The Sweeney Agency

About Dr. Kevin Freiberg - Sales and Customer Service Speaker:

Dr. Kevin Freiberg helps business leaders better understand the impact of their choices, attitudes and behaviors on corporate culture and organizational performance. He has challenged corporate leaders all over the world to create unmatched productivity, customer service, and profitability by becoming faithful, devoted, hardworking servants of the people they lead.

Dr. Freiberg is the author of a new book BOOM! 7 Choices for Blowing the Doors Off Business-as-Usual!. BOOM! is about the choices leaders and their people must make to create a culture of commitment and accountability—a culture where people take charge of their lives at work and create the freedom to achieve extraordinary business results. This book follows the Freibergs’ international bestseller NUTS! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, and its sequel, GUTS! Companies that Blow the Doors Off Business-as-Usual.

Recently named one of the top 50 Best Minds on Leadership by Leadership Excellence Magazine, Dr. Freiberg is among the most influential voices on the speaking circuit today. He is also among a select group of thought leaders working with Collective IQ, the top corporate venture advisor and platform in the world, to bring growth and innovation to their clients. Kevin has made a career out of understanding the core values and unconventional strategies used by world-class leaders. His book NUTS! was hailed by the Financial Times as one of the top five global business books of the year.

Dr. Freiberg has appeared on CNBC, CBS Sunday Morning, and the CBS Morning News for his views on the critical links between leadership, corporate culture and exceptional customer loyalty. He has also appeared on the television series Lessons in Excellence for CNBC India. His articles and interviews have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Investor’s Business Daily.

As the founder and CEO of the San Diego Consulting Group, Inc. and its professional speaking firm, freibergs.com, Kevin helps business leaders translate the winning strategies from enduring great companies into their own models of success. He is widely acknowledged for his expertise in helping clients build strong, purposeful cultures. Kevin has a global practice working with firms in Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, India, the Middle East, Central and South America, as well as companies throughout the United States and Canada.

What Dr. Kevin Freiberg Talks About:

How to Build an Unforgettable Leadership Brand
Every person has a personal brand. Is yours engaging or toxic? This speech is designed to help you and your team identify, refuel, build-on and deliver an unforgettable leadership brand.

A BRAND is a promise of a pending experience. In the context of YOU, INC., your brand says to the world: When you deal with me, here’s what you can expect.

Right now, among your colleagues, boss, vendors and customers you have a leadership brand—a reputation. What kind of leader do all these people anticipate, when they think of working with you?

Do they think; unforgettable—great to work with, great to work for, get it done, go-to person, industry expert, thought leader, product guru, coach, mentor? Or to the contrary?

If you were to build an unforgettable, we-can’t-live-without-you, leadership brand, here are some things to work on:

• Act like a Connoisseur. A connoisseur knows what’s new and innovative, who's who in the industry, and what’s lurking on the horizon. Think about it, every day around YOU people are getting better, technology is advancing, information is exploding and customers are getting smarter and more demanding. Are you keeping up? Start today; begin building a reputation for being a connoisseur in your field.
• Act with Gumption. Thriving brands are built on GUMPTION—the courage to act. It means you initiate projects, find ways to cut costs, search for new revenue streams, build creative marketing campaigns and grow sales… without being asked. And, if you haven’t got a clue about how, you surround yourself with a network of people who do and then you learn like crazy.
• Sell with Passion. In business everyone sells. Whether you are the ambassador of first impressions who answers the phones or the CEO. Is your passion for what you are doing contagious? Learn how to tell your business and personal story so it’s interesting, engaging and highly contagious—so you can’t help but catch it.
• Keep Great Company. You’re only as cool, stimulating, adventurous, thoughtful, reflective, spiritual, disciplined (you get the point) as the people with whom you associate. When you think of the gang you hang with, what’s their COLLECTIVE IQ, EQ, SQ or any other Q? Do something to broaden your network and surround yourself with people who will stretch you in directions to enhance your leadership brand.

This presentation gives you examples, ideas and tools that will immediately make a difference in how you lead. You will walk away knowing what it takes to grow a world-class leadership brand.

Gutsy Leadership
Leaders shape culture, which in turn, shapes performance and determines the ultimate financial condition of your business. Leadership is a choice, not a position. If we got rid of your title would people still follow you?

In this theme we unpack the character strengths of great leaders and show you how these strengths play out in some of the world’s most revolutionary companies. Our objective here is to help you dramatically accelerate the development of leaders at every level within your company.

We want to help you grow leaders who can energize and inspire others, who refuse to be held hostage by history and who have the GUTS to move your organization in bold new directions.

Pockets of Excellence
You learn what it takes to establish a critical mass of players who OWN IT. You know the type; the shakers and movers who take initiative vs. take orders. They don’t make excuses, they make things happen.

They might be victims of a crummy economy, an industry in turmoil or an organization undergoing significant change, yet they refuse to be victimized. Instead, they bring energy, vitality, creativity and the best of themselves to work—they are people of excellence and they create POCKETS OF EXCELLENCE.

You’ll get timeless choices, stories to share and actions to use immediately to create your own pockets of excellence.

Leading Innovation
Want to move innovation from a tired cliché to a powerful competitive advantage? Want to make it everyone’s job to innovate?

We layout the preconditions leaders must create to make innovation a way of life—a deeply embedded part of your cultural DNA. Find out how the most creative companies in the world innovate BEYOND customer expectations. Learn what the best leaders do to inspire ingenuity and unleash imagination—to create a place that is perpetually loaded with fresh ideas.

We will also take you behind the scenes and show you how, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the people of Tata Motors achieved the impossible by creating the Tata Nano, a 1 Lakh ($2500) car that has taken the world by storm.

Culture and Engagement
What if your company had a reputation for being the BEST PLACE, where the BEST PEOPLE, can do their BEST WORK? We’re talking serious competitive advantage!

You can deliver on the brand promise you make to your employees; it means creating a place where impassioned people come to work fully awake, fully engaged and committed to driving growth.

We’ll unpack Southwest Airlines’ crazy, yet very purposeful recipe for creating one of the most productive workforces in the world with 37 consecutive years of profitability. The greatest success story in the history of commercial aviation boasts a culture in which 35,000+ people are fully committed and inspired to achieve extremely high productivity, service, safety and financial objectives. This is an exciting, behind-the-scenes look into an all-American, yet globally recognized brand that will help you create your own blueprint for success.

Service from the Inside-Out
Service and loyalty are the result of leadership from the inside out—the consistent, diehard execution of a people-first service philosophy. This theme addresses the critical links between leaders who adhere to a people-first philosophy, turned-on, passionate employees who give something of themselves in addition to just doing the job and fiercely devoted customers who evangelistically tell your story.

The research is very clear. Companies known for world-class service, quality and hospitality work hard to create cultures (even in tough times) where employees feel honored and served; people truly trust and connect with each other; seamless collaboration translates into flawless execution and work is fun.

This theme allows you to borrow from the best and create your own people-first service strategy. We have written about many of the most admired companies and global service brands around and we’re passionate about revealing the chutzpah and details behind their success.

Hungry for Change
New business models are disrupting the old. The rules of your industry are being rewritten. The future is unpredictable and the pace of change continues to accelerate. If you want to be built to last you must be built to change. The only question is: Will the changes you make be opportunity led or crisis driven?

This theme is about getting in the right frame of mind—one that’s hungry for change. It’s about building a YES-FAST culture where people move with a sense of urgency, declare war on complacency and say yes to new skills, new relationships, new business models, new products and new markets. You have a choice. You can lean on yesterday’s headlines and hope that what you’ve been doing will carry you into the future, or you can change.

Fiercely Devoted Customers
We’ll share the key factors that will take you from plain vanilla consumer satisfaction to extreme customer loyalty; from simply being a vendor of choice to being a trusted advisor and a strategic partner with your clients.

What if your team knew more about the pressures, pain points, preferences and particular nuances of your customers than anyone? What if they positioned themselves as industry experts who are better than anyone at providing relevant solutions? What if they mastered the discipline of follow-up and the art of making customers feel special long after the solution is delivered?

Using these strategies your team can become the go-to people that fiercely devoted customers can’t live without and competitors can’t dethrone.

Differentiate – Stand Out in a Crowd
Radically different. Unforgettably distinct. Easily distinguished. Do these words describe your business?

In a world of mimicry and me-tooism, you can’t be a leader by playing follow the leader. You lead by constantly finding new ways to add value. We will show you what it takes to de-commoditize your business and stand out in an overcrowded market.

We will give you some vivid examples of extraordinary companies that are special. What’s so special about being special? Special means you are unforgettable. Special means that if we eliminated your business tomorrow you would be missed. Special means your customers can’t live without you. Special makes the comparison with your competitors totally irrelevant because you stand out and give your customers something they can’t get anywhere else.

Making a Profit – Making a Difference (CSR)
You will learn how some of the world’s most admired companies rally around causes that go beyond making money to making the world a better place. For these firms Corporate Social Responsibility is more than a PR tactic, sales strategy or a trend. CSR is a way of doing business—and it’s profitable. In a world where corporate behavior is under a microscope, socially-minded customers want to do business with socially-minded companies.

Companies that care about the societies in which they operate also endear themselves to socially-minded employees, partners and investors. Whether it’s green thinking, training entrepreneurs in poor villages to be self-sustaining or restoring disaster-stricken communities, these CSR leaders will inspire your group to see what’s possible in terms of its own initiatives.

Strategic Communication – Executive Messaging
any PR is good, not true! Every company has a story, and every leader has a responsibility to know the story and to tell it well.

You’ll learn how people of influence become even more powerful when they know how to tell great stories. Why, because stories are a compelling teaching tool—a fact that has been demonstrated for over 2000 years.

Research shows that stories can increase recall by up to 300%! House a critical point in an interesting story and bingo—if people remember the story they will remember the point.

Stories can strengthen team unity. They can also increase commitment and loyalty to the culture, a project and even a challenge. When was the last time you sat around with co-workers and talked about the all-nighter that got the shipment there on time; the heroic customer service comeback; or the brilliant marketing campaign that differentiated you from the competition and grew market share?