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.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Isaac Ho discusses the rules you need to break to build a six- or seven-figure business. Isaac Ho is a master sales coach, six-figure business owner, regarded health expert and dad. He helps growth-oriented entrepreneurs and business owners overcome the nasty feeling of never being good enough and the overwhelm of their outdated business model.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The rules entrepreneurs need to break to build a successful business
• How to adjust your pricing model to earn more in less time
• How do our internal beliefs prevent us from achieving success

Archaic Pricing Models

The first thing entrepreneurs need to do to achieve success is to stop using a pricing model that does not serve them or give them the outcomes they want. When Isaac learned this, it took him from charging about $200 an hour to having $16k, $30k, and $60k clients.

Often people come up with the pricing for their business by looking at their costs and adding a margin on top. This is an archaic model that ends up making us burned out and fatigued in our own business, even resenting our work. Being an entrepreneur is not worth it if you can’t have the freedom associated with it.

Charging a Premium for a Premium Product

Another way people price their products or service is by looking at what other people are charging and sticking to the same ballpark. This is a huge problem not only for the reasons discussed above but also because pricing yourself the same as everyone else tells your clients that you’re average.

It boils down to how much you value yourself and the service or product you’re offering. When you have a high-quality product or service, and you’re confident in it, don’t be afraid to charge a premium. People expect to pay top-dollar for top-quality and are generally willing to invest more in excellent products and services.

Stop Believing That It Is Hard

Another rule you must break if you want to build a seven-figure business is to stop believing that it is hard. If we think that something is hard, it will be hard. One of the ways we make sales more difficult for ourselves is by focusing on trying to convince the prospect that we’re worth the premium.

Believing that building a successful business was hard also gives us a get-out-of-jail-free card, and we tend to use it as an excuse for not being as successful as we would like.

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, Lakshmi Pappu discusses digital transformation. Lakshmi Pappu is Head of Global Digital Transformation: Director at Signify.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What digital transformation actually means
• What companies need to focus on when going through a digital transformation
• How the digital transformation journey has changed over the years

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation was a buzzword even before the pandemic, but very few people understood what it meant and were actually doing it rather than paying lip service to it. The term is so widely used that it means different things to different people in different organizations.

To Lakshmi Pappu, digital transformation is about building the right customer-centric experiences for her internal and external customers. It is about creating a customer experience that helps customers make better decisions through the products and services provided by her company — Signify.

Customer-Centricity

There’s a whole process that companies must go through to figure out whether their own processes are the right ones before heading into any kind of transformation initiative. Often, processes grow organically, and if you simply digitize or automate bad practices, you end up with bigger problems.

The tenants of doing digital transformation right include being customer-centric and process-centric. This means companies need to think about the customer as the center of the universe and think about the business processes that need to be changed to deliver the experience they’re trying to deliver.

A Journey Rather than a Project

When undergoing a digital transformation, a business must tweak, observe and test every detail to be able to improve things as time goes on. One of the things that challenge people most is the fact that the days of being able to implement a discreet project, dust off your hands, sit back and relax, are gone.

We’ve gone through the journey of technology as a service model with a product-centric approach and reached a stage where we must think about solutions on a roadmap with the ability to iterate.

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, Thomas Zweifel discusses leading through language. Thomas Zweifel has had quite an interesting journey from ski instructor to CEO, working as a construction worker, actor, director, animator, and copywriter.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How our language can shape our reality
• Why do people have trouble understanding the power of language
• The power of authentic communication in sales

Language Creates Reality

Thomas believes that, through language, we generate the reality that we encounter. Our brains are conditioned so that they only see what we already believe in, and they will only select the evidence that is consistent with their existing beliefs.

This is why communication is the water that leaders swim in. The good news is that effective communication can solve any issue, from misunderstandings, through failed mergers, failed sales, or lost clients, all the way to preventing divorce or lawsuits.

Power of Words

Today we live in a culture where language has become quite casual, and people don’t seem to pay as much attention to what they’re saying as they used to. We are quite unconscious about the way we communicate, and we think that what we say is only a representation of reality and that it doesn’t actually create reality.

However, whatever you put into words can and will become real. So, we need to treat whatever we say as a commitment. Unfortunately, people don’t understand the power of words and how they can impact your life.

Communication as the Solution

Any competent salesperson knows that sales is not about broadcasting the greatness of your product. It is actually about trying to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and listening to them, seeing what their dreams, fears, and concerns are, and what they need.

This effectively allows salespeople to customize their sales pitch depending on the customer’s needs. There’s a certain level of self-discipline required to take a step back and listen because, as salespeople, we’re motivated to close the sale. This means we need to discipline ourselves to have a proper conversation with our customers, rather than “talking at them.”

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, Aaron Hartman discusses the future of the medical practice. Aaron Hartman started Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine to provide access to advanced integrative and functional medicine, evaluations, and treatments to patients in the greater Richmond area and by way of telemedicine.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How the medical reimbursement system works
• The idea behind membership models
• Why the current reimbursement system makes patients feel like they’re on a conveyer belt

Same Old System

Medical practices have not changed very much over the past couple of decades in terms of the way they’re set up. It is really the doctors that are different, rather than how they operate. The way our grandparents went to see a doctor in their youth is basically the same system we’re using now.

With the reimbursement system, the big payers — big companies, Medicare, CMS, etc. are asking for value, so they keep using the same old method to create value via quality metrics. However, the actual science of medicine is going in a different direction.

Membership Models

Doctors trying to keep up with the times are stuck between the industry and science. This results in people jumping ship and doing direct primary care, whereby they do not accept insurance and charge their patients a monthly fee instead.

The underlying idea behind these membership models is that they allow medical professionals to minimize the overhead and run micro-practices. Many people don’t realize that 25% of their doctor’s overhead goes toward dealing with insurance companies, so if they can get rid of the insurance, doctors can create more value for the same cost.

Time vs. Procedure

The problem with current medicine is that it requires cognitive work and time. It takes time to think about patients, but the system pays for procedures. This means that we have a system of driving procedures, while what we really need is cognitive time.

Unfortunately, the fact that the system drives procedures leads to a situation where patients feel like they are not being given enough time with their doctors.

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.