5 Tips to Communication Success
Communication success is vital if you are to move forward and increase your success in any sphere
of business. Working effectively with your sales team requires people skills.
Every goal you want to accomplish in life is determined by your ability to communicate well, build collaborative relationships, and influence others. Why? Because, like it or not, everything you do involves other people.
Knowing how to get the best results out of your sales people in any situation takes skill. Here are five tips to help you maximize the potential of your relationships and move you and your team results ahead.
Stop talking
Listening is 45% of communication. And if you’re talking… you can’t be listening. People are biased towards good listeners. When people feel you have truly listened to their ideas and concerns, they are more likely to listen to yours.
Good listeners build solid relationships. To let the other person know you’re listening, look at them, lean slightly towards them, and occasionally nod to show attentiveness, not necessarily agreement.
Tune up your attitude.
Just as your car needs routine maintenance, your attitude could use a check up every now and then. When it comes to your attitude, you have all the power. You choose whether you will respond positively or negatively. No person and no situation determines your attitude. You do.
Show a genuine interest in others.
People are interested in people who are smart enough to be interested in them. Next to physical survival, our second greatest need is to be valued — to know that we matter. Demonstrating acceptance and interest in others is an excellent way to communicate value.
Don’t stew.
When you sit on your emotions, resentment towards others builds. Resolve conflicts quickly. Otherwise you risk having an emotional outburst that you will probably regret once you cool off.
Communicate assertively.
We are born either passive communicators or aggressive communicators. We must learn to be assertive communicators. Assertive communicators get the best results out of people. They are neither mean nor weak. To communicate assertively, you are tough and tender, positive and firm, confident and direct. The ability to communicate well is ranked the number one key to success.
Experts say that 15% of your success comes from your know-how, while 85% comes from your ability to connect with people and create trust and respect. If you don’t have a clear idea what to work on, make developing your people skills a priority. Excellent people skills are the most powerful career and personal skills you can possess.
To you and your teams success
Best Wishes
Denise
Popularity: 28% [?]
How To Ensure Your Sales Teams Passionate Performance
Gone is “command-and-control”; instead, today’s sales managers must connect with each sales person and engage them to perform their best.
Here are some possible steps to inspiring passionate sales people performance in the new business economy.
1. Think strategically every day; know your organisational strengths and search for corresponding opportunities. Regularly update your plan; share progress and include your sales team in strategic discussions and responses.
4. Create powerful 2-way (up and down the command chain) communication to allow for maximum information and knowledge flow throughout the organisation; share critical information with your sales people. In return, listen to what they have to say and their ideas.
5. Define the talents, skills and experience required for success in your company sales roles. Use this as the bench mark for your ongoing recruitment.
6. Create an expectation of performance ownership. Clearly define sales people performance expectations and allow sales people to own (succeed or fail in) their implementation plans; require them to own their decisions and performance.
7. Regularly build strong personal connections with your sales team through recurring performance feedback, coaching and skill building, hosted in personal discussions and open conversations.
8. Talk constantly about clients and the quality of their service experience with you; encourage all sales people to take performance risks to impress clients and to think and act like true client champions.
Today’s successful sales management involves engaging and inspiring the “whole” sales person. Heart and mind, passion and intellect, emotions and reason. This is the key to performance. Manage effectively and sales people commit to great performance, ideas and loyalty.
Have a great weekend
Popularity: 35% [?]
So why would you want to brand your self as a sales manager?
Personal branding and sales might seem a strange combination. When you compare it to a classic branding add like the Cadbury gorilla. No excuse at all for posting this apart from the reason that it demonstrates how the power of emotion memory and branding can all work together.
So why would you want to brand your self as a sales manager?
Personal branding is the powerful but simple concept that will help you engage with your team and boss in ways you never realised where possible.
Although the term has only been around for a little over a decade, the idea itself is probably as old as the first salesperson that discovered he wasn’t the only wheel maker. Yet personal branding may be more relevant today than ever.
Why? Because relationships are the key to success in the new business economy. Where trust, credibility and character are some of the most important assets.
So why bother as a sales manager you might ask? Well it can impact your team and your boss in so many ways that will literally guarentee your success. It is an underused method to fast track a route to memorability, acceptance and trust.
Understanding the keys to building your personal brand or persona begins with creating an authentic image combined with a liberal sprinkling of enthusiasm.
Knowing your skills, strengths, values and outcomes is the foundation of solid personal brand construction. When the right elements are in place, your brand is visible, unique and a reflection of your authentic self.
There are infinite ways to grow your personal brand once it’s been established, but only a short list of essential keys to ensuring successful results and maximizing your potential:
Truth
Explore your own truths. Building a strong personal brand demands an honest assessment of what you have to offer. It’s about knowing your weaknesses as intimately as you know your strengths and assets. It’s as much about spending the time to analyse what you are not willing to do to achieve success as it is commiting to an agenda that you know you can and will follow.
Originality
Be original. The definition of personal branding stems from the theory that there is something different about our unique blend of talent, personality and principles. Make a list of all the creative things that sets you and your brand apart from everyone else.
Skill Perfection
Perfect your skills. Keeping the mindset of a student of your craft can be an invaluable tool to a winning brand. Very few marketable skills remain stagnant in any business or service industry. Staying open to the fact that there is always something new to learn or a way to improve what you offer will keep you competitive and at the top of your game.
Credibility
Establish credibility. Become an expert in your given field by aspiring to know more about what you do than anyone else doing the same thing.
Information Source
Position yourself as a source of information and be willing to share that knowledge. Create a reliable and credible personal brand that makes you the authority among your peers or colleagues.
New Idea Guru
Remain open to new ideas. Understand the critical concept of change management. Many markets are in a constant state of evolution and changing faster than we can write about it. Good personal branding means staying true to your own core identity.
However, it also means being flexible enough to make adjustments and explore new developments as inevitable changes occur.
How are you branding you and your team at the monent?
Are you a branded sales manager that every great sales person wants to work for?
Are you that brand of sales manager that get the promotion because of who you are and what you stand for? Let me know your answers
To you and your Brands success!
Best Wishes
Denise
Popularity: 33% [?]
Determination to succeed in sales and sales management? What is yours like?
Determination to succeed is something that successful sales managers have. If you are reading this blog my suspicion is you have it in plentiful supply.Over the last few weeks we have been pulling together a new product that we will be launching before the end of the year. Part of it will focus on the power of success and self motivation. All related to how this helps to drive sales and increase your teams sales success. So as you might imagine my senses are heightened to various topics at the moment around this.
This morning my eyes where drawn to an amusing article on MSN news. Have a look at the summary below!
Man finds happiness with 25th wife
A man from Nepal says he has finally found happiness with his 25th wife after 24 failed marriages.
Ramchandra Katuwal, 49, a porter from Khandbari in eastern Nepal, recently celebrated his seventh wedding anniversary to latest bride Sharada, 23, and says he is now content and wants to concentrate on his children’s education.
Mr Katuwal’s first three wives and the 24th all ran away, he said. But he was married so many times over a 16-year-period he can only remember nine of his former wives clearly.
It is a great example of the power of determination and having faith about what is possible! …plus a great lesson in forgetting your mistakes.I have to reflect that if he forgot so many of his wives did he do this on other occasions? Is that’ why he got married so many times?!*
On a serious note many people really lack the determination to succeed. Failure is not the end of the world. As Edison found out after many thousands of unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb.
“Failure “is really important in learning and perfecting how to do things. The problem is many people give up so easily. Never more so than in sales.
Cast your mind back to when you where selling.
How many times did you sell on the first visit? Very few I would guess.
The research evidence suggests that customers/clients will not commit to buy till they have had at least 5 points of contacts. Shocking I know. Even more concerning is less than 10% of sales people make more calls than this on their prospects.
Relating back to what happens for you. As a sales manager do you have determination? Do you use it on a regular basis?
If not just remember:
A. Everybody fails sometimes
B. It is actually the quickest way to learn what does and does not work?
c. Failure means it has not worked yet. Rather than it will never work?
D. Failure followed by practise leads to mastery leads to results.
Have a great determined week
Best Wishes
Denise
Cast your mind back to when you where selling.
How many times did you sell on the first visit? Very few I would guess.
Popularity: 29% [?]
Goal Setting for Sales Managers Does it Work? She we have a go??
Goal setting does not seem to be quite the “in thing” it was a few years ago. Which really surprises me.
I was reading a recent blog post from a sales management site giving some top tips for sales people.
The rise of the film The Secret and the law of attraction may have something to do with it. Some clarification I think is needed. Goal setting is vital. It’s the goal achievement where the law of attaction comes into play. More of that in another post.
Let me explain a little more. Many years ago I “got into” personal development and the science of success through Earl Nightingale. Well actually Nightingale Conant to be exact. I purchased a whole host of tapes and books and started to appy many of the strategies to great effect.
One of the key things it suggested you do was to write down your list of goals that you wanted to achieve. It then suggested that this fact alone would put you in the top 3-4% of the population and that all good things where likely to happen to you.
Well I guess if you wrote down 10 or so reasonable goals at least one might happen?
A much better thing to do is actually look at your goals and take some tangible action towards them. This stands a much better chance of something realistic happening.
Earl also suggested another very nifty trick. Which was to phrase your goal in the form of a question. Then make a list of 20 possible things you could do to achieve it. Stated in a postive tense with an action step. No judgments and don’t stop till you have 20 things.
Let me give you an example. The question could be;
“How can my region/district increase market share by 3% by the end of November 2008?”
1. Analyse current cash revenue data and get a cash value for a 3% increase.
2. Break this down by week
3. Break this down by territory
4. Work out how many extra sales are needed
5. Review the teams call data and find any gaps
6. Run a fun incentive.
7. Send my team a survey and ask for ideas. ( Survey monkey is free and easy to use)
…………………etc etc.
Do you get the idea. Just take one of these ideas and implement it that day. Imagine when you do this for a number of goals what the outcome could be?
Lets say you did this 5 days a week and generated 100 ideas. If you implemented just one of them a day for a month what might happen?
This is something I have gone back to using in the last few weeks with some great success. When I managed my own sales team this is someting I would often do to raise the energy and get the creative juices flowing. It also never ceased to amaze me how many great ideas came out of it as well.
I am part of a mastermind group and we often have sessions where we work on each others business. Which leads me to a great idea. How about sending me a quick email with a goal you would like to achieve. You can be anonomous as well if you want to. I will post it on the blog and people can add in their suggestions.
Just send in your idea on the contact form and lets go for It
Take Care
Have a great week
Denise
Popularity: 33% [?]
Sales Rejection the Recession and the Weather?
Sales rejection the recession and the weather is a topic that came to me this morning. A tenuous link for a blog post I know keep with me though. As most of you know I am fortunate enough to reside in a beautiful area of the uk. Called the lake district.
That’s a picture for you below. Actually taken in the height of summer. I guess if you live in a land of lakes and mountains you expect a degree of wet weather! Leading me on to how easy it is to let our outer world effect our results.
At the moment if we are not talking about the weather its the “recession”. It is the same all over the world. I was just on the phone to a good buddy in California (oh the joys of Skype and Webcams) and we had the exact same conversation.
Now I am not saying that strange weather and financial challenges are not happening around the globe. Yes they are of course. Yet they are external events which alter our state of mind and if we are not careful can start it off in the totally wrong direction.
Getting down about things and what might or might not happen puts you in totally the wrong ” frame of mind”. I guess our beliefs are the real culprits here. You know ? those things you were brought up to believe as truths stick with us for so long when they are just not useful anymore.
If you have a thought that the recession means less sales. Guess what will happen. If its that Mr Smith can’t afford to buy our widget that happens to.
So how do you convince your team that they can create their own reality? To have belief in themselves and what they are capable of? Well you will be glad to know there are many ways.
Lets start with one that in my experince is the easiest to do particulary with a sceptical sales team
One of the quickest ways is to focus on the customer.
Just start having a look around. Successful business are often born in these times. How do they do it. They look for the best possible way to serve the customer. ( If you need any evidence to convince your guys just serach Google)
What are the challenges your customer faces everyday. What are their real pains. How can you help them with that. If you team start really interacting with customers and getting into a conversation their belief will start to change for your team as they make a difference.
So why does it work. Well customers need to have a relationship with you. Never more so than now. By building trust the relationship you have will move to a new level. When that happens your sales guys start to be more sccessful and their self esteem changes which then leads to more sales and on and on.
Take Care and enjoy what is left of the week
Denise
Popularity: 28% [?]
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