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.

Join John Golden as he discusses the importance of understanding non-verbal cues with body language expert Catherine Molloy. In this chat, they will cover how to develop and use body language to optimize your business results. Also what body language mistakes to avoid.

This is a session you don’t want to miss with Catherine Molloy the International Speaker & Communication Expert, who specializes in leadership, sales & service. With 25 years of experience in business, training, and facilitation, Catherine believes in creating effective engaging learning environments through powerful communication techniques.

Recorded Live March 10th, 2022

EPISODE QUESTIONS:

Q1: How can you use body language to impact your business success?

Q2: Common Body Language Mistakes in Business and How to Avoid Them?

Q3: How to improve your body language?

Our Guest

Catherine Molloy

Catherine Molloy is an International Speaker & Communication Expert, specializing in leadership, sales & service. With 25 years of experience in business, training, and facilitation, Catherine believes in creating effective engaging learning environments through powerful communication techniques.

Links › Catherine Molloy | Linkedin.com | Twitter

Our Hosts

John Golden

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.

Martha Neumeister

Martha is a social media strategist, responsible for all social media platforms of Pipeliner CRM. She is a communication expert with social media affinity, which she has been focusing on throughout her professional career. She has a bachelor´s degree in Entrepreneurship & Management and a master´s degree in Online Marketing which supports her in her career as Social Media Strategist.

About SalesChats

SalesChats is a fast-paced (no more than 30 minutes) multi-media series that provides leading strategies, tactics and thinking for sales professionals worldwide. It can be found on Twitter (#SalesChats), as a live Google+ Hangout, and as a podcast available on iTunes, SoundCloud and right here on SalesPOP! If you think you would make a great guest for #SalesChats, please contact co-host Martha Neumeister.

SalesChats is co-hosted by John Golden, CSO Pipeliner CRM, and Martha Neumeister, Social Media Strategist Pipeliner CRM.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Orsolya Herbein discusses how to rethink marketing and the secrets to making marketing work. Orsolya Herbein is a Partner and Creative Director at Brand3.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What most small business owners and marketers are doing wrong
• How Brand3 changed its branding to align with its customers
• Why it is crucial to take a step back and look at branding strategically

Biggest Missing Link in Marketing

Small business owners and marketers tend to dive straight into tactics. When you think about marketing, the average feedback on what it includes is SEO, website, social media, ads, etc. The problem is that marketers usually gravitate straight into doing marketing rather than looking at the strategy aspect.

This is often the most prominent missing link when it comes to making marketing work. It would be best if you thought about marketing strategically aligning your brand with an audience.

Story of Brand3

Brand3 used to be Brand3 — Brands That Deliver. However, Orsolya and her business partner Matt realized that the company was not getting traction this way because branding was so misunderstood.

Essentially, Brand3 is a branding company wrapped into marketing words because they chose to wrap themselves into what their customers want, and everybody wants marketing. Their clients call them up thinking that they will get all those marketing tactics mentioned above, but what the company is really selling is branding in terms of fixing and aligning the brand before going to market.

Taking a Step Back

Many people approach marketing from the tactics backwards, including people who have been doing it for a while. Instead of doing this, marketers need to take a step back, look at who their audience is, where these people are, how they want to be communicated with, and what they value in this communication.

Only then can you decide where to go with your marketing efforts from a tactical standpoint. That is what Orsolya means when she talks about rethinking marketing. The idea is to rethink marketing in terms of branding, align the brand with its audience, and start off on the right foot.

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, Monique Allen discusses her book Stop Landscaping, Start Life-Scaping. Monique Allen is a business coach and the Founder, CEO, Lead Sales Manager, and Creative Director of The Garden Continuum.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Monique Allen’s motivation to write Stop Landscaping, Start LifeScaping
• The challenge of codifying one’s mastery
• How Monique approached writing this book and systematizing her knowledge

Reasons for Writing the Book

Monique started in the landscape business very young. She was 18 years old when she was introduced to the concept of the landscape business, and she immediately fell in love with it, all of a sudden finding purpose and meaning within her life. Fast-forward about ten years, and she started to see that there was a lot more there.

Landscaping included design, sustainability, environmental protection, lifeforce energy, etc. Every single time she pulled on a different thread within the industry, it just kept her for a little longer. This has been the seed of building The Garden Continuum, which is her flagship company that does LifeScaping, as well as the impetus for writing her book.

Codifying

Stop Landscaping, Start LifeScaping is a tongue-in-cheek title because Monique Allen still very much landscapes every day. The book is more about methodology and looking at one’s business and life more broadly. It is also about codifying Monique’s ideas about the concept of LifeScaping.

Codifying something is often the hard part. Often people are unconsciously really great at what they do, but they’re unable to explain or teach others how to do it.

Systematization of Knowledge

For Monique to write this book, she had to “peel the onion.” She had to look at what she was doing and ask herself “why,” and as she answered one of these “whys,” she had to ask the next one.

She learned throughout this process that when you move into mastery, you’ve essentially climbed up a mountain. However, you don’t remember how you got there. You don’t know what you know, and you can’t systematize it.

Our Host

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