Sales training for everyone who touches the customers

Everyone who works for a sales and service organization will eventually have some contact with clients or prospects. So everyone needs the confidence to present your business professionally in a way that will assist the sales process of the official sales team.

When running sales training I always suggest we invite,  anyone who wishes to consider a career move to selling. After the sales audit is complete we may choose a few to invite as well.

As an example of some of this content and an introduction to my sales style, you are welcome to download the first component of my sales training series. This first session is the broad view of selling and is not specific to any industry. All in-house training is fully tailored to your industry with industry-specific examples, techniques and tools.

I believe as sales staff we are not selling something ‘to’ people, rather that we are assisting people as they make decisions. In real estate, we are helping them with an incredibly important decision so the process is even more difficult to do well. If as salespeople we understand how people make decisions we are able to help them in a way that will make the most sense to each person we met rather than just repeatedly giving out information about our offering, leaving them to make sense of it themselves.

Most sales training is only focused on how we word our information or the ‘pitch’. Some courses even teach ‘magic’ words or phrases that they claim will improve your sales performance. As an example, you may have heard trainers’ advice we refer to the price as the ‘investment’. But this all assumes that every prospect has the same existing knowledge of your product/service and that they are all looking for exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason.

I have a degree in Psychology, providing sales training since 1994, and have merged my knowledge of practical selling with how the human brain makes stable decisions. Starting from understanding why they are searching for this product or service and on the journey to that decision they currently are before introducing your solution. To do this the salesperson needs thoroughly know about the role of emotions, especially fear, in the decision process and how to build trust before a decision is possible.

The first session, which I suggest everyone attends focuses on how the brain works and what our role in that is when we are selling. The following sessions use that decision model in situation-specific contexts.

To create a training schedule tailored to your business anywhere in the English-speaking world please email me at maya@salesinventoryprofile.com

Places I have trained include Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada and the US.

How we make decisions and the effect of fear in building trust

Finding your way through the decision maze.

.

How to set fail-proof habit-based goals and change

Featured

We have all read about the importance of goals, yet the majority of people don’t really have them. Are we being lazy or is there a problem with goal setting?

The problem is with how we have been approaching goal setting. We sit ourselves down and come up with a list of things we want for ourselves. Whether the list is, written on the back of a napkin on New Year’s Eve or the result of a formal planning process meeting all the SMART goal rules, very few of us actually achieve these. Every time we fail at reaching a goal, especially one that was super important to us, we build resistance to goal setting. Nobody wants to prove to themselves, or anyone else who reads our bathroom mirrors, that we are a failure. Setting goals we didn’t achieve is unconscious proof, at the very least, that goals don’t work or, at worst, that we are a failure. Either way, why would you willingly do it again?

It’s better to never set goals than to keep setting goals you never achieve.  You need to achieve some success to prove you can succeed and then you will be able to succeed going forward.  You know this from kindergarten; when you get a gold star you work harder to get the next one.

How to set fail-proof, habit-goals and start changing your life.

  • Set the bar so low it’s impossible to fail.

For example, if you wish to improve your fitness or change your body, start with a type of exercise that you can do wherever you are and in whatever you are wearing; like running on the spot for 5 minutes a day. Even if it means doing it at the side of your bed before you lay down to sleep, in the bathroom at airports, or before you sit down to enjoy entertainment (TV, social media, reading etc). No matter where you are in the world, how pressed you are for time and regardless of what you are wearing you could do this.

In terms of fitness/health/size outcomes doing this every day will do far more for you than jogging for 30 minutes once a week.

  • Extend/intensify the habit so that it keeps being impossible to fail at.

There are several ways of extending any goal. Use the aspect that is easiest to achieve and move up in small increments. If time is your greatest hurdle don’t change that part of it. Change something else, like run with your hands on your head or by bringing your knees up to your chest. Anything so long as the extra limit is equally fail-proof. Introducing equipment like weights (on your ankles or in your hands) limits the venues you can do this so increases the likely hood of missing days and getting out of the habit.

  • Don’t change existing habits, add new ones

If you have firmly established your 5-minute daily run at its maximal doable level (hands on heads and lifting knees to chest) you’re feeling ready to make more body improvements. It’s tempting to drop your simple routine and go big. Don’t stop doing those 5-minute runs to substitute another activity like; going to a gym or playing a sport. ADD ONE of these at a time as an additional separate habit. Remember to set up the new habit in a fail-proof way.

To learn more about making changes in your life and become a better you read The What Why and How of Getting into Action and the Myth of Motivation  

The Real Purpose of Parenting by Dr Philip Dembo – Maya’s book notes

The following are the notes I took while listening to the audio version of the book. This is not intended to be a comprehensive summary nor is it objective. I hear and write, through the lenses of my current knowledge and interest levels. If you read something that fascinates you in my notes you might enjoy reading this book for a deeper understanding.

Childhood is about learning the skills required for adulthood. As parents, our role is to mentor that process not to guarantee the happiness of our children neither during childhood or beyond. Preventing a child from having a full range of complex experiences from which to learn, including failing and frustration, will lead to their underdevelopment.

We learn through experience. Through doing. Every experience has the potential to teach us something. But we cannot focus on the experience if we are continuously being judged. We edit ourselves to get ‘good’ feedback from our parents and peers. This reduces our willingness to engage in experiences where we might fail, which could be anything new or complex. This limits children very quickly to a narrow range of activities that they know they can get positive feedback and praise for.

Continuously praising our children can inhibit their growth and self-esteem just as fast as criticism.

So swap the ‘well-done Jenny’ for neutral feedback questions like; what did you do? and What did you think? ‘Tell me about your day’, instead of ‘how was your day’ which invites self-processing. To avoid judgement during their telling you, use statements like; ‘tell me more’ and ‘then what happened’.

At the end of the telling, highlight the learning from their experience by asking your child questions about how they feel about the event and if you think they could change the process, without suggesting next time will be better to ask ‘is there something you wanted to say/do that you didn’t get a chance to’ or ‘next time this happens what else will you say/do’?

Maturity requires trial and error to find our real strengths and have enough practice to develop these. That is, learning is a series of adjustments, with failure as the compass for progress. If we make it about doing it well, children will limit themselves to experiences they can already do and thus never exploring alternatives.

The truth of our experiences and the decisions we make about what to change next time create real self-esteem. Truth defines us accurately which allows us to confidently move into new activities to learn more. Dembo argues that we develop into more capable adults if we know our skills are lacking and can make adjustments to improve at our own pace. Compare this to being over-celebrated making us unsure if we should change anything and lose that praise so we plateau and waste that improvement time leaving us underprepared for further learning.

America’s success at all costs attitude, which he attributes to the Dr Benjemin Spook books on child-rearing, is creating huge unhappiness. Success is an expectation of improvement which does not allow for reality and the truth of who we really are. Most of us are pretty bad at everything we do with at best a few areas of real competence.

Judgements and comparisons, including positive ones, are unmotivating and diminishing and do not allow real self-esteem to develop resulting in;

  • low self-esteem,
  • being afraid of growing up,
  • being afraid of trying anything new.

Overpraise and celebration show the child what is expected and that everything else is bad. Then the parent’s feelings and reactions become more important than the experience itself and our reactions, this creates hesitation for further action and exploring new behaviours that we can feel good about. It becomes all about pleasing our parents rather than growing into ourselves.

The psyche is a processing centre that blends our values, morals, intellect, personality and spirit into our identity. From that blending comes a process that allows us to view the world through our interpretation; our conscience.

As parents, we used to think that teaching our children right from wrong was enough for them to navigate life. Now we think they need to perform in specific ways to be happy in the world. They are no longer relating directly to the world through the filter of their own identity, rather in comparison to a parental ideal.

This perpetual comparison is the death of self-esteem and mental health. It also leads teenagers to bad choices as they no longer evaluate situations based on their own identity or even basic issues of right and wrong, but rather on how this will be perceived by others. They do things to fit in (or not) rather than because this is where they do fit in and this is who they are and the group they belong to. So they join groups where they are miserable or agree to do things they don’t want to do. Eg children engaging in sports and even careers that are expected of them by members of their family

Life must be experienced by us and end with us with little or no interference by the reaction of others. We must feel what we feel.

Sustainable adulthood is a cycle; feel -> think -> decide-> act. 

Our identity is the reason we feel what we feel during an experience. In the same experience another person eg a sibling will have different feels in line with their identity. If we accept our true self, our identity, we don’t need to waste energy justifying our decisions to ourselves, or others, or double guessing ourselves. We do what we do because we are ourselves.

We can also become so wrapped up in other people’s judgements that we lose the ability to evaluate experiences relative to our identity and don’t make sustainable choices. The pursuit of success brings the potential for dishonesty, shortcuts, hiding our truth and going underground (living a double life).

Going underground means detaching from the feelings generated by the experience while attaching our thoughts to whatever it takes to portray the desired picture to others.

People who continue to strive for approval have not established their full identity. They choose jobs where they can get ‘good grades’ rather than job satisfaction. ‘Good grades’ being aspects that get them respect or acclaim from; peers, partners, community or even long-dead parents.

If we have no internal measure of ourselves, what we feel good about, we can never choose sustainable paths. We will wear ourselves out by expending so much energy maintaining the lie and performing tasks that do not come naturally to us. Even worse if we do not find our real strengths and develop our natural preference as a child it’s super hard to undo decades of learning and habit to go back to the exploration and learning.

How frustrating it is to have no voice. The right to express how we feel and make our own decisions. When we are not heard we feel worthless and devalued and we disconnect from all feelings. When you are afraid to speak your mind there is no safety in your family dynamic and you have to find a way to survive by living underground.

Testing our family culture does not mean abandoning the family. Testing is natural and needed to differentiate our identity from our parents by finding out how we feel and if this variation is what we want in comparison to the approval; of our parents.

Performance Theory

The competition requires an enemy to beat. Athletes are peacetime warriors. If you create competition within a team, with a leaderboard, you will destroy co-operation and harmony and this leads to increased stress and reduces health in all members and reduces output and productivity declines.

Successful performance requires no judgement. Effective performance is about the direct energy expended toward the actions. That is the intention is to complete an action, not to ‘win’. The effort is the whole issue and Personal Best is the only relevant measure, otherwise, everyone who cannot win will refuse to try.

Outcomes naturally follow effort; more effort gives more outcomes. To keep the efforts high is the thing that gives the greatest long-term output. Knowing you cannot win is demoralising and will reduce output as unhappy people have less energy and reduced effort creates reduced output.

Winning is not where the value of our experience lies. It lies in the intention to take action and the experiences derived from the activity. Enjoying the task, feeling of exhilaration, being stimulated, even being perplexed and frustrated and our decisions to adjust our activity to get more or less of these.

Do we grow up to be only the things we showed the first abilities in because these were applauded and we had no room to stubble through others we may have enjoyed more? If we had no judgement no grading, no red crosses could we have struggled through more years of maths to have found a love for it? Could we have become engineers with lesser expectations of us in the early years? Remember Einstein was just an ok mathematician in school.

Are we locking our kids in too fast? Were we locked in too fast? I was good at maths at an early stage and that was both applauded and reinforced. Could I have been a better artist if that had gotten as much attention? What of kids who show no preference through all of their schooling?

If we value the effort, whatever the outcome, we will feel the full value of our experience and continually improve our performance by choosing to alter subtly parts we did not feel good about. As we enjoy the doing we reduce stress making us any to sustain activity longer and thus the time to see improvement.

If we focus on the doing and view the output as a bonus the acclaim of others is irrelevant and unnecessary for our enjoyment and continued doing. Then the more we do the better we become at that task.

Can athletes spend thousands of hours of practice from early childhood, 4 am wake ups to swim 2 hours before school every day, without enjoying their sport? Without feeling fabulous in the doing?

As the only thing we can control is our behaviour then the other competitors are irrelevant. Great swimmers only focus on improving their own time as to whether they win or lose on the day is based on who else swims alongside them, which they cannot impact.

Parenting is teaching guiding, coaching and loving our children through their own experiences.

 

constitution is a set of rules with consequences if they are broken. There must be 3 elements of a family/group constitution;

  1. respect self
  2. respect others
  3. respect property

Group rituals create a group identity, eg how e celebrate events

Coaching starts where the truth is. When performance becomes judgement we perform to gain approval and avoid failure we stop being in the action. For example, when a professional football player kicks for goals, the process of kicking is the same whether they are alone in a park or during a match in the stadium. If they start to focus on how important that kick is their attention is no longer 100% on kicking.

Self-esteem is not defined by success, it is defined by one’s efforts and intentions and staying congruent.

Coaching children to feel their own experiences is the real purpose of parenting. Our judgement and preferences for them will not lead to their fullest development. They will not become their true self if they only choose activities within a parent-approved selection.

Respect rather than react

A reaction is the expression of feelings within the event

A response is the expression of thoughts about the feelings, that is after an event consider how you feel and choose what to do next.

 

The process of all experiences;

feelings lead to thoughts lead to decisions leads to actions and around again.

Coaching can only occur in the stage after feeling where we help them to processes all aspects for themselves to make the best decisions for themselves. If their decisions are not based on their full feelings each cycle of decisions and action takes them further from themselves and become less sustainable.

Family Culture is created by parents and is made up of the 4R’s;

  1. Rules – everyone has the right to make their own decisions within the rules of their family. Rules are only effective if they are clearly understood and thus must vary with the age/abilities of each child.
  2. Roles – must be flexible as children grow and family circumstances change.
  3. Rituals – help create a family identity through consistency.
  4. Relationships with open and honest dialogue otherwise we are not relating directly to the other.

Success and failure are each equally stages in a process of learning. They both function as input for further thinking to allow for growth. There is no objective measure of success or failure except the consequences that follow it. Children will learn to regulate their behaviour by experiencing the consequences of their actions directly, without the consequences being filtered by the reaction and judgement of others.

Others cannot make us happy in the long term if it requires being dishonest with ourselves. Pretending to like something because we learnt these are valuable to others is not sustainable leading to increased stress and poor health.

Respect is the attitude and process of honouring someone/something through the intention to be kind and thoughtful to the other.

Rituals help create an identity. When we allocate a set time or space to honour an experience it then becomes an activity that defines the identity of a family.

Family meeting – A time each week to review our agenda’s, requirements and rules. Allows each member to have a voice in the family process and self-regulate.

Ritualise time with each child separately (no matter how limited). This allows time for the child to safely express their feelings and receive coaching without fear of reaction from their siblings. Examples of a family of 9 children had only an hour alone with mum each month. That’s better than never having any.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 things that determine sales success

I’ve been helping clients recruit sales staff for over 20 years and am often asked; are great people born or made? Having developed a selling IQ questionnaire I know that it is both, but not either. What I mean is, you cannot compensate for lack of natural talent with exceptional environments like, great training, marketing and CRM tools. Alternatively, I have watched and heard of great talent that persisted against all odds and no tools to become ‘Solo’ stars.

Solo stars never become team players and often leave to start their own business in direct competition with you, leaving you short-staffed again.

So if you don’t want to get off the recruitment treadmill there are 3 parts to hiring the right person and growing a successful team long term.

1. The capacity of the individual.

SIP shows you their raw capacity with 90% accuracy. Using the SIP online recruitment tool, you can see long before you meet them regardless of their résumé (CV) exactly what type of salesperson they have the capacity for. Talented candidates represent a very small percentage of the population, so if you are using the old ‘hire a bunch and see who sticks’ system you will waste a lot of time and resources locating even one of them and years to build a team.

Sales Inventory Profile, or SIP is an on-line recruitment tool available in all English speaking countries.

2.How quickly and well they are trained.

But locating the right person is not enough for long term stability. You need to support them to realise their potential as quickly as possible by starting selling specific training from their very first day on the job. High-quality sales candidates, even in their most ignorant state, will not tolerate failure. They will not stay in a role where they cannot see how to improve and finally succeed. Candidates with real potential for selling are already impatient for success and will not wait around being unproductive. You also do not want them teaching themselves through trial and error as every mistake they make will reduce their commitment to your job and reflect directly on your companies reputation.

3. Feeling they belong in the team and are valued

When a newbie joins a team, unlike with the birth of a child into a family, they do not come as adorable babies but rather they arrive as opinionated and arrogant teenagers needing a strong yet still nurturing hand to ensure they reach their fullest adult capacity and take their rightful place in your team as adults.

You cannot leave them to their own devices to make poor decisions, waste their energy and develop battle scars. Because, if they survive all of that, they will know themselves to be solo stars and will forever be above the team. If you don’t manage them well from the beginning you will not earn their respect and they will remain impossible to manage and show no loyalty to you or your business. For this same reason, hiring superstars from other business rarely works.

Find your teacher

We all have different ways of both explaining and learning things. There is no such thing as better teachers/students. To maximise your learnings focus on finding teachers/explanations who make sense to you. Don’t give up on the topic, or worse, yourself go shopping for the right book/course/coach for you.

If you are reading something and you don’t understand it, assume the writer doesn’t know how to present it well for you and find someone else.

Think, Believe, do!

How to lead a calm, successful cheerful life – Think, believe, do! By Earl Nightingale

The following are the notes I took while watching a speech by Earl Nightingale. The link to the speech is at the end of my notes. Any text in square brackets [like these] is my pondering.

THINK
You are what you think about. We are a total of our thoughts and if our thoughts are scattered and fluctuating, we are no-one and get nowhere.

You will get to where your goals take you. If you have no goals, you go nowhere.

If you wish for a thing then you must wish very strongly, and not wish for a million incompatible things just as strongly. I cannot wish to have a corporate job and wish to sleep in every day.

BELIEVE

Mark 9:23 New King James Version (NKJV) Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” [Is this the root of ‘The Law of attraction’?]

If you think of positive things you will get positive things back (and vice versa). We become what we think. Our brain does not care what you plant in it (like the soil does not care which crops the farmer plants). It will equally easily accept all thoughts and return these back to us. But you do need to do more than just ‘think’ it, as like a seed planted in soil, an idea planted in the brain needs to be nurtured.

The most important things we get in life we get for free. Sadly we don’t value anything that comes for free, or very easily, as much as the things we buy with money. But what comes for free; family, health, relationships, our bodies, dreams, ambitions friends etc., can never be replaced once lost. Yet everything we buy; houses, cars, and trinkets, can always be bought again.

DO

Goal setting: Think of goals in a relaxed clear cheerful way. Picture myself already having achieved them. Think ‘as is’ not ‘if’.

One of Isaac Newton’s 3 laws of motion applies in very context. These laws are principals of physics but they apply to every energy system [including human effort]. https://www.livescience.com/46558-laws-of-motion.html

The First Law of Motion states, “A body at rest will remain at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.” Also referred to as the law of Inertia

The Second Law of Motion describes what happens to a massive body when it is acted upon by an external force. It states, “The force acting on an object is equal to the mass of that object times its acceleration.” 

The Third Law of Motion states, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” 

Another way to look at the third law is; “to get something we must give something of equal value”. For everything we get, there is a price (energy) that you must pay. Nothing happens by magic.

Get clear about what you want and pay the price by exerting the energy to get it.

30 day goal challenge;

Set a single clear, and reasonably ambitious goal [something you can picture very clearly, ie in realistic detail with all of my senses]. You cannot hit a target you cannot see. To know there is a red dot somewhere to the left is no good to the marksmen. So it must be within your field of vision (knowledge and ability) but not at hand where no energy is required to achieve it. The more clearly you define the goal (size, shape, weight, colour, smell etc) the better you know how to position your resources to hit it.

  1. Set a single, ambitious clear goal. Write it on a piece of paper and put it into your wallet.
  2. Think about and read this goal many times every day. Imagine each time what the consequences of having this goal are for my daily life. Think about what I will be doing, seeing, feeling when this goal is realised.
  3. Stop thinking about what scares me. When fear comes up, read the goal and see the consequences of my goal as if they are happening around me already.
  4. Give of myself (energy/price) more than I have before. Dorothy Brande wrote in her book ‘Wake up and Live’: ACT as if it is impossible to fail.
  5. Stay relaxed and cheerful

We do not ‘make’ money we earn it in exchange for the value we give, of our knowledge, time or physical exertion. If you want more money, you have to help people more or help more people.

I need to be be valuable first to exchange for the money.

Formula for change

  1. Set a definitive goal
  2. Stop running myself down
  3. Stop thinking of reasons I cannot do it.
  4. Trace my beliefs back to childhood, if you can, and look at when I first started to think these things and ask if my situation today is still the same.
  5. Change the image I have of myself by writing a description of the person I would like to be.
  6. Act the part of the successful person I have decided to be immediately.

Refusal vs Rejection in Selling

When a prospect says no, whether to giving you the time for a conversation or to the purchase, they are refusing to take up your offer. They are not rejecting you.

This is a really important distinction to being a successful salesperson. They decided that the amount of time and money they need to give up is not worth the value they will get from your product or service.

So instead of questioning your value as a person, you need to first ask what is it about my product/service that does not give them enough value to want it? Secondly, ask why the client does not value your product enough to exchange their time to discuss it? The answer to why they don’t value it enough may be their understanding and that is something you can play a role in. But if they understand your offer correctly and still don’t want it, then it is the offer they are refusing rather than rejecting you.

Is seeking acceptance crippling your personal and work relationships?

If you are searching for a partner who will ‘accept me as I am’ you are admitting that you do not accept yourself and you need someone else to confirm you are ok.

A great relationship has nothing to do with who you are or the other person thinking you’re great. It’s about how well you are, fits with who they are. So long as the two of you fit well enough (only you can say what is enough) you have the basis of a great relationship.

We all understand that no-one can fit perfectly with anyone else.   There will always be aspects of our personality that simply are of no value to anyone else; irrelevant behaviours while at work, the gym, engaging in hobbies etc. There will even be some differences that are more than neutral, they are outright annoying to the other. Belching comes to the top of my list, closely followed by Dad jokes.

You sustain great relationships when the value of the parts that do fit is more than the annoyance of the parts that don’t. A separate issue is whether you can choose to be respectful of the other, and reduce their exposure to the parts of you they struggle with. Only if you have a strong sense of self-worth do you have the choice to adapt your behaviours to strengthen the relationship further.

Let’s consider this with a really simple example.

If you are confident about your looks then you may use makeup in a large variety of ways, wearing lots on some days then none on others. People’s opinions about how much make-up you wear, the style and colours, whether it suits you, and whether you ‘need’ it, are all irrelevant to your self-confidence. That leaves you in a place to choose if you will consider the preferences of others when putting on your make-up for the day.

For most women, this is not a very simple example because looks are a very important part of confidence and identity. Let’s simplify it as promised. What if you are in a relationship with someone who is petrified of make-up (they have a clown phobia) or even allergic to it? If you are confident in your looks and value, then you will prioritise the relationship and no longer wear make-up for their safety and comfort.

But let’s make this example complex again and remove the health-threatening reaction. Then it’s less obvious where the tipping point for good relationships versus identity is. If you are not confident about your looks, you don’t have this choice without endangering yourself. Instead, you insist they ‘accept me as I am’ or if your confidence is very low you leave the relationship to ensure it does not endanger you. Behaviours you cannot live without, even while in the company of just one person, are saying more about you than the relationship.

Relationships, identity and choices are but reserved for personal relationships, life partners, family and friends. In my work as a business coach, I see the exact same balancing act occurring in relationships at work. The quality of every relationship is a combination of the value they offer you versus how much they threaten your identity. Understanding yourself allows you to better manage these reactions and make more productive choices about who you work with and how.

Is there a situation at work, a style of person, a job function that is triggering you and wasting your energy? Is it time to stop ‘divorcing’ great jobs or staff and learn to understand where these emotional responses are coming from and give yourself more choices? Then it’s time to find a business coach.

First 20 seconds of cold calling

Highlights of video by Rapid Learning. Link at end of article.

The highlights of a great training video by Rapid Learning about how to start a cold phone call.

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlVBwasfc78

https://rapidlearninginstitute.com/sales-training/blog/

 

 

 

 

 

Tips for effectively relating to people

A few simple cues and small adjustments in how you relate to others can improve your life, at work or socially.

  1. When a group of people are laughing each person looks at the individual he or she likes the most because they want to make sure that the object of their desires approves and shares their sense of humour.
  2. Chew on something when you’re nervous or before an important conversation, a public speech, or any event that makes you nervous. Nobody eats when they’re in danger, so while you’re chewing your brain thinks it’s safe to relax.
  3. Staring passively at the other person can help you get any information you need. If you don’t like the answer or it seems they’re not telling you the whole story just keep staring at them. The silence will be so unbearable that they’ll be ready to tell you anything just to end it.
  4. Imagine that your future employer is a good friend of yours to avoid getting nervous during an oral exam or a job interview. Imagine that the person in front of you is a friend you haven’t seen in ages.
  5. Consider the possibility that the interviewer is as nervous as you are. Hiring the right person is important and most managers outside of HR specialists do not do it often.
  6. Come into the interview, or a meeting, with a smile. This will make you feel more confident and put them at ease too.
  7. Put a mirror behind your desk to reduce conflict. You’ll find that many people will be polite and ready to meet you halfway in negotiations. People are social creatures and one of our survival tactics is cooperation, so nobody likes to see themselves angry or annoyed.
  8. If you want to break up a fight, get something to eat. Eating is associated with relaxation and being calm, so the probability of a person attacking someone who is eating is very low.
  9. If you want to easily become friends with someone just ask them for a favour. It can be something simple like; passing the sauce, a napkin, the sheet of paper or even asking for some advice. The person who’s doing the favour will think they like you because they’re doing something for you i.e co-operating so you must be an ally.
  10. Schedule important meetings for the beginning or the end of the day because people remember things best when they happen at the beginning and end of the day.
  11. To make participants attend and be punctual for meetings, specify a weird time and duration for the meeting. This is called the Swiss trains approach. If a person sees a meeting from 9:22 to 9:46 on their schedule they’re more likely to be on time and things will stick to the agenda more precisely.
  12. Pay attention to the direction of feet while talking to other people. Their feet can help you understand their true feelings in a conversation. If they turn their body to you, but not their feet, it means they’re not interested in talking to you or are hiding something. Also, if the tips of their shoes are facing a different direction, it means they want to get away as soon as possible.
  13. Subtly copying other people’s body language will help you win their trust.  The person doesn’t consciously realize that they see themselves in you because of the familiar gestures.
  14. So that people see that you’re paying attention during a conversation, smile when you’re listening to their good news and frown at the mention of bad events in their life.
  15. A sincere smile is a great way to build trust in any situation. When your smile isn’t forced your mood also improves, you start to exude warmth and people feel it. But if you are forcing the smile it can have exactly the opposite effect, so be sure to be thinking of something that makes you happy enough to generate a sincere smile before you approach or enter the room.

Sales success is as simple as picking up the phone, isn’t it?

Selling seems so easy. It’s just about chatting to people, isn’t it? Then why are you so many salespeople so unhappy? Because picking up the phone a hundred times a day isn’t at all easy.

PLEASE STOP TORTURING YOURSELF

Yes, the statistics about how many phone calls it takes to generate sales are correct, but they are a siren’s call. An idea of something beautiful that lures you to your death. Yes, making the phone calls creates sales but in reality, very few people can do it consistently. I know this from testing nearly 30,000 candidates who are wanting to become agents and nearly 5,000 who already are within my client base. Only 5-10% can do this naturally and another 10% at most, who can do it with better training, coaching, little tricks (like this great sticker) and nauseating determination.

find out if you could be in sales at www.salesinventoryprofile.com

The magic power of the phone

So, if you are already in sales and committed to staying but you’re struggling with the amount of proactive contact that is needed, there are things you can do to help yourself. But don’t beat yourself up by thinking this is a ‘simple’ thing that you should already be able to do.

Know your sales style

Before you embark on more training or coaching you can find out how much natural talent for selling you really have. You know it’s not the sort of selling style that enjoys spending half the day on the phone. Find out if it’s the sort that includes the nauseating determination to push yourself to the level you can find by completing a Sales Inventory Profile test. You may instead want to find out if you should be in real estate sales.

Could I have a career in the real estate industry?

If you have tried all of these things, be kind to yourself and learn to use marketing tools instead or change products to ones that do not have little or no phone work.

The what why and how of getting into action and the myth of motivation

It all starts with thinking

When we are stuck, not taking any action, we often find ourselves wistfully saying if only I had a bit more motivation. But motivation to do what? If you are stuck, it’s most likely there are too many unknown’s. You’re not sure what you want exactly. You may not even be sure where ‘here’ is. Or maybe you have a clear goal, even had it for a while, but you’re just not getting any closer to it and don’t know what to try now.

Why are you procrastinating?

It is impossible to generate action without clarity, the what, why and how of doing. If you are procrastinating there are potentially two issues getting in the way and they occur in this order;

  1. Not enough planning in at least one of the three stages; what, why and how.
  2. Emotional resistance

We are often focused on the emotional element first, having been sold the myth that if we feel good we can conquer anything, or that if we resolve old emotional issues we become more effective. Sorry to say, but even when we feel great, we can be idling in the shallows if there is not enough planning.

Let me explain.

Actions are generated by thinking – Feeling ‘good’ or ‘motivated’ cannot initiate actions.

Emotions can, however, block action- Emotions like fear, confusion or uncertainty all signal danger and will stop action.  We cannot sustain consistent action when there is significant ‘danger’ except for the actions that ensure survival (see graphic).

Emotions are themselves products of thinking. If we think something is dangerous we feel fear. If we cannot understand a situation we feel confused etc. If emotions can block action it’s understandable why we believe that simply ‘clearing’ these up is enough to stop procrastinating and restart action. But alas no. You still need clarity of what, why and how to start, and stay, in action. Without clarity, you are left in a state of confusion. Confusion is one of the emotions that stop action.

 What is motivation?

When we are unable to get into action we say we don’t feel ‘motivated’ enough, using the term as if it’s an emotion. Let’s consider what motivation really means? Motivation means having a motive, a cause or reason to act, it’s our ‘why’, that is, the second stage of planning. Motivation, it turns out, is not something we feel, it is something we think. This means we don’t have enough clarity on ‘why’ we want it, the rewards of reaching our goal and any upside during the process.

For example, you want to study to get a better job. Rewards from finishing the qualification include pride in achievement and increased social status/salary/employability. Rewards along the way may include, leaving a bad job, making new friends, living on campus/new city and for some the joy of learning. All of these only counts if you personally think they are positive.

The ‘why’ must also be the net reward after considering all costs; personal effort, actual costs, potential costs, losing the security of your current position and consequences of doing it badly (taking many years or not graduating). If there is no negative consequence of staying where you are now but action requires much effort for undefined rewards, why make the effort? Because you should? Because you ‘want it’? Neither of these is reasons enough to get you into action.

Are your attempts at ‘getting motivated’ making it worse?

To create sufficient clarity to get into action temporarily throw out the visualisation board, the 5 am alarms and other “simple” success strategies. These can be making the situation worse by creating new emotional barriers to action. Yes, all of these success ‘tools’ can make it harder to start or continue.

If you cannot get yourself into action but have started ramping up ‘motivation’, you are proving your inability to achieve your goal; no action = no progress forward = lost resources (time) = failure. This artificial loss is creating more emotional resistance and barriers to action.

How planning helps!

It’s time to start thinking in much greater detail to get yourself into action. Thinking includes 3 different aspects and they are best started in this order;

  • Deciding exactly what you want – setting specific goals and milestones. What does being ‘done’ really look like?  For example, you want to be an Art critic. That is a big lofty hard-to-define goal. Instead, you might focus on a specific tangible milestone; to have 5 unique art reviews published within 12 months. With this tighter milestone, you can now plan why this will benefit you and then what actions are needed, which need to be repeated and how often etc.
  • Understanding why you want to do this. This can be very tricky and is the place most goals stall. Without reasons you can quantify, you cannot continue to the how stage of planning. But sometimes you cannot work out if your goal is worth the effort until you know exactly how much effort it will it take, the exact value (both monetary and emotional) of the rewards including milestone rewards.  So the ‘Why’ phase often needs to include some research on the ‘how’. Analyse (cost + risk) vs. reward of the final goal and each of the milestones. Often the early stages of a plan can appear to be all negative, requiring huge additional effort, like years of education. Having clarity over what the total costs and rewards actually are is very important to both starting and staying in action during the cost/negative phase. For example, knowing how much salary advantage your qualifications can give you over the next 25 years versus the costs of tuition and salary lost during study.
  • Finally, how you would go about it all. To quantify the why you have already completed some of the how. The danger here is to think your initial considerations of how are enough to get started. Certainly, if you did the why analysis thoroughly it will ‘feel’ great. Seeing how much more upside than effort there is will energise you. You are as they say; on fire!. But beware, you will need to go into ALL the details to prevent resistance creeping back or becoming totally stalled later.

If a lot of detail makes planning seem overwhelming, then plan for a shorter horizon to a specific milestone which has a significant tangible reward. The reward must be big enough to justify the effort even if you go no further. Do you need a 5-year plan or a 3 month one? For example, will completing just the one stage of the education give you enough upside?   Big goals do take a long time to achieve, but the longer the time frame you set, the harder it will be to plan at a detailed enough level to get started.

Just do it – and the never give up death-trap

Should the story of Edison trying a thousand different materials for the filament in the lightbulb inspire us to never give up?

No. Edison had a real plan and was following a proven success process.

As a scientist, his life was about discovering things by hypothesising and experimenting with a range of options, to eliminate what does not work, in order to establish what does. So ‘failure’ is a positive action in his context that directs future actions toward success. There was also no social downside, everyone expects scientists to fail continuously. Financially risk? Nope, he was being paid to conduct these experiments. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.”

But if you are not following a proven plan and being paid for the journey, then continuously ‘failing’ will create a huge toll on your mental health, perhaps to the extent that it will rob you of your energy to perform in other parts of your life.

Should you stop wanting things if you cannot work out how to achieve them?

No.

Just don’t torture yourself if you are doing nothing about making it happen, nor confuse wanting, wishing and hoping with having a goal.

To want something and let the ‘universe provide’ can sometimes help gather information to allow detailed planning and thus get you into action later. Coming back to the art critic, with your heightened desire to achieve the goal of publishing 5 articles, you become more observant of relevant issues. You notice adverts for writing courses, ask more questions of anyone who is already in the field, read more about art, and so forth. All this ‘universe’ provided input contributes to being able to start really planning, by clarifying parts of the what, why, or how.

The role of research and networking

As a variation to waiting on the universe to provide, you can actively seek more input on any of the three stages, by researching or interacting with people who are already on this journey.

Planning is boring

Agreed. So is brushing your teeth, and as adults, we know there are real consequences, physically in the long term and socially in the short term, if we don’t do it. To succeed, planning is not just an event, it is a daily component of success. This does not mean you are continuously changing the plan, rather maintain clarity you may need to review it daily or refine it as you progress and you have more information. If you talk to anyone with greater success than you, you will see that they have done, and are doing, more planning than you are currently doing.

While enough planning must occur before action can start, you will need to be continually planning on a daily, and if unforeseen obstacles emerge, even an hourly basis for action to continue. We have many names for this continuous planning, like ‘time management’ and being ‘agile’ or ‘responsive’. This can be happening subconsciously, which does work beautifully for some people. But regardless of your usual style, if you are procrastinating you need to do your daily planning consciously, at least till are fully active again.

Where does a coach fit in?

There are lots of misconceptions about the role of the modern-day business coach. A coach is not here to provide public accountability and to keep your ‘toes to the fire’. These just increase your emotional risk of humiliation and reduce action. We don’t need to pay anyone to tell us we are behind schedule. If you think you do need someone to tell you, then you probably have a parent or sibling who will gladly do this for free.

Coaches help us becoming better at the planning, improving our skills (doing) and managing our emotions on the journey.

  1. Planning: Giving you the headspace to plan, by focusing your attention on the goal, why it matters to you and its steps. Providing skills and methodology for planning. While a coach does not need to be a subject expert they need to be good at analysis and planning, otherwise, you could use any friend to question your decisions.
  2. Doing: Improving your activity by helping to analyse the progress and by offering feedback. By telling your coach how you felt you are not just sharing the burden, but this conversation can lead to practical adjustments to the plan, improving your results, and reduce the emotional consequences over time.
  3. Managing emotions: Moral support while you learn to crawl. A cheer squad on the journey who is objectively able to say, “your winning because you’re getting better and failing less now”. The feedback that you are going forward, no matter how slowly, reduces your fear response and makes future actions easier. When you work alone the uncertainty of not knowing if your effort is moving you forward is enough for your brain to stop all activity to conserve energy for actions that can produce positive outcomes.

We all need help making things happen in our lives. A few coaching sessions could be the start of a new adventure or the insight to conquer a specific roadblock. Let’s start the conversation by emailing me at maya@salesinventoryprofile.com

Corporate Coaching since 1994 in Sydney or by Skype across Australia and New Zealand.

How delving into misery can create more joy in your life

“If you want the rainbow, you need to deal with the rain” – John Green

Our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are designed to heal and regenerate. Just as our lungs are designed to breathe out the bad air and in the good air, our minds need to deal with the bad thoughts to make way for healthier new ones. It’s not just the extreme of holding our breath that will cause our lungs to explode, it’s the breathing in of toxins that causes long-term oxygen deprivation and cell death. So too it is with ignoring our pain, from small annoyances to evenets that makes us misery, that deprives us of the ability to engage fully in the good parts of our lives and grow.

You cannot move on to a positive emotional state while your brain is filled with misery. Nor can you either pretend it didn’t happen or plaster it over with positivity, which is like holding your breath. Eventually the pressure of the pain will burst through, as a major illness. You need to jump (or sytemtically tiptoe) into that misery to excavate the old, to open the space for the new. Our brains only have so much capacity to think (emotions are just old thoughts) and if, it is full, it cannot take in new happy thoughts.

But even worse, our brains attach new thoughts to similar old ones for efficiency. We accept new thoughts fastest that fit well with our existing ones and easily forget new ones that there is nowhere to file. If your brain is filled with pain and fear it will have a hard time fitting the lovely positive new ones anywhere and certainly not as equals.

Spending an hour each day doing ‘positive’ thinking may have no effect on your mood if those thoughts have nothing to latch on to. Meanwhile your brain is strengthening fear and pain from just a minute’s negative processing. We need to resolve (remove/break/disolve) the link between the historical events and our current survival so that your brain can move out of survival and be free for growth.

Resolved is different from forgotten. You can resolve painful emotions around events and still rememeber what happened. When you think back to the event, there may even be some residue negative charge/emotion, but this is akin to scar tissue. The scar is not going to spread into something more dangerous by continuing to influence your thoughts and actions on a daily basis.

How To Resolve Your Old Negative Emotions, in this order;

1. Have them
Feeling it again, over and over, until the feelings lessen. Think about it, cry, talk about it, stomp your feet, rage against the gym equipment etc. If you cannot find specific events to focus on yet you are feeling down you can do a general emotion dump. My favourite technique for this is EFT and the Ortner’s are my favourite practitioners of this. https://www.thetappingsolution.com/

2. Get professional help
If you have suffered any of these life events; an assault, loss of a significant other through divorce or death, public humiliation, bankruptcy, been fired etc, it is best to do this with a medical professional such as a psychologist or clinically qualified therapist, not a life or business coach. Do not underestimate the depth of these emotions because you appear to be ‘coping’ or it wasn’t as bad as what other people have experienced. Any event that endangers our survival; physically, emotionally or financial will dig into the deepest level of our subconscious because survival is the primary function of the brain and takes priority every minute of every day over everything else.

Regardless of the event, if you feel like you are bordering on depression, or you have in ANY WAY been limiting your interaction with others; stopped applying for new jobs or dating or even engaging less in a sport or social activity, absolutely see a medical professional.

3. Get systematic
If the emotional charge is lower, examine your memories in a systematic detailed way. Put your thoughts under a microscope and engage the logic circuits. A significantfunction of our survivalcapacity is problem solving,so start by laying out the problem in detail.

This could be by writing a list or journaling exactly what happened. Get really detailed. Like super detailed, include every tiny thing you can remember, time of day, weather, smell, what you were wearing. Or, if there was a single significant event, write it out as a play script including dialogue and staging directions to the actors.

Your brain’s capacity for logic will kick in to clarifying which aspects of this event are still dangerous and then will start searching subconsciously for a solution to prevent any future consequences.

4. Rewrite history
I have used the write a ‘script for a play’ a few times. If, I first have a good cry, stomp, EFT session before starting to write, I usually find I can no longer recall all the issues in enough detail to finish the play. I then continue writing it as fiction and editing the factual parts I can still recall with what I would have preferred and just having fun with it. These improved fictional edits then stay in memory ready to do or say the next time something similar happens.

Your brain does not know the difference between; thoughts that you imagined and replay compared to memories of events that happened if they are of equal detail. Therefore, imagining yourself doing something in detail is a great way to prepare for doing it better. Athletes actively do this all the time. It’s not about imagining it ending well, the victory, rather imagining DOING it well. See your legs pumping faster than ever before as you run the race and then standing on the podium receiving your medal.

GETTING HAPPY BY HAVING MORE HAPPY THOUGHTS

Fill Your Day With Good Stuff.

Scientific research shows smiling and laughing have positive effects on mental and physical health. Stay alert to things to smile and laugh at. Smile and laugh, out loud, longer when these things happen.

Actively create better content by adding many, even tiny, events that make you happy. Create a list of 5 positive little things that you can spread through every day regardless of who you are with or what other obligations you have for that day. One of mine is to buy a coffee from my favourite café and really savour that first taste. Your day might allow you to listen to great music on headphones or step out into nature for a few minutes.And when you have time you might; watch feel-good movies and read books that leave you feeling inspired or filled with hope. Watch Frozen 12 times, even if you don’t have kids.

The Power Of Gratitude’s

The reason gratitude’s work way better than ‘positive’ thinking or affirmations is because you are reinforcing things that have happened to you and are already fully formed in memory. There are existing memories to easily attach the positive gratitude thoughts too. Gratitude’s don’t work if you cannot think why these events are positive. Your brain is not an idiot. The generic ‘everything occurs for a reason’ is not enough. You must actually see something positive to feel happier.

Having a daily evening gratitude ritual is a great way to resolve potentially negative daily events by analysing them for positive content to be grateful for. It will also change the ‘file to long-term memory’ balance while you sleep. Your brain will continue highlighting the positive events of the day to file and sending to trash the day’s insignificant events leaving your brain better prepared for processing more positive stuff tomorrow.

You can start this ‘clearing’ through the day, long before you actually go to sleep, like as you cook, or on your trip home from work. Better still, have a work grattitude ritual before you leave work. You can end the workday with a positive sense of closure or by writing a better to-do list for tomorrow. Either way, you can then leave work at work.

If you have young children, you can instal this habit with them by playing the ‘name three happy things’ during their bed-time routine. It’s not too late for grumpy teenagers either, you’re just going to need to debate the events of their day until they get the hang of seeing the good for themselves.

Make it part of your own bedtime routine. If your day was filled with boring uneventful stuff you may be unable to whip up any genuine gratitude’s. It’s ok to end your day thinking about something from days, weeks or years past that you are still grateful for.

How to become who you want to be

What we say to ourselves is often an echo of what other people said to us that we accepted as true. I’ve accepted a whole bunch of things over the years, some of which has served me well, like ‘I’m sporty” and ‘if she can learn to be good at that I can too’.

My tactics for letting go of the unhelpful ones

  1. Decide what characteristics I want for myself
  2. Start developing the skills needed for the new characteristics.
  3. Look for evidence that the old message is false.

We only took on the old messages because at some level we believed them. Maybe because there was real evidence of our stumbling’s when we were younger or just because someone powerful said so and nothing at the time contradicted them.

It is harder to let go of a belief without evidence that it is wrong. To get this evidence sometimes you need to learn new skills first. You say to yourself ‘I cannot sing’. If you decide you want to be able to sing, even at a simple level amongst friends, get singing lessons. Singing is a learnable skill even if you are tone deaf. Record yourself at the beginning and again after 10 lessons. Then you can hear just how much you can sing. Decide if you want to be an even better singer and how much more training you will need. Learning to be a new, singing, you is a very simple mechanical journey. Or at the end of the ten lessons, you can at least edit your old message from ‘I cannot sing’ to ‘I didn’t learn to sing’.

Choose who you want to be and start learning to be her.

Sell it to me!

Is selling something one person ‘does’ to another?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Selling is not a one-way process and without clarity, about what it really is it’s impossible to become very good at it.

I believe selling is a conversation between two or more people at the end of which somebody makes a decision.

Ultimately customers buy from us when they come to a point in their decision process that gives them the confidence to act. That decision journey, if you like, starts firstly with clarity about the need for the item/service based on many factors that have nothing to do with you or your competitors. That intrinsic first level decision is the basis for how urgently they will search for the ultimate item, how much they will pay for it and when they will act.

If all of that occurs privately before they engage with potential suppliers than the salesperson has very little influence over the decision processes and they become nothing more than a talking brochure and price is the only issue left to resolve.

True selling is being part of the fuller journey of bringing that need up from a subconscious idea or unplanned issue to a conscious detailed process. The earlier in that process you are talking with your prospect about all aspects of their actual or possible need the better you can position your offering when it’s time for them to act.

In the Emotions in Selling course, I teach how to conduct these conversations from the earliest stages and how to prospect so you can engage your prospects long before they are actively ‘shopping’. Equally importantly you will learn how, through conversation, you can manage their fear to effectively build trust so that they can confidently complete the transaction and not withdraw or becoming swayed by competitors.

Call 0407 005 290 or email maya@salesinventoryprofile.com to find out more.

Success means staying on one path

“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing until it gets there.”
– Josh Billings

 

What are you going to be when you grow up? It’s a cute question to ask a 5 year old. Sadly with the endless array of choices, it’s easy to get trapped into asking this throughout your entire life. There are all these different pulls and pushes that tempt us to stray from our path. But being a jack-of-all-trades can be detrimental to your success; it’s about choosing one thing and getting really good at it!

But how do you know what is worth sticking to?

Ultimately you don’t. It’s a decision you make.

Many of the worlds greatest achievements and success stories resulted from stepping into something radical but then many failures are too. Business plans and market research will give you some clues and it’s worth spending a few (many???) months doing these before you decide. But there are no guarantees and ultimately it’s just your choice to commit.

Once you commit there is nothing else but to persist, till success or bankruptcy do you find.

If you want to find out if you have the tenacity/persistence/endurance to stick to your path we invite you to complete a Sales Inventory Profile.

http://salesinventoryprofile.com/prk=re-41ac-sale-001

4 Tips On How to Raise Venture Capital By Topher Morrison

Most business owners falsely assume that investment potential is based on having an innovative product or service. However, we have all seen the craziest business opportunities get funding on Shark Tank solely because of the leader in the business.

 

#1. Create massive external clarity.

Everyone who comes in contact with your business must get with absolute clarity what your business does and who they do it for.

 

#2 Massive external credibility. 

This simplest way to do this is to become published in a trade journal, newspaper, or a popular blog. Many entrepreneurs find the ultimate credibility is to become a published author.

 

#3 Corporate design.

If you’re looking for equity investors to inject your business with tonnes of working capital, then you must design your business to be attractive to investors from day 1. Operations manual so someone can step in and conduct the business to some extent without explanations from the owner. At least four distinctive products or product lines. Have four to twelve staff in addition to the owners, in this ratio 2:1:1 Sales: Marketing/Promotions: Technical Support/Delivery.

 

#4 Become visible in your community. 

If the investor approaches you, you’ll have a 90% chance of getting the exact deal you want. You must increase your visibility so that investors know where you are. Participate broadly in both the business and local community to increase your peer network. This generates the word of mouth reputation that can lead to effective introductions.

 

The new big business won’t be big at all. It will be the collaboration of several small businesses or people banning together to reach a level of influence that it will generate the big company’s profits.

Get a free copy of the Collaboration Economy book https://johnspencerellis.com/collaboration-economy-book

.

5 ways SIP shields you from poor recruitment

SIP shieldWhen we think of poor recruitment outcomes it is easy to imagine the financial loss of salaries, resources and training that having the wrong person in the team will cost the business.

But even interviewing the wrong ones can have a subtle more devastating effect on your business. These are why we recommend everyone who applies for your job or approaches your business should complete a SIP before you make any contact with them.

  1. Don’t waste your own selling time

Never waste a manager’s time reading résumés and interviewing candidates who a low probability of success. Every interview you conduct with the wrong candidates is an hour of productive work lost and potentially a sales hour lost. We are all strapped for time; this is easy to conceptualise but saving your time is just the tip of the iceberg of issues to be avoided.

  1. Never miss a superstar

Selling capable candidates, especially for listing real estate, are incredibly scarce and their lack of industry knowledge means they often appear in disguise, as accountants, nurses, tradesmen, barristers and, the trickiest of all, as school leavers or retirees. LJ Hooker’s first million-dollar agent was a 45-year-old retired nurse and recent migrant who had been passed up by five offices.

What happens to your market when this star does eventually emerge at your competition?

  1. False hope in candidates can destroy your reputation

Building false hope in candidates can have an incredibly long negative impact on your business’s reputation. Candidates who feel they have been shunned at the eleventh hour after a huge build-up can have very long memories and retell their story to hundreds of people. Candidates have invested the time to come for an interview, (maybe taken time off work and lost a day’s pay), dressed up (bought something special, maybe the entire outfit), researched your business, rehearsed their answers and then had a great interview. That is a lot of personal investment to turn against you.

It’s also a much deeper, more personal rejection than if they didn’t meet one of the ‘standard’ criteria at the very beginning, like completing the SIP in the privacy and convenience of their own home. People apply to tens, if not hundreds of jobs, each year and completing a SIP will just fall into the mill of many uneventful hours of job hunting. Getting an interview and feeling it went well is something significantly different.

  1. Is it too late to contradict yourself?

No one likes it when the video referee overturns the on-field decisions. When you have met someone who is really keen on your role; who interviewed well enough to be seriously considered, any warnings provided by SIP afterwards may be too hard to accept. At this point, if SIP contradicts your judgement it is often too late emotionally to turn back from the candidate. But their SIP results will linger between you like a little black rain cloud threatening the relationship from day one.

  1. Setting candidates up for a lifetime of failure

Finally, when you interview and worse still recruit someone who does not make it; you can have an irreversible impact on their entire life. Candidates come to you with their careers, if not their hearts, in their hands, trusting that if they work hard this will be the beginning of a fabulous stage in their career. Hopefully the beginning of greater wealth for themselves and their families.

But if they don’t have enough of the core capacity to sell, no matter how hard they work, no matter how genuine they are, they will become a statistic; one of the 90% of candidates who fail and leave the industry within two years. They leave you feeling lousy, maybe even angry, having wasted their precious time and now uncertain of their next step, with the flow on effects in their family life that no-one can foresee when they could have gone on to find a job to be good at.

The industry is littered with the walking dead, sales staff who have spent years, decades even, barely breaking even. People, who have moved offices countless times, fixated on self-improvement, read every new sales book, attended every seminar, spending hours listening to audio files and then berate themselves for not being focused/motivated/something enough and believing when they just get the ‘right’ mental attitude their career will rocket them to success.

Is it time for a better way?

DIY recruiting with SIPTo find out how using SIP as your in-house recruitment specialist can give you 90% accuracy:

call +61 407 005 290 or

email maya@salesinventoryprofile

Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation, a summary

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Science knows that the 20th century tiered financial rewards do not improve performance and can even destroy creativity.

The secret to high-performance is that unseen intrinsic drive– the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things because they matter to the doer.

What science tells us from the candle problem.

candle problem partsCreated in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. Participants are given a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. “Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn’t drip onto the table.” You time how long it takes people to find a solution.

How do we get the quickest solutions? The standard business model is if you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, etc. Incentivize them. That’s how business works. But that’s not happening here.

The group who were offered a reward for being in the top 25% actually took 3.5 minutes longer than people who were given no reason to rush. You’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.candle problem solution

This experiment has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. Contingent motivators — if you do this, then you get that — work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don’t work at all or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.

If-then rewards work really well for tasks where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind. So, for mechanical tasks a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, incentives work really well.

But for the candle problem, you want to be scanning wide. The solution is on the periphery. But rewards actually narrow our focus and restricts our creativity.

last centuryIn the 21st century, white-collar workers are doing less of that routine, rule-based, left-brain work. That work is easy to outsource and fairly easy to automate. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities. Even in purely manual labour jobs, eg road repair, if some judgement and discretion remain then incentives don’t improve the quality of individual output.

Another experiment conducted in 2005 by Dan Ariely and three colleagues with MIT students. They gave the MIT students a bunch of games that involved creativity, motor skills, and concentration. And then offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. To avoid cultural bias they later repeated the experiment in India.

What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

HIGHER INCENTIVES LED TO WORSE PERFORMANCE.

That is what happens in experiments. What happens in the reality. In 2009 Economists at the London School of Economics looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here’s what they said: “We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance.”

The good news is that the scientists who’ve been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It’s built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter because we like it, they’re interesting, or part of something important.

This new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements:

Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.motivation-scaled500

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.

These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.

Let’s consider autonomy in some detail. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement then self-direction works better.

Consider examples of some radical notions of self-direction. This requires paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy.

Let me give you a radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time, or anytime. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.

What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things.

Let’s look at a real life example where incentives don’t work as well as autonomy. In the mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopaedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, they paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopaedia got started with a different model. Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent. Do it because you like to do it.

Who would have predicted the Wikipedia model would become the dominant world provider and Encarta was withdrawn in 2009 from sale?

Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout.

For the full presentation go to https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation?language=en

 

Coffee powering your health

Coffee the power food? Did you know that a cup of espresso coffee has 23 times the potassium of a banana? But NO SUGAR, how cool is that!

TOTALLY weird as this sounds, I nearly died from lack of coffee in December 1999.

In 1999 I was suffering with a gastric infection and barely digesting anything for 2 weeks, certainly not getting my morning takeaway on the way to the office or using the local cafes as meeting venues (what a great business innovation this has been!!!). I ran out of potassium and my body started to shut down.

Along with potassium, coffee also contains caffeine. Sadly caffeine has negative effects on your body so should be minimised. As always there is a down side, right? Luckily dark roasted espresso coffee has the least amount of digestible caffeine per shot. It’s unlikely the amount of caffeine in a single shot of espresso will do as much harm as the potassium can do good.

Life is too short for bad coffeeThe amount of potassium coffee contains drops off but caffeine increases as coffee is processed, so instant coffee has the worst ratio making caffeine the dominant feature.

To maximise the potassium released from coffee beans grind the beans immediately before using them. Then add intense heat, like keeping the brew at boiling point  for 20-30 seconds as Southern Europeans do, or go to a Cafe where steaming hot water is forced through the shot. Using a plunger and pouring boiling water over the grind will not release as much potassium.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/09/16/coffee-health-benefits.aspx

A new life in a heart beat

I loved this saying:

“Your life becomes the thing you have decided it shall be.” by Raymond Charles Barker

I couldn’t agree more. Everyday we all tell ourselves things that define our lives. We think: ‘I’m too old/young for that job’ or ‘I don’t have enough time for a new relationship’ and these decisions generate behaviours that ensure the outcome. Behaviours about applying, or not, for new jobs, behaviours about how we present ourselves in our current jobs and behaviours around not speaking up and staying safe that keep us where we are today – forever.

If you want a new life it’s time to make a different decision about how old you are and how much time you have.

It sounds easy?

Well it is.

Right now, this minute, you can set your life on a new path by making a new decision about how you are and what you want. Each step along that path will present you with choices and each time it’s totally up to you to keep going with the new behaviours on your new path or go back to the old ones.

Some decisions lead really quickly to new lives and some meander around and take their time. But every new path will lead to somewhere else. You just need to make that first decision and take those first steps.

And if you’re not sure what you want and who you are, decide anyway because you can change your mind again in a heart beat. But if, you make no choices, you go nowhere!

What have you decided about yourself that is not serving you?

Create a new you by making some new decisions!

Raymond_Charles_Barker

About Raymond Charles Barker
Raymond Charles Barker was an influential American minister and author in the mid-twentieth century. He wrote such books as The Power of Decision and Treat Yourself to Life, on ways to change subconscious patterns. He became president of the International New Thought Alliance in 1943, a group practicing the religious philosophy developed in the late 1800’s by Phineas Quimby, with early proponents including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louise Hay.He died in 1988 at the age of 77.

The absolute power of NO

Learning to effectively say ‘no’ without flinching or thinking it was damaging my relationships is a lesson that took me many years to get. Maybe I’m a slow learner? Maybe it’s my female instinct to value relationships above myself.  It used to strike me as too confrontational to simple say ‘no’. But not learning to efficiently communicate ‘no’ can be a huge time drain in our busy lives and creates uncertainty and resentment in relationships.

I finally learnt this lesson at home from my children but it has proven to be an important tool in all my relationships, with adults both personally and at work.When I first became a parent I was a very collaborative and soft individual. When my son did things I didn’t like and I wanted him to stop doing it I used statements like;

  • That’s not a very good idea
  • Try it this way…
  • How about we…

When I only had the one child this style worked. While it was exhausting and frustrating, I could still continue to do things that way. After my second child learned to crawl it became obvious that my systems were no longer working. Having two little boys in the house the available time to negotiate and persuade became zero.

I learned that a clear and firm direction was not only better on my nerves but better for the troops as well. Now, when I say NO, in a clear and serious voice, everyone knows exactly what that means, even the baby (child three, a daughter).

No Computer Key Showing Denial Panic And NegativityThe power of the word NO comes from its meaning. Its meaning is absolute and to the point. So to execute it properly your voice and demeanor needs to be absolute and to the point. There is no room for lightheartedness or absent-mindedness; nor is there room for any hesitation.

For NO to have absolute power it does not need to be used in anger, or frustration; or used sternly or loudly. If something, in this case a word, has real power it needs no force in its execution to be effective. To have absolute power NO needs no threat or consequences.

Continuously threatening is just as ineffective and exhausting as being too soft. As a parent, or as a leader, you cannot present every requirement as a closed statement; you will do this, or … You cannot run any team, including a family, in a permanently adversarial state. If you follow through with every threat you become the enemy. But then if you don’t follow through with every threat you get ignored and become ineffective, so stop threatening.

I have learnt that none of these things means no:

  • I don’t think so
  • That’s not what I meant
  • Let me think about it
  • Maybe another time
  • I’m not sure
  • That’s not a very good idea
  • I’d prefer you didn’t
  • I don’t like that

No means no.

As a parent my job is to lead and at times that requires making some really tough decisions, and holding my ground. My job as a parent is also to teach. I teach my children how to weigh up issues and make decisions. I will share my thinking processes to give them examples of decision-making. I will take them through situations and ask them to make the decision to let them practice under supervision.

But when it’s my place to make a decision, the quicker and more precisely I relay my decision the better. If the decision is no then saying NO is the quickest and most effective way to say no. All those other ways I used to say it just prolong the tension for everyone.

Greatness is a team act

“We are, each of us, angels with only one wing, and we can only fly embracing each other.”  – Luciano Decrescenzo

Like me Luciano must have believed it is too hard to achieve greatness alone. The focus on the individual  genius in business, the push for a ‘personal brand’ takes us further from the reason humans have become the dominant species on the plant: our strength is in our ability to co-operate.

cartoon-character_1110057-012814-int

Co-operation is our greatest strength. Whether that be physical co-operation (circling the wagons) for our safety or intellectual co-operation, sharing medical research, we get better outcomes when we work together. When we are isolated we do less work which means we achieve little, as we preserve our energy to survive till help arrives.

Humans have very complex social structures underlying our survival and quest for greatness. Co-operation not competition brings out our best. The smallest workable unit is the couple, then a family of three, to villages and then tribes. Where do you belong?

About Lucian o Decrescenzo

Luciano Decrescenzo, the Italian writer, filmmaker, and intellectual, has published 28 books on subjects ranging from Greek philosophy to his own childhood in Naples. He was born in 1928 and worked as an engineer for IBM for several years before turning to philosophy and writing. He has also directed, written, and starred in a number of Italian language films and received honorary Athenian citizenship in 1994.

 

 

Could you have a career in real estate sales?

Ever dreamed of a job in the country’s highest paying industry? Why not a professional career within your own community that can give you a six figure income after 2-3 years and where it is possible to break through the million dollar personal income barrier.

Start at $35,000 and in 5 years build to $350,000 and in 10 years the world is your oyster. Spectacular success is possible for those who are suited. You cannot achieve the same in any other industry that quickly no matter what your qualifications.

But what happens to most people that enter the industry? 90% fail and are gone within 2 years. Luckily 50% of those that start in residential sales are gone within 3 months. Lucky that they haven’t wasted more of their lives living at the basic level before working out it’s not for them

Step 1

Find out which job within Real Estate will suit you so you build a career around work that you will be successful at doing.

There are a few very different paths in the industry and they each require a different temperament of person.
SIPOur selling IQ system, Sales Inventory Profile, will show you where your natural abilities are the best match. Then you have to develop skills. There is no point in learning about the whole industry if you are best suited to one area.

 

 

The major roles in real estate are;

  • Residential listing and sales (this is the best paid but hardest to do)
  • Buyers agent
  • Property Management
  • Commercial property
  • Project sales or Display homes

Step 2

Once you know your fit the best way to get a job is to approach the bigger agencies within 10 KM of where you live and ask for an interview. Most owners will say yes just out of courtesy to members of their local community. Agents out side of 10 KM won’t be interested in hiring you anyway as travelling longer distances every day and at night is too hard and you will exhaust yourself and leave them.

Step 3

If you are under 25 or have been out of the work place for a while you will need to work on reception for a few years to build skills and area knowledge. Don’t let yourself be rushed into taking on more than you can do well.

Feel free to Email me directly if you want to discuss any of this.

Maya Saric

How To Series Episode 6: How to Sell

Many of us get into selling entirely by accident and many of us are petrified of being sold to. But selling is just a conversation – it is as simple as that. But selling is a conversation with a purpose; selling is a conversation at the end of which someone makes a decision. As a salesperson, you need to guide the conversation to a point where somebody can make a decision and that is the only thing to it. It’s deciding when is the end, and how much information do you need, to buy?

So, it’s a conversation between people, which means you need to ask as many questions as you’re giving answers because in order for a customer to make a decision, they need to have all of the facts and figures. Yet, when they come to you when you first meet them, they don’t have any questions because they don’t know, yet, what it is that’s missing in their framework, and that’s why it’s a conversation. You need to explore what they know, and what they believe in order to fit the new information in so that it makes sense to them. So, giving your blanket product information and the Ten Top Benefits of buying my teaspoon is not a conversation, and therefore, it’s not selling. You need to find out, first, what they know, what they believe, and why they wish to buy one. And then, you present your information.

Emotions in Selling program provides lots of various, specific things about how to converse, how to provide information, and how present yourself in such a way that engenders trust. Because if they don’t trust your information, then they won’t accept you.

Selling is a conversation – it is as simple as that.

How To Series Episode 5: How to Close the Sale

Selling is a conversation. At the end of which, somebody gets to make a decision. At the end, we close.

How do you know when that conversation is at its end?

Some training programs will say, close, close, close. Close a million times. Close all over the place. Close every second that you can. In fact, that’s not true. If you close too soon and all of the issues haven’t been fully resolved, in your prospect’s mind, they won’t be able to make that decision. If you force it or in some way try to corner them into it, you get a generic reaction where they will automatically say no and it’s very hard to recover from a point blank No. you can also let the conversation ramble on way too long, spend way too much time, give them way too much detail, not be really clear on what the final aspect that they need to resolve is, and talk your way around the conversation so that you totally confuse them, and then you can’t close because now they are overwhelmed. You need to be really clear about what sort of information they need form which they are capable of making that decision.

So what sort of information needs to be contained in the conversation?

While selling is a conversation and we all know how to converse, it is much more complicated than that and you need to understand both the psyche of the person that you’re dealing with, the content of your product, and how that fits into their current situation or their current… the way they run their current business.

If you are interested in learning how to sell and learning how to close and when that moment is, and how to maximize your calling rate, you really need to understand those facets. We run a training program called Emotions in Selling which clearly identifies how people make decisions. What will get in the way? How to build trust? Because if they don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you no matter how well you explained the product. Finally, when have they had enough content that they can make a stable decision that they won’t freak themselves out the next day or when they talk to somebody else back at the office or at their own home, and see that in fact, they’re not ready to decide? They need to be fully aware of what they are buying and confident before close will stick.

Learn how to identify what the needs are thoroughly and how to have that conversation so that your product answers those needs before you close them.

For more on Sales Training & Coaching, contact Maya on 0407 005 290 today.

Enjoying the series? Check out the next episode: How to Sell

How To Series Episode 4: How to Build Trust

It’s a fundamental process in human interaction whether you’re building a relationship or trying to sell a product, and the process is exactly the same.

In the Emotions in Selling program we spoke a lot about the mechanisms of fear – and fear is an instinctive and absolute reaction; we are hardwired for survival. And that means that the tiniest, little flicker, of uncertainty or danger, will instantly freeze the person you’re speaking to. And why is that important? Because you can only develop trust in the absence of fear.

So if your friend, your customer, your business partner, is in a state of fear they cannot trust you because you are bundled into the equation. So you have to look at your environment, the really simple attributes of where you’re standing and what’s happening around you, through to how you look, and how you dress, and how you speak, and then to the information that you’re giving, because that person will take the data in from the biggest cues down to the most sophisticated.

So what you say, matters least. If they’ve already been frightened by standing in an environment that’s a bit open, exposed, their fear of being overheard…or you’re wearing something that’s out of context with what they expect of you. So if you’re a professional, then you need to dress like a professional. You need to dress like that person expects of you, not how you expect, or would like to dress. So if you’re a medical professional, you have to look like their vision of a medical professional, not your own. And when selling, same in any important financial transactions, we have this stereotypical accountant or bank manager impressions of the world. People expect, when they go to the bank, to see people dressed like their stereotypical visions of a bank manager. So exactly the same thing applies to the words that you use and the things that you say; what you say has to be congruent – that’s a really big word – it means, it needs to fit in to the context of their current knowledge, including their belief system.

So say if you’ve got a piece of knowledge that conflicts or is incomplete then they cannot accept the truth of what you’re saying. So you may have to start at the beginning and educate them if it is some important and complicated procedure that you’re explaining. Or you may have to have a really long chat about what they currently believe so what you say, is then fitted in with what they currently know. And if it does contradict then you’re able to discuss why it’s still safe information, despite the fact that it doesn’t fit in. Developing trust is the first step in any relationship – it’s the most important in selling.

If you’re in sales I recommend that you explore the Emotions in Selling program and understand how to guide your clients through a simple process of conversation to making stable decisions.

Learn how to build trust with the Emotions in Selling Program blog series.

Call Maya on 0407 005 290 or send her a message on Facebook.

Want more? Watch the next episode in our How To series: How to Close a Sale

How To Series Episode 3: How Resumes are Killing your Business

Recruiting sales people is the trickiest part of your company.

Recruiting sales people is harder than recruiting any other part of the business because the number of people who can sell is actually quite small. But the number of people who think they can sell and are certainly interested and willing because sales people earn such good money, have flexible working hours and all the benefits of being in the sales department, amounts to a huge level of interest. There’s a larger level of interest than the people who are capable of doing it.

How do you work that out?

Traditionally, we’ve been doing it with resume. Resumes are incredibly flawed as recruitment tools. They talk about the past. They are full of historical facts or historical fictions sometimes. They’ve been edited somewhat but regardless of whether its fact or fiction, it’s about the past and where that has been and what they claim to have done for themselves. It’s totally impossible for you to prove any of it. It doesn’t tell you what they are capable of doing for you. It doesn’t show you the feat between their history and their abilities and your job.

What we do in the Sales Recruitment Process is identify people’s ability to sell and their ability to sell is based on 75 different attributes so impossible for them to articulate that document. We, however, have a sales IQ process that will identify all of that in 30 minutes of their time online before you meet them. Don’t rely on what they say about themselves. Allow us to measure their current ability which is core to their capacity regardless of whether they have already started to learn the skills and have had some experience.

Learning skills and having experience is important, but even how small a population can actually sell, you sometimes don’t have the luxury of recruiting just within the pool of people who have already done your job for another company.

Find out who can sell and whether or not they are sufficient of those attributes before you interview them, not by reading their resumes but by allowing them to do the sales inventory profile assessment.

You can contact us, Corporate Coach Australia, on the details provided below and allow us to help you recruit people who really can sell.

Call Maya on 0407 005 290 or send her a message on Facebook.

Next in the series: How to Build Trust – watch it here.

How To Episode 2: How To Cold Call

The first part of the process is, can you really do it? It looks easy and many people think that anyone can do it. We all have phoning blitz or a called calling day, get the whole company out there, do a bit every day or have some major function where we all get out there on the street and hassle up some new business – but less than 5% of the sales population, now that’s 5% of the sales population, not the total population, can actually do it.

The first part of how to cold call is to find out if you are able to because you don’t want to spend. This is the hardest part of the sales cycle. Despite it looking so simple, you don’t want to spend endless hours following my instructions first of all and perfecting your script or rehearsing your technique only to find that really you can’t do it. It’s going to slaughter your energy. It’s going to make you feel miserable and dejected and horrid.

First of all, do our Sales Inventory Profile IQ system. It will identify a whole bunch of things about your selling ability and one of those is whether or not you can cold call. If you can cold call, then develop the skills  Then, prepare a magnificent killer script, rehearse it to depth so that it performs naturally and practice it to a whole bunch of people before you start doing it with prospects. Because cold calling regardless of how clever you think you are or how magnificent your product is, take the whole bunch of energy. It’s really emotionally draining.

So, how do you develop a killer script?

There are 3 key components. The first 10 seconds is the most important. In the first 10 seconds, you want to do only 2 things. You want to identify yourself in the simplest, clearest way possible, and you want to give them a reason to listen. A reason a listen so that you can interrupt their current activity. You can bring their attention to you and your content. They will make all sorts of polite noises about whether or not they are listening. You can ask them on what hours they come home, if they’ve got a moment to talk and most polite people will say yes certainly. But what you really want to do is slice through their attention so that you’ll have a 100% of it yourself, that is about what is in their current environment that you can fix. So the first 10 seconds is about knowing what pain your product will address and clearly articulating how in those first 10 seconds.

When you introduce yourself that’s, “Hello, this is Maya.” That simple, right?  That clear. My name is a bit harder than hopefully yours is, but you don’t want to say, “Hello, this is Maya from Corporate Coach. That’s just too many words. And why do you want to listen to me? Because I know how to improve cold call outcomes. That’s the biggest pain that most of my prospects are in, is their ability to generate cold call outcomes. “Hello. My name is Maya. I’d like to talk to you about increasing your cold calling rate.” Those are really clear why they should listen to me and it has identified a specific pain that my business can address.

Next is, how your product does that and the final thing is getting permission to take further action. In the middle is a little bit about your product and how you do that. Then, is the permission to proceed.

What is the next step that you can gain permission for during that one cold call? Is it to meet in person? Is it to send them some information? Is it for them to attend an event? Is it to do some sort of demonstration? Be really clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Introduce yourself and your product and then ask permission to proceed to the next stage.

First of all, find out if you or your staff can in fact cold call, then get really clear about the script and do some rehearsing before you engage with clients.

Lovin’ the series? Check out How Resumes Are Killing Your Business here.

How to choose a Business Coach


Lets leave aside the question of when do you need a business coach and skip to: How do you choose the right one for you?

I often hear comments by people trying to sell their coaching services that only current superstars in any profession have the right or capacity to coach others to excellence.

Really?

What I think all good coaches need to have is not the ability to perform particular activities well themselves, but the ability to bring to consciousness your performance on those activities so that they can help you improve. But – changing human behavior is a difficult thing. Thus, the profession of coaching has moved into the business world as the bridge between classical training, i.e. giving people new  information about how to perform tasks and creating sustainable changes in behavior.

Coaching is about helping people move from ‘knowing’ to ‘doing’. That is a complex process.

A good coach – a coach that will give you the outcome of better performance – is one that is able to translate your current performance, which you may be unconscious of, into consciousness, then help you to improve from there. A good coach is someone who understands the psyche of the human being; how to guide people through change; how to support people through levels of insecurity and fear and doubt, all of which dominates the process of change and learning; who are able to guide you through that process, and bring to consciousness your abilities. Then they have a good long look at where you’re currently at, how much runway you have ahead of you (i.e. ability to change) and formulate a plan that has absolute clarity from your perspective about how to make changes in your current behaviors to create a performance improvement.

I often hear coaches selling their personal sales success as the key to being good sales coaches.  You know, currently, the best blah, blah, blah in the whole planet, or, the most squirms of any human ever blah, blah, blah.  Well congratulations on your personal success!  But often these people are successful, but can they coach someone else? They may have a great natural grasp of their topic and they may have been on a journey of growth, maybe they’ve received support or good training from somebody else and they have merged all of those things together into a system that works really, really well for themselves. Their intuitive knowledge, their education, the support they’ve received from people around them whether that was from an official coaching process or just from the warm and the encouraging words of their peers or their parents or sometimes even the insults and challenges that they’ve received, that they’ve been able to rise and prove them wrong.

But, as a coach, how do you recreate that process to another person?

How we motivate ourselves, how we change, how we responded to fear, how we deal with the uncertainty, these are the things that stand in the way of our success.  And what you want in a good coach is somebody who knows how to systematically guide you through your fear, uncertainty, confusion, boredom, irritation, etc.

You don’t need a coach who is good at the individual tasks but has no consciousness of how they got good at these things themselves.  A good coach is someone who is conscious of how success comes, and thus will be able to guide you through change.

I’ve recently saw this awful caption of “Is your Coach yesterday’s Hero?”  Meaning, have they been a great performer in the past but have long since lost their touch.  First of all, I find that kind of thinking offensive and secondly, it’s actually irrelevant whether the coach is yesterdays or today’s superstar in the performance of the actual activity.  It would be like saying that you can’t coach Olympic athletes unless you were yourself currently an Olympic athlete.  Unless you hold the world record in breaststroke, you cannot teach, or more to point, coach to excellence a current star in the swimming pool.

For more on training and improving your sales skills, check out our Emotions in Selling training blogs here