C-Suite Network™

Cindy Goldsberry

There is no magic bullet for sales success…and a focus just on sales skills, lead gen tactics and sales process only sets down a fraction of the groundwork required for achieving the critical success factors to revenue generation. Everyone knows the sales ecosystem has changed dramatically while old sales techniques and playbooks are no longer effective. It’s time sales professionals and organizations adopt a new paradigm for approaching and engaging with their ideal clients. ZFactor Sales Accelerator V2V assists sales professionals to meet buyers where they are, lead their prospects on a benefit-filled journey, and change perception of their role in sales as they experience going from being a Vendor to one of Value Creator – or partner.

“A game-changer book that makes you question what you’re doing and make changes to accelerate your success!” With a focus on the individual contributor, this book focuses on deeply understanding the thinking behind what a difference it makes when one truly creates value for others. Rich with stories, examples and self-coaching materials, this proven thinking methodology inspires sales professionals to become relationally and strategically relevant to their ideal prospects thus increasing the lifetime value of these relationships.

David Newman

As a small-business owner or solopreneur, you wear many hats–perhaps the most important of which is marketer.

But these days, with so many new ways to reach customers and clients — and only so much time in the day — it’s hard to know where to start. Should you be using social media? Email? Blogs? Video? SEO?

Small business marketing doesn’t have to be a mystery. It’s just a series of simple decisions (and the action steps to implement those decisions) that will help you regain the clarity, confidence, and control you need to succeed.

Do It! Marketing is a quick read and an encouraging kick in the pants that will reignite your marketing mojo. The underlying premise is that “only action creates results.”

Packed with do-this-now ideas to attract, engage, and win more customers and clients, this no-nonsense book reveals how to:

  • – Avoid blah, blah, blah marketing
  • – Use magnetic marketing strategies that pull (not push) qualified prospects into your world
  • – Get noticed using the power of 3PR
  • – Position yourself as the go-to expert in your field
  • – Become the obvious choice by building your Thought Leadership Platform
  • – Do social media right
  • – Zero in on your customers’ pain/gain factors
  • – Learn to speak prospect language about prospect problems
  • – Generate a steady stream of referrals
  • – Identify and focus on high-payoff marketing activities
  • – Gain clarity, confidence and control so you sell more – more easily and more often
  • – Cultivate and leverage enthusiastic advocates
  • – And more

Energetic, inspiring, and filled with concrete strategies, tactics, templates, and tools, Do It! Marketing shows you how to stop “marketing by accident” and start outsmarting, out-positioning, and out-executing the competition.

Erin Botsford

This is a guidebook packed with the best strategies to manage wealth in retirement, helping readers live the life they have always envisioned – without risk of running out of money. With decades of experience as a financial consultant, Erin Botsford shows readers how to identify their preferred lifestyle and sustain it throughout retirement. With the philosophy that money allows choices, she shows readers how to become informed, wise investors – avoiding common pitfalls, challenging the status quo, and refusing to take advice blindly. No one wants to run out of money before they run out of time, and Botsford helps restore confidence in members of the Baby-Boom generation who may have lost assets during the financial crisis. With a thorough examination of the transition into retirement, she addresses common concerns such as Do I have enough money to last a lifetime? What about my spouse and children? Will Social Security be there when I am eligible to receive it? And what about Medicare, health insurance? From a chapter titled “Economics 101” to detailed analyses of market patterns, the author exposes the failures inherent in traditional methods of asset allocation. With comprehensive explanations of investment strategies, she helps readers adopt a new philosophy about their finances and retirement planning in order to protect their hard-earned money.

Shari Harley

We all know how it feels when our colleagues talk about us but not to us. It’s frustrating, and it creates tension. When candor is missing in the workplace, employees feel like they’re working in the dark. Leaders don’t know what employees really think; managers are frustrated when outcomes are not what they expect; and employees often don’t know where they stand performance-wise.

Many of us remain passive against broken, indirect communication habits, hoping that things will miraculously improve—but they won’t. Not without skills and effort.

The people you work with can work with you, around you, or against you. How people work with you depends on the relationships you cultivate. Do your colleagues trust you? Can they speak openly with you when projects and tasks go awry?

Take charge of your career by taking charge of your business relationships. Make your work environment less tense and more productive by practicing direct communication. Set relationship expectations, work with people how they like to be worked with, and give and receive regular feedback.

In How to Say Anything to Anyone, you’ll learn how to

  • – Ask for what you want at work
  • – Improve all types of working relationship
  • – Reduce the gossip and drama in your office
  • – Tell people when you’re frustrated in a way that resonates
  • – Take action on your ideas and feelings
  • – Get honest feedback on your performance

Shari Harley shares the real-life stories of people who have struggled to get what they want at work. With her clear and specific roadmap in hand, she enables you to create the career and business relationships you really want—and keep them.

 

 

Stephen Shapiro

In times of reduced funding, tighter deadlines, and fewer resources, a different approach to innovation is required.

Unfortunately, concepts such as “thinking outside the box” actually kill innovation.

It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.

Stephen Shapiro proves that innovation isn’t just about generating occasional new ideas; it’s about staying consistently one step ahead of the competition.

  • – Don’t innovate everywhere. To get the greatest return from your innovation efforts, you must “innovate where you differentiate.”
  • – Asking for ideas is a bad idea.Instead, ask for solutions to well-defined challenges. In other words, “find a better box.”
  • – Expertise is the enemy of innovation.The more you know about a problem, the more difficult it is to find breakthrough solutions.
  • – The brain kills innovation. The brain is wired for survival, not change.

Shapiro shows that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack. In fact, his strategies have generated a tenfold improvement in innovation ROI.

Marcia Reynolds

Leaders, managers, and coaches are charged with getting people to stretch their limits but are often unsuccessful. Top leadership coach Marcia Reynolds says the problem is, incorrectly handled, difficult conversations create more resistance than growth. Reynolds offers a model and methods for discovering what to say so people change their own minds. As a result, leaders equip people to find their own solutions, see situations more strategically, and grow beyond their limitations.

Reynolds explains how to pick the right time and place to enter the discomfort zone and how to create a “safety bubble” so that people will trust your intentions. Then, drawing on recent discoveries in the neuroscience of learning, she helps leaders ask the kinds of questions that short-circuit the brain’s defense mechanisms and habitual thought patterns. Instead of being told, people see for themselves where they’re falling short and how they can do better, resulting in lasting changes. She includes numerous examples and case studies to see the techniques in action.

Conversations in the Discomfort Zone will never be easy. But with Reynolds’ assistance, a trip there will result in breakthrough solutions, lasting changes, and an engaged workforce.

Bizcast-for-CSBC-Website 

David Poulos

Everyone can “do” marketing . . . right?

Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes is a collection of essays, articles, blog posts and white papers on marketing and related topics that proves otherwise on virtually every page. The stories, recommendations, guidelines and suggestions in this book are intended to provide marketers with a framework, a skeleton, upon which to build their own experience library. They are based on over thirty years of experimental trial and error, of avoiding, bending, breaking, circumventing and twisting the accepted “rules” of marketing practice. The win/loss record in that time gives credence to the saying that rules were meant to be broken. There are many books on the marketing resource shelf written by highly-credentialed, highly-trained, scholarly academics that outline study after study, testing the rules over time, seeking best practice, showing the exceptions that prove the rules, and trying to explain the evolution of marketing practice in a codified way. This is not one of them.

They should be taken at face value – it’s not exactly a ‘How-To’ book, these are not ‘unbreakable rules’, there’s no hidden agenda here, no subtle sub-text to be deciphered, no underlying mystery to be uncovered. It’s a book of principals, guidelines, brief vignettes of experiences that might have value to those just entering the field, or those transitioning from another pocket of the profession. It’s a book, perhaps not THE Book, but the principals it posits are sound and worth the time to read.

I hope you enjoy reading it, that you learn something from it, that you try to adopt some of the philosophies, some of the techniques, and absorb some of the lessons in the stories presented here.

David Goldsmith

Have you ever thought about the fact that a craftsman has more and better tools to solve challenges on the job than the leader of a business or organization does? Leadership “tools” are usually defined as computers, spreadsheets, data, and even experience, but in reality, leaders need thinking tools that are hard to come by, so they find themselves hunting and pecking for answers in books, at seminars, through on-the-job training programs, from mentors, and at business schools, and still, they’re left with gaps. Surely, most leaders are good at what they do, but the daily challenges of their jobs, like accelerating growth, increasing productivity, driving innovation, doing more with less, and balancing work with life don’t come with some sort of leadership toolkit…until now.

In Paid to Think, international consultant David Goldsmith presents his groundbreaking approach to leadership and management based on research revealing the twelve specific activities that all leaders perform on a daily basis, and he provides you with each activity’s accompanying tools and instructions proven to boost your performance and that of your entire organization.

Take the uncertainty out of everyday leading, convert ideas to realities, and maximize your intellectual value. Learn how decision makers at some of the world’s most successful organizations have already used Paid to Think’s universal and easily transferable tools—regardless of their industries, sectors, geographic locations, or management levels—as their greatest advantages in achieving more, earning more, and living more.

Christopher Brown

BECOME THE ENVY OF YOUR INDUSTRY WITH A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC CULTURE 

For the first time, this groundbreaking guide unlocks the secrets used by Amazon, Virgin, Apple, Starbucks, and salesforce.com. It creates a guide for success based on three years of scientific study drawing insights from more than 100 businesses to identify seven key factors. When implemented together these factors have been proven to drive superior business performance. Customer culture is as fundamental to business performance as breathing is to living. It is the life force of your business. This applies no matter what your industry sector.

And with the evidence-based methods in this book, you can replicate their success in your business!

The Customer Culture Imperative reveals the key disciplines of customer culture that consistently predict enhanced, sustainable business results. Each one is linked to a particular strategy and drives predictable and measurable improvements in one or more business performance factors–from innovation and customer satisfaction to growth in sales and profits to higher rates of new-product success. It gives you the tools to:

  • – Inspire everyone in the company to embrace a customer-centric culture
  • – Unify efforts across units by creating a “common language” for change
  • – Collect and measure data from your efforts and benchmark your progress
  • – Make change long term so you leave a legacy of an enduring business

 

Creating a customer-centric company takes more than making an investment in the customer service department and systems. It’s about building a culture in which the customer is at the heart of all decisions made within every function and unit. What’s best for the customer is what’s best for business. Make that a part of the DNA of your organization, and you will lead your company to unprecedented success. Guaranteed.

Dorie Clark

A step-by-step guide to reinventing you

Are you where you want to be professionally?

Whether you want to advance faster at your present company, change jobs, or make the jump to a new field entirely, the goal is clear: to build a career that thrives on your unique passions and talents. But to achieve this in today’s competitive job market, it’s almost certain that at some point you’ll need to reinvent yourself professionally. Consider this book your road map for the next phase of your career journey.

In Reinventing You, branding expert Dorie Clark provides a step-by-step guide to help you assess your unique strengths, develop a compelling personal brand, and ensure that others recognize the powerful contribution you can make.

Mixing personal stories with engaging interviews and examples from well-known personalities—Mark Zuckerberg, Al Gore, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, and others—Reinventing You shows how to think big about your professional goals, take control of your career, build a reputation that opens doors for you, and finally live the life you want.