In this Expert Insight Interview, Anda Goseco discusses the importance of self-awareness in leadership. Anda Goseco is a global executive and leadership coach who has been coaching Fortune 500 leaders for 11+ years.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The complex nature of leadership
• Why leaders are reactive rather than proactive
• The importance of stepping out of your comfort zone

Leadership and Self-Awareness

Leadership today is more complex than ever in many ways. Leaders can get pulled into many directions and feel like they need to do so many different things. Sometimes this means they become very reactive rather than strategic and forward-thinking. So, how can leaders recognize that they might be stretching themselves too thin?

According to Anda, it takes a lot of self-awareness. Putting it like this makes it sound straightforward, but self-awareness is very complex because it depends on your triggers and how reactive you are to the environment, among other things.

Reactivity vs Proactivity

The reason many leaders are reactive, and why most were particularly reactive during this pandemic, is because humans are built to be problem-solvers. This means we often dive head-first into solving problems without first taking a step back and assessing what we need to do or even what outcome we’re trying to achieve.

Self-awareness holds many people back from achieving their potential. It is a lot harder to help somebody grow and change if they haven’t done enough to figure themselves out first. It can be a long and painful journey, but you have to be able to stick with it.

Leaving Your Comfort Zone

Growth is all about pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone. Sometimes it means having to face some hard choices. We need to let go of some things and stop doing things that are not effective. These are often habits that we picked up along the way and have known for a long time that they’re not good for us, but we haven’t had the strength to let them go.

Your comfort zone may be comfortable, but it is not doing you any good. That said, it takes a lot of courage to admit that things are not working and that it is time for a major change.

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, Amy Anderson discusses the top marketing mistakes to avoid and why. Amy Anderson is a co-founder of Wild Coffee Marketing and an accomplished marketing professional with demonstrated expertise in brand strategy.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Easily avoidable mistakes in marketing
• Why it is a bad idea to “dive right in”
• The marketing traps that people fall into

Marketing 101

There are many easily avoidable things that people do in terms of their general approach to marketing that set them up for failure. What Amy and her team see most commonly is people diving into tactics before developing a strategy. So, people tend to dive in without much of a plan, posting, and creating content without figuring out the fundamentals.

If you boil marketing down to its essence, you see that it is all about who you’re talking to, what you’re saying, and why you’re saying it. But unless you can figure out who you are, you’ll constantly be drifting off course throughout your marketing efforts.

Fundamentals

Nowadays, with all the tools and services out there, it can be particularly tempting to just dive in without figuring out who your target customer is. Unfortunately, this can lead to spending a lot of money for minimal results.

Understanding where you sit in the market is crucial from a messaging standpoint. You need to know what your brand promises to your target customers and how you will solve their problems. You will struggle to execute any marketing plans until you have these fundamentals figured out.

Traps to Avoid

People fall into a couple of traps when trying to market their brand and their products. Firstly, they have trouble understanding that other people won’t be excited about their company unless they can somehow spark that excitement. Secondly, they go too broad in their marketing efforts.

It can be argued that these two problems are closely related and that they both come as a result of the human need for cooperation and socialization. When you think that what you’re doing is exciting, you want to share that excitement with as many people as possible. But in truth, what you need to do before you begin is nail who your target audience is.

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, Bobby Chandiramani discusses messaging and the top messaging mistakes. Bobby Chandiramani is a visionary with uncanny marketing intuition and a creative brand architect with a proven track record for generating spot-on brand development and compelling messages that catalyze growth.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How to evaluate and improve your messaging
• Why spending more money on advertising isn’t the solution
• The fact that exposure is rarely the core of the problem

Evaluation

It’s a noisy world out there at the best of times, and people struggle to get heard in many ways. So, how can we evaluate our current messaging, and what process can we go through to improve it?

The easiest way to see if your messaging is off is to consider its results. Everything comes down to the clients you’re working with and the sales you’re able to achieve. Are you selling as much as you genuinely think you’re capable of? Are you aligning your services with the types of clients that you’re interested in working with?

Improving Your Messaging

Another thing to ask yourself is whether you feel that your message reflects the truth of your services, who you are, and what you represent. You may be spending a lot of money on generic messaging and advertising, which ultimately will not net you any significant results.

Sometimes, especially when a lot of money is involved, people try to convince themselves that everything is going well, even though the results are not there. As if somehow, everything will take care of itself as long as you put your name out there enough. However, things are not quite that simple.

Exposure Is Not the Problem

Many people feel that they have an exposure problem, so they end up throwing tons of money into advertising, wondering why it’s not working, and they’re attracting the wrong people.

However, this is rarely the core of the problem. Chances are most of them have enough exposure, but have a problem presenting who they are and how they add value to their customers. Understanding your position in the marketplace will enable you to create messaging that appeals to your audience.

Bobby is offering a 5 day live strategic intensive on “how to reposition your services to attract your best clients online & scale sales fast? Join here.

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, Mike Pagan discusses his latest book Mental Wealth: Unlock Your Potential and Enrich Your Life. Mike Pagan is a Superior Executive Coach with more than 25 years of corporate/business/management coaching and consulting experience.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Why it is crucial to have a support network
• The importance of questioning in sales
• The detrimental effects of isolation during the pandemic

Support Network

Mental wealth is about having the right support network around you, a proactive team of people that genuinely have your back. These people should support you, ask better questions of you, challenge you, and hold you accountable. They should also be helping you through the good times and the bad.

The biggest challenge we have is isolation because it kills creativity and hinders decision-making. Therefore, it can have a detrimental effect on our mental health as we spiral into procrastination and other issues that prevent us from taking action.

Questioning

Everybody is on a mental health spectrum. We can wake up on Tuesday feeling fantastic, and on Wednesday, for no apparent reason whatsoever, the whole world has fallen apart. This is why having people challenging and questioning your actions is crucial.

In the world of sales, questioning is so critical. If we can ask better questions of the people we’re talking to, we’ve got a higher probability of getting better answers.

Pandemic and Isolation

The pandemic has brought all of this into sharp focus because isolation has certainly affected many people. One of the main reasons for that is the fact that many people have been working alone for the first time and haven’t been able to share their experiences with colleagues and friends.

There’s a reason solitary confinement is considered one of the harshest punishments for prisoners. It deprives us of peer support, energy, and overall enjoyment in life. Things have been difficult for many people throughout this pandemic because most have never been in such a situation.

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, Spencer Hilligoss discusses the intersection between personal and professional development. Spencer Hilligoss is the CEO and co-founder of Madison Investing.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The spectrum of business vs personal and where people’s personas land on it
• The difficulty of becoming more self-aware and authentic
• The value of authenticity in today’s world

Business vs personal

There’s always a temptation to separate the work-related from the personal. We almost try and convince ourselves that there’s no overlap between the two. So, people try to keep professional and personal development separate, although they are very much related.

On the other hand, many sales professionals begin their careers with the approach of equating their self-worth and personal development to their job title. This can have a devastating impact on many aspects of one’s life, primarily their relationships.

Journey of Self-Awareness

Our professional and personal faces occupy the opposite ends of a spectrum, and unfortunately, there is a very large chasm in between for many of us. To bring the two closer together, you need to try to be the same person with everyone you interact with.

This may not make too much sense at first, but it will quickly begin to feel more and more right. However, it will likely take many confusing years until you get there. Everything starts with the journey of self-awareness, which is one of the toughest, yet most rewarding journeys you can embark on.

Authenticity

A lack of self-awareness is holding many people back from being successful, and part of that lack of self-awareness comes from the fact that they are presenting different personas to different people.

Trying to be a chameleon is not likely to get you far in today’s world. If there’s one thing we’ve learned during the last couple of years, throughout the pandemic, it is that people crave authenticity.

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, Chris Beall discusses why pre-call research is a waste of time. Chris Beall has been participating in software startups for 30+ years. He is the CEO of ConnectAndSell and the host of the Market Dominance Guys podcast.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The unfavorable statistics of pre-call research
• How much time you’re wasting researching before each call
• How to spend the time instead

Numbers Don’t Lie

Salespeople are told that when you call someone, especially on a cold call, you really need to be completely prepared with lots of information about them, their business, and their likes and dislikes.

The rosy picture is that if you do your pre-call research, you’ll have a great conversation with the prospect because you know everything about them. Unfortunately, the truth is that you won’t reach your customer more than 95% of the time. This means you wasted all the time you dedicated to researching the people you didn’t manage to reach.

Wasting Time

Assuming that it takes around five minutes to research a prospect, at the current average rate of 1 out of 21 calls going through, a salesperson who does pre-call research before every call wastes 100 minutes of research on each call.

In other words, if you’re doing pre-call research, you’re taking almost two hours out of your day to have a slightly better conversation with one prospect. Pre-call research might have made more sense in the ’80s when salespeople had about a 25% chance of getting someone on the phone, but it certainly does not make sense anymore.

Finding the Ideal Customer

So, how should you be spending the time you save by not doing pre-call research? Chris Beall suggests researching whether you should even put somebody on a list to call. In fact, you should probably have someone else do the research, preferably someone who knows how to work with data.

The idea is that you should know the type of person you’d like to talk to and let somebody else set up the list for you. The X-factor in finding your ideal audience could be any number of things, from company size, title, industry, etc.

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, Chris Pistorius discusses the challenges of dental marketing and what it takes to market a dental practice successfully. Chris Pistorius is the founder of KickStart Dental Marketing, a company that specializes in marketing game plans for the dental industry.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The difficulty of creating a buzz around going to the dentist
• The specific approach is taken by Chris’s company KickStart
• The importance of knowing your ideal customer

Getting People Excited About Dentists

Going to the dentist is not something we generally look forward to, so creating a buzz around dentistry can be quite a challenge. It is hard to market for a dental practice, but if you can figure it out and know how to do it well, you can be pretty successful in the space, and Chris and his associates did figure it out.

KickStart Dental Marketing has been operating for a little over 12 years, so needless to say, the company has a lot of experience behind it, helping it achieve excellent results. That said, Christ Pistorius agrees that it is not easy to create a buzz and get excited about going to the dentist.

Evolving Gameplans

KickStart helps dental practices create marketing strategies, and each dental practice is different. There isn’t a single game plan that works with all dentists, so Chris and his employees need to find a different approach for each.

As with any business, a dental practice’s marketing strategy depends on what it is trying to accomplish. The secret to a great marketing strategy is figuring out what makes a business different, finding its unique selling proposition, and understanding why a customer, or in this case, patient, would choose them over a competitor.

Finding the Ideal Customer

Each dental practice has a different focus, whether it is family dentistry, general dentistry, etc., so at a basic level, each has a defined market that it is trying to target. However, like many businesses, even though they do have a general target market, dental practices don’t tend to have a very clear idea of their ideal customer.

Even dentists that are very clear on their ideal customer can change focus over time. Many of Chris’s clients tend to change direction after a couple of years of operation, choosing to target a more specific, more niche market rather than everyone who has a heartbeat and a debit card.

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, Nicole Jansen discusses transformational leadership. Nicole Jansen has been coaching and training thousands of leaders and helping them achieve extraordinary results in business and life over the last 30 years.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Why salespeople often don’t make great leaders
• The skillset required to be a successful leader
• How to better understand the people you’re managing

Salespeople vs Sales Managers

The way people approach leadership is changing and evolving, but perhaps in sales, it lags a bit behind because of the simple nature of how sales often operate. Leaders in sales often come up through the ranks — they get promoted as they achieve excellent results as salespeople.

The unfortunate truth is that sales managers last only about 15 months on average because they don’t tend to be given the appropriate training or guidance even for basic management, let alone high-level transformational leadership.

Mindset Shift

Being a sales manager requires a very different skill set than being a successful salesperson. To be a successful salesperson, you have to be the achiever, the one driving success. On the other hand, to be a successful sales manager, you have to take your eyes off yourself and build up others.

Sometimes, this is a bit counterintuitive for a salesperson. They’re so used to selling that it is difficult for them to adjust their mindset to the new situation and understand that it is no longer about them.

Focusing on Others

Nicole teaches leaders, business executives, and entrepreneurs that not everything is about them. When you’re managing and leading other people, you need to understand who they are.

This is important in terms of transformation in sales in particular because salespeople tend to stick to an approach that works. However, sometimes a system may only seem like it is working, and it might be time to start exploring other options. This is evident now more than ever, with the different business climate of the past couple of years.

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.