Cam Marston
- Author, Consultant, Podcast & Radio Talk Show Host, and Top-Rated Keynote Speaker
- Informative, engaging, humorous, and full of concrete research
Cam Marston Speaker Biography
Cam Marston is an author, advisor, radio talk show host, and top-rated keynote speaker on the trends shaping the workplace and marketplace. His presentations are informative, engaging, humorous, and full of concrete research that is tailored to his audience. Cam enlivens the data with anecdotes, tales from the real business world, attention-grabbing visuals, and quips that make the messages and actionable strategies memorable.
His original focus was on generational differences and their impact on the workplace and marketplace. Cam and his firm, Generational Insights, have provided research and consultation to hundreds of organizations, ranging from small businesses to multinational corporations, as well as to major professional associations. Cam’s four books and countless articles describe and analyze the major generations of our time, explaining how generational workplace and marketplace preferences affect every aspect of business, including recruiting and retention, management and motivation, and sales and marketing.
In 2018, Cam began a podcast that was soon picked up as an FM radio show titled What’s Working with Cam Marston. Cam interviews a wide range of expert guests to learn about the trends influencing their workplace, workforce, and marketplace, and how they are successfully reacting to them. He has now broadcast over 200 episodes and released his fifth book, What Works: The Ten Best Ideas from the First 200 Episodes.
Cam also records commentaries for Alabama Public Radio called Keepin’ It Real. They’re his humorous and inspirational observations of the world around him and have won both statewide and national awards. You can find both his radio show and his commentaries on your favorite podcast app. The commentaries have recently been converted into short, subscription-based videos to be used as inspirational and motivational weekly training content for the workplace.
Cam’s expertise and acumen are the products of over 20 years of research and consultation across a wide range of industries. He has provided insight and advice to leadership at the some of the world’s most prominent corporations, including Kaiser Permanente, Charles Schwab, BASF, Nestle, Schlumberger, Fidelity, Warner Brothers, ESPN, Qualcomm, RE/MAX and Eli Lilly. He has also offered presentations and consultations for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Internal Revenue Service, NASA and the U.S. Army, as well as for major professional associations such as the American Bankers Association, the Health Care Compliance Association, FMI/The Food
Industry Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the Million Dollar Round Table.
Cam’s perspectives have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Investment Advisor, the Chicago Tribune, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Money, and Forbes, as well as on Good Morning America and the BBC. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Tulane University and is a native and resident of Mobile, Alabama.
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Speech Topics
Five Generations in The Workplace
For the first time in history, five distinct generations — Matures, Boomers, Xers, Millennials and Gen Z— may be employed side by side in the workplace. With differing values and seemingly incompatible views on leadership, these generations have stirred up unprecedented conflict in the business world. Effective management of this generational divide is vital to longevity and success. In fact, it is the most important demand your company can make of its leaders.
In this engaging presentation, Cam Marston teaches how each generation developed its core values, how these values manifest in the workplace today, and why they can all not only operate alongside each other, but do so with extraordinary success. This program provides the generational insight, concrete examples and specific approaches to help frustrated managers build the individual connections needed to boost employee performance and retention.
As you will learn, the only common ground is the intensity with which each generation holds fast to its value systems. Understanding and respecting those generational biases are critical to bringing out the best in every employee.
Recruiting and Retaining Across the Generations
We hear it all the time: “Our people are our greatest asset.” But good talent is hard to find and even harder to keep. How do you build your people assets? What do today’s employees want? In today’s multigenerational workforce, Millennials want meaning and freedom, Generation X wants openness and flexibility, Boomers want recognition and authority. Matures like rules and respect. What about the Gen Z, the generation following the Millennials? Each generation has something to offer so every business needs to offer something to each generation.
Retaining employees is far more cost-effective than recruiting and training new ones. This presentation profiles each generation of employee – what will get them on the clock and what will keep them ticking. Cam Marston will help you adapt your recruiting and retention program to suit the ambitions and goals of each generation, choose from the best that each has to offer and realize the full return on investment in your workforce.
Recruiting, training, experience, and institutional memory make your employees your most valuable assets. Effective multi-generational hiring and retention efforts will help ensure that those assets keep working for you and not for someone else.
Selling Across the Generations
The first rule of selling remains steadfast: Know your customer. With five distinct generations playing active roles in the buying decisions of companies worldwide, that tenet is increasingly difficult to fulfill. It is no longer enough to be personable and knowledgeable about your product.
Changing dynamics require changing strategies. To succeed in today’s business climate, you need to approach each buyer with an informed generational perspective — recognizing the underlying biases, values and expectations that pave the way to “Yes.”
In this presentation, Cam Marston shows you how to create a fast and genuine connection with new customers, sell to your customer’s expectations, build trust between generations, and avoid communication pitfalls
What’s Working: Workplace and Marketplace Trends
Extraordinary turnover. Mental health awareness and challenges. Diversity and inclusion priorities and backlash. Supply chain nightmares. Confusion about AI. Political divisions. Trembling stock market. Inflation forecasts. Partridge in a pear tree. Goodness.
The trends shaping today’s workplace and marketplace are, each on their own, worthy of a headline in a news cycle. But in today’s upheaval, they’re happening simultaneously. Which of the trends making current headlines will impact the workplace and marketplace most? Which ones do employers, managers, sales leaders, and human resources executives need to keep an eye on? Cam Marston has opinions on that…
In 2018, Cam began an old-school, interview-style, terrestrial radio show and podcast called What’s Working with Cam Marston. His goal? To interview professionals from a spectrum of industries across the country who will help his listeners better understand the trends shaping their workplace, the workforce, and the marketplace. Today, over 300 episodes later, Cam shares best practices gained from his continuously growing body of interviews, as well as from proprietary research, to equip each audience with a list of the most important trends, their potential impact, and guidelines on how to address them. This presentation delivers thought-provoking content, curated for your specific industry, to arm each audience with the skills and information needed to get ahead in their industry.
What Works: Sales, Leadership, and Communication Best Practices in an Unpredictable World
The pundits say one thing about the economy but you and your clients may feel another. Uncertainty is rampant today. And uncertainty, left unaddressed, breeds fear. As a leader in your firm, you are responsible for doing your best to manage the anxieties of your clients, your staff, and your colleagues. How do you do it?
With 25+ years of advising hundreds of successful corporations, associations and businesses of all sizes, combined with lessons gathered from over 300 executive interviews in his radio show and podcast, What’s Working with Cam Marston, Cam shares best practices for sales, leadership, and communication in times of uncertainty:
• Transparent Communication
• Practical Guidance
• Empathy and Support
• Impact on Recruiting and Retention
It’s a refreshing and inspiring conversation to remind leaders of their role in shaping their clients’ and team’s outlooks during daunting times.
The Gen-Savvy Financial Advisor
For decades, financial services professionals have focused on demographic groups that are now largely in retirement. The financial services industry grew up with the Matures and the Baby Boomers. Now, new generations with different economic and cultural experiences, as well as different attitudes and expectations, are in the age ranges that make them prime markets for investments, retirement planning, insurance, and other financial products.
Connecting and building trust with each of these generations? It’s a puzzle and it shouldn’t be so hard.
Cam Marston understands the attitudes and expectations of today and tomorrow’s generations and what they expect from financial services providers. He knows how they buy, how they value different types of information, what their definition of “expert” is, and how they apply it to financial professionals. He understands their preferred methods of communications, which sales tools to use and how to use them effectively.
The next generation of financial services client has arrived. They will not tolerate being treated the same way their parents were treated. Learn what they want in this exciting and impactful presentation.
Managing Your Client’s Five Greatest Financial Fears
Your clients’ fears change throughout their lives. Regardless of whether they are young or old, they
likely worry that their financial challenges are nearly insurmountable. They show a brave face to their
family and to their colleagues but inside they tremble, Uncertainty creates fear. It always has. It always will.
You, the advisor, know better. Your financial training has taught you that few financial challenges are
unalterable. You know what to do, what to expect, and what products can address your clients’
challenges. However, sharing your confident outlook requires knowing what your clients’ fears are
and how to discuss them. And knowing how to do that, requires knowing a bit more about your
clients.
Life’s Predictable Fears
• When in early adulthood, your clients’ fears are largely about themselves and their ability to
earn and save
• Later the fears center around children and their future
• Then your client’s ability to preserve good health and save funds for retirement
• Then it’s a comfortable and productive retirement
• Followed by the extraordinary human desire to be remembered
Each of these life stages require the savvy to know how to communicate appropriately with their
client going through these emotions, these phases.
Supported by data and research, this presentation equips advisors to talk their clients through their
fears and equip them to more fully develop long-lasting, fruitful client relationships.
Leading a Multi-Generational Team Effectively – Workshop
Leading Multi-Generational Teams is an out-of-your-seat, multi-media workshop using fun and engaging methods to expand leaders’ existing knowledge and facilitate new and deeper insight into those whom they lead. Providing multiple application opportunities, the workshop optimizes a leader’s abilities to develop high performance teams and achieve better results on the job.
Participants learn the demographics, historical events, and parenting trends that created each generation’s workplace preferences and how these preferences can become sources of conflict. Awareness, appreciation, and mastery of generational preferences enables leaders to address such conflict productively, if not avoid it altogether. Furthermore, mastery of generational preferences ensures productive team relationships and communications that promote creativity, innovation, teamwork, and performance.
The Gen-Flex® model—a tool for leaders to examine how generational preferences influence their own leadership approach on a case-by-case basis—is central to the workshop. The tool teaches leaders to adjust their approach to minimize generation gaps and lead effectively.
A flexible program, the course is available in half-day and full-day versions.
PHASE™ into Retirement: An Advisor Workshop on the Non-Financial Side of Retirement Readiness
Most advisors are well-prepared to manage the financial mechanics of retirement. What’s harder, and increasingly part of the job, is navigating the life transition that accompanies it.
Clients approaching retirement often struggle with questions that don’t show up in projections: loss of identity, lack of structure, uncertainty about daily life, health, purpose, and connection. When these issues remain unaddressed, confidence wavers and planning conversations stall.
PHASE Into Retirement™ introduces advisors to a practical framework for understanding and discussing those non-financial dynamics. PHASE™ examines five interconnected dimensions that shape the lived experience of retirement: Purpose, Health, Activities, Social Life, and Everyday Life.
The workshop explains how these elements interact, why gaps in one area often appear as hesitation or anxiety in planning discussions, and how advisors can use this perspective to guide more productive conversations.
As part of the workshop, advisors are given the opportunity to interact directly with the PHASE™ assessment. This hands-on exposure allows advisors to experience how the framework is translated into structured questions, scoring, and insight, providing practical context for how PHASE™ can support client conversations. This is not therapy, coaching, or role play. It is a professional, research-informed tool designed to complement existing planning processes.
Cam Marston as Your Emcee
Not only is Cam Marston a powerful speaker but he is also an exceptional Master of Ceremonies. A meeting planner’s dream, Cam’s emcee skills rival those of any comedian or other professional host. He is quick on his feet, funny, flexible, always prepared, and skilled at keeping the meeting on track and on schedule.
As an in-demand expert on workplace and marketplace trends, Cam offers special rate packages that combine his emcee work and a keynote.
Books