control

So, what is it that holds people back from listening to advice? According to Ruben Gonzales, it is about control. He wanted to be independent and in control, which is a nice way of saying he didn’t like people telling him what to do.

Being in control feels safe, but it keeps you in your comfort zone, and you can’t improve in your comfort zone. Letting go is scary, but it gets you out of your comfort zone so you can improve.

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 Marketing for Local Businesses (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Laura Nelson discusses sales and marketing for local businesses. Laura Nelson is the VP of Marketing at Signpost and a local business advocate.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The marketing options for small businesses
Why metrics tracking and measuring is crucial for success
Offline marketing methods for local businesses

Basics

If you have a small or local business, there are so many options for marketing — from traditional to digital — that it can be completely overwhelming. So how do you decide as a local business what the best marketing approach is?

Many local business owners have limited budgets, so they can’t just invest in everything and see what sticks. There are many choices, so what Laura recommends for all local businesses is to invest in foundational things first. This includes optimizing your Google Business profile to reflect your business online accurately. It is incredible how many companies still don’t utilize Google Business and other similar tools, which always seem to be an afterthought.

Metrics

Beyond the basics, there are many ways that you can go, including software programs and lead generation strategies, both online and offline, in your community. What is vital for any local business owner is to make sure that they keep track of what they do.

The marketing activities required for success will be different across industries and communities. You can’t improve on anything unless you measure it first, and getting dialed in requires experimentation and refinement.

Traditional Methods

Although we’re bombarded with digital marketing, traditional offline methods should still be a part of any local business’s marketing efforts. If you’re a business that does work in the field, and you have a fleet of vehicles or even just one car, you have an opportunity to brand yourself and get your business’s name out around town.

A simple way to do this is through an effectively designed truck wrap. Moreover, you could use a leaflet distribution service to reach your local audience and drive growth. It’ll enable you to stay ahead with tangible solutions. Other methods include building a referral program. Referrals as a concept are not going away, and if you make it easy for your happy customers to refer you to their friends and give them some perks, they’ll be glad to pass along the message.

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 Deep Connection Delivers Maximized Sales (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Justin Cunningham discusses how deep connection delivers maximized sales. Justin Cunningham is on a mission to create positive change. He works to empower people, revealing what stops us, what unlocks us, and what we can do about it to unleash our gifts to the world.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The difference in the sales approaches of small businesses and large companies
How to connect with prospects on an emotional level
Showing interest in enabling the customer’s future

Small Business vs. Large Company

Justin has worked as a sales trainer with small businesses and billion-dollar companies like Coca-Cola and Mercedes Benz. During that time, he has learned that a lot depends on the type of sales role you’re in.

For example, if you’re in a small business, it is much easier to get into relationship selling, and you can rely on that. On the other hand, if you’re employed in a large company, you typically have a quota to hit with your sales. This means there’s often a disconnect regarding what is most important, depending on where you’re employed. Smaller businesses tend to favor forming deep relationships, while larger companies try to maximize the value received from each customer.

Maximizing Customer Value

Whether small or large, every company would like to maximize its customer lifetime value. We’ve all heard that people buy emotionally and defend it logically. The only way to truly connect with somebody on an emotional level is to ask them a lot of deep questions and establish more than a basic rapport.

To make a premium sale, you probably need to ask the customer more than 20 questions to get anywhere near understanding what their problems are. Justin decided to take that methodology to every level at which he worked with people. He discovered that salespeople don’t generally spend the time forming a deep connection with the prospect.

Forming a Connection

You need to understand your customer’s past. Once you know that, it is much easier to match their values. This leads to the prospect feeling like you understand them on an entirely different level compared to most salespeople.

The idea is to show the client that you’re interested in enabling their future, rather than simply giving them a sales pitch. This leads to a more-than-optimal opportunity to maximize your sale. However, it doesn’t come from the mindset of winning the sale but from a mentality of forming a deep connection.

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.

Positive Influence and Heartfelt Resilience in a Time of Adversity (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Elias Kanaris discusses his book Leading from the Stop: Positive Influence and Heartfelt Resilience in a Time of Adversity. Elias Kanaris is an author, professional keynote speaker, executive coach, leadership trainer, and entrepreneur. He has frequently spoken to audiences in the I.T., telecommunications, insurance, financial services, real estate, and education sectors across thirteen countries on four continents.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The book’s story and Elias’s inspiration to write it
How a small town in Newfoundland banded together to help 7,000 strangers
How the people of Gander were able to react so well to this crisis

Background

It was an ordinary Tuesday, and Elias Kanaris was at his parents’ house in Wimbledon, in South London. He was supposed to take a trip from London Heathrow to Chicago, so he went to the airport and got on the plane. Halfway through the flight, the pilot came on to say that there had been a significant incident. As a result, the Federal Aviation Authority shut down all airspace.

His plane became one of the 38 diverted to the Gander International Airport in Newfoundland, Canada. Elias and the rest of the passengers spent five days in Gander as guests of the Salvation Army because the day in question was September 11, 2001.

Emergency

The town of Gander had 9,300 residents at breakfast time. By the time 38 planes had landed, they served supper to 16,000 people. How does a town cope with that? No emergency plan covers adding another 7,000 people to your population instantly.

What Elias observed during this period was all about leadership and resilience, as the people of Newfoundland came together to look after the passengers of these planes and make sure they could survive this traumatic experience.

Crisis Management

The Gander airport had been abandoned for a long time before this incident. It used to be a stopover point between Europe and North America, but planes could suddenly go much further without refuels with jet engines, so it got bypassed.

So, when many lost and confused people suddenly arrived at Gander, its residents were not exactly prepared. Luckily, they understood they needed to be there for these people and help them. Everybody was coping with the experience differently, and the people of Gander and the Salvation Army did a great job in crisis management.

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 Our Mindset Affects Our Relationship With Money (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Dr. Deborah Fryer discusses mindset and money. Dr. Deborah Fryer is a transformational coach, filmmaker, yogini, and chef. She helps creative, compassionate, visionary thinkers master their mindset to stop struggling with self-doubt and self-sabotage and start experiencing ease, abundance, freedom, and flow.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

How our mindset affects our world
The way our beliefs about money influence our relationship with it
Why it is possible to make money doing what you love

Mindset

Our mindset affects everything about us. It affects our health, income, and relationships, and money is an excellent mirror for seeing parts of yourself with which you may or may not be in the right relationship.

Think about a frustrating relationship that you’ve had with someone. Most, if not all of us, have had this type of relationship at some point in our lives. Perhaps it was with a family member, a significant other earlier in life, a boss, or an employee. The fact is that we’ve all had a relationship that we found very frustrating. Interestingly, the same problems we’ve experienced in these relationships tend to manifest in our relationship with money.

Relationship with Money

We’ve all absorbed specific values and certain beliefs in childhood about money, greed, rich people, how hard you have to work for your money, how much money you can make, and so on. We unconsciously absorb those beliefs, habits, and values, and we start living them as if we chose them.

Most people don’t realize why they’re struggling with money until they uncover the deeper layers of these beliefs. Dr. Deborah is on a mission to show people that they can make money doing what they love, and their relationship with money doesn’t have to be complicated or frustrating.

Doing What You Love

Whatever is easy for you will be hard for somebody else. As soon as you realize that, you can start marketing and selling whatever is easy for you. We all invest in what is hard for us, and we’re willing to pay other people to do it, so we don’t have to.

This is essentially how the market works — everyone has something that they’re good at, and everyone has things that they’re not very good at, and they want to pay somebody to help them with these things.

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.

Creating a Culture of Engaged Employees (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Chellie Philips discusses creating a culture of engaged employees and the power that building your personal brand can have on your success journey. Chellie Philips is a speaker and writer who produces courses on various topics.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The challenge of communicating with different generations within the workforce
How the pandemic has compounded this challenge
Why communication is a crucial factor in the success of any company

Aging Workforce

One of the most significant challenges leaders have faced over the last few years is that we now have four if not five generations in the workplace for the first time. This means there are different ways in which people like to engage.

Each of these generations likes to be communicated with differently, and they all have their wants and needs. It can be very tricky for supervisors, managers, and the organization’s leadership to determine which way to include everybody and make them feel part of the organization.

Communication Throughout the Pandemic

All of this has come to the fore over the pandemic because companies that understood the need to communicate in different ways for various audiences fared well.

In contrast, organizations that communicate only using one communication format fared relatively poorly throughout the pandemic crisis. An engaged workforce can make all the difference in a company’s success. It can set you up to outperform your competition or set you up to fail, depending on whether you are prepared to invest in your people and provide them with the opportunities they need to develop as leaders.

Two-Way Street

Communication is a massive part of any organization and individual career development. It is also an enormous part of ensuring that your workforce is getting the right messages, guaranteeing an “upstream-downstream” relationship with them.

Your employees need to have a way to communicate back with you so that you’re all hearing and seeing if the messages are received in the way they were intended. You have to look at the feedback loop to see whether your communication is having an impact or not.

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 Problems Faced by SaaS Businesses that Work Through Partners (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Sunir Shah discusses his current company, AppBind, and how it solves the billing challenges that partners face when combining multiple SaaS products into a bundled service. Sunir Shah has solved SaaS-partnership problems at FreshBooks and Olark and is the president of the Cloud Software Association.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The problems faced by SaaS businesses that work through partners
How AppBind solves these problems
The clever way in which AppBind works

Problems of SaaS Partnerships

Many channel-based companies and individuals are comfortable with the old way of operating. However, the modern SaaS business model has many moving parts and nuances. Sometimes partners don’t feel invested in the product because it is “out there somewhere” in the cloud.

This is one of the reasons why they’re often a bit reluctant to get too involved. If it is a work-oriented SaaS, there are also other considerations such as who owns the data, who owns the customer, who supports the product, and so on.

AppBind Solution

The problems listed above are what AppBind was created for. If you’re a SaaS company that wants to sell software through partners, the billing is too complex. AppBind has found a straightforward solution that allows SaaS companies to sell solutions through partners, and more importantly, they can incorporate your software into their subscription services.

AppBind takes care of all the billing in this type of partnership. Best of all, it does it without having to touch your billing or account management system. This means your sales team can focus on making sales without worrying about the billing side of the equation.

How AppBind Works

A subscription is no more than an email and credit card number. So, AppBind creates a virtual email and virtual credit card that your partners can use to sign up for the subscription on behalf of a client.

An email is then forwarded to the partner so they can manage the account; another is sent to the customer, so they own it. Instead of putting the client’s credit card into the system, the app puts in this virtual credit card, which automatically bills the client. This means the partner is never in the middle of the financial risk — the client is paying for the subscription from the beginning.

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 Foundations of Being an Authority Brand (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Steph Weber discusses the foundations of being an authority brand. Steph Weber is the CEO of The Weber Company. She looks after and helps people and brands flourish and achieve great brand authority.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The comprehensive nature of branding
The importance of having a unified brand across the organization
How to build an authority brand

Branding

People today still don’t seem to understand the comprehensive nature of branding. Many people still think it is as simple as creating a logo and coming up with a pretty color scheme and a fancy slogan.

Your brand is your audience’s perception of you and your company. It is the human connection, the emotional side of marketing, and the ultimate reason people say “yes” to you. On the other hand, the marketing strategy is all about sharing that message across many platforms to bring new members into your ecosystem.

Unified Approach

The brand is something that everybody in your organization needs to understand and be able to support and articulate. You may come up with a concept for a great brand, but some people within your company may not fully understand it or present it well. This leads to different prospects getting a different brand experience depending on who they interact with.

Your brand is not just about what you put out to the prospects and customers but also your internal company culture. The team needs to buy into the brand just as much as the clients do, if not more. Ultimately, you are the one guiding that vision for the brand.

Authority

So how do you start building a brand with some real authority? First, you need to understand what it means to be an authority brand. Being an authority brand means that you stand in your power — you know with complete confidence that you bring something meaningful and impactful to the table.

Many others in your industry do what you do, but none of them will do it in the same way. This is why the brand experience is so important. It is truly up to you to discover the gaps in the market and fill them in your unique way. You also need to show up ready to make an impact on your life and the lives of others.

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.