Find My Catalyst Podcast

In this episode, Mike and Erik Kostelnik talk about solving problems, working towards execution and building out your business. Erik is the Founder and CEO of Postal.io  Questions Answered: Why do people struggle with engagement? How have things changed in our current environment? What is your approach to problem solving? How do you avoid scope creep? What is your decision making process? Why do w...

In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss the definition of pipeline and common challenges associated with a Sales pipeline.  Questions Answered: When we say pipeline, what are we talking about? What are some common pipeline challenges? Are there different segments of the pipeline? Key Takeaways: Sum of all of the opportunity that is out there = pipeline Weighted probability of closing that business...

In this episode, Mike talks with Tanner Brock about his continued onboarding experience with Catalyst Sale.  Questions Answered: What has been the worst thing that has happened so far? How are you overcoming this issue? Why might our outreach number be lower than we expect? What's next? Do we apply call planning in the context of outreach? How do we measure success? Key Takeaways: Adjustment into...

In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss the best ways to handle mistakes when they occur. Questions Answered: What are the best ways to handle mistakes? How can we handle current mistakes? How do you view historical mistakes? Key Takeaways: It is great to share stories about lessons learned. It is important to be transparent and open. We can all learn from each others mistakes and learn from the st...

In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss the importance of a good first customer interaction and discovery call/meeting. Questions Answered: What should the first customer interaction look like? What is involved in discovery? Why do you want to find out more about the person? How does knowing the person better help you with the sale you are trying to make? What else do we need to know about the firs...

This week Tanner Brock, founder of 9-5 5-9 Coaching joins the Catalyst Sale Podcast.  Tanner is joining the team in a freelance role as an Account Executive.  As an account executive, Tanner's focus will be on selling Catalyst Sale courses in the B2B space. Tanner is a non-traditional sales professional, who has not worked in an account executive role.  Tanner will be a guest on the podcast in the...

This week we have a listener question - how do you avoid selling on price alone? Questions Answered: How do you avoid selling on price alone? How do you go about figuring out what the problem is? If a customer keeps driving conversation towards price, should we be concerned? Are there other bad habits to avoid? Key Takeaways: Price is one of those things that a lot of people want to know about, bu...

In this episode, Mike and Amanda Goetz have a great conversation about intention, focus, lessons learned in building a business, joining a business and starting over. Amanda is the VP of Marketing at The Knot and Founder of a new side gig.  Questions Answered: What drove you to start building out a side business? How do you keep things straight? How did you start to get comfortable with saying no...

How do you create a great proposal? In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss best practices when it comes to proposal planning. Questions Answered: What goes into a proposal? Where does price go? What are some mistakes people make with proposals? Key Takeaways: One of the challenges people will make when coming to proposal writing is they feel like they have to put everything in there. I would chall...

A lot has happened since launching Catalyst Sale in 2015.  In the spirit of making it easier to work with us, Mike and Jody talk about Catalyst Sale and what Mike is working on now. We take some time and distinguish between Catalyst Sale the products, and the advisory services Mike provides. Questions Answered: What will listeners get when working with Mike? What will listeners get from Catalyst S...

Handling Objections In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss a listener tip regarding objection handling.  We bounce around a bit on this one, but ultimately bring it home with some practical thoughts on objection handling. TLDR - ask questions, gain context, don't react. Questions Answered: Do objection handling documents work? Can you build out questions on an objection handling sheet? Key Takeawa...

In this episode, Mike talks with Chris Walker about marketing, sales, revenue operations and alignment. Chris is the CEO of Refine Labs. Questions Answered: How did you suddenly start to appear in everyone feed's and gain a following? How do we design for the future? Where did your appreciation for doing the work come from? What are some biases that Sales folks have about marketing? Why don't we d...

In this episode, Mike and Jody tackle a listener question and provide tips on how to make it easy to do business with you. Listener Question: For companies not taking a beating, but also are not currently positioned for success, what are clever and nimble revenue leaders doing right now? Questions Answered: How easy is it for our customers to do business with us? What can we do to help our custome...

In this episode, Mike talks with Justin Rohner about entrepreneurship, mindset and gardening. Justin is the Founder and CEO of Agriscaping Technologies and Director of the Queen Creek Botanical Garden. Questions Answered: From an entrepreneurial aspect, where does creativity come into play? What questions do you use to drive curiosity? Should there always be balance? Are mindset and perspective cr...

In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss a listener question related to adopting the Challenger Sales Method. Listener Question: My organization is adopting the Challenger Sales Method. I am curious on your thoughts on Challenger and training the team on the same process.  Questions Answered: What is the benefit of training a sales team all on the same process/method? What do you think about the Cha...

*Language Warning* On this episode, Mike is joined by Scott Leese. Scott is the Founder of Scott Leese Consulting, Co-Founder of Surf and Sales and Co-Host of the Surf and Sales Podcast and author of Addicted To The Process . Mike and Scott discuss building a community, transparency and more.  Questions Answered: Why do people try to present a persona? How do I find a community? How do we become m...

In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss how businesses may begin thinking differently due to the COVID19 Pandemic and taking a page out of Jeff Noel's book, Mike offers a 72 hour challenge. Questions Answered: Why is it important to think differently about things I already know? Will this pandemic change the way we do things? Key Takeaways: It's important to have some sort of qualification process....

The First 200! In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss the first 200 episodes of the Catalyst Sale Podcast. They talk about what has changed, what has stayed the same and what we can look forward to in the future.  Questions Answered: Why did you start a Podcast? Why do you still do a Podcast? What has changed over the 200 episodes? What has stayed the same? What will change in the next 200 episode...

In this episode, Mike talks with Alanna Fincke about the timely topics of resilience, mindfulness, overcoming challenges and self-care.  Questions Answered: How can we overcome the challenge of uncertainty?  What are the 3 components? What are some tools we can use? What is mindfulness? What is resilience?  Can we build resilience? Why is self-care important? Key Takeaways: Resilience can be our g...

This is the 11th in a series of short episodes where we will focus on specific topics that are relevant to today's working environment.  Many of us are making the transition to remote work, working from home, leading distributed teams, navigating our own personal experiences.  Alanna Fincke is the VP of Content at meQuilibrium, she is an integrative health coach, and resilience expert. She joins m...

In this episode, Mike and Jody discuss bad practices and offer some tips on how to avoid implementing them in your business processes.  Questions Answered: How do we know if we have a bad practice? How do we avoid bad practices? What is the first step to take in avoiding them? Key Takeaways: It is important to have an actual discussion with your customer. Ask, "Is this thing that I am doing better...

On this episode, Mike is joined by Chris Ronzio. Chris is the Founder and CEO of Trainual. They discuss entrepreneurship, company culture and growing your business.  Questions Answered: What are the different stages of being an entrepreneur? Why is there a negative connotation to being self-employed? How can we improve communication with peers? How can we create a company culture with a remote sta...

On this episode, Mike is joined by Dr. J.J. Peterson, Chief of Teaching and Facilitation at StoryBrand and Co-Author of Marketing Made Simple. They discuss sales funnels, narrative marketing and story.  Questions Answered: Is now a good time to build a Sales Funnel? What are the 3 steps to a Sales Funnel? What exactly is a Sales Funnel? What does a narrative approach mean? How do we build better c...

On this episode, Mike and Jody discuss using decision making frameworks, and how they apply to thinking, making decisions, and execution. Questions Answered: What are the things that get in the way of effective decision making? How do we avoid some of those challenges? What are some decision making frameworks? How does using a framework help us in our Sales roles? What do decisions look like with...

On this episode, Mike is joined by Max Altschuler. Max is the VP of Marketing at Outreach, Founder of Sales Hacker and fellow Sun Devil! #ForksUp. They discuss empathy and things to consider when working with customers during a crisis.  Questions Answered: What inspired Max's LinkedIn Post about Sales? How can you build trust and rapport digitally? How do you help your team during times like these...