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The Idea Climbing Podcast

The Idea Climbing Podcast

By: Mark J. Carter
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If you’re passionate about bringing your big ideas to life and want actionable strategies for marketing, branding, sales, mentoring, networking and more this show is for you! You’ll learn from interviews with successful B2B thought leaders and entrepreneurs.© 2019 Mark J. Carter & ONE80 Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • How to do Simple Things Savagely Well with “Doc” Thom Mayer

    How to do Simple Things Savagely Well with “Doc” Thom Mayer
    Jul 23 2025
    Many self-help books and programs are overly complicated with dozens of steps or components. My guest, “Doc” Thom Mayer believes we can (and should) do simple things savagely well. We discuss how to do that in this episode. Doc is the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association, as well as a prominent figure in the fields of emergency medicine, sports medicine and leading in times of crisis. He has built a distinguished career focused on athlete and patient health, safety, emergency response, as well as the skills required to lead from the front lines, making significant contributions to clinical practice, medical education, and thought leadership. Doc has always thought that we've made life more complicated than it really needs to be. It shouldn't be as complicated as we've made it. And he believes all of us who are in the business of trying to help others, that's his business, that's your business, should simplify, simplify. Einstein said, “Simplify, simplify, but not too much.” Doc’s great friend, Mark Verstegen is the founder of Team Exos. Team Exos is the best athletes' performance company in the world. Had they been a country in the Paris Olympics, they would have finished sixth in the medal count. That's how elite the athletes are and how diverse the sports world is that he's involved with. And Mark is the one who said, “Do simple things done savagely well.” So, combining Einstein and Mark Verstegen, Doc has tried to do simple things done savagely well. What Does “Too Simple” Mean? An simple example of “too simple” is looking at the equation E equals MC squared. Energy equals mass times the square of the speed of light. When Doc learned that he thought, well, that's awfully simple. I Why didn't somebody come up with that before? The reason is that wasn't the equation. It turns out the real equation is not that simple. The real equation is E equals MC squared divided by one, divided by the square root of one minus V (velocity) divided by C squared. Well, that's a little more complicated. So, some genius in marketing somewhere decided let's just do E equals MC squared. So yes, simplify, but not too much. To simplify too much is when people fail to make the connections that are simple but have failed to be made because there's all kinds of corollaries of logical consequences that come out of that. How Do You Start to Simplify Something That's Complex? Doc says to start by taking something that is considered to be the status quo, thinking about it, reflecting on it, and starting to think, well, how do I put it to work? For example, Doc’s most recent book is titled “Leadership is Worthless, but Leading is Priceless, what I learned from 9-11, the NFL, and Ukraine”. Doc was in all those places. So, the simple idea is, leadership is worthless. How can that be? There's 50,000 books on Amazon alone that have leadership in the title. The problem is that most leadership titles and advice include the 25 this, the 7 of this, the 14 things, and people can't remember them. So, it's not simplified enough. So, to Doc, that contrarian idea is very simple. Leadership is worthless because it's what you say. And anybody can say anything. They often do say a lot, tediously and at length, and usually about themselves. So leading is priceless because it's what we do all day, every day. So, the simple thought is that leadership is worthless because it’s a noun, leading is priceless because it's a verb, what we do. So Doc always tells his audiences, or anybody who will sit and listen, you must change the noun to a verb. Once you change the noun to the verb, life becomes so much more simple. And therefore, new ideas are born, including the answers that are not above us in life, in an organization, in our family. They're within and among us. The question that we should be asking ourselves is not am I, will I become a leader? You already are. You’ve got to say “Today I'm a leader.
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    25 mins
  • The Power of Meaningful Sales Questions and How to Harness It with Leslie Venetz

    The Power of Meaningful Sales Questions and How to Harness It with Leslie Venetz
    Jul 15 2025
    If you want more quality sales conversations, you must ask more meaningful questions. I discuss how to do that in this episode with my guest, Leslie Venetz. Leslie is a top 1% B2B sales expert, sought-after speaker, and founder of The Sales-Led GTM Agency. Leslie has been recognized as a global sales thought leader and her insights have been viewed over 100 million times. Awarded LinkedIn Editorial Top Voice, 5x top 50 Sales Thought Leader, and 2024 Sales Innovator of the Year, Leslie’s also been featured in the Wall Street Journal and Success Magazine. Leslie is the co-author of Heels to Deals and author of the upcoming Profit-Generating Pipeline: A Proven Formula to Earn Trust & Drive Revenue. A Story and a Roadmap for a Successful Sales Journey Leslie didn’t realize that her ability to ask questions was so central to her sales success because it wasn't the thing she was told is most essential to success in the sales world. The things that you're told are essential to sales success are things like “never take no for an answer” and to “grind and crush objections” and other cliche sales advice. A couple of years into her sales career Leslie reflected on why she was having so much success, examining things like her sales style and overall sales philosophy. She realized that her approach to selling was drastically different than most of her peers. The types of questions Leslie was asking weren't just traditional qualifying questions or the superficial “What's keeping you up at night?” style questions. She was going much deeper. She realized those deeper, more meaningful questions are her sales superpower. It's something she’s embraced as a skill and has gotten even better at creating meaningful conversations with her prospects as a result. How to Go Deeper with Questions In middle school, high school, and college Leslie was a bit of a self-proclaimed nerd, a geek, and she means that in the most positive light ever. She was a varsity policy debater. Her weekends were spent on stage winning awards for policy debate. Later, she participated in her school’s Model UN (MUN). She was even the president of her college MUN group for a handful of years. So, Leslie spent a tremendous amount of time practicing rhetoric. She didn’t know at the time that she was developing a sales skill, but she was, in fact, accidentally practicing the exact foundation that eventually made her wildly successful in sales. That means when she was participating in a policy debate or a model United Nations round of debate, she couldn’t just ask “What's keeping you up at night?” and then move on to something else. That would never work if she wanted to have a focused conversation and effective debate. In that context, she had to pull the evidence together or create the reports to support her arguments. When it comes to sales conversations, it's nice to know that somebody, for instance, is worried about budgets. If you can create the dynamic where you have the privilege of asking, say, two or three more questions, what you might uncover is that it's not that they're just worried about budgets. They're worried that if they don't hit their budget numbers, that might require them to lay off some of their staff. And so, what's really causing the pain and what they really want to solve for isn't a little bit of ROI (which is what most salespeople commonly pitch). It is to avoid laying off one of their staff members, all of whom they worked with for years and have strong relationships with. Laying them off could damage those relationships. Leslie found that the ability to ask meaningful follow-up questions that allow you to go deep and uncover not just a superficial sort of pain that they're giving you gets to the real issue. Fast. You get to that thing that is going to cause them to want to put the time and effort and budget into solving their problem now instead of later. Those deeper questions make all the difference.
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    25 mins
  • The Case for Focusing on Face-to-Face Networking with Brian Wallace

    The Case for Focusing on Face-to-Face Networking with Brian Wallace
    Jul 8 2025
    The digital networking scene is booming. So is a growing lack of respect for common people skills and decency. I discuss the case for bringing them back through face-to-face networking with my guest, Brian Wallace. Brian is Founder of NowSourcing, an industry leading content marketing agency that makes the world's ideas simple, visual, and influential. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016-present, joined the SXSW Advisory Board in 2019-present and became an SMB Advisor for Lexmark in 2023. He is the Co-Founder for The Innovate Summit which launched in May 2024. We’ve gotten used to interacting in a digital landscape, including video conferencing most of the time. As we get further towards the edge of a proverbial cliff, assuming AI is going to make everything better and we have the totality of everything on the phones in our pockets, what do we do to avoid falling? We can perfect our sales pitches on LinkedIn and elevator pitches on Zoom, and it’s still not nearly as impactful as face-to-face networking. Getting Back to Being Human in Business Networking Situations What people need to understand is, we need to stop running away from humanity and trying to do everything at scale in a virtual world. We need to get more personal again instead of just building new connections on LinkedIn like a video game. Think about it… when is the last time you checked in on somebody you’ve known for a couple of years but haven’t spoken to recently and set up an in-person meeting? Brian says he can guarantee that everybody right now has a ton of missed messages they’re sifting through because they were focused on playing the LinkedIn game for so long. In person interactions have taken a big hit. We’ve forgotten how to make eye contact, we’ve forgotten how to shake hands, we’ve forgotten how to be human. The world needs to get better at being human again. When it comes to networking in general, more so for in person networking, we need to stop selling everybody, stop coming up with canned sales pitches, and start connecting meaningfully again. At the end of the day meaningful relationships are paramount to your success (or failure) in the business world. Brian believes the main thing to remember about face-to-face networking is to figure out how to be the most interesting person in the room or at least the most interesting version of yourself. That doesn’t mean you have to brag, grandstand, or be over-the-top energetically if you’re normally introverted. It just means that instead of asking meaningless questions about the weather, come up with better stuff and ask more meaningful questions that yield more meaningful answers and interactions. We don’t need dumb party tricks instead of connecting as humans, and that is what is wrong with the networking world. What NOT to do in Face-to-Face Networking Situations Let’s start by unpacking the word “networking”. Brian believes there’s a lot of misuse of the word, and that means developing the understanding of and behind that word. Because a lot of people depending on your personality type, how you show up in business, if you’re introverted or extroverted, in sales or a different career, “networking” means different things to different people. So, let’s just examine the networking event game. When you’re at any kind of conference, meetup, or event where part of the agenda is networking there are many misconceptions. So, what do we automatically think? We better come armed to the teeth with a fancy suit and a bunch of business cards. We’re just doing the business version of speed dating. We run around in this horrible, cutthroat way, and we’re just focused on sales and transactions instead of trying to make a good impression. But the truth is that people buy, people interact, people engage with the people that they know, like, and trust. It’s not rocket science. But it can seem that way if you have the wrong approach.
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    26 mins
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