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Seeking Wisdom with David Cancel

#Exceptions 9: The Most Crucial Leadership Principle Most B2B Brands Miss

Seeking Wisdom with David Cancel

Molly Sloan

Business, Entrepreneurship

5610 Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode of #Exceptions, a revelation about leadership and team happiness and retention in B2B. Indianapolis startup Lessonly teaches us about the communication principle most needed but often overlooked across the corporate world. It's one that explains why customers send Lessonly unsolicited letters praising them, and why the company's VP of Marketing spent a recent evening alone in his garage, spray painting 700 toy llamas gold. This is an #Exceptions episode unlike any other. If you like it, be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and say hi on Twitter: @lessonly @kyleplacy @jayacunzo @seekingwisdomio.

 In this episode: 
0:35 - You’re only as good as your last at bat. 1:20 - Read Break the Wheel 1:56 - Meet Lessonly 2:56 - Jay reaches out to one of Lessonly’s happy customers. 4:10 - Putting the customer at the center of it all 7:17 - Jay explains Lessonly’s road map… with llamas. 9:00 - Jamie advocates really knowing what conference you’re going to. 10:09 - If Lessonly were a person it would be Jamie’s friend that would follow through. 13:00 - Psychological Safety introduced 13:17 - Employees are the best place to invest. 13:54 - Most marketers are reactive and skittish. 14:57 - At the core of psychological safety is trust. 15:21 - Marketing successes 16:40 - Caring about the whole person on our team 17:40 - Meet Kyle Lacy (Lessonly’s VP of Marketing) 17:47 - Non-violent communication & appreciative inquiry 20:53 - Katie Brunette (Marketing Manager) talks about Lessonly’s CEO & work/life integration. 23:40 - Kyle Lacy explains being too metric-heavy. 24:55 - The Golden Llama trophy 27:14 - The things that aren’t scalable are typically what works. 27:53 - Why Yellowship? 29:55 - Psychological safety while event planning for Yellowship 32:15 - Lessonly’s branding and unexpected touches 33:30 - Jay reads a letter from a customer. 35:54 - Gut-checking as a team 37:28 - The ability to help others do better work IS the platform.

Transcript

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0:00.0

There's a saying in baseball, you're only as good as your last at bat.

0:10.9

It means essentially that your latest results are who you are. And if that is true, well,

0:17.7

you better act accordingly. If you aren't getting results, then that's who you are as a player, so work hard to improve.

0:24.1

Don't rest easy knowing that you're talented or had prior success.

0:27.9

And don't shrug and think, well, it's a long season, I'll get plenty of at-bats.

0:33.8

Because you're only as good as you're last at bat.

0:42.3

And while that might be a fine personal motivator for some people, I guess, I wonder, is that a healthy way to motivate an entire team in business?

0:46.3

I mean, in our world in B2B marketing,

0:49.3

a lot of executives seem to treat their teams that same way.

0:53.3

But today, we explore a concept called

0:56.0

psychological safety, and we meet a team that's hell-bent on challenging that idea,

1:01.9

that you're only as good as you're last at bat. And this team has reaped some incredible

1:08.0

rewards as a result.

1:11.0

Welcome to Exceptions, the show about why brand matters more than ever in B2B.

1:16.6

I'm your host Jay Akunzo, author of the book about challenging conventional thinking,

1:21.2

Break the Wheel.

1:22.7

And I've partnered with Drift to bring you this show because Drift is all about creating a better

1:27.1

experience between

1:28.5

B2B sales and marketing and their customers. In each episode, I go inside one of the world's

1:34.0

best B2B companies to understand how and why they're actually proactively building a brand.

1:39.6

After so many years where just uttering that phrase was seemingly forbidden, these companies are challenging

1:45.2

that conventional thinking.

...

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