Bob Burg
speaker
120 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Bob Burg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Thank you, Holla. Great to be here.
I just began as a sportscaster for a local radio station where I grew up, got into TV. I was the late night news guy for a very small ABC affiliate in the Midwestern United States. I wasn't very good at it though. Yeah, I could read the news. Anyone can do that. But I certainly wasn't a journalist. And so it wasn't long before I graduated into sales.
And I stumbled and floundered for the first few months because I had no formal sales training. And the company I was with apparently didn't either. So I was sort of left on my own. Fortunately, after a few months, I was in a bookstore and I saw there were a couple of books on sales, which doesn't seem like a big deal right now, but that was 40 years ago.
Sales books, they simply were not as prolific as they are now. I didn't even know such a thing existed. When I saw them, I picked them up, bought them, brought them home. And every night I'd come home after work and I would study into the wee hours of the morning. And within a few weeks of applying the information, my sales began to go through the roof. And it was really a great experience for me.
From there, I started to really get into the personal development aspect because I quickly learned that sales was really about building yourself on the inside. right? And that that success manifested outwardly, but it really was what you put into your mind and took into your heart.
So I started getting all the, you know, the classics of personal development from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to Think and Grow Rich to The Magic of Thinking Big and Psycho-Cybernetics and As a Man Thinketh and Ogmandino's books and all the great books. And I just, I became a, I guess, an internal library, right?
And, you know, so I really enjoyed it and eventually worked my way up to sales manager of a company. And people began to ask me to show their sales team what was working for me and eventually just morphed into a speaking business.
Exactly. And, you know, I think when you... And there are different types of books. There are the books that really you're just developing yourself personally and professionally. And then there are the how-to books. And they can provide, and such as the ones I purchased, and they were by Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins, the two that I purchased when I first saw them. They were roadmaps for me.
They told me how to do what I needed to do. It was really, it was a methodology. It was a system. And to this day, I personally define a system as the process of predictably achieving a goal based on a logical and specific set of how-to principles. The key is being predictability, right?
If it's been documented that by doing A, you can get the desired results of B, then you know all you need to do is A and continue to do A and continue to do A and eventually you'll get the desired results of B. So yeah, absolutely. And you think about how many years Mr. Hopkins and Mr. Ziegler spent learning their craft.
And then as you said, they put it into book form and I got to read it within a few hours and and you apply the information. So yeah, I think you really hit it right on the head.
Well, kinda, let's look at that. So the basic premise of the Go-Giver is simply this, that shifting your focus, and this is really where it all begins, shifting your focus from getting to giving.
Now, when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others, understanding that doing so is not only a more fulfilling way of conducting business, it's the most financially profitable way as well. And not for any way out there, woo-woo type of magical, mystical reasons. It makes very logical, very rational sense.
When you're that person, Hala, who can take your focus off yourself and place it on serving others, on discovering what they need, what they want, what they desire, focusing on helping them solve their challenge and problems, taking your focus off of yourself and making it about helping to bring them closer to happiness, people feel good about you. People want to get to know you. They like you.
They trust you. They want to be part of your life, part of your business. They want to tell others about you. Now, we would say in terms of go-giver and go-getter, it always depends upon how you define terms. So what we like to say is we love go-getters because go-getters are people of action. You know, you're a go-getter as well as a go-giver. You're a person of action, right?
You started in radio, you went into, you had your blog that you had, you led a whole group of teams. As that died down, now you went into something else. You're a go-getter, but you're always providing value to others. You're a go-giver. And so we like people to be both go-getters, people of action, and go-givers, people who are absolutely focused on providing immense value to others.
We would say the opposite of a go-giver is a go-taker. And that's that person who feels almost entitled, if you will, to take, take, take without having added value to the person, to the process, to the situation. And they tend to be frustrated because they rarely have the kind of sustainable success that they believe they have.
Okay, so there are the laws of value, compensation, influence, authenticity, and receptivity. The law of value is all about making the experience so wonderful for the prospective customer and client and eventual customer and client that...
Aside from just the intrinsic value of your product or service, it's the excellence, it's the consistency, it's the empathy, it's the attention, it's the gratitude, everything you put into the entire experience that makes it so worthwhile for them that they feel as though they're receiving much more in value. than what they're paying. And they do, while you also make a very healthy profit.
In any free market-based exchange, there should always be two profits, the buyer profits and the seller profits, because each of them come away much better off afterwards than they were beforehand.
Showing 1–20 of 120 · page 1 of 6
Next →