In this Expert Insight Interview, Matthew Muscat discusses tracking the referrals you give to get the referrals you want. Matt Muscat is the marketing director at Treadstone Funding, one of the top boutique marketing lenders, and the author of TAG Tangible Action Guide: For Real Estate Marketing. He also founded Maltese Marketing, a boutique digital marketing firm.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How you can get people to help you by asking how you can help them
• Why tracking your referrals is a fantastic business strategy
• How to use social media for referrals regardless of your industry

Helping to Get Help

You can help every person you meet in some way, but most of us don’t think to ask, or we don’t think about what the value is that we’re giving to these people. So, every time you talk to someone, try asking how you can help them if you can’t immediately figure it out.

As soon as you make someone aware that you’re trying to help them, it becomes a lot easier to tell them how they can help you. In fact, most people will offer to help you without you needing to ask in this situation. Once you’ve done something positive for someone else, it is much easier to receive something positive from them.

Tracking Your Referrals

The referrals that people give are usually not tracked, so even though most of us give them, we don’t see their effect. The real value here isn’t in spending lots of money in lots of different businesses; it is in tracking the referrals that you’re giving out and the value that you’re bringing through them so that you can then ask for the same favor in return.

This more elegant approach will give you a much better chance of getting referred back to, as people are unlikely to have someone to recommend the moment you ask them. Sales is not constantly on the minds of people working in other industries, so giving them time to think about who they might refer to you is usually beneficial.

Using Social Media

Social media opens up a massive opportunity for referrals regardless of your industry. Most people use social media to “shout,” posting about our business, our kids, the food we ate, etc. However, if you can use social medial to listen instead and go through what other people are posting, you’ll find that someone is asking for help in one in every 10–20 posts.

People use social media to ask for recommendations on where to take their family to dinner, things to do in vacation spots, etc. You can use these questions as opportunities to make a referral to someone or to connect with people you haven’t talked to in a long time.

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, Alexis Gladstone discusses managing change within organizations and coming out stronger. Alexis Gladstone is the founder and president of Intelead and has extensive talent leadership, training, and development background.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How to manage and lead change within organizations
• Why a lack of communication is the most common cause of failure in change
• The importance of addressing the elephant in the room upfront

Accelerated Change

We have witnessed a lot of change in recent years, some of it driven by the pandemic, some of it driven by technology advances, big business, automation, etc. Whatever the driving factors, most people would agree that we live in a period of accelerated change.

However, not everybody understands the best way of approaching and managing change within an organization, especially how to lead change. Change often fails due to a lack of proper communication, and according to Alexis Gladstone, if leading change came down to one thing, it would be communication.

Communication Is Key

Unfortunately, sometimes communication within an organization boils down to matter-of-fact instructions, without much effort to paint the picture of why the change is happening and where the destination is.

With Intelead, the communication plan is always about telling the customer what is in it for them and communicating often. Stories are vital in business these days, and companies need to tell the story of why they’re doing what they’re doing, how it will help, what’s in it for everybody in the organization, and what’s changing along the way.

The Elephant in the Room

When changes are announced or talked about, we all tend to get a bit vulnerable and worry about how it would affect us. This is the part that organizations need to address from the get-go. The change may not be to everybody’s liking, but addressing the elephant in the room upfront is critical nonetheless.

Whatever process you look at, people tend to start apprehensive — they don’t know what it will lead to and whether they want to go along with it. This is why organizations have to let their team members and customers go through hearing about it, stating their concerns, and coming out on the other side.

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, Amit Prakash discusses a concept he has come up with called Salesvice. Amit Prakash is an international business trainer, speaker, and consultant with over 16 years of action-packed and quality experience. He is the founder, lead trainer and consultant at Motivus.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The importance of integrating sales and service for a top-notch customer experience
• Why the customer experience needs to be viewed as an end-to-end process
• How handoffs between different departments can be handled more elegantly

Salesvice

While working in sales in the service industry, Amit interacted with companies and people from almost every other industry out there, getting to know them a lot more closely. During this time, he found that there were great sales speakers, trainers and professionals, and also great customer service speakers, trainers and professionals in the market.

However, what was missing was the integration of these two critical departments and teams. Suppose sales and service are not aligned and integrated. In that case, the gap created between the two teams and operations leads to a poor customer experience, which is detrimental to the success of any organization.

End-to-End

Still, today, people don’t always understand that the customer experience is an end-to-end process. It is not only related to the sale, or focused on pre-sale only, or after-sale only — it is about all of these combined. That means that if one part of the process fails, customers tend to default to the negative part of the experience.

This is why it is critical to bring sales and service together to create a unified customer and user experience. This is why Amit Prakash has developed this framework for the customer experience, starting before the sale, continuing through the sale and customer service, and ending with customer feedback management.

Elegant Handoffs

The handoffs between the different departments during the entire customer experience process must be handled seamlessly and elegantly because people tend to hate being dumped from one team to another and end up feeling lost.

If there’s a lack of integration, communication, and collaboration between departments, the delivery of the marketing team’s promise often fails. This is because each group follows its own set of procedures without much coordination between the different departments.

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, Julie Bartkus discusses how one might go about detoxing a workplace and what a toxic workplace looks like in the first place. Julie Bartkus is an expert in leadership and healthy workplace culture and the founder of the Workplace Detox movement.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Julie Bartkus’ experience with making toxic workplaces more productive
• How to find a balance between being positive and being productive
• Why amenities like pool tables and massage chairs don’t make a difference when it comes to employee happiness

Workplace Detox Movement

Julie Bartkus has been working with industry leaders for over 20 years, helping them transform their workplaces, and the name Workplace Detox only popped into her head relatively recently. Julie and her team look at what makes a workplace destructive and think about how to make it more constructive.

As it turns out, it is less about what managers and business owners need to do and more about what workplaces, in general, need to stop doing to create a more positive and productive environment.

Striking a Balance

Most people would agree that a more positive work environment is a good thing. Still, there comes the point in which managers might worry that the pendulum would swing too far in the opposite direction, making a workplace less effective and productive.

Because people struggle to achieve this balance, they often avoid being honest with their employees and team members rather than delivering the strong messages when they need to be delivered. If you’re a leader in any industry, you must try to be as transparent and vulnerable with your team as possible.

Why Turnover Happens

Getting his start in America during the “.com era,” John experienced first-hand the introduction of foosball tables, massage chairs, and dartboards into offices at the time. This seemed like a massive step toward employee satisfaction at the time, but as it turned out, they didn’t make much of a difference and are most often seen collecting dust in today’s offices.

All the amenities in the world are not going to help unless the management addresses the primary issues regarding company culture. As a leader, it is all about helping employees get in touch with the feeling of making a difference in the workplace. In Julie’s experience, turnover most often happens because people feel burnt out, leading them to check out mentally before physically checking out.

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, James Andrew Beck discusses the origins and principles behind his Neuroplastic Mental Rewiring Theory. In order to overcome PTSD and anxiety from childhood trauma, James Andrew Beck developed and tested the Neuroplastic Mental Rewiring Theory in a year-long nationwide experiment. During this process, James gave everything away and decided to go through the 50 states, serving at least one person in each state.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How serving others puts us at the highest level of human connection
• Why the consumer culture spoils our relationship with ourselves and each other
• The fact that using your body is necessary when it comes to rewiring your intuitive mind

Service and Human Connection

When you are in a stressful situation and choose to serve people, it wires your mind to the people you choose to serve. This puts you at the highest level of human connection and understanding, releases dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, and opens your neural pathways for higher learning.

Serving others turns you into your best self, which is why every religious text tells us as human beings to do this. Instead of working his way up to service, James decided to start there and “backward engineer” the rest, and everything fell into place for him.

Material Possessions and Consumer Culture

We live in a consumer culture, so somebody giving away all of their possessions can be somewhat difficult to relate to. Our culture seems to be all about getting more all the time, so the idea of giving everything away would be pretty traumatic for most people.

But, according to James Beck, that is precisely the point. It is about facing your fears until you are no longer afraid. Like many other people, he used to be very addicted to controlling his world through money, material possessions, and other things he had built up throughout his life. However, it becomes easier to let go when you realize that you’ve been climbing the wrong mountain your whole life.

Connection Between the Physical and the Subconscious

The one thing that people don’t realize is what brings something from your subconscious mind to your conscious mind, from your parietal lobe to your executive function, is using your motor skills and your neuronal system.

A neuronal impulse coming from your brain through your spinal cord to your muscles is necessary, whether it is moving your lips, your arms, or whatever. Doing this puts you in your executive function, and living in a state of service rewires your limbic brain and intuition, so you get more of a connection to how you’re supposed to be.

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.

All of us here at Sales POP! are so thankful for your support in 2021!

What an amazing year with both new and returning contributors providing unrivaled content of the highest quality for our growing global audience. The success of Sales POP! continues to be built upon bringing you a diverse range of content, perspectives, and insights from across the world – we will continue to build on this in 2022 plus introduce some new features and innovations to make your reading/viewing/listening experience even better.

This is the time of year to celebrate and to give thanks, so Sales POP! would like to thank:

🙏  Our wonderful contributors who never cease to amaze us with their unique insights and perspectives

🙏  Our wonderful audience who engage, interact and motivate us

🙏  Our wonderful advertisers who see the value in being associated with Sales POP!

🎄  Have a wonderful Holiday Season from your friends at Sales POP!

John, Claudia, Jocelyne, Milos, Martha, Marek, Bojana, Petar, Animesh & everyone else behind the scenes at Sales POP!

In this Expert Insight Interview, Jon Lightfoot discusses SEO and how to outrank and outperform organic search. Jon Lightfoot is the founder and CEO of Strategic SEO Solutions.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What search engine optimization is all about
• The different parts of the SEO process
• How to use competitive analysis to boost your SEO efforts

Understanding SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of leveraging search engines such as Google to improve your visibility. It is about helping search engines understand where your business matters most, what your core demographic is, and how you fit into a particular search query.

The biggest differentiator between hiring an agency that truly understands SEO and hiring a freelancer to simply do some link building is in the nurturing of an ecosystem. On a basic level, SEO is often a mechanical process based on checklists and templates. However, real SEO needs to be looked at from a broader point of view.

High-Level SEO

The fortification of the technical components of a website is undoubtedly part of the SEO process, but search engine optimization is about more than that. It is also about what is happening off-site and within the lens of your “keyword universe.”

Great SEO specialists focus on nurturing and propagating your relevant keywords through your content and social media fingerprint, ensuring it all folds back through your unified and consistent messaging.

Competitive Analysis

One of the traps that people often fall into is going to a competitor and looking at their keywords. This is a viable approach, but good SEO typically requires more strategy. When taking on a new client, Strategic SEO Solutions first spends a lot of time building a definitive keyword ecosystem and classifying the seed keywords and their semantic partners.

The way to use competitive analysis is as a learning tool, not just about the keywords you should be targeting, but about the keywords you shouldn’t be focusing on. Looking at competitors can teach you a lot about the strategies that don’t work so that you can focus your efforts elsewhere.

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, Matt McDarby discusses his latest book, The Divine Comedy of Sales. Matt McDarby is a long-time sales professional and sales consultant. He is the founder and CEO of United Sales Resources (USR) and the author of three books.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What Matt’s latest book is based on and where the idea came from
• The virtues that make a great leader
• Why people are willing to follow great leaders

The Divine Comedy of Sales

The previous two of Matt’s books were about some common challenges that people in leadership face. The first one was about finding enough time to do important things well, and the second book was about how to systematically approach getting the right talent from in-house to do what needs to be done.

This third book is all about getting the best out of the people on your team. If you’ve got a proper operating rhythm with your employees, focused on the right things, and have the right people on the team, you need to start paying attention to how you go about leading.

Seven Deadly Sins

So, what is different about the environment and the approach of the best leaders out there? How do they get the best out of their teams? In Matt’s experience, it comes down to two things — how they carry themselves and how they treat their employees.

The best leaders are conscious of these things. However, it’s not just about how you treat your employees. It’s also about how you treat your customers and partners, both in the business and externally. The book is called The Divine Comedy of Sales because it encapsulates the “seven deadly sins” of sales leaders and how to avoid these pitfalls, demonstrating the seven great virtues instead.

Seven Great Virtues

Humility, patience, diligence, self-control, goodwill, generosity, and detachment are the virtues embodied by the best leaders. These are the types of people that others are willing to run through walls for.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to applying these virtues in practice. So, the book is about stories that identify great sales leaders.

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.