It's Time to Rethink Your Leadership Strategies and Business Models

While I’m taking a break from recording new podcasts and LinkedIn Live conversations, I’ll be sharing a few compilations of previously recorded interviews. We have pulled out relevant insights and chunks of conversation from guests that you’ll find useful as you lead or take part in the CX undertakings in your organization.

Today’s episode features two authors, Alain Hunkins, who wrote Cracking the Leadership Code: Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders, and Robbie Kellman-Baxter, author of The Forever Transaction: How to Build a Subscription Model So Compelling, Your Customers Will Never Want to Leave. Both guests share examples and tactics from their books to help you elevate your leadership. Their strategies will help you think through ways to better connect with your audience, your team, and perhaps even yourself! Enjoy!

Connect, Communicate, Collaborate

We need to be able to step back and recognize that the way we’re working isn’t working, and there’s got to be a different and better way. Now, the good news is, there is a better way and some people are already doing it. And in the book, I tried to share a number of those examples.
–– Alain Hunkins

In addition to being an author, Alain is a keynote speaker, a coach, and facilitator, who has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies. His book, Cracking the Leadership Code, is a practical guide with frameworks and tools to help you rethink what it means to be a leader.

In our conversation, Alain talks about the “three secrets to building strong leaders,” which is the subtitle of his book, and these secrets are: connection, communication and collaboration. He stresses the importance around the power of empathy, saying, “empathy is the gateway to connection because we’re all human, and we want to know before anything else, that we’re seen or heard, and we’re recognized.”

Empathetic leaders can have better connections with their audience, colleagues, and employees. In addition to enhancing your empathic abilities, Alain shares that leaders need to be “nimble, agile, and responsive,” in order to best respond to the increasing demands of customers. By enacting these behaviors, you can have better relationships with your employees and have a better understanding of their needs. Ultimately, you’ll also want to give them a seat at the table so they can have meaningful contributions to your organization.

Empathy is the gateway to connection because we're all human, and we want to know before anything else, that we're seen or heard, and we're recognized. –– @AlainHunkins #leadershipdevelopment #CX Share on X

You can find the full episode with Alain, here: Connect, Communicate, and Collaborate to Unite Leadership and Improve Experience

Build a Forever Transaction

To do your forever promise, you have to know who’s your best customer, and who are you designing your subscription around? You have to be laser focused. That is the first step. If you already have your data, you have to look at your data and see who are we designing it for? […] Who is the best customer? […] And then you say, who are not the best customers, and what attributes do they have?
––Robbie Kellman-Baxter

In the second half of this episode, I share a portion of my conversation with Robbie Kellman-Baxter, who helps us break down the steps to creating your forever transaction. In order for your organization to create a forever transaction, you have to develop a “forever promise.” You will need to determine who are the customers that you need to engage, and who can offer a lifetime value?

Robbie has spent over two decades developing her marketing and strategy expertise––she has real-life experience doing the work. As a consultant, she has worked with over 100 different organizations to help them develop subscription models or membership structures. Robbie even coined the business term, “membership economy,” which is the title of her first book, “The Membership Economy: Find Your Superusers, Master the Forever Transaction and Build Recurring Revenue,” released in 2015.

In our conversation, we discuss the road to developing the forever transaction, and what the steps to creating a subscription model look like. These steps are outlined in the three sections of her book: launch, scale, and culture. Robbie’s goal is to help people understand the long tail of relationship building, so you can move from transactional work to the powerful growth strategy around members.

Listen to the interview to hear Robbie address uniting the C-Suite while developing your subscription-based model, the importance of cultivating good talent, and more.

Find the original episode here: The Forever Transaction: How to Build Life-Long Relationships with Customers, with Robbie Kellman-Baxter