StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 21d – An Interview with Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 21d – An Interview with Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty explores how professional salespeople can move customers beyond being merely satisfied to true loyalty such that they have stopped shopping and are highly resistant to competitors’ appeals. During our discussion, Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty: How to turn your sales force into a loyalty force. and Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • what true customer loyalty is
  • why customer loyalty programs do not make customers loyal
  • the benefits of attaining real customer loyalty
  • how to earn customer loyalty using the Action Selling process

Additional Information

In addition to the invaluable selling skills insight Duane shares in Masters of Loyalty and this special edition podcast, please visit his company’s Sales Training or Sales Management site. To discover why this selling skill is so effective at maximizing sales productivity, purchase Duane’s book: Masters of Loyalty.

Complimenting Masters of Loyalty, are Duane’s four other books on the consultative sales process including:


Read a Summary of the above Sales Books.

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About the Author

Duane Sparks, author of Masters of Loyalty, is Chairman and Founder of The Sales Board, a Minneapolis-based strategic sales training company that has trained and certified more than 350,000 salespeople in more than 3,000 groups in the system and skills of Action Selling. He has written five sales books, personally facilitated more than 300 Action Selling training sessions and continues to engage in the business and art of the strategic sales process. Read Duane’s full biography and the history of Action Selling Sales Management Training.

Leadership Inspirations – Great Minds

“Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.”

Eleanor Roosevelt
First Lady of the United States
(1933 – 1945)

A Better Brand of Leadership

Is leadership defined solely by results? Most of the flood of leader literature makes that assumption. Leaders get things done. They win wars, championships, fortune, fame. They cure sick teams, organizations, whole countries. Not by themselves, of course – we followers have a limited role, as foot soldiers, employees, voters, or, as Michael Jordan once memorably described his Chicago Bulls teammates, “my supporting cast.” But the leader is that (usually) charismatic individual who is somehow able to motivate or drive or carry his/her team to achieve an (often) unlikely goal. Conversely, the absence of significant achievement generally signifies a leadership-free environment.

Much of what we think about leadership follows from this original assumption. We think, for example, that the tougher the goal, the greater the leader; our most iconic leaders – the Pattons, the Lombardis, the Iacoccas – were somehow able to achieve the impossible. It is the magnitude of their achievements that make them great leaders, not their methods; who cares, in fact, about their methods, as long as they were able to get something of extraordinary importance done?


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About the Authors

David Esler and Myra Kruger are the authors of the book The Pursuit of Something Better. They combined their 30 years of corporate communication, human resources, and consulting experience into Esler Kruger Associates in 1987. Their consulting firm focuses on culture change, organizational surveys, and executive counsel in effective leadership. Esler and Kruger are based in Highland Park, Illinois.

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice Article

Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice 7 – Be Prepared from the Start

StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Best Practice ArticleBusiness performance assessments aggregate huge amounts of data in order to provide a very few high value insights. (See Figure 1: Data Refinement and Consolidation Model below) As an assessment progresses, evaluators often feel increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of data they must sift through, organize, and analyze. Time seems to slip away and pressure to find the key insights mounts; making the objective appear to be that of finding a needle in a haystack with only a moment’s notice. To be successful requires thoughtful, deliberate preparation.


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Leadership Inspirations – Find a Way

“When faced with a challenge, look for a way, not a way out.”

David Weatherford