What&#8217;s Next! with Tiffani Bova

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Disruptive Innovation: Play to Your Strengths with Whitney Johnson Oct 12, 2017

Show notes

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

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Harvard Business Review

The Intersection of Innovation and Disruption with Lisa Bodell Sep 28, 2017

Show notes

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

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Mental Models of Customer-Centricity with Mark Bonchek Sep 14, 2017

Show notes

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

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Harvard Business Review

Storytelling in Business with Nancy Duarte Aug 31, 2017

Show notes

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

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How to Handle Everyone Owning Customer Experience with Tamara McCleary Aug 17, 2017

Show notes

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

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Website

EP001b: 3 Days with a Shark with Naomi Simson Jul 24, 2017

Show notes

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

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Instagram

EP001a: The Human Side of Business with Seth Godin Jul 21, 2017

Show notes

Welcome to the What's Next! podcast with Tiffani Bova.

Today's guest is Seth Godin. Seth is a bestselling author of 18 books and loves to talk about making something happen.

Seth is a huge fan of doing the right thing in business. The "right thing" means not caring about stock options or your career and still caring about what you're making. Seth promotes focusing on service to deliver consistently.

Great marketers should spread ideas, not make sales. Your job as the marketer is not to sell what the factory makes, but to serve the people the company seeks to serve.

This is the human side of business.

In this episode:

3:15 – Doing the right thing in business

3:35 – How marketers are having to face shifting from worrying about what's coming next to ensuring they are doing what's right today

5:10 – Giving books away + traditional publishing

7:03 – Why Random House should have started Google and Simon and Schuster should have started Facebook

7:36 – How an individual (you!) can make a difference beyond metrics in your company…even when your company isn't there yet

10:43 – How to generate leads/opportunities in an authentic way (human-to-human interactions)

12:14 – What to do if you feel trapped and feel like you aren't doing good work

16:52 – Why companies are leading with experience over product

20:31 – Can you have a good-enough product and an excellent experience and win?

25:10 – Seth's advice for the new marketer

27:08 – How to market from the sales side (and vice versa)

28:35 – Building your confidence muscle

30:35 – How to be a better marketer

Running time: 35:52

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EP000: Welcome to the What's Next! Podcast with Tiffani Bova Jul 21, 2017

Show notes

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!

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