Sales & Customer Acquisition

Why organisations work with Kevin Kelly His Xceptional Execution methodology is not motivational scaffolding – it is a documented framework built from original case study research with high-growth entrepreneurs across the globe, making the argument that execution, not vision, is the real driver of commercial success. Do! The Pursuit of Xceptional Execution was endorsed by Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, as the book Peters himself had always wanted to write – a specific, named validation from one of the most cited figures in management literature. The Triple A (Attention, Awareness, Authentic Action) and Storytelling frameworks give teams named, repeatable tools for immediately improving how they earn attention, structure conversations, and close in markets where buyers are already sceptical before a call begins. His cross-industry track record is verifiable: rated the highest-performing speaker at Microsoft’s World Partner Conference (92.5% satisfaction score, ahead of five other speakers on the programme) and a repeat keynote speaker at the Million Dollar Round Table – two of the most commercially exacting professional audiences in technology and financial services. His starting point is always the specific failure mode that sales leaders recognise – the knowing-doing gap – rather than generic motivation; audiences leave with a named diagnosis and specific tools, not energy that fades by the following Monday. Biography highlights Founder of Advanced Marketing, established in Ireland in 1990 following a career breaking sales records across construction and manufacturing sectors in Ireland and internationally Author of five business books, including Do! The Pursuit of Xceptional Execution, endorsed by Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence How? When You Don’t Know How sold 15,000 copies in Ireland – a bestseller for an independent Irish author on a first title Developed the Xceptional Execution Video Series for Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Community; rated top speaker at the 2015 Microsoft World Partner Conference with a 92.5% audience satisfaction score Repeat keynote speaker at the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), one of the most selective annual platforms for financial services professionals globally Has addressed audiences across more than 35 countries, with named corporate clients including GE Healthcare, KPMG, Hologic, Hang Seng Bank, Lane Crawford, and ICON Clinical Research Biography The central problem in most commercial teams is not a shortage of knowledge. It is a shortage of consistent execution. Kevin Kelly, founder of Advanced Marketing, has built a 30-year methodology on that distinction: the argument that competitive advantage in sales and leadership is won not by the team with the most insight, but by the team that acts on ordinary ideas with extraordinary discipline. His framework, Xceptional Execution, emerged from structured research with entrepreneurs and executives across the globe: people who achieved outsized commercial results not through original thinking, but through repeatable, disciplined action. Do! The Pursuit of Xceptional Execution captured this research and was endorsed by Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence, as the book Peters himself had always wanted to write. The frameworks Kelly uses in his sessions: Triple A (Attention, Awareness, Authentic Action) and Storytelling, are designed to be immediately applicable by sales and leadership teams returning to their desks the next morning. At Microsoft’s World Partner Conference he was rated the highest-performing speaker on a six-speaker programme, with a 92.5% audience satisfaction score. He has since delivered keynotes for the Million Dollar Round Table and for commercial audiences across more than 35 countries spanning financial services, healthcare, technology, and professional services. Based in the west of Ireland, Kelly holds a marketing degree and began his career breaking sales records in construction and manufacturing before founding Advanced Marketing in 1990. His first book, How? When You Don’t Know How, sold 15,000 copies in Ireland. His subsequent body of work (five books in total) returns repeatedly to the same conviction: that performance, at the individual and organisational level, is almost always a question of execution rather than ambition. Key speaking topics Sales performance and commercial execution Attention and persuasion in distracted markets Xceptional Execution methodology and frameworks Storytelling and business communication Leadership, engagement, and team performance Entrepreneurship and growth through disciplined action Communication and influence in multicultural environments Ideal for Sales directors and commercial leaders seeking to close the gap between sales training and sustained field performance CEOs and senior executives accountable for execution culture across distributed or international teams Partner and channel organisations – particularly in technology and financial services – where performance depends on enabling third-party sales behaviours Associations and conference organisers serving entrepreneurial, financial services, or sales professional audiences (including MDRT-type communities) Audience outcomes A named framework (Triple A and Storytelling) for structuring sales conversations and earning attention from overloaded, sceptical buyers A shift in perspective from sales as persuasion to sales as disciplined execution – with specific practices that distinguish knowing from consistently doing Practical storytelling tools for making commercial messages stick in distracted, multicultural, and low-trust environments Clarity on the specific behaviours and mindsets that separate average teams from those that execute consistently under pressure Approaches to converting disengaged employees and resistant prospects into active advocates – grounded in the Xceptionalists research from Do!

Why organisations work with Jonas Kjellberg He has lived the full venture cycle at the level most leadership teams only theorise about: founding member of Skype’s leadership group, head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik backing Zalando and HelloFresh, then founder again at NORNORM. The Gear Up framework, developed with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley, gives executives a structured way to diagnose where a business model will break before they commit capital. He brings the operator’s view on how Skype actually generated revenue and scaled commercially, not the founding myth. That distinction is what makes his sessions useful for boards thinking about commercial models, not just product. His current work at NORNORM puts him inside a circular, subscription-based business model with IKEA as a co-founder investor, which gives him a current case study on how subscription and sustainability economics interact. Biography highlights Co-creator and former member of the leadership team at Skype, with operating responsibility on the commercial side. Co-author of Gear Up (Wiley/Capstone, 2014) and Business Creation, with Stanford’s Lena Ramfelt and Tom Kosnik. Lecturer on entrepreneurship and sales culture at Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics. Former Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, leading roughly EUR 700m of investment into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. Founder and Chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company co-founded with Inter IKEA, which raised EUR 110m in scale-up funding led by Verdane. Founder of Player:IO and former senior advisor at BCG Digital Ventures. Biography Skype was a small Stockholm team trying to work out whether voice-over-IP could ever be a real business. Jonas Kjellberg sat inside that team as part of the founding leadership group, focused on the commercial engine that turned a free product into a company eBay was prepared to pay for. That experience, of seeing exactly which business model decisions made the venture scalable and which nearly broke it, became the raw material for everything that followed. After Skype, he moved to the investor side as Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, deploying around EUR 700m into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. That seat gave him a comparative view across consumer internet bets that most operators never get. He saw which models survived contact with real markets and which collapsed under their own assumptions. Out of that operating and investing work came Gear Up, written with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley in 2014. The book sets out a nine-component framework for testing whether a business model is actually viable before scaling it. It is now used in entrepreneurship classrooms at Stanford and the Stockholm School of Economics, where Kjellberg lectures on venture creation and sales culture. He is now back inside an operating business as founder and chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company built with Inter IKEA as a co-founding investor and now backed by Verdane in a EUR 110m round. For executive audiences, this matters because it gives him a live case study on subscription economics and circular business models, drawn from a company he is currently running. Key speaking topics Business model innovation and venture design Scaling consumer technology businesses Sales culture and commercial growth Circular and subscription business models Corporate venturing and intrapreneurship Entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty Ideal for Boards and executive teams evaluating new ventures, spin-offs, or commercial model changes Chief Strategy Officers and Heads of Innovation responsible for new business creation Corporate venturing units and incubators inside large companies Founders and senior operators inside scale-up companies preparing for the next stage of growth Audience outcomes A clear way to stress-test a business model against the nine components of the Gear Up framework before committing capital A first-hand account of the commercial decisions that made Skype a scalable business, useful as a reference case for current bets A working view of how subscription and circular models change unit economics, drawn from NORNORM A sharper sense of which venture decisions are reversible and which lock the business in Direct comparison points from a portfolio that includes Zalando, HelloFresh, and Rocket Internet

Why organisations work with Jay Baer He has built first-party research, not opinion, into the link between speed and revenue, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. He treats complaints as a growth channel, with a working method (Hug Your Haters) used by service and CX teams inside large consumer and B2B brands. He gives marketing and CX leaders a named framework for engineering word of mouth on purpose, drawn from Talk Triggers and case studies including DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory. He has advised more than 700 companies through Convince & Convert, including roughly 30 of the FORTUNE 500, so the boardroom examples are first hand, not borrowed. He is one of a small group of speakers in this category to hold both CSP and CPAE Hall of Fame recognition from the National Speakers Association, which is a useful signal for buyers booking high-stakes general sessions. Biography highlights Founder of Convince & Convert, a customer experience and marketing strategy firm advising 700+ brands since 2008. Author of seven business books, including the New York Times bestseller Youtility, Hug Your Haters, Talk Triggers, and The Time to Win. Inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association, holds CSP designation. Clients cited across his consulting and advisory work include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, Allstate, and the United Nations. Author of the proprietary Time to Win research on customer responsiveness, including the finding that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. Co-founder and editor of The Tequila Report, with a subscriber base above 50,000 and a substantial second-career media presence. Biography Most companies still treat customer service as a cost centre and word of mouth as a happy accident. Both assumptions are wrong, and both are expensive. The work that defines Jay Baer’s career has been to convert each of them into something a leadership team can actually manage. Through Convince & Convert, the strategy firm he founded in 2008, Baer has advised more than 700 companies on customer experience and marketing, including around 30 of the FORTUNE 500. Named clients include Nike, Oracle, Salesforce, Caterpillar, and the United Nations. The books carry the same operating logic into a wider audience: Youtility on help-as-marketing reached number three on the New York Times business list, Hug Your Haters reframed complaints as a retention asset, and Talk Triggers, written with Daniel Lemin, set out a structured method for engineering word of mouth using case studies from DoubleTree, Five Guys, and The Cheesecake Factory. His most recent book, The Time to Win, is the sharpest expression of the argument. It is built on proprietary research showing that two thirds of customers now rate speed as important as price, that more than half hire the first company to respond, and that customers will pay up to 50% more to avoid waiting. For CX and commercial leaders, the implication is direct: response time is a pricing variable. Recognition tracks the substance. Baer was inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame by the National Speakers Association in 2018 and holds the CSP designation, two credentials held simultaneously by a small minority of working speakers. The practical consequence for buyers is reliability under pressure: he is one of the relatively few keynote choices in this category that large general sessions and senior leadership audiences both tend to find credible. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Customer responsiveness and speed to revenue Word of mouth as a managed marketing discipline Complaint handling and customer retention Practical AI for customer-facing teams Marketing as customer help, not interruption Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Customer Officers, and Chief Experience Officers setting CX or growth agendas Sales, service, and contact-centre leaders being asked to convert responsiveness into commercial outcomes Franchise, hospitality, retail, and B2B brands where word of mouth is a material growth lever Annual conferences and leadership offsites that need a senior keynote with general-session range Audience outcomes A defensible position on why response time should be treated as a commercial metric, not a service KPI A working method for converting customer complaints into a retention and acquisition channel A repeatable approach to engineering word of mouth, with named operational examples to adapt A clearer view of where AI plausibly belongs inside customer-facing workflows, and where it does not Specific, named case studies the audience can quote in their own internal conversations the next week

Why organisations work with David Meerman Scott He wrote the book that reset the category. The New Rules of Marketing and PR sits in its ninth edition, has been translated into 29 languages, and is standard reading inside marketing functions worldwide. When he speaks to a commercial team, they are hearing from the person who named the model they already use. He coined Newsjacking, now in the Oxford English Dictionary, and turned it into a repeatable method for injecting a brand into live news cycles without a campaign budget. He has been inside HubSpot’s growth story since 2007, when the company had fewer than ten employees, and continues as its Marketer in Residence. The playbook he talks about is one he helped build in practice. Fanocracy, his Wall Street Journal bestseller with Reiko Scott, gives commercial leaders a second framework: how to turn customers into fans, and fans into a growth engine that competitors cannot copy. He sits on advisory boards across software, AI, and live-music businesses, which keeps his material in front of current commercial problems rather than recycled case studies. Biography highlights Author of more than a dozen books, including The New Rules of Marketing and PR (9th edition, 29 languages), Fanocracy, Real-Time Marketing and PR, Marketing the Moon, and Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. Coined “Newsjacking”; the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. HubSpot advisory board member since 2007 and current Marketer in Residence. Keynotes and masterclasses delivered on all seven continents and in more than 45 countries, for clients including Cisco, HP, SAP, Google, Microsoft, Ford, PwC, NASDAQ, McKesson, the US Air Force, and the US Marine Corps. Advisor and board member to emerging companies including Eloqua (IPO 2012, acquired by Oracle), NewsWatch KK (acquired by Yahoo Japan), and GrabCAD (acquired by Stratasys). Serves on the advisory boards of the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz and the voter-registration nonprofit HeadCount. Biography The shift that matters in marketing is not a tool, it is a timing problem. Buyers move through most of a purchase decision on their own, using search, social, and peer networks, before a seller is ever involved. David Meerman Scott built his career by naming that shift and giving commercial teams a way to work inside it. The New Rules of Marketing and PR, first published in 2006 and now in its ninth edition, turned a set of emerging practices into a coherent model: publish useful content, reach buyers directly, and abandon the campaign calendar as the organising unit of marketing. The book has been translated into 29 languages and is now treated as a standard reference inside marketing functions from Fortune 500 incumbents to early-stage software companies. Real-Time Marketing and PR and Newsjacking extended the argument into live events and breaking news, and gave the commercial world a new vocabulary for opportunistic reach. His credibility is not only editorial. He has been on the HubSpot advisory board since 2007, when the company had fewer than ten employees, and remains its Marketer in Residence. He sat on the board of Eloqua through its IPO and sale to Oracle, and on NewsWatch KK through its sale to Yahoo Japan. With his daughter Reiko Scott he wrote Fanocracy, a 2020 Wall Street Journal bestseller that moved the conversation from reach to fandom, and gave leaders at companies like Hagerty, MeUndies, and HubSpot a framework for building customer communities that behave like a compounding asset. When Scott walks into a sales kickoff or a marketing leadership offsite, the value is compression. He has already tested these ideas across more than 45 countries, all seven continents, and hundreds of commercial teams, and he will tell a CMO in the room which parts of the playbook are load-bearing and which are noise. Key speaking topics Modern marketing strategy and the new rules of marketing and PR Newsjacking and real-time marketing Content-led sales and social selling Fanocracy and customer community as a growth engine Digital buyer behaviour and the shift from campaigns to always-on Marketing leadership inside high-growth technology companies Ideal for CMOs, marketing directors, and heads of brand rebuilding their function for a post-campaign buying journey. Chief Revenue Officers and sales leaders running kickoffs where marketing and sales need one shared operating model. Founders and leadership teams at growth-stage software, services, and consumer businesses looking for a repeatable customer-acquisition method. Corporate communications and PR leaders modernising earned-media strategy around live news and owned content. Audience outcomes A clear read on where their current marketing and sales model is leaking pipeline, and which specific tactics to retire. A working definition of Newsjacking and Real-Time Marketing, with concrete examples of how to execute both inside a regulated or conservative organisation. The Fanocracy framework for converting buyers into repeat advocates, with named examples from Hagerty, MeUndies, HubSpot, and HeadCount. A sharper view of what a modern marketing and sales operating rhythm looks like day to day, not as an annual plan. Practical language to align a CMO, CRO, and CEO on what good looks like in the next twelve months.

Why organisations work with Alex Hunter He ran Virgin Group’s global digital strategy and Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. That is rare operator experience at the intersection of corporate brand and personal brand at global scale. As a founding-team member at Virgin America, he built the marketing campaign that won the airline public support during its certification process. His work was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four separate times. He has had to build and keep a digital audience himself, which sharpens how he thinks about customer loyalty for the brands he advises. His client work spans Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. The pattern recognition he brings to a brand question comes from operating across categories where customer expectations look nothing alike. Biography highlights Former Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, including oversight of Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital strategy. Founding-team member at Virgin America as Manager of Interactive Marketing. Work honoured with ad:tech and Webby Award recognition and covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. Creator and host of Attaché. Named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards in 2016, 2017, 2023 and 2024. Co-host of Layovers, an air travel and aviation podcast that has charted at number one in more than fifty countries. Venture Partner at Ignite Accelerator. Former trustee of UK alcohol education charity Drinkaware and advisor to the Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Trust on social media engagement. Speaker and advisor to organisations including Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, Twitter, L’Oréal, Pepsi, McDonald’s and the BBC. Biography Virgin runs across airlines, telecoms, music, trains, space travel and wellness, and the brand reads as a single personality in each. Getting that kind of consistency out of a global portfolio is a specific operational discipline. Alex Hunter spent years running it. As Global Head of Online for the Virgin Group, Hunter oversaw digital strategy across the entire brand portfolio and ran Sir Richard Branson’s personal digital presence. Before that he was a founding-team member at Virgin America, where his marketing campaign won the airline public support during certification and was covered by Time, CNN and CNBC. He has also worked the other side of the table, as a creator. His travel series Attaché has been named Travel Vlogger of the Year at the Travel Media Awards four times since 2016. His aviation podcast Layovers has charted at number one in over fifty countries. Both have required him to build and hold an audience himself, which is what the brands he advises are trying to do at scale. His client list runs through Volkswagen, IKEA, Adobe, Shell, Salesforce, L’Oréal, Pepsi and McDonald’s. What he gives each is a view shaped by running Virgin’s digital brand at portfolio scale and then earning his own audiences from zero. The first taught him that brand consistency is a daily editorial discipline. The second taught him that customer loyalty is won episode by episode and can be lost in one. Key speaking topics Brand strategy in a digital-first market Customer experience and loyalty Digital marketing and audience engagement Content, storytelling and brand voice Building brands at corporate scale and startup pace Customer expectations across industries Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and Chief Customer Officers setting brand and loyalty agendas Digital, e-commerce and customer experience leadership teams Agency leadership and in-house creative teams briefing against enterprise clients Board and executive forums where brand reputation sits alongside revenue and risk Audience outcomes A sharper view of where their brand actually lives in a customer’s day, and where it does not The specific places digital investment earns loyalty and the specific places it wastes it A working definition of customer experience that separates noise from the decisions that move repeat business Examples from inside Virgin, Virgin America and his own Attaché audience of what consistency costs and what it earns

Why organisations work with Robert Cialdini His Seven Principles of Influence – Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, Scarcity, and Unity – are the most widely referenced persuasion framework in business, grounded in peer-reviewed experimental research rather than practitioner observation. No comparable model carries equivalent scientific credibility. Pre-Suasion introduced a counterintuitive and commercially actionable argument: the moment before a message is delivered determines whether it will be received. That gives leaders, negotiators, and commercial teams a lever – the deliberate management of attention and context – that most organisations have never systematically deployed. His research has been applied across contexts from US presidential campaign strategy to national energy conservation policy, demonstrating that the principles are not industry-specific – they describe universal mechanisms of human decision-making. Influence is listed in Fortune’s “75 Smartest Business Books” and CEO Read’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time”; Pre-Suasion was a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016. The durability of both titles means organisations are reinforcing, not introducing, a framework that their people already partially know – which accelerates adoption. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has named a prize in his honour – a signal of the field’s verdict on the quality and societal relevance of his research, not merely its commercial reach. Biography highlights Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing, Arizona State University; visiting scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Ohio State, and the Annenberg School of Communications Author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984) and Pre-Suasion (2016) – combined sales of over seven million copies in more than 44 languages Pre-Suasion was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller; named a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018) and the National Academy of Sciences (2019) Described by Harvard Business Review as “the foremost expert on effective persuasion”; Influence listed in Fortune’s “75 Smartest Business Books” and CEO Read’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time” President and CEO of INFLUENCE AT WORK; holds honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Wroclaw), and the University of Basel Biography Robert Cialdini’s foundational research did not begin in a laboratory. He spent three years working undercover inside the professions of compliance – car dealerships, fundraising organisations, telemarketing firms – observing how influence actually operates in real commercial settings. That methodology produced Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, published in 1984. The Six Principles it identified – Reciprocity, Commitment and Consistency, Social Proof, Authority, Liking, and Scarcity – became the most applied persuasion framework in business, referenced from sales training programmes to business school curricula to the annual letters of Berkshire Hathaway. More than thirty years later, Cialdini returned with a second argument. Pre-Suasion proposed that the persuasive moment does not begin when a message is delivered – it begins before. The conditions set in the moments prior to communication determine whether an audience is receptive. Changing minds, he argued, requires changing states of mind first. Pre-Suasion became a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, and a Financial Times Best Business Book of 2016. It also introduced the seventh principle – Unity – based on the finding that shared identity is among the most powerful drivers of influence. The commercial applications are direct and cross-functional. Sales and marketing teams use the principles to structure offers and sequence communications. Leaders apply them to change management and stakeholder alignment. Negotiators use the Pre-Suasion concept to set the conditions before a position is stated. Harvard Business Review has described Cialdini as “the foremost expert on effective persuasion.” Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge, has said no psychologist’s research has been applied more often or more successfully. Cialdini is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and has held visiting scholar appointments at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the Annenberg School of Communications. He has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has named a prize in his honour – awarded for research that demonstrates societal relevance through field methods, which is precisely the standard his own work set. Key speaking topics The Seven Principles of Influence Pre-Suasion and the psychology of attention Ethical persuasion in leadership and negotiation Behavioural science in sales and marketing Social proof and organisational decision-making The Unity principle and collaborative alignment Science-based communication strategy Ideal for CMOs, sales directors, and commercial leadership teams seeking evidence-based frameworks for customer and stakeholder communication C-suite and board-level audiences navigating change, alignment, or strategic persuasion challenges Heads of marketing, brand, and communications responsible for message design and audience receptivity Negotiation, procurement, and business development professionals Audience outcomes A working understanding of the Seven Principles of Influence – including Unity – and how each applies in commercial, leadership, and negotiation contexts A clear grasp of the Pre-Suasion concept: how to shape audience receptivity before a message is delivered, and why this is distinct from refining the message itself A framework for distinguishing ethical influence from manipulation – and a practical understanding of why the distinction matters commercially as well as reputationally Specific, research-grounded adjustments to the sequencing, framing, and context of communication that improve persuasive effectiveness Confidence to apply the principles immediately across sales, leadership, and change management settings without requiring institutional change first

Why organisations work with Peter Cross He has held the customer experience seat at one of the UK’s most service-known retailers. As Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, he was responsible for the customer agenda across both John Lewis and Waitrose at a moment of acute pressure on British retail. His thinking is now codified in book form. Start with the Customer, published by Pearson in 2025 and called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer, gives audiences a usable framework, including a “lexicon of customer needs” that distinguishes transactional, interactional, core and higher-level requirements. As Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, he sits at the centre of the national conversation about service standards, with sight of how the issue plays out across sectors rather than inside a single company. His career holds two seats most operators never combine: ten years inside the Mary Portas consultancy that worked on the 2011 Portas Review, and eight years inside the John Lewis Partnership. He has built the strategy and lived with the consequences. Biography highlights Former Customer Experience Director at the John Lewis Partnership, with the brief extended to cover Waitrose Co-author of Start with the Customer (Pearson, 2025), called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service Ambassador for the Retail Trust and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School Ten-year business partnership with Mary Portas at her retail agency Earlier senior roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill Biography Between 2017 and 2021, two of Britain’s most service-known retailers, John Lewis and Waitrose, were pressured by pure-play online players and a public mood shifting hard toward speed. Holding their character through that period was the customer experience brief, and it sat with Peter Cross. Before John Lewis, he spent ten years as business partner to Mary Portas at her retail agency. Their work together included charity-shop reinvention and the 2011 Portas Review of the British high street, commissioned by government. Earlier still came senior marketing roles at L’Oréal, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill. He has occupied both the operator’s chair and the advisor’s chair. Start with the Customer, his 2025 Pearson book co-written with Institute of Customer Service CEO Jo Causon, was called “the essential text on customer experience” by The Grocer. The book argues that service has been quietly reduced to process, and that technology cannot substitute for the cultural work of building a service organisation from the CEO’s desk down. He now serves as Vice President of the Institute of Customer Service, Ambassador for the Retail Trust, and Leader in Residence at Leeds University Business School. The thinking he brings to senior teams centres on a framework from his book: the “lexicon of customer needs,” which separates requirements into transactional, interactional, core and higher-level categories. The standards he asks organisations to meet are ones he held himself, for eight years, on the customer agenda at the John Lewis Partnership. Key speaking topics Customer experience strategy Service culture The lexicon of customer needs Customer behaviour and expectation Leadership in customer-facing organisations Employee engagement and frontline empowerment The future of retail Ideal for Boards and CEOs setting the customer agenda for the next strategic cycle CMOs, Chief Customer Officers and Customer Experience Directors making the case for cultural investment alongside technology spend Retail and consumer-facing leadership teams under pressure from online competitors HR and people leaders responsible for service culture and frontline engagement Audience outcomes A vocabulary for the different types of customer need (transactional, interactional, core, higher-level) and where each one surfaces across the customer journey The case, evidenced through John Lewis and Mary Portas-era examples, for treating service culture as a board-level discipline A way to test whether technology investment is enabling service or quietly substituting for it The “golden rules and cardinal sins” of service that separate brands customers stay with from brands they leave

Why organisations work with Laura Gassner Otting She names a problem CHROs and talent leaders see every quarter but rarely have language for: the high-performer who hits the number, then quietly checks out. Wonderhell gives that pattern a vocabulary leadership teams can act on. She writes from operator experience, not theory. She built and sold a national executive search firm, served as a Clinton White House appointee on the launch of AmeriCorps, and has advised leaders across corporate, political, and nonprofit settings. Her work travels across audience seniority. The same framework speaks to high-potential talent in early career, to senior leaders rethinking what success means at the next stage, and to founders running into the wall their own ambition built. She brings genuine media reach. Wonderhell debuted at #2 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, Limitless debuted at #2 on the Washington Post list, and she is a regular contributor to Good Morning America, Harvard Business Review, and Oprah Daily. Biography highlights Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Wonderhell (Ideapress, 2023) and author of Limitless (2019), which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post bestseller list. Presidential appointee in the Clinton White House, working on the launch of AmeriCorps. Founder and former CEO of the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a national executive search firm she sold in 2015. TEDxCambridge speaker, “Stop Asking ‘How Can I Help?'”, with millions of views to date. Contributor and featured expert across Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, Good Morning America, the Today Show, and Oprah Daily. ABC News on-air contributor on careers, leadership, and ambition. Biography Most organisations track the moment a top performer joins. Few track the moment they hit their stretch goal and start to drift. That gap, the space between visible achievement and invisible disengagement, is the territory Laura Gassner Otting works in. Her bestselling book Wonderhell, a Wall Street Journal bestseller published by Ideapress in 2023, gave language to a pattern senior leaders had seen for years without being able to describe. Success, for ambitious people, is not a finish line. It is a doorway into a harder version of the same question: what now, and was it worth it. Her earlier book Limitless, which debuted at #2 on the Washington Post list in 2019, framed the upstream problem of how high performers define success in the first place. The argument has weight because it sits on top of a real career. She left law school to join a southern governor’s presidential campaign and ended up as a presidential appointee in Bill Clinton’s White House, working on the launch of AmeriCorps. She later founded and ran the Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, a national executive search firm, which she sold in 2015. Her TEDxCambridge talk, “Stop Asking ‘How Can I Help?'”, has been viewed millions of times. She is an ABC News contributor and writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company, and Oprah Daily. Inside organisations, her work shows up where talent strategy, executive development, and culture intersect, especially with the people any business can least afford to lose: the ones who already won, and are now quietly wondering what they are running toward. Key speaking topics High-performer retention and engagement The psychology of ambition and success Leadership development for emerging and senior leaders Career decision-making and purpose alignment Culture and talent strategy in mission-driven organisations Confidence and voice in leadership Sales performance through meaningful client connection Ideal for CHROs, CPOs, and talent leaders trying to retain high performers past their first big win High-potential leadership programmes and executive development cohorts Sales kickoffs and revenue leadership offsites focused on motivation and meaning Mission-driven organisations and nonprofit boards rethinking purpose and engagement Audience outcomes A shared vocabulary for the discomfort that follows achievement, so teams can talk about it before people quietly leave. A sharper personal definition of success that holds up against external metrics and pressure. Practical decision-making cues for when to push, when to pause, and when to redefine the goal. Renewed clarity for senior leaders on what their highest performers actually need from them next.

Why organisations work with Darren Hardy He has run the operating seat, not just studied it. He led SUCCESS magazine as publisher and founding editor for eight years and built businesses before that, so the material lands with founders and CEOs rather than feeling like borrowed theory. The Compound Effect gives audiences a single, durable mental model for how small daily choices become outsized business outcomes. It survives long after the keynote ends, which is what organisations actually pay for. His 2016 Master of Influence award from the National Speakers Association places him in a lineage of fewer than a dozen people, alongside Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy. Few current keynote speakers carry that specific credential. He has spent two decades interviewing the operators behind large companies, including Richard Branson, Howard Schultz and Jack Welch, and brings those case studies into rooms without name-dropping for its own sake. DarrenDaily gives him a live, ongoing feedback loop with hundreds of thousands of high-performers, so the content is stress-tested against what is actually working in the field rather than recycled from a book written years ago. Biography highlights New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Compound Effect, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster and Living Your Best Year Ever. Publisher and Founding Editor of SUCCESS magazine, 2007 to 2015. National Speakers Association Master of Influence Award, 2016. Former executive producer of The People’s Network and chairman of The Success Training Network. Founder of DarrenDaily, a daily mentoring platform for entrepreneurs and executives. Has interviewed leaders including Richard Branson, Howard Schultz, Jack Welch and Steve Wynn. Biography Most performance problems in founder-led businesses are not strategy problems. They are execution problems dressed up as strategy problems, and they compound quietly until a growth plan stalls. Darren Hardy has spent twenty-five years working on the side of that equation that boards rarely discuss directly: the daily habits, operating rhythms and personal disciplines that separate the operators who build something lasting from the ones who do not. His argument is built from two sources. The first is his own operating career. He started his first business at eighteen and ran a company generating material annual revenue before he was thirty, before spending eight years as Publisher and Founding Editor of SUCCESS magazine, relaunching the title and running it as a business. The second is editorial. Through SUCCESS and the networks he ran before it, he interviewed a long line of senior operators, including Richard Branson, Howard Schultz, Jack Welch and Steve Wynn, and distilled what he learned into The Compound Effect, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller still in active circulation more than a decade after publication. The 2016 Master of Influence Award from the National Speakers Association is the credential that most senior buyers notice. It has gone to roughly a dozen people in the history of the profession, including Jim Rohn, Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy, and it is not given for platform skill alone. It signals durability of ideas, something Hardy has since extended through DarrenDaily, a daily mentoring programme followed by hundreds of thousands of founders, sales leaders and executives. What a room gets from him is not motivation in the old sense. It is a specific mental model for how decisions compound, delivered by someone who has run the P&L, built the audience, and stress-tested the ideas against a live community of operators every working day. Key speaking topics Entrepreneurial performance and founder psychology Habit compounding and long-term execution discipline Leadership in fast-changing, multi-generational workplaces Productivity systems of high-performing operators Sales team performance and commercial discipline Personal leadership and daily operating rhythm Ideal for Founder-led and founder-stage businesses facing the transition from hustle to operating discipline CEOs, COOs and sales leaders running performance-driven commercial organisations Annual kick-offs, leadership offsites and sales conferences where the brief is execution, not strategy Audience outcomes A clear, durable model for how small daily choices compound into commercial outcomes A sharper view of the specific habits and rhythms that separate top operators from competent ones Case material drawn from real interviews with leaders such as Branson, Schultz and Welch, applied to the audience’s own context A concrete shift in how leaders structure their own days, weeks and quarters on returning to the business

Why organisations work with Ryan Serhant He built a brokerage that uses its own studio as the primary lead source, giving sales and marketing leaders a working reference for how content-to-commerce actually operates at scale. He has closed close to ten billion dollars in personal real estate sales while running the firm, including the most expensive home ever sold in Florida, so the methodology comes from a practitioner still in the deal flow. His three books, Sell It Like Serhant, Big Money Energy, and Brand It Like Serhant, sequence a coherent commercial argument from individual sales technique to personal brand as a business asset. He is one of the few operators booked at this level whose audience already knows the work through Netflix’s Owning Manhattan and Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York, which compresses the credibility step at large commercial events. Biography highlights Founder and CEO of SERHANT., a brokerage with an in-house film studio used as its lead-generation engine. Star and executive producer of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan; star of Bravo’s two-time Emmy-nominated Million Dollar Listing New York. Author of Sell It Like Serhant (2018), Big Money Energy (2021), and Brand It Like Serhant (2024). The Serhant Team ranked top sales team in New York by The Wall Street Journal for three consecutive years and Top 5 nationwide. Closed close to ten billion dollars in personal sales, including record-setting transactions in New York and Florida. Founder of SERHANT. Studios and the SELL IT digital education platform. Biography Most brokerages still treat marketing as a cost centre and the salesforce as the engine. SERHANT., the firm Ryan Serhant founded in September 2020, inverts that. The studio is the engine. The agents convert the demand it generates. Owning Manhattan, the Netflix series Serhant produces and stars in, is part of the same flywheel. That model is the reason commercial leaders book him. Serhant has closed close to ten billion dollars in personal real estate sales, including the most expensive home ever sold in Florida, while running the firm. The point on stage is not the listings. It is what an operating model looks like when content production, personal brand, and sales pipeline are run as a single discipline rather than three departments. His three books trace the same argument at different altitudes. Sell It Like Serhant (2018) is a salesperson’s playbook. Big Money Energy (2021) reframes ambition as a discipline that can be coached. Brand It Like Serhant (2024) treats personal and corporate brand as a measurable commercial asset that produces inbound demand. Together they are the spine of his keynote work and the SELL IT education platform that grew out of the first book. The Serhant Team was ranked the top sales team in New York by The Wall Street Journal for three consecutive years before he launched the brokerage. Million Dollar Listing New York, the two-time Emmy-nominated Bravo series, gave the broader audience the character. Owning Manhattan, now in its second Netflix season, gives them the company. Key speaking topics Content-to-commerce business models Sales methodology and pipeline Personal brand as a commercial asset Entrepreneurship and scale-up Customer acquisition and lead generation Founder mindset and commercial ambition Ideal for Chief revenue officers and heads of sales rebuilding pipeline economics around content Chief marketing officers integrating brand, social, and demand generation into one operating function Founders and CEOs of scale-up businesses building category presence Sales conferences, kickoffs, and partner events for high-ticket and brokerage businesses Audience outcomes A working picture of how an in-house content engine can function as the primary acquisition channel A clearer line between personal brand investment and measurable revenue A sales operating logic drawn from a practitioner who is still closing deals at the top of the market Language and frameworks senior leaders can take back to their commercial teams the next morning

Why organisations work with Ken Schmidt He sat inside the room when Harley-Davidson went from near-collapse to one of the most emotionally bonded brands in American business, and he can describe what changed in the company’s positioning rather than what got written about it afterwards. He frames customer loyalty as an operating decision, not a marketing output. His Noise Cubed Trilogy gives leadership teams a structured way to interrogate how they are heard, remembered and chosen. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) gives leaders a written, reusable method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning. He works in the language operators use. Sales teams, dealer networks, franchisees and frontline staff respond to him because he treats reputation as something the whole organisation builds, not a head-office function. He is consistently booked for annual sales kickoffs, dealer conferences and leadership offsites where the brief is to change how a workforce thinks about its own market position, not to deliver a generic motivational talk. Biography highlights Director of Corporate and Financial Communications at Harley-Davidson Motor Company, 1990 to 1997; joined the company in 1985. Primary spokesperson to media and financial communities during Harley-Davidson’s turnaround years. Author of Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance, Simon and Schuster, November 2018. Co-creator of 100 Years of Harley-Davidson, an official centenary motorsports title. Founder of Ken Schmidt Company (1999); co-founder of Torque Sessions Leadership Training. Host of the Tailgating with Geniuses business podcast; previously held an ownership stake in Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners. Biography Harley-Davidson was effectively a dying American manufacturer in the mid-1980s. The bikes had reputation problems, the financials were thin, and the brand was the punchline of its own segment. The work that pulled the company out was not a product fix. It was a deliberate reconstruction of how customers, dealers and the financial community thought and talked about the company, and Ken Schmidt was inside that work from 1985. By 1990 he was Director of Corporate and Financial Communications, working directly with the CEO and CFO and serving as the primary voice to the media and investment community during the years sales and brand equity recovered. That seat gave him a particular vantage on how reputation actually gets engineered inside a company under pressure, and on how leadership decisions about positioning translate into customer behaviour on the ground. After leaving Harley in 1997 he took an ownership position at Chicago marketing firm VSA Partners, then founded Ken Schmidt Company in 1999. Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance (Simon and Schuster, 2018) sets out his method for moving a company from product-first to people-first positioning; his Torque Sessions training format and Tailgating with Geniuses podcast extend the same operating logic. The argument he brings to a leadership room is that competitive advantage built on product specifications is now mostly perishable, and the durable form of advantage is being chosen on purpose by customers who feel something specific about the company. That is a hard claim to make credibly. It is harder to make from the inside of a brand that did it. Key speaking topics Customer loyalty and advocacy Brand positioning and reputation Competitive differentiation People-first organisational culture Storytelling and corporate voice Sales force and dealer-network alignment Ideal for Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and customer-experience leadership teams. Sales leadership at companies running annual kickoffs, dealer conferences or franchise summits. CEO and executive teams in mature categories where product parity is eroding margins. Membership organisations, associations and trade bodies needing to reset how they are perceived. Audience outcomes A sharper internal language for what their company is actually known for, versus what it claims to be known for. Schmidt’s three-question Noise Cubed framework, useable as a working tool on positioning decisions. A concrete view of how the Harley-Davidson turnaround changed customer behaviour, with the operator-side mechanics named. A reframing of customer loyalty as something every part of the business builds, not a marketing or CX function output.

Why organisations work with Chris Voss He brings a method built in the only setting where negotiation failure is counted in lives, then translated into vocabulary sales, procurement, and executive teams can apply on Monday. Tactical Empathy, mirroring, labeling, and calibrated questions are named, teachable moves, which means the approach survives the room and becomes company muscle memory rather than a memorable keynote. The Black Swan Group is a working consultancy, so the same principles that land on stage can be extended into deal-desk coaching, procurement clinics, and bespoke leadership training. His credibility reads instantly to a sceptical senior audience: 24 years in the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit, the US National Security Council Hostage Working Group, lead negotiator on the Jill Carroll and Steve Centanni cases. “Never Split the Difference” has made his vocabulary common currency across revenue, HR, and leadership functions, so a keynote plugs into language teams already recognise. Biography highlights Former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, 2003 to 2007, inside a 24-year FBI career across more than 150 international hostage cases. Founder and CEO of The Black Swan Group, a negotiation training and consulting firm serving corporate clients globally. Co-author of “Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It” with Tahl Raz, reported at more than 5 million copies sold. Adjunct professor at Harvard Law School and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business; lecturer at the USC Marshall School of Business. Represented the FBI on the US National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. Instructor of the MasterClass “Chris Voss Teaches the Art of Negotiation”; recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement. Biography Jill Carroll was held in Iraq. Steve Centanni was held in Gaza. Chris Voss was the lead FBI negotiator on both. That is the operational record that sits underneath his commercial work, and it is why his language about negotiation reads differently from most of what senior teams have heard before. For 24 years inside the FBI, including four as the Bureau’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, he worked cases where concession logic, position-trading, and splitting the difference were not available moves. The alternative he developed, and later named Tactical Empathy, is a discipline of understanding the counterpart’s emotional world accurately enough to influence the decision in front of them. Mirroring, labeling, and calibrated questions are the operating components. In 2008 he founded The Black Swan Group to teach that discipline to commercial teams, and in 2016 he codified it with Tahl Raz in “Never Split the Difference”. The book has moved more than 5 million copies and reshaped how sales, procurement, legal, and executive teams in large organisations talk about difficult conversations. He has carried the same material into classrooms at Harvard Law School, Georgetown McDonough, and USC Marshall. What buyers get when they book him is the original source of that vocabulary, with the cases that generated it. The US National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group asked him to represent the FBI on it. The Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement went to him on the strength of the same work. A room of senior commercial leaders is a softer setting than the one that built his method, which is precisely why the method holds. Key speaking topics High-stakes negotiation Tactical empathy and influence Sales and commercial negotiation Procurement and deal-desk strategy Crisis communication Leadership under pressure Conflict resolution Ideal for Chief Revenue Officers, sales leadership, and enterprise account teams preparing for contested renewals and complex deals. Chief Procurement Officers and commercial directors leading supplier and cost negotiations with long-term partners. C-suite and board audiences managing stakeholder, activist, regulator, or crisis conversations where positions harden fast. Senior legal, HR, and people leaders handling disputes, restructurings, and executive-level conflict. Audience outcomes Specific language moves (mirroring, labeling, calibrated questions) the audience can test in their next live call. A reframe of empathy as a commercial tool, separated from concession and rapport. A shared vocabulary across revenue, procurement, and leadership functions for the deals and disputes that matter. Sharper preparation habits for high-stakes conversations, including how to identify the “Black Swans” that reset a negotiation. Confidence handling the counterpart who will not move, drawn from cases where not moving had life-or-death consequences.