Season 3, Episode 13: Meridith Elliott Powell
Thriving Through Uncertainty: Lessons from Meridith Elliott Powell
In this powerful episode of Jack Rants with Modern Bankers, Jack Hubbard welcomes back bestselling author, keynote speaker, and renowned business strategist Meridith Elliott Powell, a leader whose journey and insights continue to shape the future of sales, leadership, and organizational growth.
Jack and Meridith go deep into her newest book, Perspective: Reignite, Reinvent, Reframe, the final installment of her acclaimed “Thrive” trilogy. Meridith shares why today’s uncertain marketplace isn’t a threat, but an unparalleled opportunity for those who listen better, adapt faster, and lead with purpose.
View Transcript
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Jack Hubbard: Well, as I mentioned in the introduction, I met Meredith Elliott Powell in 2002.
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Jack Hubbard: When she was a young banker at First Citizens Bank in North Carolina. Now, here's how good this lady was. In less than a couple of years, 2 or 3 years, her division, her area, was the number one sales division on the retail side of the bank, and she was so good…
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Jack Hubbard: that the bank asked her to write the retail plan for the entire bank, and it is so great to have you back, Meredith Elliott Powell. Great to see you.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Thank you, I'm excited to be here. I was a youngster when we first met.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, but I always tell people, you know, I knew the moment we shook hands and I looked into your eyes, I saw a consultant, not a banker, and you've been such a tremendous success, and you've helped so many people.
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Jack Hubbard: And today, we want to talk about your brand new book, Perspective, Reignite, Reinvent, Reframe, and I want to talk a lot about that. But Meredith, you know, this is the second time
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Jack Hubbard: You've been on the show, and I always like to start with, tell us a little bit about Meredith. You know, you've had a great career, but what… how do you help your clients now? What are some things you're involved with?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, so the biggest things that I'm involved with is really helping my clients. I mean, Jack, I've been on this mission, this particular mission, since 2016, doing something that I learned from you, and that was to get out and really talk and engage with clients and with prospects, to get a feel for what they're challenged with and what they're struggling with. And every single client, every single prospect I spoke with in 2016
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Meridith Elliott Powell: was challenged with the exact same thing. Now, if you'll remember, 2016, the economy was hot. Everybody was having their best year on record. But everybody was saying the same thing. Everybody was saying this uncertainty. We're worried about what's coming next.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And that just put me on a mission. I thought, what if you flip the script on that? Where could you go as an organization, as an industry, as a leader, if you decided that uncertainty was a positive? And I have been on that kick since 2016, and the uncertainty just keeps getting stronger, faster, and more intense.
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Jack Hubbard: And you've written 3 books about it. It's a trilogy, and Perspective is the most recent one. But I would be remiss, and I would be doing interview malpractice if I didn't ask you a question about sales. You are out
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Jack Hubbard: constantly speaking to groups, and you're seeing companies, banks, and others around sales and around leadership.
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Jack Hubbard: and you have your podcast, Sales Logic, every Saturday at 8 a.m. Eastern Time with Mark Hunter. So you are in the midst of this all the time. What are you seeing, Meredith, as we roll into 2026? What's working in sales and leadership? What's not?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, so I… let me start with what's not. I think that this is one of the best markets to sell in, and what I'm seeing is most organizations, most sales professionals really struggling with sales. And the biggest reason I think they are struggling with sales is that they are using strategies that are out
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Meridith Elliott Powell: of date. They are meant for a very different marketplace. And what I mean by that is, let me talk about what is working. What is working is understanding you are not selling a product or a service, that it is, I don't care what you sell, it is a commodity market. You are solving a problem. Now, we've all heard that probably since the late 90s, that you are solving a problem, but you have to solve a problem right now by listening to
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Meridith Elliott Powell: customers, because the problem that everybody faced in December of 2024 is not the same problem they face
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Meridith Elliott Powell: in December of 2025. I mean, I was just listening to the news right before we popped on here, and they were talking about the new Fed chair maybe coming in, you know, that Trump has decided to do the new Fed chair. Well, that's gonna be, especially for your clients, that's gonna mean a whole different marketplace, whole different set of opportunities, a whole different set of challenges. And if you don't have your ear to the ground.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Really understanding what is going on in the marketplace.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: You know, I also think that people are selling from a place of desperation rather than a place of power. And in an uncertain marketplace, we need people to sell to us who are confident, who are resources, who are advocates, who understand our industry better than we are. We need a partner. And so I think there's just a lot of things missing, and I think it's sad, because I think it's a great opportunity for growth.
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Jack Hubbard: I do too, and one of the recent podcasts that you and Mark did had as a subject, AI, and I'd love your perspective on this. I've heard, you know, AI is going to replace all salespeople, which is just crap.
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Jack Hubbard: You know, I've heard banks say, well, I don't want to use AI, which is stupid.
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Jack Hubbard: Talk about what you're seeing in AI, Meredith, especially in the sales space.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, so I take the stance that, that I think that AI is going to increase the demand for salespeople who, who really enhance their human connection and, and soft skills, but also those that learn to leverage
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Meridith Elliott Powell: AI. And what I mean by that is, I had a client call me about a month ago, and she said, my niece is going to graduate school, what would you advise her to go to graduate school for? She wants to get a job when she gets out. I said, go to graduate school for the soft skills. I said, the biggest thing that I am seeing missing in the marketplace is the ability to look somebody in the eye, the ability to pick up the phone, the ability to have
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Meridith Elliott Powell: a conversation, the ability to critically think, the ability to problem solve and to influence. Now, I can do all those things because AI is making my job so much easier. Just this morning, I've got a prospect call later this afternoon. They sent me the biggest research paper to read.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I mean, it's huge!
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I put the whole thing into AI, and I said, summarize this for me. Give me the top, you know, points that I need to know and to understand from this research paper. It's unbelievable. I use it to write my contracts. I mean, it is… you have to understand that what makes you good as a salesperson is about to go on steroids.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: But you have to leverage AI to be able to do it.
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Jack Hubbard: Well… Time is your biggest enemy and your biggest ally.
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Jack Hubbard: And the more minutes you can grab by having, like, an AI do something that's a menial task, like a contract, or an invoice, or whatever, that frees you up to talk to your customers, and that's what really sales is all about.
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Jack Hubbard: You started this journey, as you mentioned, in 2016, and you maybe didn't set out to write a trilogy, but you did. But let's talk about the Thrive trilogy and the three books in it, and then we'll dive into perspective.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Sure, so, no, I did not set out to write a, trilogy. In fact, I was sort of amazed I even got one book out, but, but as I said.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: you know, I… this is what we do in sales, right? You're listening for a problem that needs to be solved, and everybody was talking about uncertainty. And I just thought, you know, what if I could help people learn to see uncertainty as opportunity? And more importantly.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Aren't there leaders in companies that have done that? I mean, we always think the time we're living in is the most challenging time that ever was, but when you think about it, companies have grown through world wars, they've grown through economic depression, they've grown through pandemics. I mean, they've grown through unbelievable odds. I wanted to know why. So I spent 3 years researching 9 companies that have been in business for over 250
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Meridith Elliott Powell: 50 years. And from that research, I wrote Thrive. I extracted a formula based on what these companies did, that if you put that into place.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: that would… you… I could guarantee, not because I thought so, but because people far smarter than me proved it with growth of their companies.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And Jack, so when I finished that book, I had it all ready to go to the publisher, all set to go, and I thought, the Great Depression didn't end at 5 o'clock. Like, people had to deal with this in their personal lives. So that's when I wrote Mentally Fit. I took the formula, and I wrote Mentally Fit for your personal life.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Or, if you weren't a leader, and you were a frontline personnel, and you weren't being led by somebody who was helping you thrive in uncertainty, how do you navigate as an individual contributor, or just the chaos you have in your life? So, those were the first two, those were the first two books, and they kind of went together.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And then the more I spoke, and the more I talked about Thrive and Mentally Fit, the more perspective kind of eked out, that, quite frankly.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I can't help you at all thrive in uncertainty if you can't get your mindset right. If you can't see it as a positive, you are going to be stuck forever. And that was why I wrote Perspective.
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Jack Hubbard: I always tell my grandchildren.
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Jack Hubbard: You can hold one thought in your mind. You can't hold a positive and a negative thought. And your book takes negative thoughts and puts a tremendous spin on it, but one of the things, and I didn't know this about you until I read the book.
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Jack Hubbard: there are… you talk about a lot of stories, but you have some very personal stories in here that actually taught you perspective. Talk about your family a little bit, because it's in the book, and your first husband, and all the perspective you got from that.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I used to be ashamed and embarrassed to talk about it, and now I really realize it's what's given me the education to be able to do what I do. But my first husband was 41 years old when he died of alcoholism, but before that, six male members of my family had all died of alcoholism. My family's really riddled
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Meridith Elliott Powell: With alcoholism. And my last surviving brother committed suicide right in front of my mother, and took her as, as well. Kind of, she never really recovered and died two years later after that. And… and the perspective that I had
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Meridith Elliott Powell: On all that that had happened in the family was that
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Meridith Elliott Powell: somehow, I didn't deserve good things to happen for me, and I didn't deserve a happy life. And I felt very much a victim, and very much that my, that life was unfair for me, and that I just wasn't going to get a shot. And I didn't realize
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Until I started doing the work, that it wasn't the addicts in my life that were holding me back. It was my perspective. I was so focused on what was wrong with my life, I could not find the path forward.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And I just think that's amazing. It took me to the age of 37 to figure that out. I'd have given anything to have known that when I was 6 or 7 years old.
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Jack Hubbard: That's just unbelievable. How do you…
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Jack Hubbard: You have such strength of character to recover from that, and now you and your husband are active.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah.
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Jack Hubbard: mountain bike, you golf, you do tennis. How… I'm curious how much he…
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Jack Hubbard: Because you don't talk about him much on the podcast, and I get that. How much did he help you turn this ship around?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: You know, I think… I think my husband now helped me quite a bit, to turn the ship around. One thing that is, great… there are a lot of things great about my husband now, but one of the things that's great is that I didn't understand until I married him that my addiction was work.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I would work all the time. And quite frankly, it's one of the things that I really learned that, you know, whether it's alcohol, whether it's work, whether it's…
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Meridith Elliott Powell: you know, food, whatever it is, whatever it is that's taking you away from the people that you love and you care about is a, is a, you know, is a problem. And when I met my husband, he worked incredibly hard. He was very much… he'd go to work every day at 7, come home every day between 5 and 6, but when he was done, he was done, and he played just as hard as he, as he worked. And he really taught me the importance of,
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Meridith Elliott Powell: of looking at my life, getting clarity on life, of what I wanted.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And, and to stop being a martyr, and to go for what, I want, and not apologize for it.
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Jack Hubbard: That's just… that's unbelievable. And you mentioned that in the book.
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Jack Hubbard: And all of the books. You took a lot of stories from companies that had been in business a long time.
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Jack Hubbard: And, in perspective, you have a lot of stories about small businesses.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah.
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Jack Hubbard: I'm curious, where do you find these stories? What got in your mind, say, that's a story, that's a story, and can you share one of the more compelling stories in the book?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, so, so first of all, I wanted the stories to be big business, and I wanted them to be small business. I really wanted them to be both, because I don't want… I didn't want people to read the book and think that it was… it was for somebody, you know, somebody else.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: everything's a story to me. Every time I'm in a situation… I mean, I'll give you an example. I was at a dinner party, and somebody was telling a story about, Carolina basketball, and it was such a good story that it's in one of my keynotes now. I tell it all the time. So everything's a story for me. Anything that I can connect to, you know, connect to, connect to a point. And if you'll indulge me, I think one of the most compelling
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Meridith Elliott Powell: stories in… in perspective. It's the story of, of… What… what motivated me?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: to go get the therapy that I needed, and that was the story of… my husband and I were in this song and dance, my first husband. I would go to work every day and work ridiculously long hours and support the family, and he would drink every day and charge up all of our credit cards. And every night, I would get home from work expecting him to be sober, and he would… I would walk through the door, and we would have a huge
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Meridith Elliott Powell: fight, and it would become pretty abusive and pretty, you know, tough, and I would wait until he would pass out, and then I would come back to the house, and we danced like that for 10 years. Every day, like clockwork, you could count on it. And then one day, I came home from work, expecting to find him sober, two bottles of vodka drained, and a credit card charged up, and I lost it, just like I always do. But for some reason, he didn't yell at me, he didn't scream, he never said a word, and finally.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I became so exhausted from yelling that there was silence between us, and he just looked at me and said, who asked you?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And I was like, what do you mean? And he said, who asked you to pay for the roof? Who asked you to get me sober? Who asked you to do these things? And I was so mad, I just wanted to jump all over him.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: But it was like the universe caught me, and my perspective changed. And my perspective in that moment became, he's right. Nobody asked me to do this, and even if they did.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I didn't have to. And that was the moment that the light bulb went off, that it was not his fault my life was a mess. It was my fault my life was a mess. And that may sound harsh, but I cannot tell you how powerful that was, because the moment that my perspective shifted, and the moment that I realized I was where I was, because it was my choice.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: all the power went back to me. And when all the power went back to me, my life just radically decided, my life radically changed.
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Jack Hubbard: That's amazing.
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Jack Hubbard: And you write in the book about some things we should know. Early on, you talk about some things we should know about perspective. What are some of those, Meredith?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, number one, the perspective is everything. It's… it is… it is absolutely everything, is that how you choose to see something will feed the beliefs you have, which will feed the actions you get, which will feed the results.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I think another thing about perspective is to understand it's a choice.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Like, it isn't easy to… I can't tell you that, like, my husband looked at me and said, you know, who asked you? And a light bulb went off, and I never blamed him again for anything that ever happened. It didn't work that way. I mean, I had to work very hard at changing my perspective, and I have to do it, you know, every… every single day. But at the end of the day, it's a choice. So I think that's probably the third thing that I would say, is that it's a practice. It's a, you know, it's a,
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Meridith Elliott Powell: It's a decision. Like, I share the fact that I'm sitting in my office right now in Asheville, North Carolina, and right in this desk drawer is a note card. And on that note card is my vision. It's where I see my life, my health, my relationships, my finances, and my spirituality a year from now. I read that note card 3 times a day, and the reason I'm doing it is because I'm training my brain to remain positive.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Intentional, and thinking through what what I'm doing.
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Jack Hubbard: Well, that brings up a chapter about the power of the past.
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Jack Hubbard: And you've just described
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Jack Hubbard: a situation where you could look at this as baggage or history. Talk about those concepts, that's powerful.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, so baggage, in my opinion, is what holds you back, and that's how I spent the first 36 years of my life, is with baggage. It was like I allowed my past to define me.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Versus history is… I think history is what made you. You know, probably the biggest perspective shift
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I had, and I'll never forget it. I was, my first husband had passed away, and I was trying to clean out the house, like, get rid of, you know, our things, and I was getting ready to sell the home that we lived in, and and I was crying. I was feeling sorry for myself. This wasn't fair. I didn't want to be this age, and
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Meridith Elliott Powell: single, why hadn't life just worked out, you know, why I wanted it to work out. And all of a sudden, it hit me that I was waiting for somebody to show up and change my life, and nobody was coming to the door. That if my life was going to change.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I was the only one who could change it. And in that moment.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: something happened. I decided that everything that had happened in my life, when… by society's measures, is embarrassing,
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Meridith Elliott Powell: sort of made me a badass, sorry about that. Sort of made me tough, rather than something I should be ashamed of. You know, like, it was always something I'd been trying to hide, which was my baggage, versus
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I just realized that most people would not survive what I had been through, and that made me special. And just shifting… whether it was true or not, who cares? That perspective really, really shifted everything, so I feel like I turned…
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Meridith Elliott Powell: my past into something that fueled my growth, not to be repeated again. And my baggage was what I was wearing, like a… like a coat of armor that was
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Holding me back and sinking me.
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Jack Hubbard: So, that leads me to…
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Jack Hubbard: how do people that have such horrible things happen to them come out the other end? And one of the things you write about is focus, and that focus is your secret weapon. What do you mean by that?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, the focus is so incredibly important. In fact, Jack, one of my favorite exercises to do for my, for my clients is to write out all the things that you're angry about, all the things you're worried about, all the things that you're fearful about. Just get it all out of your system.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And then look at that, and really ask yourself what on that sheet of paper can you impact, or what can you control? And it's usually no more than 3 things that you can impact and you can control.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And focus your time and your energy on what you can control and what you can impact. It is…
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Meridith Elliott Powell: it's important to go through the exercise, because I don't think we can let go of anger. I don't think we can let go of the things that we're feeling. I mean, I'll admit, I was angry, I was mad, this isn't fair. Like, why didn't I marry my high school sweetheart, have 3.5 children, you know, get the, you know, we both get really nice jobs, we live in a nice neighborhood, nothing bad ever happens to us.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: That didn't happen. And you know what? And that doesn't really happen for anybody, right? I mean, life is just full of this type of stuff. But what I see, where I see the most amazing things happen, is people's ability to focus on what matters, and to let the rest
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Meridith Elliott Powell: go. And crazy things happen, like, people go through insurmountable odds. I'll just give you a really quick example. I was, the incoming chair of the National Speakers Association when this happened, and we had been, the organization, when I joined the board, had been bleeding $60,000 a month for 10 years.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: The only way to save the organization, we'd gone through all the investments, was to, double the dues, and we hadn't raised dues in,
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Meridith Elliott Powell: 20 years? We had to sell out every event. We hadn't sold an event out in 10 years, and we had to balance the budget. All we did was focus on those 3 things. Selling out events.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Explaining why we doubled the dues, and and and balancing the budget. And in a year, we turned the thing around. I… I just… I couldn't believe it. Everybody… we… we had decided who we were going to sell it to, we were going to shut it down, like, it was a crazy Hail Mary.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: But it was that power of focus. Everybody focused on the exact same things, and it's all we worried about. We didn't worry about anything else. The power of focus, it is your secret weapon, but it takes
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Meridith Elliott Powell: you've got to be willing, like I always say, you know, go grab your friend, grab a glass of wine, complain, complain, complain, complain. 20 minutes later, set an alarm, now focus on what you can control.
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Jack Hubbard: Absolutely.
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Jack Hubbard: And that brings me to your commentary about the National Speakers Association, brings me to an organization. When Bob and I started St. Meyer and Hubbard 25 years ago.
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Jack Hubbard: you know, I'd never owned a company, I didn't know anything about leading people, and so what I didn't realize is that all these people… you know, come on, I'm, you know, what a dope.
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Jack Hubbard: All these people come to the job every day with all this history.
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Jack Hubbard: And maybe they did have a fight, or maybe their kids are sick, or their mom's in the elder care. You know, a thousand things are going on. Hell, I wanted to focus on
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Jack Hubbard: let's go sell some stuff to bankers. Well, that… because my life was in really good shape.
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Jack Hubbard: where I'm going with this is, having focus for an individual is hard enough.
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Jack Hubbard: as an owner, or the leader of a band, it's even tougher, because you've got all these other people that have all this… this kind of history as well.
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Jack Hubbard: One of the greatest quote of your book is, and I'll read it, culture is how people feel when they come to work.
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Jack Hubbard: Talk about culture and how you take perspective from an individual level to a culture, and how do leaders fit into all this stuff?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, I think… well, I think leaders are the anchor of it, right? This is… this is probably going to sound really simple, and I think it is simple, it just isn't easy, because it… it requires us to be, as leaders, it requires us to do one of the hardest things we ever do, and that is to be consistent.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And so,
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Meridith Elliott Powell: You know, when it comes to an uncertain environment, and it comes to building a culture, people really need clarity.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: they really need to understand where are we headed and where are we going. And that doesn't mean that you create a vision and you put it on the wall, or you even put it on your email signature. It means that you, as the leader, every time I see you, every time I hear you, every time I talk to you, I hear that vision coming out of your mouth. And it's something very simple, something very, you know, something very…
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Meridith Elliott Powell: clear, that, not, not overly scripted or overly, you know, heavy vocabulary words. It's just, this is who we are, and this is what we're doing here, and this is why what you're doing really makes a difference.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: And then you really need to connect people to the vision. You know, one of my favorite things to do is to have every department get a name. Like, if I work in an accounting department, you know, we're the money makers of the company. Like, we, you know, we do this. Or if we're the salespeople, we're the revenue generators. Like, that's my part.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: in this vision. This is how I make a difference. And so I feel like we…
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Worry so much about culture by trying to define it.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: when really what people should do is feel it. And when people feel it, you feel that energy. When you know when you walk into an organization whether they've got a good culture or they don't have a good culture. But, but if you don't hear the leader talking about the vision and the purpose.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: You don't have a culture at all.
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Jack Hubbard: And if the vision and the purpose are too hard to understand.
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Jack Hubbard: or if they're just a bunch of memorized words, that isn't gonna work either. I remember when we started the company, you know, one of the… I said to Bob, okay, what's our… what's our vision statement, mission statement? He said, eat.
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Jack Hubbard: And I said, well, okay, that's fine, but what about the bankers? He said, give. I said.
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Jack Hubbard: Give to eat is our mission statement.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I love that!
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Jack Hubbard: give something to bankers that they can use to help them grow, and in the process, we get to eat. Yeah. It's really simple. It's really simple. No, we didn't put on note cards, but everybody that we hired said, understand, give to eat, and they did, keeping it… keeping it simple.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Well, I love that, and see, you just… you know whether you belong there, whether you don't belong there, and you… with every decision that you make, it's easy for me to say, does this help us give to eat? Like, it's easy for me to go, okay, I can think exactly like Jack thinks, because it's very clear what I'm supposed to do in this situation.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, no doubt about it. Well, you're… you're busy. I just want to ask you a couple more questions.
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Jack Hubbard: look into your crystal ball. You probably speak as much, if not more, than anybody on Earth. You are… I'll tell you a quick story about poor Meredith. I was speaking at an event up in Portland, Maine, in the spring.
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Jack Hubbard: And it's the very first time I was gonna have a chance to hear Meredith and speak myself, so what a privilege to be on stage with Meredith. So we were going to have dinner the night before.
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Jack Hubbard: And you couldn't… I didn't hear from you, I… oh my god, is she… is she okay? Talk about where you slept that night, and how you got to Portland, Maine.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, I got to the airport, and I got to the airport, and as luck would have it, just, you know, as it happens in the airport, my flight got delayed, it got delayed, it got delayed, it got canceled. I slept on the floor of the, airport, got up the next morning, got the first flight out. I think, what did I get to the keynote? 30 minutes before I was supposed to go on stage?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Walked in there, got on stage, did my keynote, walked out the door, back on a plane, headed home.
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Jack Hubbard: Unbelievable.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: But you do… do what you gotta do, right?
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Jack Hubbard: You do, you do. But where I want to go with this is, you know, you've done this for a long time, and you've seen sales a lot. You've talked about what you see for 2025. What's in your crystal ball? What are you seeing for 2026? You mentioned you think it could be a good year. Where's 26 going to be for sales?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Yeah, I think, 26, I think there's still going to be a lot of headwinds. I think there's still going to be a lot of, a whole lot of uncertainty. But the reason I think it's going to be a, a good year for sales is that in an uncertain marketplace, your customers need you more.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: then they need you in a certain marketplace. And so, I think this is a very good year to get out there and really figure out
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Meridith Elliott Powell: what are your customers worried about? What are your prospects thinking about? Like, what are their… what are they, concerned over, and how can you help, and how can you support? I also think we're going to see 2026 as an increase in the need of face-to-face.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: and more connection, and more, you know, more building those relationships. I said to somebody, you know, my grandfather was in the lumber business back in the 1930s and the 1940s, and he used to, you know, do business on Handshake all the time, and I said, I really think we're going back there.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I really do. You know, we're gonna have all this technology around us, but we're gonna go back to a world of, who do you know? Who would you recommend? Like, who do you think would be good? And so, we're going to be… need to be out there pressing the flesh more than ever.
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Jack Hubbard: Look, y'all, a keynote speaker, mastermind group.
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Jack Hubbard: online training, newsletter, books, and a podcast. Meredith, I don't know how you do this all, but talk about all these resources that you bring to the table that help people so much.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Well, I think it's important for any of us, whether you do what I do for a living or, you know, or you're a banker, but can people access the information they need from you in a way that works for them?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: You know, I write a lot of books, but not everybody wants to read a book, so I also record them on Audible so that people can listen to the book if they prefer. I do a podcast because some people
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Meridith Elliott Powell: prefer more, you know, real-time information. I definitely step on a stage and I keynote. I do consulting services and sales and in leadership, development, as well as executive coaching, because everybody needs
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Their little dose of how to thrive in uncertainty in a way that works
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Meridith Elliott Powell: for them, and I just want to be able to deliver in those mediums. I also think it keeps it a lot more interesting for me. You have to feel this. I mean, as much fun as it is to step on a stage or to do a podcast, there's nothing more real than dealing one-on-one, than rolling up your sleeves and really learning from people what's relevant and important for them. It kind of reminds me
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Meridith Elliott Powell: when I worked in corporate, and I was writing the retail strategy, all I wanted to do was be on the
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Meridith Elliott Powell: ground with customers, because that was how I stayed in touch. And I feel like offering a lot of different ways to deliver my services ensures that what I'm delivering is relevant and important.
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Jack Hubbard: Yeah, and, and… 8 o'clock Eastern, every, every Saturday.
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Jack Hubbard: Meredith and Mark Hunter do this amazing podcast. I get my coffee, my wife says, where you going? Oh, I know you're gonna see Meredith this morning.
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Jack Hubbard: And I get my coffee, and I listen, and I always learn something new. So, the Sales Logic Podcast is, is on. You know, I met you… I think life is, very serendipitous.
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Jack Hubbard: I don't know why I met you, but I'm glad I did many, many years ago. What you've done for society, for sales, and books-like perspective is absolutely world-class, Meredith. I'm glad to know you, glad you're my friend, and glad you were on with me today. Thank you so much for your time.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Thank you so much, Jack. As always, it's been, it's been great. Always fun hanging out with you.
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Jack Hubbard: Alright.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Alright, good deal, my friend!
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Jack Hubbard: So, are you off to do…
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Jack Hubbard: Are you running to something else now, or are you gonna have some downtime?
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Meridith Elliott Powell: No, I'm off to, I've got a really busy December, so I take it right up until about the, the 20th, and then I'm gonna chill out. But listen, I'll keep in touch. I'd love to… sometime when I'm in Chicago, maybe we can make up that dinner.
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Jack Hubbard: I would love to do that, and I'm serious about your, your publishing company. I'd love to talk to somebody.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: I'll make that, I'll make that connection.
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Jack Hubbard: Okay, thanks, Meredith, good to see you.
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Meridith Elliott Powell: Bye!
