Episode 348: Transform Sales Through Authentic Connections

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:48 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m excited to introduce my new friend. Get Ready for a Burst of Inspiration with Karen Colonna. With over 25 years of sales leadership and expertise, Karen combines her deep professional experience with personal resilience. That’s a word I love. She’s a newlywed mom of four amazing young adults and a true warrior who’s turned life’s toughest challenges into a journey of growth and opportunity.

0:01:20 – (Brynne Tillman): Karen’s not only about inspiration. She offers actionable advice rooted in her years of proven sales acumen and nonprofit fundraising development. Her keynotes are a mix of practical wisdom, heartfelt vulnerability, and plenty of laughs. When she’s not guiding others, Karen enjoys exploring new places with her family, hiking, and unwinding with a craft beer. Join us as we dive into Karen’s Resilience roadmap and discover how to shine forward.

0:01:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Get ready for high-energy episodes filled with insights and laughter. Karen, welcome to the show.

0:02:01 – (Karen Colonna): Thank you for having me, Brynne. I’m excited to be here, just by getting prepared for what we’re going to talk about today.

0:02:07 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I’m excited because the topics that we’re going to cover today are both emotionally relevant and will have such an impact on productivity and success and really even mental health in some of these ways.

0:02:25 – (Karen Colonna): Right?

0:02:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Like, I am beyond excited. But before we dump into. Dump into. Before we jump into. Love the English language. Before we jump into your brilliance magic and expertise, we ask all of our guests one question, which is what does Making Sales Social mean to you?

0:02:45 – (Karen Colonna): So Making Sales Social for me is all about fostering connection. And regardless of how you do that, whether it’s with the social media tools that you so wonderfully help us to engage and utilize. But it’s that true connection that happens when we are humble and vulnerable and we allow ourselves to forge a sense of community. And it’s in those three things that together we take whatever brought us to that moment of engagement with our peers or our clients and we leverage whatever we’ve overcome to get there and we use it to help shine forward so that we are leveraging that experience to help others find a shorter path, a better way, or maybe even be brave enough to ask for help.

0:03:33 – (Karen Colonna): And I think our world doesn’t honor even really kind of foster any type of weakness or shortcoming. But if we can’t share it openly with those three, you know, with the mindset of humility, vulnerability, and community, then how do we connect? And you’re going to talk a lot about, you know, how we use the tools, but in complement with the tools we have to have a relationship so that they’re visible and relevant. And so fostering a connection to me is like the groundbreaking piece of social selling.

0:04:08 – (Brynne Tillman): So I absolutely love that. And you can’t people buy from people, people they want to trust and that rapport. So I absolutely love that perspective. I think it’s absolutely fantastic. So fostering connections is, is foundational, I believe, to all relationships. And when you’re selling, you’re building new professional relationships. Brilliant. I already, I’m like, I knew this was going to be awesome.

0:04:39 – (Brynne Tillman): I want to jump into a little bit about kind of where, how you landed here and you know, if you could share a personal or professional adversity that you faced and how you overcame it and really kind of how does that, how did that lead to what you’re doing today?

0:04:58 – (Karen Colonna): So my trajectory in life changed about 20 years ago when my then four-year-old daughter said the four words, Mommy, my leg hurts. And at that point in time I had already had a successful 15 years in sales internationally. I loved what I did. I left college and I wanted to sell marketing and I did. Through a direct marketing campaign from our university, I found my first job and I got to travel and sell marketing, consulting, and database management. And I loved it in the heydays.

0:05:31 – (Karen Colonna): And then I became a mom. So I measured everything, wake-ups, and goodnights. I finally got a consulting gig which gave me three days a week benefits. I was literally in kind of the high of where I wanted to be professionally and as a mom. And then those four words. And that would lead us to some doctor’s visits and it was growing pains and she was just acting out consistent change. And then it led to a low-grade fever and then her screaming that her heart was on fire from her throat to her belly.

0:06:02 – (Karen Colonna): And it would end with a diagnosis of stage four neuroblastoma and a 30% chance to live. And we would battle for three years and I would go from being this confident, you know, marketing and sales consultant to a medical advocate, where my greatest role was fighting for my daughter’s life. And that journey, albeit in the throes of it, I wasn’t quite aware of my resilient superpowers as I navigated it through the end of her life three years later and moved forward through other journeys. As a result, you know, I ended up divorced, we ended up with bankruptcy, and, you know, I had an entitlement that said I lost my daughter, bad things shouldn’t happen to me, but we live a real life and bad things happen to good people.

0:06:53 – (Karen Colonna): And it was the ability to realize what I’d overcome already that helped me to leap forward. And one of my last jobs, I went back to work after she passed away and I was back in sales and I sat in a meeting with an executive and literally in the back of my mind, helping to close a million-dollar deal, thought marketing is stupid and marketing is not stupid. But in my place of life, it had lost its relevance.

0:07:22 – (Karen Colonna): And I knew it was time to make a change. And I went off and I found a nonprofit. So I took my sales skills in a profit-generating world and I translated them. Instead of selling a product and a service, I sold hope. And I did that for 10 years. And I leveraged my skillset and the resilience superpowers that I gained along the way and through my journey. Um, I am very vulnerable with my story and I believe everybody has a test in their life, we have many and it’s our testimony that becomes somebody else’s tether.

0:07:57 – (Karen Colonna): And that is why I share my story and that’s why, you know, I’m really passionate about sharing it in the sales field because we are taught, we are energized and we are literally surrounded with resources that help us to communicate and open doors and effectively launch where we need to be in connecting with our clients. It’s a tough job. We hear no more than anyone else. And how do we bounce back from that? And if we can really focus on our resilience, what we already have overcome, and use it and share it with others, the magnitude of what we can do moving forward is really unstoppable. And I’m really passionate in case you give Zelle about this.

0:08:39 – (Karen Colonna): So I translated that into a speaking career. Also I work with companies and I help them a lot with the training of their sales team, a lot around kickoffs, and helping people go. You know, that year, beginning of the year when you go from I made president’s club, I Knocked my quota out of the ballpark. And then on whatever your fiscal one is, you’re at 00, you have to do it again. And so helping people look back to leap forward is a passion of mine. So that’s how I ended up here and why I love to speak to audiences about how to build their personal resilience, roadmap, how to get from where you were to where you are and leap forward.

0:09:25 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. And her legacy is really impacting so many other lives.

0:09:33 – (Karen Colonna): When she passed away, I wanted to do something in honor of her right away. I wanted to start a foundation. I didn’t know how to do that. I was also grieving and I was also newly pregnant. I know I delivered my youngest nine months to the day. Talk about divine categories. But in any case, somebody said to me, what if the best legacy you leave is A, how you raised your other two daughters and B, any life you impact by sharing your journey?

0:10:02 – (Karen Colonna): And that’s why I’m so passionate. You asked me at the very beginning, what do I, you know, what does social selling mean to me, connection is not just a word. When we are actually able to share a piece of ourselves, regardless of the topic, with somebody else, we change their trajectory. And we also give people the chance to help us. And I think in business, we tend to isolate ourselves around that because we need to be more professional.

0:10:28 – (Karen Colonna): If you know something about me, should you? Well, yes, if you know a little bit of my story, that makes me more of a person, less of a commodity. But we have to be willing to do that. And as organizations, we need to foster it.

0:10:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Right? Yeah, no, I absolutely love that. Right. Are you an interchangeable salesperson or a trusted advisor that they’re relying on to ultimately help you solve a problem? Right. And so your perspective is, yeah, I’m here as a human being to help you solve your problems if I’m able. And that’s the humanization of this that I feel. It has its ebbs and flows. But now with AI and some of the artificial intelligence, we need to come back to more of that personalization and more of that connection.

0:11:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Otherwise everything we do becomes commoditized. Right.

0:11:32 – (Karen Colonna): So I believe they complement each other. If you’re building trust through your ability to be humble, I don’t have the answer for your client. I don’t. I wish I did, but this isn’t the best fit. Let me take you down a path to fill that need. So in my humility, knowing that I don’t have it, I can ask somebody else to help fulfill. It builds trust. Knowing a little bit about me, that vulnerability is going to build trust. So when we build trust in that relationship when we leverage the tools that make us more efficient and that sometimes close that gap of knowledge we may not have, we’ve already built the trust and then they work. In synergy alone, you have skepticism. And I believe that.

0:12:15 – (Karen Colonna): I believe wholeheartedly that when we let down that wall, we forge a connection.

0:12:20 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah.

0:12:21 – (Karen Colonna): That is going to supersede, you know, an objection sometimes. I mean, we’ve all had that sale that isn’t logical. At the end of the day, we’re more expensive. You know, so and so’s brother-in-law is the decision maker. But we get the business because we have built a level of trust and connection with them that will come and go and it might and hopefully come with us. When people make changes, which we know they do.

0:12:48 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. And I completely agree. I mean, we teach AI, but we teach AI from an authentic perspective. How can it help you be more efficient? But it does not replace a handshake. It does not replace, you know, a kneecap to kneecap, eyeball to eyeball. In some cases, if it’s just zoom, it’s eyeball, eyeball only. Right. But it can’t replace relationships. It just makes it. Yeah, right. I agree completely. Yeah. I mean, it’s just, that you have to use the technology not as a crutch, but as an enhancement.

0:13:27 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that, Absolutely love that. We are like on question one and we’re halfway through, which is crazy, but it’s, it’s great. So we talked a lot about resilience. You had resilience in the moment. After your daughter passed, you went back to work. You showed some resilience as you progressed and said, I need to move to a nonprofit. Talk to me about that evolution, just briefly on how resilience really impacted all of, you know, those moves over time and professionally.

0:14:07 – (Karen Colonna): So initially when I, you know, I talk about taking an inventory. So to get from losing my daughter to be able to move forward, I needed a roadmap of sorts. And for me, that became really looking at what I had overcome and realizing the magnitude of it, and taking an inventory of what, what were those strengths. And for me at the time, it was vulnerability and humility. Humor was an anchor from day one. It’s who I am.

0:14:43 – (Karen Colonna): I even say that I didn’t have funeral sex. I gave birth nine months later. I did not. But some might find that inappropriate. But for me, it Was it. It was insane, and illogical, the fact that I conceived a child at that time, and so that humor is what allowed us to able to survive something that was not laughable. And then my faith and I didn’t realize that till many years later. And I reread the homily that the priest did at my daughter’s funeral.

0:15:13 – (Karen Colonna): And I blogged back in the day for all of that time and 3,000 followers before it was cool to have followers. And I told the story, and he found the word miracle in there over 30 times. I didn’t get the miracle I prayed for, but I had a level of faith that I found a thread of that throughout the entire journey. So that faith became evident to me. So in the moment, I didn’t see the fact that I’ve got resilient superpowers. I can leap forward, but I took an inventory.

0:15:43 – (Karen Colonna): I didn’t call it that then. I call it that now. But I looked back and then I was able to go, okay, now as I look forward and I see different things, I would reset my mindset. I would look at things a little differently. And that’s where those three Cs come in. Control, courage, and confidence. So where was I making decisions from that would help me decide where to go professionally or even where to go personally a little bit in our pre-conversation about, you know, divorce and marriage and really those. Resetting my mindset was another key piece of I’ve got these resilient superpowers. Now how can I use them to help me make choices?

0:16:21 – (Karen Colonna): And then the connectivity piece was really being vulnerable enough to ask for help and to be willing to receive it. So I believe that receiving is a resilient superpower. You have to be humbly humble enough to know you don’t have all the answers. And I tell you what, in sales, one of the most naked places I ever felt was presenting to my peers at a sales meeting when everybody had to get up and present a different part of the package.

0:16:51 – (Karen Colonna): Because everybody in that room knows what the client doesn’t. They know the features, the benefits, the cost. They can poke holes in you, but the client can’t. They’re going to buy what you have to sell. You have to build the trust so they know it’s authentic. But I building those connections and being vulnerable enough to say, hey, I need help with this. Letting somebody else help you was another part of my armor that helped me navigate different positions.

0:17:17 – (Karen Colonna): Somebody had to know that I was out of work to offer me the opportunity for a new position. So that vulnerability and then knowing that I needed to recharge and rest, that was, you know, the culminating piece is we’re on any journey. You need gas, you gotta refuel, right? So I would pause, and what the rest looks like to me is not other people. I’m weird. I do ice baths. That’s how I rest, recharge, and recover.

0:17:45 – (Karen Colonna): I also run, so mine’s a little different. But that’s. That’s how I would know that I could recharge my superpowers. I had the objectivity to say, okay, where am I strong? Where am I not? And at the end of any journey, I would pause for a second and be grateful that the journey happened. When you get to the end, you come back from a vacation, you forget that you had a flat tire. You forget that the room was a little. Eh.

0:18:08 – (Karen Colonna): You even forget the bad tacos you had at the. At the boardwalk. You tend to remember the good. And it’s remembering that piece of it that helps you to leverage the journey for a purpose. So I created a resilience roadmap just by watching where I’d been, how I’d responded, and how it helped me move forward. That’s what I use to get through job transitions and end up where I am with you today, which is a speaker and a consultant who helps other people to find their own personal resilience roadmap.

0:18:42 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s so interesting. I would say the typical person thinks of resilience as a coping. The ability to cope or to stay strong. How would you personally define resilience? If you were to put it in a definition, what would you say?

0:19:01 – (Karen Colonna): Resilience is the ability to bounce back. It’s the ability to adapt through change, have the ability to reset your mindset, and the ability to keep going. So I was called strong. Year after year after year, through my daughter’s journey, through my divorce. I’m almost embarrassed to admit one of the biggest shameful experiences that I felt was my financial insecurity. I almost felt a greater grief in my soul from not being able to take care of my kids as I did in losing one of them.

0:19:39 – (Karen Colonna): That’s a heavyweight. And in that journey, I. I realized that I had overcome everything else. And it wasn’t. It wasn’t a scar. It was active. Actually more like a badge of honor, if you will. Because when I accepted it, it didn’t happen to me. In a lot of cases, it happened to me. And if I could share that, then somebody else doesn’t have to wear the badge of shame. So for me, I. Resilience really is one sentence. It’s the ability to bounce back.

0:20:18 – (Karen Colonna): I have been strong when I didn’t want to be strong. And you know what, it’s not a four-letter word anymore. It’s actually one five, six letter word. But resilience is just knowing that you can. If I can, you can too.

0:20:34 – (Brynne Tillman): Really? I love that. I love that. You mentioned a few times the phrase shine forward, which I think is wonderful. You know, talk a little bit about how you integrate shine forward into your approach that helps people really transform their setbacks into success.

0:21:00 – (Karen Colonna): You have to accept, you have to be aware that life is going to throw you problems. You’re all going to suffer. That’s. I even had suffering in one of my titles and my friends were like, you can’t do it. But we have a choice if we’re going to suffer or suffer for a purpose, right? And so to shine forward means accept what’s going to happen and what has happened and realize what you overcame to get here and share it.

0:21:32 – (Karen Colonna): I believe when we shine forward is sharing what it is that you need at the moment, sharing what it is where you need help, what you’ve overcome, what you’re stuck on. And the person listening has an opportunity to help you. And when they help you, they stand taller. And whatever it is that they’re in, they tend to have more competence and confidence to work through. So in accepting and owning what it is that we’ve been through, knowing we can overcome it, and shining that experience forward, we create a cycle.

0:22:06 – (Karen Colonna): And in our world, I believe it’s that light of shining forward instead of hiding in the darkness of our weakness and the shame of our experiences that keep us disconnected. That’s called isolation, and that is driving us to a mental health crisis. I think of those of us who are in a business every day where we have to show up rotten and vulnerable. I hate the visual of a used car salesperson because that is the most protected, plastic, armored visual.

0:22:39 – (Karen Colonna): Salespeople are literally showing up without the armor. We put ourselves out there, we cold call, we show up. We don’t know what the environment is. I mean, we’ve done our homework. But the courage it takes to be vulnerable as a salesperson and I’ve also done the nonprofit world in development, asking for money is one of the hardest things in the world. But when your armor is down and you can show up and allow people to accept that, we build connectivity that helps us to be accepted for that authenticity.

0:23:13 – (Karen Colonna): And that authenticity, combined with the gifts of AI is how? I don’t know. That’s a whole nother superpower.

0:23:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I absolutely love that. Yeah. And you know I’m right there with you. And how are we using AI to enhance relationships, not replace them? So I absolutely love your perspective. You know, every inch of you just radiates this growth, mindset. It just is about continual, continuous improvement in our lives. So I’m curious if you had to name one practice that you implement every day that helps you shine forward, what would that be?

0:23:57 – (Karen Colonna): Okay, so I have three W’s. I work out, I read the words and I write words. That is my personal practice. And I get up at 5:30 every day. I’m a little crazy. I go to a boot camp, which is a community of women that I have made friends and they know I show up because they’ll know if I’m not there. I need accountability. And then I come home and I sit with my devotionals. I set my mind straight. I remember that this world isn’t about me, it’s about a power that fuels me.

0:24:27 – (Karen Colonna): And regardless of your faith, we all need an anchor beyond ourselves because we’re just a piece of the puzzle. And then whether I write a sentence, which is, here’s what I’m going to do today. Here’s what I’m going to let go today. Sometimes it’s a to-do list. I’ll admit I’m dory the fish. I need a list. But other times it’s writing about the fear that I have or where I need courage so that I can reset the motives of my choices for the day.

0:24:54 – (Karen Colonna): When I practice those three things, I usually have a good day. And my dog also likes to visit me in the reading chair. And if I don’t do that, he doesn’t have a good day. And you know where it goes from there.

0:25:08 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, routines are sometimes the best thing that anyone can do for you, just the balance of your day. So just setting that up is so great. And I’m happy for your dog that you get that time. But that’s awesome. This was just amazing. Last question. Was there any question I should have asked you? I didn’t.

0:25:34 – (Karen Colonna): So I guess for me it’s how do organizations make the commitment to include resilience in their cultural direction? So folks, when I think of organizations, we think of productivity, we think of mental health development. And I would ask organizations the question, where does resilience training fit in how you build a culture to support a thriving workplace? In that category, resilience training helps in organizations when you’re building employee resource groups, which are organizations that are literally now have-to versus nice-to-little communities within businesses that help us belong and help us connect.

0:26:28 – (Karen Colonna): And I think it serves a very strong purpose there. Whether it’s a mental health erg or women’s erg, a sales erg, it could be, you know, a diversity erg, because it’s through that vulnerability, humility, and connection that we become human, that allows us to work better together. Whether it’s sales or leadership, leaders by nature are supposed to be resilient and strong, but do they have the grace to know what that looks like for them and as somebody walk them through that journey so they can show up authentic for their teams and build that level of trust in sharing their resilience superpowers that could in fact empower their teams to go off and do what they need to do. So, you know, I challenge organizations to see where it fits.

0:27:16 – (Karen Colonna): And if you’re curious to know what impact it can have on your teams, your employees, give me a ring. We did it.

0:27:25 – (Brynne Tillman): We brought a ring into it. I love it. I love it. I love it.

0:27:29 – (Karen Colonna): Okay, Brynne, that’s for another time, folks, but we hit a home run with that last statement.

0:27:36 – (Brynne Tillman): So fun. This was absolutely not just mind-blowing, but the aha moments, the new perspective where resilience needs to be at the center of everything. It really does. Because every day things are happening. Tell me that line again. It’s not happened to me, but for me, say that one more time.

0:28:05 – (Karen Colonna): So I’m going to look. So I get it right? You don’t get to choose always what happens to you or in you, but you do have a choice about what you do about it.

0:28:17 – (Brynne Tillman): One more time.

0:28:18 – (Karen Colonna): You don’t have a choice about what happens to you, but you do have a choice about what you do with it.

0:28:26 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s a game changer in life, right? We have. We have that. That’s like I had a little bit of chills around that because it takes us out of victim mode. It and it really, it, you know, control one of those Cs and you’re focusing on what you can control in that statement. You can’t control what happened, but you can control how you respond to it.

0:28:55 – (Karen Colonna): And what you know, where your brain goes. We follow. You can take a narrative. My story could be very, very different than it is today. And I’m not saying that I got to today on, you know, trajectory. What does it bring me up? Scotty, it wasn’t instant. It was a journey, which is why I have this resilience roadmap. And candidly, I look at it every day. And when the next challenge pops up, where am I on the roadmap? Where? Do I need rest?

0:29:29 – (Karen Colonna): Do I need to realize I’ve already overcome something? Do I need to, I don’t know, phone a friend? And I need to build some more connections? And honestly, if I’m not in a place of gratitude, then I need to pause and figure out why. And then usually that sets me straight. It’s not an instant, but it’s a process and it works for me and I hope it works for someone else.

0:29:51 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love it. Okay, so, I mean, forever. I could go on. I’m thinking, you know, I could use you as a therapist, but that’s beside the point. This was amazing. I know that it is bringing enormous value to our listeners. Give you a ring. Where can they reach you? How do they reach you?

0:30:12 – (Karen Colonna): They can ring me right now it’s Karen Colonna.com and I’m going to spell it. It’s K A R E N C O L O N N a dot com. And I’m also on the socials as Karen Colonaspeaks. So come check me out and I would love to help your organization, help you as a leader shine forward.

0:30:40 – (Brynne Tillman): Wonderful. Thank you so much. And to all our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social. Bye. Thank you.

Outro:

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