Bits about Books

By Subhanjan Sarkar

Business Podcast Network produces podcasts for B2B brands, Sales and Marketing Teams, SAAS products, Startups and HR teams, helping organizations to connect with audiences and build brand stories.... more

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FAQs about Bits about Books:

How many episodes does Bits about Books have?

The podcast currently has 83 episodes available.

Bits about Books episodes:

September 26, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Bob Burg, Author, “The Go-Giver”
For more than 30 years Bob Burg has been successfully showing entrepreneurs, leaders, and sales professionals how to build relationships, communicate their value, and accelerate their business growth. Although he was best known for his sales classic, Endless Referrals, for years, his business parable, The Go-Giver, coauthored with John David Mann, has created a worldwide movement.
While part of a four-book series, The Go-Giver has sold well over a million copies and been translated into 30 languages. It was rated #10 on Inc. Magazine’s list of “The Most Motivational Books Ever Written” and was on HubSpot’s 20 Most Highly Rated Sales Books of All Time.
Bob is co-founder of SALESWISE LIVE™ Sales Mastery, an event for successful entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and leaders from around the world held in West Palm Beach, Florida. He also publishes the very popular Daily Impact email which you can subscribe to at Burg.com.
Bob is an advocate, supporter, and defender of the Free Enterprise system, believing that the amount of money one makes is directly proportional to how many people they serve.
He is also an unapologetic animal fanatic and serves as part of a South Florida rescue, foster, and adoption organization.

Bob Burg
The Go-Giver
“The Go-Giver” deals with achieving success in business through five tenets that turn around the concept of a “Go-Getter” and focus instead upon creating value for prospects and customers, which, according to the authors, automatically leads to greater gains for both seller and buyer.
The concepts are presented in a parable form, with a protagonist seeking to achieve success. The young man, Joe, years for success and considers himself a go-getter. In his quest, he takes the help of Pindar, a consultant, who introduces Joe to a few ‘go-givers’, who reveal to him the ‘Five Laws of Stratospheric Success’, which are about the power of ‘giving’.
Joe realizes that putting the interests of others before his demands and requirements could lead to greater success and even the power of his influence is determined by how much he focuses on others’ interests rather than his own.
Run time – 40:45 mins.
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41min
August 31, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Charles S. Birney, Author, “The Tao of Podcasting”
Based in Washington, DC, and Maryland, Charles S. Birney, Co-Founder of Podville Media, channels his passion for new technology into creating impactful media experiences.
His journey began eleven years ago at Launch Workplaces in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Since then, Podville Media (originally Podcast Village) has earned six Telly Awards, including three in 2023, highlighting their commitment to excellence in media production. He is particularly proud of ‘Rap Stories,’ which reached the number one spot on Apple Podcasts in the music category.
With over 25 years in the real estate market, and experience in the tourism and golf industries, his diverse roles have profoundly shaped his approach to media and podcasting, enabling him to craft messages that truly resonate and engage.
He is the author of “Podcasting Made Simple”, where he attempted to demystify podcasting. In ‘The Tao of Podcasting,’ he merges philosophical insights with practical tips, emphasizing engaged listening and the strategic pause before the podcast.
His current focus is in creating Inward Facing Podcasts.
Beyond his professional life, he is the father of 24-year-old twins and an avid musician, playing the mandolin in both a folk duo and a jug band. Not to mention his penchant for doodling which embellishes the Tao of Podcasting cover to cover.

Charles S. Birney
The Tao of Podcasting
Charles Birney, the author of “The Tao of Podcasting”, had been impressed by the contemplative philosophy of “Tao”, or “Way” a long time ago back in his college days, when he came across books by authors such as Alan Watts. He decided to re-interpret the philosophy in his own way and on his own terms— through a book on podcasting.
In his endeavour to re-interpret the “Tao”, which can often be quite obscure, or at the most suggestive to the point of being poetic, the author gained new insights into the deeper meanings concealed within the original “Tao Te Ching” enshrined by Laozi, perhaps as early as in the 4th Century B.C.
The original Tao e Ching consists of 81 brief chapters. The “Tao of Podcasting” follows the same pattern and is divided into 81 brief chapters that dwell upon intent, method, focus, purpose, simplicity, listening and other fundamental ideas that can drive a podcast towards higher objectives.
Run time – 59:40 mins.
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1h
June 27, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Amit Agarwal, Author, “The Ultimate Sales Accelerator (Updated Edition)”
An IIT—IIM alumnus, Amit Agarwal is known for his original takes on Sales and Startups. He has coined the term Salespreneur®, created a sales strategy – Use Case Selling® and has professional selling experience in twenty-three countries across bootstrapped, Series A, B, C and D start-ups.
Amit aims to harness and evangelize four life skills: sales, mindfulness, nutritional diet and personal finance. He believes that incremental progress in harnessing these life skills helps us balance material accomplishments and spiritual growth. Amit’s two books, The Ultimate Sales Accelerator – the subject of today’s session – and Small Is Big, are steps in this journey.

Amit Agarwal
The Ultimate Sales Accelerator (Updated Edition)
The Ultimate Sales Accelerator is about Use Case Selling— a powerful strategy that can help to close complex big ticket sales. This is the second updated edition of an earlier edition with ten chapters. This edition adds two more chapters based on the author’s interactions with readers of the first edition and subsequent learnings, especially in light of the post-pandemic selling environment.
The book also deals with thirty-one B2B and B2C selling experiences, which amplify the concept of the single strategy propounded by the author. Use case selling is illustrated through many examples. Key propositions include deep research to create exemplary content, and telling the prospect something about their business that they may not be aware of, such as how their competition is faring.
Many of the principles are illustrated through real incidents narrated by users of the strategies or are gathered experiences of the author. Deeper research, for example is illustrated by an example where a prospect wished to address five use cases, and the sales executive replied that not only would he demonstrate those five, but also five more to the prospect.
Run time – 51:20 mins.
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52min
April 29, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Georgiana Laudi, Author, “Forget The Funnel”
Georgiana Laudi is a strategic advisor and speaker who’s passionate about turning customer value into revenue-generating outcomes. Marketing online since 2000, she began as a marketing executive and product growth advisor in 2010 working with high-growth, B2B SaaS products like Unbounce, Sprout Social, Bitly, Appcues, SparkToro, Invoice Simple and more.
It was while leading Marketing for Unbounce – a largely marketing-led SaaS – that she discovered customer experience mapping. One where the entire relationship with customers — from experiencing the problem to engagement and expansion — is measured not based on transactional moments and business metrics, but instead on the customer’s success milestones.
She says she realized that if she could operationalize the process of helping customers reach their goals, take customer insights and turn them into revenue-generating outcomes – that could change the way SaaS success is achieved. That’s what she set out to accomplish with her partner Claire Suellentrop.
Georgiana Laudi
Forget The Funnel
The author emphasizes that getting more leads to fill the top of the funnel does not ultimately work, since there is no funnel. While business leaders are often tasked with growing the company, they find it hard to understand what marketing is. The author’s remedy is to make the customer happy ultimately.
Most companies, even if they are not SAAS or do not have a subscription model, do realize that recurring revenue is important. Georgiana Laudi advises that businesses should ensure continuous customer satisfaction rather than concentrate money and resources on top-of-the-funnel.
To this end, sellers must assess what are the factors that made the buyer decide to buy their product. Through testing such variables, key drivers will emerge, which the seller must focus on, improve upon, and continuously validate whether the promise has indeed been delivered.
Run time – 73.22 mins.
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1h 14min
March 23, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Ted McKenna, Author, “The Jolt Effect”
Ted McKenna is one of the world’s leading experts in sales, business development, and customer experience and a co-author of the bestselling book The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. His research frequently appears in the pages of Harvard Business Review and he is a founding partner of DCM Insights, a boutique consultancy focused on using data and research-backed frameworks to help companies attract, retain, and grow their customers.
Ted is an expert in analyzing behaviours—of customers, doer-sellers, frontline sales & service agents, leaders, and board members—and applying analytics in various forms of content, products, and services. At Tethr, Ted worked on mining unstructured conversational data using advanced data science and leading AI/ML tools to build models, scores, and behavioural frameworks of which the most well-known model is the Tethr Effort Index. Previous roles called for deploying syndicated research methods to mine more structured sources such as surveys, diagnostics, demographics, and job data.
Ted McKenna
The Jolt Effect
“The Jolt Effect” is based upon studies of real buyer-seller conversations, using statistical and AI methods to understand what results in a sale, what factors result in negative effects, and what more successful salespersons can do differently when deals don’t seem to progress.
One of the startling discoveries the author talks about is the fact that buyers are extremely jittery in making decisions precisely because there is an overload of information these days. To minimize risk, they often delay or abandon purchases.
When buyers stall, sellers assume that they have not been able to convince the buyer with enough information. So they end up piling more information and somehow bring on the fear of missing out on an opportunity. This has negative effects since the buyer is already fearful of making a mistake they might regret later. Most of these engagements result in “no deal”. Instead, the seller must help the buyer as if they were advising their best friend on a purchase.
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Run time – 57.01 mins.
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58min
February 22, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Emilia Korczynska, Author, “Content Operations”
Emilia Korczynska is a Head of Marketing at Userpilot, a Product-Growth Platform for SaaS companies. She’s especially interested in product-led growth, product marketing and content marketing in SaaS companies.
Emilia Korczynska
Content Operations – How to Build and Scale your Content Ops
The author describes content operations as the whole process of planning, creating, optimizing and scaling up content delivery for measured outcomes. This process starts with careful planning, and keyword research to build reach by targeting SEO metrics. This entails organizing content hierarchy for crawl ability.
Emilia outlines organizing content plans in content epics, SOPS for scaling, and using tools such as Asana, Notion and Google Sheets for a team play for content at scale, as well as the less well-known SurferSEO and StoryChief.
The book also details roles that are required in the content team for operations at scale. These include writers, content editors, proofreaders, and the head of content. The book is meant to serve as a resource for content managers and heads of content and marketing, both in-house and in agencies.
Run time – 64.08 mins.
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1h 5min
February 04, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Stu Heinecke, Author, “How To Grow Your Business Like A Weed”
Dubbed by the American Marketing Association the “Father of Contact Marketing,” Stu Heinecke is a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, hall of fame-nominated marketer, and the bestselling author of “How to Get a Meeting with Anyone” and “Get the Meeting!” Stu is also the founder of Cartoonists.org, a group of WSJ and New Yorker cartoonists who donate their art to help charities raise funds.
Stu Heinecke
How To Grow Your Business Like A Weed
Weeds are resilient and aggressive and propagate even amidst the most difficult of conditions. The author examines their behavior, and what enables them to perform so well. While we do look at weeds as impediments, and we would like to remove them, they come right back. This property of being resilient, however, should be a desirable quality for businesses. Stu Heinecke develops a model for business growth based on the strategies used by weeds to propagate.
The book dives deep into the weeds model and expands on insights gathered from business leaders, government functionaries, and stars from the world of entertainment. It goes on to explain the W.E.E.D.S. model that can help businesses grow, expand, dominate, and defend.
Stu Heinecke develops strategies such as Seed Pod Strategy, Seed Strategy, Thorn Strategy, Soil Strategy, Root Strategy, and so on, each aimed at achieving a certain objective. For writing the book the author also had to learn about the biology, nature, environment, and life cycle of weeds in general, as well as specific weed plants. The book is illustrated with some of these plants and gives a brief introduction to these plants.
Run time – 55.02 mins.
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56min
January 12, 2024Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Justin Michael, Author, Sales Superpowers
Justin Michael is a world-record-breaking, outbound sales maven who has arguably built the deepest client acquisition methodology of all time: the Justin Michael Method (JMM). It’s driven over 1B in pipeline for 200+ startups and over 25K reps he’s advised. Ex Salesforce and LinkedIn, Justin is the global authority on AI-based outbound prospecting alongside legends like Aaron Ross, Josh Braun, and Mark Roberge.
His counterintuitive, mobile-responsive, neuroscience-backed visual prospecting methodology made him a million-dollar earner and helped countless startups scale past 10M ARR. Justin is the bestselling author of Tech-Powered Sales, which proved that over 75% of the top funnel can be automated by raising your technology quotient (TQ). He lives in Los Angeles, California, advising top SaaS technology CROs and teams on bleeding-edge revenue models.
Justin Michael
Sales Superpowers
Sales Superpowers develop a methodology to consistently perform better in cold outreach. According to the author, being consistent and achieving a target number of outreach is better even if the quality of outreach is somewhat less than excellent, than being exceptional on only two days of the week.
The author teaches the power of personalization and how to research the prospect so as to enable meaningful messages that don’t look like they are part of a mass campaign. He shows how to use current technology to leverage the best of both worlds and use omni-channel messaging to reach prospects through all available channels.
The author explains neuroscience, game theory, and negotiation, to help sales professionals overcome reluctance and instead serve the client’s best interests. His methods are ultimately very scalable and adaptable to the personal workflows of salespersons.
Run time – 40.22 mins.
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41min
December 20, 2023Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Mark W Schaefer, Author, “Belonging To The Brand”
Mark W Schaefer is a globally recognized author, keynote speaker, futurist, and business consultant who blogs at {grow} — one of the top five marketing blogs in the world. He teaches graduate marketing classes at Rutgers University and has written 10 best-selling books. Mark’s new book, “Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy” describes an essential new path to connect to customers in the modern digital world.
Mark’s many global clients include Pfizer, Cisco, Dell, Adidas, and the US Air Force. He has been a keynote speaker at prestigious events all over the world, including SXSW, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and the Institute for International and European Affairs. Mark has appeared as a guest on media channels such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CBS News.
Mark W Schaefer
Belonging To The Brand
In this book, the author explains why other selling methods such as cold outreach and inbound are failing to get us the results in an increasingly noisy and disconnected world. This is why the community has become critically important for creating a social continuum that draws in people with similar and relevant interests to engage. Engagement is the cornerstone of being able to exchange ideas that ultimately lead to sustained interest in products and services.
Many organizations mistake an audience for a community. Social media creates an audience. The difference is, that it is mostly a one-way communication of ideas. A community is different in the sense that every participant communicates ideas. New tools and platforms such as Discord provide the ability to create communities that encourage engagement from all participants. The three distinguishing features of a community are Connection, Purpose, and Relevance.
Most communities fail because there is a mismatch between company culture and the needs of the customer community. The book details five aspects of company culture that make a community flourish. The book has interviews and case studies and builds a community framework to help organizations go about creating their community.
Run time – 47.07 mins.
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48min
December 02, 2023Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Gretchen Gordon, Author, “The Happy Sales Manager”
Gretchen Gordon, a self-proclaimed sales nerd, is far from your ordinary sales expert. After a disastrous Girl Scout cookie-selling experience and a P&G sales gig that left her questioning her career choice in sales, Gretchen decided to face her fears head-on. With a lot of grit and determination, she transformed herself into an award-winning salesperson and was soon promoted to sales manager. Initially proud, she quickly became frustrated and overwhelmed as she felt ill-equipped to perform as a manager. Fortunately, she channeled her inner sales need to learn the secrets to successful sales management.
Now, after nearly 40 years in and around sales, having studied the science associated with success, and after helping hundreds of sales managers grow out of their frustration and stress, Gretchen is determined to create an army of happy sales managers. She wrote “The Happy Sales Manager” to make it easier for the many people who find themselves leading a sales team but feel overwhelmed and underqualified as she once did.
Gretchen leads a team of sales experts at her company, Braveheart Sales, with a mission to cultivate sales organizations so sellers can sell, and leaders can lead. A sought-after keynote speaker, she focuses on the skillset and mindset of sales and sales leadership. When she’s not changing the sales world, Gretchen is an avid competitive golfer, wife, proud mother of grown children, and fur-mom to two Shih Tzus.
Gretchen Gordon
The Happy Sales Manager
Sales Managers, once promoted from their roles in frontline sales, often find themselves ill-equipped for their new tasks. Crucially, they often don’t even realize what their core task is. This book talks about key areas that sales managers must focus on, the key competencies to master, and tactical elements that make for great sales leadership.
Once a salesperson is pushed up to the designation of a manager, they should no longer have a quota, and should not continue to be the rain-maker. Selling and managing are entirely different skills, and you can be focused on only one. Frequently, the sales manager fails because they cannot change their mindset from selling to managing. A key difference in the management mindset is that of a team focus. Since sales are often about individual skills, salespeople often do not have the DNA to make that jump from an individual player to a team player.
The author dives into details such as coaching as an integral competency to master for the managing function, as well as tactical processes such as conducting meetings. Sales meetings should not, according to her, delve into targets, as these are best spoken about individually with stakeholders.
Run time – 50.57 mins.
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51min

FAQs about Bits about Books:

How many episodes does Bits about Books have?

The podcast currently has 83 episodes available.