How to Sell Innovation With a Strategic Narrative (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Guillaume Wiatr discusses how to sell innovation with a strategic narrative. Guillaume Wiatr is the principal and founder of MetaHelm. He teaches CEOs, leadership teams, and entrepreneurs how to create a strategic initiative.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The difference between a story and a narrative
Why narratives are more important now than ever before
How narratives are conveyed in the business world

Story vs Narrative

If you look in the dictionary, “story” and “narrative” have very similar definitions. Still, there is one slight nuance in the term “narrative” that makes a big difference in the business context in terms of launching new products and ventures. Namely, a narrative conveys a particular point of view.

When we talk about a narrative in an industry, we refer to a set or system of conversations. The fact that it is a system means that you can break it down, reconstruct it, and shape it strategically for the benefit of something you are putting out on the market.

Importance of the Narrative

Things in the business world have evolved to the point where a narrative is more important than ever before. Part of the issue nowadays is that people have this perception that products and services are heavily commoditized and that they’re pretty much all the same.

Therefore, the narrative that you present and the experience of working with your customers and listening to them are the things that capture people. These things have come to the fore as being more critical than ever.

Higher Purpose

Narratives are conveyed through telling stories and the living of said stories. Companies have shifted their spending considerably towards experiences, including sponsoring and supporting events representing their purpose and message.

On the other hand, people want to work with companies that invite them to their narrative. We want to be part of a larger idea and belong to a group of people who share the same values and purpose. This trend existed before, but it has been magnified during the pandemic, as evidenced by the Great Resignation and other similar shifts.

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.

Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Darcy Eikenberg discusses her new book called Red Cape Rescue: Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job. Darcy Eikenberg wrote this book because, as a coach and teacher, she watched too many talented professionals just like her waste their time and energy feeling like they had no control over their lives and work.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Whether changing your job is the solution to your problems
How you can take back control of your life without changing everything
The fact that work is often blamed for other issues in our lives

Change

Most people reach a stage of their career where they just think that everything around them sucks and they want to leave. Darcy is saying in her book that, although this might be a good time to switch careers, maybe you can also rescue what you have without leaving.

Our workplaces are so organic, with changes happening all the time. However, different changes affect us in different ways, so whenever we hit some kind of speedbump, we find ourselves stopping and thinking about whether the situation we’re in is what we really want. This happens in every single person’s career and often more than once.

Taking Back Control

Conventional wisdom tells us that when we do hit a speedbump, we should change something. For most people, this means it is time to look for another job. But the truth is, when we really dig into it and take it apart a little more, there are often maybe one or two core things that you have more control over than you ever realized.

This is the pattern that Darcy saw working with her clients, and she started to put together her ideas in the book around how you can take back control without having to change everything in your life.

Work as a Scapegoat

We often bring so many different things into our work life, and work can sometimes become a convenient scapegoat for all of those issues. We’re inclined to blame all of our problems on our job rather than looking at what is going on below the surface.

Darcy has seen people go through this pattern multiple times, quitting their jobs and using their skills to find something else. However, six to nine months in, the same issues often keep coming up, so nothing changes in the long run.

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.

Focusing on 4 Key Principles Can Improve Performance and Sales (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Brandon Fluharty discusses his personal operating system as the antidote to hustle. Brandon Fluharty has done business with the world’s largest brands, and he has sold over $50 million in SaaS deals using conversational AI. However, he decided to ditch the “hustle culture” and create a unique personal operating system from the ground up. This system has been designed to sustain peak performance without sacrificing health and wellbeing.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

Brandon Fluharty’s motivation to create a personal operating system
How the lockdown helped Brandon improve his performance
The lessons we can learn from professional athletes

Offset Circadian Rhythm

The onset of the pandemic drove Brandon to look at creating a personal operating system. Before the pandemic, working in strategic selling, he was on a plane just about every week.

He would be in a different time zone every single week for three to four months at a stretch, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to travel across the country for an hour-long meeting, only to turn around and come right back. When you’re in this situation, your circadian rhythm is off, and your sleep is off, meaning your performance is also off.

Set Schedule

So, the lockdown reminded Brandon of a time in his early adulthood when he was an aspiring soccer player in Eastern Europe and had a set schedule every day — getting up, going to bed, eating, and training at the same time. This consistent schedule allowed Brandon to get 1% better every day as a player.

When the pandemic hit, and he had the opportunity to go back to a set schedule, he started digging deep on this topic. He started looking at whether his sleep pattern could have a measurable impact on his sales, and he discovered that it absolutely did.

Recovery

In sports, when people are preparing for peak performance, they’re not going all out all the time, the way we’ve been taught to do, especially in corporate America. They don’t do that because they realize that you can overstress your body and that recovery time is crucial.

We can learn so many lessons from professional athletes in this regard, yet in the corporate world, we’re still addicted to constant motion, working all the hours we’re given, and just being on a hamster wheel.

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 Shift & Lift Mindset for Change (video)

In this Expert Insight Interview, Trish Jenkins discusses the Shift and Lift mindset for change. Trish Jenkins is a motivational speaker, author, and consultant.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

The basis of the Shift and Lift mindset
How Trish Jenkins’ time in prison taught her that the strongest bars are in our mind
The fact that every choice has consequences

Shift and Lift

The Shift and Lift mindset is based on an experience that hopefully most people haven’t had. Namely, Trish Jenkins somewhat unwittingly ended up incarcerated for a time, which has massively influenced her worldview.

In her opinion, the strongest prison bars holding us back are in our heads. Regardless of whether most people would agree with this, it is clear that we tend to lock ourselves in these prisons in our minds. These include a lack of confidence, excessive worry, fear of failure, fear of success, and many others.

Treasures of Darkness

In her own words, Trish Jenkins broke the law, and if she could go back and change that, she would. This is, unfortunately, not possible, but she has managed to find treasure in the darkness — in fact, “Treasures of Darkness” is the title of her book.

The good that has come out of her entire ordeal has been tremendous, and she loves her life now, and perhaps more importantly, she loves the person she has become. However, she didn’t become the person she is today because she went to prison — she became that person because of her response to being sent to jail.

Choices and Consequences

Most of us have a get-out-of-jail-free card. We can quit our jobs, walk out of our relationships, throw our hands up in the air, blame the world, and go do something else. When that is removed as an option, as it was for Trish, one needs to make a significant adjustment in terms of their psyche, understanding that they have no choice but to deal with the situation at hand.

If you leave your job, you’ll have to find another one to put food on the table. You might not be able to control your environment, but you always have a choice of how you respond to 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.

Tracking The Referrals You Give, In Order To Get More Referrals You Want (video)

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.

How to Lead and Manage for Change in Business (video)

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.

Salesvice – The New Recipe for Business Success (video)

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.

How to Detoxify a Toxic Workplace (video)

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.