Why you shouldn’t let rudeness lead to the ruination of business and sales

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Communication, Customer Service, Ethics & Values, Life Skills, Presentation & Grooming, Sales Relationships, Self Development, Wellbeing

In the midst of the trend and hype of ‘customer centricity’, ‘the customer experience (CX)’, ‘customer excellence’ and other such terms it appears there is something amiss – the rise and rise of rudeness, incivility, disrespectful behaviour, and the trend of behaving badly at work.

This is not a new phenomenon; however, it is reaching epic proportions and affecting many businesses, their staff, customers and suppliers as we speak with devastating consequences.

Ray Williams writing for ‘Psychology Today’ back in October 2016 said this: “Has incivility become the new norm in America? Fundamental ethical values such as respect, fairness, honesty, personal responsibility …

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12 Sales Trends for 2018 – Welcome to the State of Flux

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Sales Trends

The world, more specifically the human world, is changing and moving at lightning speed, adapting and evolving, and getting more complex by the day, to the point where it is becoming too overwhelming for many. Just when we need to be able to really think about and manage complexity, there is a flight to the simplistic to just cope with the day to day. Simple solutions, easy fixes are called for on a daily basis. Many people want a short list of bullet points to give them the answer to make a complex decision. However, simplistic answers to complex problems …

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Is an Organic Growth Strategy a better way to go?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Entrepreneurship, Performance Management, Sales Results, Strategy, Success

How do I grow my business?

How do I get a better ROI?

How do I get more profitable sales?

How do I attract and convert more customer?

These are some of questions entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs and sales leaders ask on daily basis. And rightly so. We need to ask questions of ourselves and how we run our businesses so as to be appraised of the better ideas that serve our goals and ambitions.

To keep me fresh, I like to read widely and most recently, while sitting on a plane to Sydney, I came across a very interesting McKinsey article about the various …

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I’m really frustrated because we could all achieve magnificent sales results if only…

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Essentials, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Strategy, Sales Training

I am, by nature, a realist optimist who looks at what we can do, how we can make things better and so on. But I don’t do things on a whim, my team and I study what is best practice and look to design, build and weave the various ingredients together to create cost effective, human-centred, strategy and process driven transformation frameworks and journeys that deliver magnificent results and highly capable people when it to comes to selling better.

So effective – cost wise and results wise – that it becomes a no-brainer.

Yet, too many business and sales leaders opt for …

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Professional Jealousy?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Ethics & Values, Life Skills, Self Development, Self Promotion, Success

How those who shame others for selling themselves are the biggest losers

Let’s begin with a story about an excellent scientist. Someone so passionate and competent about his subject area that he happily and productively spent years studying the topic, getting to know it deeply and how it affects the world; how it is part of a broader system.

Then, with this great body of work and innovative ideas to share, he happily and proactively goes about meeting, informing and persuading key people as to the importance of his ideas and how these ideas can change things for the better.

The target audiences …

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Back to sales basics

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, CRM, Education in Sales, Marketing, Prospecting, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Essentials, Sales Results, Sales Tips, Social Media

I like to keep on top of what is current, what is emerging, and what is still an idea. This is why I make time each week to do research as it helps me navigate my way around the present and into the future. However, I am finding there is so much to read, so much to get my head around, and so much to integrate into my business that it can take up a lot of time… and it only seems to be increasing.

This is why I want to get back to basics.

As I wade through all of the …

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The Flight to Ethical Selling – how the banks can avoid a royal commission

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Ethics & Values, Performance Management, Sales Culture

Everybody lives by selling something and so it is true for the banks and financial services businesses; however, it seems that too many people in some divisions of some of the banking, financial planning and insurance institutions have confused ethical selling with unethical selling practices. Not all banks and financial institutions, mind you, but enough of the big ones to erode trust so badly that people are baying for a royal commission.

When I first started introducing the discipline of Selling to the Australian banking sector back in early 1990’s I was met with a ‘we don’t sell’ mentality even though …

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Sales Trend 11 – Sales to Add Value to Procurement, Not Just Follow the Process

By / / 12 Sales Trends Pages Category, Procurement, Sales Trends

Sales Trend 11 from Barrett’s 12 Sales Trends for 2017 Report is about Procurement. Guest author Ben Shute, CEO of Comprara, shares his insights.

It was 1999 when De Vincentis and Rackham (of SPIN Selling fame) wrote ‘Rethinking the Sales Force’, a book describing how the rise and rise of procurement challenged sales professionals about how best to organise business-to-business sales teams. Fast forward to 2016 and there are 15,000 people working full time in procurement in Australia, and the proportion of sales revenue that is won through competitive processes is rising year on year. …

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Why we can all benefit from thinking like a ‘freak’

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Education in Sales, Sales Psychology, Sales Skills, Success

Steven Levitt, the co-author of Freakonomics, SuperFreakonomics, Think like a Freak and When to Rob a Bank, defines thinking like a freak as: “…putting away your moral compass and not worrying about what the answer “should” be, but focusing on what the answer really is. It means thinking hard about causality. It means going beyond the obvious to consider all the possibilities — but still being willing to accept the obvious.”

When businesses, and especially, sales teams and salespeople come across challenges, they usually try to solve them by using the same parameters and approaches they had used in past, but …

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Get more sales by aligning your sales process to the buying process

By / / Sales Consulting, Sales Culture, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Process Maps, Sales Results

In the classic Bill Murray movie Caddyshack, he tries in vain to catch a gopher (rodent) ruining the golf course. Eventually, it occurs to him that “in order to catch a gopher, you have to think like one…” It was a good movie, with good advice from Murray. And it is good advice for salespeople who want to “catch” customers: they need to think like their customers.

What this means is that salespeople have to go about learning and understanding how customers buy. Salespeople know, at all times, where their prospects are in their sales cycle. The problem is that they …

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