5 Tips to Communication Success
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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: 41% [?]
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: 55% [?]
Motivation and Learning
Motivation and its link to learning is something all new sales managers would do really well to know about from day one of their career.
Motivation is the fuel that fires every human achievement, and learning is the perfect example. Image yourself in this situation: You are just starting a new job and you know very little about what is involved in doing that job successfully. Nevertheless, you are really excited about your new sales career.
You are motivated to learn as much as possible to overcome your feeling of ineptness and to make a good impression. You might think that with so much at stake , you would absorb your lessons quickly and retain them until they were second nature, right? unfortunatley wrong!
When people are given too much information in a short time period, panic sets in. Human beings experience stress when they implement new behaviors, especially when they perform them imperfectly.
As a sales manager and coach, you can play a crucial role by helping your sales guys and girls over the rough spots. It’s all right for them to make mistakes.
In fact, it’s necessary so they can improve their competence through practice, practice and more practice. Your job is to assist them by following up their new knowledge with concrete skill development. Encourage them over these hurdles and you and they will reap the harvest of perseverance. Competence breeds confidence which, in turn, leads to inner motivation.
Bite Sized is Best
A key factor that influences learning is the nature of the subject. It comes as no surprise that simple material is easier to master than complex. Have you ever learnt how to play a musical instrument?
To enlighten you if not all music students start with scales and work their way up to performance level pieces. At any level of proficiency, the key to making a subject easier to learn is to break it down into small, simple increments. The same can be said for training. Often, sales managers with a big quota or target overwhelm their employees with massive amounts of information in a short period of time. The outcome is “information overload” and confusion.
An analogy is the sponge. It will absorb only so much at which time it reaches a saturation point where it will absorb no more. When this happens to sales people, they learn only what is necessary to get by or just those subjects that come easily to them. The rest doesn’t get soaked up and falls by the wayside. The solution is to break down training into bite size pieces that can be readily digested, absorbed and put to work in the field.
Popularity: 47% [?]
Sales Managers: How not to motivate your team
On the back of last weeks post and the reference to The Office. I had a conversation with an old buddy of mine I worked with when I first started selling.
It was great to chat about old times. As usual the conversation included a good laugh about a notorious boss we both had. As we looked back it was amusing and outrageous some of the things that went on.
This of course was a number of years ago. When employees where seen and not heard! Particularly brand new sales reps with a swanky new Ford Cortina!
I have been lucky in my sales and management career in working for pretty forward thinking companies. Where people are important and their welfare and development is paramount.
In the new business economy, the only true advantage organisations have is their cultural capital. For the simple amongst us thats the people who work there. The ones that turn up everyday and are totally comitted to what they do. This is never more so than with a sales team.
Get your team firing on all cylinders with an upbeat attitude and they are awesome. Treat them like a number and at best they are uninspired and resentful and at worse and they will walk away.
It is sometimes still surprising for me for me when I go into organisations where old fashioned ways of treating people still go on.
I found a great article. On 50 ways to get employees to quit. I laughed when I read it. Though when I got to the comments I reaslised that many had taken it seriously. Which makes me appreciate how much poor management still goes on. The psychology of how to work with people has still got a long way to go in some organisations.
It would be great to hear how many of you have experiend any of these?
Read on and let me know what you think
The article
I polled the other guys in my group and we built a damn good list of things that our IT manager did that led to him losing his $100K/year job. Note that I left a few specific things out because I don’t need anyone getting pinched. If you repeat these things successfully, you too will get your team to hate you. If you are a reporting to someone that does these things, print this and do the old Office Space under the door routine.
Assign enough projects with tight deadlines so that your team has no choice but to work a 60 hour week while you only work 30 hours
Cap overtime pay.
Do not offer project pay.
Constantly underestimate the time it takes to get things done and then penalize employees’ bonuses because they didn’t hit the goal.
Talk more than you listen.
Tell the team to begin planning for tons of deployments but never obtain the budget to actually implement any of them.
Don’t trust written time cards. Make employees email you when they get to the office so you can see a timestamp when they get in.
Always take sides in disputes instead of moderating.
Avoid looking people in the eye.
Reprimand employees in front of the entire team.
Hire someone that is very weak to take the place of a veteran and expect the same results from the team.
Reprimand Mark but don’t reprimand Tony when he makes the same error.
Consistency is good. Never ask you employees if they are challenged enough or want to take on more responsibility.
Make promises to internal customers but have no idea on the elements involved in getting the task done.
You know that Tony is a slacker, but he is really cool to hang out with so keep him around and give him good reviews.
Suzy can take 20 minute breaks instead of 10 because she’s a little cuter than Paul.
Give your employees 2nd tier systems to work with but expect top tier results.
Never cross train anybody on anything. The skills they walked in with are the skills they are leaving with.
Mandate a new policy without consulting a single person that will have to live with it.
Give employees low raises because the more you save, the higher your bonus.
When talking to an employee on the phone, type away at your email. That’s a great time to catch-up!
When someone comes to you with an issue regarding another employee, use a lot of big words to explain the situation but really take no interest or action.
Create a desk cleanliness policy.
When Suzy comes in late and leaves early, and we complain, do nothing about it.
Instead of offering to help hands-on, watch from a distance and provide support over email.
Mandate that the entire team use a single to-do list application simply because you think it’s best.
Make your best employees train the newbies for weeks at a time but insist that all deadlines be met.
Never answer your cell phone.
Never be the on-call guy to share in the team burden.
Have a group of employees that you get a long with and go out to lunch with while those that you don’t like get left out.
Send employees lots of chain letters, poems and other crap spam when they are hard at work.
Constantly give your employees vague project plans and get pissed when the result is not what you wanted.
Refuse to upgrade a system after the entire team asks for it and then be sure not to give a valid reason.
Blame everything on your boss because no one will ever call you on it.
Make all men wear ties.
Do not let employees expense cell phone use but require a cell phone number for the on-call guy.
Shut off access to Google and Ebay because it’s not “required for work”.
Never let employees hangout and use the corp. network to play games after hours.
Tell employees to do plan B because you will save $11 even though plan A is the safer, more efficient way to go.
I don’t care what they are working on. No one should get a monitor larger than yours
Insist employees come to your wife’s silly Barbecue.
Give advice on topics you are only partially educated in.
When the kudos are handed out, you should take the credit because you managed the team. Do not give credit to anyone else.
Monitor all phone use.
Charge someone .25 days off for a dentist appointment.
Lecture the team at least weekly.
Hold team meetings to provide updates even though the updates only pertain to one-third of team.
Buy the team lunch and always forget that Vegan in the corner…he’ll come around.
Make the team fill out self evaluations but provide very vague feedback on what they type.
Sleep with that girl Suzy on the team. No one will suspect she’s getting preferential treatment.
Call the redhead guy on the team Rusty. Everyone will laugh and you are sure to win their hearts.
Make sure the cubicles are as close to each other as physically possible. The open areas surrounding the group will be used eventually.
Make the entire team read a book and then set aside 3 hours to discuss it. This is sure to increase productivity.
Let a couple people work from the house, but provide no reason for it or ways for others to obtain the right.
Insist that employees complete projects that even you admit are worthless.
In the new business economy
As industry and business has moved on
As time moves on and
I am sure there are many more ways than this to demoralise a team
Yes these things still go on. Not with Sales Team of course. Let me know how many of these you have experienced.
To you and your teams success
Best Wishes
Denise
Popularity: 72% [?]
How to run a successful sales team meeting
How to Run A Successful Sales Team Meeting
Meetings are an important part of most corporate structures; but especially within sales. Many people will moan (sometimes inwardly!) over scheduled meetings because over the years they’ve sort of got a bit of a bad reputation.
We’ve probably all attended a meeting and then left when it was over- scratching our heads and wondering exactly what was accomplished from that hour of time. The problem with the majority of workplace meetings is that they are unstructured, completely unplanned, uninspiring and therefore- unproductive.
Here are some tips to help you run a successful sales team meeting; one that your sales team will thank you for and actually leave the meeting knowing exactly what is expected of them and how they’re going to get it done!
1. Have a clearly defined purpose and outcome.
In order for a meeting to be successful, you must have a way to measure the results. Don’t have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting, in other words, schedule meetings to generate a specific outcome.
2. Set an agenda (and stick to it).
Before the meeting, an agenda should be created that outlines what each member of the sales team plans to discuss, in line with the planned outcome of that particular meeting. You’ll want to plan the best way to use the allocated meeting time while still giving everyone ample opportunity to say what they need to say.
You will need to have some flexibility with your agenda as you can never completely predict how much time you may need on a certain topic, but having the agenda and distributing it to the sales team before the meeting helps everyone get focused and stay on track.
3. Engage the participants.
One reason meetings tend to fall short of their planned outcomes is due to the participants each attempting to take notes about what is being discussed. You may find it works better to assign a note-taker to each meeting, or simply record the meeting and have someone transcribe it into written form afterwards for each participant.
That way, everyone can be actively engaged in the discussion or presentation of the meeting, and not focused on trying to write down everything that’s being said.
4. Be a Clock Watcher
Time flies when you’re having fun – and it’s been known to get away from people during a meeting, too. Take a tip from Google: when they hold meetings, they literally project a four foot tall image of a timer on the wall. The timer counts down the time left for a meeting or time for discussion of a particular topic within the meeting.
It adds some pressure to keep the meetings moving as planned on the agenda. While you don’t necessarily have to have a wall projection of a timer; you may want to keep an egg timer or clock visible to everyone at the meeting to help the sales team stay focused and on task.
5. Use Visual Aids
A large percentage of the population consider themselves to be “visual” learners. If they can’t see it, they can’t understand it. Visual aidsshould be used in meetings to help people “see” what you are trying to explain to them.
Visual aids can be things like flip charts, video presentations, slide shows, or transparencies, among others. The best visual aids:
Designed simply Contain few words, often with bullet points
Make only one point per visual (one point per slide or per page on a flip chart for example)
May be props or actual products
These tips should help you run a successful sales meeting with your sales team. Proper planning before the meeting ensures the meeting will have focus; careful actions during the meeting result in progress towards the desired outcome of the meeting.
Using these five keys should give you some new ideas about how to elevate your meetings from what people consider a “waste of time” to what is considered time well spent.
Popularity: 88% [?]
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