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Bits about Books episodes
- Bizcast: Bits about books – Dan Pfister on his book, “Million Dollar Winback”, in conversation with Subhanjan Sarkar
Dan Pfister was a co-founder at The Business Source Corp., where he helped generate over 50,000 customers.
While at The Business Source, Dan created a customer win back process, and based on its success, he founded WinBack Labs. He’s also the host of ‘The Winback Marketing Podcast’ and author of ‘Million Dollar Winback.’
Dan PfisterMillion Dollar Winback- Churn costs businesses significant amounts in lost revenue. While businesses are more focused on acquiring new customers, they ignore customers who move to other vendors— at their own peril.
- Dan Pfister in his book, “Million Dollar Winback”, outlines a process to assess the causes of losing paying customers and win them back. He outlines a seven-step framework that allows businesses to pinpoint the best prospects to win back and open the conversation once again.
- Lifetime Value and recency are strong indicators for determining the best prospects. While higher LTV is an obvious metric to focus upon, it seems that how recently a customer left is also a good indicator of how likely they are to come back. The more recently they left, the more likely they are to come back. These apart, the framework dives into several metrics and processes to win back customers.
Run time – 49:54 mins.
50 min - Bizcast: Bits about books – Stan Peake on his book, “Never Sell Again”, in conversation with Subhanjan Sarkar
Stan Peake is an expert at unleashing potential one leader and one business at a time. Co-founder at FSQ Consulting Inc he has grown a team of over 40 executive coaches to help impact more leaders all over the world.
He holds a Graduate Certificate in Values-Based Leadership from Royal Roads University, an Executive Education in Sales Leadership from Queens University, and a diploma with distinction in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy from the Centre of Excellence. Most recently Stan completed an online certificate in entrepreneurship and innovation from Harvard Business School.
Author of 9 business books, including 7 bestsellers, Stan has spoken at conferences and coached entrepreneurs, executives and athletes from Victoria, British Columbia to Miami, Florida, and as far away as Switzerland and Australia. Stan’s TEDx talk, “Lasting Happiness is an Inside Job”, has over 114,000 views on YouTube. Stan has also been published in several magazines, newspapers, and blogs, like Entrepreneur Magazine and Bizztor Media.
While not coaching or speaking, Stan enjoys travelling and staying active with family and friends. He resides in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his wife Maria, son Chase, and dog Zeke.
Stan PeakeNever Sell Again- Understanding the buyer’s perspective and how they want to be approached during the sales process is important. The concept of “discovery-based sales” focuses on asking questions, listening intently, and positioning your value proposition based on the buyer’s needs, goals, and pain points.
- There are three levels of listening: Level 1 (poor quality, focused on the listener), Level 2 (focused on the speaker), and Level 3 (focused on co-creating value). Understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) and tailoring your approach accordingly is important.
- The 10-point “Never Sell Again” system, includes steps like identifying your ICP, defining your value proposition, networking, needs discovery, and positioning your offering as the solution to the buyer’s problems.
Run time – 51:46 mins.
52 min - Bizcast: Bits about books -: Wes Bush on his book, “The Product-Led Playbook”, in conversation with Subhanjan Sarkar
Wes Bush is a prominent Canadian entrepreneur and author.
He started his journey working at VC-backed, hypergrowth startups in demand generation, where he thrived by generating a high volume of leads for their sales teams. However, everything changed in 2016 during his tenure at Vidyard, when Wes launched a free product. Instead of paying hundreds of dollars to capture someone’s lead info, he could give users a great free product, and users would do the marketing themselves by sharing it with others. Millions of people have since used Vidyard’s free product.
Over the next three years, Wes wanted to see if he could replicate these results, so he started consulting hypergrowth and Fortune 500 software companies on how to grow faster by leveraging free products. His guidance was instrumental in helping these organizations accelerate their growth trajectories using a product-led growth strategy.
In 2019, Wes released the bestselling book Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself. This book popularized this new approach to doing business and sold more than 100,000 copies internationally from word-of-mouth alone.
The monumental success of the book led to the rebranding of his consultancy in 2020, which emerged as ProductLed.com, now recognized as the leading education company dedicated to advancing product-led growth. Their relentless focus on empowering software companies to become product-led has yielded remarkable results. By 2023, 700+ companies have collectively sold more than $1,000,000,000 in product-led revenue.
Wes’ mission is to make it easy for anyone to build a successful product-led business and change the way an industry sells for the better. He fulfils this by publishing free books and advising entrepreneurs on how to break through their product-led bottlenecks. When not helping his clients win, Wes enjoys travelling to exotic locations, playing pickleball, and reading a good history book.
Wes BushThe Product-Led Playbook- Product-led Growth strategies focus squarely on the product. In other scenarios there are Sales and Marketing, there is Fulfillment, Delivery and all these verticals, but those miss the centrality of the product itself. In these scenarios, the business operates in silos with each team communicating with the other. Whereas in Product Led, the product is baked into the strategy.
- How do you scale to say $1 million per employee? You usually can’t with most strategies. Normally such scaling demands hiring more salespersons and marketers, allotting a certain quota for each employee, and so on and so forth. But with product-led strategies organizations can scale really well because the one employee who/which ensures that is the product itself.
- This strategy needs to map out the user journey to better understand users’ challenges. In the book, this is mapped into five main stages, and each stage is further broken down into two steps.
Run time – 47:57 mins.
48 min - Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Julienne B. Ryan, Author, “The Learned-it-in Queens Communications Playbook and Workbook— Winning Against Digital Distraction”
Julienne B. Ryan is a humorist, storytelling speaker, facilitator, and coach on a mission to connect her audiences with themselves and each other, one authentic conversation and humorous story at a time. She uses humour to disrupt and interrupt assumptions so audiences can learn how to listen!
Storytelling and sharing hold a special place in her work whether she is giving a keynote or facilitating a workshop. Her storytelling programs are designed to disrupt behaviours and perspectives and entertainingly teach listening and feedback skills. The result is that participants learn to see each other freshly, which lays the foundation for building trust, collaboration, and productivity. Change doesn’t happen in a day… but her process gives it a good kick forward.
Julienne B. RyanThe Learned-it-in Queens Communications Playbook and Workbook— Winning Against Digital Distraction- “The Learned-it-in Queens Communications Playbook and Workbook” is about being authentic to be able to build genuine, long-term relationships. This involves owning who we really are and also listening to others with empathy.
- We all come with our cultural backgrounds and personal experiences, making us who we are. We must acknowledge and accept these traits as a part of our authentic self if we are to come across to others as “genuine”. It is also important to have face to face interactions and learn from other people and cultures.
- Often, it is important to also let go and not push an argument. Not being invested in it beyond a point. The author explains her philosophy of communication and interaction through the humorous backdrop of Queen’s dialect and style.
Run time – 41:25 mins.
42 min - Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Graham Shaw, Author, “The Speaker’s Coach”
Graham Shaw is a speaker coach and international conference presenter. He has helped thousands of people make convincing presentations. His speciality is visual communication, and he is best known for his ability to convey business ideas with a quick sketch. His numerous conference audiences were amazed to discover that they, too, could draw their ideas—a talent they never knew they had.
Graham has appeared on BBC television and radio, including BBC World News ‘Talking Business’ and BBC World Service radio, as well as in numerous business and lifestyle publications. He spoke at TEDx Hull in 2015 and his talk; ‘Why people believe they can’t draw –and how to prove they can,’ has been viewed by over 40 million people. It is one of the most viewed talks in the TED online library of talks. More recently he spoke at TEDX Vienna on the topic; ‘How to draw to remember more’. He is a speaker coach to TEDx speakers.
Graham is the author of the popular book ‘The Art of Business Communication’ which was shortlisted for the UK’s Chartered Management Institute Management Book of the Year Awards 2016.
Graham ShawThe Speaker’s Coach- The Speaker’s Coach is a guide to making presentations that capture audiences’ attention. It is formatted in a fun, easy-to-read package that everyone can consume in small bits. However, it is packed with extremely relevant “tips and tricks” that anyone can utilize to communicate better with audiences.
- This however does not imply that preparation and hard work are not necessary- quite the contrary- presentations require a deeper understanding of the subject and catering to the four essential questions on the mind of the audience- the why, the what, the how, and ‘what if’. Audiences are diverse and cannot be categorized into one block, but certain key factors remain common among everyone who attends a presentation.
- Sixty essential tips are provided by the author, such as make yourself the main part of the presentation, not the slide. The slide is just an aid that is subordinate to the main presenter and what she presents.
Run time – 62:35 mins.
1 hr 3 min - Bizcast: Bits about books – In Conversation with Kristie K. Jones, Author, “Selling Your Way In”
Kristie K. Jones is the author of Selling Your Way In. Companies hire Kristie to elevate their sales organization because most sales leaders and professionals feel discouraged and frustrated about anaemic pipelines, low close rates, and missed targets. Audiences find Kristie’s presentations engaging and packed with passion, energy, and valuable insights.
Kristie K. JonesSelling Your Way In- Kristie K. Jones aims to help sales professionals find their sweet spot in sales jobs. Not all sales jobs are the same, and not all professionals are suited to all sales jobs. Finding the right career and gaining sales superpowers is the subject of this book.
- There are jobs with set remunerations and jobs where you can set your income target. Sales careers are opportunities where you can set your earnings. But to do that, you must understand your strengths and weaknesses. That is where the journey starts.
- Most people believe a sales job is just a sales job, and there is no difference between any of them. This doesn’t seem right, and one must choose the “right seat on the bus” to be able to succeed in the sales career. The book also dwells upon what the top 10% performers in sales are doing differently from the rest, and what you can do to reach that top 10%.
Run time – 40:45 mins.
44 min - Bizcast: 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 BurgThe 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.
41 min - Bizcast: 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. BirneyThe 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.
1 hr - Bizcast: 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 AgarwalThe 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.
52 min - Bizcast: 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 LaudiForget 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.
1 hr 14 min
About Bits about Books
From the publisher's feed
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.