The world is an incredibly complicated place and none of us can ever have the full lock on truth, we only ever see the world from a particular vantage point. This means that our knowledge is going to have a special insight because of our vantage point, but it’s also going to be limited because of our vantage point. And so, this limited knowledge that we have about the world means that we must enter into any conversation with a deep sense of humility. This is because you need to help me to fill in my knowledge gaps, and I need you.
We have the opportunity to gain in our knowledge and to learn from anyone. I think that when we are thinking with humility anyone can be our teacher. The cool thing about conversations is when both of us look at the world from different vantage points, and that means that we each have something to offer the other. And this is true whether one person is the expert or not. A really great conversation is one where we genuinely learn something, or we come to a deeper understanding about why someone holds a particular point of view. It might have been a conversation that challenged you in all the right ways and left you feeling smarter. What are the design principles of a great conversation?
Words are words
Communication is a craft, it will serve you so well at home and in the marketplace, it will server you so well in your career and making your fortune. Here’s the combination; well-chosen words mixed with measured emotion. Not only do the words have to be well chosen, but the emotions also have to be well measured. I mean do not place too much power on a minor point, for example, nobody would get it, if you have a powerful point and a little bit of emotion. It wouldn’t make sense, therefore. adjust your style to fit the occasion and the emotional content.
Effective communicators spend a lot of time getting to know the product's target customer. Whether it’s working on a job or advancing your career, whatever it is, craft your communications and become a little more aware. Effective communicators ask themselves:
•. What is the customer's pain?
• What does the customer find frustrating with current products?
• What will surprise and delight this customer?
The better you know your customer, the more effective you'll be at crafting messages that resonate with them. This is a craft, and the payoff is so great when your communication makes sense. Just ask yourself the question: Could we possibly get better at affecting people with our words and language? What about with style and emotion content? And if the answers are yes, contact me via e-mail for creating a framework that ensures it consistently works.
Knowing the scenario
Illustration Francesco Ciccolella
Dr. Richard Carlson’s book, “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” from 1998 advised us to only deal with things that matter and follow simple strategies for living a more fulfilled and peaceful life. As leaders, let’s learn to help people not just with their jobs but also with their lives. I think we have a two-fold responsibility to help people with job skills and I think the greater responsibility is to help people with life skills. Don’t only teach people how to work, let’s teach people how to live and how to assimilate and accumulate far greater treasures than just a salary.
“It not only about what I earned, it’s also about what I learned.”
There is treasure in awareness, understanding, setting goals, reaching into the future, and expanding our horizons. I have been in London this week teaching a sales team how to ask great questions, whom to target, how to follow up and how they efficiently fill their pipelines. The workshop revolved around, “How do I attract my ideal customers?” The larger the challenge, the larger the opportunity! Contact me via e-mail for sales training and workshops about mastering the science of achievement and the art of fulfilment.
Going against the grain
Advertising has been around for millions of years old and nowadays people use advertising as a heuristic for knowing whom to trust. I think that innovation tends to happen around the edges as if you design for the middle market you’ll end up in an overcrowded field. We don’t get an endorphin rush from mid-market retail. The people who successfully innovate are the people who actually understand that there is a margin and there is an extravagant treat.
By modelling social science on physics, we think that being scientific means that there is a right answer and a wrong answer. In marketing, the rules of the game aren’t constant, and you can re-write them, for example, by changing the context you can change what good means. The first assumption of science is that magic is impossible, which is absolutely true in physics but not true in psychology. Magic is possible in psychology, for example, you can make something worth 10 times as much simply by tweaking with the brain and not the thing itself.
The way to solve a problem may be trivial and silly, and our attempts in business to make ourselves look serious and important by always talking about higher order may also make us look stupid. Sometimes all you have to do is implement a very small “butterfly effect change” and actually you can. Big inputs can have small effects and small inputs can have big effects, that’s why human behaviour, I mean complex behaviour is not like high-school science.
Excellence is a journey
When an organisation has a strong and clearly stated set of values and the employees act in accordance with those values and the culture will be strong. However, if the values are ill defined, constantly changing and people are not held accountable or incentivised to uphold those values, then the culture will be weak. I think culture equals values plus behaviour. You can become anything that you want to become! Success is predictable if you commit yourself to becoming excellent.
I have been studying success for years both professionally and personally, and what I have found is that competence and commitment are the prerequisite for success. Excellence is a journey, it’s not a destination! I think complacency and satisfaction are the key enemies of excellence. Becoming excellent in your chosen field is indispensable, if you are not then you haven’t got a chance in our competitive society. You don’t have to be a quantum leap different from anybody else. You just have to be different in the critical areas that make a difference, and you can achieve this simply by setting it as a goal, and subsequently work on it.
The ripple effect is bigger
It’s the autumn holidays and I’m still coming to terms with the passing of my mother. As a parent you have a responsibility to guide your children through life and I am grateful to be spending some quality time with my son. The life crises have a way of stripping you of our old certainties and throwing us into chaos and I think the only way to survive is to surrender to the process. When you emerge, blinking into the light, you have to rebuild what you thought you knew about yourself.
We live in an age of positive curation where everyone has a personal brand on social media and fear, anxiety and depression are on the rise. Challenges have a way of humbling us and knocking down our egos. The same thing can happen to two different people and one person may see it as a problem, something to complain about or run and hide from, the other can see it as an opportunity to learn and grow, and they dig in and push through. It’s not easy to shift our mindset to view challenges as opportunities, as it takes practice to change our instinctual reaction. Every day I reveal my vulnerable self and this fragility has enabled me to build up an emotional resilience necessary to tackle the next challenge.
I think what you learn from things not turning out the way you planned can give you a lot more texture and meaning. I definitely would not have seen the richness in my life if I had not suffered setbacks along the way, because without them I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am today, so I am extremely grateful. Success is not about getting things right the first time but stemmed from being able to look at one’s past honestly and then to correct missteps or errors of judgment.
You want an agreement
There’s nothing that raises your self-confidence faster than to feel that you have been successful in negotiating a contract and that you have got a good deal as a result. On the flip side, there is nothing that lowers your self-confidence faster than to think that you have been out negotiated into a poor deal that you will have to live with. Therefore, negotiating skills are an important part of your personality development and of your sense of personal effectiveness and self-confidence. When you are a good negotiator, your self-confidence is higher, and you feel more positive towards yourself and other in everything that you do.
Very often negotiations depend on setting conditions; what you can offer depends on what the other side can do. It’s a good idea when negotiating to keep things calm and avoid direct criticisms. The skills you need to be a good negotiator are rarely something you learned as part of a formal education. Some people think they are good negotiators, but in reality are not. Contact me via e-mail for negotiation training and workshops.
Improve your outcomes
Some people are good at negotiating for their own interest and some people are not. Which one of these two types of people do you want to be? One of your main jobs in life, one that will lead to increased levels of self confidence is to become more effective in influencing others by learning great negotiation skills and choosing good questions to ask. I think the best negotiators all have basically the same characteristics and qualities, they are pleasant people, they are warm, friendly, and humble. You have an automatic tendency to trust someone with great negotiation skills and feel what they are asking for is in the best interests of both parties.
Skilled negotiators are usually quite concerned about finding a solution or an agreement that is satisfactory for both parties. They look for “win-win” situations, where both parties are happy with the results of the negotiation. It’s imperative that you choose good questions to ask and try to understand what both parties are trying to achieve from the negotiation. I think that finding good questions to ask about a customer’s needs is the only way you will be able to find out what exactly is important to them in a negotiation. And it is important to show the customer other benefits they are receiving.
Good negotiators are patient, and they concentrate first on getting agreements on all the parts of the contract that the two parties have in common, before they go on seeking for amicable ways to settle the other issues. Good negotiators also take their time to prepare good questions to ask to get clarity and understand each point as they go along to ensure that there are no confusions later in the negotiations. Remember, price is not always the most important thing in negotiations. Contact me via e-mail for negotiation training and workshops.
Think like your customers
The key to success is to make your customers happy. And then make them happier than your competitors and then every single day wake up and think, how can I make my customers happier? In my experience the very best companies think like their customers. They are obsessed with their customers, they think and talk about their customers the whole time, they personally responded to their customer complaints, they are just obsessed with their customers.
- What do customers want?
- What do customers need?
Sales and marketing are different functions! Marketing is to attract people who are interested in the benefits of your products or services. And selling is the conversation, that is to buy from you rather than from your competitors. You can’t sell if you can’t attract interesting prospects. I think 90% will be the quality of your product or service. How can you tell whether you have a great product or service? This is the test that will predict your future above any other test for the rest of your business career. How many people after they have used your product or service turn to another person and say, “wow, that was great product or service?”
We all want to belong
American psychologist Abraham Maslow theorized that human decision-making is undergirded by a hierarchy of psychological needs in his initial paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation” and subsequent book, “Motivation and Personality”from 1954. Maslow proposed that five core needs form the basis for human behavioral motivation, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. Needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up.
Every person is capable and has the desire to move up the hierarchy toward a level of self-actualisation. Unfortunately, progress is often disrupted by a failure to meet lower level needs. Not everyone will move through the hierarchy in a uni-directional manner but may move back and forth between the different types of needs. Contact me via e-mail and let me know where you are on the pyramid.
“A river does not push, it just flows.”
What's your take on it?
Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to have worked with some outstanding people and these opportunities has enabled me to work across businesses and functions, allowing me to understand organisational dynamics through people, process and technology. This has been proven to be invaluable as I engage stakeholders and explore ideas and opportunities in line with business priorities.
“Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.”
I have had the pleasure of working for global companies and have acknowledged that humans and knowledge are the two of the most important resources. There are huge financial incentives that keep the status quo locked in place with the “this is just how it is” attitude. I think that all successful people begin with these two beliefs:
1. The future can be better than the present, and
2. I have the power to make it so.
Do you agree? I have seen great results and productivity improvements in organisations leveraging this framework. Contact me via e-mail and let’s have a conversation.
Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
The results that are expected of us in selling are sales, and the only time that we are working is when we are doing something that contributes directly to that result. Selling is when you are face to face with real life customers who are willing and capable of buying a product (or service). Today’s businesses are learning from the science of change that they must recreate themselves even when they would like to believe that the old business will go on forever.
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
Which means to have a vision and even though the vision is in the air or sky, you start to build a foundation under your dreams. All high achievers are result orientated, they dream big dreams and focus on results not activities. The key is to be clear about the results that you are trying to accomplish and ask yourself the following questions:
1) What results are expected of me?
2) What am I supposed to produce in my job?
3) Why am I employed here?
Please reach out if you have questions about how it can impact your organisation or yourself.
The harder you work the better you become
Business is a vehicle for self-expression, for dreaming about creating the future we desire, for accomplishing together what we cannot do alone and for creating extraordinary amounts of value. Business is far more than a profit machine and can be the primary vehicle for building a better world, if we appropriately respect and care for people. You will need to design a strategy that attracts the target market in the right way, and you will need to immediately have the right mix of products and solutions developed so that they can engage you immediately.
We are not in a “You” economy, it’s a “We” economy. We are sharing, we are growing, we are expanding, we are finding ways to add value. The secret to business is to think about others, not about yourself! I think a meaningful life is serving something greater than yourself. When we are excited about something, the first thing we want to do is share it with our loved ones. A lot of people think you have to get it right before you start, the most important thing is to get started and begin learning as quickly as you can.
A tremendous feeling of recognition
Image c/o Harvard Business Review
Having a feeling of worthiness regardless of what you are doing is the underpinning of unconditional love and built-in value. The most important opinion you will ever have is the one you have of yourself, no one looks at a photo of you with such scrutiny. We tend to be so critical of ourselves, every blemish instead of blessing is what we count. I think the best way to reinforce good behaviours and overcome fear is with knowledge, training, skills, and action. The best tips are given before anyone does anything because it raises the level of expectation. I think that a tip is an expected level of achievement which you want to give to yourself and other people because only an expected level of success is motivational. And if you expect more from yourself and others then you will perform more to that expectation than anything else.
If you are inexperienced, you see the danger in every opportunity and when you are experienced you see the potential. You can engage role models, coaches, and mentors, they will teach you the “correct swing” and then you will gain courage and confidence with knowledge and training. I think when you have the ability to influence people, it really does change the way you go about your day-to-day life and approach opportunities. I can help you eliminate the fear of the unknown, the fear of rejection, the fear of change and the fear of success.
Movers and shakers
If you don’t know where you are going then any road will take you there! Human beings are goal seeking organisms and we only function at our very best when we are working towards accomplishing something that is important to us. Clarity is the starting point of all success, and this means clarity in thinking. Clarity means the ability to determine exactly what it is that you want to be, have, or do in life. The more I study successful men and women, the more I find that every single one of them are very clear about where they are going and what it is they want to accomplish.
All the great movers and shakers throughout history have been dreamers. If you’re leading the ship and don’t know how to operate a compass, the journey will not be a fun one - for you or your shipmates. It’s vital to have a clear sense of where you are going. Clarity is especially important when you’re introducing change or working towards new goals with your team. The common mix of excitement and anticipation alongside anxiety and fear can be challenging and even unsettling. The differences between successes and failures are not that successful people make right decisions, it’s that successful people make their decisions right.
Embark on your journey now
As a salesperson you already know there is a vast difference between understanding something well enough to buy it as opposed to understanding it well enough to sell it. Zig Ziglar described selling as a transference of feeling and I tend to agree with him. I think effective sales procedures work everywhere and you do not need to be a “natural born” salesperson in order to be a good one. Selling is an exciting profession and in many ways a complex one. There are many specialists in the field and no one person has a monopoly on all the information.
The reaction to success is different for different people. A common problem people experience, following success, is to go into an emotional dive or feel depressed. There may be a bit of an anti-climax afterwards due to the loss of focus and routine. I have never seen a spreadsheet that tells you how you should treat people. How do you react when you experience a dive in emotions? Contact me via e-mail for tolerance, understanding as well as solid actions.
Walk the talk
Sales has always been about the power of persuasion and buyers always want to buy from people whom they trust. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, persuasion is a process whose objective is to change a person’s attitude and/or behavior towards an idea, event, person, or an object. I think that the understanding of various effective persuasion techniques will help sales professionals to make sales and meet their targets and it will also give them an edge over competitors in the market.
Listening is a major component of persuasion, therefore:
· Listen with interest
· Reflect with grace
· Think with sincerity
· Plan with optimism
· Speak with honesty
· Give with gratitude
· Act with integrity
Before persuasion comes knowledge, therefore, it’s essential that you do your in-depth research as “one size does not fit all”. Sales professionals need to execute a fine balance between transparency and persuasion to guide the buyer towards the intended outcome of buying. Contact me via e-mail for sales training and workshops about mastering the science of achievement and the art of fulfilment.
No one cares!
The world is changing fast but certain things remain consistent, for example, you have the leverage to make it better. I don’t think your customers buy from you because they care about you, they buy from you because they care about themselves. There’s a huge difference between tell the others and find the others. To tell the others says, “I need your support, please tell everyone else.”
A Gen Z’er recently asked me, “How do I become popular?”
As long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. And as you gain life experience you will create your own blueprint for how you define popularity. I think we measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.
“No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”
Learn to sell
The ability to get along with others and show an interest in the world around them is essential for sales professionals. If you can find someone with a problem and they will pay you money to solve the problem, you will never have a financial problem and you will be of service to people. Sounds easy! Would you like to learn to sell?
Here’s a simple formula to follow:
- Here's what this product or service is.
- Here's what it does.
- Here's how it can help you.
- Here's why I think it's worth it.
- Here's why you should take action right now.
Resilience is also vital if you want to succeed as you are likely to get knocked back a fair few times on the road to success. Just because one person isn’t interested, you just have to keep going. And that resilience, that refusal to give up in the face of adversity, is another lesson we can all take forward into our lives, no matter how old we are. Contact me via e-mail for sales training and workshops.
Calm is a superpower
All the successful people that I have met in my life all seem to be at peace with themselves. No matter what the trials and tribulations they are faced with or are facing they have a level of acceptance, they are mentally prepared, tough, and ready to take on the challenge. As a result, their inner peace gives them a different perspective on the world. If you master the inside world then the outside world will be kinder and more beautiful.
“One of the best lessons you can learn in life is to master how to remain calm.”
The trick is not to be fooled by illusions of superiority and to learn to accurately reevaluate our competence each day. Think about it? When you are angry or upset you often see the things around you in a negative light, but if you are happy, suddenly, everything around you are bathed in rainbows and sunshine. Dealing with your inner demons is a necessary step towards living a truly fulfilled and successful life.