What's Next! with Tiffani Bova

Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova. I am thrilled to bring you Tom Peters on this week’s episode. Tom is the co-author of In Search of Excellence and is one of the most exceptional management, sales, and marketing thinkers around. This book has been tagged as the “best business book ever.” THIS EPISODE IS PERFECT FOR… leaders. Think about it, have you ever seen a tombstone with someone’s net worth on it? No. That’s not what matters. What matters in life and business is relationships, embracing differences, and pushing yourself to make sure you don't get caught in the same-same trap. TODAY’S MAIN MESSAGE… is that people come before everything else. Tom wholeheartedly believes in matching people to culture; otherwise, he knows, culture falls apart. To create culture, you must have a foundation of listening, caring, smiling, and saying thank you. It’s about being nice to other people. WHAT I LOVE MOST… is that Tom shapes what excellence looks like. Take a moment to step back and give people the space to say what they are thinking. Building teams and coaching is all about the people side of business, not the shiny stuff. A PIECE OF ADVICE… consider management by wandering around (MBWA). Take 10 minutes and walk around with no goal in mind. Let your thoughts be your guide as you take moment to reflect. Running time: 46:10   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on social: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Tom on social: Website Twitter Facebook

Welcome to the What’s Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova. This week, we have Martin Lindstrom on the show. Martin has developed an unorthodox method of doing what every company says it wants to do: understanding its consumers’ deepest desires and turning them into breakthrough products, brands or retail experiences. He’s a change agent, brand futurist, best-selling author, and pioneer in the fields of consumer psychology, brand marketing, and neuroscientific research. Martin is also the anchor and producer of NBC’s popular show, ‘Main Street Makeover.’ Martin is living with less technology. He believes that we should get out of focus groups and into the homes of real customers. When you see how people are truly living and using products, you can create real value, spark creativity for future projects, and see the tiny details of the big picture. In this episode: 4:29 – Why Martin wrote his book, Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends 7:15 – The problem with linear data 9:29 – How jumping to conclusions with data correlation doesn’t work 10:14 – Why Tiffani says, “analytics is the refinery on the data, but intelligence is the petrol.” 11:35 – Even if the data doesn't tell you what you want, don’t discount it 13:09 – What refrigerator magnets can tell you about a child’s need for entertainment in your community 15:57 – How can we have data and no information? 19:06 – Why Tiffani is surprised that CMOs don’t spend time with customers 21:03 – What happens when downtime disappears? 23:06 – What Martin thinks you should do on Monday morning to lean into more downtime 26:38 – The magic of working from the outside in 28:25 – What can a small business do with data? 31:59 – What’s next for small data?   Running time: 33:40   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on Social Media: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Martin on Social Media: LinkedIn Twitter YouTube

 Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova.  This week, Whitney Johnson joins Tiffani on the podcast. Whitney was recognized as one of the world's most influential management thinkers in 2015, was a finalist for the Top Thinkers on Talent at the biennial Thinkers50 ceremony in London, and is best known for her work on driving corporate innovation through personal disruption. She's the author of the critically acclaimed Disrupt Yourself, one of Tiffani’s favorite books. Tiffani and Whitney talk about personal disruption – a favorite conversational topic for both women. Disruption is bound to happen, at work and in your personal life. There are ways to adapt to change and so you (or your company) aren’t left behind as the rest of the world moves forward.   In this episode: 4:43 – What is personal disruption? 7:40 – Is change more difficult in your professional life? 8:34 - Companies that sell technology are actually selling change 8:56 – Why early adopters are better at change 10:29 – What you can control in your work life 11:09 – What can individual contributors do when they feel stuck in their own personal journey? 12:40 – Why you should play to your strengths 16:28 – What to do if your leader isn’t willing to change, but you know you have to disrupt 19:38 – Why you should focus on what scares you, even if that means starting over 20:11 - Self-disruption exercises 28:31 - Preparing for the learning around the execution gap 32:25 – Take the S-Curve Locator   Running time: 33:14   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on social: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Whitney on social: Twitter LinkedIn Harvard Business Review

Welcome to the What’s Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova.   Today’s guest is Lisa Bodell. Lisa is a globally recognized innovation leader, futurist, and CEO of futurethink. As an expert on the topic of change, she is also the author of two best-selling books: Why Simple Wins (2016), and Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution (2012). Lisa serves as a global council member of the World Economic Forum and is a frequent contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review. Lisa believes that innovation is not new – it’s something that adds value. Ideas, Lisa believes, are everywhere. It’s about what you do with those ideas that make them special.   In this episode: 5:13 – What is innovation? 7:42 – Do teams need diversity beyond men and women? 9:50 – What happens when a leader has an established, homogeneous team? 10:42 – What is the difference between a groove and rut? 14:15 – How to have the opportunity to have a beginner’s mindset? 15:14 – How risk, fear, power, and control impact every single person 19:05 – How we made innovation too complex 21:03 – Lisa challenges Tiffani on having the time and bandwidth to do more than you think you can 23:33 – You can create a simplification code of conduct to have more time to innovate 25:02 – Lisa’s magical “kill a stupid rule” strategy 26:20 – The benefit of killing rules and meetings 30:09 – Simplification is contagious 30:43 – What inspires Lisa at the World Economic Forum?   Running time: 34:40   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on social: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Lisa on social: Twitter YouTube LinkedIn  

Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova. This week, I have the pleasure of having Mark Bonchek on the show. Mark is the Founder and Chief Epiphany Officer of Shift Thinking. He leads organizations to make the shift from incremental to exponential growth and to achieve transformational change so that they can more effectively compete in their market, engage their customers, and organize their teams. Mark believes that the business model is on the surface and what's underneath it is the customer centric mental model. The mental model, which focuses on people, has two parts. One view is a broad, outwardly focused model of engagement and marketing concentrating resources on targeting, segmenting, running campaigns, and moving customers through the funnel. This model spotlights the company’s objectives and how to get the customer to take action to achieve corporate goals. Another model of customer centricity, which works backwards from the customer, asks, “What is the need that we're filling? What are the customer's objectives? How do we help the customer fulfill their objectives?” This model seeks to understand the customer's goals and how to marshal resources to help them achieve their goals. Both parts are customer centric, but one is about you and the other is about them.   In this episode: 2:45 – Why Mark is in the epiphany business, not the consulting business 4:59 – Business model vs. mental model vs. measurement model 7:40 – Mark defines customer centricity 8:50 – Outwardly focused customer centricity 13:25 - How do you execute on customer experience? 14:45 – How to scale using engaged customer communities and user groups 16:05 – How disconnected teams and disconnected metrics lead to a disconnected experience, in the customer's eyes 20:30 – How an established culture can understand what customer centricity means 26:10 – How to see your own eyeballs 27:48 - We don’t have technology problem; we have a people process problem 30:25 – Mark’s article on Harvard Business Review, Don't Sell a Product, Sell a Whole New Way of Thinking 31:05 – What’s next for customer centricity?     Running time: 32:43   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on social: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Mark on social: Twitter LinkedIn Harvard Business Review  

Welcome to the What’s Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova. This week on the podcast, I’m interviewing Nancy Duarte. Nancy is a communications expert who's been featured in Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and on CNN. Her firm, Duarte Inc., is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley as well as one of the top women-owned businesses in the area. It's the global leader behind some of the most influential visual messages in business and culture creating more than a quarter of a million presentations. As a persuasion expert, she cracked the code for effectively incorporating story patterns into business communications. She's written five best-selling books and is ranked #1 on the list of the World's Top 30 Communication Professionals. Her TED Talk, The Secret Structure of Great Talks, has over 1 million views. Nancy’s expertise in the world of communication and presentations reveal how people can use stories to make real connections. In a B2B situation, real connections go beyond PowerPoint or pitching off of a slide deck. It’s about doing your research, asking the right questions, and not wasting anyone’s time. In this episode: 3:24 – How to NOT drink your own Kool-Aid 4:06 – How your words can change the world with an idea 4:24 – Are sales people selling a product or change? 5:02 – What is a story? 5:50 – How stories are empathy-builders 7:06 – How companies are challenged with trust 7:23 – The lack of storytelling is hurting executives 8:35 – How executives can create an emotional connection 8:59 – How to create emotional connection in our social world 10:08 – Finding the moment of inspiration 12:00 – Should you be transparent in front of customers to inspire them to buy? 13:06 – The impassioned plea, how all sales calls start 13:33 – How slide docs are beautiful, modular, collaterals 13:53 – A bad example of pitching to get $100,000,000 and what to do instead 15:37 – Machine learning + AI + pitching 16:44 – Can AI learn the secrets to the human heart? 17:46 – Human + Machine + AI 18:10 – Will AI replace sales people? 18:43 – AI + Machine learning predicting outcomes 19:46 – What is a data story? 20:15 – Bias in the data 20:35 – What happens when you make 25,000 sales calls? 22:14 – How to create a hook on a sales call 24:50 – Why the customer knows so much more than they used to 25:05 – Are people emotionally invested in brands? 25:59 – How to be prepared for the face-to-face 27:20 – Why you need 4-5 different stories 28:03 – What’s next for storytelling? 31:32 – How to be better at storytelling   Running Time: 32:54 Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on Social Media: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Find Nancy on Social Media: Website Twitter LinkedIn

Welcome to the What’s Next! Podcast with Tiffani Bova.  This week’s guest is Tamara McCleary. Tamara is an international branding expert, a technology futurist, and the CEO of Thulium. She was named the #1 Most Influential Woman in MarTech by B2B Marketing and ranked by LeadTail as the 3rd most mentioned person on Twitter by CMOs. Tiffani and Tamara talk about What's Next! in the future of marketing, sales, AI, customer experience and let’s not forget 3D printed shoes. It's fascinating to understand how all of these components fit together into one conversation. People have changed; expectations have changed; and, the future of retail, artificial intelligence, and customer success is changing daily.   In this episode: 3:40 – Is 3D, instant gratifications commerce the future? 4:48 – The future of shopping 5:47 – Hyper-personalization of products 7:48 – What is artificial intelligence? 8:18 – What is machine learning? 8:34 – Tesla, the great example of machine learning 9:05 – Why machine learning is fascinating 10:53 – Why do some retailers are failing while other are thriving? 14:13 – Using data in new, competitive ways to access the customer experience 17:19 – How can salespeople get better in segmenting by using data or AI or machine learning by understanding behavior? 17:38 – How to ask the right questions of data 20:50 – Machines have bias 21:37 – Customers experience on the new battleground 22:32 – Who owns customer experience? 24:18 – What’s a common metric by which to measure customer success? 25:08 – What CMOs say about customer success 28:33 – How incentivizing increases the lifetime value of a customer   Running time: 33:12   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on Social Media: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Tamara on social: Website LinkedIn Twitter Facebook      

My amazing guest is Naomi Simson. Naomi is the founding director of Australian online tech success story RedBalloon and Redii. She’s been blogging for a decade at Naomi Simson and is one of 5 Sharks on Network 10’s business reality show Shark Tank in Australia. You can join Naomi’s private online community at www.joinnaomisimson.com.   After spending 3 Days with a Shark, Tiffani shares her favorite lessons learned:   Naomi is committed: to her people and nurturing her staff Naomi admits that she’s better at leadership than management; she wants people to be aligned to the values and working toward the greater good.   Even though she’s successful, Naomi pushes herself every day. She’s still very hungry. She works so hard because want to be an equal with the people on her team and the community she serves. She doesn’t forget where she came from.   Personal motto: if it’s meant to be, it’s up to me. I don’t expect anything and I’m happy to keep sharing and being a role model to others.   It’s not about the budget, its what you do with them that makes the difference. Knowledge and reputation aren't just attached to businesses. You get focused on the return dollars and time. I can never buy another hour.   Time for reflection is equally important as productive time. If you know what the tasks are the people loathe, you can potentially find solutions to make their lives easier and create a better place to work.   Take the criticism that you’ll inevitably receive, and celebrate the greatness too. Everything is transparent with social media, so you have to really listen to the concerns.   In this episode: 5:07 – Commitment to people and nurturing the staff 6:18 – Management vs. Leadership 8:07 – Know your weaknesses (or non-strengths) 8:36 – Why you should surround yourself with the right talent 11:31 – Don’t forget where you came from 11:48 – Naomi’s personal motto 13:49 – Challenges small businesses face 16:55 – How to think about your time in a strategic way 17:32 – How Naomi’s book writing process took 14 hours a day but saved time in other areas 18:44 – How do I choose what is the one thing to focus on? 19:12 – If you’re relying on your phone, you are not in control of your life 21:15 – Why you should track your time 22:23 – What is RedBalloon? 26:44 – Why it’s about the experience of the experience 29:06 – How to take constructive criticism   Running time: 34:05   Subscribe on iTunes   Find Tiffani on social: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn   Find Naomi on social: Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn

Guest Seth Godin, bestselling author of 18 books and advocate for doing the right thing in business, discusses topics such as the importance of serving rather than selling, how to generate leads in an authentic way, why companies are prioritizing experience over product, and advice for new marketers.

Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova. In my 20+ years in the sales industry, I’ve met so many cool people and have had some fascinating conversations. There have been too many times I’ve wished a microphone was on so I could record my conversations with amazing people and share them with you.   I take a practical approach when I work with tech companies, to help define growth strategies and go to market models. I am always on the outlook for emerging technologies and disruptive shifts in buyer behavior. Then I translate pragmatic plans into sales transformation. I have been told the combination of my operational and research experience is what positioned me as one of the leading thinkers in the area of sales transformation and business model innovation. My current conversations center around one objective: customer success. My conversations inspire me as a speaker and when I write for publications such as Harvard Business Review and Huffington Post. Meeting innovative and creative people push me to do better and be better too. I feel selfish keeping those conversations to myself, and my goal with the What’s Next podcast is to share these inspiring conversations with you to keep you thinking and to challenge you to think about what’s next. This is a window into my process.  Enjoy! Find Tiffani on Social Media: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn