Welcome And Sponsor Thanks

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Welcome to the Hemma Podcast, where we give you the tips, the tools, and strategies you need to be successful. My name is Brian, I'll be your host today, and today we have a very special guest, and his name is Bernard. Bernard is a seasoned SaaS executive with over 25 years of experience across sales, marketing, customer success, and go-to-market strategy. After holding executive roles in multiple software companies, Bernard developed a unique perspective on one of the biggest challenges facing B2B SaaS organizations today: fragmentation across teams. In 2025, he founded Holistic Selling, a framework designed to align every function in a company around one goal, delivering exceptional outcomes for customers. Through this content, podcast, and advisory work, Bernard helps SaaS leaders improve growth, profitability, and customer success performance across the entire life cycle. Bernard, welcome to the show. But before we get into the show, we'd like to say thank you to our sponsors. Today's episode is sponsored by Nouveau Desk Co-Working, the home of Arlington's most accessible production-ready podcast studio. Whether you're launching your first show or leveling up your content game, Nuvodesk gives you a professional studio environment where you can walk in, hit record, and create. But Nuvodesk is more than just a podcast room. It's fully equipped business hub with private offices, conference rooms, and workshop and event spaces designed to help you host, collaborate, and grow. If you're ready to elevate your brand, your business, or your voice, book your next recording or your next tour at Nuvodesk.com. Create here, work here, build here. Today's episode is brought to you by Nuvio, the all-in-one business platform designed to help you build, manage, and scale with confidence. With Nuvio, you can build your own website in minutes, manage all of your leads and customers through a powerful CRM. And if you're in the restaurant industry, you can run your entire operations using Nuvio's modern point of sale system. Whether you're a startup, a service provider, or a full-scale restaurant, Nuvio gives you everything you need in one place. Simple, connected, and built to grow with you. Discover why entrepreneurs are switching to Nuvio. Visit Nuvio.com and run your entire business on one platform. Well, welcome back to the Atma podcast. And during this show, we truly enjoy walking people through our framework, which is Build, Launch, Grow and Scale. And Build Launch Grow and Scale could look different for every different industry, different organizations. And but today we have somebody who oddly enough has a very similar uh structure to his organization, uh, which is Bernard with uh holistic selling. So, Bernard, thank you for jumping on to the show. Appreciate you jumping on with us. And if you'd like to introduce yourself and who you're with and and what got you started with holistic selling.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. First of all, Brian, really appreciate it. Great to do uh a podcast locally here in the DFW area. Um 25 years of industry experience in SaaS B2B across seven different companies. Uh I quote unquote retired from the corporate world in May of 2025 and right away decided that I wanted to share the lessons learned, my experience across those 25 years with my peers in the industry, which led to the creation of Holistic Setting and HolisticSetting.com. Uh that led into the, as you pointed out, the creation of 15 newsletters, the creation of a about a 90-page document that summarized them uh together. And then a couple of months ago, I started a podcast to uh grow the uh the audience for uh for the messaging. So we're right on the way and uh very much appreciate the opportunity to share my message with the audience today.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Wow. So 25 years in SaaS companies and just understanding how what did it what it takes to build a SaaS program. Right. And in today's age, we have lots of companies building with the the uh a rise of, you know, and and the rise of of AI and all these different softwares, it's kind of crazy, right? Indeed. Um But uh you you said something about patterns that kept showing up when you you were you know starting this business and and things that you wanted to fix, right? And help help business owners and leadership fix. What were what were those patterns that kept on popping up?

True North Starts With Customers

SPEAKER_01 4:33

Well, what I noticed, and again, the seven companies that worked for went from startups to very large industry uh companies. And what I noticed over and over again is when the company is not operating at at full capacity, when sales are not coming in, when profitability is lacking, companies tend to try to fix it with functional programs. Um maybe we need to replace a sales team, maybe we need to replace the sales methodology, maybe we need to invent new marketing campaigns, or we need to implement new customer success programs or processes. Inevitably, one after the other, those might create a a burst on a temporary basis, but it does not solve the fundamental problem. So what is the fundamental problem? The fundamental problem is a lack of alignment across the organization. Now, what does that mean? When you say lack of alignment, lack of alignment towards what? You need to first define what the true north is in the organization so that you know what to align against. And the true north in the organization has to be the point of contact with the customer and the prospect. That conversation, that email, every touch point with the customer and the prospect through the entire life cycle has to be engineered to deliver extraordinary experiences and outcomes to those customers and prospects at every touch point. It starts there. That is the true north. Then what you need to do is make sure that all that the organization is organized to enable that process, enable the frontline team members to deliver those extraordinary experiences and outcomes to customers and prospects at every touch point. Alignment means two things alignment across functions. So making sure that finance, marketing, go to market, sales, product development, develop uh, product uh management, development, customer success management are all aligned against that true north. And also alignment at all levels of the organization, from what I call foundational, which is the cultural elements, to the strategies you deploy, the tactics you deploy, and the operational processes that guide the frontline team members to deliver those great experiences to the customers at every touch point. So that's what it means. And I realized that I started populating those newsletters that um that that framework, I had not seen it before. And so that gave me the motivation to continue uh publishing uh the content and and now trying to obviously drive the the audience for it.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

That's awesome. That's awesome. It's it kind of reminds me of like um uh you know some of the books I've been reading and listening to um recently is just making sure that the entire team is aligned with the with one true goal, right? Exactly. But they that they true have clarity uh within what they're actually um and I think this this falls a lot on CEOs too as well. Um me too. Like this happens a lot with uh where we we can see the vision in our head, we know where we're going, right, uh, but the team doesn't, right? Or the customer doesn't. Actually, we just had this situation just happen today where um uh luckily we you know uh we we were able to to clarify what where that project was going. Uh but it was an implementation of a software, right? And because we knew where it was going, we could see the finish line, but the customer couldn't. And they're like, well, I I still can't see it. And so we did have to skip ahead and say, okay, let me let us show you. And so that way uh what what the software is capable of doing. Uh so we had to kind of skip a step just to show them, hey, this is this is what it's capable of doing. And they're like, Wow, now I have hope, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yeah. One of my taglines is make the customers the heroes of your story, right? It's always about the customers, never about us. Yeah. So the customers are the center of the universe. But very closely attached to that is the frontline team members who have those touch points with the customers and the prospects. And how do we equip them, how do we enable them to deliver those extraordinary experience experiences and outcomes? That has to start there. If you use that as your true north and you make sure that all the strategies and the tactics are set up to enable those moments of truth, you're gonna be a very successful SaaS B2B company.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Wow. Yeah, awesome, awesome. Um, and so we go kind of, you know, uh this podcast, we go through the build, launch, grow scale. And uh I always enjoyed the launch because everybody we we talk about build is building the foundation, right? Right. Uh now we go into launch and execution really is really what uh launch is about. Um so you you just you didn't just launch a company. I mean, you built a framework before launching, right? You you had those 15 newsletters, you had that uh 89 to 90 page methodology that you what drove that approach before, you know, what what drove you to do that before you even go into the market?

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Yeah, the day after I uh quote unquote retired from corporate life, I woke up and I said, I've I've learned so much. 25 years in the industry, I took a lot of notes and and I wanted to I wanted to give back. I wanted to uh to to make sure that I could share that experience with others in the industry. So uh my passion was how do I share everything that I've learned, how do I help others in the industry uh improve the results of their business, improve their the the success they can have with with their their own customers. Uh so that was that was the motivation right from the get-go. Uh and that motivation is still here today, obviously. It's all about giving back, it's all about creating value. Um I'm adopting for myself the same principle that I'm teaching in the in the holistic selling framework, which is how can I deliver extraordinary experiences and outcomes to my customers, my audience, at every touch point. That will continue to guide me. How do I make sure that every article, every podcast, every newsletter is full of insight so that it can drive uh an extraordinary experience?

The Four Levels Of Alignment

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Awesome. And and you have, which is funny, uh you have a framework similar to ours uh for right, for foundational, strategic, tactical, and operational. Right. Can you walk us through those uh that that framework?

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Yeah, I'd be happy to. And as as I started, I'm a big believer in servant leadership, um, and uh it's really inherent to the to the framework. Um so I first of all started with building the logo, and the logo is built on an inverse pyramid that obviously has the customers and the frontline team members on top, and those four levels built up to that. So the first level at the bottom is the foundational level, that's the culture of the enterprise. So culture is a bit abstract, and I realized I need to be more pragmatic as to how to impress upon my audience how you build the right um uh culture. So the first important element of culture is your purpose. What is the purpose of the organization? And it's very important to come up with a purpose that is bigger than yourself. It has to be outside in driven, it has to be business outcome driven, but it has to be bigger than yourself. The purpose is not just to make money, the purpose is something bigger than than than than yourself. That purpose has to be inspiring for employees, customers, and prospects to engage with the brand. It's so fundamental. And we've seen this time and time again in the world of business, Apple being a good example with the be different logo back in the 80s and the 90s. So very important. The second key element is values. The values drive the behaviors and and the way that you act in between yourselves and in front of customers and prospects. And we can touch base on the values a bit later in in this conversation. So that's the foundational level and the role of the leadership team, especially the CEO, to make sure that uh the values are being uh key to every interaction, every behavior, every day for every employee in the company. How do you make that happen? The strategic level then is the building blocks of the functional strategies: finance, sales, marketing, go to market, product management, customer success management, et cetera. Now obviously those strategies exist in every organization. The key though is how aligned are they to enable the front time the frontline team members to deliver those extraordinary experiences and outcomes. So it's all about alignment of all the strategies. And I could go in great details in this, but whether it's the financial model that you adopt, whether it's the the power of your brand, the impact of your reputation in the marketplace, uh, the impact of the product quality on the activities of product management and development, uh and uh and the the the the um uh the organization that you have in your in your sales team to make sure that you have the right capacity in the right in the right areas to deliver the right outcomes to your customers. All of that has to be aligned to your true north. Then you go into tactics, and uh it's a very important level because uh many times I've been in organizations where the leadership team says, here's the strategy, go make it happen. And we all look at each other and we go, so how do we interpret the strategy when we actually do our job? Right? Yeah. And we end up interpreting it in somewhat different ways. So the tactical level is very important to convert the strategies into what I call how-to guides for the for the frontline team members. How do you convert the strategy into very specific things that they can lean on to delight customers and prospects? A simple example is um playbooks, sales playbooks and sales plays. How do you convert your solutions into a message that's driven by your business outcomes to make sure that you understand what kind of conversations you I want to have with the customers and the prospects to be able to win their trust. And then finally, operations, which is very much ground zero, where you have four key processes lead generation, pipeline management, sales execute, sales execution, and uh uh account management and customer success management, actually five processes that are inherent to how they do their jobs every day. So the more programmatic those areas are, the more successful you're going to be. So all of that again has to be subjugated to the uh the true north, and all of those uh layers have to be aligned towards that true north of delighting customers and prospects at every touch point.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

That's awesome. Yeah, that's so funny because um, you know, uh I think it's important that um uh uh that there is clarity, right? Uh everybody learns differently, and I've learned that uh the same thing is when uh you know employees will actually ask for SOPs, as you know, standard operating procedures and how-tos, um, you know, just to make sure that they're at least at a high level doing doing it right, right? Right. And so um yeah, sometimes we we get caught up in and I think this happens to a lot of CEOs where or uh you know independent leaders where they kind of just go, right? They they don't really need to be told, right? And so, but not everybody operates that way.

Content And Podcasts As Go To Market

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, I think it's it's very important again to guide the frontline teams to help them deliver those extraordinary experiences and outcomes. It it it's certainly the the the the better the processes are that guide them along the way, the more consistent the output is going to be, the more consistent the outcome is going to be, and that's how you're gonna win the hearts and minds of your customers and prospects at every touch point.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

That's awesome. So you've just also launched a podcast just like this one, right? Uh recently. How does content creation play an overall goal for go-to-market strategy?

SPEAKER_01 16:41

Content creation is everything these days, as as you well know, right? It's so important for um my audience to find me, right? And to find me by way of the content that I'm publishing on on LinkedIn as well as uh you know YouTube, uh, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, X, and TikTok, and so on and so forth. So, first of all, you gotta create the content. Fortunately, I had 15 newsletters to uh to rely on. I've continued to build the content, and I realized after I published the newsletters that I needed to go the extra mile to build the audience. So I came up with the idea of the podcast as a way to not only publish my content but invite uh very valuable, esteemed guests on my podcast for them to share their uh insights in the context of the holistic setting framework. And I've now this morning published my tenth podcast episode uh and I'm gonna continue to do so for the foreseeable future on Tuesday morning every week to make sure that I continue to uh share uh those insights uh with my audience. Uh so absolutely critical to continue creating content and finding ways to publish that content to make sure that the audience can can find it, learn from it, and and hopefully that can grow over time.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Yeah. I think it's so funny because um uh we've been teaching B2B specifically. If you're in a B2B industry and you're um you're struggling, right? Because B2B is so different than B2C. Absolutely. Right? B2C, you can run campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. It's it's a different monster. But B2B is relationship-based, right? It's it's a lot of relationship-based. And so how do you expand on that? And so um podcast is a great way to do that because, like you said, you're bringing on guests, you're filling in that pipeline of people that you may have not even run to because now you have access to them. Because who doesn't like to talk about themselves on on you know social media uh and and promote their business, right? Right. Uh, but not just that, um, podcast is great because uh we use it to repurpose content on social media uh and people are looking for thought leaders, right? They're looking for people that's like, does this does this person actually know what they're talking about? Like if they're actually gonna help me with my business, it doesn't matter what whether it's a software, whether it's a business service, if you're if you're supporting a business um investment, they want to know that you know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Yes, and the key for me is I launched the idea of a podcast. I reached out to my first group of ten uh friends in the industry. And nine out of ten right away said absolutely would love to do it. The last person was out of the country, couldn't do it at the time. So I was very pleased to see the level of support that the podcast initially got. And after the the the ninth episode last week, I'm now starting to get requests from industry leaders to say, hey, I'd love to have a conversation with you on your podcast. So it's great to see that I'm starting to get a a little bit of you know the next step coming in in terms of in terms of people volunteering to uh to join me on the podcast. And I think that's absolutely fantastic to uh to see that evolution over time.

Value Creation And Better Commitments

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Yeah, I get text messages all the time about hey, can I can I be on your podcast? And you know, it's it's great lead generation, to be honest with you. Yes. Um so let's go into the grow phase, right? Where um, you know, now we're thinking systems, thinking leadership, thinking value creation, right? Um so you define success as the value you deliver to others. How does this philosophy show up in how you work with SaaS leadership teams?

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah, so it's core to everything. Um value creation is not only a value of the holistic setting framework, it's also a mindset that needs to pervade the entire the entire company. What does value creation mean? It means that in every interaction with anyone, whether it's a colleague within the company or a prospect and a customer, always look at how can I make that person's life better? How can I deliver value to that person? That mindset is really important because that's how you're gonna develop relationships that are truly value-based, where you can win the hearts and minds of the people around you. Especially with customers and prospects, go into every interaction with something of value you can leave behind. Sometimes early in the sales cycle it could be an insight, sometimes later on it could be a great business case or a great proposal. The bottom line is always be prepared to deliver value. Why is that important? Because every time you deliver incremental value to the prospect or the customer, it puts you in a position to ask for incremental commitment. Make sure that right from the first interaction, it's a give and take relationship. Yeah. Right. You don't want to be in a position where you give, give, give. Uh Kino Held me, one of my guests mentioned, and and they take, take, take. That's not a relationship. Yeah. Right. So every point, every every interaction, put yourself in a position where you have something to Give, you have an insight, you have something of value, it gives you the opportunity to ask for something in return. And as that grows through the relationship, the the it builds the it'll build it builds a partnership with a customer on an equal footing that allows you then to win the hearts and mind and win the evaluation and the deal at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

It's so funny because we've had multiple guests on this podcast, okay? And this topic keeps on popping up. And these are successful people, successful business owners, different industries. And the the topic that keeps on popping up is if you want to grow, you have to be selfless instead of being selfish. Absolutely. And so it's so funny because um when you put the customer first, and I'm talking multiple people that have come onto the podcast, it says you have to put others first, and then when it's time, they'll take care of you. Right? Um so that's so interesting that this topic just keeps on popping up with multiple leaders, multiple guests, and and you just you know verified it.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

It's interesting. Actually, two of my guests uh so far have come up with a tagline saying employee first, customer always. So it's interesting because their point of view is if you truly want to deliver value to the customers, you have to take care of your employees first, which is core to the holistic selling framework. Yeah. You got to take care of your frontline employees as especially, and you need to enable them to delight the customers and the prospects at every touch point. So employee for first, customer always, I think is a great uh great slogan.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

Trevor Burrus, Jr. That's awesome. So when a SaaS company is experiencing inconsistent growth or broken pipeline conversion, where do you typically start your diagnosis?

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Well, that's a great question. What I've seen a lot of companies do when you have broken pipeline or lack of sales success, the company sort of focuses on the sales function and the BDR, SDR function. What's wrong with the sales team? What's wrong with the business development team? What do we need to do differently? Do we need to change the team? Is it a talent problem? Is it a methodology problem? Is it a process problem? And they zero in on that. And the whole point of the holistic selling methodology is yes, it's important, it's necessary, but absolutely not sufficient to ensure success. So where I recommend is to go through a whole company diagnostic. Look at the holistic selling assessment that I'm about to launch in the next couple of weeks as a means to evaluate how the entire company is organized to drive your sales success and the success of your customers. It's so important because things are affecting uh the performance of the sales team that are not under the sales team's sphere of control. How uh is your brand relevant? Is your purpose relevant? Is your reputation impacting your ability to sell? All of those things are absolutely critical to enable your sales team to succeed. And so you've got to have the intellectual integrity to really look at every facet of the company and look at uh building an assessment to truly understand what are the root causes of our lack of success. And if you do it that way, you're gonna come up with a list of initiatives that you can prioritize into a corrective action plan that will enable you to truly solve the root cause of the problem instead of saying I gotta replace that sales leader or I gotta change my sales methodology, which is by far not enough to solve the problem long term.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Wow. Wow. And so um it's so funny because this leads into our next question, which is what are the most common mistakes CEOs make when trying to scale their go-to market engine?

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Yeah, once again, I think the the first mistake is focus on sales. You've got to have as a CEO, I mean the role of CEO is absolutely the most critical in the enterprise from an alignment standpoint. So is every function, is every level in the organization aligned to enable the frontline team members to delight customers and prospect at every touch point. And it it's so important to make sure that you have the right financial strategy, the right product management strategy, the right go-to-market strategy, the right sales strategy, the right customer success management strategy, and they're all aligned against that that true know of that purpose. And so the role of a CEO is truly to enable that that alignment as opposed to I've got a sales problem, I've got to fix sales.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Yeah. Which is I think it I think it gets the best of all most CEOs, right? Um because they do get overwhelmed. They get overwhelmed with seeing the overall picture, but they also get overwhelmed with uh maybe there's a problem with their finances, maybe there's a problem with operations, and they're now getting called by customers. And you know, I think that uh I think you're right, you know, like um most CEOs dig overwhelmed, and sometimes they need somebody like you to say, hey, slow down, take a step back, let's fix these things first before you get to to Yes.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

No, I I I think I think hopefully over time I'll be able to get a relationship going with some of the CEOs in the industry to work alongside them to help improve, if you will, the alignment of the organization and and ensure their success. That's only one of my goals going forward.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Awesome. And and speaking of, what you know, you you've uh you're in the early stages, right? You're in the early stages of your business of a holistic selling journey. Uh, what does scaling this business look like for the next three or five years? Great question.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

Uh if I take a step back for a second, the first was get the framework in my head, right? Um come up with the idea. And the idea was holistic selling uh and the true north we talked about, then build the content, right? Articulate the content. And what I've done that I think is different from everything else that I've been seeing is there's been a few books and articles that have talked about value creation at a high level, for example, but have not taken it down through the the the uh the foundational strategic uh tactical and and operational level. So I basically build you know the content for about four months last year. So create the content, publish the content. I move to the podcast to continue publishing the content, creating the audience. Right. My next goal is find signs as to whether I can start becoming viral. Right. Is this thing feeding on itself? Is it is it growing by you know beyond the scale that I'm at right now? I'm still very small. I'm I'm very humble as to where I am right now, but can I see signs of viral adoption? When I I'm gonna start seeing those signs, my next step is gonna be monetizing the content. Right. And so what does that mean? I'm I'm working on a framework right now to figure out how will I, at the right time, if I get there, monetize uh my the the framework. And it could be a uh a function of personal involvement with CEOs and leadership teams, it could be online tools that I can monetize. Uh it could be also leveraging partners on on the podcast or that that are willing to contribute to being guests on the podcast, etc. So we'll see what forms it takes. I have a lot, uh I have a lot to learn. But that's the approach. Content creation, content publishing, audience building, becoming viral, and then and then see if I can turn that into uh monetizing the framework uh at a certain point in time. And I've listened to a lot of podcasts about podcasting. Everybody says the same thing. You have to be passionate about an idea you're expert in. Start there. Don't think about making money in Israel soon. That's not the that's not the point. The point is continue to leverage your expertise on something you're passionate about. It may take one, two, three years to get to a point where you can monetize the the brand that you've built. So I'm no in a hur I'm I'm I'm in no hurry. And uh but I will continue to be consistent in in building the audience and and we'll see where it goes.

SPEAKER_00 30:21

Awesome, awesome. So what would it look like if more SaaS companies truly adopted this holistic model? Uh and what change what changes, what's going to change in the industry if they if they adopt the holistic selling model?

SPEAKER_01 30:34

Yeah, let's so let's assume for a second that holistic selling becomes viral and more and more companies in the in the in the industry adopt it. What would be different? I I think what would be different is value creation. If I have to sum it up with one element, is the ability to create more value to customers, which you can then convert into higher growth and higher profitability for yourself. What will make that happen is once again the ability to enable your frontline team members to deliver extraordinary experiences and outcomes to customers and prospects, which will then enable you to drive that value for the customers and enable that value across the entire life cycle of the customer, uh, from finding, identifying the right prospects, nurturing them, converting them, obviously engaging in the sales cycle with them through uh you know engagement, uh differentiation and close. And then once they become a customer, how do I implement, how do I uh get them to adopt the solution, how do I retain them, how do I grow them, and ultimately how do I turn them into advocates to fuel that virtual virtuous cycle of growth that ultimately will be good for everybody. So that would be what I could see would would impact the industry.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

So funny because uh um, you know, you kind of explain what we call a customer journey, yes, right, which is how do they become aware of your business? Um, you know, how do we get them interested in asking questions? Um, how do we get them to convert, right? Which is hey, uh let's let's try this out. Let's try this out. Um but I think that people miss you know stop there and um they don't go to the next step, which is um delighting them, which you said, right? And and you're I you know everything you're saying is is uh is is true, you know, because most people they stop at this conversion. They're like, I got the money, I'm good. And uh that's not true.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

It doesn't it doesn't work that way anymore.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

No, it doesn't. You have to you have to do the next step, which is delight the customer that they they are happy, they're satisfied. Um, you know, buyer's remorse is real, right? Uh and buyer's remorse happens almost instantly sometimes, right? Uh after they even pay you. They they have to have that sense of hope, the sense of hope. And your team needs to be equipped to give them that hope and then to help that customer not just be delight but advocate, right? And and advocation, um, which is funny because I have an ebook and it's called The Customer Journey, which is this five, the five points we just talked about, and it's aligned to everything you're talking about. Um and so I think that everything you're on the right path, right? Um, and so you know, um it it's I think that that everything you're saying is something what people need to hear. And unfortunately, you know, um people sometimes they want to hear things, it's not gonna help their business, right? It's not gonna help their business. You have to tell them what they need to hear.

Values Empathy And Listening To Win

SPEAKER_01 33:34

I I I agree. And and I'm also learning along the way that how do you make the messaging consumable? We're in the day and age, as we know, that everybody lives by by the you know the short message, right? It's the soundbite that wins. And I see this in the early stages of the podcast. You know, the the long form 30-minute podcasts may have uh a certain amount of of views, but the shorts have 10 to 20 times more views, right? And so continuing to use the the 30-second, 60-second soundbite to propagate the message. Right. I think is going to continue to be very important so that I I can build the base, right, the audience, uh, through those uh those sound bites uh and leveraging obviously my guests as part of the process.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Um so at the core of your work are values, like accountability, integrity, empathy, and value creation. Uh when you think long-term, what impact do you want holistic selling to have in the SaaS industry?

SPEAKER_01 34:38

I think that's that's very core to my beliefs, very core to the impact I want to have on the industry, is a big word, but every person who's gonna be listening to the message. Values are fundamental. And you pointed them out. Accountability, integrity, empathy, humility, uh, respect, and value creation. I selected those very, very carefully because they all are critical to doing business the right way. Accountability is of course being able to own your circumstances, integrity is be a person of your word and and and be uh uh be truthful. Um empathy is listen intently to the other person to truly understand their situation. Humility is being able to understand your strength but also your your blind spots and be able to learn, be able to take feedback. Respect, as we know, is respect everybody around you. And value creation is that notion again of deliver value to everyone you interact with, always be ready to deliver value in every interaction. And I've seen organizations when they practice those values, they will flourish. If you think on the other side of any organization for that matter, where the leaders do not have integrity, do not have accountability, do not have empathy, do not have humility, don't care about value creation, don't respect others, those organizations invariably always collapse under their own weight of deception. And so we've seen this time and time again. So I truly believe that the values are inherent to the success of any organization.

SPEAKER_00 36:15

Yeah. Well, Renard, before we close this out, I just had something that came up in my mind. And uh when we're talking about one of your core values, which is empathy, uh, I have a mentor that says one thing to me, and um, he says it constantly. You know, um, as we grow up, it takes us what, three to five years to learn how to speak, but it takes us our entire lives to learn how to listen. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

And it's it's hard. We've seen this time and time again, even even in this day and age, right? Salespeople go into a conversation and they talk. Yeah. No, I always have this key message of diagnose before you prescribe. Diagnose means ask questions, listen, follow-up questions, listen. Probe, truly understand the root cause of the problem that's afflicting the customer before you offer any advice.

SPEAKER_02 37:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:05

First of all, the customer will appreciate you take the time to understand their problems and the root cause of the problem, not the symptom. But then also it will also give you the ammunition to make sure you can design a successful solution for to enable the remedy and solve the root cause that's afflicting them. So it's essential, yet it's not an easy behavior to change.

Where To Find Bernard And Closing

SPEAKER_00 37:29

And so that's part obviously of the journey that I'm on. Awesome, awesome. Well, Bernard, thank you for jumping on this podcast. We appreciate Bernard being on here and showing his wisdom. You know, uh he's starting up, but doesn't mean that he doesn't have 25 years of experience with SaaS program. So um, Bernard, where can we find you if people are looking for you um on the internet?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Yeah, I would say first of all, look for uh all the work that I've published on LinkedIn, uh the newsletters and the podcasts. You can also go to www.holist.holholisticselling.com, a website that I've upgraded a couple of months ago. That will give you the key messages. And if you want to reach out to me personally, bg at holisticselling.com is my email address, and feel free to reach out.

SPEAKER_00 38:15

Awesome. Well, Bernard, once again, thank you for being on the show. We hope you guys learned a little bit about um what it takes to go to market and launch a SaaS business. And it doesn't look any different than any other business, but just uh rudimentally needed to find um what your value is, and Bernard, you did a great job today. So we thank you for being on the show. We thank you for sharing your wisdom and holistic selling and damage and listening and the first time.