Chris Van Timmeren is the head coach of the ACHA national champion Hope College Hockey team. You probably haven't heard of Hope College... just like you haven't heard of a lot of small companies who have carved out dominance in their niche. Chris talks about recruiting (a combination of sales and hiring), and how he approaches his competitive environment (here's the concept, here are some optional actions to take, but players need to read and react). Most interestingly, he talks about how his pl...
Sep 13, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Kara Goldin is the founder of Hint Inc...as in Hint Waters. Now, the company has expanded into sunscreens, lip balms, deodorants. Through the founding of her company until now, she's learned lessons on entrepreneurship that she shares in her book, "Undaunted". As I read it, her focus on improving peoples' health was the purpose at every stage, and the principle that guided her decisions. We talked about how combining her curiosity, drive, creativity, and outsider's perspective with that focus on...
Sep 06, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 18
Fares Ksebati (pronounced "se BAH tea") and MySwimPro came on my radar when they were pre-revenue and I was a mentor at the accelerator whose wing they were under. I've had a seat to their growing and maturing through some tumultuous years, and I've watched as the value focus has become more robust through the years. Now, MySwimPro isn't just a training app for adult swimmers (the #1 such app in the world), it's a community of dedicated members, all trying to co-create a better experience that i...
Aug 30, 2021•32 min•Season 3Ep. 17
Michelle Cirocco has been a key executive at Televerde for many years. Currently, she's the chief social responsibility officer. At Televerde, that's not a fluff title. Televerde's mission is social responsibility, in the form of providing great customer value by employing highly committed, dedicated, motivated people as outsourced lead gen, sales, and marketing experts. When you hire a superior class of BDR or SDR, you deliver better business results...and oh, yeah: you build careers for people...
Aug 23, 2021•28 min•Season 3Ep. 16
Nikolaus Kimla founded and leads PipelinerSales, a full featured CRM solution built for sales person success first. Thus his software drives salesperson utilization by rewarding use for great selling, not forcing compliance, the way many CRMs do -- the ones built for sales manager monitoring first. We talked about incorporating methodology into CRM, and a great innovation: opening the environment up to ALL of the roles that touch a customer, especially in a key account management scenario. I was...
Aug 16, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 15
C. Lee Smith leads Sales Fuel, a company that helps sales organizations build sales capability in talent, hiring and coaching. Lee has written several books, most recently "Sales Credibility", to help sales forces build that credibility foundation. We had a great discussion talking about how he focuses his company on client outcomes, and invests the greatest resources on clients who he can deliver outcomes to most effectively and profitably. HIs focus on profitable customers is a great one. Give...
Aug 09, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 14
Aric Faber heads SalesPage Technologies, a software and solutions company serving part of the financial services industry. His software competes with the likes of the big four consulting firms, down to DIY efforts by IT departments. SalesPage differentiates based upon customer focus...and Aric describes his business as "growing our clients' business by helping them understand THEIR customers better". Aric and I had a great conversation about wrapping your entire company around a customer to have...
Aug 02, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Steve Sundberg leads MedTorque, a company that machines precision instruments for surgeons. One of the finest leaders I've ever met, Steve is highly attuned to pointing everyone in his company toward expanding customer-perceived value. As you can imagine, we're kindred spirits, and we had a great conversation about value, how COVID has affected his business, key employee retention, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 26, 2021•40 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Eric Rollins helps medical professionals grow their practices. Doing this, he helps them sell their now-more-valuable practices. His consulting is about helping doctors become more patient-centric, learning more about their daily lives, and helping patients see better in every aspect of their lives. This isn't selling -- or doesn't feel like it. It's being of greater service. The examples and stories Eric gives are ones we can all apply in our own businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Vi...
Jul 19, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Duncan Blowers is the Managing Director for Henkelman USA (https://www.henkelman.com/us/), who is the major producer of commercial grade vacuum sealers, used mostly in food service. Before the pandemic, Henkelman was engaged in changing hearts and minds about extending food shelf life. The pandemic shook the food industry deeply, and the same product became a solution to a much larger set of problems, which Henkelman had to become adept at articulating. In addition, they use a complex channel of...
Jul 12, 2021•37 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Robert Bendetti is the CFO for LifeCycle Management, an engineering services firm. I was thrilled to get him on the podcast to talk about the sometimes fraught relationship between sales and the CFO, and how the two should be partners in profit. Robert shared his perspective on the difficulty of sales, but that elite salespeople create healthier businesses for both the buying and selling companies. What a great conversation! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 05, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Pete Romano (pete@segwik.com) founded Segwick to be something other than just another CRM. In fact, he consultatively helps his clients achieve success by building a solution around THEIR customer's buying process, or customer journey. Pete has staked the claim as being a pioneer in CJM, or customer journey management. This is true value focus, and I wanted to share it with you. Nobody buys a CRM for its features...OK, people who end up having failing CRM initiatives do...People buy CRM to help ...
Jun 28, 2021•32 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Evan Dash and his wife Sarah founded Storebound in 2010 as the "anti-supplier" of home goods...being the vendor that solved retailer problems rather than creating them. Their Dash appliance brand is a huge success, and they've grown rapidly in a market dominated by giant firms. Their secret has been relentless focus on their consumers AND their retail partners. Oh, and incessant creativity and agility in how they respond to the many dramatic changes in their business environment. Evan and Storeb...
Jun 21, 2021•31 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Repeat guest Jerry Gowen is back. This time, he's telling a story about how he dealt with a common sales situation: being called upon to assist a customer in "value engineering"....often a fig leaf for "grinding you for a price reduction". In this case, there was actually an opportunity for engineering cost out of a product, but only after winning a piece of business that his company had failed to win for seventeen years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 14, 2021•32 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Bob Truxes runs American Liberator Aerospace, an injection molding company that sells to...well...aerospace. And over a dozen other industries. As a US company, he's always had to compete with foreign suppliers, especially in Asia; China in particular. An outsider would think that's a tough uphill battle, but Bob's company has been doing it successfully for about 15 years. The trick is adding value: delivering an outcome to a customer that a price-based competitor can't. Learn more about your ad...
Jun 07, 2021•29 min•Season 3Ep. 5
I was struck by the similarity between the premise of my book, "Radical Value", and the ideas of Peter Drucker, who is famous for many things, including "the purpose of a business is to create a customer"...except that he went on to say some important things after that pithy gem. I wanted to share my thoughts on the rest of that quote, as well as some thoughts on famous business books of the past.. and today's business priorities and metrics. Here's a link to the article I quoted: https://www.fo...
May 31, 2021•11 min•Season 3Ep. 4
This is the third episode with my old colleague, Jerry Gowen. He's got a lifetime's worth of value selling stories, and we focused mostly on the value of RELIABILITY. Many products or services differentiate by being more reliable in some way, but few sellers are good at selling all of the value that reliability delivers to their customers. As a result, they don't sell as successfully, or at the prices they could. Jerry's stories are pure gold, and I encourage you to listen to them. Learn more ab...
May 24, 2021•32 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Scott Newsome is the CFO and a board member at Dexwet (https://dexwet.com), an Austrian company which has patented and developed an air filtration technology that 1) operates at both high and low airflow rates that are difficult/impossible for conventional media filters to handle, 2) has much lower maintenance requirements and costs than traditional media filters. Dexwet has concentrated on markets it can easily dominate, and Scott is making sure that his entire organization is engaged in engagi...
May 17, 2021•31 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Nathan Kievman runs Linked Strategies, which has grown from a LinkedIn lead gen shop to something far more valuable -- and far more successful. He's evolved his business into "Accelerating the Growth of Conscious and Transformational Companies and Individuals". To achieve that customer outcome, Linked Strategies has had to offer more services, rethink its talent strategy, and create a highly engaged culture. This is an extra-length episode, because Nate keeps dishing out insights. Learn more abo...
May 10, 2021•46 min•Season 3Ep. 1
Season two of the ValuClarity podcast featured some major executive themes, and Gayle Keller helped me cover one of the most important. Gayle has been a successful woman in a STEM-related business,..isn't it sad that she's an anomaly? Gayle is committed to helping women find their voice and their confidence. WE had a great conversation about it. Thanks, Gayle! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
May 03, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 41
From the Israeli Army to running her own business, Dr. Karen Jacobson has learned leadership lessons that she shares with her clients in her leadership practice. She Aligns leaders and their teams, helping them achieve high performance. We talked about what leadership means in the post-Covid environment, and with workers of all levels. We went deeper than than the glittering generalities around what effective organizations do; we dove into the hard financial impacts that an aligned team achieves...
Apr 26, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 40
Kurt Shaver is with Vengreso, who helps sales teams become adept at using sales tools from THIS century (Kurt's expression). They are masters at LinkedIn and now, one-to-one video messaging. The blessing of these tools is also that they are simple and powerful. The curse of these tools is that they are so simple and powerful that it's easy to misuse them: approaching people and immediately selling. We had a great conversation about selling in the modern world. Thanks Kurt! Learn more about your ...
Apr 19, 2021•33 min•Season 2Ep. 39
Jerry Gowen has retired from a career as one of the best value sellers I've ever come across. We agreed to sit him in front of a microphone to share some of his approaches to sales, punctuated by a few of his experiences in selling highly engineered products. We spent most of this episode talking about understanding the customer, doing your homework, as well as finding and developing internal advocates, This episode is not only instructive for sellers, but corporate leaders should listen to the ...
Apr 12, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 38
Lee Salz is a best-selling author (check out "Sales Differentiation") and sales strategist. As kindred spirits on Sales and value, we always have great conversations, and decided to have one with the microphone turned on. Lee shared some great stories about his work with his clients on helping them differentiate how and what they sell. Thanks, Lee! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 05, 2021•36 min•Season 2Ep. 37
Jerry Gowen is a former colleague...and one of the best salespeople I ever worked with. We'll be having a whole series of conversations together. In this first conversation, we talk about selling value, but I tried to steer the conversation to that foundational skill: understanding your customer, their world, and their business. Part of what makes Jerry a great seller is that he's also an old-school renaissance man: he reads widely and deeply on multiple topics. Learn more about your ad choices....
Mar 29, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 36
Kevin Dixon, founder and CEO of Boxxstep (www.boxxstep.com) led sales organizations in the "high consideration B2B" space for years. Like me, he's found that buying committees have grown, and with that, decision complexity has grown -- and "no decision" has become by far the dominant competitor. In response, the average company's selling approach has become more mechanized and seller-centric: exactly the wrong approach. We had a great, wide-ranging conversation about what's needed by today's sel...
Mar 22, 2021•34 min•Season 2Ep. 35
Alan Brunton has been an "audio guy" for decades, as a performer and more often, as a sound engineer. In his quest for understanding how humans are impacted by the sounds around us, he discovered some physiological quirks of the human aural (sound-processing) system, and founded a company whose software takes advantage of -- and improves attention and retention of -- the audio tracks you listen to. HIs company, Cymatrax, is a sponsor of the ValuClarity podcast, and we're a beneficiary of his sou...
Mar 15, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 34
Jim Hardwick has led sales organizations for decades, and now does it as an outsourced CSO for companies in scale-up phase. He loves setting up the selling system in companies, and clients get to use a high-end skillset on a part-time basis, allowing them to ramp up more skillfully, rapidly, and scalably (is that a word?) than otherwise. Part of what makes Jim special is his mature outlook on the profession of selling, and how it is an act of servant leadership...Jim's true gift. Learn more abou...
Mar 08, 2021•31 min•Season 2Ep. 33
Steven Zylstra leads the Arizona Technology Council, a trade organization that promotes the interests of all kinds of tech companies in Arizona. The council is one of the most impactful organizations in the state. I wanted Steven's take on the future: the future of work, technology, and how tech companies go to market. It was a great conversation! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 01, 2021•28 min•Season 2Ep. 32
Mark Hinderliter is a HR professional who helps corporations develop leaders and cultures that outperform. He knows that some culture types have higher growth ad profits, while others stagnate. Building those cultures requires great leadership. Mark and I talked about those issues, and how they are becoming even more important now, and will become keys to survival in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Feb 22, 2021•30 min•Season 2Ep. 31
