I think a fanbase is absolutely key to momentum and growth. Fans are not just loyal, they're devoted. They’ll consume whatever it is that their favorite artists or teams put out. 

Fans are advocates. They'll visually show their support with branded clothes and merchandise. 

Fans are evangelists. They'll tell all their friends about their favorite things and try to show them why their friends need to be fans too.

But what if your customers could be fans of you and your brand. Not just loyal customers, but actual SUPER FANS. 

It’s totally possible. And it can happen. But it takes a lot of work on your part. It takes you delivering the right experiences to them that helps them turn into super fans.

That’s why I had such a fun time talking with this week’s guest - Brittany Hodak.

Brittany’s an international keynote speaker and award-winning customer experience leader. She’s been a regular contributor for Forbes, Adweek, and Success Magazine. And she’s been featured on ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News, and more.

Brittany’s been named in Advertising Age’s 40 Under 40 list, and Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list, and she was awarded Most Disruptive Marketing Entrepreneur at the UN’s Empact Awards.

 And Entrepreneur Magazine calls Brittany an “expert at creating loyal fans for your brand,” and she’s widely regarded as the “go-to source” on creating and retaining superfans.

Of course, your goal for your brand should be to deliver an experience that creates loyal customers who come back again and again. That’s a given. But then your goal should be to take that even further. You want to deliver experiences that convert customers into DEVOTED SUPERFANS — repeat clients who will always advocate for your brand without you even having to ask. And in this week’s episode, Brittany gives us lessons on how to do just that.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How being customer-centric means never resting on your laurels
• What we can learn from superstars with engaged fanbases and instill those lessons into our brands
• How a conversation with 16-year-old Taylor Swift turned into a lesson around creating a two-way street relationship with your customers
• Your competitors are happy to treat your customers the way they deserve to be treated if you won’t do it
• The definition of a superfan and how they can be the best marketing for your brand
• Brittany’s five-step framework for creating superfans
•  Why every employee is in both the Experience and Sales departments
• Why your customers are comparing you to every great experience they've had, not just your direct competitors 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Brittany's site (you’ll also get access to Brittany’s Superfan WAVE video course here!)

These brands no longer have to do much work to draw in customers. They simply have fans who continuously come to them in drives.

These are the brands that really stand out. They’re the ones who’ve become irresistible.

But how can you do that in a crowded world when your customers are bombarded with competing and distracting messages and experiences every day?

Luckily, there’s an answer, and I discuss it this week with Gair Maxwell. 

Gair’s an international keynote speaker, author and brand strategist. He’s the host of the top-rated podcast: The Leadership Standard, produced with TEC Canada.

And he’s the author of Big Little Legends: How Everyday Leaders Build Irresistible Brands.

But what if there’s another way? What if there’s something different we should focus on and be chasing?

That’s exactly what Tim Schurrer teaches. 

 Tim is the former Chief Operating Officer of StoryBrand where he worked alongside New York Times bestselling author, Donald Miller to launch and operate two brands, StoryBrand and Business Made Simple.

 Today he’s the host of the Build a Winning Team podcast, where he interviews top business leaders to bring you actionable advice to help you improve your leadership. 

 And Tim’s the author of The Secret Society of Success - it’s out this week!

 Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why what we've traditionally been taught about success may not be right
• How our culture's primary message around success we hear makes us exhausted 
• What the spotlight mindset is and how to avoid it 
• The value of surrounding ourselves with others whose strengths complement our liabilities
• The question we should be asking ourselves instead of "What's in it for me?"
•  The value of recognizing people who report to you, and people who you report to, for their work 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Tim's site
• Tim's book - The Secret Society of Success: Stop Chasing the Spotlight and Learn to Enjoy Your Work (and Life) Again
• Tim's podcast - Build a Winning Team With Tim Schurrer

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Focusing on developing and managing the right team is foundational to your Customer Experience operation
• How making “happiness as a habit” is integral to your customer experience and employee experience
• The leading principles on customer experience are the same for employee experience
• Breaking down organizational silos helps executives buy into and invest in a customer experience mindset
• It’s not just customer-facing teams that impact the customer experience
• Adrian’s Four CX Pillars that are the essential building blocks of a winning customer experience operation
• The ideal habits and values needed to thrive as a customer experience leader

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Adrian's LinkedIn profile
• Adrian's website
• Adrian's podcast - CXChronicles
  
  

Think about it. You may keep buying from a brand because they’re meeting your expectations, and you feel okay as long as they continue doing that. But what if you find a brand that'll exceed your expectations? What if you find a brand that'll deliver a remarkable experience every time? 

Now combine that with how easy it is to switch brands today. Buh-bye satisfactory experience!

And that’s just what your customers are doing with your satisfactory experience.

That’s why I was happy to talk with Jon Picoult this week. 

Jon’s the founder of Watermark Consulting. He’s a keynote speaker and one of the most noted authorities on customer and employee experience. He’s been featured by dozens of media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, NBC News, and Forbes.

And Jon is the author of From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles For Turning Customers and Employees Into Lifelong Fans.

Jon and I discuss his lessons around building customer loyalty through his 12 customer experience principles. What’s great is that these principles can be applied to most any type of business. And they can be applied to your employee experience to build more loyalty from your people.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Jon's book: From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles For Turning Customers and Employees Into Lifelong Fans
• Watermark Consulting
• Jon's Annual CX ROI Study

In this episode, Carmine and I go further with his lessons and dig into more tools you can use to simplify your communications. And we talk about some of the habits that leaders instill to help them continuously improve how they communicate to and motivate their teams.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Simplifying your communications is counterintuitive but powerful
• Reducing the number of words you use gives your message a stronger impact
• The ability to take something complex and make it simple will help you stand out in your career
• BLOT (Bottom Line On Top) is an effective way to help save your audience’s time in your writing
• The best leaders know that they’re never done learning and improving
• The best communicators are voracious readers
• Improving your communications doesn’t happen overnight - it’s an iterative process over time

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• SIMPLE brand #91 - Part 1 of this interview 
• Carmine's website
• Carmine's book - The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets from the World's Greatest Salesman  
• Carmine's book - Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds
• Carmine's book - The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch On and Others Don't
•  Carmine's book - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

 And Dan is the author of The Experience Maker: How To Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can’t Wait To Share.  

 In The Experience Maker, Dan teaches us how to focus on and create a customer experience that will actually retain customers so we can focus more on them than having to spend time, money and resources on constantly trying to gain new customers. 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Dan's book:The Experience Maker: How to Create Remarkable Experiences That Your Customers Can't Wait to Share 
• Dan Gingiss's Site
• The Experience This! Show 
• The Experience Maker Show
• Brittany Hodak’s Podcast: Creating Superfans
  
  

I’m doing something a little different with this interview. I’m releasing it as a 2-part series. My interview with Carmine is jam-packed with so many lessons on improving your communication that I don’t want you to get overwhelmed by having to digest it all in one listen. My hope is that splitting it up makes it a simpler listen for you.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Learning to write well is actually hard
• No matter your skills, you need to constantly be growing in them
• Using metaphors is a powerful tool for helping your communications resonate
• The questions to ask before you start to invest in customer service technology
• Developing great writing and communication skills are valuable for all of your employees, no matter their role or function
• Why Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint in Amazon meetings
• Focusing on the “big idea” first will help your audience more easily buy into your message
• How “simple is the new superpower”
• For your communication to be effective, write for an 8th-grade-level audience
• Using short words helps create simple, and more powerful, communications

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Carmine's website
• Carmine's book - The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets from the World's Greatest Salesman

Basically, your customers are now in charge. And they expect a lot more from you.

And if you want to survive and thrive in this new economy, then you have to recognize, embrace and adhere to new consumer demands. That can feel pretty intimidating.

And that's why I was happy to talk with Joel Bines this week. 

Joel co-leads the Global Retail Practice at AlixPartners. He’s a frequent contributor to major media outlets like NPR, CNBC, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. And he’s now officially a published author.

Joel’s first book is out this week! - The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution.

Joel and I talk about this new retail industry power shift where the consumers are essentially now in charge. But thankfully, Joel shares his methods that brands can use to connect with the Me-centric consumer and thrive in this new world.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Joel's book: The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution
• The Metail Economy site
• AlixPartners

He’s the host of the Agile Brand podcast.

Greg and I discuss:

• What customer-centric brands do that are different than all the others
• How customer expectations continue to rise
• Too many brands misunderstand what it means to create a customer-first approach
• Focusing on intrinsic and extrinsic values motivates employees to focus on the customer
• Agile principles help create an employee-driven culture
• The value of creating a culture of experimentation
• Greg’s 4 North Star goals that brands should have for a customer-first experience
• Where most brands get personalization wrong
• The 7 elements of Greg’s "House of the Customer" blueprint
• Greg’s take on who in an organization should own and govern the customer experience 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Greg’s site 
• Greg’s book - House of the Customer: A blueprint for one-to-one, customer-first, employee-driven business transformation

Erica is an international keynote speaker, a bestselling author, and a workplace strategist who partners with some of the most well-known companies in the world. She's one of Marshall Goldsmith's Top 100 Coaches. 

And Erica’s the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the “Human Workplace Trilogy” that includes Bring Your Human to Work, Rituals Roadmap, and her very latest, The Retention Revolution: 7 Surprising (and Very Human!) Ways to Keep Employees Connected to Your Company.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Pretty much everything we know about work has changed
• The need to rethink how we approach employee retention
• The value of staying connected with employees
• The right approach to flexibility
• How being intentional avoids employee resentment
• The role of meetings and how they can provide value
• Why middle managers are the MVPs

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Erica’s website
• Erica’s book - The Retention Revolution: 7 Surprising (and Very Human!) Ways to Keep Employees Connected to Your Company
• Five Ways to Embrace Your Humanity in the Age of AI
• Erica on LinkedIn

How are some people able to use their personal brand to create a stellar career while others either struggle in their career or simply gradually move forward, at best?

Or how are some others able to create six- or seven-figure businesses based around their personal brand while others strive to make a consistent income?

The ones who are really succeeding in developing, growing and managing their personal brand are following some intentional steps to do it.

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with Mike Kim this week.

Mike’s one of the top marketing and personal brand teachers in the world. He’s the host of the top-ranked Brand You podcast. He’s been featured in Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur and HuffPost. And he’s the author of his new book that releases today: You Are the Brand. 

Mike and I talk about his personal brand lessons and we walk through his 8-step blueprint that he’s used to help build the brands for some of the most influential thought leaders today.

What’s great here is that these lessons work for anyone who’s trying to build a business around their own personal brand, but they’re also valuable for anyone who’s trying to leverage their personal brand to succeed in their career.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Mike' book: You Are the Brand
• Mike's podcast: Brand You
• Mike's site
• Mike on Instagram
• Mike on Twitter
• Mike on YouTube

Jim’s the former head of global training for Hard Rock International - so you KNOW he’s great at teaching people how to deliver rock star experiences.

Jim’s the author of three best-selling books including his latest - Service That Rocks!

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How rock bands and brands are similar in how the biggest ones create fans
• Why the customer experience is the most important piece of your brand
• Employees’ behaviors are valuable in delivering the customer experience
• You need to constantly communicate how your brand values translate into your employees’ roles
• Your customers see your employees as the brand
• How to create unique experiences that differentiate from the competition
• The value of empowering your employees
• The four-letter words you don’t want customers to use to describe your customer experience
• A secret to turn customers into fans is treating them like rockstars

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Jim’s website
• Jim’s book - Service That Rocks: Create Unforgettable Experiences and Turn Customers into Fans
• Jim’s podcast - Thoughts That Rock

We’ll talk about their business, how it’s positioned, and what attributes they’ve defined that help it stand out. 

When they talk about how they’re differentiated and how they stand out, they’ll say things like:

“Oh, we provide reliable service.” 

“We deliver our product on time.” 

“We deliver a consistent experience.” 

“Our employees are courteous to our customers.”

Now here’s what’s difficult and what a lot of leaders don’t want to hear. None of those attributes will help differentiate you. None.

In fact, those are just minimum requirements that your customers expect from you.  So if you’re not already there today, you’ve got to figure out exactly how you can start meeting your customers’ minimum requirements. Then you need to figure out what customers expect from you beyond just minimum requirements and beyond just minimum convenience. And then figure out how you can successfully deliver that so you can differentiate and  brand out from the crowd.

You have to figure out exactly when, exactly where and exactly how you can play an active role in your customers’ lives. The role that they need you to play, not simply the role you want to play.

I’m overwhelmed just thinking about all of that.

And that’s why I’m glad to talk with Steven Van Belleghem this week. Steven is one of the top customer experience thought leaders in the world. And he’s the best-selling author of multiple books including his latest: The Offer You Can’t Refuse - where he teaches how businesses of any size can brand out from the crowd and deliver better experiences through customer-centric thinking and being a partner in customers’ lives.  

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Steven's book: The Offer You Can't Refuse
• Steven's site
• Steven's YouTube channel
• Steven on Twitter

But I can truly say - without a doubt - that I love this week’s guests more than any other.

In honor of Fathers Day coming this weekend, I recorded a special Fathers Day interview with my sons - Allen and Thomas.

Children can have a pretty different perspective on the world than we have, and it can be insightful to hear their perspective. 

In this episode, I talk with my boys about some of their favorite brands and what they think of the experiences those brands deliver. And we talk  about a number of leadership lessons that they’re currently learning and trying to instill.

Of course, I enjoyed hearing a unique perspective on the lessons I discuss and teach.

But really -  it was a lot of fun spending time with my boys as part of my work.

Unfortunately, too many self-employed business owners find out the "self-employed life" can feel like a roller coaster where they have even less control than before. 

We’re being bombarded by and chased by way too many demands. It’s becoming harder to get traction in our business. And, if we do make traction, sometimes it comes at the sacrifice of our friends and/or family.  It’s exhausting. Too many business owners and business leaders become burned out, or sometimes, even worse.

What if you could have far more control over your business than you previously thought? It turns out, you can. The key is setting up the right environment for sustainable success and happiness through a Self-Employed Ecosystem.

Thankfully, this week’s guest can help with that! He actually developed the Self-Employed Ecosystem concept. It’s Jeffrey Shaw!

Jeffrey's a highly sought-after keynote speaker. He’s a LinkedIn Learning instructor and a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine. He’s the founder of the Self-Employed Business Institute, the host of the top-ranked Self-Employed Life podcast, and the author of the bestselling book: The Self-Employed Life.

Jeffrey and I talk about how to help business owners gain control of their business and life by creating the environment for the results they want instead of an environment that goes off the rails. And much of that is through creating Jeffrey’s Self-Employed Ecosystem. And honestly, even though these lessons are designed for self-employed business owners, I think they’ll help any busy leader!

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Jeffrey's site
• Jeffrey's book - The Self-Employed Life

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

Michael’s the founder and president of customer experience consultancy McorpCX where they help brands make customer experience easier for their leadership, their people, and their customers. He’s recognized on over a dozen "Top Global CX Influencers" lists. 

And Michael’s the co-author of two best-selling books including his latest - Experience Rules! The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Who really defines your customer experience
• It takes more than surveys to understand your customers
• How to align silos in your organization
• Non-customer facing teams still impact the customer experience
• How your culture drives your customer experience approach

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• McorpCX
• Michael’s book - Experience Rules!: The Experience Operating System (XOS) and 8 Keys to Enable It 
• Michael’s book - Smart Customers, Stupid Companies: Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How To Be One of Them 
• Michael on LinkedIn

As a seasoned Customer Experience veteran with over 30 years of experience, Annette’s held CX leadership roles at some of the top brands in the country including J.D. Power, Fidelity, and Mattel.

 And her latest book was just released this month! Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business.

While lots of experts talk about the value of customer-centric experiences, there aren’t enough lessons out there on how to build a customer-centric culture in your organization and how to ensure that the customer is fully ingrained into your organization’s DNA. And that’s just what Annette focuses on in Built to Win, and we take a deep-dive discussion into those lessons.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The difference between being customer-focused and being customer-centric and the value of a customer-centric culture
• The barriers to creating a customer-centric culture
• The value of defining both behaviors and anti-behaviors that tie to your organization’s values
• Why your employees should come “more first” [that’s not a typo!]
• How to ensure your customer experience thinking is outside-in vs inside-out
• How to apply the Platinum Rule to your customer experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Annette's site
• Annette on LinkedIn
• Annette's book - Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value For Your Business
• Annette's book - Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business) 

Howard is the CEO and Founder of FROM, a digital transformation agency that helps some of the world's largest brands navigate digital transformation and re-invent their customer journeys to earn the love of today's ‘digital customers’.

He’s named one of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers by IDG Magazine, and one of the Top 100 Customer Success Strategists by Success Coaching.

And Howard’s the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller - Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance.

Howard and I discuss why the most valuable companies are known for providing a seamless, digital customer experience. And we discuss his five-step roadmap to help your brand do the same.

Here’s what we discuss:

• What drives irrelevance in brands today
• Every interaction a customer has with you forms their perception of the entire experience
• How to earn and keep customer love by helping them feel loved
• What causes 84% of digital transformations to fail
• How to get your peer leaders to buy into digital transformation
• Howard’s five-step roadmap for transforming your customer experience
• How focusing on quick wins helps fuel momentum in digital transformation
• How to calculate, prioritize and know which quick wins to build in your customer experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Howard’s site
• Howard’s book - Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance
• Howard on LinkedIn

But most business leaders don’t understand how to position their business so that it truly is different enough to stand out.

In fact, most business leaders don’t really understand how to incorporate their brand across everything they deliver to the customer. Too many leaders I talk to only think of their brand in terms of their logo, their communications, their advertising.

Actually - and fortunately - your business’s brand is much more than that. And if you can learn how to instill your brand across everything you deliver to the customer then your brand has a much stronger chance of standing out from everyone else.

That’s why I really enjoyed talking with Josh Miles this week. Josh is a keynote speaker, a TEDx speaker, a brand consultant, the former CMO of the Society for Marketing Professional Services. He’s the host of the Obsessed Show podcast. And he’s the author of Bold Brand 2.0 - How to Leverage Brand Strategy to Reposition, Differentiate and Market your Professional Services Firm.

In this episode, Josh and I talk about his proven process to help you find your niche, position your business, and develop a Bold Brand that’s truly differentiated.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Josh's book: Bold Brand 2.0
• Josh's site
• The Obsessed Show podcast
• Josh on Instagram
• Josh on Twitter

Nancie’s an executive coach, a leadership advisor, a marketing consultant and the founder of Noetic Consultants where they help companies build their internal marketing strength – so that their external marketing efforts are more focused and more effective.

She’s an adjunct professor of Integrated Marketing Communications at Georgetown University.

And Nancie’s the bestselling author of How Senior Marketers Scale the Heights: What is Still True, More True, & Newly True. It’s now in its second edition!

Nancie and I discuss lessons from her research where she’s identified the qualities of senior marketers that help them make it to the top of their field.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How brands can strengthen themselves from the inside out
• How brands can get the insights they need from internal employees
• Delivering on the brand inside your organization creates engaged employees
• You can’t fix operational issues with better branding
• Why it’s actually valuable to be a “jack of all trades”
• Psychological safety is a key driver in an innovative culture
• Nancie’s “Art & Science Assessment” helps marketers understand their needed skills
• How to help your peers learn from your own trials and errors

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Noetic Consultants
• Nancie’s book - How Senior Marketers Scale the Heights: What is Still True, More True, & Newly True
• Nancie on LinkedIn
• Noetic Consultants brand health diagnostic

Phil’s the Director of Experience for Social Media Examiner where he's been designing and delivering amazing event experiences like Social Media Marketing World and the Social Media Success Summit for over a decade.

Drawing from over 25 years in creating customized events, Phil's a master at delivering and teaching others how to deliver memorable moments in transformational experiences.

Phil and I talk about how to create life-changing experiences that leave a lasting impact on your audience.

Here’s what we discuss:

🎙️How the acronym DRIED describes the 5 threats to executing a great event

🎙️How event planners can mitigate distractions and build in margin

🎙️How the concept of baking bread relates to planning events

🎙️How to use the customer journey to create peak moments that stand out

🎙️What emotions attendees should feel each moment of the event experience

🎙️How a toothbrush can create an unforgettable experience

🎙️What event planning and everyday customer experience have in common

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Phil's site
• Phil’s book - Unforgettable: The Art and Science of Creating Memorable Experiences
• Phil on LinkedIn

Some of the topics we discuss include: 

• Organizational culture, employee experience, and customer experience must all work together
• If you want your employees to deliver a red-carpet experience to your customers, you need to deliver it to them so they know what it looks and feels like
• Your goal should be for the customer to feel happier than before they interacted with you
• How leaders can instill a sense of purpose in their employees
• Today’s employees are looking for something that is bigger than themselves
• You can tap into your organization’s greater purpose no matter your industry or product
• How you can compensate your employees fairly without breaking the bank
• It’s valuable to listen to and collaborate with your employees to craft the employee experience
• The best ways to listen to your employees are literally getting into a room with them and talking
• The ideal way to attract new employees to come into your organization is by treating them like customers
• Onboarding new employees is a process that’s longer and more important than you think

• Donna's site
• Donna's book - Employees First!
• Red Carpet Culture Club

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

I’ve been talking with a number of business owners over the past couple of months, and they’re pretty distraught over a couple of things, and they both have to do with their people and a massive labor shortage. On one hand, people are leaving their jobs at a drastic rate and leaving business owners in the lurch. On the other hand, business owners are trying to hire for lots of open positions, but they can’t seem to get anyone to want to apply and come onboard.

These are both indicative of what’s being called the Great Resignation. Millions of workers are quitting their jobs, and it’s happening at an alarmingly, unusual rate that we’ve never really seen before.

So what can you do? How can you keep your best employees from jumping ship for greener pastures? How can you curb the Great Resignation in your organization?

If you know me, then you can already guess that what I’m going to share as some of the best ways to retain and engage your employees - and more easily hire new employees - all center around simplifying your team members’ experience.

Now as you hear about these practices that need to be instilled into your business in 2021, you may be tempted to think, “Well those are all well and good, Matt. But my business is different. My industry’s different. We aren’t able to do any of that.”

My advice to you here is to rethink what you can and can't do. Instead of saying “We cant do that.” Say “What if we could do that?” or “How might we be able to instill that into what we do?”

So take a listen and learn some key practices that'll help you curb the Great Resignation from affecting your team and losing your most valuable people. And if you really do it right, you’ll even be able to recruit valuable high performers as they resign from their organizations.

• You need to get your purpose, direction, and systems defined before hiring and focusing on your people
• Every organization needs to solve indifference in their customers and their employees
• You can solve customer and employee indifference by being equally customer-centric and innovative
• How companies tend to lose their customer-centric focus as they grow
• Should Customer Experience (CX) be owned across a company or owned within one team? 
• How to instill empathy to really know your customers
• How to figure out what a customer needs instead of giving them what they want
• Five principles to help you instill innovation into your team
• Why diversity and inclusion are valuable for innovation
• The traits and behaviors to hire for in order to ensure your team is customer-centric
• Steps you can take to know if your organization is customer-centric

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Dennis's site
• Dennis's book - The Zero In Formula
• Dennis's course
• Dennis's tools and resources to build a customer-centric and innovative business
• Customer Camp Clarity Call Cheat Sheets

Jay’s one of the world’s top 30 Global Gurus in customer service AND online marketing and is a hall of fame keynote speaker. And Jay’s the author of six best-selling books.

Jay and I discuss insights from his latest research study - The Time to Win: The 2022 Consumer Patience Study. It’s all around brand speed and consumer patience. And it provides all the evidence you need to increase your speed and responsiveness in your customer experience.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The importance of speed in customer experience
• How to know exactly how fast to be for your customers 
• Situations where being TOO fast can actually hurt your business
• The surprising data that shows which age demographics are less patient than others
• How to increase revenue by offering a “fast pass”
• How providing proactive content helps save time and decrease customer service expenses

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Time to Win: The 2022 Consumer Patience Study
• Jay’s website
• Jay’s book - Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth
• Jay’s book - Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers
• Jay’s tequila review profile on Instagram

Erik’s the Founder and CEO of HawkeMedia, the fastest-growing marketing consultancy in the United States that’s helped develop marketing strategies for more than 4,000 businesses. Erik and I discuss the Hawke Method principles along with how any brand can apply them, no matter their budget.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The first thing brands need to consider if they want to grow
• How to understand your customer’s purchase cycle and consideration period
• Erik’s 3 principles of marketing simultaneously needed to acquire and retain customers
• The right tactics to take to grow awareness
• Don’t confuse your target audience and your brand persona - they can be different
• How to balance nurturing tactics alongside awareness tactics
• The need for using content as a way to nurture and create trust 
• Why 3rd party validation is an ideal way to build trust
• Over time, what you deliver consistently becomes your brand - good or bad
• How marketers can use AI in the right way to help cut through all the noise

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Erik’s site - Hawke Media
• Erik’s book - The Hawke Method: The Three Principles of Marketing that Made Over 3,000 Brands Soar

Sylvie’s an international keynote speaker and expert in emotional intelligence, personal image, and leadership. 

And she’s the bestselling author of Discover Your Fair Advantage: Leverage Your Unique Selling Points and Human Potential for Work, Life, and Business.

Sylvie and I talk about her lessons to help you leverage all the right gifts and attributes that are unique to you so you can better stand out from the crowd.

Here’s what we discuss:

🎙️Why it’s important that you define what your first impression should be

🎙️How we can become more self-aware of the impression that we give

🎙️How to use other people’s biases to your advantage

🎙️Using the first five letters of the alphabet to influence how people perceive you

🎙️What your brand really is and how you can purposefully imprint it on other people

🎙️Distinguishing between fair and unfair advantages

🎙️How to take perceived weaknesses and turn them into fair advantages

🎙️Recognizing how your natural skill set can actually be your superpower

🎙️Defining the ideal way to communicate your fair advantage

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Sylvie's website
• Sylvie’s book - Discover Your Fair Advantage: Leverage Your Unique Selling Points and Human Potential for Work, Business, and Life
• Sylvie’s Fair Advantage Assessment
• Sylvie on LinkedIn

WHAT'S YOUR FUN FACT? Email me at matt@mattlyles.com with the subject #funfact

• Siegel+Gale’s World’s Simplest Brands study
• Siegel+Gale's site 

Stephen’s a brand strategist, consultant, the CEO and Founder of Brand Master Academy, and the host of one of my favorite branding podcasts, The Brand Master Podcast.

Stephen and I discuss his lessons all around what branding and brand strategy truly are and how you can use his processes and framework to create a highly sought-after, stand-out brand.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The true definition of a brand - [SPOILER ALERT] it’s not what you think
• The difference between branding and brand strategy
• How customers choose the brands they want to do business with
• The steps to defining and building your brand strategy
• The value of focusing on customer relationships vs customer transactions
• The need for understanding your audience and your competitors to create your positioning
• Your brand voice is as important, if not more, than your visual identity
• The habits and values that help brand strategists thrive in their career

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Stephen’s website - Brand Master Academy

Pro Brand Strategy Blueprint

Ann’s the Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs which educates more than 600,000 marketers around the world. 

Her book - Everybody Writes - has been considered the bible for marketing writing for close to a decade.  Ann recently expanded and revised the book to update it on how marketing, content, writing, and audience mindset have evolved since the first edition.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How marketing and writing have evolved over the past nine years
• How to build a strong writing habit
• What prevents most people from writing “that big thing” they want to write
• Ann’s framework for consistently creating ridiculously good content
• Crafting and evolving your brand voice
• How we should approach AI in our writing

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Ann’s website
• Ann’s book - Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
• Ann’s newsletter - Total ANNARCHY
• MarketingProfs
• MarketingProfs 2023 B2B Marketing Forum

Heather’s an international keynote speaker, and she’s the Founder and CEO of Employee Fanatix, a leading employee engagement firm.

She’s also the host of Leadership With Heart podcast.

And she’s the author of three best-selling leadership and employee engagement books including her latest - The Art of Active Listening: How People at Work Feel Heard, Valued, and Understood.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How active listening helps people feel valued
• What’s causing the barrier for people to be able to listen effectively
• The five steps needed for active listening
• “Closing the loop” motivates people to be comfortable sharing with you in the future
• Most employees and customers hate surveys because they feel nothing will come from it
• What to do when you can't actually give someone what they're asking for
• How to help your employees become better listeners

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Heather’s site
• Employee Fanatix
• Heather’s book - The Art of Active Listening
• Heather’s podcast - Leadership With Heart
• Heather on LinkedIn

Part message designer, part English-to-English translator, part magpie, Tamsen helps leaders craft their case for large-scale change. As a sought-after speaker and consultant, she’s spent more than 25 years developing the field and practice of persuasive message design, with a particular focus on the principles and processes that build buy-in that lasts.

And Tamsen is the author of the best-selling book - Say What They Can't Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Why so many change initiatives fail in the long-term
• The biggest mistakes in change communication
• How to understand what’s important to your people
• How co-creation with others leads to more buy-in
• Dealing with antagonists and indifferent stakeholders in your change approach
• BONUS: Applying change principles as parents

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Tamsen’s website
• Tamsen’s free resource for you - The Compact Case
• Tamsen’s book - Say What They Can't Unhear: The 9 Principles of Lasting Change 
• Tamsen’s book - Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible 
• Tamsen’s Message Design Institute
• SIMPLE brand #75: Tamsen Webster – Find Your Red Thread

One of the lessons I teach leaders in simplifying what they do and becoming truly effective in their role is:

“You should only do those things that only you can do. And everything else should be automated or delegated.” 

When you strip away all the things that you shouldn’t be doing or those things that anyone else can do, and you focus on only those things that you can and should do, your accomplishments become exponentially larger.

But it’s not easy to strip those things away. And that’s why it was such a big help for me to talk with Emily Morgan this week. 

Emily is a keynote speaker and the head of Delegate Solutions where they provide virtual executive support services and delegation coaching. And she's been featured in Forbes, HuffPost, The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, CNBC and many other outlets.

Emily and I discuss her lessons on how you can better manage your time and priorities. And we discuss how you can use the right delegation strategies to free up your time and energy to do more of what you love - more of the work that only you can do.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Delegate Solutions' site - it's a specially curated page just for SIMPLE brand listeners!

Steven is one of the top customer experience thought leaders in the world. He’s helped world-leading companies like Disney, Mastercard, Mercedes, and Salesforce learn how to be more customer-centric. 

And Steven is the author of six bestselling books including his latest - A Diamond in the Rough: Over a 100 Specific Tips to Build a Strong Customer Culture.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How to know if your brand is truly customer-centric
• The value of adding emotion to customer relationships
• How details make the difference in your customer experience
• The barriers that keep brands from being customer-centric
• How to instill effective empathy in your customer experience
• The secret to customer loyalty is being more loyal to your customers

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Steven's website
• Steven’s book - A Diamond in the Rough: Over a 100 Specific Tips to Build a Strong Customer Culture 
• Steven’s free resource - How to Become a Shiny Diamond Workbook
• Steven's YouTube channel 
• Steven on LinkedIn
• SIMPLE brand Podcast #35 - Create a Customer-Centric Experience

Nate’s the Senior Director of Customer Experience for Arise Virtual Solutions. But beyond that, he's one of the biggest experts in the Customer Experience industry.

I say he’s an expert, but Nate proclaims himself more of a perpetual student of the world's greatest experiences who simply shares his learnings with the world.

And in line with his nature of sharing his learnings, Nate’s the founder and head of CX Accelerator - an online community of customer experience professionals all sharing their learnings, guidance, and mentorship with each other.

Nate and I discuss having a frictionless, seamless customer experience that helps your brand stand out. And we also discuss how you can instill a customer experience mindset into every team in your organization, even the non-customer-facing teams.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The customer service issues your customers bring up help you decide how to shape your customer experience
• The difference between customer experience and customer service
• How friction points in the customer journey are usually created “upstream”
• How leaders can help all teams understand the entire customer journey and be better aligned with other teams
• Brands that focus on short-term success vs long-term customer relationships will fail in the long run
• What The Lord of the Rings teaches us to break down silos and create a “team of one” to be a customer-centric brand
• How to ensure your entire customer journey is a seamless journey
• How to use a Voice of the Customer system to understand your customer
• How creating and managing a customer community can help you gain customer insights.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Nate's website
• The Ultimate Customer Experience Primer
• Nate's Twitter

Jennifer is a master of innovation practices having held senior roles to drive innovation for companies like Accenture, Booz Allen, Gartner, Wells Fargo Bank, Cisco, and Stanford Research Institute.

Today she works with teams and organizations to help them fuel their innovation, performance, and revenue.

And Jennifer is the author of the best-selling book - The Innovation Mindset: A Proven Method to Fuel Performance and Results.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How to make innovation a practice instead of sporadic ideation
• The barriers that hinder innovation in teams
• The importance of co-inventing and building trust within teams
• How gender balance impacts an organization’s innovation capacity
• Jennifer's six-step practice model for fostering innovation
• How innovation drives employee satisfaction and retention

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Jennifer's website
• Jennifer’s book - The Innovation Mindset: A Proven Method to Fuel Performance and Results 
• Jennifer on LinkedIn

Blake is known as the “Queen of CX.” She is a customer experience futurist and one of the top keynote speakers in the world. She’s the host of The Modern Customer Podcast and the author of three books, including her latest, The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: New Rules for Building a Business Around Today's Customer.

Blake and I talk about her blueprint for creating customer-focused leaders and how the customer experience mindset applies both on - and off - the job.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Why customer experience must start with leadership
• Why the CX mindset needs to be a lifestyle
• How to define customer-centricity
• The importance of a simple framework for enacting change
• How leaders can instill the CX mindset in their employees
• How leaders can become customer-experience futurists
• Using customer-focused leader skills as a spouse and parent

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Blake's website
• Blake's book: The 8 Laws of Customer-Focused Leadership: New Rules for Building a Business Around Today's Customer
• Blake’s podcast: The Modern Customer Podcast
• Blake on LinkedIn

Aidan is a change consultant and executive coach who helps organizational teams improve how they engage and innovate. He’s the host of The Innovation Show podcast.

And Aidan’s the bestselling author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Overcoming resistance to change
• Recognizing change as an opportunity for reinvention
• The difference between optimization and true innovation
• If you start adapting once you recognize change, it’s too late
• How the most successful companies can be disrupted 
• You can’t innovate if your employees operate in a culture of fear

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Aidan’s website
• Aidan’s podcast - The Innovation Show
• Aidan’s newsletter - The Thursday Thought
• Aidan’s book - Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life
• Aidan on LinkedIn

Ben’s a marketing and communications expert who’s on a mission to train leaders in effective connection through simplified messaging. Ben’s the former co-founder of Digital Natives Group, a professor at Baruch College, and the best-selling author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win - and How to Design Them.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Why simplified messaging is necessary
• Why your messages aren’t breaking through the noise
• The different roles of communication “senders” and “receivers”
• How empathy should be used in communications
• The distinction between “complex” and “complicated” communications
• Five design principles to use when crafting a message
• How to avoid Frankenstein messaging
• The value of constraints in creating your message

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Ben's website
• Ben's book - Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them
• Ben's 1,000 Words Checker
• Ben on LinkedIn

David is one of the most popular Customer Experience speakers and consultants in the world.  In fact, over the past 25 years, David has shared his lessons on competitive advantage with leaders and teams from thousands of organizations in 26 countries around the world! And David is the best-selling author of six books including his latest, Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With: A Practical Guide to Giving Customers What They Want, How and When They Want It.

David and I talk about how to discover what’s causing your customers friction so that you can begin delivering a “ridiculously easy” experience to them.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How to move from being competent to being preferable
• Why being simple causes you to stand out
• How to tell if your policies or procedures are prohibiting an easy customer experience
• The importance of your team knowing what they can do for customers
• How to future-proof your business
• Why informal feedback is just as critical as formal feedback
• The value in walking your customer’s journey

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• David's website
• Ridiculously Easy to Do Business With: A Practical Guide to Giving Customers What They Want, How and When They Want It
• David on LinkedIn

John is the founder and Chief Revolution Officer of The DiJulius Group, a customer experience consulting firm that helps clients build customer care strategies that lead to happy customers, employees, and shareholders. John has spent decades becoming the authority on building world-class customer and employee experiences. John is the bestselling author of six books, including his newest, The Employee Experience Revolution: Increase Morale, Retain Your Workforce, and Drive Business Growth.

John and I talk about the little-known secret of how to become a more profitable company in both the short and long term: happy employees. 

Here’s what we discuss:

• How we got to the point of “quiet quitting”
• Why the power of purpose trumps the paycheck
• The importance of storytelling in vision-casting a career
• How to make your employees feel as cared for as your customers
• How to avoid creating accidental managers
• Why onboarding needs to be more than a training class
• How to design an employee-specific career journey
• The importance of focusing on the whole person, not just the job
• How the employee experience starts during recruitment
• The “Columbo method” of interviewing

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• John's website
• The Employee Experience Revolution: Increase Morale, Retain Your Workforce, and Drive Business Growth
• John on LinkedIn

Jeannie’s an award-winning customer experience expert, international keynote speaker, and Founder of Experience Investigators - a firm helping companies increase sales and customer retention through elevated customer experiences. And she’s the host of the Experience Action podcast.

From the importance of creating and instilling a Customer Experience Mission to approaching your customer journey map as a verb, and not a noun - Jeannie and I discuss the right ways to help you and your team demystify the process for improving your customer experience.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How to create fewer ruined days for customers
• What customers expect from brands today
• Understanding a customer’s journey helps you know what they want at each interaction
• Customer journey mapping is a verb, not a noun
• How to use “micro-mapping” to truly understand customers along each interaction
• If you recognize a poor interaction across the customer journey, there’s no need to validate it with data
• A CX mission statement empowers your employees to know exactly how to deliver on your brand’s promise
• A focus on customer experience helps create a better employee experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Jeannie’s site
• Jeannie’s podcast - Experience Action
• Leave your question for Jeannie to answer on the Experience Action podcast here
• Jeannie on LinkedIn

Emmanuel’s the Global Lead of Brand Thought-Leadership at Ipsos. He’s an adjunct professor of Consumer Market Research at UCLA. And he’s a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of two brand strategy books including his latest -  Assemblage – The Art and Science of Brand Transformation.

Just like a master blender uses the art of assemblage to know how to orchestrate, assemble and combine all the right elements to make a fine wine or cognac, a master brand strategist can do the same with their brand. But they have to be able to recognize and understand which elements to use and exactly how to combine them to craft meaningful, impactful brands.

That’s the art and science of creating a transformative brand.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Not all brands need to demonstrate a purpose, but they do need to help their customers transform
• How your brand can be empathetic, relatable, authentic, and genuine
• Your customers need to understand “the one thing” your brand can do for them
• What the history of James Bond can teach you about assembling and evolving a brand
• There is nothing original. Most creations are remixes and recreations of existing elements 
• Brands are now open-source and need to allow for co-creation with customers
• Your brand is not the hero of the customer story, but there are important roles it can play
• Your brand is what people say it is, not what you say it is
• What’s driving a decrease in consumer trust of brands 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Emmanuel’s site
• Emmanuel’s book - Assemblage: The Art and Science of Brand Transformation
• Emmanuel’s book - Brand Hacks: How to Build Brands by Fulfilling the Consumer Quest for Meaning
• Emmanuel on LinkedIn

Robert’s an international best-selling author and he’s the founder of Creative Agency Success, a consulting firm dedicated to helping creative agencies scale. And he’s the host of the Agency Blueprint podcast. Robert and I discuss lessons on how to take your team’s operations from complex and out of hand to a simple, scalable machine. A machine that helps you ultimately have more time to focus on the right work to move your business forward.

If you want to simplify and make things much smoother for you and your team, this episode’s for you.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Giving your team space and frameworks to solve problems is much more valuable than solving problems for them
• Our desire to be immediately responsive causes us to complete work 5x-10x longer than necessary
• The approaches to work that drive complexity across most teams
• How you can accomplish more by focusing on doing less
• The steps and framework to take to eliminate complexity from your team
• The ideal method for delegating work to others
• The value of videoing all of your processes as processes documentation
• Your processes have typically been put together by everyone else except for you
• Connecting with community outside of your business can help you learn how to simplify

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Robert’s site
• Robert’s book - The Practical Agency (get it for free here!)
• Robert’s podcast - The Agency Blueprint

Joe’s an international keynote speaker, he’s the founder of BossBetter Leadership Academy, and he’s the host of the BossBetter Now podcast. Employalty releases on May 9, but it’s quickly becoming one of the most talked about HR and workplace culture books.

Joe and I discuss his lessons from Employalty all around turning your organization into a destination workplace to attract and keep top talent. 

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• What’s REALLY driving record-setting job switching today
• There is no staffing shortage, there’s a great job shortage
• The desire of professionals to seek a higher quality of life without their job encroaching on that
• Why leaders want to move their team from a departure organization to a destination workplace
• Where commitment really comes from in the workplace
• What’s broken in the work environment and made it more dehumanized lately
• The MYTH that employees are just lazy today
• What too many leaders get wrong in offering flexibility to their employees
• Meaningful work isn’t only for nonprofit or purpose-driven brands
• The way employees are recognized is typically all wrong
• Great bosses are advocates for their employees

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Joe’s site
• Joe’s book - Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work
• Joe’s podcast - Boss Better Now

Adam’s an internationally-recognized customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and customer service trainer who helps organizations transform their relationships with their customers through better strategy, training, and communication. He’s the founder of Customers That Stick®, and the former co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• It doesn’t take grand, superhero actions to become your customer’s hero
• The need for focusing on peak emotions in the customer experience
• Consistently focusing on positive “brand deposits” buys you goodwill with your customers
• The service “triggers” that can set your customer off
• Get the biggest return on your customer experience efforts by identifying and removing your customer’s biggest hassles
• Why you should regularly assess your policies and procedures and cut the ones that hinder your employees
• How curating and sharing success stories is one of the best ways to train employees
• Empowering your employees can deliver hassle-free experiences
• Adam’s 3S process for employees to follow when resolving customer issues

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Adam’s site

Adam’s book - Be Your Customer’s Hero

SIMPLE brand episode 38 with Lisa Bodell - we talk about killing stupid rules and policies

I say he’s an expert, but Nate proclaims himself more of a perpetual student of the world's greatest experiences who simply shares his learnings with the world.

And in line with his nature of sharing his learnings, Nate’s the founder and head of CX Accelerator - an online community of customer experience professionals all sharing their learnings, guidance, and mentorship with each other.

Nate and I discuss having a frictionless, seamless customer experience that helps your brand stand out. And we also discuss how you can instill a customer experience mindset into every team in your organization, even the non-customer-facing teams.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The customer service issues your customers bring up help you decide how to shape your customer experience
• The difference between customer experience and customer service
• How friction points in the customer journey are usually created “upstream”
• How leaders can help all teams understand the entire customer journey and be better aligned with other teams
• Brands that focus on short-term success vs long-term customer relationships will fail in the long run
• What The Lord of the Rings teaches us to break down silos and create a “team of one” to be a customer-centric brand
• How to ensure your entire customer journey is a seamless journey
• How to use a Voice of the Customer system to understand your customer
• How creating and managing a customer community can help you gain customer insight

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Nate's website
• The Ultimate Customer Experience Primer
• Nate's Twitter

You’ve likely heard about how valuable storytelling is in your content. But too many marketers today throw around the term "storytelling" without really knowing HOW to use storytelling well.

Sarah’s a brand storytelling strategist, and she’s the owner of Kindred Speak consulting where she helps communicators and content marketers create more meaningful connections with their customers - all through the power of empathy-driven brand storytelling.

Sarah and I talk about the common mistakes marketers make when they attempt storytelling. And we talk about the right ways to use storytelling in your content in a way that actually resonates and connects with your customers. Sarah's got a pretty simple framework that helps you do just that.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why brand storytelling is the most ideal way to stand out against all of the clutter your customers see
• How to approach brand storytelling
• Your brand is not the hero of your story
• Sarah’s Focus Empathy Data framework simplifies the storytelling process
• The ideal way to mine the best stories
• How to use empathy filters to instill empathy into your content and storytelling
• How Search Engine Optimization (SEO) insights can inform the stories you should create
• How to use empathy the right way in creating content
• How empathy-driven storytelling can actually help brands save money

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Sarah's site
• Sarah's podcast - Marketing With Empathy

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Margaret's newsletter: How CMOs Commit
• The How CMOs Commit podcast
• Siegel+Gale’s site
• Margaret on Twitter 

Melanie was on the show all the way back in episode 13 where we discussed her first book, The Content Fuel Framework.

This time she’s back to discuss her new book - Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust.

There's a simple framework to follow to help you craft your promises and back up each claim your brand makes. Melanie and I discuss that framework to help you not only craft the right promise to your customers but also to create and deliver the right content that proves your promise without you simply saying, “Hey! Trust me!”

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Customers want to be able to trust brands so there’s an opportunity for your brand to stand out from the crowd
  
  
• Why there’s such a lack of trust from consumers today
  
  
• The three different types of content to create to back up your brand’s claims
  
  
• How to understand the claims that our brand is already making 
  
  
• The difference between objective and subjective claims
  
  
• The five types of claims brands can make
  
  
• Why brands need to be careful about liberally saying they’re committed to social causes
  
  
• How to prove to your customers that you deliver a simple and convenient customer experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Melanie's website
• Melanie's book - Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust
• Melanie's book - The Content Fuel Framework
• SIMPLE brand #13: Melanie Deziel - How to Generate Unlimited Content for Your Brand

Bill and I discuss his lessons around seeking, finding, and eliminating all the friction that can happen in your customer experience.  And more importantly, we discuss how to proactively ensure that friction doesn’t get into the customer experience in the first place.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why the best service is when the customer doesn’t even need to contact you
• Bill’s definition of a frictionless organization
• The value of proactively communicating with your customers
• Educating your customers can curb customer service calls and reduce friction
• The questions to ask before you start to invest in customer service technology
• The need to proactively go upstream and prevent customer service issues from happening in the first place
• How delivering a frictionless experience actually demonstrates respect to your customer 
• The right way to proactively plan on how your customer experience will be frictionless instead of solving customer service issues
• With customer expectations always changing, creating a frictionless experience is not a one-and-done approach
• The habits and values that customer experience leaders should embrace

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Bill's website
• Bill's book - The Frictionless Organization: Deliver Great Customer Experiences with Less Effort 

Stan’s the founder of Purple Goldfish think tank.

And Stan’s the bestselling author of the Goldfish series of books. That’s 13 books that focus on all the various ways to help brands drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and promote positive word of mouth.

If you want to brand out from the crowd, it's not going to happen through your product or pricing. It's going to happen through the differentiated experience you deliver.

And a differentiated experience isn't just about what you say. It's about WHAT you do and, more importantly, HOW you do it and WHY you do it.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

•  The companies that win don’t put their customer first. They focus on engaged employees to deliver a remarkable customer experience
• The same five reasons that drive a goldfish to grow are the same reasons your business will grow
• How the New Orleans creole concept of lagniappe can help you differentiate your brand
• There’s no such thing as meeting customer expectations
• How to understand our customer’s expectations and how to exceed them
• Improving the customer experience through gaps or opportunities
• Offering free samples to existing customers is more valuable than offering them to potential customers
• Improving the customer experience through gaps or opportunities
• The missed opportunities that too many brands don’t take with referrals and word-of-mouth marketing

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Stan's site
• Stan's book - Purple Goldfish 2.0 
• Stan on LinkedIn

In the last episode I talked with Sara Frasca on the importance of creativity and innovation and how to build a culture of innovation. And I’m following that episode up this week with another episode on the importance of creativity. 

We’ve established that creativity is important, and we’ve established that everyone can be creative - not just a select few. But when it comes down to being more creative and really building your creativity muscle, you can only do that through establishing and committing to the right creative habits.

And Maria Brito helps you learn how to do just that. 

Maria is an award-winning New York-based contemporary art advisor, author, and curator who was named by Complex Magazine as one of the 20 Power Players in the Art World

She’s written for and she’s been featured in Entrepreneur, HuffPost, Elle, Forbes, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and lots of other outlets. And she’s the host of The "C" Files with Maria Brito on PBS.

And Maria’s the author of the bestselling book -  How Creativity Rules The World!

In her book, Maria helps you overcome limiting thoughts and dispel the traditional myths we tend to have about creativity. And she helps you and your team learn how you can cultivate the habits, the actions, and the attitudes that inspire creativity and innovation.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How creativity has been stifled in the corporate environment
• Creativity is the top skill that employers are looking for across all job openings
• How some brainstorming sessions can kill the creative process all together
• Creativity doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and commitment
• How empathy ties to being more creative
• How the digital world has taken away the ability to empathize
• How the more diverse your team is, the more creative it can be
• Why analog habits (using real pen and paper) help strengthen your creative muscle

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Maria's site
• Maria's book - How Creativity Rules the World

• 20% of small businesses fail within their first year
• 50% of all businesses don't last five years
• Only 33% of all businesses last 10 years or more

And that’s in average economies, without a pandemic.

Last year, and this year, have made small business ownership much, much worse.

In 2020, over 100,000 businesses permanently closed.

This year, in 2021, roughly 9 million businesses say they’re afraid they won’t survive through the rest of the year without additional government assistance.

No matter how you look at it, no matter what economy you’re in, business ownership is a struggle.

Beyond just your expertise, you have to know how - and put into place - those practices and systems that will not only ensure your business survives, but also ensure it thrives. Because if you’re a business owner, I’m sure you didn’t create your business just to simply survive.

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with John Meese this week.

John’s the CEO of CoWork Inc. He’s the former dean of Platform University. He’s the host of the Thrive School podcast. And he’s the author of the recent #1 bestseller Survive and Thrive: How to Build a Profitable Business in Any Economy (Including This One).

John and I talk about how the global pandemic effected - and continues to effect - our economy and small business owners, and we discuss the key plan business owners can use for building (or re-building) a business with legs that will last for the long haul - even in the next economy-impacting event.

No matter what industry you’re in, no matter what size your business is, these are the practices that you need to instill to ensure your business not only survives, but thrives  - regardless of the economy.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• John's book: Survive and Thrive
• John's site 
• John's podcast: Thrive School With John Meese

 For the longest time, I thought I was the only one who struggled with. But it turns out I wasn’t alone.  It turns out that that a lot of people suffer from it - A LOT.

In fact, according to the International Journal of Behavioral Science - over 70% of people experience imposter syndrome and that inner critic voice at some point.

So if you don’t suffer from it, there’s a high chance that your people do.

 
And if you’re like me, and you do suffer from or experience it, then there are tools to help you overcome it - likely more quickly than I did. 

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with Kris Kelso in this episode.

 
Kris is an executive coach and speaker who’s helped thousands of leaders turn their teams around. And he’s the author of the book: Overcoming the Imposter: Silence Your Inner Critic and Lead With Confidence.

 
Kris  and I talk about something that most leaders struggle with - that inner critic voice that downplays our own accomplishments and tells us we don’t have what it takes. And we talk about strategies and tools to silence that inner critic voice to be able to emerge as more effective and confident leaders.

 
The book provides the powerful tools needed to expose the Impostor's methods and emerge as more effective and confident leaders.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Kris's book: Overcoming the Imposter
• Kris's site 

If you’ve listened to the SIMPLE brand podcast enough then you know that most of the guests I bring on teach about marketing,  leadership or other business functions and will tell you, “Here’s how I became successful. Here’s how you do it.” And those stories ARE great. And they ARE insightful.

But rarely will you find someone who’s vulnerable enough to say, “Well - I made some mistakes. Do NOT do what I did.”

And that’s why this week’s guest stands out among most other leadership thought leaders. It’s Scott Miller - back again with another of his “Mess to Success” books: Marketing Mess to Brand Success.

Scott’s the Executive VP of Thought Leadership with Franklin Covey. He’s the host of  FranklinCovey's On Leadership With Scott Miller podcast. And he’s one of the few authors who’s on a mission to release leadership books filled with lessons on what NOT to do - including his latest book that releases today: Marketing Mess to Brand Success. It’s 30 different challenges he went through and that you need to overcome if you’re a marketing leader who wants your team to truly thrive.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Scott's book: Marketing Mess to Brand Success
• Scott's book: Management Mess to Leadership Success
• Scott's site
• Scott's Ignite Your Genius career coaching course
• FranklinCovey's On Leadership With Scott Miller podcast
• Scott on Instagram
• Scott on Facebook

When we look at the best brands in the world, they’re the ones that are delivering a great - and usually simple - customer experience. But beyond that, they’re also the ones that take steps to proactively avoid friction and the things that customers hate. These companies have learned that if you can eliminate what customers hate, you’ll automatically become the best option in your market.

This week’s guest knows all about removing friction and what customers hate. 

Nick’s the author of many customer experience and innovation-based books including What Customers Crave, The Innovation Mandate, Happy Work, and his latest bestseller -  What Customers Hate!

Nick and I discuss how to deliver an experience to your customers that will retain them AND turn them into loyal evangelists.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Most promoter and customer satisfaction data is useless and wrong
• How to take a true self-assessment of your customer experience
• Self-awareness will show where the things that customers hate reside in your organization
• Customer experience is an innovation activity
• How brands can ensure they get the right insights from their customers
• How to know why customers hate aspects of your customer experience. SPOILER ALERT: it’s not in the traditional scores and surveys
•  How Lemonade Insurance became a success by fixing the top things customers hate about insurance customer experience
• Why most brands still tend to focus on customer acquisition over customer retention
• How to better understand your customer experience through “Customer Experience by Walking Around”
• Why “Happiness as a Strategy” is valuable in your employee and customer experience
• The five touchpoints that make up the human experience
• Why the first customer experience touchpoints are the most valuable 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Nick's site
• Nick's book - What Customers Hate
• Nick's book - What Customers Crave

Rick’s an author, a speaker, and a customer-experience expert who helps companies achieve greater customer loyalty. And he’s one of the co-authors of The Effortless Experience.

Today, Rick’s back at it with his latest book - Digital Customer Service.

The importance of crafting your customer experience centers around how you make your customer feel throughout every interaction. But in a digital-first world, you’ve got to make sure you invest in the right technology and the right technology processes. Delivering an outstanding customer experience today isn’t just about the psychology or just about the technology - it’s about having the right marriage of psychology and technology baked into the experience. And Rick’s lessons help you learn just how to do that so that you’re always able to meet your customers where they are.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• In a ME-centric culture, you should treat each individual customer like the unique person they are
• How customers define their effort in a customer experience is ⅓ what they actually do and ⅔ how they feel
• Customers are exponentially more loyal to a company when they feel like the company is an advocate for them
• Why the term “Customer Experience” is a monster noun that has a wide variety of meanings
• The impression that customers are left with following direct contact with a company’s frontline is one of the most important in the customer experience so make it count
• The real definition of “meeting your customer where they are” is not what you think it is
• The more your customer has agency in the customer experience, the higher their positive feelings will be about the experience
• When brands instill a Digital Customer Service model, it creates a Win-Win-Win-Win situation

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Rick's LinkedIn profile
• Rick's book - Digital Customer Service: Transforming Customer Experience for an On-Screen World
• Rick's book - The Effortless Experience

Dave’s the Founder and Principal of Stone Mantel, an insights consultancy focused on helping companies create meaningful experiences for their customers.

And he co-hosts the Experience Strategy Podcast where he explores how organizations create deep and meaningful relationships with their customers.

Dave and I discuss all the right ways to design your customer experience so that your customers won’t see it as time wasted - but rather as time well saved, time well invested, and especially time well spent.

Here’s what we discuss:

• With all the apps that promised to help save time, people feel like they have less time
• Brands make the mistake of focusing on convenience without considering time spent
• The difference among time well spent, time well saved, and time well invested in experiences
• How to be purposeful in focusing on time in your customer experience
• Focusing too much on customer segments and personas can limit innovative thinking
• More successful disruptors focus on situations and problems to solve vs a customer persona
• How to find out if your customers consider their experience time well spent
• The ideal way to pinpoint specific interactions to focus on to make time better
• How to proactively deal with the uncertainty of evolving customer expectations

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Dave's site - Stone Mantel
• Dave’s site - The Collaboratives
• Dave's podcast - Experience Strategy Podcast
• Dave on LinkedIn

Derrick is the managing partner of The Blake Project, a strategic brand consultancy that helps businesses gain an emotional advantage, a distinctive advantage, and a connective advantage, moving them from brand awareness to brand insistence.

He’s the founder of Branding Strategy Insider - an online publication to help marketing-oriented leaders and professionals build strong brands.

Derrick and I discuss what goes into building a lasting brand that connects with customers and keeps them for the long term.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How brand strategy has evolved vs. what has stayed the same
• The best definition of a brand
• How to tie brand and business strategy together when starting a brand
• How branding and customer experience relate
• The best way to build a brand
• How to create a strong emotional connection with your customers
• Why storytelling is key to the brand conversation

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Derrick's website
• Derek's publication - Branding Strategy Insider
• Derrick on LinkedIn

David’s written six award-winning books. He’s delivered three TEDx talks that have been viewed over two million times. He’s been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, Fast Company, and more. And he’s consistently ranked as one of the top world business thought leaders by thinkers50. 

David was actually our very first guest on episode 2 talking about how to inspire and align your employees to pick a fight.

Then he was back on episode 23 teaching us how to lead from anywhere.

This time he’s back to discuss his latest book - Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams.

Why are some teams more motivated, more innovative, and more successful than others? Why do some groups of talented people actually fall short when compared to teams of less talented people?

It comes down to the habits and practices you put in place that bring out the best in your team.

David and I discuss how some of the world’s most effective teams do this, and we show you how you can do the same with your team.

Here’s what we discuss:

• The team that an employee is on is highly correlated to their employee experience
• Team cultures are likely different from the corporate culture
• The three elements that separate high-performing teams from all others
• The talent of your team members doesn’t matter as much as you think it does
• How to build a common understanding in your team
• Build psychological safety in your team through Trust, Risk, Respect
• Focusing on WHO is impacted by your work is a stronger driver than your WHY
• How to build your team back up if any high-performing elements break down

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• David's site
• David's book - Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams
• David on LinkedIn
• SIMPLE brand #23: David Burkus – Leading From Anywhere
• SIMPLE brand #2: David Burkus – Inspire And Align Your Employees to Pick A Fight

Known as the "King of Clarity," Steve's passion is helping companies and individuals communicate clearly and effectively. Steve is the author of two books, including his latest, The Point: How to Win with Clarity-Fueled Communications.

Steve and I discuss how the use of his "Clarity Fuel Formula" helps communicators break through the noise to quickly grab - and keep - the attention of their audience without creating confusion.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How anyone can learn to be a simple, effective communicator
• A business's main competitor isn't another business - it's noise
• Understanding how the brain works is crucial to communicating clearly
• Why seconds matter in gaining your audience's attention
• How jargon and too much information shut down the attention center of the brain
• Why assuming your audience shares your same level of knowledge is a critical mistake
• The importance of defining terms to bring clarity to the conversation
• Why storytelling and analogies are brain-friendly communication tools
• How poor communication within an organization can lead to a 20% loss in efficiency per week

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Steve's website
• Steve's book - The Point: How to Win with Clarity-Fueled Communications
• Steve on LinkedIn

Scott’s a globally recognized authority on how organizations and professionals create a distinction to attract and retain customers. He’s a member of the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame. And he’s one of 24 members of the “Sales and Marketing Hall of Fame.” 

And Scott’s the author of eight best-selling customer experience books including his latest - The Ultimate Customer Experience: 5 Steps Everyone Must Know to Excite Your Customers, Engage Your Colleagues, and Enjoy Your Work.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Scott learned the value of customer experience from his father’s grocery store
• While customer expectations have changed, the basic premise is still the same
• Customer loyalty is only created through emotion
• What James Cameron’s The Titanic teaches us about word of mouth
• Customers don’t want you to make it right - they want you to get it right
• The ultimate customer experience drives customers to repeat and refer
• Customers compare you to every great experience, not your direct competitors
• How the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess resort created the ultimate experience with golden retrievers
• The right way to be empathetic to customers
• Leaders need to model the behaviors they expect from employees

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Scott’s site
• Scott’s book - The Ultimate Customer Experience
• Scott on LinkedIn

Mark’s the Vice President of High Performance Leadership with Chick-fil-A. And Mark’s the author of 11 best-selling books including his latest Wall Street Journal bestseller - Culture Rules: The Leader’s Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The three rules that go into creating a high-performance culture
• Why leaders shouldn’t worry too much about how they define their vision, mission, and purpose
• The simple test to know if you have defined your team’s aspiration well
• The value of recognizing reality and comparing that to your culture aspiration
• How to ensure your people can clearly articulate your culture values
• What Alexander the Great teaches us about modeling values to your people
• The right way to use storytelling with your people
• How to discern and remove toxins from your organization
• Be grateful that there’s no finish line to developing and adapting your culture

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Mark’s site - leadeveryday.com

Mark’s book - Culture Rules: The Leader’s Guide to Creating the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

Mark’s book - Smart Leadership: Four Simple Choices to Scale Your Impact

Mark’s book - Win the Heart: How to Create a Culture of Full Engagement

Juliana and ScaleTime have helped hundreds of agency owners and business leaders get their lives back by developing systems to save time, add employees, and streamline processes to create lean, mean, profitable machines.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why most leaders have a hard time creating and managing systems
• Having systems in place helps your people feel secure and view you as a better leader
• Having the right systems in place creates an engaged culture
• How to recognize that you don’t have the right systems in place
• How to assess the strength of your current systems (if any!)
• Templates for content your team creates repeatedly can actually help them be creative
• Training your people on processes is just as important as documentation of processes
• How to ensure your people actually follow your systems
• Perfection can kill your progress when building systems so iterate and evolve them

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Juliana’s business - ScaleTime

Juliana on LinkedIn

Over the past couple of decades, too many businesses have continued to operate the same way for decades because "that’s how we’ve always done things."

While there are so many thought leaders and authors who are providing some fantastic lessons on how to become successful, no one is talking nearly enough about how ensure you remain successful once you do make it.

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with Len Herstein this week.  Len’s had a long history developing, growing and managing some pretty well-known brands: Campbell’s Soup, Coca-Cola, Nabisco. Today, he’s the Founder, CEO & President of ManageCamp Inc., where he provides the strategic vision behind the annual Brand ManageCamp conferences, leads the planning on clients’ custom events, and is the day-to-day contact and project leader for ManageCamp’s brand consulting projects. And this is pretty cool - On the side, he’s a volunteer sheriff’s deputy in Colorado.

And Len is the author of Be Vigilant: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance, and Safeguard Success. Your Business and Relationships Depend on It.

So many books and authors teach lessons on how to become successful. But Len’s lessons are a little different. They focus on what to do once you’re already successful. In Be Vigilant, Len teaches us how so many successful companies - and even successful leaders - can fail big time when they get complacent. And he teaches us how to best guard against complacency so we can remain successful. What’s really cool here is that - in his book - Len uses cautionary tales from both businesses that have fallen but also from some of the crime and police lessons he’s learned in his time as a volunteer sheriff’s deputy.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Len's book: Be Vigilant: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance, and Safeguard Success 
• Len Herstein's Site
• Brand ManageCamp 

In the last episode, I talked with Jeffrey Shaw about how you can gain more control in your business - and in your life - through his self-employed ecosystem of personal development, business strategies, and daily habits

In this week's episode, I’m taking those lessons further to discuss HOW you can gain more control in your business and life through developing the right systems.

Think about your own role. Can you honestly say that you’re consistently doing the work that you and only you can do? Or better yet the work that you and only you SHOULD do?

If you’re like most people, then you’re likely doing too much of the work that you shouldn’t do and not focusing enough on the work you should be doing.

But imagine for a moment that it could be better.

Imagine being able to work fewer hours, while making an even greater impact since you’re working on more strategic work.

Imagine empowering your team to answer their own questions or develop their own solutions BEFORE they even have to ask you how to solve a problem.

Imagine being able to have more free time without that free time negatively affecting your business or career.

Well, you don’t have to just imagine it. You can actually have that in your business. But it’s not going to magically happen just by you hoping for it, imagining it, or manifesting it.

You’ve got to put in the work to build the right systems and strategies to make it happen.

And this week’s guest can help you do just that. It’s Jenny Blake!

Jenny is an author, podcaster, and keynote speaker who loves helping business leaders move from friction to flow through smarter systems.

Jenny hosts two podcasts with over one million downloads combined: Free Time for heart-based business owners, and Pivot with Jenny Blake to help people learn how to navigate change.

And she’s the author of three bestselling books including her latest, Free Time: Lose The Busywork, Love Your Business.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Jenny's site
• Jenny's book - Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business
• Jenny's Free Time Toolkit
• Jenny's podcast - Free Time With Jenny Blake
• Jenny's podcast - Pivot With Jenny Blake

• Clint's site
• Clint's book- Tattoos, Not Brands: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Smart Marketing and Business Building
• Clint's podcast - Tattoos Not Brands

If you’ve been following me for a while, then you likely know that I preach “Innovating to stay ahead” as one of the key behaviors that goes into creating simple experiences. But there’s a challenge that most people face when it comes to innovation.

Most people make innovation much harder than it has to be. Most people think innovation is confusing, complicated, intimidating, complex. Most people think you need a special degree or training to do innovation right. Or they think that only certain people - an elite few - are capable of being innovative.

And not only do most people think that they’re not innovative. They also think that they can’t be innovative.  Most people don't recognize their ability to be creative and they don’t understand how to exercise or hone their creative thinking skills.

If you’re like most people, then I want to bust this myth wide open for you.

The truth is, coming up with innovative, creative ideas isn’t a talent you’re born with. Anyone can do it.

But at the same time - you can’t just wake up one day and flip a switch and say, “Oh! Now I’m going to be creative. I’m going to come up with something innovative today.”

You have to learn how to have the right innovative mindset. You have to learn how to have the right innovative habits. You have to learn HOW to be innovative.

Thankfully, Sara Frascahelps you learn how to do just that. 

Sara is a keynote speaker, global business coach and innovation expert. She helps leading organizations cultivate human imagination, build a culture of innovation, and solve complex problems in creative ways - all while helping teams recognize their ability to help all of their employees develop and strengthen their creative muscles.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Creativity being one of the most sought-after job skills by employers
• How creativity has been stifled in corporate employees
•  How the crazy idea of painting cows to look like zebras helped save $2 Billion in the Japanese cattle industry
• Why borrowing ideas from outside of your industry is a valuable way to innovate
• What holds most companies back from being creative and innovative
• How creative habits help increase creativity
• The core mindsets that are common across the most creative people
•  How to keep your composure in the face of distractions

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Sara's site
• Point Northeast site

But more than just a master copyright, Ray’s developed a simple messaging framework that will help you more effectively shepherd and influence any audience - The PASTOR Framework.

Matt and Ray discuss his PASTOR Framework and how you can use it to craft a message that will tap into your audience’s emotions and move them to action without being slick or sleazy.

We hope you enjoy this episode, and we're excited for you to hear the next ones. We've got more great guest interviews and a few lessons with Matt along the way.

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

And that business owner has to learn a lot of lessons as that business grows. Lessons around providing the customer experience, lessons around leading their people, lessons around when and how to make impactful decisions.

That’s why I’m excited to be talking with Gigi Butler in this episode.

Gigi is the founder of the largest cupcake franchise in the world - Gigi’s Cupcakes. And she’s the author of The Secret Ingredient: Recipes for Success In Business and Life. Today, Gigi’s a highly sought-after speaker where she gives her inspirational and entrepreneurial lessons. 

Gigi and I discuss her lessons from growing her business as well as creating a consistent customer experience.

Leslie’s the owner and founder of E-WRITE where she helps Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations learn how to write better for both their customers and their internal audiences.

Leslie and I discuss how you can use plain language to simplify your customer experience while setting up your frontline employees for success.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How writing in business has changed (not devolved!) over the decades
• How customer experience is like a romantic relationship
• How brands can build up affinity with customers through plain language
• The biggest drivers of complex and boring language form brands
• How to build empathy with customers without increasing legal risk
• How to empower frontline employees to incorporate plain language and brand voice
• The need for consistent language and brand voice pre and post-purchase
• Can and should empathy be scripted?

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Leslie's site
• Leslie on LinkedIn
• Leslie on Threads

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

The Guaranteed Customer Experience turns the concept of a guarantee on its head. An experience guarantee goes beyond merely providing a warranty against any product defects or failures. It actually encompasses the entire customer journey to promise an experience that never falls short of expectations.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The elements needed to create an experience guarantee
• The common ways that drive brand promises and experience guarantees to break
• The need for ensuring your operations can feasibly deliver on your promise 
• How to define your promise is clear to all employees
• How to know what to promise based on what’s relevant to your customers
• Defining the problems you don’t solve is just as important as defining the ones you do solve
• How to restore trust from your customer by recovering from a service failure

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Jeff’s book - The Guaranteed Customer Experience: How to win Customers by Keeping Your Promises

Jeff’s newsletter - Customer Service Tip of the Week

Jeff Toister on Twitter

Jeff Toister on LinkedIn

Sara’s an international keynote speaker and the founder of the leadership research firm BrainAMPED. She’s transforming the future of work by using the power of brain science to amplify organizational vitality, and by helping people work, lead, and succeed in healthy, high-performing, human-centric ways.

It’s no secret that too many leaders and too many professionals feel like they’re stuck in a complicated work environment. Overworked and under-living. Thankfully, Sara has the strategies to simplify that as you boost your work vitality, stand out, and bring your best, most energized self to your career and your other important life areas.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How thinking of your work like a relationship is valuable for your career
• What’s causing so many professionals to have a “toxic relationship” with their work
• How you can raise your vitality in your work (and other life areas)
• Recognize that your energy will ebb and flow - and that’s natural and okay
• You can instill your purpose into interactions and aspects of your role instead of struggling to find that purpose-driven role
• The “success traps” that can actually confine you in your work
• Placing too much focus on one life area is detrimental to the other major life areas
• You need to be as intentional about resting as you are about working

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Sara’s book - Dear Work: Something Has to Change

Sara’s site and newsletter - The Dear Work Letter

Sara on Linkedin

Sara on Instagram

All that comes from a culture of complexity. 

Look, no one plans to make things too complex and burdensome for their employees. But complexity does happen. And it creeps in a little bit at a time when you’re not expecting it. And once it’s in your business, it’s so hard to get it out. It's detrimental to your business and you have to find a way to solve it.

And that’s why I was so excited to talk with Lisa Bodell this week.

Lisa is one of the top 50 keynote speakers in the world. And she’s the best-selling author of multiple books including: Why Simple Wins. And she’s one of my favorite teachers on simplicity.

Lisa and I talk about how businesses find themselves in the complexity trap and we discuss her lessons that will help you and your team eradicate that complexity and get back to meaningful work that drives your business forward.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Lisa's book: Why Simple Wins
• Lisa's book: Kill the Company
• FutureThink's site
• Lisa on Twitter
• FutureThink on Twitter

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

It can be frustrating knowing how great your idea is, how much potential your idea has, and then recognizing that the people you’re trying to convince just aren’t getting it. But what if there was a process you could follow to help people not only understand your idea and have it resonate with them but for them actually to "buy in" to your idea as well? 

It turns out there is a process for that - a pretty powerful process. And once you learn this process, you’ll be able to win over, inspire and influence your audience - every single time.

Part strategist, part storyteller, part English-to-English translator, Tamsen Webster helps experts drive action with their ideas. Tamsen honed her trademark Red Thread approach in and for major organizations.

Tamsen and I discuss her lessons and her process for taking your big ideas and making them irresistible to any audience. And it turns out that the key to doing this is by building the story that your audience will tell themselves about your idea.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why just identifying your audience’s problem and sharing your solution isn’t enough
• How our brains generate stories to make sense of our decisions
• How brands are doing storytelling wrong 
• There are more storytelling structures behind just the “hero’s journey”
• Tamsen’s Red Thread elements that help drive any story forward
•  Story structure is like a programming language for our brains
• Where most marketing and communications fail in using storytelling
• The importance of giving your audience a choice

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Tamsen's site
• Tamsen's book - Find Your Red Thread: Make Your Big Ideas Irresistible

We hope you enjoy this episode, and we're excited for you to hear the next ones. We've got more great guest interviews and a few lessons with Matt along the way.

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

Too many business owners are left frustrated because they feel invisible in a crowded marketplace. They know they’re better than their competitors, but when they focus on that fact, their customers don’t pay attention - their customers don’t really care.

That's because, to customers, better is not actually better. Different is better.

And those who market differently are the ones who win.

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with Mike Michalowicz this week. Mike's top keynote speaker, a best-selling author, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, and business makeover specialist for MSNBC. And Simon Sinek calls him “the top contender for the patron saint of entrepreneurs.”

Mike and I talk about his new book that’s out this week: Get Different: Marketing That Can’t Be Ignored.  

Mike and I discuss the right ways to go about knowing how and where to be different. And we discuss how to grab - and keep - your customer’s attention. All based on the methods, tools and lessons from his book - Get Different.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Mike's book: Get Different: Marketing That Can't Be Ignored!
• Mike's site 
• Mike's podcast: Mike Up In Your Business 

Having a data-driven strategy is imperative to constantly provide the simple experiences that customers crave. But if having a data-driven strategy were that straightforward and simple, every business would be killing it today. The real challenge comes from analyzing, extracting and understanding the right insights from the data. 

 And there’s no better leader I can think of that understands this more than this week’s guest - Dan Marks.

We hope you enjoy this episode, and we're excited for you to hear the next ones. We've got more great guest interviews and a few lessons with Matt along the way.

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

Sean is an internationally recognized thought leader, speaker, and transformational coach with 20+ years of leading customer experience initiatives for companies ranging from startups to the Fortune 200.

And Sean is the author of the award-winning book - 4ROCKS: Reduce Effort, Drive Loyalty, Transform the Customer Journey.

Here’s what we discuss:

• The four types of “rocks” that disrupt your customer experience
• How to find and eliminate the “rocks” from your customer journey
• Connecting silos to create a seamless experience
• The need for cross-functional teams to address customer experience
• Connecting upstream and downstream effects in your customer journey
• The Colorado DMV’s seamless customer experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Sean’s website
• Sean’s book - 4ROCKS: Reduce Effort, Drive Loyalty, Transform the Customer Journey
• Sean on LinkedIn

We hope you enjoy this episode, and we're excited for you to hear the next ones. We've got more great guest interviews and a few lessons with Matt along the way.

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

Mike was on the show back in episode 45 where we discussed how to differentiate your brand so you can grab and keep your customer’s attention.

But in this episode, we’re talking about lessons to help you simplify your business in a way that can make the most impact.

Mike's a keynote speaker, a best-selling author, a former Wall Street Journal columnist, and a business makeover specialist for MSNBC. Simon Sinek calls him “the top contender for the patron saint of entrepreneurs.”

Mike and I discuss his simple, counterintuitive approach to creating efficiency that frees you up to pay attention to the things that matter - in life and in your work. So regardless if you’re leading a team of one, a team of one thousand, or somewhere in between, you need to have an organization that gets things done while you do what only you should do - the strategic, needle-moving, drive-the-business-forward type of work. And that’s just what you’ll learn from Mike’s lessons from Clockwork.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The right way to delegate so that you’re truly freed up for the work you need to do
• The importance of defining and focusing on one core function in your business
• The “superhero syndrome” and why it’s so important to be able to remove yourself from the business for the sake of your team
• Why a 4-week vacation is actually valuable to your business and team
• Why the method of “capturing” your team’s processes is more valuable than SOPs
• The 5 dimensions of your team’s work

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Mike's site
• Mike's book - Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself 

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

We hope you enjoy this episode, and we're excited for you to hear the next ones. We've got more great guest interviews and a few lessons with Matt along the way.

Join the simplicity crusade and hit subscribe!

That’s why I’m thrilled to have Nick Westergaard on the show this week.

Nick’s one of the top marketing keynote speakers and influencers. He’s the host of the On Brand podcast. And he’s the author of Brand Now. 

Nick and I discuss the foundational brand lessons from his book. And we discuss how any business - large or small - can create a brand experience that’s simple and transparent and can stand out at every customer interaction.

Nick helps you learn all that and much more in this week's episode.

No, there’s actually a method to it. And this week’s guest actually created the method - it’s called the Nice Method. And our guest is Dave Delaney!

Dave’s a keynote speaker, author, corporate trainer, and host of The Nice Podcast.

And Dave’s the founder and head of Future Forth, where he helps leaders of fast-growing companies retain talent, improve communication and strengthen their culture.

It turns out Dave’s an expert on how leaders can strengthen their team culture - all by being nice.

Dave and I discuss lessons from his Nice Method that helps leaders learn how to foster communication mastery and build a strong culture in today’s complex environment - the nice way.  And we also get into his improv comedy background to discuss how improv can help you grow a stronger, more engaged team.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Dave's site
• Dave's ebook - The Nice Method (Use code "SIMPLE" for a free download!)
• Dave's blog - Bring the Nice
• Dave's podcast - The Nice Podcast

Karin is the founder of Let’s Grow Leaders, a training firm focused on helping human-centered leaders find clarity in uncertainty, drive innovation, and achieve breakthrough results - without losing their humanity.

She’s an international keynote speaker. In fact, Inc. Magazine says she’s one of the top 100 leadership speakers.

And Karin’s the bestselling author of four books including Courageous Cultures. 

Karin and I discuss her lessons to help you create a courageous culture that shares new ideas, proactively solves problems, and generates contributions from all levels.

Here’s what we discuss:

• What holds employees back from speaking up and sharing ideas
• Why telling your employees you have an “open door” policy isn’t enough
• Why creating clarity helps generate better ideas
• Setting constraints helps employees feel less intimidated to share ideas
• Steps for building a courageous culture
• Karin’s IDEA model helps you effectively frame and pitch new ideas
• The concept of micro-innovations helps everyone realize that they’re innovative
• How to influence a courageous culture in both your team and your leadership

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Karin's website
• Karin's book - Courageous Cultures
• Karin on LinkedIn

Thankfully, Joey Coleman can help you turn that around to not only keep your customers but also turn them into raving fans.

Joey is an award-winning speaker and a customer experience design expert. He’s worked with hundreds of companies to help them deliver remarkable customer experiences while dramatically improving their profits. 

He’s the co-host of Experience This! podcast along with Dan Gingiss who’s a SIMPLE brand guest in episode 48.

And Joey’s the author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller -  Never Lose a Customer Again!

Joey and I talk about his lessons that’ll help you turn one-time purchasers into lifelong customers and that’ll help you retain your best customers and turn them into raving fans. And the lessons are all from his First 100 Days® methodology.

SPOILER ALERT: customer loyalty isn't about focusing on marketing efforts or simply closing the sale. Customer Loyalty is about focusing on the First 100 Days® AFTER the sale and focusing on ALL the interactions the customer experiences.

And just when you think our discussion is all around customer experience, we take a hard right turn into a discussion that I've NEVER heard anyone talk about before: the value of empathy..........with yourself. Think about it. By now, many of us understand the value of empathy, and we strive to empathize with others. But we rarely empathize with the one person who usually needs it the most, ourselves.

Want to know the other topics we discuss? They're right here:

• How companies over-emphasize the wrong things to contribute to the vibe of their brand
• The dangers of silos to your customer experience
• Why business leaders have a tendency to focus more on customer acquisition than customer retention (half of the reason is biological)
• Why the majority of customers leave a brand within the first 100 days after their purchase
• What brands can do in the first 100 days to retain customers
• The eight simple phases in the customer life journey
•  Empathy is going to be the single most important skill for humans to have over the next 20-50 years
• The importance of having empathy for yourself

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Joey's site
• Joey's book - Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale Into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days
• Joey's podcast - Experience This!

Scott is the founder and CEO of Swoz Consulting where he helps startups, family enterprises, and Fortune 500 companies create raving fans of customers and employees.

And Scott’s the bestselling author of Make Your Brand Legendary: Create Raving Fans With the Customer Experience Engine.

Here’s what we discuss:

• The secret to creating raving fans
• Customer Insight is the fuel that powers your customer experience engine
• Operational excellence is more important than wowing customers
• A healthy leadership team is needed for excellent customer experience
• How Scott’s faith drives his customer experience approach

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Scott’s website
• Swoz Consulting
• Scott’s book - Make Your Brand Legendary: Create Raving Fans With the Customer Experience Engine
• Scott on LinkedIn
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and The Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings
• The Four Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney and Sean Covey
• The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni

Ali is the CEO of Alignmint Growth Strategies. With over 15 years advising startups and global companies, Ali’s specialty is transforming customer experience, increasing customer lifetime value, and building customer loyalty. Ali is also the author of the bestselling book, Keep Your Customers: How to Stop Customer Turnover, Improve Retention and Get Lucrative, Long-Term Loyalty.

Ali and I talk through the significant impact customer retention, versus customer acquisition, has on the bottom line and the direct tie between customer experience and customer loyalty. Ali explains her perspective on the different levels of customer loyalty and how to move more of your customers to the highest level of loyalty. 

Here’s what we discuss:

• How to define customer loyalty
• How to let leaders know that customer loyalty matters
• The different distinctions of customer loyalty
• Strategies to take around “bad revenue” customers
• The two major components of customer retention
• Who within a company owns customer experience
• How to keep an entire company on track with customer experience
• The ideal way to track customer loyalty progress

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Ali's website
• Keep Your Customers: How to Stop Customer Turnover, Improve Retention and Get Lucrative, Long-Term Loyalty
• Ali on LinkedIn

Tiffani’s an international keynote speaker and the former global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce.

She’s been named twice as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50. She’s a regular contributor to Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review.

And she’s the host of the What's Next! With Tiffani Bova podcast.

Tiffani and I discuss the impact your brand has when you place an equal focus on both customer experience and employee experience.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How Tiffani defines “happy employees”
• The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their job.
• How a focus on reducing customer effort has created the “CX Delimma” 
• The pandemic shined a light onto the lack of investment brands have made for employees
• What companies see when they place a simultaneous focus on CX and EX
• How to help your employees instill an experience mindset 
• How Best Buy was able to turn things around by placing an equal focus on CX and EX

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Tiffani's site
• Tiffani’s book - The Experience Mindset: Changing the Way You Think About Growth
• Tiffani’s book - Growth IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business
• Tiffani's podcast - What's Next! With Tiffani Bova
• Tiffani on LinkedIn

When it comes to providing simple experiences to your customers, or your team members, you’re either helped or hindered by your level of influence. And many leaders are mistaken about what it means to be influential. In this episode, Stacey and I discuss methods for improving communication and producing the ideal type of influence—one that moves people to action long after an interaction is over. She dispels the most common influence myths and shares how leaders can stop sabotaging themselves in order to leave a positive, lasting impression with everyone.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Stacey’s book: Influence Redefined
• Stacey Hanke, Inc.

Joey’s an award-winning speaker and a customer experience and employee experience design expert. He’s worked with hundreds of companies to help them deliver remarkable customer experiences while dramatically improving their profits.

You may remember ​Joey’s first appearance on the SIMPLE brand podcast when he taught us how to successfully retain and grow our customer base. This time, we discuss his latest bestseller about how to apply those same principles in our own house – ​Never Lose an Employee Again: The Simple Path to Remarkable Retention.

Joey and I discuss what you can do to help your employees feel heard, understood, and valued in their first 100 days and beyond.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Why brands spend more time acquiring and hiring talent versus retaining talent
• Most brands have a gap in who’s responsible for creating a remarkable experience on a new hire’s Day 2 and beyond 
• If we don’t hold our employees’ hands and help them acclimate they’ll leave
• The cost of an employee leaving is 250% of their annual salary
• 45% of new hires won’t make the 100-day anniversary: 4% leave on Day 1!
• When one employee leaves, there’s a snowball effect on remaining employees 
• If you create remarkable employee experiences, your employees create remarkable customer experiences
• Joey’s 100-day 8-phase employee journey to focus on
• You can gauge your employee advocacy by the number of employee referrals you have
• While you’re focused on your new hires’ journeys, don’t forget your existing employees

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Joey’s site
• Joey’s book - Never Lose an Employee Again
• Joey on LinkedIn
• SIMPLE brand #73: Joey Coleman – Never Lose a Customer Again

Dee Ann is the former head of Talent with Chick-fil-A. She was the company’s first female officer and was instrumental in building and growing Chick-fil-A’s well-known culture. In her 33-year career with Chick-fil-A, she was responsible for franchisee selection, talent acquisition, management and development, diversity and inclusion, culture and engagement, social responsibility and sustainability. Today, she’s a speaker, consultant and author where she helps organizations create and strengthen culture and talent to better serve their customers.

With all her experience, it’s safe to say that Dee Ann knows what it takes to teach people how to develop, build and manage a fulfilling career.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Dee Ann ‘s book: Crush Your Career
• Dee Ann’s book: Bet On Talent
• Dee Ann’s site
• Dee Ann on Instagram
• Dee Ann on Twitter
• Dee Ann on Facebook

Dr. Cindy and I discuss her lessons from Sell Yourself all around the right ways to create and manage a personal brand. 

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How selling is really about helping and how everyone is in sales, no matter their role
• Your personal brand is the legacy and impact you leave with others
• You have a personal brand, and everyone knows it except for you
• How to solicit feedback to understand how others define your personal brand
• The steps you need to take to craft the personal brand you want
• What to do when the brand others define for you doesn’t match what you’ve defined
• Dr. Cindy’s three critical components to crafting a personal brand
• How to ensure you’re consistently living the personal brand you want
• How to help your network advocate for and sell your personal brand
• How to recover when you’ve gone “off-brand”

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

Dr. Cindy’s website

Orange Leaf Consulting

Orange Leaf Academy

Dr. Cindy’s book - Sell Yourself: How to Create, Live and Sell a Powerful Personal Brand

Dr. Cindy’s book - Every Job is a Sales Job: How to Use the Art of Selling to Win at Work

Nick is a world-renowned Strategist, Futurist, Bestselling Author, and one of the top keynote speakers in the world.

Nick was on the SIMPLE brand podcast back in episode 74 talking about What Customers Hate.

This time he’s back to talk about lessons from his latest book - One Step Ahead: How To Dominate Your Market With Innovation Leadership.

In today’s hypercompetitive environment, the difference between winning and losing really isn’t that big of a gap. It’s actually pretty small. It’s like a race, where the fastest runner who crosses the finish line can be just One Step Ahead.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How to stay one step ahead in your leadership
• Why your individual leadership is important in setting your team’s pace
• Why surveys and promoter scores are worth very little
• The correlation between a brand’s Glassdoor ratings and Yelp and Google ratings
• The three things your employees need from you and your organization
• Taking action from employee feedback builds your credibility 
• Any customer experience initiative must be tied with an employee experience initiative
• The four behaviors that help leaders stay one step ahead

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

SIMPLE brand  episode #74 - Nick Webb - What Customers Hate

Nick’s Consulting site - Leader Logic

Nick’s speaking site

Nick’s book - One Step Ahead: How To Dominate Your Market With Innovation Leadership

Nick’s book - What Customers Hate: Drive Fast and Scalable Growth by Eliminating the Things that Drive Away Business

Melina is CEO of The Brainy Business, where she provides behavioral economics training and consulting to businesses all around the world.

She's the host of The Brainy Business podcast.

 And she's the bestselling author of two books devoted to behavioral economics. In her latest book, What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You, she helps readers better understand how the human brain works and how the human brain adapts to change. But, more importantly, Melina explains how your employees adapt to change.

Melina and I talk through her roadmap to help you reduce any friction related to instilling organizational change. We also explore how to ensure that you can get your employees on board with any change in the simplest way possible.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why it’s difficult for leaders to instill and implement change in their organizations
• Leaders need to consider all the little changes their employees make, not just the big ones
• How leaders can find out what drives and motivates their employees
• Instead of eliminating biases, leaders should look for where they can work with existing biases
• Investing time upfront to look at the right problem will help you instill change more easily
• How you present change is just as important as how you develop the change, so you must take time to craft that communication
• Melina’s “It’s Not About the Cookie” framework to help leaders deliver change
• Using simpler language to frame a change helps people more easily buy into change

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Melina's site
• Melina's book - What Your Employees Need But Can't Tell You
• Melina's book - What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You
• Melina's podcast - The Brainy Business

And Joe Pulizzi has that guide book for you.

Joe’s the founder of Content Marketing Institute and The Tilt. He’s the co-host of the This Old Marketing podcast. And he’s the best-selling author of a number of books including Content Inc. The best way to reach and serve your customers today is through content. But you can’t just throw out a bunch of content everywhere - you need a plan, and this book will help you strategically and intentionally build that plan.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Joe's book: Content Inc.
• The Tilt
• Orange Effect Foundation
• This Old Marketing podcast
• Joe on Instagram
• Joe on Twitter

Pamela’s the best-selling author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, Body of Work and her latest: The Widest Net.

In The Widest Net, Pam teaches us how to build strong diverse relationships, identify and connect with new partners, expand markets, generate leads, and find new customers in places we may never have considered. And she shows us how to connect with potential clients and customers using the true breadth of the marketplace, which she calls an ecosystem of living connections.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• How. to search outside your own "lens" to target your ideal customers
• How to more authentically learn about your customers
• How you and your customers can help each other grow through a trusted reciprocity framework
• How to build a community of customers and partners through relationship-building
• How to simplify your marketing and content strategy by focusing on a "beacon" - one primary communication vehicle
•  

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Pamela's site
  
  
• Pamela's book - The Widest Net: Unlock Untapped Markets and Discover New Customers Right in Front of You
• Pamela's book - Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur
• Pamela's book - Body of Work: Finding the Thread That Ties Your Story Together

Christy and I get to talk about her new book: Take Back Your Time: The Guilt-Free Guide to Life Balance.  

 In Take Back Your Time, Christy gives you the method, framework and lessons to help you identify what balance looks like in your specific life. And she uncovers the steps to help you focus on what matters most and achieve your own version of balance.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Christy's book: Take Back Your Time
• Christy's site 
• Christy's podcast: The Christy Wright Show

So you can say that your brand is customer-centric all day long,  but if your customer doesn’t agree with you, then you’ve got a big problem. And that problem is even bigger when you’re oblivious to it.

Delivering a truly customer-centric experience is pretty simple. It may not be easy, but it is simple. And it starts with your culture. It starts with you recognizing that your customer experience will not improve until you have an understanding of your customer and their needs instilled into everything that everyone across your organization does - not just those teams that are customer-facing. 

A truly customer-centric experience starts with having a truly customer-centric culture.

I don’t think enough leaders are talking about how to truly accomplish this, but this week’s guest is - it’s Annette Franz.

Annette’s the founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc., a customer experience strategy consulting firm that helps clients ensure that the customer is at the center of all they do.

As a seasoned Customer Experience veteran with over 30 years of experience, Annette’s held CX leadership roles at some of the top brands in the country including J.D. Power, Fidelity, and Mattel.

 And her latest book was just released this month! Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business.

While lots of experts talk about the value of customer-centric experiences, there aren’t enough lessons out there on how to build a customer-centric culture in your organization and how to ensure that the customer is fully ingrained into your organization’s DNA. And that’s just what Annette focuses on in Built to Win, and we take a deep-dive discussion into those lessons.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The difference between being customer-focused and being customer-centric and the value of a customer-centric culture
• The barriers to creating a customer-centric culture
• The value of defining both behaviors and anti-behaviors that tie to your organization’s values
• Why your employees should come “more first” [that’s not a typo!]
• How to ensure your customer experience thinking is outside-in vs inside-out
• How to apply the Platinum Rule to your customer experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Annette's site
• Annette on LinkedIn
• Annette's book - Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value For Your Business
• Annette's book - Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the "Customer" in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business) 

When I was in college twenty-plus years ago, a handful of us loved watching the movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

And we absolutely LOVED Alec Baldwin’s scene where he’s teaching his lesson to on closing deals. At one time, some of us could even quote his monologue verbatim.

 Always Be Closing.

Now whether that way of selling truly worked or not was up for debate. What isn’t up for debate is that method (even if it did work at one time) is completely outdated.

Today’s consumers, today’s customers, today’s buyers are different. With the tools and information they have, they’re savvier than ever. They have the ability to take their money and give it to someone else quicker than ever.

The way they research, the information they have available to them, the way they interact with (and choose to interact with) sales reps - has completely changed.

But too many brands aren’t recognizing this change. Too many brands aren't recognizing the need to change their approach to selling. And they’re starting to fail and become completely irrelevant to their customers. And when that happens, they can’t figure out why. They can’t figure out how to adapt.

Thankfully, this week’s guest has the lessons and strategies to help brands adapt to these changes - it’s Jeremy Miner.

Jeremy is the Founder and Chairman of 7th Level, a Global Sales Training company. He’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, and lots of other publications.

Jeremy and I talk about his lessons on being able to influence and sell to anyone today. SPOILER ALERT: it’s all about being a problem finder AND a problem solver... NOT a product pusher.

What’s great here is that you can apply these lessons in most any aspect of your career or business. Whether it’s client relationships, whether it’s your leadership, whether it’s other teams you collaborate with, whether it’s your customers -  If you’re wanting to influence someone else to take action - this discussion is for you.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why we need to become problem finders and problem solvers, not product pushers
• How to find customers' problems through questions
• Why no one trusts you when you say you’re better or even the best
• Why top marketers and top salespeople are collaborative
• The value of learning psychology and human behavior in order to sell more
• How dialogue is the most persuasive form of selling
•  

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Jeremy's free Sales Revolution group - [LOTS of great resources here!]
• Jeremy's podcast: Closers Are Losers  

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Musicians On Call Site
• Ways for you to help Musicians On Call 

It’s no secret - highly skilled employees bring at least 10 times their value to your organization, maybe even more!

When you have highly skilled, 10x high performers in your organization your business is more agile, more innovative, more productive, more collaborative and much more effective. It’s like your team has, and continues to experience, transformational growth.

But how do you  create a culture and leadership behaviors and habits that recruit these high 10x performers? And once you do have them, how do you lead, manage and develop them? And here's the $50k dollar question - once you have them, how do you retain them?

It’s not easy, especially in 2021 as so many organizations are experiencing the GREAT RESIGNATION.

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with Michael Solomon this week.

Michael is the co-founder of 10X Management, where they help companies find the top tech experts. He’s been featured in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, CNN, and much more. I was excited to find out that he’s got a pretty cool connection to the original 10x BOSS - Bruce Springsteen.

And he’s the co-author of Game Changer: How To Be 10x in the Talent Economy.

In Game Changer, Michael provides you with proven strategies on how your company can create the right environment for top talent and breakthrough success by upending traditional business practices - those practices that everyone assumes are the right ones because "WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY."

He also reveals how professionals can evolve from good to great to 10x, and enjoy all the perks and rewards that this status brings.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Michael's book: Game Changer: How to be 10x in the Talent Economy
• 10x Management site 

Don't get me wrong - storytelling itself is valuable, impactful and absolutely necessary for creating and managing a relationship with your customers. What’s getting overused is the term: storytelling. And it’s being overused because marketers are simply slapping it onto what they think storytelling is.

There’s a reason everyone’s talking about storytelling - it’s because true storytelling works.

But there’s also a reason why storytelling isn’t working for so many marketers - it’s because they're doing it wrong.

And that’s why I’m happy to talk with J.J. Peterson this week.

J.J. is the Sr. Director of StoryBrand where he’s helped over 10,000 businesses learn how to clarify their message so they can thrive.  He’s the co-host of both the Business Made Simple podcast AND the Marketing Made Simple podcast. He’s the co-author of the book: Marketing Made Simple. 

J.J. and I talk about how most brands are using storytelling in the wrong way and how the StoryBrand framework can help them do it in the right way that will help them hook and engage customers for the long-term so their business really thrives.

And one of the great things about the StoryBrand framework is that it can be used beyond just marketing. If you’re giving a presentation to an audience, making a proposal to a potential client, pitching a new idea to your leadership, trying to influence someone else to take action - you’re going to see much better results when you use the StoryBrand framework.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• J.J.'s book: Marketing Made Simple
• J.J.'s podcast: Marketing Made Simple
• J.J.'s podcast: Business Made Simple
• StoryBrand site: 5 Minute Marketing Makeover
• J.J. on Instagram
• J.J. on Twitter

I preach “Innovating to stay ahead” as one of the key behaviors that creates simple experiences. But there’s a challenge with innovation.

People make innovation much harder than it has to be. They think innovation is confusing, complicated, intimidating, complex. They think you need a special degree or training to do innovation right. They think it’s something that only elite natural-born geniuses are capable of.

And because of these assumptions, most people think that they’re not innovative.

The truth is, consistently coming up with great, innovative, creative ideas isn’t a talent you’re born with or a skill that takes years to learn. Anyone can do it. But it does help to have a process to understand HOW to be innovative.

And that’s why I’m glad to talk with Carla Johnson in this episode. Carla’s one of the top marketing keynote speakers. And she’s a bestselling author of multiple books with her latest book coming out this summer: RE:Think Innovation: How the World’s Most Prolific Innovators Come Up With Great Ideas That Deliver Extraordinary Outcomes.

In RE:Think Innovation,  Carla teaches how to make innovation everyone’s business. In fact - she’s got a goal to teach one million people how to become innovative thinkers by 2025 - and today - you get to be one of those people.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Carla's book: RE:Think Innovation
• Carla's site
• Carla on Instagram
• Carla on Twitter

Chris is the co-founder and president of InnerView Group - a brand consultancy that helps organizations improve alignment between their frontline teams and their go-to-market strategies.

Chris and I chat about how to create a more collaborative relationship with your frontline team and how to get your frontline to care more about your brand.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How to move a vision from the C-suite to the frontline team
• Why spoon-feeding the frontline is not a bad thing
• Why “asking” is a much better strategy than “telling”
• How to create evangelists in your frontline employees
• How to put your customer insight into action
• Why influencing your frontline workers is the best way to influence the customer
• How your frontline employees double as your customers’ best consultants
• How customer and employee experience tie to your company’s overall brand and culture
• How to balance digital experiences with the human touch of the frontline 

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Chris's website
• A Guide to Frontline Insights - eBook
• Chris on LinkedIn

Allen’s the co-founder and managing partner of Metaforce, a consultancy that takes a disruptive, multidisciplinary approach to help brands grow. He's also an adjunct professor at the Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship at NYU Stern School of Business.

And Allen’s the author of a number of bestselling brand strategy books including his latest - Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do, Not Buy, to Gain Market Advantage.

Allen and I walk through his eight different lenses to help you understand the best ways to innovate your experience based on your brand, your industry, and most importantly your customer.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Before you make a brand promise, make sure your brand has the ability to deliver on it
• How brands differentiate themselves has evolved over the past few decades
• What it means for brands to make people’s lives better through experience innovation
• The best brands find ways to cut steps out of the normal customer experience
• Marketers are here to figure out how to solve problems in their customers’ lives
• Allen’s eight lenses for marketers to use to craft and deliver their customer experience
• Customers don’t share about an experience unless it’s phenomenally good or phenomenally bad
• The best brands focus in and drill down instead of trying to broaden their reach
• The most important word in a marketer’s vocabulary is “WHY?”
• How marketers can enlist other functional areas to focus on customer experience

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Allen's site
• Allen’s agency - Metaforce
• Allen’s book - Seeing the How: Transforming What People Do, Not Buy, To Gain Market Advantage
• Allen on LinkedIn

Henna’s a workplace performance expert, a global keynote speaker, and a two-time TEDx speaker. She's been featured in Forbes, Real Simple, Fast Company, and more. 

And Henna’s the author of Good Awkward. How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You. 

Henna and I discuss her lessons to help you become a better risk taker; to help you strengthen your mental muscles; and to help you be braver in moments when it really counts.

Here’s what we discuss:

• How embracing your awkwardness is good for your personal brand
• Why embracing your awkwardness is not just about being comfortable with discomfort
• How to reframe our mindsets around awkward situations
• How to build your social muscle for awkwardness tolerance
• Why a “bad idea brainstorm” is a good idea to implement in business meetings
• How role-playing and mock interviews actually reduce awkwardness
• Why embracing awkward moments is a strength vs. a weakness
• How to help your kids embrace their own awkwardness

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Henna's site
• Henna’s book - Good Awkward: How to Embrace the Embarrassing and Celebrate the Cringe to Become the Bravest You
• Henna on LinkedIn
• Henna’s Good Awkward Spotify playlist

Evelyn is an author, brand expert, and marketing consultant with over 25 years of marketing strategy and research experience. She’s worked with a number of well-known brands including Hasbro, Gillette, and Dunkin. She specializes in working with “brands in adolescence,” brands that have stalled after their initial success. 

And Evelyn’s the author of Teenage Wastebrand: How Your Brand Can Stop Struggling and Start Scaling.

Evelyn and I discuss her lessons from Teenage Wastebrand including the symptoms that adolescent brands display when they hit that awkward phase and start stalling. Fortunately, we also discuss the steps you can take to help your brand navigate through adolescence and come out stronger.

Here’s what we discuss:

• Brands should not be a “set it and forget it” approach. They should evolve.
• Brands are formed in customers’ minds based on their experience
• How you can ensure your customers define your brand the way you’d like
• What causes a brand to stall into “brand adolescence” 
• The different symptoms of brand adolescence
• How brands get into identity crisis
• The right way to define your brand purpose and brand attributes
• How to help your employees understand minimum requirements versus differentiators
• Recognizing when your brand is self-centered and how to solve that
• The brand your employees receive internally will be the brand they deliver to your customers
• Your brand values act as a filter for your employees’ decisions and actions

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Evelyn's site
• Evelyn's book - Teenage Wastebrand: How Your Brand Can Stop Struggling and Start Scaling
• Evelyn on LinkedIn

My guest this week in the November nonprofits series is Joe Pulizzi.

Joe was previously featured on the SIMPLE brand podcast episode 33. Joe’s the founder of Content Marketing Institute and The Tilt. He’s the co-host of the This Old Marketing podcast. And he’s the best-selling author of a number of books including Content Inc.

But we’re not here to talk about content today. We’re here to talk about the organization that Joe and his wife Pam founded in 2014: Orange Effect Foundation.

Orange Effect Foundation makes sure children with speech disorders receive the speech therapy and technology equipment they need...especially when the children's family doesn't have the financial means.

Not only that, they also create relationships with speech therapists to help them help families know about the financial opportunities, and they work with therapists and families to help simplify their understanding of the insurance around paying for therapy and equipment.

Brittany was on the SIMPLE brand podcast back in episode 67. This time she’s back to discuss her new book, Creating Superfans. You want to deliver experiences that convert your customers into devoted superfans — repeat customers who evangelize and advocate for your brand to others without you even having to ask. Brittany and I discuss her lessons on how to do just that.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The definition of a superfan and why you should care
• How apathy in your customers is a major concern
• Brittany’s SUPER Model that helps you craft experiences that create superfans
• How every employee on your team is really in the Experience department
• Why your competition is more than just your direct competition
• The right ways to exceed customers’ expectations
• If you want your customers to have a superfan experience, you need to deliver that superfan experience to your employees

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Brittany’s website
• Brittany’s book - Creating Superfans: How to Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates
• Brittany’s Creating Superfans playlist (100+ songs sprinkled throughout the book)
• SIMPLE brand #67: Brittany Hodak - How to Turn Your Customers Into Superfans

But not only does it take time, it also takes work - strategic, intentional and focused work. And it takes setting up the right decisions and boundaries so that you can ensure you’re always focused on the right work.

When you add all of those things together, it’s not that easy to do. We need help in understanding how to plan for and play that long game. We need a framework. We need guidance. We need a strategy.

And that’s why it was such a big help for me to talk with Dorie Clark this week. 

Dorie’s a leadership consultant, keynote speaker and professor at both Duke University’s {FEW-KWA} School of Business and Columbia Business School. She’s a contributor to Harvard Business Review and she’s been named as one of the Top 50 business thinkers in the world by Thinkers50! Dorie’s also the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Entrepreneurial You, Reinventing You and Stand Out, which was named the #1 Leadership Book of the Year by Inc. magazine.

And Dorie’s recent book recently hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list too - The Long Game: How to be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World.

If you think about where we are today, and what technology and customer experience has provided us, we’re pretty spoiled as it relates to instant gratification. While it’s great to be able to get our hands onto most anything we want either overnight or same-day, that expectation is spilling over into our lives and what we expect to achieve. But that’s not the case. Real significance, real milestones, real achievements take time. In The Long Game, Dorie shows us why it takes time, but she also gives us the strategies and frameworks to work towards those goals while it’s taking time so we don’t simply give up when realistic timelines and our own timelines don’t match up.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Dorie's book: The Long Game: How to be a Long-term Thinker in a Short-term World 
• Dorie Clark's Site
• The Long Game Strategic Thinking Self-Assessment

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Stuckey's site
• Stuckey's on Instagram
• Stuckey's on Facebook
• Stuckey's on Twitter
• Stephanie on Instagram
• Stephanie on Twitter

 Here’s a scary truth as it relates to your customers. Your customers don’t have an abundance of opportunity for you.

 Your customers have finite time, finite resources and finite attention. None of them are able to, nor do they want to, accept all competing offers and solutions thrown their way.

 That’s why - like it or not - sales is often a zero-sum game. Your win is someone else’s loss. Most growth, most achievements, most wins require you to take market share from your competitors, while they’re trying to do the same to you. I mean - how else can you grow your business by double digits if you’re in an industry that’s only growing at a lower rate?

The point is: if you don’t win over and persuade your customer, someone else will.

 And (no matter what your role is) if you’re trying to persuade others for anything, that means you’re in sales.

 But how can you persuade others in a crowded world when your customers are bombarded with competing experiences, competing requests and competing relationships every day?

 How can you create, and continue to offer value to others so they view you as a long-term partner?

 Thankfully, Anthony Iannarino is here to share how to do that this week. 

 Anthony’s an international keynote speaker and the Founder and CEO of B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, a boutique sales coaching and consulting firm where they provide individual and corporate training to sales teams. 

 And he’s the author of The Lost Art of Closing, The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need and Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away From Your Competition.

 Anthony and I discuss his lessons on winning, developing and managing client relationships. While Anthony approaches his lessons from a Sales perspective, they’re valuable for anyone that needs to build relationships in their career. That includes you and me!

 RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Anthony's book: Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away From Your Competition
• Anthony's site: The Sales Blog

But it is possible to focus on and be good at both. And If you can drive simply reasonable growth in net-new business while also cross-selling your current clients, then you can actually double your revenue in less than 3 years.

But it does take an intentional strategy and it does take the right alignment between Sales and Marketing.

And this week’s guest is here to help you learn how to do just that. It’s Darrell Amy.

Darrell’s the author of the best-selling book Revenue Growth Engine: How To Align Sales and Marketing To Drive Accelerate Growth. He’s the host of the Revenue Growth Podcast on the C-Suite Radio Network and the co-host of the Selling From the Heart podcast. And he’s a member of the Forbes Business Council and a C-Suite Advisor. Darrell and I discuss his lessons around aligning your Sales and Marketing teams, growing your revenue aggressively yet realistically, and the number one way to differentiate yourself among your competitors. SPOILER ALERT: It’s all in the experience you deliver.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• The law of exponential revenue growth
• The value ratio of net-new customers vs existing customers
• How the experience we deliver drives whether customers continue to buy from you
• The difference between a customer and a client
• How to break down the Sales and Marketing silos
•  How to ensure all your teams view everything from the eyes of the customer
• The importance of having your frontline team members understand what it feels like to receive the level of experience that your customers expect
•  Darrell and I discuss a hypothesis on how the identity given to your team members empowers them in delivering your customer experience
•  

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Darrell's site
• Darrell's book - Revenue Growth Engine: How to Align Sales and Marketing to Accelerate Growth

Alex is a former SEC quarterback for the Missouri Tigers. He’s also a top keynote speaker and trainer for the Jon Gordon Companies. 

Alex and I discuss his lessons all around instilling integrity and building trust. Not only do we talk about how to build the right habits to instill integrity into your personal brand as a leader, we also discuss how you can help your employees build those habits too.

Some of the topics we discuss include:

• Why delayed gratification is so valuable for being excellent in the long-term
• How integrity has changed in culture recently
• Your life is more fulfilling when you live your life with integrity in place
• 59% of people that leave their job do so because they dislike their boss
• Gen Z would rather take a job with less money if it’s part of an organization where they truly believe in the mission and values
• Integrity in leadership is a key driver in employee retention
• The misconception that most people have about integrity
• The best leaders lead from the inside-out vs outside-in
• Strategies to instill so that you don’t veer away from integrity as you grow in your career
• Accountability from others is key to staying on a track of integrity
• The steps you can take to build trust back if you’ve lost it

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Alex's site
• Alex's book - The Sale: The Number One Strategy to Build Trust and Create Success 
• Streamline Books

At first, you may think that  we’re simply being asked to do more with less, like our days are being hijacked by somebody else’s agenda. Sometimes that’s true. But if you look a little bit deeper, it’s not just that. We’re being bombarded with all kinds of distractions that we’re not ignoring. And we’re saying yes to what seems like so many worthwhile opportunities. We know we can’t do it all, but it’s difficult to know what we can, or should do.

And that’s why I’m thrilled to talk with Christy Wright this week.

 Christy is a #1 national best-selling author,  she’s a personal development expert, and she’s the host of The Christy Wright Show. She’s also the founder of Business Boutique, which equips over 40,000 women business owners to make money doing what they love.

Christy and I get to talk about her new book that comes out today: Take Back Your Time: The Guilt-Free Guide to Life Balance.  

In Take Back Your Time, Christy gives you the method, framework and lessons to help you identify what balance looks like in your specific life. And she uncovers the steps to help you focus on what matters most and achieve your own version of balance.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

• Christy's book: Take Back Your Time
• Christy's site 
• Christy's podcast: The Christy Wright Show