Dan Waldschmidt

Dan Waldschmidt

DanWaldschmidt.com

Speaker, author, strategist, Dan Waldschmidt is a conversation changer.

Dan and his team help people arrive at business-changing breakthrough ideas by moving past outdated conventional wisdom, social peer pressure, and the selfish behaviors that stop them from being high performers.

The Wall Street Journal calls his blog, Edge of Explosion, one of the Top 7 blogs sales blogs anywhere on the internet and hundreds of his articles on unconventional sales tactics have been published.

  • 0 comments 429 reads
    Posted on 2012-02-01

    One of the recently trendy business strategies over the last decade is the idea of creating “recurring revenue”.

    The basic concept is that you can create content and marketing that together drive sustainable revenue long after the content is first created.  In other words, you spend a lot of time creating something (an e-book, for example) or reselling someone else’s services (like Amway) and over time the business automatically drives large amount of revenue back to you without much ongoing effort.

    Which sounds exciting.

    Especially if you’re an entrepreneur who is getting older in age or someone interested in pursuing personal hobbies while making enough money to support your lifestyle.  It’s exciting to imagine that you could plug an idea into a proven process, automate your marketing, and then watch as revenue piles in the front door.

    The reality is that that strategy doesn’t work. It’s not just a financial scam (where...

  • 0 comments 433 reads
    Posted on 2012-01-06

    Yesware presents an interesting case study about the business pursuit of getting it right.

    About starting.

    Rethinking.

    About finding success.

    It seems like it has been several years since I had my first conversation with Matthew Bellows. It’s actually been a little over a year.  We talked about a brand-new product called Yesware that he was prototyping with his partner Cashman Andrus.

    As I began to look at the screenshots that he had put together for me, I began to get really excited by what I saw.  Matthew and his bootstrapped team planned to design a web e-mail client built specifically for sales people.  Matthew had a deep background in sales (and  talked with a lot of sales people) and understood how differently sales people view e-mail interactions.  He saw the struggle that sales people went through on a daily basis to get answers to their e-mails.

    So he decided to build a platform that would tell you when e-mails weren’t...

  • 0 comments 344 reads
    Posted on 2012-01-03

    Giving buyers more value than they pay for is the most effective way to create a delightfully memorable buying experience.

    To illustrate this point more clearly, think about the opposite of this. Think about the last time you felt ripped off.

    No one wants to be taken advantage of.

    It’s a bad feeling. Even if you might be wrong about what is going on.

    Chance are you might have received a perfectly logical explanation from the person you were doing business with about why you shouldn’t be unhappy.

    Heck, even the fine print might show that you got everything you paid for — and more. But you aren’t feeling happy. You aren’t delighted.

    You feel cheated. And that feeling– regardless of how logical it might not be — is how you will remember doing business with that company.

    The exact opposite is also true.

    When you deliver more value than people pay for it seems to defy logic. Especially for the consumer.

    It can be...

  • 0 comments 364 reads
    Posted on 2011-12-29

    Leading isn’t easy.

    Under any circumstance, having a vision and motivating others to follow you is a feat of monumental proportions.

    As a leader, you’re responsible for what happens to the people that follow you. When they get hurt you feel that hurt.

    Leading is not just about being out in front, it’s about being close to those who look to you for wisdom, guidance, their inspiration.

    Which means you have to be all in.

    You have to be dedicated to your mission.

    And while that seems obvious, it’s not always the easiest thing to do as a leader.

    Because it means sometimes you get it wrong.

    Sometimes you try your hardest to succeed and those who believe in you most have to suffer the consequences when you get hurt.   You take them down with you.  You’re responsible for the collateral damage.

    That’s not easy to be a part off.

    So to get more comfortable with the tough decisions...

  • 0 comments 557 reads
    Posted on 2011-12-13

    It is pretty common knowledge that people interpret what you say paying little attention to the actual words that you use.

    And while all the scientists don’t agree on how much impact feelings have on interpreting a conversation, they all agree that what you say is significantly less important than how you say it.

    The words themselves just aren’t that important.

    What is important is how people feel when they hear the words.

    This mirrors a lot of what we currently know about how the brain works. You might think your brain is unbiased in how it selects, stores, categorizes, and retrieves memories, but quite the opposite is true.

    Your brain actively stores and more quickly retrieves memories that match how you feel about a specific instance. Nobody is lying. It’s how the brain plays tricks on you– hiding memories that don’t match your feelings about the experience.

    For example, getting engaged is a powerful memory that most couples never...

  • 0 comments 285 reads
    Posted on 2011-12-01

    Business strategy is any evolving science.

    The last thousand years of studied commercial history show a cyclical nuance that usually follows the path of reinvention, risk-taking, and reversion.

    As entrepreneurs expand on new ideas, old business methodologies get reinvented.  For a period of time this reinvention creates new economic opportunities and increases profitability and prospective growth.

    This period of “healthy” commerce drives increased risk-taking.  Prospective investors looking to increase their own wealth gamble heavily on these reinvented business strategies.  Which, quite often, leads to high-risk, unhealthy investments.

    These unsound investments trigger a financial crash and disrupt the business system.  Which, in turn, fuels a  reversion back to less risky, more proven business strategies – beginning a cycle of “playing it safe”.

    That’s how business works...

  • 0 comments 575 reads
    Posted on 2011-11-15

    The last decade of business has been a rapidly changing chronology of growth, struggle, confusion, and depression.

    The cornerstones of enterprise stability and growth have crumbled into an elusively expensive hodgepodge of misguided effort and bi-polar strategy.

    The business of growth has changed.

    Fundamentally, sales and marketing behaviors are no longer the same.  If you look closely enough you’ll notice three specific transitions happening all at the same time.  Overlapping transitions in technology, economics, and social dynamics are together driving this decade-long business fragmentation.

    Technology changes have made accurate access to complex answers easier than ever.  Data systems are faster and more people have smarter phones with faster access to the Internet.  What used to make us...

  • 0 comments 811 reads
    Posted on 2011-10-18

    Following the rules doesn’t work in business.

    Even if you’re doing it right, you’re doing it like everybody else.

    Which is wrong.

    At the extremes is where you find your edge — your tactical business advantage.

    The reason why extreme behavior is so powerful for companies is really a simple psychological concept.

    Being radical is memorable.

    Anything other than extreme behavior just blends in.  If it looks like everything else, you assume that it is just like everything else.

    That’s just how your brain is wired.

    A deer looking at a hunter in camouflage doesn’t imagine that the hunter is a tree.  The deer just ignores the hunter because it looks so much like the tree.

    And since a tree is completely safe, the deer’s brain does not trigger any alerts — possibly to the peril of...

  • 0 comments 476 reads
    Posted on 2011-09-13

    Much of what we know about the brain is only 4 to 5 years old.

    Recent advancements in science and technology show us how the brain actually operates. Using functional magnetic reasonance imaging, we can see how the brain develops, what threatens it, and how simple every-day decisions effect complex processing.

    But it doesn’t always work as it should.

    Along with an increased understanding of how the brain operates, doctors have become more astute at diagnosing and treating diseases of the brain. Over the last decade, a disturbing rise in autism among children has sparked intense attention and focus from the medical community.

    Using highly developed technical equipment, scientists can actually pinpoint specific sections of the brain that seemed to be unwired. Quite literally, for autism patients it’s as if the brain cannot communicate to certain sections of the brain.

    One of the key areas of that disfunction is limited access and control to their...

  • 0 comments 703 reads
    Posted on 2011-09-06

    Leadership is broken.

    Perhaps that’s a mis-statement. Maybe leadership isn’t broken at all.

    Maybe what’s really broken is our understanding of leadership.

    And that’s certainly not because we haven’t tried to figure it out.

    Thousands of books and countless experts have explored this topic on the last few decades.

    And their opinions seem to be clear on a few things:

    1. Leadership demands boldness.
    2. Leadership demands clarity.
    3. Leadership demands a vision.

    All the experts seem to agree.

    To get people to follow you. You need to be a leader.

    And in a certain sense of the word, people can’t follow you unless you’re leading them. Unless you’re in front of them.

    But the idea of leadership has changed over the last few years as cultural norms have evolved.

    1. Philosophical creativity is no longer reserved to experts in academia.
    2. Innovation is no longer solely relegated to...