So how do success-oriented salespeople deal with these potential pitfalls?  The answer is actually very simple.  They develop and nurture a conscious desire to succeed!  And how do you make a decision to succeed?  By focusing on what you want to do with your life and how you’re going to go about making that happen. 

Attitudes are merely habits of thought.  They are emotional beliefs that one has regarding a variety of things.  Are they powerful? Absolutely.  And many are deep-seated and very difficult to change.  Think of it this way—if there were any one thing that you could pinpoint and change in people, what would it be?  Many people would say, “Attitude!”  How many times have you been told, “You need to change your attitude”?  Where do people get their attitudes?

Attitudes are the result of past experiences and current situations.  Have you ever walked up to someone and said, “Great day isn’t it?”  And they turn and look at you and say “What’s so great about it?”  Not uncommon, right? 

The sales professional who knows all the selling skills but does not have the motivation to use them is no better than the person who doesn’t know anything.  Knowledge is only useful when it is put into action.  Only a positive attitude will provide the arena for your skills and knowledge to be practiced. A salesperson’s attitude must include a commitment to serve their company and their customers. 

For more information on improving your sellling skills go to http://theemployersedge.com/products/training-and-employee-development.

May we assess up to 5 managers and give specific insight that will help them develop coaching skills and improve their managerial success…at NO CHARGE to your company.

Why?  We want you to know who we are at The Employers Edge and the sustainable value you can expect when we solve your people problems.  Here’s what you receive:  Free on-line behavioral assessment for up to 5 managers with a 2 hour training session on Coaching Skills for Managers. Limit 1 per client, not valid with any other offer.

Find the Answer.

You hear frustrated salespeople all the time saying, “My customer is crazy for not taking me up on this offer.  By implementing my recommendation, they will be able to save thousands of dollars, eliminate a whole department, and reduce inventory by 10%.”  The problem here is that the sales person in this scenario is transferring his/her buying reasons (based on logic) to the customer.  The customer isn’t buying for the salesperson’s reasons.  Customers buy for their reasons (based on emotion).  Behind every logical need lurks an emotional want.  If there is no emotional want, there will be no sale.  The salesperson’s mission must be to show their client how their product or service will fulfill a personal want as well as a logical need, as shown below:

PERSONAL REASONS  (WANTS)                       BUSINESS REASONS (NEEDS)

more power                                                              increase sales

control others                                                           reduce cost

self-esteem                                                               return on investment

enjoyment                                                                 less risk

recognition                                                                better quality

more leisure                                                              increased productivity

fame and glory                                                          control

team player                                                               better service

risk taking                                                                  good price

This is not to underestimate the importance of logical buying reasons.  You won’t make the sale without the facts provided by the left brain.  But the battery that fires the buying spark plug is more likely to be in the right brain.  Yet most (sometimes all) of our focus as a salesperson is on the facts, the logics, and the business reasons.

• Did you know a typical business hears from only 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers.  The other 96 percent just quietly go away and 91 percent will never come back.  That represents a serious financial loss for companies whose people don’t know how to treat customers, and a tremendous gain to those that do.
• A typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about his problem.  One in five will tell twenty.  It takes twelve positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident.
•  Seven out of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favor.  If you resolve it on the spot, 95 percent will do business with you again.  On average, a satisfied complainer will tell five people about the problem and how it was satisfactorily resolved.
• The average business spends six times more to attract new customers than it does to keep old ones.  Yet customer loyalty is in most cases worth ten times the price of a single purchase.

One of the greatest keys to long-term business success can be summed up in three simple words:  quality customer service. In today’s service-oriented economy, developing relationships and providing excellent service is more than a competitive weapon—it’s a survival skill.  If you don’t offer it, someone else will.  Can you afford not to improve in it?

Listening with empathy involves much more than registering, reflecting, or even understanding the words that are said.  Communication experts estimate, in fact, that only 10 percent of communication is represented by the words one says.  Another 30 percent is represented by sounds and 60 percent by body language.  Listening with empathy is listening with your ears, your eyes, and your heart.  You listen for feeling, for meaning.  You listen for behavior.  You use your right brain as well as your left.  You sense, you intuit, you feel.

One of the basic human needs that motivates is to be understood, validated and appreciated.  Only when that need is met is someone open to receiving advice.  Listening with empathy can also be risky.  It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced.  you become vulnerable.  It’s a paradox, in a sense, because in order to have influence over others, you have to be willing to be influenced yourself.  That means you have to really understand.

Listening with empathy takes time and practice.  A manager who is willing to try to see things from the employee’s perspective is a leader who will hear the real problems and needs of the employees.  The time to start listening is now.  The difference it makes will definitely be worth the effort, both personally and professionally.

• Help you make the best use of your talents, aptitudes and abilities
• Enhance the enjoyment of your job
• Cause you to have more self-confidence
• Ultimately increase your income
• Cause you to become more self-motivated
• Give you a greater sense of control and mastery over your job

15 Ways to Become More Creative:

• Ask “what if” questions–the crazier the better
• Make up metaphors and analogies.  My job is like_______
• Pay attention to small ideas.  That’s where many big ones get their start.
• Daydream.  Let your mind wander
• Play, “Just Suppose.”
• Try different ways of expressing your creativity.  Cooking, painting, photography, writing, etc.
• Notice when you do do something creative and keep a Creativity success file
• Learn and play strategy games like chess, checkers, and backgammon.
• Learn a foreign language and force your brain to think in new patterns
• If you’re right handed, try using your left hand to do things, and vice versa
• Guess at measurements rather than using a yard stick, tape measure or a cup.  Then measure to see how close you were
• Balance your checkbook without using a calculator
• Read three-quarters of a novel, then stop and write your own ending
• Do jigsaw and crossword puzzles

Years ago in the newspaper column of Ripley’s “Believer It or Not,” the following item appeared:  A plain iron bar is worth $5.00.  If you take that iron bar and forge horseshoes from it, the value increases to $10.50.  If it is made into needles, the price rises to $3,285.00.  And if you make watch springs from it, it then is worth $250,000.00.  Ergo, the difference between $5.00 and $250,000 is creativity.  All of us can enhance the creativity we possess.  What are you doing to enhance yours?

Delegation involves entrusting another person with a task for which the delegator remains ultimately responsible.  Delegation can range from a major appointment, such as the leadership of a team developing a new product, to one of any number of smaller tasks like interviewing a job candidate.  Examining the overall structure of an organization will reveal a complex web of delegated authority, usually in the form of management chains, providing a mechanism for reporting and control.

Delegation takes time to organize and prioritize, but the costs of avoiding it are even higher.  The manager who does not delegate will not only seem disorganized, but will spend many hours each week completing low-priority tasks.  This can result in excessive hours worked by senior managers;  low morale among underemployed staff, basic processes slowed down by bottlenecks, poor quality of work, or missed deadlines.  Surely, you don’t want to be the one responsible for all this. Learn to delegate and get the monkey off your back.

NUMBER THREE: Don’t have any “square pegs in round holes”.

Interestingly, back in the aftermath of the September 11^th terrorist attacks and the economy nose-diving at that time, companies who had bench-marked the shared characteristics of their top-performers in the positions within their company saw a phenomenon. The people that most closely fit the job they were doing were the first to return to work and were the quickest to get back up to full productivity. With a huge amount of human capital available in the market today, companies have the opportunity to not only be an “Employer of Choice”, but to be a choosy employer. Make sure that the people you have are in the right job. Re-engineer the job to better fit their competencies or reallocate them to where they can be better performers. For those that don’t fit your company culture, it’s time to ask them to find a company that they do fit and bring someone else in to fill their place.  You can still get some valuable information from these people, though. By conducting exit interviews and using assessments to match them against the benchmark of your top-performers, you can identify traits they lacked. This will improve your future hiring process and prepare your company for growth.

NUMBER FOUR: Hire people that will make you a profit every day.

Be opportunistic with your ability to be choosy.  If you need to hire someone, interview as many candidates as possible in order to select the best available. Your company not only deserves the best, you must require it.  The economy is cycling back up again and this gives you the opportunity to be more selective. Hire people that will be honest, hardworking, reliable, and drug-free. Hire people that are like your top-performers. If you do, as the economy turns around, you will need to hire less people to do the same jobs, which means having an enormous edge on your competition.  Harland Checks, the second largest check manufacturer in the U.S., was able to reduce their workforce by 30% while keeping at or above their previous production rates using this method. This contributed substantially to their bottom-line.

NUMBER FIVE: Rev-up the engine of your business – your Sales Department.

Never before has it been so important that the sales people you have be able to sell well. Not just sell well, but, sell your product well! Ever heard of the 80-20 Rule? Statistics show that 55% of all sales people shouldn’t be in sales, 25% shouldn’t be selling your product. That leaves 20% that should be selling your product, that’s why they are your top-performers! Studies show that salespeople share 5 key qualities, Competitiveness, Self-reliance, Persistence, Energy, and Sales Drive and 7 critical sales behaviors,  Prospecting, Closing Sales, Call Reluctance, Self-starting, Teamwork, Building and Maintaining Relationships, and Compensation Preference.

How do your salespeople compare? Do they have these qualities and behaviors? And, how different are your top salespeople versus your bottom performers? These are but a few steps that can be taken to assure, not just the survival of your organization, but to position it to be a top competitor!

There are five ways to get more from the people that you currently have on staff, any new people you may to hire, and even from those employees you may still have to down-size. Let’s take a brief look at the first two of these five areas to understand how companies can increase their profits and readiness to compete on a global scale, not just survive a down-cycle, and come out a winner.

NUMBER ONE: Get more from your Management Team.

Your management team has a huge impact on your company’s performance at any time, but during economic hardships, not only do they need to perform well, they have to perform well. So, how can you get more from them so that you can cascade a high level of performance throughout your organization? You need to have a way to quantify their competencies. Would you agree that they need to communicate well?  Provide strong leadership? Improve themselves and their Direct Reports? Can be adaptable to change? Maintain good relationships? Be cohesive as a team? Absolutely! So, to get more from your management team, now is the time to get a better assessment of the people on that team, highlight their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Your company’s profitability and productivity will improve through top-notch managers and leaders.

NUMBER TWO: Get more from fewer employees.

Employees who are de-motivated by seeing their peers down-sized may create their own “job-security” through lowered production. Even worse, those that have options, your top performers, will look to use their talents and skills with a company that may offer more of what they want in an employer, such as feeling they actually contribute to the company, that they are valued, or that they get a chance to belong.  To meet the this challenge, what would it mean to know each employee’s productivity style, their ability to work within a team, their natural quality of work, the degree of initiative they will take, and their ability to solve problems?  Further, would it help to get a grasp of what behaviors to expect to see when they are under continued stress, frustration, & conflict?  Or, with money being a poor motivator anyway, can you envision knowing how and what motivates your people to perform at their top-level day-in-&-day-out? Finally, what would it be worth to you to know how engaged your employees are mentally, emotionally, physically, and from a values standpoint?

With our eye on helping you make your company the top competitor in your industry, we’ll discuss the final three points on getting more from fewer people in Part II.

Here’s the thing, the places to go that offer 12,000 ft. views are few and far between, and they are hard to get to.  Life isn’t just going to hand you this view.  It takes the right vehicle, time, courage, risk and persistence.  In the process of climbing to this view, you will hit multiple obstacles and fall off your motorcycle; you will cross streams and lose your balance on the slick rocks.  You will have to add power to scale undaunting boulders when intuition tells you to turn around and go home, today is not the day.  Regardless, you continue because of that view that is burning in your mind, and needs to become a reality.

The business of training and coaching, and the world of entrepreneurship is identical to that climb.  You must have the right vehicle, expect to hit obstacles and fall over, know ahead of time you will be tested to just give up and go home, and expect to lose traction and spin your wheels.  Above all, you will have to show courage, risk your pride,  and do things you don’t want to do.  The difference is that riding to the top of a mountain takes only hours, but riding to the top of your business takes years, but it’s just as intense.  That view of your business is there.  It’s as real as standing on a 12,000 ft pass, but that isn’t the question.  The real issue, is will you locate the path to get there, and then endure what is thrown at you.