Celebrating ‘Clarity’ After 17 Years In Business

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This year I am celebrating ‘Clarity’ as my cornerstone in business. I believe Clarity is the most important idea in any business. Vision, strategy, purpose, product, plans, people and all factors of successful business stem from clarity.

 

It has taken me many (frustrating) years to clarify and define my true goals and intentions when I launched Barrett Consulting Group, 17 years ago on Monday 9 January 1995. With just $3,000 as my seed capital, a home office with phone and computer and an idea based purely on a strong feeling, a hunch and passion, I …

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Make 2012 The Best Year Yet – Put Yourself First!

By / / Assessments, Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Communication, Success, Teamwork

As we all come sailing in from the rather stormy seas of 2011 for a brief rest in a safe harbour we can chose to look back and reflect on what has happened in 2011; the challenges, mistakes, triumphs and lessons learned. Although reflection is very important we must not forget to take time to rest, relax and recharge before we look forward and dream about the future and what it holds for us.

2011 may have left you feeling overwhelmed running from one task to the other never stopping to rest and recoup. If you can take time to just …

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Why LinkedIn Invitations Need To Be Purposeful

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Social Media

LinkedIn is about creating and nurturing relationships. It’s a marvelous tool for researching and connecting with people and helps you forge genuine relationships based on substance and value. I’ve been on LinkedIn for many years now and have been steadily growing my network. I only connect with people I know personally or have connected with via an event or activity. As much as I am for prospecting and building new networks and business I draw the line at sending out impersonal LinekdIn requests, random or otherwise to people that I don’t know.

So why do so many …

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Getting Personal Or Time To Get Personal

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Customer Service, Sales Relationships

‘Getting Personal’ was voted as the Number 12 Sales Trends for 2011. Despite the advances in technology and the rise of the Internet, customers still want personal and single contact satisfaction. Contrary to some pundits who believe the role of salespeople is becoming obsolete with the proliferation of Internet and mobile technology, effective sales professionals and a personal approach to selling remains important to successful business this year and in the years to come. Smart salespeople are offloading functional and transactional activities to better concentrate …

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What Athletes, Top CEO’s and Pop Stars Have in Common

By / / Coaching, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Training, Self Development, Success

Elite athletes, pop stars, top selling writers, politicians, Fortune 100 CEO’s all have one thing in commonthey hire coaches to help them achieve their goals faster and become or maintain their ‘number one’ status. Elite performers see the value their coach brings to their craft. They know their coach will help them gain and create insights that transform their performance. The rest of us can take the same approach. Many salespeople see the value of hiring a sales coach to help maintain an edge internally and over …

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Collaboration Software – The New Sharing

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication

‘The New Sharing’ was voted as the Number 11 Sales Trends for 2011. Just think, it was a milestone to have a shared calendar! Well, think again. We’ve come a long way. Look out for new collaboration software tools; people within companies are better sharing information, connecting, communicating and collaborating in secure online environments. Because of this, people can connect about projects, sales pitches, client accounts and daily work flow in real time across geographic locations and time zones.

Like Facebook, Twitter,

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Breast Ain’t Best: Why Sex & Selling Don’t Mix

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Sales Culture, Sales Relationships

‘Sex’ as a consumer marketing and sales strategy infiltrates our daily lives via advertising, celebrity endorsements, tabloids, publications and various other means and has done so for as long as we can remember. Using images of women (more recently men) in a variety of formats is supposed to entice prospective buyers (adults) and sell products and services. The ‘sex sells’ consumer marketing strategy is more recently infiltrating children’s markets creating much angst and debate about its merits and rightly so.

I want to make it clear that I’m not attempting to debate the use of ‘sex’ in consumer marketing here. Although …

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Why B2B Buying Decisions Are Taking Longer Than Ever

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Mindful selling, Sales Coaching, Sales Forecasting, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Pipeline, Sales Planning, Sales Relationships, Sales Training

Are companies taking longer to make buying decisions or does it come down to impatience on the part of the B2B sales person, in a hurry to reach their sales targets? It seems nowadays buying decisions are taking longer to make than in previous years. This slow purchasing process isn’t just happening at the enterprise level in large scale businesses, it’s extended right across the board.

Protracted buying is dramatically slowing the sales process. The flow-on effects of such time delays are causing blow-outs in the cost of sale for many

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Learning how to ride the Boom AND Bust economy

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Business Acumen, Marketing, Resilience, Sales Culture, Sales Leadership, Sales Planning, Sales Results, Strategy

These turbulent, challenging and sometimes volatile times we find ourselves living in are making many of us rethink how we do business, how we live our lives and how we engage with the world. Unless you are hiding under the doona, the rest of us are witnessing and experiencing a major transition from the Industrial Revolution to a brave new world of the New Tech paradigm.

This transition is exciting and frightening at the same time because the ‘new order’ is not ordered at all. It keeps changing at a rapid rate leaving a constant sense of unease. Many of the …

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Signs you are at risk of losing your top sales performers

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Talent, Self Development, Success, Wellbeing

There they are every day bringing in the deals. They’re always prospecting, meeting clients, networking, making suggestions about how to do things even better and they never discount unnecessarily. Best of all your clients are happy. They’re happy with your offering, happy with your service, happy with the sales support they get and your business is profitable.

Sounds magnificent doesn’t it? Your top sales performer(s) require(s) very little work. They self manage, are resilient and are such a breeze to work with. They’re low maintenance and are not temperamental like those

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