In this Expert Insight Interview, Julie Broad discusses whether having an impactful book can help you shorten your sales cycle, create credibility and give you a competitive advantage. Julie Broad is the founder of Book Launchers; she is an Amazon #1 best-selling author, international book award winner, recipient of the Beverly Hills Book Award for Best Sales Book, an entrepreneur, successful real estate investor.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Why publishing a book is always a good idea
• Where the opportunity lies for self-published authors
• How to create a marketing and publishing plan for a book

Making your Book Stand out

In 2018, there were 1.6 million independently published books, and common sense indicates that this number could only have been more considerable during the pandemic with everyone remaining indoors.

Given the volume of books produced, it is natural to wonder whether it is still a good idea to consider writing and publishing one. However, many people self-publish, but they do it in a way that will never make their book stand out. This means they don’t invest in their books in the same way that traditional publishers do.

Positioning Yourself as the Expert

Even though so many people publish books independently, there’s still a world of opportunity for dedicated writers to stand out. Aside from the fact that a considerable percentage of self-published authors don’t properly invest in publishing their books, there’s another point to consider.

Namely, if you look around your industry, whatever it may be, you’ll see people with the same degrees and backgrounds. A book is a fantastic way to differentiate yourself from the rest of the talent in your industry and help you stand out as the expert on the subject that you’ve written about.

Creating a Marketing Plan

One of the big challenges to self-publishing a book is creating a marketing plan. When working with clients, Julie makes sure they build their marketing and selling plans before writing the book. This contrasts with most self-published authors, who write their books before even considering how they would sell them.

The best approach to take when it comes to creating a marketing plan for a book is to focus on who your readers are and how your book would help them differently from the other literature already available on the subject.

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, Terri Duhon discusses reinvention and the future of success. Terri Duhon is the Non-Executive Chair of Morgan Stanley Investment Management Ltd.; she is on the board of Morgan Stanley International and Rathbone Wealth Management. She likes to point out that her short bio is misleading without knowing the highs and lows along the way.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• How reinvention helped Terri Duhon build a highly successful career
• The confidence that comes through reinventing oneself
• Why having a career plan from a very young age can be a hindrance to success

Reinvention

Reinvention has been the foundation of Terri Duhon’s career, and as she says, it is precisely the thing that has made her successful and more confident.

By her own account, she was not one of those people who have a very clear dream of where they’re going, and when she was a young student at MIT, she used to be so envious of people who had such clarity of where they were going. However, she ultimately figured out that all she needed to do was take steps forward.

Building Confidence

When you’re in university, and straight out of it, everything is a learning experience because you really know nothing. However, once you get your first learning experience, you start to think critically about what you’re learning and how it can be applied to your future development.

Terri started on the trading floor at JP Morgan, and what she learned about herself was that it takes her about eight years to become bored with her current position and about two more years to figure out what’s next. She has found that reinventing herself time and time again gives her the confidence of knowing that she would be capable of finding her way through any struggle.

Not Having a Clear Plan

People often default into careers from a very young age, knowing that they would be doctors or lawyers even before starting college, and that is also perfectly fine.

That said, such an approach sometimes holds people back from reinventing themselves because they’re worried about the perception of the social circle they find themselves in at any given moment or the expectations they think other people have of 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, Dr. Justin James Kennedy returns to discuss how you can win over new online clients by applying neuroscience. Dr. Justin James Kennedy is a TEDx speaker, author, neuroscientist and executive coach.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The unfading relevance of online communication
• The origin and main ideas behind the Brain Hack Project
• How executive coaches and consultants can use neuroscience to influence their clients

Online as the New Norm

Salespeople who are comfortable with a face-to-face approach can often struggle online. Despite this form of communication being forced into our lives for the past year and a half, it still throws some people for a loop, and there are plenty of professionals out there who still can’t find their way in the medium.

The online space has become the new norm, and we can expect it to remain highly relevant even when everyone is allowed to return to their office permanently.

Brain Hack Project

The prevalence of the online space in today’s business world has its upsides and downsides, but it is mainly a good thing, according to Dr. Kennedy. He has been working online in his coaching business for years and has even worked remotely as a professor.

This experience has led him to conduct a pilot study in cooperation with many coaches from Marshall Goldsmith’s community. The study was received very positively by the stakeholder-centred Marshall Goldsmith coaches, which led to the creation of the Brain Hack Project, which shows coaches and consultants how to win over new clients through the lens of applied neuroscience.

Where to Start?

The Brain Hack Project contains several modules that have been put together to take people through the process of applying neuroscience to win over new clients. Essentially, as its name suggests, the Brain Hack Project helps coaches and consultants hack their clients’ brains, enabling them to do what they do best.

If you’re looking to make a change in your interactions with people online, your best bet is to start with the client’s unconscious awareness. You need to be approachable and pleasant to converse with, using lots of smiling, nodding, and laughing at their jokes to establish rapport. By understanding the application of neuroscience in this way, you can influence your clients’ decision-making process.

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, Ciara Stockeland discusses her entrepreneurship journey, from selling rocks to selling a business. Ciara Stockeland is the mentor in charge of the Boutique Workshop and the founder of the Boutique Box, the original wholesale subscription box for boutique owners.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The beginnings of her entrepreneurial journey
• Why thinking about the end goal is crucial for entrepreneurs
• How this approach helped her build the Boutique Box

Selling Rocks

Ciara Stockeland has had an entrepreneurial spirit from a very young age, selling rocks from her mother’s garden to her neighbors. Her mom did make her return the nickels and dimes her neighbors were gracious enough to give her for the rocks, but this was an important stepping stone in her life as a serial entrepreneur.

She has had several businesses so far in her career, and when she made her way through her last large business venture, she decided she wanted to build something and sell it. She believes having both the end and the beginning in mind is crucial if you’re building something to sell.

Thinking About the End Result

Entrepreneurs don’t tend to think about the result or goal for their company as often as people may think. Instead, they often live in the moment, trying to stay afloat every day. However, if you keep thinking about what you want the end to look like and back into that, you can create an excellent filter for decision making and the way you pivot, grow, and move in your business.

It is always worth taking a bit of extra time to figure out what you want from your business over the long term, instead of simply trying to keep it alive, hoping to achieve some undefined success down the line.

Decision Filter

When Ciara built the Boutique Box, her goal was to build and sell it. Previously, she had never thought about the end goal for a business in the same way. What she finds particularly interesting about her journey with Boutique Box was the fact that she could use her exit strategy as a filter when making decisions about her platform, marketing strategy, team members to hire, etc.

With each decision, she could look back on that filter and consider whether the move she makes would take her closer to her goal or drive her further away from 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.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Sam Ovett discusses augmenting human and technological resources to leverage growth and streamline productivity in sales. Sam Ovett is the founder of Mobile Pocket Office.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

How the pandemic forced businesses into digital transformations
Why people are hesitant to make changes until they’re faced with a crisis
Why automation doesn’t necessarily mean replacement or job loss

Digital Transformation During the Pandemic

Before the pandemic, many people talked about automation, digital processes, digital transformation, etc. However, many companies only seemed to pay lip service to these ideas. Usually, when times are good, we’re very good at overlooking inefficiencies, and we don’t seem to focus on finding workarounds for our problems.

The pandemic forced a lot of companies to focus, making them realize that inefficiency can be disastrous when we’re confronted with some catastrophic event. This means we can no longer pay lip service to digital processes, and we have to start actively working on developing them.

Responding to a Crisis

We as humans typically don’t respond until we’re faced with a dire crisis. When it comes to the pandemic, the dire crisis businesses faced was that sales couldn’t happen the way they used to happen, which means they weren’t happening. This was the number one driver for digital transformation.

Sales cover many sins. If you’re making sales, you can afford to be inefficient or do things slowly and manually, but as soon as those sales stop happening, you’re left with no choice. The fact that many businesses’ hands were forced was the main reason there was suddenly a massive amount of interest in digital transformation.

Automation vs. Replacement

Sometimes people equate automation with replacement. When they hear about automating processes, they assume that means they would lose their jobs, or other people within their company would be replaced.

The reality is that most automation, digital processes, and digital transformations begin with routine, rote, repetitive, low-value tasks because, at the end of the day, you want to free up people to do high-value work.

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, Willie Mandrell discusses real-estate investing. Willie Mandrell is a self-made multimillionaire real-estate investor, broker, coach, lecturer, and author.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The state of the real estate market
• Why real estate is the best hedge against inflation
• Why bubbles don’t matter for long-term investors

State of the Market

Right now, the real estate market is really hot, particularly on the residential side. There’s a low supply and high demand, and the prices are skyrocketing. New construction is down, while the price of lumber, inflation and other costs are all going up.

For people looking into getting started with real estate investing, this may not look like a particularly good time on the surface. However, Willie Mandrell believes that it is always a good time to get involved in the real estate market, and there’s always a benefit.

Inflation Hedge

We’re living in inflationary times now, but real estate is the best hedge against inflation. If you’re thinking about sitting on the sidelines, you should know that prices are only going to go up, so if you get in on the action now, you’re going to be able to capture some of that appreciation and ultimately make a profit.

When the market goes in the opposite direction, people want to run away from it, but humans still need a place to live and a roof over their heads. Therefore, if you’re running away from the market, you’ll be renting. In this situation, rentals will be in high demand, and rental prices will go up. So, owning land is always beneficial, one way or another.

Speculating vs Long-Term Investing

Just a couple of decades ago, 6 billion people were living on the planet. Now, the Earth’s population is close to 8 billion, but the planet hasn’t gotten any bigger. The planet hasn’t grown, and cities have nowhere to expand. Because we can’t create any more land, the people who own land are guaranteed to see benefits of either rental prices going up or the value of land appreciation.

This is why it doesn’t really matter whether we’re currently in a bubble or not. The bubble only matters if you’re speculating and jumping into the action short-term just to capture appreciation. If you’re in it for the long haul, time will always be on your side in real estate.

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, Jermain Edwards discusses customer leadership and why customers need leadership instead of management. Jermain Edwards helps enable customer leaders and key account teams to create recurring revenue, relationship growth and retention results they can trust with their most important customers.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Customer management vs customer leadership
• Why a shift in semantics can be a crucial step to shifting your mindset
• Establishing a relationship of trust

Customer Leadership

When most people land a customer, they immediately want to get into a customer management process or a customer success process, and most companies do it the same way. Jermain, however, says that this is not the way to go and that salespeople need to provide leadership to their customers.

According to him, there is an old-fashioned approach to management still used today that focuses on managing a series of interactions that people hope to go in their favor without any intentional work being done to inspire, provide insight and learn the trust and recognition of the clients that they work with.

Mindset Shift

Helping customers shape the future they want to create is not a management activity but a leadership one. This may sound like a play on semantics, but the shift in language is a critical reference point to speaking with our teams regarding how they approach their work with clients.

You should not think of yourself as a customer manager, but as a customer leader, because your customers are coming to you with a specific reason, which is to give them guided and appropriate advice to help them navigate uncertainty and provide them with a particular result.

Building Trust

This shift in mindset allows us to think about what leadership looks like to us. Most likely, it entails an entirely different set of activities to management. To become a customer leader rather than a customer manager, you have to establish a good relationship with your customers.

Building trust is critical to lay the foundation and be able to assume a leadership position in the first place.

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, Larry Kaufman discusses creating sales results without selling. Larry Kaufman is a best-selling author of The NCG Factor, ang has been a global virtual and live keynote speaker on LinkedIn networking, sales leadership, etc.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Why it is important to build relationships rather than simply selling
• The value behind getting to know a prospect
• The advantages social media provides to salespeople

Cultivating Relationships

If you sell too hard, your prospects will notice. Therefore, you need to develop and cultivate relationships to create sales results without selling. In fact, these sales results are more likely to stick and help you develop long-term relationships and repeat sales with your respective client.

Nowadays people have become more sophisticated, and in some ways more defensive. When you try to engage with a prospect their defense mechanism is up very quickly, so the way that you approach them is critical. This is where Larry Kaufman’s approach of creating sales results without selling really shines.

Personal Connections

It is very easy for salespeople to “show up and throw up,” focusing on their own side of the conversation and speaking ad nauseum. It is really important not to do this, especially today. Salespeople need to try and get to know the person they are speaking with, not only personally, but professionally as well.

We often can’t wait to get to the business, but when you make the effort to get to know the person that you’re talking to you can achieve a great connection and build towards significant professional results as well.

Doing the Homework

Back in the day, there was no opportunity to look at a prospect’s LinkedIn or Facebook page, and you had to go to every business meeting with a new person “blind.” Nowadays, we have this incredible resource at our fingertips, allowing us to learn a few things about our prospects before we even officially meet them.

If a salesperson is prepared to do their homework and talk about the person they’re meeting, asking intelligent, insightful questions, they can establish a strong personal connection from the very start. Getting to know a person personally as well as professionally, allows you learn more about their personality and ask deeper, more thought provoking questions, instead of simply focusing on business.

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.