Lessons in Leadership

Being A Great Leader

Muhammed Ali taught us that status, money, and titles don't make leaders. We all know people usually don’t remember us for how much money we made but more for the impact we made on society and how we treated people.

As we see many business leaders from Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk dominating their industry but what social change did they create outside it? I am not saying they aren’t involved in any social change — great leaders incorporate bringing a social change juxtaposed to their company mission which can be used as a vehicle to inspire generations to also use their gifts to make a bigger social impact more powerful than they do in their business.  This is what Muhammed Ali did very well.

Impactful Leadership

As you strive to influence and lead others, we want to share some insights to help you learn from a successful leader. If you don't think of Ali as a great leader from whom you can learn, we think you should.   

Without question Muhammed Ali transformed the world of sports. Winning the heavyweight title three times — beginning with his shocking upset of Sonny Liston in 1964, which made him the youngest boxer to unseat an incumbent heavyweight champion. Though his pugilistic style was unorthodox and an affront to boxing purists at the time, his dazzling combination of speed and power revolutionized the sport and also become a champion for humanity.

The Greatest of All Time” left an impact on our nation as a leader.

Today, CultureSparq celebrates Muhammed Ali leadership style because he was able to achieve greatness and make history by doing what we believe are important lesson in leadership.

1. Authentic: Sharing thoughts with authenticity, conviction, and openness. 

2. Identify Affirmation:  Building a culture of affection, positive feelings and a strong sense of belonging as a social group.

3. Champion of People: Break the rules and go against the status quo by speaking out against injustice and racial inequality to make a bigger impact beyond his gift as a boxer or your gift as a business leader.

Remember 

As a leader you must seek to lead, inspire, and contribute to the greater good.  It’s also essential to realize that leadership is a social process. If you demonstrate several of the characteristics of a good leader but fail to grasp this, chances are you won’t get very far on your own.  You may be well liked and respected, but it will be challenging to accomplish team or organizational goals.

Leadership is a journey requiring you to view and use your gift to change the world in different ways.

We Build The Culture!

How To Transform Your Sales Organization

We are helping CEOs mobilize a winning culture!

Sales Ops

Your Sales Operations must be positioned to drive one thing in the digital economy- predictable and profitable growth. While the the current digital era is reinventing the startup and large enterprises, many sales organizations have lagged behind. 

Fortunately, some of top sales organizations we’ve worked with are reporting expected or even better results from our digital transformation strategies, now have a deeper understanding of the digitalization of their sales operations.

Part of this change is a result of the customers expectations—who are now demanding human centered experiences, brand intimacy, including personalization, speed, and value-based outcomes.

How do we know this? We are constantly diagnosing the experiences customers expect in the current market, how sales organizations are being impacted, and how sales leaders are responding. We found today’s customers seek remarkable experiences that deliver:

1. Personalization, including one-to-one interactions and offerings

2. Speed, by delivering effortless buying journeys and enabling self-service

3. Outcomes, from solving problems through partnership to delivering on promises to realize value

Here are Five steps to transform and deliver the right customer experience:

1. Sales Strategy and Sales Playbook Development.  The playbook will serve as your strategic document that determines how your company will grow sales and prosper. The focus here should be on Transforming your sales force in record time to bring in predictable and profitable growth.

2. Reimagine the buying journey. Imagine the pre-purchase to purchase to post-purchase from the lens of customer experience and seek out what matters to them the most. By identifying the right customers to target through these stages will give you a better understanding of their unique buying processes.  Once you put yourself in the role of the customer and the seller, you can then design one-to-one personalized experiences that make those efforts easier to navigate.

3. Connect your commerce channels.  Unify the seller experience both internally and across channels to improve the experiences of customers. By making it easier for sales reps to navigate complicated buying processes reduces the administrative burden, improves speed and ease for critical points of the selling process. 

4. Double down on data analytics.  You will need to collect and deliver better insights and embed them directly within the sales process.  Being able to integrate insights into decision-making at speed can boost your customer insights, partner insights, sales planning, and deal analytics.

5. Up-Skill your sales Team to be more strategic, data-driven and agile.  Having quarterly sales training workshops will transform your sales organization’s performance. Bringing in High-Touch training consultants with real world sales strategies and tactics will be needed since the customer and markets are constantly shifting so quickly.  To become that high-growth company, you will need to invest in training your salespeople on the process to educate both your channel partners and customers about the products and procedures to ensure everyone is achieving success along the journey.

REMEMBER

Successful organizations don’t just build great products and services- they enable customers to buy them easily- again and again and refer them to others.  Today’s sales organizations operate in an environment that poses new challenges, but that environment also presents many opportunities. Continuous training, new tools, technologies, and techniques offer great possibilities for increasing sales reach, decreasing sales cost, and driving differentiated experiences. 

CULTURESPARQ crafts the customer experience that’s human-centered and future-ready to help you transform your sales organizations and better equip them to serve today’s customers. Let’s hop on a call!

WE BUILD THE CULTURE 

Why You Should Break The Rules

CULTURESPARQ.COM | WE BUILD THE CULTURE

Are You A Rule Breaker Or A Conformer?

Breaking rules starts with you renewing the mindset of yourself and your people, it’s what we call Culture.  This allows you to begin building a strategy and execution that break the rules towards delivering a massive brand explosion.

Entrepreneurs are rule breakers, and business need to be too, but do so with a strategy and execution plan that aligns to people hearts and minds.  Knowing how to do this is also knowing your current market rules so you can break them.

As leaders, we don’t break rules for the fun of it. We break rules when we understand the systems that created those rules -- and then, with careful thought and relentless resolve, we can bend that system to our will. We learned the rules. We know what we’re doing. And that’s why, when the time is right, we don’t follow them.

Many businesses are great at conforming and are always trying to do what the market dictates or follow the most popular trend or business model — stop it — be authentic? 

Do you think all those great inventors, explorers, entrepreneurs- the people look up to-followed the rules?   No, they all have one thing in common…they gave the middle finger to rule and conforming. Some of the most successful people in the world didn’t even finish school! 

In this current landscape, you don’t get many opportunities to make a big impact, so make the most of it.

Here are 5 insights on why it pays to break the rules.

1. It increases how much we grow in both confidence and ability.

2. It can generate surprising results.

3. Our ideas are more innovative. Plus curiosity and innovation go hand in hand because the more curious we as leaders feel, the greater our productivity.

4. It changes how much respect we gain in the eyes of others. When you take charge by leading into uncharted territory—willing to get your hands dirty— you will create a reputation of a fearless and bold leader. People will follow you.

5. We can use our passion to avoid boredom, and choose novelty over what's familiar and comfortable.

REMEMBER 

By breaking rules, our ideas become more creative, our relationships become stronger and joy and excitement become common at work and in our lives. Though rebelling against the market rules may seem risky, it clearly pays off. We encourage leaders to BREAK THE RULES.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE!

3 Unstoppable Ways To CREATE Remarkable Customer Experiences

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture!

Customers don't buy products or services, they buy experiences to give them a good feeling and a solution to their problems. Most customer needs are emotional rather than logical. So, the more you know your customers, the better you become at anticipating their needs and connecting with them emotionally.

At CultureSparq, we believe in giving the same level of care and attention when dealing with customers that we would hope to receive. This seems straightforward enough, but many of us fall into common foils of customer care. 

Customer service can make or break a relationship. For many companies, they have a build it and they will come attitude. You may have a fantastic product, but if your customer service is unhelpful, unreliable, or just plain hard to get in touch with, people will hear about it, and you’ll lose customers over it. That’s one big reason why investing in customer service is key to long-term business success. 

What is a remarkable customer experiences?

Remarkable customer experience means making absolutely certain no one can find a substitute for what your company offers. When there is no substitute for what you offer, you cannot be commoditized. When you cannot be commoditized, then growth, loyal customers and profits are yours for the taking.  It’s part of your differentiation.

The process of creating Remarkable Experiences is about breaking rules and creating your on best practices that includes ingredients like valuing customers’ time, having a pleasant attitude, and providing knowledgeable and skillful resources, who can take things a step further to exceed — rather than just meet — expectations throughout the customer journey.

Know your and understand your Customer Identity because most of the efforts by businesses seeking to provide amazing experiences is that they often forget that it is the customer, not the business who decides what is remarkable and what isn’t. You have to remember, too, that what is remarkable for one company, may not be remarkable for you. So know your CustomerDNA offer experiences that are unique.

Yeah I know, easier said than done, Right?

One way to get started in ensuring that every customer has a remarkable experience with your company is by making the customer experience, pricing and product a priority followed with a hyper focus on three areas to create a remarkable experience and they are:

1. Create a compelling customer experience vision:  

   Your strategy should have a clear customer-focused vision that you can communicate with your organization. The easiest way to define this vision is to create a set of aspirational statements that act as guiding principles.

2. Know your CustomersDNA:

   Understand who your customers are. If your organization is going to really understand customer needs and wants, then they need to be able to make deep connects and empathize with the situations that your customers face.

3. Create an emotional connection with your customers:

   Some of the best customer experiences are achieved when a member of your team creates an emotional connection with a customer. This is what also known as Emotional Quotient (EQ) — it’s the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of somebody else and in this case, the customer.

REMEMBER

Great customer service happens when everyone from the CEO to product development, the sales team and customer service reps understand their purpose in the business.  One good customer service experience can change the entire perception a customer holds toward an organization. 

At CultureSparq, we continue to work at this for our customers. We are always trying to exceed expectations.

SCHEDULE some time with us to learn our process.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE!

Long Live Data

CultureSparq.com | We Build The Culture!

Data.  The Heartbeat of eCommerce

How fast does your business filter and pump usable information (data) into your system?

Take our hearts for example.  The heartbeat is the contraction of your heart to pump blood to your lungs and the rest of your body. Your heart's electrical system determines how fast your heart beats.  This is exactly how we view the flow of Data in your eCommerce. 

So let’s imagine for purpose of this post that Data mining is the heartbeat in your eCommerce because its goal is to pump information to help you stay alive.

Purpose of data in your business

Your data should pump information (oxygen) into to your business and other important insights (nutrients) to all the connecting points in your business (organs) in order to stay healthy and to work properly. Your Data is your organizations muscle, and its job is to pump information throughout your organization (circulatory) system.

Data mining in eCommerce

Data mining is a form of business intelligence and data analysis.  It’s the process of taking raw data, finding anomalies, patterns and correlations within large data sets to predict outcomes that we call “Triggers”. Using a broad range of techniques, you can use this information to increase revenues, lower costs, improve customer relationships, reduce risks and create new markets. 

Data Science Practice

You may need a Data Science practice if you are in eCommerce.  Retailing integrates both brick-and-mortar and multiple e-commerce sales channels to provide consumers a flexible retail shopping experience. Global retail sales were projected to amount to around 26.7 trillion U.S. dollars by 2022, up from approximately 24.8 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019.

Similar to other industries, there has been a growing interest in leveraging data science and related techniques in retail and e-commerce (Unified Commerce) to provide a more efficient, convenient and personalized shopping experiences to increase customer foot traffic and spend. 

With the introduction of ML/AI, there is a great opportunity to bring awareness of a Unified Commerce strategy across the industry and tackle problems which can have a wide impact in this industry.   

There are plenty of opportunities to apply data science in the customer retail journey ranging from pre-purchasing, purchasing, post-purchasing, product search and recommendations plus inventory management, warehouse operations automation, delivery prediction and customer post-care experiences. The Data that businesses collect about customers and their transactions are the greatest assets of that business.

Here are some areas to think about when making your Unified Commerce data healthy:

• Data cleaning

• Data normalization

• Classification

• Clustering

• Predictive Analytics 

• Optimization techniques and ranking

We propose these as advantages for using data mining techniques for Retail and eCommerce, as a way to apply practical applications and system innovations to extract value towards new opportunities.

REMEMBER

Running your data at rate to create a differentiation in the market is what we do at CultureSparq — it starts with a strategy and execution plan of how the data is entered, filtered and flows throughout the organization.

We offer our a Data workshop to expose your unexplored high impact problems in e-commerce, but also help grow your customer community by attracting new from the broader retail and e-commerce space.

Schedule some time with me so we can show you how we keep your business healthy with good flowing data.

WE BUILD THE CULTURE

CEO Challenges for 2021: Being Fearless And Unapologetically Bold

As CEOs plan for 2021, they will face some challenges both in terms of strategy and execution.  In the face of our new reality, many businesses remain closed or operate under restrictions. CEOs are thinking strategically about how they can keep their companies moving forward in the current environment while planning for the future. 

As we begin 2021 we understand the decisions leaders make now will define long-term success both for their businesses and employees.

As we look ahead, we wanted to shed some light on CEOs biggest challenges for 2021. We’ve gathered five areas to help CEOs ponder while preparing for the year ahead.

Let’s Dive in. 

Here are some challenges CEOs must overcome in 2021:

1. Uncertainty is at the core of 2021 and CEOs will have to figure out how to execute strategies in the unknown that will help them stay ahead of the curve.

2. Being a Fearless & Unapologetically Bold CEO is using new ways to stress-test, shape and elevate the mindset of their leadership teams to meet the demand of future customers and create new markets.

3. CEOs will need to Optimize Operations to maximize efficiency and engagement.

4. Develop Deep Relationships with highly intelligent leaders who can Sparq innovative ideas and cause CEOs to reconsider how to do business in a different way.

5. Managing Remote Work. 97% of CEOs will allow remote work to some degree moving forward. CEOs will need to embrace telecommuting as part of their long-term strategy. Part of this will have to be retraining/up-skill micro-managers that is unable to make this shift.

Remember

Since Markets are constantly in flux with varying economic outlooks and complications arising on a regular basis, it can be very challenging for leaders.  You will have to forge ahead by being fearless and unapologetically bold at tackling your challenges to get the progress you want.

We look forward to helping you implement new, positive initiatives in your company. SCHEDULE some time with me to learn more about Sparq Worldwide business offering.

We Build The Culture!