In this Expert Insight Interview, Dr. Cheryl Wood discusses developing obstinate persistence to thrive in business. Dr. Cheryl Wood is an international motivational speaker, best-selling author, master speaker, and development coach for women. She is committed to empowering and equipping women with the tools to share their unique voice, story, and subject-matter expertise.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What “obstinate persistence” means and why it is necessary for success
• Why we must nurture the spirit of stubbornness and train our “resilience muscle.”
• How social media is affecting our perception of what it takes to achieve success

Obstinate Persistence

The adjective “obstinate” is defined as “showing stubborn refusal to change a course of action.” Persistence means continuing in a course of action despite any difficulty, delay, opposition, or failure.

When pursuing your big dream, you must have a stubborn continuance of one course of action until you get exactly what you desire. To manifest everything that you’ve been dreaming, journaling, and vision-boarding about, you have to stay the course. There should be no option to quit or abandon ship.

Resilience Muscle

Let’s face it; we’re excellent at giving ourselves out clauses or external reasons why we couldn’t pursue something. Plus, whenever you embark on a journey, there’s always a rough patch at some stage that is discouraging, and that is the part that you have to work through.

No one will ever go through a journey to any level of success without challenges, setbacks, obstacles, and roadblocks. We have to have a spirit of stubbornness, getting back up every time we’re knocked down. That requires some mindset work and the ability to work out our “resilience muscle.”

Peeling Back the Curtain

Resilience is almost counter-culture today because we live in a world where everything is supposed to be easy. Our attention spans are shortening, and we’re all looking for instant gratification, so working hard at something, sticking with it for an extended period, and going through a rough time is not “in” at the moment.

Social media is largely to blame for this situation, with people creating a narrative of instant success which is not realistic. This is why Dr. Wood peels back the curtain with her clients and shows them what she goes through daily to create 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.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Cyriel Kortleven discusses how to change your mindset to make coping with change a little easier. Cyriel Kortleven is a global speaker who has inspired organizations like IKEA and NASA to approach change with courage, confidence, and enthusiasm for more than 20 years. His pragmatic advice has earned him the nickname “The Simplifier.”

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Why it is a good idea to simplify business processes
• How corporations slow their decision-making down as they grow
• The concept of “yes, and” in business meetings

Simplification

Sometimes we tend to make things unnecessarily complex. This is undoubtedly the case in the business world. If something goes wrong in our work environment, instead of having a simple chat, we go to HR to develop a procedure to ensure it never happens again.

Then, when an exception inevitably happens, we come up with another rule and another one, and after a while, we don’t even know why those rules and regulations are there. Although simple solutions cannot solve everything, they could potentially fix 75–80% of our problems — we just need to remember to keep it simple.

Decision-Making

If you sit people down to put a process in place, they will start building exceptions rather than the rules. This is because the world will change anyway; there will always be people going in a different direction from what you originally intended.

It is impossible to predict every possible decision someone will make in the future and put it all in a system. That is part of why startups often make progress much faster than big corporations. Startups can often just try things out and see if they stick, while in a big corporation, you need several people to sign off each decision, slowing things down significantly.

“Yes, And”

As human beings, we often approach change with a lot of resistance from the outset. We have a negative bias toward new ideas and changes. Cyriel advises everyone to suspend their judgment at the very start. Instead of saying “yes, but,” say “yes, and.”

This helps you create a more accepting atmosphere, where ideas are welcome, and enables you to build things you previously might not have thought possible. Not all of these ideas will be perfect, but you could create something special if you can pick a few pieces out of each one.

Our Host

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

In this Expert Insight Interview, Christine Hansen discusses creating a content flow to bring in perfect clients. Christine Hansen is a one-of-a-kind business coach and the founder of Sleep Like a Boss and Christine Means Business.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How to start creating content that reaches the right audience
• Why it is crucial to write and talk about things that interest you
• The difference between long-term and short-term content

Being Egocentric

Everybody is struggling to get to the right target audience today. Our buyers are distracted, our sellers are distracted, everybody is overwhelmed with information. So how do you start to build something that can flow and build on itself in this environment?

Christine teaches her clients to “be very egocentric,” which goes against everything we’ve ever been taught. We’re taught to be looking after others, put others first, and know that “it is not about us.” However, when you are creating content, it is actually all about you.

Finding What Interests You

Whatever it may be, your content has to start with the question of what is important or exciting to you. Looking at SEO, what is trending, and which pieces of content are performing best is important. However, that should only come after deciding what you are interested in and what matters to you.

This will kindle your passion for what you are selling, doing, or helping with. Come up with topics that interest you, so you can potentially look at analytics and find a crossover or a gap you could fit into. As a content creator, Christine hires people for the SEO side of things because “analytics bore her to death.”

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Content

Many people think that you have to produce content daily to be successful. The trick is to differentiate between long-term and short-term content. Long-term content is about “schmoozing” Google through platforms such as a blog, a podcast, YouTube, and Pinterest, while short-term content is about social media.

You don’t necessarily need to do something daily for your long-term content. You only need to do as much as you can come up with to keep it high-quality and value-driven. It is a bit more tricky when it comes to the short-term, but if you stick with what you’re interested in, you’ll find it much more manageable.

Our Host

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

In this Expert Insight Interview, Brent Keltner discusses how to transition elegantly from sales to customer success and develop that as a continuum. Brent Keltner is the president of Winalytics, and he has created the Winalytics Value-Driven Growth Methodology.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How customer success has changed in the subscription-based economy
• Why organizations must work hard to make the customer experience seamless
• How the role of the CSM has changed over the years

Customer Success

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as customer success. We used to throw stuff over the wall to the next team and hope for the best, but those methods no longer work. Customer success is an excellent example of a whole new area where the lines between departments are blurred.

Customer success has become a third revenue team in today’s subscription-based economy. Renewals and incremental expansions become as crucial to growth as the net new. They are key to ramping up the foundation. In that world, the way that sales and customer success teams create a seamless experience around value becomes critical.

Aligning Your Goals

If you clearly establish the goals and there’s a good hand-off, the information is all there. This results in the whole organization working to achieve the same goals, creating a more seamless experience for the customer.

One of the worst things to experience as a customer is getting used to a salesperson, going through the process with them, establishing trust, only to be shifted to a new implementation person as soon as you sign on the dotted line. This always feels slightly off, as the new person is not always completely aware of everything you already agreed on with the salesperson.

Redefining the CSM Role

Ultimately the job of the CSM (customer service manager/customer success manager) is to make sure the contract gets renewed and take advantage of any upselling opportunities. This is much more than a simple maintenance role nowadays, so they have to work closely with their sales manager.

It also needs to be laid out very clearly what the expectation is for selling from the owner of the account, as opposed to the customer success person. In other words, the definition of the CSM role has changed over the years, and so has their partnership with the sales/account manager.

Our Host

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

In this Expert Insight Interview, Amber Vanderburg discusses having a competitive advantage within teams. Amber Vanderburg is a multi-award-winning international businessperson, keynote speaker, and founder of the Pathways Group.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How to create a competitive advantage when working with teams
• The four major opportunities for gaining a competitive advantage
• The most important characteristics of a good system

Asking the Right Questions

Whenever we work within teams, there are specific opportunities for ownership to define our competitive advantage. We must begin by clarifying our “why” and “what.” This means understanding our vision and defining what success looks like for us.

Those two questions will lay the foundation for us to establish those opportunities to be uniquely better. Once we’ve answered the “why” and clarified the “what,” it is time to move on to the “how” with four major opportunities for ownership.

Systematic Approach

Having a systematic approach to teams gives us the four significant opportunities for gaining a competitive advantage. These are found in our:

• Processes
• Methods
• Projects
• Roles

Whenever we are looking to be strategic in building our competitive advantage, there is a specific process that we can follow. You might have recruited the best people in the world, but if they are working within a system that is not setting them up for success, they will struggle. Therefore, you need both the right people and the right approach.

Clarity and Adaptability

The most important characteristic of a good system is that it is clear. It cannot be overly complex, as everybody needs to understand their role within the system. Secondly, you need to think of any system as a framework, regardless of how perfect it might look.

There always needs to be room for agility and adaptation. Your system must act as handrails and not handcuffs. This means that a high-quality system always needs to have the right balance between clarity and adaptability.

Our Host

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

In this Expert Insight Interview, Adam Hartung discusses why all business people need to pay more attention to trends. Adam Hartung has an excellent track record on using proprietary frameworks for predicting business success — The Phoenix Principle and the Status-Quo Risk-Management Playbook. He has made keynotes and presentations to companies worldwide and was the #1 leadership columnist for Forbes.com for eight years with over 50 million readers.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How to recognize trends in business
• The difference between the value proposition and the value delivery system
• Why do businesses have a hard time making significant changes

Recognizing Trends

People nowadays extrapolate things, make things up, or misinterpret things, so it is tough to know what is a trend. There is a cacophony of data out there, but the reality is that when you talk to business people, you discover that 90-100% of decision-making is based on internal parameters.

These biases built into the business model were usually set up during the company’s early days or a transition period. So, even though all these things are happening in the business world at large, in reality, very little of it makes its way into the decision-making process.

Value Proposition vs. Value Delivery System

Do you know the difference between your value proposition and your value delivery system? Many businesses spend most of their time thinking about their value delivery systems and entirely forget about their value propositions.

A great example of this is encyclopedias, which are stuck in the old value delivery system (books) and lost track of their value proposition (information at your fingertips). This is where most businesses get stuck — clinging to the value delivery system they are used to.

Incremental Changes vs. Big Shifts

It is tough to persuade people to shift a business model that is still working, although it is atrophying. At one point, you have to stop the incremental changes and investments to make the necessary change.

Organizations tend to be very incrementally focused, so making these giant leaps forward is difficult. However, the more you work on improving incrementally, the more stuck you become, so these significant shifts are necessary to keep moving forward.

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 this Expert Insight Interview, Vincent Racioppo discusses using artificial intelligence to hire better, understand the best systems and culture, and increase company performance. Vincent Racioppo does leadership development and growth, executive coaching, team building, management coaching, positive culture change, employee engagement, etc.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The future of AI in business
• How artificial intelligence could help us hire better
• Why organizations have had trouble hiring well for decades

How AI Works

There has been a lot of hype surrounding AI over the last few years. In reality, we are just beginning to break ground on what AI will do for organizations, and it will be incumbent on people to understand fully what it takes to put an AI in, what it can do for you, and what it cannot.

If you look at what AI does and how it works, you’ll realize it all relies on brute force. Artificial intelligence systems do things that human beings couldn’t do in the timeframe that we have. However, wrong inputs will give you bad outputs, so what you put in is all about.

Using AI to Hire Better

We need to understand that hiring well also means hiring for the organization’s culture. In other words, you may find somebody with tremendous intelligence and a suitable skill set, but if they don’t fit into the organization’s culture, they will not do well.

The work that Vincent Racioppo and his team are doing relies on both what a person is like when they come in through the door, as well as what they will be doing for the culture, and how the culture of the organization will be impacted by the addition of this new team member.

Profiling and Improving Systems

Hiring has traditionally been a bit of a crapshoot, and the way we go about it hasn’t changed much over the years. This is the first real opportunity to change how we profile and hire people. If you go back to what we know about hiring, you’ll realize that most people hire or even interview two or three people a year, perhaps a few more. So, we never get good at it.

People who have been in the recruitment business for a while know that performing a simple cognitive assessment, like an IQ test, increases a company’s chances of hiring dramatically. This means there are instruments that you can get on board quickly and do a better job of hiring.

Our Host

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

In this Expert Insight Interview, Tamsen Webster discusses finding your red thread and simple ways to change how people see you and what they do as a result. Tamsen Webster is a part-keynote speaker part-message strategist, all about building ideas. She has 20 years in marketing,13 years as a Weight Watchers Leader, and four years as TEDx Executive Producer under her belt.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The concept of the red thread
• The classical storytelling elements used by our brains to understand real-life events
• Why humans are hard-wired for stories

The Red Thread

A red thread is a story we tell ourselves to make things make sense. Human beings are wired to look for a cause-and-effect link, so whenever we see something happen, we always look for an explanation as to why it happened in exactly the way that it did.

This is essentially what the red thread is — the connection our brain makes between these two things, making them make sense with each other.

Classical Storytelling Elements

We can draw from classical storytelling to figure out what people look at when creating their red thread. There’s a reason why traditional stories have the elements that they do — those are the elements that our brain needs to explain, justify, and fully understand the transformation that all stories are about.

All stories boil down to five elements:

1. The goal
2. A problem that the protagonist did not know about that gets in the way
3. A moment of truth where the problem becomes impossible to ignore
4. A choice
5. The actions that bring that choice about
6. These are all the elements that we need to explain, persuade, and help people find our ideas irresistible.

Hard-Wired for Stories

Most of us come from cultures with oral storytelling traditions. Storytellers, poets, and musicians have been highly regarded in our society for centuries. Therefore, we’re hard-wired for this form of storytelling, backed up by tons of research.

Even before we consciously think about a situation, our brain is trying to find things like characters, events, and motivations. The thought that we believe we are just having has already been through the part of our brain that makes it into a story.

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.