SIMPLE brand With Matt Lyles

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Jim Knight, author of Service That Rocks: Create Unforgettable Experiences and Turn Customers into Fans.

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

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Brittany Hodak, author of Creating Superfans: How to Turn Customers Into Lifelong Advocates.

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

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Dr. Cindy McGovern, author of Sell Yourself: How to Create, Live, and Sell a Powerful Personal Brand!

Dr. Cindy is best known as the First Lady of Sales®. She’s an internationally renowned keynote speaker and she’s the founder of Orange Leaf Consulting which helps thousands of organizations and individuals create dynamic and robust sales processes.

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

This week's episode features a "from the vault" discussion with Nate Brown.

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 insight

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE:

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

This week's episode features a "from the vault" discussion with 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) 

This week's episode features a "from the vault" discussion with the Chief Global Marketing Officer of Siegel+Gale, Margaret Molloy.

Margaret’s been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes and so many others. And she’s consistently recognized as one the most influential CMOs on Twitter.

The best way for your business to brand out from the crowd is through a focus on simplicity. Not only do your customers require it, they’re willing to pay a premium for it. And they’re much more loyal to you if you do provide them a simple experience. But how do you provide simple experiences? How are simple experiences even defined? What are customers really looking for? What if your business is B2B - are you off the hook? How do you get your team members to focus on simplicity too?

Margaret helps you learn that and much more in this "from the vault" episode.

RESOURCES FROM THIS EPISODE

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

This week's episode features a "from the vault" discussion with Dan Gingiss.

Dan’s an international keynote speaker and customer experience coach who believes that a remarkable customer experience is your best marketing strategy. He’s had a 20-year professional career where he’s held leadership positions at McDonald’s, Discover and Humana. He also hosts the Experience This! Show podcast and The Experience Maker Show.

 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
  
  

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Melanie Deziel, author of Prove It: Exactly How Modern Marketers Earn Trust!

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

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Carmine Gallo, author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World's Greatest Salesman!

This episode is Part 2 in my two-part series with Carmine. You can listen to Part 1 in Episode 91 here.

Carmine’s here to talk about his latest book - The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman.

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

In this week’s episode of the SIMPLE brand podcast, I talk with Carmine Gallo, author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World's Greatest Salesman!

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