How will Millennials save the world? In this Expert Insight Interview, Phillip Zimmerman discusses a fully connected age transformation by Millennial leaders for sustainability and resilience in the workplace to innovate market sector disruption. Phillip Zimmerman is President at Engineering Leadership Design Company, master coach, consultant, speaker, and author of the book Unleash the Millenials and Save the World.

This interview discusses:

• Millennials stepping up to a challenge
• Implementing the Learning Management Systems within the organizations
• Changing the attitude towards AI

The Step Up

In a virtual workforce environment, Millennial work talent managed to embrace the new challenge, step up, provide solutions and achieve higher productivity than before. With Millennials and Generation Z comes the transformation in the workplace, and it is called Artificial Intelligence. And while everyone can notice the innovation, the Millennials are the ones who know the best what it is and how to deal with it. Thus, business leaders should consider turning over critical areas of the organization’s leadership to Millenials to lead organizational transformation.

The LMS

Currently, Millennials represent 50 percent of the global workforce. By the year 2025, Millennials will represent 75 percent of the workforce. Thus, companies should focus on aligning, developing, and advancing their Millennial talent to fill out the positions they are still not ready to take on due to lack of experience and business acumen. Companies should use technology, Learning Management Systems (LMS), for building development programs for Millenials to develop their skills, learn how and have resources to achieve the next level. And once they do achieve it, to know that the next step is getting the promotion.

Implementing LMS into the company processes is essential to keep the Millennial talent with the company. Otherwise, they will leave. Millennials have the option to decide from where, how, and how much they want to work. Thus, companies have to be proactive in adjusting business on Millennials’ criteria not to lose both the talent and clients.

The AI Benefits

The digital transformation lead by the Millennial workforce needs to be a deliberate company strategy. Since we are experiencing cultural and workplace shifts, having people who know what is coming to the market, how it will impact the business, and how to use it to our advantage is essential to stay competitive.

The attitude regarding AI needs to reorient towards its benefits. The power of AI is that it frees up people from manual work to do more high-value things. It provides you with the knowledge and information to better serve your clients. Also, the automation creates more time to, in sales, do more of selling and engaging with a client. Thus, we need to let go of the false assumptions about Millennial talent because they will take productivity to the levels nobody ever imagined.

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 research shows that before the Covid19 pandemic, 32 million people were affected by mental health concerns in the US. That number has increased to about 180 million during the pandemic. Thus, in this Expert insight Interview, Chuck Cooper discusses how the Covid19 pandemic impacted the employees’ mental health. Chuck Cooper is a Managing Member at Whitewater Consulting, a company specializing in HR solutions for small and mid-size businesses.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Approaching the topic of mental health
• Utilizing vacation time
• Recognizing signs of burnout, stress, and mental health concerns

The Approach

The negative stigma associated with mental health issues most commonly prevents people from opening about it. From the business and leadership standpoint, there should be a higher level of addressing this topic and providing resources to help those who need them. Many people are reluctant to ask for mental help because of the fear that will affect their position at work. The company leadership should model changing the attitude regarding employees taking time off for mental reasons. For example, many people spend too much time working, watching, and educating kids from home, which adds stress. Thus, companies should find ways to introduce more flexible company cultures. Communicating with employees, redefining working hours, and setting clear expectations on working from home is beneficial for both company and employees.

The Break-Away

Furthermore, encouraging your employees to take a vacation and recharge their batteries is critical. Contrary to the European countries, taking time off from work in America puts a lot of pressure on employees. The study shows that in 2018, there were 700 million unused PTO days, leading to an increase in the number of people feeling anxious and depressed.

How to Recognize it

Managers and HR should maintain close personal relationships with employees to notice the change in their behavior and actions as a cause of burnout. But, managers should also get trained by experts on recognizing the signs of mental exhaustion with their employees.

Getting back to office work after much time of remote work can also cause stress. Some people do not feel comfortable anymore working from the office. Thus, the leadership’s job is to adjust employees to their optimal work environments. If the job role allows it, remote work can improve one’s quality of life by increasing time spent with family, eliminating time lost in traffic, enabling work from another country, etc. But employees have to speak up to their managers about what they need and ask for help so that the stigma starts going away.

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, Ryann Dowdy discusses mindset, more specifically sales mindset. Ryann Dowdy is the CEO and co-founder of Social Sellers Academy, and she hosts the Daily Sales on Demand for CEOs podcast.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What it means to have a sales mindset
• Thinking of salespeople as problem-solvers
• How to be enthusiastic about your product

Sales Mindset

People throw the word “mindset” around a lot and sometimes they don’t really have a good definition of what a good mindset actually is. For Ryann, the sales mindset is about the way we show up as salespeople.

Frequently, with sales professionals, she sees this idea that selling is something they do “to” someone, or that their role is perhaps not as important as that of people with the money. The sales mindset, therefore, is the mindset that, as a sales professional, you actually are the one with the power to solve problems.

Solving Problems

Rather than being worried about being perceived as too money-hungry, or focused on making a sale, salespeople should understand that they are important business people who help people get specific results and solve specific problems. A good salesperson should believe that everybody should want to have a conversation with them.

When having a conversation with a prospect, you should feel like you’re doing them a favor for introducing them to this solution to their problems, rather than feeling like they are doing you a favor for listening to your pitch.

Trust in your Product

The easiest way to accomplish this is to be 100% confident in the product or service that you’re trying to sell. Let’s face it; if you’re not enthusiastic about whatever it is you’re selling or representing, why would your prospects get excited about it?

This seems to be the “missing link” for so many people — if you’re able to talk enthusiastically about what you do, people will be interested. Often it is not about what you say, but rather about your energy and how you show up.

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, Gabrielle Dolan discusses how you can use brand storytelling to connect and engage with customers or prospective customers and how you can get your employees to be brand ambassadors. Gabrielle Dolan has written many books, with the latest one, Magnetic Stories, dealing with connecting customers and engaging employees with brand storytelling.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Reasons to get involved in brand storytelling
• What businesses don’t understand about storytelling
• What a good story consists of

Magnetic Stories

This is Gabrielle’s sixth book, and for the last sixteen years, she has been working with businesses to help their leaders share stories and communicate better. So far, most of her work has had a more internal focus, dealing with things like connecting and engaging employees with company values, sharing personal stories, etc.

However, more recently, she realized that there’s a lot of work to be done with regards to connecting with customers, so she decided to deal with brand storytelling more closely.

Telling Real Stories

A good story is like a magnet that creates an instant connection that is incredibly difficult to pull away from. However, when most people hear about storytelling and telling stories about their brand, they probably get a rough idea of it. Still, on the practical level, many people don’t know what the characteristics of a story are or how they would even use it.

If you look at the websites of many up-and-coming companies, you’ll see that the About Us page is often replaced with an Our Story page, but it is most often not a real story. Instead, it is just a timeline or a paragraph full of acronyms or jargon.

Stories and Emotions

To Gabrielle Dolan, a story has to have an element of human connection. It has to be about someone. That is why case studies or timelines of companies’ development are not stories. In business, a story also has to be succinct, so people can get the message quickly and get on with their day.

Storytelling in business should also try to deliver one message per story instead of covering a wide range of themes. Crucially, the human element must be there to help people connect with it on a personal level.

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, Daniel Cooper discusses digital transformation. Daniel Cooper is the managing director of Lolly, which helps companies automate and scale with digital transformation.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Whether companies are actually automating
• What digital transformation is all about
• How automation can help us focus on more creative tasks

Paying Lip Service to Automation

A lot of people talk about digital transformation. There’s been a lot written and spoken about it, but it certainly seems that there was a lot of lip service being paid to the idea of digital transformation even before the pandemic.

Once the pandemic hit, many companies discovered to their detriment that paying lip service would come back to bite them.

Pillars of Digital Transformation

When we look at digital transformation, we’re looking at a couple of pillars:

• What’s happening internally in the business, how that can be digitized and improved with technology.
• What’s happening outside of the business with existing or would-be customers, and how we can digitize and improve that aspect.

Digital transformation is a very corporate term, one of those sayings that don’t really convey their meaning. In simple terms, it is about finding processes that can now be automated and improved to free people up to get back to doing what they’re good at — being humans, not machines.

Automating Mundane Processes

Some people tend to get a little leery about terms like digital transformation and automation. They often worry about whether they would be automated out of a job, but that’s not exactly what automation is about.

Probably the best place to start with digital processes is looking at those routine, mundane, repetitive tasks and free yourself to do more high-value activities. CRMs are an excellent example of that.

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, Mandy Napier discusses why curiosity is essential for business professionals in 2021. Mandy Napier is known as “The Mindset Alchemist.” She is a global high-performance mindset coach, speaker, educator, and author of Creating Healthy Life Habits.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• What it means to be curious
• How to become more curious through focus and attention
• Why curiosity is a crucial skill in this day and age

The Concept of Curiosity

For Mandy Napier, the definition of curiosity is an open mind and a desire to explore. The dictionary definition states that it is a “strong desire to know or learn something / to be inquisitive.” The meaning of the word curiosity takes us on a fascinating journey that lifts our energy and compels us to explore further.

We live in somewhat of a “shortcut culture” where everything is a little bit easier, and people have in some ways become a little lazy and less curious. Fundamentally, humans are hard-wired to fall back into lazy patterns, but it all depends on who you are.

Attention and the Sense of Focus

People are often held back by what they don’t know. They tend to put up with mediocrity in their lives or their past patterns and programs. The energy of the mind is attention, so we see new things wherever we steer our minds. Unfortunately, not everybody has the desire to learn and grow.

Entrepreneurs, successful business owners, and other people who want to grow and improve have a natural curiosity. Still, without a sense of focus, it is easy to “live by default” and let life happen to you.

Developing Curiosity in 2021

Curiosity and the tendency to ask questions are essential habits to develop because humans have to learn to adapt to change. Change is always happening, and the world has gone through a massive shift in the past year. The world we used to know doesn’t exist anymore, and so many people have had to completely change the way they do business.

Some more creative and more driven entrepreneurial types have easily adapted, whereas it has been more challenging for others. Being more curious means that they must begin asking questions like “How can I do this differently?” and “What other ways can we change our business and get our income going?”. Unless you adopt the energy of curiosity, it will be hard to thrive or even survive the current business climate.

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, Maulik Parekh discusses the future of business and how we can adapt to the challenges brought forth by the digital age. Maulik Parekh is an avid entrepreneur and serial angel investor with investments spanning three continents. He is the author of a book called Futureproof Your Career and Company: Flourish in an Era of AI, Digital Natives, and the Gig Economy.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• People’s fears of the future, AI, and the digital transformation
• How to be a futurist and create your own future
• Artificial intelligence and how to futureproof your career

Digital Transformation

It’s safe to say that a lot of people are confused and concerned about the future because the rate of change is so rapid. Obviously, the pandemic has played a part in additionally accelerating the digital transformation in our lives.

So how can people be more at ease with what’s happening, embrace it, and actually make it work for them as opposed to being fearful?

Being a Futurist

One way to be less fearful and be excited about the future is to learn more about it. Create your perspective on what the future will be. One of the chapters of Malik’s book says that “the future is unknown, so be a futurist.”

If we learn to pay attention to the clues and trends around us, we can extrapolate those trends, synthesize them and create our own version of what the future may unfold. We can learn the opportunities and risks that may present themselves to us, and be better prepared for them. If we study the future, just like we study other fields, we can be less fearful of it.

Artificial Intelligence

At the beginning of the book, Maulik talks about disruptive forces, and one that he focuses on, in particular, is artificial intelligence. At this point, there has been so much written and said about artificial intelligence, and it has been “hyped” to such an extent that there’s a level of confusion around it. People are unsure about which direction AI is going to take, whether their job would end up being taken over by a machine, etc.

If you look at artificial intelligence, there are a few things to keep in mind in terms of how it will impact our lives and our jobs:
If any part of your job is repetitive, boring, and predictable, AI will be able to do it.
If any part of your job has a vast amount of data from the past that can be fed to an AI algorithm, AI will be able to do it.
The parts of your job that require simple reasoning, learning, and predicting could be done by AI.

The secret to future-proofing your career is figuring out the work that will be “left” for humans and specializing in those fields.

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, Jamy Bechler discusses the concept and practice of character building. Jamy Bechler is the host of the Success Is a Choice podcast and the author of three books including The Bus Trip. He spent 20 years as a college basketball coach and a high-school AD, and now he works with high-level corporations and sports teams, helping them maximize their potential in the areas of leadership culture and teamwork.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The importance of character building
• Why having a strong character matters regardless of your level of success
• Why it is impossible to achieve sustainable success with a suspect character

Character Building

Character building is a subject that we don’t hear enough about, and it almost sounds anachronistic at this stage. The older generations might remember that anything bad that ever happened to them in their youth was always considered character building, but it seems as though that is no longer the case.

However, character building is still important because the character is still important. And although we may want to stop building character and stop suffering through those difficult times, they are what make us who we are.

Integrity as a Foundation

Your character is the summation of your values; it is your integrity, the foundation, the rock that you can stand on. When the storms of life hit, and your character is shaky or underdeveloped, you might end up like a tumbleweed, carried in whichever direction the wind is blowing.
We can all agree that we don’t want to be that tumbleweed. We want to have a firm foundation and be solid in our beliefs and values, and that’s where a strong character really shines.

However, your character doesn’t only show up when you’re going through a rough patch; it really shows when you’re successful too. If you’re at the peak of success and you don’t have a strong character, you might have trouble handling the rough winds at the peak and you may not stay there for long.

Sustainable Success

Without knowing your value system or developing your character you can live a rootless life. If you don’t have the foundations to fall back on, you’re always going to drift. And at the end of the day, that shows through, both in business and in your personal life.

If you’re a social chameleon, or a tumbleweed, switching direction depending on where the wind happens to blow, you might experience short-term success. However, most of us want to have sustainable success, and the only way to achieve this is to stand up for what you believe in, instead of trying to fit in at all costs.

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.