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Marc Appleman has had a stellar career in the sports and media space. He's currently in a venture that is leveraging a vast trove of historic sports articles and photographs, but he was also the CEO of SABR, the Society of American Baseball Research (an offshoot of SabreMetrics, of "Moneybag") fame. Marc transformed SABR into a thriving community of people passionate about baseball, and we talked about what that looks like...and how it applies to any business or association. We also talked about how he's turning a historical archive into vibrant memories and celebrations of our shared past. Inspiring stuff, Marc! Thanks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brion Crum is an executive with Caliber Investments, one of the country's fastest growing companies, and a business who differentiates by bringing quality real estate investing to groups who seldom have access to the kind of deals that big institutional investors are able to take advantage of. Caliber partners with experts in specific markets, and specific project types to bring a diversified flow of investment opportunities for its investors. Brion articulated this differentiation pretty clearly for me, and talked about how Caliber gets everyone in the company aligned around delivering great outcomes. Give it a listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

TIno Go founded and leads Baru (hellobaru.com), an innovator in the furniture and cabinetry business. He partners with companies around the country (there are quite a few of them) who have purchased computer-aided manufacturing equipment for furniture and cabinetry -- machines that only run a small percentage of the time (almost all of those). This means that these items can be manufactured thousands of miles closer to where they will be installed -- a cost and time savings in shipping and packaging. Of course, these are all built-to-customer-spec, and can use higher quality materials, so they're custom. The owners of these machines earn more revenue using an expensive yet underutilized asset. It's amazing! And furniture and cabinetry are just the beginning for Baru. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Park Howell believes, just like I do, that customers buy outcomes from doing business with you. He helps his clients compose stories that light up the limbic brain, or as Park calls it, "the movie theatre of the mind". I'm a big fan of how he simplifies the story format...by studying the art of story from experts in moviemaking, novel writing, and yes, marketing, he's distilled the art of story building into a simpler formula than I have ever heard. Give this great episode a listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nelson Griswold leads Next Gen benefits, a consultant-to-consultants who teaches benefits experts how to deliver better healthcare to employee populations at lower cost. We talked about how he does that, how so much of his effort is devoted to selling through a channel of healthcare consultants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Loren Fogelman consults to accountants and financial professionals, focusing particularly on weaning them off of the "hourly rate trap". She has a great process for helping accounting professionals understand their value, build value-based programmatic pricing, and have great sales conversations with their clients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniel Hammond's practice is centered around what he calls customer-driven leadership. In addition to leading a company with focus on customers. This includes the real, external customer, but also internal customers. I loved that perspective Daniel is passionate about building high-performing organizations with a customer focus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Olle Ljundqvist is a founder of the Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) society. ERAS is a collection of small changes to patient care, pre-, during-, and post-surgery. As Olle points out, most hospitals are already practicing several of them...just not as consistently as they should, not as measurable, and of course, not the rest of them. Getting a healthcare provider to increase compliance to 75-or 80% yields huge improvements in patient recovery, wellness, pain, and freedom from complications. Sounds great, right? Yeah, but the real problem is change management, and getting buy-in from administrators to nutritionists. It's been an interesting journey for ERAS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rod Collins is an author and keynote speaker whose work in organizational effectiveness is focused on changing organizations from hierarchies to self-guided teams of peer-to-peer networks. Democratizing work like this is the way of the future, according to Rod. I worked in a famous example of this kind of culture, and we discussed it in some depth. We also talked about how much more effective it is to have such teams focused on customers and customer value. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam Kipnes has provided strategic consulting for his clients for many years. He believes in involving everyone in the process, but also in a very simplified strategic document, so that people use and live up to the strategies they develop together. We talked about the value of a strategic approach that works because it gets used, and also spent some time talking about his "100 day sprint" that clients are finding compelling and actionable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Stiving is a kindred spirit -- and we always have great conversations about selling value. This time, we talked about how Mark has captured some of his wisdom in his book "Selling Value. How to Win More Deals at Higher Prices". We talked about the book for a bit (I recommend it, as I got the chance to comment on one of his draft manuscripts), but we also talked about how important value selling is in today's world. Thanks Mark! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jac Arbour is exceptional, personally and professionally. He's an author and philanthropist, all pursuits that derive from his excellence as a comprehensive financial consultant for his clients. His approach is to really know what drives each person he serves so that he can become a genuine partner. What a refreshing difference from other financial advisors who really sell point solutions, under the guise of "full spectrum". Jac and I had a great conversation about what it means to be a true trusted advisor. Good stuff, Jac! Thanks.. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bill Baer runs Baerclaw Productions, a video production company. As a former news-guy, with crews drawn from the news business, Baerclaw is driven by high quality, but has a production mindset. Bill and I talked about how he helps his clients figure out which videos they should produce themselves (and how to produce them better) and also helps them understand why and when they need professionals doing it. He gave some great stories about how he works with his clients -- not declaring he's done until the customer says it's done. Inspiring customer focus, Bill. Thanks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeb Blount's new #1 Best Seller responds to our current rising prices environment with timely tools and research meant to help sellers and sales leaders achieve price increases without losing business, and while causing minimum harm to the relationship. Jeb shared some of his thinking about several types of price increase, and how to approach each one. Great Stuff, Jeb! Thanks for stopping by the ValuClarity podcast! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Walters is an old friend who I've attached climb in the Commercial Real Estate Business for a few decades now. I was in a business adjacent to that for one of those decades, and I've always found it interesting. This is a very relationship-driven business, but I wanted to unpack that term "relationship driven". So many people think that it's about personal affinity or the "liking" in "Know, Like, and Trust". We explored how much more important the other two are...kind of. It's far less important that they know you. You have to know their business, their aspirations, their situation. And credibility...the trust part, is critical. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mickey O'Callahan has been building sales and commercial excellence in companies for decades, and Oceaneering International brought him on board to do it for them as an insider, not a consultant. Since coming on board just over two years ago, he's been applying his expertise to a widely diversified global company. We talked about his journey, and what's next. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jennifer Blowers has left the comfort of corporate America to start her own consultancy. I Her energy and passion for changing things in the healthcare industry comes right through the microphone (the sound quality is my fault, sorry!). She also realizes that market access teams can't be a simple product push function, but need to be full service change management consultants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tina is a long-time therapist who helps clients in all fields master their stress levels to perform at their highest. We all have a level of stress we can handle and perform well under. We also each have an overload level of stress, at which we start shutting down, and no longer perform well. Tina helps clients raise their "overload level". We talked about that, mindset, and more during this great episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every once in a while, someone shares their skepticism that everyone in a company can be made to understand how their job connects to customer value creation or realization. I wanted to share my experience, which states that it can in fact, be done. In fact, achieving this goal means that you can achieve something even more important: an entire sales force who is expected to sell at an elite level of value selling, and that nothing less is acceptable. This flies in the face of normal management dogma that you are always ever going to get 15-20% elite sellers. I've experienced an organization that threw such dogma out the window. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mediocrity isn't bad...it just isn't good either. It' good enough...for some. I have become a student of mediocrity in the workplace, and will be shepherding a book on sales leadership mediocrity to the market at some point. In this episode, I tackle four major areas where I see mediocrity in sales and sales leadership. Training, use of scripts, "show up and throw up" demos...and discounting. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices