Richard's Review of Sales and Management Techniques

Seven Steps to Differentiation

2010-11-12T07:30:00.003+02:00

1. Why bother to differentiate?

I would like you to imagine that I have two boxes in front of me. The boxes are identical, what is in them is identical and they were both manufactured by the same company in Taiwan. Two different companies sell the boxes and the only difference between the boxes seems to be the price. Box A is priced at $300 and box B at $400. Which would you buy?

Of course… you would buy box A. If you can see no difference between two products other than the price you will always buy the cheapest, it is human nature.

Now imaging that with Box B you also get delivery over the next 24 hours, a lifetime guarantee and a very attractive sales person to sell it to you, which one would you buy now? Of course you would buy Box B. Even though the boxes are the same the apparent value is now very different and you would be happy to spend more if you think you are getting better value.

The power of differentiation cannot be underestimated. In a highly competitive market we need to be seen to be different from all the other products or services out there or the customer will just buy the cheapest. So how do we do that?

2. Know your own business

What business are you in? I know…. You are in the pipe laying business, or you provide a catering service or sell insurance. This may be the business you think you are in but it was Charles Handy that said, “The business of business is to satisfy Customers”. So now what business are you in?

If you think you are in the pipe laying business, you may be very proud of the quality of the pipe, the strength of the re-enforced concrete that is in the pipe or the way each piece of pipe fits together. Your customers, however, couldn’t care less about your pipe!

What the customer cares about is getting fluid efficiently and economically from point A to point B. That’s all. So now what business are you in? Your competition may be selling pipes but if you start to sell the ability to get fluid from point A to point B you will differentiate yourself from your competition.

When Parker advertise pens they don’t advertise writing implements the advertise gifts. Kodak advertises memories. They know what business they are in. Have another look at your business and work out what it is the customers are buying.

Differentiate yourself from your competition by focusing on the end result the customers want not the way you will help them get it.

3. Look at the competition

Of course you know what business you are in, you have been in it for years and you are an expert. But when was the last time you had a look to see what your competitors are doing? There should be one member of every sales team whose responsibility it is to gather competitor information. You should have all the competitor brochures, know where they are working and what they are offering. Keep an eye on their advertising and see what they are doing differently. We should be trying to develop USPs (Unique Selling Propositions). By definition a USP is unique. If the customers want it they have to come to you to get it.

Do the competitors have any USP that we should be copying? Are there opportunities that the competitors are missing?

Differentiate yourself from your competition by being unique

4. Talk to the Customers

When was the last time you talked to your customers? I know, you do it all the time. You often go to customers and ask them how the service was, whether the products arrived on time or if we fully satisfied the customer’s needs. But when was the last time you asked your customers what they would like to see you doing in the future?

The customers will not always be right of course. But having had a look at what your competitors are up to, it makes a great deal of sense to see what your customers want in the future. Good customers will help you develop your business if you ask them.

Differentiate yourself from your competition by focusing on what the customers want you to do next year.

5. Be Creative in the way you attract customers to your business

If I were to ask you where your new customers come from, after some thought, you would probably answer with the following four items:

Advertising; Referrals; Cold Calling; Walk Ins/Phone Ins

How do I know this? I have asked this question of thousands of groups all over the world and I always get the same four items, and there lies a problem. Both you and your competition are trying to get new customers in the same way. The customers, therefore, cannot see the difference between you and will just buy the cheapest.

We need to be much more creative in the way we attract new customers to our business. How can you be creative? I don’t know your industry but what about some of the following:

Stop people in the street and give them a business card.
Announce a new service by hanging from a hot air balloon
Stick a coin on your business cards (do you think people would throw that away?)
Give everybody in your team a really different new uniform
Have a party in your factory and invite all your competitors’ customers

The list is endless. Ten minutes of every sales meeting should be dedicated to creativity.

Differentiate yourself from your competition by attracting new customers in creative and exciting ways.

6. Don’t forget the little things

There is a great book on the shelves of your local bookstore called “Don’t sweat the small stuff” (Richard Carlson). In selling it is different. “Do sweat the small stuff” (Richard Mulvey). It is the little things that can make a big difference in the minds of the customer. Consider the following:

When was the last time you sent a customer a thank you card when you didn’t get the business?
When you make a delivery include a small bar of chocolate with a thank you note.
Send a personal SMS on every customers’ birthday

· Always be looking for an opportunity to do something extra. An extra 100 pages printed, an extra button just incase the customer looses one, a small battery charger and rechargeable batteries with the toy, a bag of mints in the hire car, fruit in the room at the hotel……. etc.

Interestingly the little things also cost a little amount of money but they make a big difference in the minds of your customer

Differentiate yourself from your competition by doing little things for your customers every day.

7. Be happy when you make mistakes

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that if you make a mistake the customer will go to your competition next time but this isn’t exactly true.

Your customers don’t mind you making a mistake, what the customer really cares about is when you take forever to fix it, that is when they decide to go elsewhere next time they want to buy. If you can fix the problem straight away, however, the customer will be happy to come back because they know if they have another problem you will solve it without delay.

Time is of the essence here. Every member of your staff should have the authority to solve customer problems straight away. In this way you can keep a customer for life.

Differentiate yourself from your competition by solving customer’s problems straight away.

Being different isn’t difficult, but it is an effective way of letting the customer know there is more to the decision they have to make than just looking at the price.

Richard

Richard Mulvey "The International Sales Guru" is available at www.richardmulvey.com & www.salescoachingworx.com. You may re-publish this article in any electronic media as long as it is not changed in any way and includes this paragraph at the end.

107 Joe Girard on Beating the Recession

2009-09-10T21:41:00.002+02:00

How the Top Sales Guru's are Beating the Recession

Joe Girard - No 3 on the list of top 30 sales gurus in the world.

Background

Joe Girard is a motivational speaker and sales trainer but when he was younger he sold cars… lots of cars. In fact he is still in the Guinness Book of Records as having sold more individual cars and trucks than any body else in History.

Joe - “After the third year of my automotive retail sales career I was already doing very well. In fact, I became the number one new retail car and truck salesperson in the world; a title I never relinquished until I retired.”

What we are really interested in for this series of articles is how Joe Girard responds to the recession.

In 1974, during a major recession, unemployment at 9% in the US (today it is hovering around 8%,) oil was in short supply, petrol being rationed, not sold, the consensus was you could not sell cars. Joe only sold 1,376 that year, or roughly 27 cars a week! This is not the total cars sold in the dealership, these were sold by Joe Girard himself.

How did Joe sell so many cars?

As you might have guessed, primarily by referrals. Long before email and the personal computer Joe sent a handwritten card to every single person on his list, every month, just to let people know he was still out there selling cars and thinking about them. No promotions, no advertisements, just hand written cards.

Joe’s referral system was so successful he personally hired two assistants to help him pre-screen his customers, manage his appointment-only sales schedule, and assist him in writing 500+ cards every day.

Richard – Don’t you just love this simple approach. I often get sales people writing to me about the recession and asking what they should do to get out of it. They are looking for brand new ideas and earth shattering sales skills that will break the hold that the recession seems to have on their business.

For every one of these people the answer is the same, “Get More Referrals”. Every one of your existing customers knows someone else you could be doing business with. Find out the name of that “someone else” and you will double the number of people you get face to face with overnight. Don’t you think that would be cool? Can you think of anything easier?

In good times and bad Joe Girard sent hand written cards to his customer base every month. Not cards advertising his cars or the service he provides. Just a simple, personal message of friendship. Today we all have the means at our fingertips (literally) to do this with very little effort and yet how many of us follow in Joe Girard’s footsteps?

You have the solution to the recession in your hands right now. You know how to fix the problem all you have to do is just get out there and do it!

Read Joe's 13 rules to success. It is simple stuff but if we could do this all the time we would all be as successful as Joe Girard

Visit Joe Girard's Website: www.joegirard.com

Joe Girard - No 3 on the list of top 30 sales gurus in the world.

106 - Zig Ziglar on Beating the Recession

2009-08-28T21:20:00.001+02:00

Zig Ziglar - No 1 on the list of top 30 sales gurus in the world.

Attitude Makes the DifferenceHTML clipboard

The sales profession has a different attitude about life and business. In the non-sales community, when business drops, management generally calls a 'pity party.' (That's what Mrs. Mamie McCullough, the lady who started the I CAN course for schools, named them. She also says many pity parties are held on an individual basis.) To zero in on all the difficulties, management explains they are going to have to cut the lights and let a couple of the janitors, secretaries, and support personnel go. With a stiff upper lip they explain that despite the fact things are tough 'We're going to fight this and hope for the best.' The sales world handles recessions differently. When the media announces a recession, management gets everybody together and says, 'We know you've been hearing all about the recession, but we've figured out a foolproof way to beat it. All we've got to do is reduce our sales.'

Right? Wrong!

What management does is simple. They call a management conference to organize a sales meeting to end all sales meetings. The president, board chairman, and sales manager are primed and rarin' to go. They get the troops together, roll out the red carpet, and in a highly excited manner say, 'Folks, we know all of you have been hearing the completely unfounded rumor about a recession. Well, let me tell you what we think about recessions. We think they are definitely between your ears! Recessions are like a lot of other things. You can either join them or refuse to join. It is our current company policy not to join.

'Let me tell you what we are going to do. We're going to put on a contest like you have never seen before in your life! We're going to put prizes up like you can't believe. We're going to offer incentives to our customers and to you as salespeople which will make everybody so ecstatically happy and excited that they'll end up praying for any so-called recession to continue. We're going to embark on a promotion and advertising campaign that will absolutely blow your mind! We're going to get each one of you involved in a sales training and a motivational program which will increase your effectiveness and productivity dramatically. We're going to sell more and better than ever before.'

Richard - I love this approach. Oh Sure.... I can already hear some of you saying that Zig is naive. "You can't just ignore the recession, it is here and we have to cope with it."

If this is your point of view consider this for a second. The problem is not the lack of business in your industry (whatever industry you are in), the problem is your share of the business that is available. You can do the same things in the same way as you have always done if you want. The result of this activity (or lack of activity) is that your percentage of the market will, at best, stay the same. As the market goes down so will your business.

The alternative, if you truly want different results, is to start to do things differently. More activity, more enthusiasm, more promotions, more rewards, more motivation, more creativity and much, much more positivity. There is business out there you just need to have a bigger share of the declining market and that will take some interesting activity on your behalf.

So what are you going to do? Sit back and complain about the recession or get up and take some action?

Zig Ziglar took a fall down some stairs a couple of years ago and now at the tender age of 80 doesn't get out as much as he used to. He is still writing books and articles and for my money he has earned the title as the world's No1 Sales Guru.

Visit Zig Ziglar's Website: http://www.ziglar.com

Zig Ziglar - No 1 on the list of top 30 sales gurus in the world.

105 Bob Urichuck - Beating the Recession

2009-08-19T21:14:00.001+02:00

How the Top Sales Guru's are Beating the Recession

Bob Urichuck - No 7 on the list of top 30 sales gurus in the world.

www.bobu.com

Dear Richard

Thanks for the invite to share a few pointers with your readers.

My main message to many recently has been to double up. Whatever you did in the past, do twice as much with better targeting – A and B profile clients where you can get the best R.O.T.I. (Return on time invested).

Richard – I don’t think Bob is talking about having twice as many hours in the day, but rather doing twice as much of the good stuff that brings in the good business.

The acronym ROTI (return on time invested) is a very important one here. Have a look at your existing customers and dived the amount of their monthly income by the time it takes each month to service the client, then look at the results.

A good customer measured by their turnover may be taking up a large amount of your time. They may look good on paper but when you analyze their ROTI they may be costing you money. Sometimes we have to bite the bullet and drop customers that take too much time to service and use that time to get customers with a better ROTI.

Create a personal marketing plan where you are positioned as an expert in your target market and do things to attract people towards you – they chase you, not the norm of you chasing them – a pull vs push strategy. This means knowing who your targeted prospects are and how to be able to reach them – through speaking at the associations they belong to, getting involved in a active way in that Association, writing articles in the magazines they read, being in the media as best you can – press releases, charitable drives, etc.; gathering and using testimonials.

Richard – We didn’t need to do this when business was flowing in over the last seven years so many of us just got lazy. Start now to make a name for yourself in your industry

Having a referral reward program in place, along with other educational, socially responsible and value added activities.

Richard – Getting referrals is important but how often do we remember to say thank you? We need to have a system in place that reminds us to send a little something to say ‘thank you’ when a customer gives us a referral.

Finally look for ways to partner with your best customers and suppliers to increase awareness and create a win-win for all.

Richard – In the marketplace there are people who are thriving and people who are struggling. In my experience the people who are thriving are the people who set up partnerships with their customers some time ago. It is not too late to do this. Identify your top customers and meet with them. Discuss the possibility of exclusivity in exchange for longer contracts or better terms. Find out more about their business and see if there are other things that you can do to help them. Can you make their life easier? Solve some of their problems? If you can you are ensuring your own survival. (One word of warning, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Linking yourself very closely with just one customer may have the opposite effect if they begin to struggle)

Bob Urichuck - No 7 on the list of top 30 sales gurus in the world.

Bob Urichuck is a globally sought speaker on sales, motivation, leadership and team skills. He has spoken in over 100 cities, in over 25 countries and to over 1,000 organizations worldwide. Bob is available on www.bobu.com

104 Frank Furness on Growing in the Recession

2009-08-12T18:38:00.002+02:00

Frank Furness

Frank Furness is No 13 on the top 30 list of World Sales Gurus and can be found at www.frankfurness.com

When speaking to clients about the current economic climate and how to deal with it, I have 5 strategies that I speak about:

1 – Looking after your key clients better than your competitors. Who are your top 10 clients and what are 10 things you know about them. What are you doing that is different and better than your competitors and why should your key clients stick with you when they can get similar service, pricing and products elsewhere.

Richard – We all know that 80% of our business comes from 20 % of our customer base so looking after the top ten clients makes a great deal of sense. When times are difficult we sometimes often rush off in different directions looking for new business without making sure that our existing business is secure.

2 – Constantly be prospecting for new business and clients. Presently there are a lot of companies unhappy with their suppliers, so how do you build your brand online and offline to let organisations know who you are and how you can help them. I also show them different strategies for finding new business and clients.

Richard- The last 7 years has been a sellers market and sales people the world over have become “order takers”. We now have to re-train our sales people to sell all over again and in Frank’s excellent book “Sales Prospecting for new business and clients” he describes 17 ways to get new business (http://www.prospectingforsales.com/)

3 – Everybody is a salesperson – I am advising my clients to let all their staff know that they are all relationship managers.

Richard - This is so important. When business is easy we get lazy. We forget that it is not just the sales teams job to bring in the business. The Accounts Department, Transport, Reception, Technical and even the tea lady. We all get face to face with customers on a regular basis and therefore must be trained to provide great service. When business is tight the last thing we can afford to do is to lose customers because of bad service delivery.

4 – Get up to date with technology – there are so many free tools and methods to use social networking to build your brand and drive business

Richard - Technology is Frank’s passion and a brief search on the internet will let you know how well equipped he is to talk on the subject. Many of us are missing out on potential business opportunities because we don’t understand the power of the Internet. This is a subject I will return to over the coming months but in the mean time social networking is something you should be working with now. This will have as much impact on the sales department as e-mail did 15 years ago. I signed up for Twitter just a few months ago but I am already getting new business from there. (Sign up and then follow me on: www.twitter.com/richardmulvey )

5 – Get rid of dead wood. There is a glut of talent out there at the moment looking for employment; there is no better time to replace underperforming staff.

Richard – I was speaking to a friend over the weekend and he tells me that 52% of estate agents have left the business over the last year. Has anybody noticed? In a business where people have to be successful or starve, the underperformers move very quickly. In your business you may be supporting underperformers, but now is the time to get rid of them.

Frank Furness is No 13 on the top 30 list of World Sales Gurus and can be found at www.frankfurness.com

103 Do Something Extraordinary

2009-08-07T10:53:00.002+02:00

My work as a motivational sales speaker and trainer is an interesting one. Much of my day is spent with groups of people encouraging then to be different. They want different results otherwise they wouldn’t have called me in the first place, however, in most cases they want to keep doing the same things in the same way and, by some magic, end up with better figures at the end of the month. My job is to politely (but firmly) explain that this is not going to happen.

If you want different results you have to do things differently. If you are going to carry on doing the same things in the same way you will get the same results. The only way to get different results is to change what you do and how you do it. Most people find this the hardest part of skills development.

Just getting different results is okay, but not extraordinary. Each of us has the ability to be extraordinary but few of us tap into that ability. As I write this I am reminded of the very topical Susan Boyle.

Eight weeks ago Susan Boyle was a very ordinary person living in a small village in Scotland going about her ordinary life in an ordinary way. At 47 years old and single, she lives in a small cottage with her cat. That was just eight weeks ago but now she is the talk of the world. She has travelled to America, interviewed by Oprah had many television appearances and won the hearts of millions of viewers all over the world. How has she done this?

Susan Boyle decided to have a go at being extraordinary. She applied to sing in a talent show in the UK and was given the opportunity. The rest is, as they say, history. (If you haven’t heard of Susan Boyle have a look at You Tube).

Susan Boyle has an extraordinary talent but she didn’t allow that talent to excel until her late forties. We all have extraordinary abilities hidden within our selves. What is yours? I know you know what it is. You know, but you keep it hidden. It is easier not to let it out. It is easier to be ordinary then you don’t risk making a fool of yourself.

Invest the next 20 minutes in yourself. Consider what extraordinary talents you may have that you have kept under wraps for all these years. You know what your extraordinary talent is and it would be a waste to spend the rest of your life hiding it.

If you want to continue the rest of your life getting the same results that’s okay. If you want to get different results, however, now is a good time to allow yourself to be extraordinary.

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains this final paragraph

102 Creating your own website in 15 minutes

2008-09-08T12:05:00.002+02:00

The internet is a great source of new business and we haven’t yet started to scratch its surface.

I know what you are thinking here. You are thinking that the internet marketplace is for the bright young nerds who are making a fortune on e-bay, but this is just not true. Even if you think that “Java” is coffee and “Flash” is what men do in raincoats in the park. You can still make use of the internet to sell your products or services very easily.

The first thing you need is a website. Wait a minute! Don’t switch off just yet. A website does not have to be a 100 page monster that costs half the national debt to create. You can create a website in 10 minutes for free! (yes YOU!)

It is very easy to do and as long as you know how to switch on the computer and connect to the internet you too can be the proud owner of a website selling your products or services. In fact, it is so easy that I recommend that you consider doing it for each of your products.

The easiest way to create a website is to create a “Blog”. Blogs were originally designed as an internet diary, and bloggers (everyone has a name on the internet) compete with each other to have the most interesting (and therefore the most sought after) blog.

Blog software is, however, the easiest to use and you can easily create a blog for yourself for FREE, in just 10 minutes. Let me explain how it is done:

Switch on your computer and make sure it is connected to the internet
Open your internet software (usually Internet Explorer) and type in the following address: https://www.blogger.com/start.
I will be creating the website in Blogger which is Google’s free blog generator. There are others out there to choose from I just use Blogger because it seems to be the easiest, and they don’t insist on you using their advertising.
If you like you can cruise around the site learning more about how it all works but for now we are going to create the site.
Click on “Create your Blog Now”
If you haven’t got a Google account you will have to do this now. Follow the instructions, it costs nothing and all you have to have is an e-mail address.
Keep following the instructions and you will get to the Blogger Dashboard. You are now ready to create your blog.
Click on “Create your Blog Now”
Type in the name of your Blog. Anything will do here… “Fred’s Spanners”
Now type in the URL name. This will be http://www.(yoursitename).blogspot.com. Again you can type in anything you like to describe the content of your site.
You are now directed to the template page. You can choose what you want your blog to look like. It doesn’t matter what you choose because you can change it later. Click on one of the templates, then press “Continue”
Click “Start Blogging” and you will be directed to a page that you have to complete with your first article or information.
Fill in the title at the top and then some description of your product or service.
Click on “Post Article” and you are away.
You can click on a button to view your blog, but I recommend you click on the “Layout” tab, and add a few interesting additions.
Click on “Add a Gadget” on the right hand column and you can add pictures, videos, slide shows, text, pretty much anything.
Keep referring back to your Blog to see how you are going.
Don’t forget to put your telephone number or contact details so that people can contact you to buy…..

How simple is that? It has probably taken longer to read this that it does to start your own website. Now we have to drive people to your website, and we will look at that in the next issue

101 How to become a Professional Speaker.

2008-07-22T10:01:00.000+02:00

As the president of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa (formerly the NSASA) I am often asked how I became a speaker. People think I have a wonderful job. I get to travel all over the country and all over the world, stay in the best hotels, have plenty of free time and get paid to tell people what I think.

Actually I do have a wonderful job but it is not always that glamorous.

If you would like to become a speaker you can, but don’t expect it to be the easiest ride of your life. Of the hundreds of people who decide to take up a career in speaking every year, very few have the stamina to make it. Many of them have had a career in Human Resources or Sales and are used to speaking in front of an audience. They see the speaker at their annual conference speak for an hour and get paid well, so they decide this is the life for them. Most of these people fail in the speaking industry. They work for a couple of years trying to make a go of it but move into another more reliable career when their golden handshake runs out. In the PSASA we help people avoid the pitfalls and develop a speaking business that works.

There are four things involved in becoming a professional speaker:

Develop a good message
Acquire exceptional speaking skills
Find paying audiences who want to listen to your message
Work out a good business model

Let’s have a look at these one at a time.

Develop a good message

People often go into the speaking business for the wrong reason. They have the skills to deliver a message, but they are not passionate about the message they deliver. The first stage to being an exceptional speaker is to have a good message. You may well have climbed a mountain or walked the Great Wall of China, but what is the message in the experience? What does your target market care about? In the PSASA we often talk about the “Niche” you should focus on. It is a mistake to try to be all things to all people, so where should you focus?

Acquire exceptional speaking skills

People are not born good speakers, they acquire the skills to speak and then practice. I will often encourage people to join the Toastmasters organisation to develop their speaking skills, but the best way to fine tune them is to practice. Once you have a message, get yourself in front of as many people who will listen and present your ideas. There are many organisations that are looking for speakers at their meetings. Organisations like Rotary, Round Table, and networking groups are crying out for interesting speakers. You will not get paid for this of course, but you are fine tuning your skills at their expense which is worth its weight in gold. If you have a book or video on the subject, take it with you to sell after the event. During my first year as a speaker this income was sometimes the only money I had to live on.

Find paying audiences who want to listen to your message

This is a tough one. You have a great message and the skills to deliver that message, now you need to find people who will listen and pay you for the privilege. The Speaker’s Agents and Bureaus will help here but don’t rely on them to be your only income. They are in business just like you are so don’t expect them to invest a lot of their time in you without getting a good return on that investment. They will help of course, especially if you have an interesting or unique message. Their customers are always looking for something a little different. Some speakers work entirely with bureaus but this is unusual. Most speakers also create their own audiences with Seminars, Training courses, or working directly with companies at their conferences.

Nobody is going to hand you audiences on a plate; you have to work hard for them. Many speakers fail at this point because they expect the audiences to beat a path to the door. It’s just not going to happen.

Work out a good business model

It is well known in the speaking industry that you have to create a business model that is sustainable. It isn’t just about speaking. Most speakers have written a book or two to give them credibility and have something to sell at the back of the room after the presentation. Others have become consultants, give webinars or teleseminars, become coaches or mentors, and have DVDs, CDs and MP3s to support their message. Each successful speaker develops their own business model and this is where the PSASA can be of great assistance. We cannot help you get audiences, but we can help you with advice on how to create a sustainable business model. Our monthly chapter meetings have speakers from all over the world who are delighted to share their experiences and offer advice.

So if you want to become one of South Africa’s great world speakers, have a interesting message, develop the skills to deliver that message, start to work on getting as many people to listen to you as possible and create the right business model. That’s all you have to do! See you at the next PSASA meeting.

100 Selling in a Receding Economy

2008-07-10T09:33:00.001+02:00

In today’s competitive market there seem to be more suppliers and less customers than ever before. World costs are rising dramatically and here in South Africa we have additional challenges of an inconsistent electricity supply, impending political change, rising fuel costs and a sharp decline in the growth of the economy. The ecomomists will tell you that we are not actually in a recession, but it sure does feel like it. So how come some businesses excel? Why are there are more millionaires created in a declining market than in a growing one?

What makes the winners so successful?

How do we become wealthy in a receding economy?

Attitude is important here. The people who thrive in a receding economy are those people who see themselves as successful despite all the evidence to the contrary, see a positive future where others are battening down the hatches or worse still, leaving the country.

Even if you do decide to go, where do you go to? This is a world recession; America’s housing market is struggling as is that of the UK and Japan. The American dollar is in decline which may sound like good news for tourists but with a weakened economy the USA will be purchasing less and this has a considerable effect on the exports from countries like China, Canada, Mexico and even South Africa, who exported over US$7,5 billion worth of merchandise to the USA last year.

Very few countries are immune so the only real answer is to make this country work. But how?

Attitude is important but it is not the only thing that matters.

We all know people who are positive at every opportunity, but fail to get the desired results. This sort of idiocy will not work. Positive thinking has to be converted to positive action if we are really going to make this work. “Action is the mother of opportunity”. We will explore this principle later in this series but it is clear that sitting quietly in a darkened room being positive is not going to generate the required results.

So what action do we need to take?

Interestingly any action is better than no action at all, but what action to take? Too often we fall back on lots of ¨M.O.T.S¨

M.O.T.S.?... More Of The Same.....

This will just not work. Oh sure, when things are going well M.O.T.S. works. When the economy is growing you can continue to do what you did last year and get good results. When the economy is receding however, this approach is doomed to failure.

Many businesses are now doing business as normal and wondering why their results are declining. To these businesses I say “Watch Out!” These businesses will be the first to go to the wall.

Over the next few months we will be exploring what you can do in a receeding economy to grow your business but for now I would like you to consider how flexibility can help.

When the economy is receeding there will be many industries that decline, but some will flourish. The housing market typically will be in decline, but people have got to live somewhere, so the rental market is increasing.

In my own market as a conference speaker, conferences are in decline. Many companies are reconsidering their budget for the year and cutting back on what they consider to be non-essential expenditure. Interestingly there has been a dramatic increase in the requests for focused sales training. This is a good thing of course. Businesses are struggling so it is a good time to get the sales team to improve their performance and deliver better results.

Consider your own market and work out what areas will be in decline and what will grow. Then be flexible to focus on the areas of growth.

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains this final paragraph

When in Rome

2008-06-03T22:03:00.005+02:00

In Cameroon I had the rare honour to be introduced to the Fon of Bafut (A Fon is the "King" of the area and Bafut is the largest of the three provinces in Cameroon). Prior to the meeting I was given explicit instructions not to shake his hand and what to do with my own hands instead. Our friend who had arranged the meeting, was his son.

I was told that the proper use of the hands when speaking to the Fon is in front of your mouth with your eyes cast down to the floor, and when the Fon is speaking the hands should keep up a quiet clapping motion in front of the body. It was felt, however that I may get this wrong which would be a terrible insult, so when (if) the Fon addresses me I should keep my hands behind my back at all times, which I did. I also looked at him when he talked which was, apparently, not on, so my conversation with the Fon was quite short.

The psychology behind the position of the hands is, I guess, that the Fon is too important to care about your attitude when you are talking to him so you should lower your eyes and hold both hands over your mouth. This would effectively hide your body language and therefore a large part of the communication of your feelings. By clapping when the Fon is talking however you are indicating your approval of what he is saying. He is all powerful in the area anyway so I guess it doesn't matter what you feel, you have to approve.

This story serves to underline an important issue. When doing business with people of other cultures, it is not only important to learn some of their verbal language but also their body language. By not fully understanding the importance of averting my eyes, my conversation with the Fon was cut short. Under the circumstances this was not a problem but if I had been visiting the Fon to get his approval over some business matter, my mistake could have been catastrophic.

The lesson here is easy one. I was told what to do, and I simply did not realise the importance of this type of body language.In business we learn by training or experience how to use verbal and written language to communicate. Nobody would doubt the importance of these media in business communications, and without a good command of the appropriate language, business at anything but a basic level would be impossible.

To be really effective in business, however, it is essential that we learn the art of understanding body language, so that we can communicate well using our own gestures and understand others by reading theirs.

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains this final paragraph

98 Proposals and how to write them

2008-05-02T12:51:00.002+02:00

Okay... we are having a bad year, at least some of us are. The recession is hitting us and many areas of the economy are tightening their belts. In order to succeed we have to work harder to produce the same results, but to improve our results we will have to work smarter.

It is no longer good enough to let the customer know how much your products or services are and expect them to beat a path to your door. This is just not going to work. We need to be selling all the way and this includes how you get your price to your customer.

One of the many gripes I have with traditional selling is the way we send out “Quotations”.

A Typical quote will look something like this:

Quotations

Specifications: Details of the product offered, such as size, shape, design, etc.
Price: The current price offered. This section may also include some additional savings for bulk purchase.
Delivery: The lead time or delivery details.
Terms and conditions: This is the small print and will contain a large variety of disclaimers and legal conditions protecting the vendor.
Limitations: Finally, the quotation is finished with the limitations, for example that it holds good for only 30 days.

Does any this sound familiar? I am not suggesting that it is wrong; it is just less likely to get the desired effect. I accept that many of the items above have to be in the quote but I recommend a different approach, a proposal.

Proposals

Proposals tend to be more in line with the customer whereas quotes seem to focus on the product and the price.

A typical proposal should include the following:

The customer’s objectives: The first thing the customer should read in your proposal is an outline of their own requirements. The customer wants to know that you fully understand their problem or need before you tell them how you are going to meet or solve it.

Your recommendations: First come the customer’s problems or needs, next you offer your solutions (benefits).

Summary of additional benefits: Once you have told your customer how your product or service solves their problem you may want to include additional benefits of your product. Be careful, these must be benefits and not features. Make sure items mentioned here really are going to benefit the customer and are not just “nice to haves” of no value to them.

Financial implications: Once the customer can see that your product or service will really work for them, tell them how much it will cost. Be careful to include the cost as well as the financial benefit to their business. For instance, show the return on their investment, or the profit to be made from selling your product or compare the savings they will make using your service against those made with the present one. Always look at price in terms of improved efficiency, increased production, improved safety, reduced costs, etc.

Your additional information: Finally, you can attach additional information for your customer at the end. This will include the dimensions or specifications of your product or service, any legal obligations, etc.

You will see that proposals are much more effective than quotations because they focus on the customer and their problems rather than on your product or company.

Of course some of you will be thinking that we have to send the customer the standard quotation form because it contains our standard terms and conditions, “the legal stuff”. Okay… I can understand that, however there is nothing stopping you putting a one page proposal in front of the quotation. This is more work of course, but it is much more likely to bring in the business.

One last word on proposals. “If you want to win…take it in!” I was sitting with the members of a small company last week who were complaining that they were not getting enough people to say yes. They would e-mail 2 or 3 large proposals each week but not getting the answers they wanted

After some discussion I realised that although these proposals were often for business worth more than R300,000 they would rarely take in the proposal and present it to the decision maker. Frankly they were losing business because of this approach. “If you want to win…take it in!”.

To read more articles in the Richard’s Review series have a look at the blog www.richards-review.blogspot.com.

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains these final two paragraphs

My Daughter's Report

2008-04-11T23:22:00.001+02:00

My daughter came home last week with her school report. I have 5 children and for as many years as I can easily remember we have had school reports to deal with.

I am not a great believer in the necessity for academic achievement. Now that most of my children are away from home and having families of their own I can admit to this. In the past I felt compelled to do the normal fatherly thing and praise the child for an ‘A’ or a ‘B’, discuss the ‘C’ and ‘D’ and complain about the occasional ‘E’ and ‘F’, but in my heart I have always known that my children will do well in life despite their school reports rather than because of them.

Okay… I know what you are thinking, but this is not the day to discuss that.

Anyway… My Daughter comes home with her report and unusually it is the best she has ever brought home. Six Bs and one D. This is fantastic, and I told her so in my “father knows best” voice. Then my wife and I do what ever other parent would do, started to focus on the ‘D’ and see if we can help the child to improve.

We do that all the time. Instead of focusing on the best subjects, the ones she really enjoys, trying to help her excel in these areas, we focus on her worst subject and help her become average in that.

At about the same time I watched a presentation in Durban by Marcus Buckingham. Marcus is a world class speaker and the author of “First, Break all the rules” and “Now, discover your strengths” and he says that we have got it all wrong. Focus your attention on developing your strengths rather than improving your weaknesses.

If you have a corporate job I guess you have a review each year with your boss. I occasionally get asked to comment on these documents and they all seem the same. You start out by rating yourself, your boss does the same and then you compare notes. The final stage is to make a list of “Areas for improvement”. So instead of looking at what you are really good at and encouraging you to become a super star, you are asked to focus on what you are bad at so that you can improve those areas to average.

Does this make sense? Of course not!

Imagine a world class cricket team. Each team member has to bat, but some of the team, especially the best bowlers, do not bat well. If we were to extend this train of thought the cricket coach should instruct the batters who perform badly to spend all their time in the nets improving their batting skills. Of course this is not the best way to produce a winning team. The Bowlers spend most of their time concentrating on improving their bowling, becoming superstars and just a little time in the nets with a bat in their hand

We must do the same with our teams at work. When it comes time for the review with your team, encourage the stars to become superstars. Let them focus on the things they are good at so they can become great. Support them in the things that they are not so go at and they will drive your success forward.

We can’t all be good at everything all of the time. I think I would much rather be a star at one thing than average at everything.

And what about my daughter’s report? Well that very quickly got filed with the others as Michaela rushed off for yet another hockey practice. She has her heart set on playing for SA schools this year, and you know what? She may just make it!

96 The Power of Differentiation

2008-03-12T09:47:00.000+02:00

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the risks we face in business with a weakening economy.

Some of the replies I got back said that was okay, but what can we do to make sure that we are still in business at the end of the year? How do we compete in a shrinking market?

The first rule here is differentiation. We have to make sure we can differentiate ourselves from our competitors so that the customers can see us as different. In a growing market when there is enough business to go round there is less pressure to differentiate. In a shrinking market we must be seen to be different or die.

If the customer can see no difference between you and your competitors they will choose the cheapest price.

Let’s imagine I have two identical products (or services) in front of me. They come off the same production line in Taiwan so they are identical, in fact the only difference between the two products is that one is priced at R300 and the other is priced at R400. Which one would you buy?

Of course you would buy the cheaper product, and probably be very pleased with your self for doing so. The customer will always buy the cheaper product if they can see no difference between one brand and another.

In this environment where all products are identical there is a temptation to enter into a price war. As manufacturers, we see our customers always buying the cheapest so we begin to believe the customer only cares about price. How often have you heard that in your sales meetings?

Now, let us imagine that the product priced at R400 also comes with a lifetime guarantee, delivery over the next 24 hours, parts readily available and a very attractive sales person to sell it to you. Which one would you buy now?

The R400 one of course… but why? Because it is better value. You have differentiated yourself from your competitors with added items that the customer values and, therefore, made your product more attractive.

Don’t be tempted into a price war with your competitors in this shrinking market. Rather talk to as many customers as possible to see what they consider would add value to your product or service.

There are many items that this might be:

Improved delivery, smarter delivery vehicles, attractive sales people (and by that I mean sales people with attractive personalities), longer guarantee, uncondititional guarantee, bigger range of colours, better response to customer complaints, more flexible working hours, bigger range of products, shorter service contract, longer service contracts, additional benefits, stronger materials, longer lasting, self-lubricating, 24 hour delivery, open all hours, the list is endless.

What are you going to do to differentiate yourself from your competitors this year?

95 A rising tide sinks all ships.

2008-02-25T10:05:00.000+02:00

I have a friend who insists on looking negatively at everything he sees.

“It’s going to be a tough year”, he said to me last night. “Many small businesses will be out of business by the end of the year and some of the larger businesses will have to batten down the hatches if they are to stay afloat.” And you know what… he’s right about one thing. We are in for a tough year. I guess you are agreeing with me already. We have seen it on the TV; we read it in the Newspapers. We hear it from almost everybody we talk to. It is going to be a tough year…. and I am delighted.

History tells us that we will have years like this every so often. Some people will tell you that they come on a cycle every 4, or 7 or 11 years. These are the same people who tell you that there is a big wave every 7 and I am not sure I believe that either, I just know that every so often we get a challenging year and 2008 is going to be one here in South Africa.

I have no intention in listing the challenges you and I will be facing this year, you know them off by heart. You have read them in the paper and your next door neighbour delights on supporting these articles with statistics to prove that he was right all the time to worrey. You will see them in your e-mail from people who delight is sending bad news with headings like “I told you things were bad”, or “Finally someone tells the truth”.

But I am delighted this year is going to be a tough one. We need it. We have had it easy for the last few years and complacency is beginning to set in. Business has been easier to get in the past few years and many of us thought (hoped) that this would go on for ever. Well I have news for you. Nothing lasts forever.

My industry (training and communication) is a good example. There is a restively low entry barrier in this industry and the rewards are good, if you know what you are doing. This low entry barrier has, over the last five years or so, encouraged thousands of people to take their retrenchment package and become a business speaker or trainer. Most don’t make it. It seems like an easy business, however you need to know what you are doing, and be prepared for three or more lean years while you are learning the trade and creating a name for yourself.

This year is going to be a tough year and those people who entered this industry as a soft option to earn a good salary in the last 10 years of their working life will just fall by the wayside. I have some friends in the National Speakers Association who will be amongst the casualties. I will be sorry to see them go but go they must.

This is true of many industries. The marginal businesses, “also rans” and “hangers on” will be swept away with the high tide leaving the way open in the next few years for the rest of us to prosper.

The title of this article is “A rising tide sinks all ships” but this is only true if the ships are securely anchored to the sea bed on a fixed cable.

The businesses that are going to prosper this year and benefit from the lack of competition over the next few years will be the ones that understand that you cannot just stand still and wait for the business to come to you.

If you do the same things this year as you did last year you are destined for disaster. The businesses that succeed will be the ones that take action and change their approach to meet the challenges of the year ahead.

Action is the mother of opportunity.

It is going to be a tough business year this year but if you can be successful this year you will be amongst the few, and you (and I) are in for a bumper few years ahead.

93 The Number’s Game

2008-01-21T09:04:00.000+02:00

A few weeks ago I had an e-mail from a very distraught salesperson. She was upset because her company had set her an impossible target to reach and while she liked her job she didn’t feel she could carry on working for them if they set targets she can not reach.

Have you ever felt like that? I remember many years ago being sent targets from head office by people who plainly did not know what is happening on the ground. It seemed as though they had completed their budgets and needed another 30% over inflation to balance, so guess what? The sales department gets the burden.

Okay, now I understand. Now that I have worked both sides of the fence I can see that the pen pushers in Head office weren’t just sucking the figures out of their thumbs. There is usually some science in the work they do (not always, but usually) but the poor sales person hasn’t been given insight into the calculations, they are just told to get on with it, and if they wont, there are plenty of sales people in the wings who are waiting to take over.

The real problem with impossible targets is the way we react when we get them. You have the e-mail with your targets on and you are looking at it for the first time…. “What!” you exclaim “This is impossible. This target is unrealistic. They should get off their a***s in head office and come down here and try and do my job if they think they can do better. There is no way I can achieve this target.”

The problem is that as soon as you say “There is no way I can achieve this target.” Guess what? There is no way you are going to achieve that target. It’s what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy. The moment you say you can not achieve the target you set up a belief system that sticks and you will never achieve that target. You get to the end of the year with only 70% of your target and you say “I told you so”.

The solution

When your boss sets you an unrealistic target, DOUBLE IT!. That’s right Double that unrealistic target in your mind (Don’t tell the boss you are doing this). Then send yourself forward 12 months and see yourself at the end of the year having achieved double that tough target and ask yourself “How did I do it?” (Just ignore your belief system at the moment because it is making fun of you for playing such a silly game)

If it helps, imagine yourself at the annual convention receiving the award (two weeks in Mauritius) for the best sales person of the year. Then look back down the time line and ask yourself “What did I do to achieve double that tough target?” Of course you couldn’t work any harder, you are already working hard so what else did you do?

Maybe you worked smarter rather than harder. Perhaps you concentrated on the larger contracts, rather than spending your time on the little ones. Maybe you played the “Numbers Game” Let me explain.

Imagine you make phone calls to make appointments and then you visit the prospects to close the sale.

Let’s say that you make 30 phone calls in a week and you have a 30% success rate on making appointments. Let’s also imagine that you then visit those 10 people and you have a 25% closing ratio so you close 2.5 customers a week.

30 phone calls x 30% strike rate = 10 Appointments

10 Appointments x 25% strike rate = 2.5 closed customers a week

Now let us imagine that you make a few very small changes. Let’s say that you make 40 phone calls a week instead of 30. That shouldn’t be too difficult should it? Then let’s imagine that you increase your strike rates by just 5% each. Just a few better selling skills should do that easily. See how the figures respond:

40 phone calls x 35% strike rate = 14 Appointments

14 Appointments x 30% strike rate = 4.2 closed customers a week

You have nearly doubled your closed sales by very minor improvements in your performance. Selling is a numbers game, and while the purists will quite rightly talk about qualified leads and focusing on a few, rather than a shot gun approach, we all have to work with the numbers if we are going to succeed.

The next time you get an impossible target consider this. The really great sales people never say it’s impossible, rather they ask “How can I make that possible?”

This article is written and published by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com, or www.salescoachingworx.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains this final paragraph

92 What do you do when the customer doesn’t turn up?

2008-01-15T09:02:00.000+02:00

Last week one of the members of my distance learning website, www.salescoachingworx.com asked a question about a customer who wasn’t there for a prearranged meeting.

This is a tough one and without knowing more background it is hard to give a definitive answer. In principle, if a person isn’t there having confirmed an appointment, he is rude and it is down to him to apologise and make sure you are happy. In the real world however, this is not likely to happen. Sales people will tell you it happens all the time.

Presuming there wasn’t an accident or some other unavoidable delay, when a customer is not there for a meeting that was previously arranged, he is saying that we are not important to him. We can say this is his fault but it may be more beneficial to accept that maybe it is our fault. Perhaps we didn’t get across the importance of the meeting, our product or the benefits he will be getting once he has purchased.

Maybe we didn’t uncover his problems and give him confidence that we are the right people to solve them for him.

This is not to say that the customer has a right to be rude. Sometimes customers ignore you to make you feel small. They figure that if they are important and you are not, they will get a better deal. If a customer keeps me waiting for a meeting that I was on time for, I will always thank him for giving me more time to prepare. This will take away any advantage he may have gained by keeping me waiting

Sometimes a customer will ignore you when come into their office for a meeting. They keep their head down with some apparently important paperwork and make you wait. In this case again, this is just a trick. It is natural for people to look up when you walk in and takes some effort just to stay looking at the apparently important document they are engrossed in.

When this has happened to me in the past I haven’t waited politely, I wander around their office picking up things to look at or straightening their pictures. This will usually get their attention.

In the case of your customer that wasn’t there, I would just make contact again, tell him that you were pleased to have the extra time in your busy day and set another appointment. Telling him how rude he was may make you feel better but is not likely to get you another customer. I would also recommend that you make sure the customer is looking forward to the meeting by letting him know how he will benefit by it.

91 Where’s the chocolate made?

2007-07-12T09:05:00.000+02:00

Last week my wife and I were in Cape Town for the weekend. This was just a fun trip and on the Saturday we were driving around the mother city in the rain getting quite lost and then we drove past a lovely little shop in a residential area called “The Chocolate House”. So, of course, we stopped.

The shop was delightful but empty.

A very nice lady came out to help us with our chocolate purchases and while we were choosing my wife asked “Where’s the Chocolate made?”

There was a brief silence, and then the lady replied “Oh…. The chocolate maid is away today she will be back on Monday.” We, of course, roared with laughter. I had my daughter and son-in-law with me and this conversation was a source of amusement for the rest of the weekend.

Flying back on Sunday I had a chance to consider this incident and I was reminded about rule number one of Communication. “The responsibility for the success of any communication rests with the communicator.”

Any language can be easily misunderstood. We think we are saying one thing but the person who is receiving the communication is hearing another. They then respond to that misunderstanding and we blame them for getting it wrong.

I recently placed an advertisement on the wall of my local shopping centre. We have a lady who helps around the house and she was looking for additional work and I offered to help. The main body of the advertisement looked like this:

Daily household help available

Good with kids

Trustworthy

Hard Working

Can Cook

Available now

For more details.... etc.

Not my best bit of copy writing, but it worked.

In two days, I received 15 phone calls. 14 of the calls, however, came from people who were looking for domestic work, and only one from an employer. When I told Sheila (my wife) she said, “That’s stupid. Can’t they read?”

I was agreeing with her, of course, (well, she is my wife after all) and most of us would say, or at least think something similar. However, I was breaking the first rule of communication. The responsibility of this communication lies with me, as the communicator. If the communication has failed, it was my fault and it was necessary for me to rephrase the communication, to get the desired result.

I was in a friend’s office a few weeks ago. One of his team came in with an e-mail that he didn’t understand. My friend was abrupt and said, “Can’t you read English?” (How many of us have said something similar?) As the communicator, my friend was responsible for constructing the e-mail in such a way that the target audience would read and understand it, without a problem. In this of course, he failed and he should have been angry with himself, not his team member.

This raises another issue. In this country we have 11 official languages. When we communicate we do so in the language we are most comfortable with but it may not be the first language of the person who is receiving the communication. No wonder we have problems!

When communication breaks down in the office and a strike is looming, how often will you hear this lament from all sides “The trouble is, they never listen!”

Still though, the responsibility lies with the communicator. If communication breaks down it is our fault. If you accept this principle your communication will improve dramatically.

And the chocolate maid? Well she enjoyed the joke as much as we did in the end and the chocolate was fantastic.

This article is written and posted by Richard Mulvey who can be contacted on www.richardmulvey.com, or www.salescoachingworx.com. You may re-publish this article in any media as long as it is not altered in any way and it contains this final paragraph

90 I Don’t Care!

2007-07-12T09:02:00.000+02:00

On the sales coaching website last week, someone asked a simple enough question about the difference between a feature and a benefit. I know that you know the answer to that question and in fact many of the people who visit the website could easily have written a good reply but I was reminded of an excellent way of demonstrating the difference that I heard from a speaker when I was in Birmingham last year.

The simple way to answer to the question is to define the three words that we, in sales, use more than any other; Features, Needs and Benefits.

A Feature is something that defines your product or service. If you are selling cars for instance, a feature may be that this car has a very efficient engine, you have a full range of metallic colours or you have a CD player in all of your cars. A feature my also be that you have been in business for 25 years and have won many awards for our service.

A Need is a customer requirement.

A benefit is a feature that satisfies a need.

Using the features mentioned above, consider the following example:

This car has a very efficient engine (feature) so that you don’t have to fill the tank very often (benefit).

This car has a full range of metallic colours (feature) so that your wife can have exactly the colour she wants (benefit)

We have been in business for 25 years and have won many awards for our service (feature), so you can be sure we are going to give you the best service available (benefit).

Notice the phrase “so that”. This helps to remind us to provide the benefit that the customer really wants.

Okay… that’s simple enough. But is that enough? To be really certain that we are, in fact, getting to the heart of the customer’s needs we often have to go further than that.

There is a game that I play in my training sessions that I learnt last year, and I truly wish I could remember the great speaker I learnt it from so that I can credit him for the idea. (If you know who it is please write to me). The game is called “I don’t care!” and the way it works is this.

Get your sales colleagues together in pairs. One is playing the customer and one the sales person. The sales person starts by giving the customer a feature of your product or service, then the customer says “I don’t care!”

The challenge here is for the sales person to continue refining what he or she is saying but each time the customer will say “I don’t care!” until the customer finds that, in fact, the salesperson says something that the customer does really care about.

Let’s give it a go.

Sales person “All our cars have a CD player installed”

Customer “I don’t care!”

Sales person “This means that you can listen to your favourite music in the car”

Customer “I don’t care!”

Sales person “This means that you will be more relaxed when you are driving”

Customer “I don’t care!”

Sales person “Being relaxed on long trips may just keep you away from that accident saving the life of you and your children”

Customer “Ah…. Well I care about that.”

See what I mean? Let’s try another

Sales person “Installing our pumps will reduce the need to shut down your equipment for maintenance”

Customer “I don’t care!”

Sales person “If you don’t have to shut down you will save R100,000 a year”

Customer “I don’t care!”

Sales person “If you save that much on your maintenance budget you will probably get promoted”

Customer “I don’t care!”

Sales person “If you get promoted you will earn more money and get a bigger car”

Customer “I care about that”

Give this a go with your sales team during your meeting today, and when it works let me know.

89 Test your sales attitude

2007-07-12T09:01:00.001+02:00

Developing the skills to sell is easy. There are many great sales trainers, books, training courses, DVDs and sales coaching websites that will give you the skills. The hard part about becoming a great salesperson is not getting the skills but developing the attitude to use the skills.

All the great sales people agree. Selling is 30 % skills and 70% attitude, but do you have the right attitude to sell? Try this little test:

Do you jump out of bed each morning looking forward to the day ahead?
Do you phone 20 new prospects every morning even though it is not your favorite pastime?
Do you enjoy doing the paperwork knowing that an analysis of your results will help you perform better next month?
Do you get motivated when 10 people say “no”, knowing that, by the law of averages, the next 5 will say yes (if you have a 33% strike rate)?
Do you keep in contact with your prospects once they have said “no” to continue to form closer relationships looking forward to your next opportunity to quote?
Do you keep your car clean at all times in case your next best customer pulls up beside you at the traffic lights?
Do you have your business cards in your pocket when you go to party?
Do you love the product or service you represent? (I mean truly, passionately love it.)
Do you look forward to Monday as being another day when you can help a prospect solve a problem?
Are you proud of the work you do when you talk to your friends?
Do you dress for your customers or do you just wear what you wore yesterday because it is not too creased this morning?
Do you blame other people or other things when you lose a customer?
Are you always trying to improve your strike rate?
Have you asked your boss to lower your salary and increase your commission lately?
Have you ever given a really good prospect to a colleague, knowing that they have a better chance of pulling that one in?
Do you practice a successful meeting outcome on the way to the meeting?
Do you get feel motivated when the boss gives you difficult targets to meet?
Do you get excited when the prospect raises an objection?
Do you always try the “close” at every meeting with the prospect?
Do you feel a thrill when your customer tells you that you are not the cheapest?
Do you love to be a salesperson?

If you have answered “No” top any of these questions then your attitude may be holding you back a little. If you have answered “no” to more than half of these questions then you could easily double your closing rate by working on your attitude.

The challenge here is not to become a victim. When reading the above list did you find yourself saying something like; “My attitude would be better if my Boss was better” or “My attitude would change in a shot if only I was paid a better wage.”

It is too easy to blame something or someone else for what is going on inside your own head. You are in control up there. If your attitude is not right; FIFO (Fix It or …… Find

88 Why would I spend R100.00 on something when I could buy it for R5.00

2007-07-12T08:59:00.000+02:00

I had a question from a Richard’s Review reader that made me think a little. The question was about restaurant prices, and how dare they charge that much for a piece of chicken.

Of course, expensive restaurants have been around for as long as there have been places to eat out, and they are often successful. I remember when I was 18; my Mum asked me what special treat I would like to have on my birthday. I didn’t have to think long. “Lunch at the Café Royal” I said. This was a very smart restaurant in London, and at the age of 18 seemed to me to be the most expensive. Why would an 18 year old want a fancy meal rather than a party? What is it about such places that make us want to eat there?

Why would I go to a restaurant to buy a portion of chicken at R100 rand when I could buy the same piece of chicken for R27.50 at Nandos, R7.50 in a shop or even go to the farm and get the whole chicken for R5.00?

The answer is not in the chicken, nor even in satisfying my needs. I am hungry so I need food. To satisfy that need I could easily eat a bowl of chicken soup and a slice of bread. I would no longer be hungry so that need has been satisfied.

The answer is in understanding not so much my needs but my desires, (my emotional needs). I eat the chicken at R100 in a fancy restaurant because I like to be seen in a fancy restaurant. I like my guest to know that I can afford eat there, and, with a bit of luck, the owner of the restaurant knows my name. I like the music and the atmosphere, and my car is parked safely. Of course, my needs are satisfied, I am no longer hungry, but I feel really good about having been to that restaurant over and above need satisfaction.

All products and services are like that. We buy a product because is satisfies a desire (an emotional need), and then we justify that purchase to our selves and others by talking about how it will satisfy our logical needs.

Think about your own products or services. Why are the customers buying them? Certainly not because your products are cheaper than anybody else’s. The only reason why a customer will buy the cheapest is if they can see no real difference between your product and your competitors.

Spend some time now and consider the emotional reasons why people buy your products, then focus on these when you meet new customers.

I buy baby carrots in a little container because they are clean, there is little to prepare, and I believe the advertising that says they taste better, even though I know the best tasting carrots are the ones you pick yourself and cook straight away. I feel good about spending more money on baby carrots because I can spend more money on baby carrots.

Customers will be happy to tell you what they want (needs), but vary rarely tell you what they desire (emotional needs). In many cases they are embarrassed by what they desire or don't even know themselves. Satisfy desires and you will be selling a lot of "baby carrots".

I hope this gives you a little food for thought.

87 Men and Women are different

2007-07-12T08:50:00.000+02:00

Men and Women are different! They think differently, they talk differently, they act differently. They are different! That is not to say that one is better than the other. You cannot say that an orange is better than an apple. You may say that you prefer oranges to apples. You may even say that oranges are better on duck and apples on pork but one is not better than the other in the grand scale of things. It is the same with Men and Women.

What brought this on you may say.

I have just finished my latest book “The Power of Positive Selling” and it is with the publishers for the launch at the Cape Town Book Fair in June. I have really enjoyed writing this book, which is a lot bigger than my other books and, I think, better for that.

The book has been edited of course, and during that process changes have been made to the people in the book to make them more politically correct. When I have referred to “Mr. Customer” it has been changed to “Ms. Customer” (not Miss or Mrs. I notice). The basic Anglo-Saxon names that I often use (John, Fred, and Jane etc.) have been changed to more appropriate names for the African market and I go along with that entirely. The book is a far better book after editing than before and I am very grateful for that.

The question I have to ask though is this. Is it necessary to be totally balanced in a book like this? Do I really need to count up the number of times I have used “he” in examples and balance that with an equal number of “shes”? Or should I make it unreadable and use “he or she” all the time.

Do we really need to go so far down this road that we have to write “Female Secretary” rather than just put “Secretary” and know that people will presume that the secretary is female? (Lets face it 99% of secretaries are female). Would it be sexist to say that the children are more likely to drive Mum’s car than Dad’s?

I know this conversation is risky. I know that there are plenty of people out there who have strong opinions about all this.

I am not in any way trying to say that we should go back to the old days when men ran businesses. I am a great believer in having a balance of the sexes on the board of any company as they both have major things to offer. I certainly do not want to go back to the stage where women had to be more like men if they wanted to succeed. Those of you who know me know that I am not a great believer in the “bare foot in the kitchen” syndrome for either men or women and I am certainly more likely to be found in the kitchen in my household than my wife.

What worries me is that we are going too far with this need to be seen to be balanced.

Men and women are different. 99% of secretaries are women and 99% of car mechanics are men. Of course there are exceptions to this and I am sure we all know a female mechanic or a male secretary but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. The reason for this is that men and women are different. Men make better mechanics and women better secretaries. That’s just the way it is.

What’s the point to all this ranting? Well… I would like your opinion. How do you feel about the issues I have raised above? Are we going too far to balance the sexes and not far enough towards the understanding that we are different?

My point of view is this.

Men and Women are different! They think differently, they talk differently, they act differently. They are different! That is not to say that one is better than the other, just different. We have gone a long way towards balancing out equality and I know there is still a long way to go but let’s not fall into the trap of trying to force the issue by saying that Men and Women are the same. They are not!

What is your take on this issue?

86 Getting your book published

2007-03-13T11:11:00.000+02:00

After discussing how to write a book a couple of weeks ago I was amazed how many people have asked how to get their book published. Of course there is no simple answer to this question but there are a number of choices and in this article we will explore a few of them

Approaching a publisher

So…… You have finished the first draft of your manuscript and you think it is going to be a best seller. Your mind is already thinking ahead to the film rights but first you have to interest a publisher. It is important to remember that publishers see hundreds of such manuscripts each week and a very small percentage go on to hit the book shelves, so your manuscript needs to be different.

The first thing to do is decide who would be the best publisher to develop your book. There is no point in sending your manuscript on Gardening in South Africa to a publisher who specialises in thrillers. There is a great book on the market called “How to get published in South Africa” This will help you decide which publisher would be the best for your material. Failing that have a look at similar books that are already on the shelves and see who publishes them. Publishers tend to stick to the sort of books they understand.

Having chosen a publisher find out a little more about them. You need to have a name to write to rather than “Dear Sir”. Even though I don’t publish any authors other than myself I often get people writing to me offering their book. In many cases it is plain that they have sent the same letter to as many publishers as they can find in the yellow pages, in the hope they will find someone sympathetic. This will not work. Choose one publisher and focus on getting them to publish your book. When they reject it (the odds are very good that it will get rejected first time) try another publisher. You may think that your book has international appeal. There is a book published called “The writers handbook” that has international publishers and agents listed that may help you get your book on the international market.

The publisher will not need your whole book at this stage, just an outline and the first chapter. Remember you are selling the book to the publisher, you need him far more then he needs you. Do some research before you contact the publisher, find out which books of a similar nature are selling and which are not. Don’t sit back and tell the publisher that the book is unique and there is nothing like it on the book shelves. The publisher does not want to hear that at all. It may well be that there is nothing like it because it is not a popular subject and therefor will not sell.

Publishers are in business. They take the risk of publishing your book and they will want to be sure they will make a profit or they will go out of business.

If your publisher accepts your book (which is very unlikely, Harry Potter was turned down a few times) you will then be offered a percentage of the profit, but don’t go out and buy that boat just yet. The percentage will be a lot less than you think you are worth and will probably be paid a year in areas. There are a few very successful authors in South Africa but the vast majority should hang on to their day jobs for a while.

Self Publishing

One Area that I am very familiar with is self publishing. My first 15 books have been self published and only one is being published by another company (New Africa Books). The real benefit of self publishing is that you keep control and, if the book is successful, you will make much more money. The down side is that you are going into an industry you probably have had little experience in and you are likely to make many mistakes.

To self publish you will need to finish your manuscript and format it into something that looks like a book. If you are comfortable with Microsoft Word there are settings that will help you format your book, if not you may be able to get a printer to do that for you, at a price. Self publishing is just that. You need to be able to do most of this yourself otherwise it can become very expensive. Having written your book you will need to find a friendly editor. This should not be a family member who does not want upset you, but should be someone who has an excellent understanding of the language you have written in. Be open to the suggestions of your editor. Rewrite if necessary.

The next stage is to decide on the size of the book and get a few printers to quote. Choose a printer who specialises in book printing rather than the cheapest printer who will give it a go for you. I have heard a few horror stories of people who get their own book printed but it is a disaster. Don’t pay the printer in advance!

The next stage is to design your cover. This is best left to a professional designer unless you have a real talent for design. I have designed all my own covers but I got it wrong at the beginning and it cost me a lot of money.

Try and produce your book in one of the standard sizes. Speak to your printer about this. You will keep the costs down if the printer doesn’t have to do anything special. Also try to avoid colour pages unless you have to include them to make your point. Colour adds greatly to the cost of the finished product.

The question of the number of books to print is an interesting one. If you are sure you will have a ready market (1000’s of club members for instance) then you can go for a long print run of 4 or 5 thousand. Otherwise keep it down to 2,000, or even less if you are not sure. The cost per copy will be higher of course, but the total investment will be less. There are some printers who specialise in much shorter print runs (one hundred or less) and this may be an option if this is your first book. Get a good relationship with your printer and let him guide you.

Once you have your book delivered (2,000 copies in your front room) you will need to sell them to the bookshops. This has got to be the hardest job of all. You may be able to interest a book distributor to sell your books for you but they will also want a percentage of the retail price and if you have your sums wrong you may not make any money from your book at all.

If you have he time and are good at developing relationships you may try to sell the books to the shops yourself. I enjoyed doing this to start with but it is very time consuming.

Most bookshops, including the Exclusive Books chain, buy their books locally. This means that the managers decide which books are put on the shelf. CNA have a central purchasing policy, and they are quite difficult to sell to. The bookshops will want anything between 35% and 50% discount on the retail price of your book, and in most cases expect to be able to send the books back for a full refund if they don’t sell.

Once you have your book pack a few in a case and visit your local bookshops. Chat to the managers and in most cases they will be helpful to a new author/publisher, as long as your book is professionally put together.

E-books

The growth of the Internet means that we can now publish our manuscripts and sell them as e-books, without demolishing any more trees. This is great, but it has the effect of eliminating the entry barriers. Anybody with a little intelligence and a computer can publish E-books so there are a lot about.

It is possible to launch the book on the Internet to see how it goes and then, if the response is good, turn it into the paper version. This is not the time to discuss Internet marketing so I will go no further into selling on the net. E-books are best produced in .pdf format. This is the Adobe Acrobat format that most people can read on their computers, however you do not need Acrobat to create them. There are a number of different software's that will create .pdf format documents at a 10^th of the price of Acrobat. Just type “pdf creator” in Google and see what you can turn up.

I am sure there are other ways to get your book to the market. Serialise it as a series of magazine articles for instance (All of Charles Dickens’ books started off this way), but the traditional ways seem to be the best bet.

I apologise that this Richard’s Review is longer than usual, there is a lot to say on the subject. Good luck with your publishing and don’t forget to check out Dan Poynter’s session in Durban on the 24^th March.

85 Writing a Book

2007-02-13T12:06:00.000+02:00

Last week I talked about taking the time to write that book you have always promissed to write. The article wasn’t about books it was about time but, as with many of these articles, there has been a lot of interest in how I have written my books, so I thought I would spend a little of my time to tell you how I do it.

Starting to write is always the hardest part. You have an idea that you think will make a best selling book, but you can’t decide how best to put it down on paper. You procrastinate the book to death and you haven’t written one word. Three things that might help here.

1. Start with a skeleton. You will have in your mind the sort of book you want to write but being in your mind it will be a series of pictures. These pictures need to be put down on paper in some sort of order. Don’t worry if it doesn’t feel right yet, the skeleton will need a lot of work before it is complete. The skeleton should contain the rough outline of the book structured with a beginning, a middle and an end. Once the skeleton is in place and you are happy with it start to flesh it out with more detail.

2. Don’t start at the beginning! I usually write the first few pages of my books last. There is no need to write the book in a the finished order. When you have your skeleton you can write any part of the book, in any order you want. I find this advice valuable because it gets past the usual excuse, “I don’t know how to start the book” .

3. Remember the 15 second principle. I wrote about a book some years ago called “The 15 Second Principle” by Al Secunda. The principle is very simple but very profound. When you say you haven’t got time to do something (take exercise every day for instance, or write that book), allocate 15 seconds of your day to doing that task. Everybody in the world has 15 seconds spare to do something, so you have lost the excuse that you don’t have time. Of course when you apply yourself for 15 seconds, you have started. Carrying on is much easier than starting.

I mentioned earlier that the book should be structured with a beginning, a middle and an end. In my experience far too many books have the middle section without a good beginning and an end. The beginning is most important.

In the beginning you will need to engage the reader. You will need to introduce the story, the charectures, the setting and, in the case of business books, what the reader will gain by reading on. Your beginning is setting the tone. Think of it like a good newspaper headline, it captures the attention of trhe reader and tells them a little of what to expect from the rest of the book.

Have an idea in your mind who the average reader is. I imagine my reader and then write for him or her. My writing style is very conversational, and while I have heard many experts suggest that this is not the best approach, it works for me. I imagine having a conversation with my reader and write accordingly. When you have got the reader in your mind make sure you are focusing your content on the things they care about or at least can relate to.

Don’t be afraid to get emotional. Books are powerful tools to convey emotion, and if you are able to do this you will hook the reader.

The hardest part of the book you are going to write is starting to write it. The above is just a sketch of what you will need, but it enough for you to get started. Next week I will talk about getting your manuscript published.

84 I don’t seem to have time to do the important things

2007-02-01T23:00:00.000+02:00

I was chatting to a friend just before Christmas. We were talking about work and he was telling me how lucky I am to be able to find the time to write books, and even write this article. “I don’t know how you do it” he said. “I am home from the office late most evenings, then I have to eat dinner, spend time with the family, catch up with my ever growing e-mail intray and then to bed. The following morning it starts all over again.

This is not a new complaint. How many times have you wished that there were 25 hours or more in the day? How many times have you wanted to do more with your life but just don’t seem to have the time to do it? There is an answer to this problem. You may not like it, but the answer is there none the less.

Think of the world’s great achievers from Leonardo da Vinci to Richard Branson. How many hours did they have in the day? The problem is not time it’s choice

They say time is money, but I think time is much more important than that.

Consider the following:

Let us imagine that you get given R86,400 rand in the morning and the deal is this. You can hang on to that money for 24 Hours. You can do anything you like with it, invest it, put it under your mattress, anything, but at the end of the 24 hours you have to give it back. Would you manage that money carefully? Of course you would.

But you don’t get R86,400 rand every day you get 86,400 seconds and the deal is this. You can do anything you like with those seconds but at the end of 24 hours you have to give them back, but you can keep anything you make out of them.

We tend to manage our money well but our time badly. If you are not sure if you are using your time properly try converting each second into a rand and ask yourself if you would be investing R1,200 in this task for instance, rather than wasting 20 minutes of your time.

The amazing thing is that you have enough time in your life to do exactly what you want to do, but you have to choose to use your time in this way. Every day we make a choice as to how we are going to allocate the greatest of all our resources, our time. So how will you allocate your time today? How much time will you waste doing things that you would otherwise consider to be a waste of time.

You probably have a book in you, get it written, do it now, and I will show you how to get it published. Deal?

83 It’s a Mission

2007-02-01T22:57:00.000+02:00

A couple of days ago I had a different request from a Customer.

“Richard, I would like you to join myself and the other board members at a meeting to discuss and finalise our new mission statement”

It seems that the company had changed and the directors could not agree on a new mission statement. They wanted me to go along and facilitate the discussion with a view to creating a mission that would proactively and assertively customise new paradigms to better focus on their customer base. (Sorry… getting carried away)

I declined.

The problem is that I do not all together agree with Mission Statements. And I especially do not agree with Mission statements that are developed by the board and passed down to the team.

There is only one item that should be passed down and that is the Vision. It is important that the senior people (Person) have a dream, a vision of the future to give the company direction. The rest, Goals; Objectives; Strategies; Targets; and the Mission Statement should be bottom up, not top down.

If you want to develop a mission statement you could do worse that going to: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/games/career/bin/ms.cgi

Here you will find Dilbert’s Mission Statement Generator. The way this works is that it takes a series of random Nouns, Adjectives, Adverbs and Verbs, and creates very good mission statements.

The words they use are similar to that “Bullshit Bingo” game that was doing the rounds a couple of years ago:

Nouns

content, paradigms, data, opportunities, information, services, materials, technology, benefits, solutions, infrastructures, products, deliverables, catalysts for change, resources, methods of empowerment, sources, leadership skills, meta-services, intellectual capital

Verbs

maintain, supply, provide access to, disseminate, network, create, engineer, integrate, leverage other's, leverage existing, coordinate, administrate, initiate, facilitate, promote, restore, fashion, revolutionize, build, enhance, simplify, pursue, utilize, foster, customize, negotiate

Adverbs

quickly, proactively, efficiently, assertively, interactively, professionally, authoritatively, conveniently, completely, continually, dramatically, enthusiastically, collaboratively, synergistically, seamlessly, competently, globally

Adjectives

professional, timely, effective, unique, cost effective, virtual, scalable, economically sound, inexpensive, value-added, business, quality, diverse, high-quality, competitive, excellent, innovative, corporate, high standards in, world-class, error-free, performance based, multimedia based, market-driven, cutting edge, high-payoff, low-risk high-yield, long-term high-impact, prospective, progressive, ethical, enterprise-wide, principle-centred, mission-critical, parallel, interdependent, emerging, seven-habits-conforming, resource-levelling

With the press of a button the Mission Generator will create a quite useable Mission Statements like:

We professionally pursue interdependent information to allow us to synergistically foster effective methods of empowerment

The customer can count on us to quickly enhance prospective information in order to efficiently restore competitive services to set us apart from the competition

Our goal is to efficiently promote high-quality leadership skills so that we may conveniently restore innovative solutions for 100% customer satisfaction

We strive to competently negotiate multimedia based content to meet our customer's needs

Our mission is to interactively restore long-term high-impact opportunities to allow us to authoritatively promote multimedia based information while promoting personal employee growth

And my favorite:

It is our business to synergistically promote prospective infrastructures and dramatically administrate seven-habits-conforming solutions to exceed customer expectations

There are many things that Corporate South Africa can be proud of, the Corporate Mission Statement, decided upon behind closed doors, framed and placed in the Reception Area for all to ignore, is not one of them.

Have a great year

82 - Just the way it is... The Law Governing Belief Systems

2006-12-30T12:42:00.000+02:00

82 The Law Governing Belief Systems

I trust you have had a really good Christmas. The New Year will be starting next week and that is usually a time of renewal. Not just a new year, but new ideas, new plans, new beginnings and often a new sense of enthusiasm. I know in the training industry people often want to start the year with a new set of skills, or to brush up on their existing skills, so we get very busy for the first few months of the year.

You may even be planning some New Year resolutions. To be honest I am not a great fan of this sort of life planning. Resolving to do something different, or improve your life in some way, should not be left to that one time in the year when you are probably celebrating. New Year resolutions seldom work.

However, planning for your future around this time does make a lot of sense. But what do you want to achieve in 2007? In my experience we tend to set very low goals and even then we fail to achieve them. The reason why we set low goals is to do with what we believe about ourselves.

Do you believe that you can earn a million rand this year?

No?...... Why not?

Don't worry about it just yet, you are in the majority, most people feel the same way. "A Million Rand" We say, "I will never earn a million rand in a year". Our belief system tells us that we can not do it so we do not even try.

We all have a belief system that prescribes what we can achieve. Our belief system has been built up over the years from our parents, from our teachers, from the people we meet, from the television, from our culture, from our religious leaders, and from what we see and hear around us. Our belief system is telling us what we can achieve and what is not possible to achieve. Our belief system is controlling our destiny and in most cases our belief system is holding us back. What is in your belief system right at this moment that is holding you back?

Our belief system started to develop back at school. The teacher says to little Johnny "I am sorry Johnny, but you are never going to be an artist. You may be an accountant one day but you will never be an artist."

Teachers are always right, of course, (Parents are often wrong, but teachers are always right!) so Johnny does not try to be an artist. Seventy years later Johnny looks back at his life and says "You know, my teacher was absolutely right. I never became an artist"

Well of course he did not become an artist; he did not try to become an artist. This is what is known as a self fulfilling prophecy.

What is in your belief system right now that is holding you back?

When I left school I was at a loose end for a while. I was not good academically. I struggled with spelling at school and that effected most subjects in those days and while I just about passed, that was all I could manage.

After School I was not sure what I should do so my Mother said to my Father "What about taking Richard into the business with you?" My Father was a successful businessman with branches of his business all over the country so I am sure he could have found something for me but he said "What?... Richard?...... In my business?.... What would he do? ...... He cannot write, he cannot spell. What could he do in the Business?

So there was a man whom I respect, telling me I could not write and that went into my belief system. I did not write my first book until I was 45 years old, and to write that first book I had to battle with my belief system. I have eleven books published now and many more on the way but I had to get beyond my belief system to do it.

What is in your belief system that is holding you back?

Last year I was running one of the two day sales training courses that have become very popular over the last few years and during the break I was having a cup of tea with one of the young delegates. She took one sip of her coffee and made a face "Yuck... this milk is off" she said.

"That is funny I said, I have had the same milk in my tea and it is fine"

Then she said something very strange "I Hate Tuesday!" Now this was very odd because we were not talking about Tuesday at all.

"Tuesdays are horrible" she went on "I was late this morning, but I am always late on a Tuesday. My assignment was wrong and now the milk is off in my coffee. Why are Tuesdays always bad days?"

"That's strange" I said "I quite like Tuesdays. But then again, I like Mondays as well, and the rest of the week is pretty good, I wonder why you hate Tuesday?"

"I have no idea," she said, "But I hate Tuesdays!"

It was then time to get back to the training course so we could not continue the discussion.

About half an hour later during a particularly intense part of the course on Negotiation skills she put up her hand and, at the same time said "I know what it is!"

Nobody else in the room had any idea what she was talking about but she went on "I remember that when I was 12 years old we had a large family and I had to do the washing up on a Tuesday, and I hate washing up! I remember lying in bed after I had been called on Tuesday morning pretending to be asleep because when I wake that would start the day that would end with me having to do the washing up. I was always late for school on a Tuesday, and Tuesdays have been bad to me since then."

What is in your belief system that is holding you back? We have already agreed that you do not believe that you can earn a million rand this year so what else is holding you back?

Belief systems are in all of us, and even when you know they are dangerous, we all still have them. Last year I was sitting with my accountant discussing the previous year's figures. This is a task that I do not look forward to. I have never really understood the complexities of the balance sheet so I have an excellent bookkeeper and an excellent account and I let them worry about all that stuff.

To make the pain of the annual occasion easier, we always finish the meeting with an excellent lunch, so when we are discussing the figures I am half focused on the lunch to come. During the last meeting Marc, my accountant, suggested that I should concentrate on the figures and I told him that I am sure he knows what he is doing, and anyway, I don't really understand Balance Sheets. "Why not?" asked Marc "You are an intelligent guy, with a good head for figures, balance sheets are easy."

It was then that I realised that he was absolutely right. Looking back I realised that, as a child, my brother was always the one with the head for figures. He was the one who became a Chartered Accountant. Richard, on the other hand, was not gifted in that way (according to my parents) and would probably end up as a milkman. This then goes into my belief system and while I have had a very interesting life and broken away from my parents expectations, my belief system tells me that I don't understand Balance Sheets.

Once I identified that as an issue I have easily overcome it. Very often it is identifying these limiting belief systems that help you realise how silly they are.

So what's in your belief system that is holding you back?

Right now your belief system is telling you what you deserve in your life, what position you should hold at work and what you should be earning. Your belief system is telling you where you should live, what type of car you should drive, who you should marry and how successful you will be. In short, your belief system is in control.

In your company the belief system of your team is controlling how successful you are going to be. Can you really afford to leave it like that?

I have no idea why our belief systems are so powerful. I have no idea why our belief systems have such a control over us. It's just the way it is. But once you know you are being controlled by your belief systems, and those belief systems come from the craziest of things, like a comment from a teacher 20 years ago for instance, you can begin to question what you believe about yourself.

When you set your goals for this coming year set goals outside your own belief system.

Later on in this series we are going to show how we can achieve these goals and then how to create our own belief systems to be as successful as we want to be.

81 – Just the way it is 2 - The Law of Synchronicity

2006-12-11T16:01:00.000+02:00

Last night I got an e-mail from a friend in England. This is not such an unusual occurrence; I have a few friends in England and around this time of year people are often moved to write a line or two to their friends. What made this more interesting was the fact that I had just written to him and the moment before I pressed the button to send my communication, I got his. Was that a coincidence?

Of course, this has happened to you as well. You think about someone and 5 minutes later you get a phone call from them. You are having a conversation with someone and you both introduce the same subject at the same time. Coincidence?

With some people this sort of “communication” is much more common. Twins, for instance, often feel each other’s presence even when they are in different parts of the world. What makes this “feeling” more interesting is that there seems to be no time delay between sending the feeling on the one hand, and receiving the feeling on the other. I don’t mean that it is just quick; it is instant, it happens at exactly the same time.

This phenomena has interested scientists for some time and a couple of discoveries over the last few years may be able to shed some light onto what is happening (Even though nobody has shed any light on how it is happening)

We all learnt at school that all physical matter is made up of molecules and these molecules are made up of atoms. Atoms have a nucleus with loads of bits buzzing around them in a predictable way. The buzzing bits (not a technical term) sometimes appear to jump from one orbit to another. This is not new stuff at all but what makes it interesting is that it is not moving from one orbit to another. It seems to vanish in one place and instantly appear in another. This is known as a Quantum Leap.

The other interesting scientific stuff that may shed some light on the law of synchronicity, is that studies have shown that cells taken from a human and placed in a jar some distance from the donor will react to what happens to the donor. For instance: Sperm cells placed under a microscope will react when the donor is reading a copy of Playboy in the next room or 50 miles away.

One last thing to consider before looking at the results of this law. We are all individuals with individual identities and feelings; however, we are also living and breathing in a world full of other individuals. Each time you breathe out you breathe cells into the atmosphere, which will be taken in when someone else breaths in. When I touch a door handle I leave cells for someone to pick up when they open the same door straight after me. We are individuals of course, but we are exchanging cells with other people all the time. We are individuals but an outsider might see us as one mass of interchanging cells.

The world has a way of synchronising events. A couple of months ago I went to the new aquarium in Durban and was fascinated with the schools of small fish swimming in the same direction. When they changed direction they all did it at the same time. Not one fish changing direction and the rest following, all at exactly the same time. Nobody knows how they do it; it’s just the way it is. Flocks of birds have a similar ability. They swoop and turn in unison, if they didn’t they would bump into each other.

We seem to have lost our trust and understanding of the law of synchronicity that the birds and fish see as second nature.

I work from home and I am fascinated by my two dogs that seem to know when people are coming to the house long before they arrive. They will be sitting at the front gate when my gardener arrives despite the fact that he only comes once a week and nobody knows which day of the week he is coming. (Nobody except the dogs that is) My wife arrives home through the garage at the back and they will be sitting waiting at the back long before she arrives. Coincidence? Maybe…. But in my experience this happens far too often to be coincidence. Just like the fish and the birds, the dogs are tuned into something that helps them predict and communicate.

We all have this ability but our trust in science and technology and our mistrust of anything we don’t really understand has put up a barrier between ourselves and our natural understanding of the world and the way it works.

Last night I was sorting out some old photographs taken 25 years ago when I was living in England. About 20 minutes ago, just after I started this article I had an e-mail from a friend in one of the photographs. I haven’t seen nor spoken to her for 5 years.

I have no idea how this works in the way it does, I don’t have to understand it to know that it works. It’s just the way it is.

You may be sceptical, I can understand that, and that’s okay. I am sceptical about things that I don’t understand until I prove to myself that it works in certain way.

Take some time this evening to prove it to yourself. Sit down quietly on your own and focus on a friend you have lost touch with. Think lovingly of them, truly wishing that you could make contact again. Remember what it was like when you were last with them. Feel the feelings that you had for them.

You may not get a phone call from them tomorrow, they may not have your number, or they may not think now would be a good time to get back in touch. A thousand things may get in the way but if you don’t hear from them, give them a call.

I wonder how often you will get the answer. “Funny you should call I was thinking about you just last night!” Don’t prompt it, just wait and see what they say. The worst thing that can happen is that you speak to a friend you have been thinking about.

I have hundreds of my own experiences in synchronicity but I would be very interested to hear yours. If this article struck a cord please write back and share your experiences with me. (richard@richardmulvey.com)

80 Just the way it is! - The Law of Attraction

2006-12-01T08:30:00.000+02:00

Have you ever wondered why gravity pulls things down rather than up? Probably not, well not since you were 5 going through that “Why?” stage.

Actually I am not sure that I care very much why gravity works, just as long as it just does. Life would be very awkward if gravity didn’t work all the time in a predictable way. Walking in the street would be very dangerous with cars floating in the air one day and falling to the ground the next. I stand on the scales one day and am happy to see that I am 75kg. The next day I am 110kg and suicidal. That wouldn’t work at all so I am very relieved that there are laws that govern these things.

There are loads of things that I don’t really understand. Oh sure…. I was taught at school all about the magnetic field of the earth and how that affects apples that fall from trees. I am not sure I really understood why the earth has a magnetic field, but my family home in Stanmore (London) was built on the site of an old orchard so I certainly knew not to sit under the apple trees at the end of the growing season.

There are lots of things I don’t really understand.

How does electricity work for instance? Why do I like oranges but not pineapples? Why do I chip the ball into the water trap when I am trying so desperately hard not to?

I have a big barrel in my mind where I put the things I don’t really understand. I rarely go back to that barrel and look inside for greater understanding. I don’t pull things out and ponder over them with an enquiring mind. I am very happy not to know why these things do what they do. I know that is “just the way it is” and I leave it at that.

There are many Laws that the world seems to live by. The law of gravity will hold you on to the pavement when you walk to the shops but the same law will let you float around in a space ship. When you switch on the light in the bedroom you make a direct connection to a power generator many hundreds of miles away and instantly experience the result of many of the laws of physics. You will probably also disturb your partner who was trying to lie in for another 30 minutes and develop a greater understanding of the laws of relationships.

We don’t have to understand the laws of physics to know that the switch will illuminate the bedroom. That’s just the way it is.

Success or failure work in the same way. There are a few fundamental laws that govern whether you will be successful or not. These are not laws that I fully understand, I simply know them to be true from my experience and the experiences of others. I started to understand these laws when I was 26 years old, although I am still learning about them now.

Over the next few weeks Richard’s Review is going to be a little different. Rather than discussing a series of random sales and management principles, I am going to expand on the laws governing success and failure. In many cases I don’t know how they work. Many of them are securely placed in that barrel of things I don’t really understand. What I do know is that they do work, like switching on the lights, with a few simple actions I can take full advantage of their benefits without understanding how. That’s just the way it is.

The Laws

1. The Law of Attraction

2. The Law of Abundance

3. The Law Governing Belief systems

4. The Laws of Pleasure and Pain

5. The Law of Focus

6. The Power of Visualisation

7. The Law of Cause and Effect

8. The Law of Change

9. The Law of Karma

10. The Law of Time

11. The Law of Confidence

12. The Law of Giving and Receiving

13. The Law of Synchronicity

14. The Law of Balance

1. The Law of Attraction

As I reach into that barrel of things that I don’t really understand I pull out the law of attraction.

This law states simply that like attracts like. I have read many articles by people far cleverer than I, that try to explain why this happens and I am still not sure, it’s just the way it is and it can be seen in action everyday.

Why do you think that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (if that is possible). That’s the law of attraction. When George Bush spends so much of his time focusing on terrorism, who is surprised that he is attracting exactly what he is trying to repel.

You cannot get away from this law. We are attracted to live in areas with like minded people; we are attracted to the same music and the same holiday destinations (if you don’t believe me take a trip to Margate on the coast in KZN and see if you can spot anybody not from Gauteng.)

This law of attraction works on a much deeper level as well. We tend to get what we think most about, and this is where the law can become a very useful tool, or a dangerous one.

Useful

Imagine you would like to attract wealth into your life. The poor find this difficult because they are focused on getting to the end of the day with a full stomach and a roof over their head. They are constantly focused on being poor and cannot see an end to it. The rich, on the other hand, focus on being rich, on spending wealth and attracting more. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

To change this cycle we have to begin to think like the rich. Focus on being wealthy; act as if you are wealthy. Now I don’t mean rush off and max out your credit card. That’s the sort of thing that poor people do. I mean get a clear visual image (we will look at visualisation later) of what it will be like when you are rich, make plans for the future as if you are rich. You can still see yourself as a wealthy person and drive around in a 10 year old Audi 400. I did that for a few years when I started this business and I never for one second thought of myself as less than wealthy.

Your friends have a major part to play in this process as well. Surround yourself with people who have in their life what you would like to have in yours. See yourself on a level with them and you will, eventually get there.

Dangerous

The law of attraction does not know the difference between good or bad. In the same way that poor people get poorer, unless they change their thinking, you will attract into your life all of the bad things that you would like to repel when you focus on these things.

My in-laws were wonderful people, and I loved them dearly, however, they were obsessed with being robbed. They had burglar guards every where. Metal trellises across every window that had to be closed at night and a wrought iron secure entrance lobby that had to be entered before the front door. Dogs in the garden. The works!

They were not wealthy people and therefore not really attractive to organised crime, but despite their security measures, their house was broken into twice and they were also mugged in a restaurant. They attracted the very thing they didn’t want by becoming obsessed with it. We all know of people like that.

George Bush in a prime example of the same syndrome.

How to use the Law of Attraction.

Firstly you have to decide what you want of course. If you want to be wealthy, (and there is nothing wrong with wealth, it’s what you do with it that matters) think yourself wealthy, act yourself wealthy, surround yourself with wealthy people and plan for your wealthy future.

You will bang your head against your belief system at this point and we will be looking at that later in this series, but for now ignore your belief system and feel wealthy.

If you want to give up smoking don’t focus on giving up smoking. If you focus on smoking your will attract to your life exactly what you are trying to avoid. Focus on being healthier; surround yourself with healthy people and feel healthy. Many studies have shown that people who believe they are healthy are very rarely ill.

The Law of attraction works. I don’t know why, that’s just the way it is.

79 True Love on Body Language – Lisa Templeton

2006-11-01T21:30:00.000+02:00

Bet you don’t think of yourself as a body language expert, but chances are that you are, especially if you are a woman.

Ever since the days when we grunted and lugged stones about to make fire, humans have been relying on reading body signals to work out whether someone is friend, foe, or potential lover.

Think your pick up line is important? Well, adjust your body attitude first.

Stats suggest that a mere 7% of the impression people make on us comes from the words we use, 38% stems from our tone, speed and inflection and a hefty 55% depends on our body language.

“Body language is critical in all inter-relations,” says SA body language expert, Richard Mulvey. “Your body language shows exactly what you are thinking when you’re thinking it.”

And the good news, sisters, is that women are better at it than men.

Women are far more instinctive and intuitive when it comes to reading body signals, according to Richard.

“It’s probably why they are better at relationships,” he laughed.

What can I learn from someone’s body signals

First of all you’ve got to remember that body language comes from a number of gestures and not just one. Rubbing a nose could just be an itch, but rubbing a nose while avoiding eye contact, could be a signal that someone is telling a lie.

Here are some of the signals worth knowing:

Is he flirting with me?

The classic romantic meeting always begins with eyes meeting across a crowded room – and that’s exactly how it happens. Romantic gazes are longer, more meaningful and sometime roam lower than any other gaze. A man that has set his eyes on you is also likely to preen, says Richard. He may straighten his tie or sweep his hands back over his hair and he is sure to stand tall to show off his masculinity. In the meantime you are probably throwing him a few meaningful looks yourself, and perhaps crossing your legs alluringly. Take a look at his feet, if they’re in your direction he’s yours – we tend to subconsciously point our hands and feet at those we are interested in. The final stage is touch. If he’s confident that you are signalling that you are keen he may brush your arm to make a point or cross legs and fleetingly touch your legs. From then on his signals should be pretty clear.

Is my friend lying to me? Have you ever seen a child lie? Less crafty than us adults they will often cover their mouths with their hands as if to push the lie back to where it came from. When we are older that simple gesture evolves into rubbing our nose or brushing our hair back with our hands. (Think of the salesman who is not 100% certain of what he’s saying and he’ll surely rub his head like this.) They will also avoid eye contact or rub their eyes. If all this is going on, your friend could be telling you a corker.

Am I impressing my job interviewer or boss? If someone is leaning towards you it’s a very good sign that they are interested in what you have to say. If they lean back it’s time to lift your game, they’ve lost interest. But don’t worry about the person who leans back in their chair with their hands behind their head. They’re telling you they are the most important person in the room – you can bet they don’t do this when they are in a room with their boss. While we’re on the subject, you be careful that you don’t fold your arms, it’s a sure sign that you are feeling defensive and uncomfortable, you are literally trying to protect your body.

Some useful signs in a nutshell

· When someone has had enough of listening to you, they often rub their ear lobes, something President Thabo Mbeki does. They really want to cover their ears but can’t.

· When they think you’re lying they may rub their own mouth, they really want to cover yours but can’t do it politely.

· And when they no longer want to see you they may rub their eyes, or take their glasses off and rub their eyes.

Ward off trouble by walking tall We’ve all walked streets that give that creepy feeling that trouble is lurking around the corner. Best to hunch your shoulders, clutch your bag, look around nervously and hurry out of there, right? Wrong, says Richard. Fearful gestures attract muggers. Instead walk tall and purposefully without visibly rushing and your body language will say ‘don’t mess with me.’

78 Do you sell Products or Dreams?

2006-10-29T21:28:00.000+02:00

In August 1963 Martin Luther King had a “Dream”. Forty three years later we are still quoting him… Why?

Eight Months later at his Rivonia Trial, Nelson Mandela dreamed “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”

Twenty years later Bill Gates said that in his dream one day every desk in every office would have a computer in it. Well... we have certainly bought into that dream.

Steve Jobs set up Apple Computers with a dream. He left the company but the dream was so compelling, 10 years later, he took over the company again and still drives it today. Apple is an interesting example of this type of selling. In the early days they didn’t have a marketing team, they had Evangelists. Successful sales people know, as Customers we never buy products we buy dreams.

You buy a 4x4 because you dream of the bush or of that parking space on the pavement out side the rugby stadium. If you were to buy logically you would probably buy a “city golf”!

You buy a new bath plug because you dream of long, soak in the bath without the water draining away, or you dream of not being nagged by your wife because you forgot to buy it.

You buy a house because you dream of those lovely summer evenings on the patio drinking red wine with your partner.

When you buy new furniture you are dreaming of a beautiful house. A Diary and you are dreaming of a well organised life next year. New clothes and you are dreaming of a beautiful image.

In almost everything we buy, we buy into the dream not the product.

Martin Luther King knew that. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates know that. Richard Branson and Bob Smith know that.

Who’s Bob Smith? Well… When I first started to write I used to do all the shopping. My wife said that if I was going to sit around the house all day doing nothing I might at least do the shopping. I guess that’s fair enough so I used to do all the shopping for the groceries once a week. That is when I first met Bob. Bob used to be one of the car guards near the local supermarket. When I parked my car to do the shopping Bob would come over and great me like a long lost friend and then say “Don’t worry Sir, your car will be here for you when you get back, safe and sound, not a scratch. And you know what? It always was. Bob sure knew how to sell dreams and made quite a nice living from the tips he got from his regular customers. I know that I would always try to park in Bob’s area, dreaming about an undamaged car on my return, and I was never let down.

Dreams are powerful things. Dreams drive the imagination to drive us into action. If you can get into people’s dreams you are helping guide them into future action.

Sales people the world over have discovered that to be truly successful you have to be part of your customer’s dreams.

77 What do you call yourself?

2006-10-02T20:27:00.000+02:00

I have been training sales people for many years and thousands of sales people have been through my courses. At the beginning of each course I ask each person to introduce themselves and, of course, along with the introduction we get their job title. There have been hundreds of different titles but the most common are:

Sales Representative

Sales Executive

Marketer

Marketing consultant

New Business Development Officer

Internal Sales

And, of course, just Sales

Now there is nothing wrong with these titles. Being a Sales Representative, as we have already discussed, is a noble task and one to be proud of.

However, there is a problem here. When you go and visit a customer and you give him a card it says “Sales Representative” You are saying that you represent your company. He gives you his card and it says he is a “Buyer” Buying for his company. So you are on different sides doing different things, representing different interests. You are separating yourself from your customer before you start.

I met someone at a party once and I was chatting to him, making small conversation, so I asked him what he does for a living. That’s what you do at parties isn’t it. You have to ask them what they do for a living to know if you should be talking down to them or not. So I asked him the question and he replied: “I buy insurance”

“You Buy Insurance!” I said, “That’s interesting, what does someone who buys insurance do all day?”

“Well”, he replied, “I spend all day hunting around for the best insurance deals and I buy them for my customers.”

He is actually an insurance salesman. But he sees his job a little differently. He looks for the best deals for his customers and isn’t that just what his customer would want him to do?

Perhaps you should consider changing your job title to reflect what the customer would like you to be. Instead of a sales rep, consider some of the following:

Customer Representative

Client Solutions Provider

Customer Consultant

Customer Support Staff

Customer Services Consultant

Client Liaison Executive

If you give your card to a customer and it states that you are a Customer Representative, you are saying that you are on his side, you are looking after his interests, and you are much more likely to make the sale in the end.

I have many examples of how effective this can be and there are a number of companies I have trained, who have changed their job titles on the strength of this argument. Interestingly the job title that I included with tongue in cheek was “Client Solutions Provider”, but I know of three companies that are using this title very effectively. One trainee sales person who came to my training course had “Catalyst” on her business card and I love that.

76 Anybody can become a good salesperson

2006-09-01T20:26:00.000+02:00

When I left school I didn’t want to be a salesman. Few teenagers leave school with the idea of going into sales, they want go into teaching or catering; they want to become attorneys or engineers. Selling is rarely considered to be a career, and when I was young very few parents would have encourage their children to become salespeople. Very little has changed in this regard.

I followed my basic education with two years at Hotel School where I was taught how to be a waiter, a chef and a hotel manager. I learnt how to make beds and why you can always get instant hot water in a hotel bedroom even though the water heater is as much as 100 meters away.

In the first long holiday while I was at hotel school, I got a job as a waiter at the Garners Steak House in London. I wasn’t allowed to serve in the restaurant until I had undergone a full day’s training but I wasn’t trained how to be a waiter. They just presumed that I knew that the food was served from the left and cleared from the right, that I knew how to fold napkins and “Crumb Down”. The training course focused entirely on selling skills.

The customer walking into a restaurant is a “prospect”. You know he has a need (he is hungry) but we have yet to discover how we are going to satisfy that need. In many cases that ‘need’ would be satisfied with a bowl of soup and a slice of bread so it is the waiter’s job to create a ‘desire’ for something much more exciting (and more expensive of course).

During the training I was shown how to encourage the customer to buy two bottles of wine instead of just one; why the waiter must never just offer sweet, but suggest that the lady in the group may enjoy a crème caramel or fresh strawberries flown in from Israel. I also learnt not just to offer the most expensive items on the menu first, but the ones with the highest profit margin. I discovered that customers come into a restaurant not just to eat but for the ambiance, the fun, the friendly service and the good company. Customers don’t mind paying more if all these are in place. The restaurant certainly knew how to do these things and was always full, mostly with regular customers.

My money at the end of the week was dependant on my ability as a sales person to satisfy the customers, rather than as a caterer and I enjoyed being well paid for the first time in my life.

So I started in catering before I became a salesperson, you may have been a teacher or an engineer. Selling does not have the charisma of many careers but it is a noble task none the less. Industries would collapse without us. Customers would not know what is available or what is possible if sales people were not there to help. Selling helps make the world go round and good salespeople are hard to find.

Good sales people are made not born. This is the whole Nurture vs. Nature issue and in the case of sales people I am very clear on the result. In fact, the stereotypical sales person who look and act like the ones you see on the television and think they are born to it are not the best of the sales people out there.

I was asked, by the senior partner in a firm of attorneys in Durban, to train his team to become sales people. “We have very good attorneys, but they are not good at getting new business or closing the sale, can you help?”

“Of course” I said.

I prepared a proposal for the customer based on training 25 attorneys the finer arts of selling. I proposed a series of sessions with assignments in between that would at least give them the basics, and presented that to the customer.

“Oh no” he said, “We just need a day. Just come in for a day and tell us what it takes to be good in sales.”

ONE DAY! It takes seven years to be qualified as an attorney and they want to become salespeople in just one day.

To become a good sales person, like many other tasks, takes skills and practice. Anybody can be good in sales if they are prepared to put in the time and study the skills, then practice what they have learnt until they get it right.

75 Mastering Stage Fright

2006-07-01T20:26:00.000+02:00

“There is nothing to fear but fear itself” – Winston Churchill

Everybody gets stage fright in one form or another. Even the most professional actors and politicians feel tense before they perform and the following few pages will help you reduce the amount of tension and use what’s left to your advantage.

Let us first consider why we get stage fright.

We are all afraid of getting something wrong and making a fool of ourselves but this becomes far more acute when we are faced with the possibility of making a fool of ourselves in front of an audience.
Being on show is for most of us outside our comfort zone and therefore frightening.
For those of us who have presented and experienced severe stage fright, the fear is not just of the presentation but of the stage fright itself.

When you experience stage fright the adrenalin starts to pump round the body heightening your senses. You start to perspire more than normal, your breathing is short and shallow, your hands, knees and voice start to shake, your muscles freeze and you forget what you are about to say.

There are few of us that have not felt some or all of those symptoms and just talking about them runs a chill down my spine.

The problem is not just a matter of control. Stage fright in small doses is an extremely valuable human condition. The adrenalin surging around your body will sharpen your mind and greatly increase your ability to react quickly to unforeseen circumstances.

There are three stages to mastering stage fright:

Reducing the need to be frightened.

Controlling the symptoms.

Using the fear

Reducing the need to be frightened

The majority of your pre-presentation fear is based on making a mistake and therefore making a fool of yourself and you can reduce this fear by practising your presentation. This may sound obvious but practising your presentation is as important as ensuring that it is properly put together and the more you practise the less there is to fear.

We will be looking at practise in more details in the next section but in broad terms you should practise until you do not need to refer to your notes, and then take your notes to reduce the fear of forgetting what you have to say.

Now let us consider what else there is to be afraid of. Spend an hour or so going through your presentation and jotting down everything that could go wrong. Don’t consider what you would do at this stage, just complete the list.

The list may look like this:

- Forgotten my notes

- Car broke down

- Arrived late

- Slides were put in the projector in the wrong order

- Audience was told to arrive at a different time

- Dropped my notes as I stood up and confused the order

- My mouth went dry and I couldn’t speak

- Etc.

If you are taking this seriously there should be a page or so of possibilities. Now start at the beginning and write beside each potential disaster how you would handle the problem if you knew about it in advance.

- Forgotten my notes – make two copies and put one in the car now

- Car broke down – Check the car

- Arrived Late – Leave earlier

- Slides were put in the projector in the wrong order – number the slides and run through them after you arrive but before you present

- Audience was told to arrive at a different time – check the arrangements the day before

- Dropped my notes as I stood up and confused the order – make sure the notes have page numbers

- My mouth went dry and I couldn’t speak – ask the organiser to have water available near your speaking position.

If you approach this task seriously you will automatically reduce the fear that something will go wrong which represents more than half of any stage fright.

In addition you have started to complete your check list.

Controlling the Symptoms

Practising your presentation and having a solution at hand for any potential disaster will go a long way to reducing your stage fright, but what if your stage fright is based upon the fear of the fear ?

There are a few simple precautions that will reduce the symptoms considerably.

v Before you present spend a few seconds doing physical exercises. This will prepare your body for action and reduce the risk of stiffening up. Don’t overdo it and leave yourself out of breath, as this will have the reverse effect.

v Just before you stand up, take two really deep breaths. This will help you relax and encourage normal breathing while presenting.

v When you stand up to present stop for a few seconds and look at each member of your audience. Your mind should now totally focus on them and their needs. If you can achieve this you will be thinking of them not yourself and your stage fright will vanish.

v DON’T be tempted to reduce the nerves by having a couple of drinks before you go on. You may feel better, but you will not perform better and the alcohol will reduce your reaction time considerably.

Using the Fear

Stage fright is not a bad thing. Once you have reduced the need to be frightened and taken steps to control the symptoms, what you have left is pure emotion heightened by the adrenalin surging around your body. This helps you think quicker and will show itself in the way you present and the emotion you are able to convey.

Anxiety is an emotion and like any other emotion it is possible to transfer its strength to the next emotion you are feeling.

Have you ever watched a really frightening movie and then found yourself crying like a baby at the soppy bit at the end? You would not have felt anything at all at the end of the movie if your feelings had not been heightened by the fear you experienced earlier on.

Some people find that the love they feel for their partner is heightened after a raging argument has been resolved. (“The best part of an argument is making up afterwards”).

This ability to transfer the strength of emotions is very useful to presenters.

Before your presentation decide what emotion you wish to portray to your audience. This may be love for the service you would like them to buy, hate for the proposition you want them to vote against, or fear for a world without an ozone layer, etc. Whatever you are presenting there is always one emotion or other that you can tap into.

Just before you present you will feel that strong anxiety that we call stage fright. Before you stand up remind yourself why you feel so strongly about your subject. Feel that emotion that you generated earlier when you decided to speak on the subject.

The strength of your stage fright will transfer to the emotion you wish to portray.

Easy isn’t it!

Actually it is easy because it normally happens automatically. Humans can only experience one emotion at a time. If you think you are experiencing two, it will be one straight after another and the strength of one emotion will be supported by the strength of the other.

One other useful fact about emotion is that it can be highly infectious. Excellent presenters will often use the strength of their passion for the subject to be convincing. Audience members will feel moved, not by what is being said but by the emotion that the presenter is projecting.

74 Don’t ask the prospect if he has time to speak

2006-06-28T20:25:00.000+02:00

I was reading an old sales training book a few days ago, in which the writer made the comment that it is only polite to ask the person you are ringing if they have time to speak at the moment. This is a mistake. I was sharing this with a friend and he told me that this was the way he was trained just last year!

Please don’t fall into this trap even if you were at the same training course as my friend.

When you are making a telephone call to encourage a prospect to buy your product or service, or even just to make an appointment, you walk a difficult line. It is much easier to sell face to face as the customer can see you and can tell you are genuine. On the telephone the first few seconds are critical and it is important to avoid simple mistakes.

Let us imagine that you are a customer and I am a sales person. If I were to start the conversation with “Do you have time to speak to me at the moment” what are you thinking? My guess is that you are thinking negatively. You may be thinking; “Well I am busy, how much time will you be taking?” or you may simply be thinking “This sounds like a sales person I had better be on my guard.” However it goes it will be negative.

It you ask the prospect if he has time to talk to you, you will be building a wall between you that will be hard to break down. Having greeted the prospect and introduced myself I prefer to get straight into the reason for the call.

Sometimes, of course, the prospect will tell you that he is too busy, and this is your opportunity to practise your alternative close and make an appointment to ring him back:

“That’s okay John, we all get busy from time to time, when would be the best time to ring you back, would Thursday afternoon be good for you or would Friday morning be better?”

The grey area here, of course, is the cell phone. If you are ringing a customer on his cell phone then you will have to ask if it is okay to chat to him at the moment. If your customer sounds as if he is sitting in a small, echoy room, it is probably not the best time to be speaking to him.

As a matter of principle I don’t ring customers on their cell phone unless there is no choice. The sound quality on the cell phone is not as good as a land line and sometimes you get an echo which does not help with the clarity of the conversation. Your customer may be in the car, with an important customer, with his family, or just having some quiet time on his own, you never know.

Using the telephone to sell can be very effective if it is done properly. You can make 30 calls in the same time it takes to visit one customer, and while your strike rate will probably be lower, even if it is one tenth of your strike rate when you are face to face, you will be making three times the sales.

Like many other things, this all comes with practice so get phoning and improve those skills, and don’t forget, don’t ask if they have the time.

73 The Problem with Potatoes – a negotiation lesson

2006-06-03T20:23:00.000+02:00

Some time ago I had an interesting experience in a shop that I would like to share with you. As an author, I work from home and inevitably get called upon from time to time, to complete household tasks when I should be working. On one occasion, I was battling with a particularly difficult part of a book when the lady who cooks for us, knocked on my office door and announced that there were no potatoes and she needed them straight away.

I was angry. Partially because I don't like being disturbed when I am working but mostly because it is my job in the house to buy the food and I had forgotten to buy the potatoes.

Leaving the office, but taking my bad mood with me, I jumped in the car and drove down to the nearest vegetable shop. This shop is not where I usually buy the vegetables but I was in a hurry. I parked the car, rushed into the shop, picked up a pocket of potatoes and took it to the counter to pay. The potatoes were advertised at R17.50, so I held out a twenty rand note expecting the lady to take it, but she didn't.

"What are you going to do with these?" she asked.

"Stupid damn question, what do you think I'm going to do with them?" I would have liked to have said, however what I did say was "Um.. What do you mean?"

"I mean." she replied, "Are you going to roast them, boil them, make mashed potato, what?"

"Gosh, I don't know.... um... I think we are having roast tonight."

"Well, these potatoes won't be any good for roasting" she said as she picked up the pocket I had chosen and took it back.

"It's difficult" I said "to know what's in a pocket of potatoes".

"I can understand that", she replied as she went to the other side of the small shop and picked up another pocket of potatoes, and brought it back to the counter.

I still had the R20 note in my hand and I continued to offer it to her but she said "That will be R24.50 please."

I paid the money, left the shop and vowed never to return. Having deposited the potatoes in the kitchen, I went back to the office but couldn't write, so that was the end of the day.

When the meal was served that evening, things brightened up considerably. I have 5 children and there are always some hangers on so we rarely have less than nine around the dinner table. The roast potatoes were, by every account, the best roast potatoes any of us had ever eaten. This would have been wonderful on it’s own but because everybody knows I do the shopping, I had the unusual experience of all the children liking me at the same time. Father’s of large families will appreciate how wonderful this experience can be and I had to rethink my approach to the shop I had visited that afternoon.

On consideration, I realised that the lady in the shop had instinctively used many of the techniques that I teach in negotiation skills.

Plainly, she decided from the beginning that we were both going to win out of the deal.

By asking what I was going to do with the potatoes, she was finding out about my interests. She told me she understood when I said that I couldn't tell one bag of potatoes from another. She didn't agree with me, she sympathised. By bringing a higher priced pocket of potatoes into the deal, she was making the "pie" bigger.

As it turned out it was a perfect Win-Win. She made the extra R7 on the deal and we not only had great roast potatoes that evening, but I also had the unusual experience of all the children liking me at the same time (worth every cent). Not only that, guess where we buy our vegetables now!

You see, the skills we teach, are not just for the formal negotiation. They are for every time you want something that someone else has, or you want someone to do something for you.

72 Meditation for the average Business Person

2006-05-28T20:22:00.000+02:00

Last week I was being driven to a seminar by a good friend and we got to chatting about meditation. We talked about the process and how helpful it had been to me over the last few years, then I was asked the big question, “How do I stop the chattering in my brain when I meditate?” so I thought I would explore the subject in this weeks Richard’s Review and maybe answer that one.

I discovered meditation a few years ago. Of course I wasn’t the first to do this and I won’t be the last, but until that time I had no idea how powerful this simple process could be.

I had heard of Meditation of course, and remember the Beatles going off to discover themselves, but I always thought that meditation was for the others, who ever they may be. “I have my feat firmly planted on the ground” I would tell anybody who was prepared to listen.

In my naivety I thought that meditation was something to do in the lotus position, staring at a candle chanting “Ommmmm” but, as with many things I didn’t understand, there is a lot more to it than that. Of course you can do it like that but you can also meditate in your office, sitting in the chair you are sitting in right now, just experiencing the calmness around you. What calmness?... The inner calm that is always there waiting for your to find.

Of course this state is not always called meditation. In medicine you will here it called restful awareness and in many religions it may be called prayer.

Meditation is easy and before you discard this as nonsence, why not give it a go? What have you got to lose?

The bodily changes in meditation are almost exactly opposite to the stress symptoms that we talked about a few weeks ago. The breathing slows, blood pressure falls, and the stress related hormone levels fall as well. Even though the body is resting in meditation the mind is awake. According to Dr. Deepak Chopra, people who regularly meditate develop less hypertension, heart disease, anxiety and depression, which can’t be a bad thing for the busy business person, and there are no medical fees involved. Studies have shown that people who meditate live longer. Depak Chopra goes on to say that the best time to meditate is early morning or early evening.

So, now you are interested how do you do it?

There are as many different meditations as there are people who meditate but the simplest way to start is to use the “So.. Hummmm” technique. Find a quiet place, sit back into the chair with your arms and legs uncrossed.

Close your eyes and start by feeling your body relax all over. Breath deeply and when you inhale think “So” to yourself when you exhale think “Hummmm”. You will then start a steady rythem of “So… Hummmm….. So… Hummmm” etc. When you exhale feel yourself getting more and more relaxed.

Your mind will drift off into other thoughts, this is natural and when it does just gently go back to thinking “So… Hummmm”.

Like all good things this will take a little practise but even after just one session you will feel invigorated and ready to face the business day.

Occasionally you will experience a thoughtless state of deep relaxation. Just stay there for as long as you feel comfortable.

In business meditation can be a wonderful asset. It can calm you when everyone about you seems to be losing their heads. It can show you the way when there seems to be no way ahead. It can help you find the ‘better you’ needed to make difficult decisions. It can remind you where you have been and how blessed you are to be here now.

In Meditation you can find the younger you that has always been there waiting to be listened to. You can talk to the great leaders and thinkers to ask their advice. You can even meet up with your parents and grand parents and anybody else that has had an influence on your life.

If you have read this far I urge you to try it. Just follow the simple steps above and then let me know how you feel.

richard@richardmulvey.com

71 Richard Mulvey’s 19 laws of Success

2006-05-20T20:18:00.000+02:00

I have recently taken on a number of people in my business and now I am going through the process of inducting them into the family that is Perception Business Skills. It is important for me to make sure that everybody in the organisation understands the principles by which we do business so I have found the old Richard’s Review that covers this and brought it up to date. I thought you might find this interesting as well.

What are the fundamental rules of business that the Richard Mulvey Brand stands by?

My experience has taught me that there are (with apologies to Ringo and Sooty) “many ways to skin a cat” but for me there are 19 laws that successful organizations and people should live by.

Richard Mulvey’s 19 laws of success

1. Do what you like to do

You will never be successful doing things you don’t like to do. If you are doing a job you don’t like, resign! You will hate every day you go to work, and because of that you are very likely to perform badly. This is not a practice run folks. You only get one chance to get this life right and much of your life you will spend at work so you had better make sure you enjoy it.

2. Do what is right

Of course you know what is right. Everybody knows what is right but not everybody chooses to do the right thing. I am not a rotary club member but they have a wonderful test that they recite at the beginning of meetings, it is called the four-way test and goes as follows. “Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendship? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?” Member or not you could do a lot worse than considering these four items before making your next decision.

3. Honesty and integrity

Always be honest with the people you come in contact with. When you are dishonest with a customer, you over charge them for instance, or you under deliver just because you know you can get away with it, what will your team think? When they see you short change a customer, they will know it is all right to cheat. And when they see an opportunity to steal from you they will know that this is all right too.

4. Develop a positive attitude

Positive things happen to positive people. This is not a grey area but a fundamental law of business (and of life by the way)

5. Take Risks

Not only with your money, but with yourself. Stick your neck out. Tell your customers, your team, even your boss what you think is right. “Timid salespeople have skinny kids”.

6. Be determined to succeed

The greatest achievers have all had their downs as well as their ups and it is when we are down that we are truly tested. I was in a reception area a few weeks ago that had the following as a notice on the wall. “Incy Wincey Spider (our hero)” Don’t you just love that message.

7. Daywbdb

When managing people we are all faced with difficult decisions to take from time to time. How do you make sure the job is done the way you want it to be done? How do you reprimand in a positive way? How do you tell a team member they are going to be retrenched? These are tough questions but I have always stood by the “daywbdb” (pronounced da-wub-dub ) principle of management. Daywbdb stands for “Do as you would be done by”. If you are not sure how to handle a team member put yourself in his or her position and ask yourself “How would I like to be treated if it were me in that position?” Not sure how to handle a customer complaint? Put yourself in the position of the customer and see how you would like to be handled.

8. Customers come second, your people come first.

I know, this breaks all the rules, but it is fundamental to business success. You have to care about your team first and demonstrate that you care. If you don’t care about your people how do you expect your people to care about your customers?

9. Surround yourself with good people

You are unlikely to be a success on your own and most successful people will tell you that they could not have achieved success without the support of their team. Surround yourself with clever, like minded, positive supporters.

10. Embrace Change

The only thing that is really certain about the future is that it will be different to the present. Successful people understand this and become flexible in their ever changing business environment.

11. Keep fit and eat well

It is said that “We are what we eat” but recent research has shown this to be perfectly true. Every cell in our body is replaced over a period of just one year; some of our cells, in our eyes for instance, are replaced every few days. The raw material to make these cells come directly from what we eat, what we drink, what we inhale and what we inject so just remember that when you next consume something you know is not good for you. In addition our bodies are designed to perform best when physically fit. We don’t all have to be marathon runners however. Twenty minutes exercise every day is enough to stay fit.

12. Listen First

In business your ability to communicate your ideas is your most important skill but how do you get people to listen to you? We often believe the best way to get people to listen is to speak first, speak loudest and speak longest but in fact the exact opposite is true. The best way to get people to listen is to speak last, speak softest and speak shortest. Listen first and then demonstrate you have understood. Empathise

13. Have a reason for doing it

What is the purpose of your business or the business you are working in? What is the purpose of your organisation, your family, your club, your government or any other group you belong to? If you say to make money you have missed the point entirely. Money is not an end - it is merely a means to an end. Imagine you are sitting in the back row at your own funeral. What would you like people to say about you? Would you be happy if they just said that you made a lot of money?

14. Be Powerful / Be tough

Sometimes that means being tough with other people when you know you are doing the right thing, other times that means being tough with yourself.

15. Know that we are ignorant

In my teenage years I knew everything, now that I am well into my fifties I am amazed how little I know. The more I learn the more there is to learn and I am having the time of my life trying to get ahead. Stephen Covey has said that the best way to learn is to teach and he is absolutely right. Teaching a subject forces you to get focussed on the real issues and if you are able to get the message across to others you have fully grasped the message yourself.

16. Give of yourself

The principle of abundance suggests that once you start giving in this way, you are allowing energy to flow. By giving your time, your money or even your unconditional love, you are creating space for others to give in return.

17. Manage your time well.

Time is your most important resource. Focus on the important things in business. Allow time for the important things in your personal life. When was the last time you rolled on the grass with your young children? When was the last time you went out with your partner on a “date”.

18. Lead by example

I have often said that it is difficult to teach your own children. This is, of course, not true. Your children may not learn from your words but they certainly learn from your actions. If you want your children to be honest, then be honest with them. If you want your children to show compassion, then show compassion to them. If on the other hand you want your children to believe that it is okay for bigger people to get their own way by hitting smaller people then hit your children whenever you want to control them. Your children are learning by your actions every day.

In business the same applies. If you want your team to manage their time well, then you must lead by example. If you want your team to be honest with your customers you must do the same. The “don’t do as I do, do as I say” principle of management just doesn’t work.

19. Have fun

When was the last time you had fun at work? Fun is not frivolous, it is a reason for being. Fun is not a waste of time but a valuable use of the resource. Ask yourself. Who will perform better, a person who likes what he is doing or a person who hates it? I met a guy called David last week and he taught me a lot about having fun at work. Have a look at his wed site www.funman.com.au

70 Improving your life style and your life expectancy

2006-04-02T20:18:00.000+02:00

Lets be clear about this, we all have stress in our working lives. Eight out of ten executives in South Africa suffer from stress related problems; seven out of the eight deny it!

We think stress is an occupational hazard that we must endure in our business world but this is just not true. Stress itself is not addictive but one of the side effects is and there lies a problem. We get addicted to the adrenalin rush.

Adrenalin is addictive. If you are not sure if you are addicted or not, take a two week holiday. The first weekend will be fine, but come Monday morning you start to wonder if the office is managing without you, you remember that letter that must go off or the customer who was not happy on Friday. You know that you are on holiday but by eleven o’clock you can’t resist and you slip out the back to ring the office. Of course you justify it by telling yourself that you are indispensable, but what you are really missing is your daily “High”, and that daily high is probably reducing your life expectancy.

Many studies have conclusively shown that stress is a killer. Stress is not only linked to heart related problems (the second biggest killer in South Africa after Hiv/Aids), but also digestive problems like ulcers and IBS, and some studies link stress with Cancer. In addition Stress reduces your immune system leaving you defenceless against all the other bugs that are going about.

Not sure whether stress is taking hold of your life? You just have to listen to your body. Do you ever get chest pains you can’t account for? Does your thinking become muddled sometimes or are you finding it hard to concentrate? What about decisions, are they harder to make sometimes? Do you tire easily?

Sometimes people under stress will struggle to sleep while others need eight hours a day and still wake up tired in the morning. Some people will eat more under Stress and gain weight while others stop eating and lose their weight. If you are a smoker you will smoke more and drinkers begin to rely too heavily on their daily dose.

As a manager you will have to consider your team’s stress situation. Blue collar stress is just a common as white collar stress and just a likely to disrupt the workplace.

So what’s to be done?

The first thing to understand when managing stress is that we are not looking for a stress free life. Stress is a good thing in small doses. We tend to perform better under Stress as all sports people know. So we don’t want to get rid of stress just manage it before it manages us.

Once we begin to notice the symptoms we tend to rush off to the doctor for a pill that will solve the problem. Far too often we end up with a pill to keep us going during the day and another one to put us to sleep at night. One to slow down our heart rate and another to manage the side effects of the first three, and many of these pills are addictive in themselves. Of course if you are prescribed pills you must take them but I recommend another approach to managing stress that can be far more effective.

There are six types of stress; work related, fear, emotional, environmental; biological, and anxiety. The bad news is that stress is cumulative. So if you have a difficult working environment, where you have poor relationships with your colleagues, but you also eat badly and are not physically fit these will all go together to create stress problems.

Once you understand that stress is cumulative then you are half way to solving the problem. If stress is cumulative then the solution is also cumulative.

Have a look at your life style under each of the stress factors I have mentioned above. You may not be able to change your job to reduce your stress but you can improve your relationships at home with your spouse or teenage children perhaps (just sitting down with them and talking to them openly and honestly like adults will work well). Have a look at your diet. You know what you should be eating; your body is telling you all the time. Then get out your old running gear and start to jog again. We don’t all have to be comrades marathon runners, 20 minutes running up and down stairs will do the trick (okay 5 minutes to start and build up from there).

Have a look at your environment at work. Is your chair well designed or is it getting just a little old. Are the lights in your office appropriate? (If you have strip lights that are not covered in your office you will probably go home with a headache each night). Sit down with your partner once a month and look at your financial plan. Money can so often be the cause of stress but a good financial plan may well just solve this for you. If you are not sure how to do it have a chat with your bank manager, they will be delighted to help you and in most cases they will do it for free.

Take a break! Most people have a lunch break but only do one of those things. They have lunch, but they don’t have a break. Get out of the office at lunch time and sit in the park, or even listen to your favourite music in your car. You don’t need to take an hour, 15 minutes will do. Take the holidays you are entitled to and add to that a few weekends away with your family. If you think that may even be more stressful then have another look at your life.

You may not be able to do all of these things but we can all make a start. By incorporating just one or two of the above suggestions you will have reduced your stress factor considerably and by doing so increased your life expectancy.

If you would like to more about your stress position right now and your how to manage your life to live longer come along to the Stress Management Breakfast in J’burg, Durban, and Bloemfontein this week and Cape Town next week.

69 Getting That Appointment

2006-03-20T21:16:00.000+02:00

Thank you for your note and your interest in the training we are able to offer. You asked the question: How do I handle the following objection?

“We are happy with our current company and we are not looking to change”

Very often we get an objection because of our approach. You are right in thinking that this is an "Indifferent Objection", but you may have got it because of the way you started the phone call in the first place. This is the type of objection that cuts off the sales person leaving them with very few options. Your prospect probably has a good relationship with their current supplier so you are not only battling with the benefits but also with the relationship. The ready made answers to this depend on your product or service. Find out who you are competing with first ( "That's interesting Mr.Smith, may I ask who is supplying you at the moment?" ) and then;

"They are a good supplier. Just yesterday I was speaking to a customer who splits the business between them and us so that if there is a problem he always has another supplier to fall back on."

"I am sure they are a great supplier, but it is important to make sure that they are kept competitive. A quote from us will be a great way to make sure they are still providing a good service at a great price."

or, if you know that their supplier has a problem with something specific, say... delivery;

"They are a good supplier, How are their deliveries going at the moment?"

As with all Indifferent objections, if that doesn't seem to work then try grabbing them with your best feature.

"I understand Mr Smith, I just wanted to tell you how you could get a security system for your home absolutely free!"

If you get this objection, as I said at the beginning you are probably using a poor script to make appointments.

When you are using the telephone to make an appointment please remember you are only selling the appointment. If you give them too much information about the product or service you are giving them too much to object to. There is a very good script that I picked up about 15 years ago that will help you to sell the appointment. It is not my script but I have changed it from the original and I have found it to be very effective.

“John Smith Please”

“John Smith Speaking”

“John, This is (Your Name) from (Your Company). How are you today?

“I’m fine, how are you?”

“I’m fine, Thank you for asking”

Ice Breaker

“John, has my name been mentioned to you recently?”

Or “Has Peter Brown mentioned my name to you recently?”

Or “We are calling about the letter we sent to you, do you recall it?”

“Yes” or “No” or “Maybe” or “Don’t Know”

“Okay!”

“The Reason for the call today John, as you may be aware, (Your Company) have recently developed an idea on ???????? (Good Feature) for people in positions like yourself and I would be happy to drop by and give you the opportunity of seeing it. I am calling today to say that I will be in your area tomorrow around three and wondered, would you be there for about 7 minutes”

“Yes”

“Fine, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow around three” Hang up

This is a very soft approach and there is very little to object to in the script. If you have not tried this script then I recommend that you give it a go, it is very effective.

Well, there you go Graeme, I hope you find something useful here, let me know how it works

Thanks again for your interest and I look forward to seeing you again at our next Seminar

68 Performance Appraisals

2006-03-01T21:15:00.000+02:00

I was first exposed to formal performance appraisals about 25 years ago. Management systems were very different in those days, being far more autocratic and less participative.

The HR department of the company I was working for had just attended a 2 day workshop and were keen to implement what they had learnt. The other management however, were more of the opinion that subordinates should do as they are told and if they don’t like it find another place to work on the FIFO principle (That’s Fit In or Find Other employment), so spending time on appraisals seemed such a waste. The CEO, who was a little more enlightened, introduced annual appraisals as mandatory and so we had to do it.

My first appraisal came as quite a shock. Without having sight of the appraisal form I was seated with my boss and he proceeded to tell me that I was performing badly, I was a poor role model for my subordinates, I was not a team player and should not expect to make any advancement in the company. He then asked me to sign the form as an indication that I agree with his diagnosis after which I left. The whole process took 12 minutes.

Having had this experience of performance appraisals I felt confident that I could handle them with my team and made the mistake (not for the first time) of learning from my boss.

Twenty five years later some corporate companies have moved very little from this approach.

During the team break at one of my training sessions a few weeks ago I was discussing performance appraisals with a couple of delegates and they both had appointments to attend theirs in the following week. Neither was looking forward to the experience. It was generally agreed that by the members of that company that performance appraisals were a formal opportunity for the boss to put the subordinate in his or her place.

Far too often appraisals consist of the boss doing most of the talking, the subordinate being criticised between the occasional compliments, the boss focusing on personality, and discussion centering on the performance over the last year.

So how should they work?

In my ideal company performance appraisals should be every 6 months and should represent an opportunity for both the boss and the subordinate to improve the working relationship, measure the subordinate’s performance, discuss training needs for the future and identify future prospects and salary increases.

In advance of the agreed time for the appraisal both the boss and the subordinate should consider their performance using a predefined form. The questions to consider on the form will depend on the company but should but should include objective questions (measurable results) as well as subjective questions (opinions). Both the boss and the subordinate will rate themselves individually and then compare results at the appraisal. In my experience this sort of self appraisal has better results.

For sales people the questions should include:

· Sales Results

· Sales Quality

· Sales Activities

· Administration

· Customer Relations

· Competencies

· Training Job Knowledge

· Organisation

· Time Management

· Territory Management

· Expense Control

· Inter-company Relations

· Personal Attributes

Not only will there be questions focussing on the subordinates performance but also the way the boss manages the subordinate.

· Relationship with the subordinate

· Training opportunities offered

· Sticking to agreed standards

· Fairness

· Performance as a coach

The performance is an opportunity for both sides to form a closer working relationship work towards agreed future developments.

67 How to work for an Idiot

2006-02-20T21:12:00.000+02:00

My middle son works in the computer industry. I am not sure that “works” is a good word for it, they seem to spend as much time playing, as working. I guess if you can find a job that you consider as play then you have made it!..

Anyway my son tells me that when they have a customer who’s computer is not working because the customer has done something stupid, they will tell the customer that there was an “ID ten T” problem. (write it out if you haven’t smiled at this point)

The day after this discussion I picked up a book at Exclusive called “How to work for an Idiot” by John Hoover. Titles always fascinate me and this must be one of the best.

Which of us hasn’t worked for an idiot at one stage of our lives? Maybe you are working for an idiot right now. If you are, then this book is for you.

Paradoxically I don’t think this book was written for the people who are working for idiot bosses... No, I think this book was written for another group of people all together.

In the book, Hoover suggests that there are eight types of bosses:

The Good Boss

The God Boss

The Machiavellian Boss

The Masochistic Boss

The Sadistic Boss

The Paranoid Boss

The Buddy Boss

And the Idiot Boss

He suggests that there are some bosses that are good bosses but they are few and far between. The rest of us are idiots.

I am not of course going to tell you the full story, you need to read the book for that but I will quote a few words that Hoover wrote about the sadistic boss:

Take for example the practical joker sadistic boss that puts up signs reading “When I want your opinion I’ll give it to you” Ha-Ha. What these morons apparently don’t realise is people see through the psudo-humour for what it is - a reminder of who has the power.

If it so funny, why isn’t anybody laughing except the boss? There’s always the suggestion box with no bottom placed strategically over a wastebasket. Do you hear anybody laughing? I’ll never understand why people think making light of power disparity in the workplace is supposed to make it okay.

Like the mouse that has been caught, and not killed, the sadistic boss will not let you get away. She will keep you alive to torture you. If you try to transfer out of her department she will show up at your door holding your transfer request with R-E-J-E-C-T-E-D written across it in big red letters. You will pinch yourself to wake from the nightmare only to find that you are just pinching yourself and she is still standing there - with an evil smile. If you go around her or above her she will go to the Pope if necessary to get your transfer requested rejected.

The book continues on in this light hearted and interesting manner, and very quickly you notice a few symptoms of the I-Boss that are familiar. “But haven’t I done something like that sometimes” I heard myself saying.

Oh no... The book isn’t really written for the employee but rather for the Boss. There is a little of the I-Boss in all of us and this book will help you identify your own ID 10 T characteristics and hopefully encourage you to change them to be a better Boss in the future.

There are only really two types of Boss. The ‘Active Idiot’ and the ‘Recovering Idiot’. Since reading the book I am working hard to be in the later category.

66 The Victim

2006-02-01T21:11:00.000+02:00

I was chatting to a small group last week and one of them said to me “I would love to write a book but I can’t afford to take the time of work”

How often have I heard that or something like it. How easy is it to blame someone or something for our own mistakes.

There is a little of the victim in all of us. A victim would prefer to find someone to blame than find a solution. You will hear two or three victim statements everyday at work, and you will sometimes catch yourself being a victim. Consider the following:

Ÿ "I am sorry Boss, my report was late because the printer was broken”

It's the printer’s fault.

Ÿ "I am late this morning because the bus was early and I missed it."

It's the bus's fault.

Ÿ "We can't go out on your birthday Darling, because restaurants are too expensive"

It's the restaurant's fault.

By blaming somebody or something else for the situation we are in we can sit back in the comfortable knowledge that it is somebody else's responsibility to fix. The problem arises when you discover that by making it somebody else's responsibility you are giving away your ability to respond. (response - ability). Once you take responsibility for everything that happens in your life however can you empower yourself to make things work for you. For instance:

Ÿ "My report was late because I was cutting it too fine."

It's my Fault!

Ÿ "I got up late so I missed the bus"

It's my Fault!

Ÿ "We can't go out to dinner on your birthday Darling because I haven't earned enough this month" It's my Fault!

Once you have taken responsibility (the ability to respond) for everything that happens to you in your life you can change your status from a victim to a winner simply by adding action to the statement.

For Instance:

Ÿ "My report was late because I was cutting it too fine, but next month I will write the report early and I can take the disk to any printer to have it printed"

It's my fault but I've fixed it!

Ÿ "I am late this morning because I was late getting up but tomorrow I will leave earlier and I will catch it"

It's my fault but I've fixed it!

Ÿ "We can't go out to dinner this month because I haven't earned enough, but next month I will earn more and we will go out twice!"

It's my fault but I've fixed it!

The final stage here is to be a proactive winner. Proactive Winners would not have let the problem occur. They would have anticipated that there may be a problem and then solved it in advance.

For Instance:

Ÿ "I would have been late this morning because the bus was early but I left home earlier and caught it"

I fixed it in advance!

Ÿ "It might have been difficult to go out to dinner this month but I knew your birthday was coming up so I earned extra.

I fixed it in advance!

When faced with change there is a strong temptation to become a victim. Its much easier that way because victims take no responsibility for what is happening around them.

Ÿ "I lost my job this year because the company no longer requires widget makers"

It's the company's fault

Ÿ "We will have to cancel our holiday abroad because of the exchange rate"

It's the Rand's fault.

Ÿ "I lost my wife to another man because she was bored sitting at home all day"

It's my ex-wife's fault.

Ÿ "I lost all my money because the rain never came and the crops died"

It's the weather's fault.

In every Change Causality you will find a victim, in their opinion it is always the fault of somebody or something else. Of course there are few of us who can take responsibility for the state of the Rand and fewer still who consider that they have any control over the weather, but we can all take responsibility for the way in which these items influence us.

Ÿ "I lost my job this year because I failed to retrain and the company no longer requires widget makers"

It's my fault

Ÿ "We will have to cancel our holiday abroad because I didn't earn enough to take into account the fluctuating exchange rate"

It's my fault

Ÿ "I lost my wife to another man because I didn't take enough interest in her"

It's my fault

Ÿ "I lost all my money because I didn't insure the crops and the rain failed"

It's my fault

Once you have taken responsibility you have the ability to respond and you are only two short steps away from becoming a proactive winner.

Ÿ "I would have lost my wife to another man but I began to take a lot more interest in her, I changed my job so that I am at home more often during the week and even though we have less money we are much happier"

Change Winners know that they have to take responsibility for the way in which everything affects their lives because without that they have no control.

Victims are likely to become the casualties of change and they will continue to apportion blame as they slide down the slope to failure. Taking responsibility for the way everything affects you automatically gives you the ability to respond, offering you the chance to create a winning solution rather than be a casualty. The good news is that it is never to late to start.

65 Mentoring

2006-01-20T21:08:00.000+02:00

A couple of centuries ago, according to Homer’s Iliad, Odysseus had to rush off to the Trojan war, leaving his son, Telemachus, to grow up without a Father. If you believe the recent film, Brad Pitt and his mates knocked over the Trojan defences in a matter of a few hours but in fact the war lasted many years, that is, of course, if your believe Homer’s poem. The Greeks idea of a good time two centuries ago was to read poetry to each other just like we go to movies, so I guess there is just as little reason to believe today’s movies as yesterday’s poems. Anyway....

The Trojan war, was going to last a few years so Odysseus thought it would be a really good plan to leave the education of his son in the hands of his trusted friend Mentor. (now do you see where we are going?). Mentor was instructed to make sure that Telemachus became the good King that destiny decreed, so Mentor had to take on the role, not only as a surrogate parent, but also as a teacher, role model, trusted advisor, challenger, encourage, and councillor. Apparently Mentor did a good job and not only did Telemachus become a good King, but also later in life lent his name to a whole industry in telephone selling.

On a slightly more serious note, the point of today’s article is to discuss mentoring and it’s value in developing our young stars.

Those of us who have reached an age where we have gained some practical experience in our chosen field have a responsibility to begin to look for people to Mentor. These people have to be chosen carefully of course and not everybody is in a position or even want to be mentored.

Mentors can play a variety of roles:

Help new staff members to feel part of the organisation
Help protégés to set goals, plan careers and develop skills
Listen to problems, calm fears, provide feedback, and boost confidence
Provide a role model
Generally help, guide and even coach the protégé to greater achievement.

In my opinion any new member of a team should be allocated a Mentor. Their responsibility would include the following:

From Day one they would have to make connect with the new employee, make the introductions, point out which balcony the smokers congregate on, and generally make the employee feel welcome.
During the first few weeks the mentor will ensure that the new employee is part of the team and is never left out. One of the most common reasons for people leaving an organisation is that they feel they don't fit in.
If the relationship is working for both sides the Mentor can begin to take on the more important tasks of guiding, coaching and encouraging the protégé.
Regular meetings will be set up to help set targets and measure performance, other times may be set aside for formal or informal training sessions in areas that have been identified as in need of attention.
Care must be taken to encourage individuality. You do not want to be creating a clone of yourself however brilliant you think you are.

When coaching your protégé take care to avoid the following:

Lecturing instead of coaching - Coaching is usually a sharing of ideas not a one way dialogue
Confusing a coaching session with a disciplinary session
Don’t assume that your protégé is aware of a performance problem
Not being specific - Make sure you provide examples, dates and documentation to support your attempt to change your protégé’s poor performance.

Be aware that your protégé may also have a very different cultural background to yourself. Things that you assume “everybody knows” may not be common knowledge at all in the culture that the protégé comes from.

Finally I know from personal experience, that mentoring and coaching is not only great for the soul but also a steep learning curve for the mentor. We all have a lot to learn from each other and Mentoring is a great way to encourage that learning.

64 What the bleep do we know!

2006-01-02T21:04:00.000+02:00

I recently watched a great movie called “What the Bleep... do we know”. Okay I admit, it is not a great title for a movie and it will never be a blockbuster, but I found it to be the most influential movie I have watched this year and maybe this decade.

I am still trying to absorb the movie and I know I will have to watch it again if I am going to fully understand it’s message, but I wanted to share with you one of the experiments that the movie discussed and then tell you what this means to me.

The movie is not really a story; it is more of a documentary exploring how, what we see on the outside of us is a reflection of what we feel on the inside of us. Still with me? Good, because it gets deeper!

An experiment undertaken by a Japanese scientist Mr. Imoto, showed some interesting results with water under a high powered microscope. Mr. Imoto was interested in the molecular structure of water and what affects it. Water is, apparently, the most responsive of the four elements. Mr Imoto considered that water may respond to non-physical events, so he set up a series of studies in which he applied mental stimuli to water and photographed what he saw through a microscope.

He photographed the molecules of water from the Fujiwara dam, and then took pictures of the same water after it had been blessed by a Zen Buddhist Monk. The difference in the shape and design of the molecules was very clear.

Mr Imoto then photographed molecules of distilled water in a number of different containers. Each jar of water had a different feeling typed on a piece of paper and attached to it and left to sit overnight. The jars with words like “Love” and “Thank you” taped to them had molecules that were well ordered and beautiful in shape and design but the jars with less attractive emotions on them like “You make me sick” or “I will kill you” showed molecules that were jagged and unpleasant. It is not known why the molecules are effected in this way, just that they are.

90% of our bodies are made up of water.

The movie then goes on to say “Makes you wonder doesn’t it. If thoughts can do that to water, I wonder what our thoughts can do to us.”

Another experiment undertaken by the American military but not in the movie was described to me recently and I consider this also to be mind bending.

Our DNA, as you know, can be viewed under a microscope and looks like coiled threads.

In this experiment some DNA was extracted from a man (Not difficult, a swab in the mouth will do it) and examined while the donor of the DNA was shown a series of movies.

While the man was watching a horror movie the DNA strands coiled tightly but while he watched a love story the DNA strands relaxed and spread out. This would not be so remarkable except, the DNA was in a container three feet from the man, and yet what he was watching had a considerable effect on it.

They then moved the man into the next room and the same stimuli had the same effect. Moving the man further and further away did not seem to make any difference and even at a distance of 50 miles the man was still affecting his DNA. How does this happen? We do not know, but it makes you think doesn’t it.

Okay those two things are interesting but what have they got to do with you and me. Well I think these two pieces of information have a fundamental effect on what we do and how successful we are. Let me tell you something that happened to me about 25 years ago.

At that time I was living in a VW Kombi driving from London, touring Europe and Africa and returning to London. The trip took me two years to undertake but that is another, very long, story.

After touring Europe (Germany, Austria, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, etc.) For three months we decided to cross the Mediterranean and start through Africa. Our departure point from Europe was going to be Marseilles in Southern France, but we were not looking forward to it at all. In fact we were scared of Marseilles.

We had heard that Marseilles is a terrible port full of thieves and rapists and to carry a knife to protect ourselves, so that is what we did. Arriving in Marseilles late in the afternoon we parked the car in a public car park but the attendant was very unpleasant confirming our worst fears. I griped the knife in my pocket and we proceeded towards the port to buy our ticket for the ferry across the Mediterranean.

In the ticket office we were greeted by a very unpleasant sales person who told us that we had missed the ferry and the next one would be tomorrow. We paid the fare and were told to collect our tickets in the morning.

Stopping at a shop on the way back to the car we bought some food for the evening and thought we would stock up for Africa the following day. The people in the shop were very rude and that was the final confirmation that Marseilles was the worst City in Europe.

That evening we drove out of Marseilles parked at a very nice Motorway service station (These places in Europe are not like ours in SA. They are well designed, quite places with showers you can use, places to park for the night and safe.)

The evening meal was excellent. We opened and finished a lovely bottle of wine and were happy that we were, at last, off to Africa in the morning so our spirits rose.

We were feeling very good when we got up in the morning and after a shower we were ready for anything. Driving into Marseilles we were feeling great and parked in the same car park as the night before. The parking attendant, (the same one as yesterday) was pleased to see us again. He remembered the Kombi, and smiles warmly promising to look after it for us. In the ticket shop the people (the same as yesterday) were wonderful. We stayed with them for a while explaining that we were driving down to South Africa. I don’t think they believed us but they enjoyed the conversation and gave us a small gift to remember them by.

Into the shop to stock up on things that we thought would be hard to get in Africa, the owner came out and kissed us both on each cheek. His sister in the ticket shop had rung him and told him what we were doing. He had travelled in Algeria and knew what we would need to buy and we left the shop with a bottle of wine, another gift.

Later that afternoon on the ferry, we were excited to be finally on our way but disappointed to be leaving Marseilles. So what happened between day one and day two? How can Marseilles have changed so much in just one day?

Of course the answer is simple. Marseilles hadn’t changed, we had. We found in Marseilles on the first day exactly what we expected. It was a reflection of the way we were feeling. However, on the second day when our spirits were high, so were the people we met.

What you see on the outside of you is simply a reflection of what you feel on the inside of you.

One last thought for today. I was reading a note about how to avoid being raped on the streets and some of the things the article said was; walk tall, don’t look as if you are afraid, be positively going somewhere, smile, look people in the eye rather than looking away, be confident.

If you walk around fearful of being raped you are actually attracting the rapist. Isn’t that the same thing?

What you see on the outside of you is simply a reflection of what you feel on the inside of you.

63 We are all motivated by Pain and Pleasure

2005-11-28T21:03:00.000+02:00

What are you motivated by? When I ask this question at Seminars there are usually five or six things that get mentioned. Money, success, power, wining, love and even hate on occasions. Everybody is different and each occasion is different so it's hard to tie it down to one thing or another. When we explore this issue deeper, however each of the above drivers can be tied down to two things; The avoidance of Pain or desire for Pleasure.

I came across this idea some time ago in one of Anthony Robins early books and the principle works well.

Everything we do, we do to gain long or short term pleasure, or to avoid long or short term pain. I will give you some examples and as you are reading through try to fit them to your lifestyle and see how this principle works.

If you have a late night it's painful to get up at 05:30 the following morning but you do so to avoid the greater pain of being late for work.

It's painful to train but there is a greater pleasure in staying fit.

It's a great pleasure to eat chocolates and cream cakes but it may cause you long term pain from being over weight or unhealthy if you do.

You may put off completing your paperwork because it causes you pain, until the deadline when you do them because failure to complete the paperwork will cause greater pain.

When you give of yourself it may cause pain but the pleasure of giving is greater.

Pain and pleasure both for you or for your company are the only true motivates and you can use them to motivate yourself.

If you want to make a decision of any sort you start by preparing yourself for making the decision, defining the objectives and listing the criteria on which the decision is to be taken. Now go back to those three things and consider how the motivators of pain and pleasure can assist in this process.

When you are preparing yourself for making the decision focus your mind in the pain of not making the decision and the pleasure that a correct decision could bring you. When you are defining the objectives and listing the criteria of the decision you will find that they fit into two categories. The reduction of pain or the increase of pleasure.

As I said earlier, this pain / pleasure principle works just as well in your company as in your personal life. Company pain could include a reduction of profits, decrease in competitive advantage or loss of a valued employee, while company pleasure could be increase in staff moral, a drop in interest rates or a national industry award.

Having identified the areas of your decision making where this pain /pleasure principle can work, let us consider how it can work in making the decision stick.

Some decisions are tough and they can get tougher before they are through so you may need to keep re-enforcing the reasons why you took the decision in the first place. This is where the principle can help. Be aware of the painful reasons why you took the decision and the pleasure you will receive when the decision works out. When times get tough remind yourself of these things. Write them down if necessary and keep them in your pocket to glance at from time to time. This may sound odd but I can tell you they really work. If you don't believe me try it for yourself.

This principle can also work in other ways. If you have made a tough decision where you have to stop doing something that really gives you pleasure to make the decision work, like cutting back on your food or giving up smoking, try artificially replacing that pleasure with something that you really like to do. By doing this you effectively reward yourself for sticking to the decision.

This principle of Pain and Pleasure works in many ways if you put your mind to it and can be useful to motivate yourself to do what ever you set out to do.

62 Who knows Whom

2005-11-01T21:02:00.000+02:00

Two things have been said to me over the last few days that have prompted this article.

I have been amazed at the number of people who are interested in coming to work with me for a few days each month next year. I sent out a note to the people on my database telling them I am looking for a PR professional in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and that note has been passed around the country to friends and friends of friends. Many people have applied who were not on my database, but who knew me, knew of me, or just fancied the job.

Four people who applied used the phrase “It’s a small world” in the application letter and they are right, it is.

Yesterday I was listening to a great speaker from the UK, and he made the statement that we are just six people away from everybody in the world. This stuck in my mind, along with a load of other stuff I will tell you about another time, and I decided to do the math to see if that is true. (Those of you who know me well, will know I am sceptical until I can prove it to be true).

The proof is as follows. We probably all know maybe 50 people. Some we know well, others we have just a passing acquaintance with. People from your work, people from your golf club, church, synagogue or mosque, people you have known since school, parents of your children’s friends, neighbours etc. I am sure you could easily get to 50. If we are just 6 steps away from knowing everybody in the world the figures look something like this: I know 50 people, if they all know 50 people each, that is 2500 people, if they all know 50 the number goes up to 125,000, then 6,250,000, then 312,500,000 and finally after just 6 steps the number is 15,625,000,000. Now presuming that some of the people I know, you know as well, it is not difficult to see how, in just six steps, we could get to the 7 billion people in the world.

“It is not what you know that matters but who you know”. We have all heard that statement often but I would like to expand that thought. It is not just who you know but who your friends know that may be really valuable.

As a salesman many years ago, on my first day the sales manager asked me to sit and write down a list of all the people I know. My friends, my family, my previous customers, and anybody I was vaguely aquatinted with. He understood that these people may be good opportunities for me to sell to. If I know them they are more likely to trust me and therefor buy my products. Interestingly he never asked me to write down the people my friends knew. A friend of a friend is almost as good as a friend. That is why referral business is so much more powerful and effective than cold calling.

Maybe there is a company right now that you would like to do business with, Microsoft, for instance or Standard Bank. They have been in your sights for a few months but you have not been able to get an appointment. They are too busy, they already have a supplier, they do not need your product or service, sound familiar?

Now is the time to make use of your network, tell your friends that you are wanting to make contact with Microsoft and do they know anybody who can help. Maybe they don’t know anybody directly but they may know somebody who knows somebody. Don’t be afraid to ask.

Never be afraid to ask!

You have heard me say this before but “Timid salespeople have skinny kids.”

There is a book on the market, published each year by McGregor’s called “Who owns whom” This is a great book and a must for every sales team. It outlines the ownership of all the major companies in South Africa.

I have an idea that an even better book would be “Who knows whom” and maybe you should start to write your own book know. So send this article to your friends and ask them who they know. Keep that list because you never know which contacts you may need in the future. It’s not what you know that matters but who your friends know!

While you are at it you could recommend that they subscribe to Richard’s Review then we will all benefit from it. (www.richardmulvey.com)

By the way, the British speaker I listened to yesterday was Nigel Risen. Thanks Nigel, great presentation!

61 Seeing it from the other person’s viewpoint

2005-10-05T20:01:00.000+02:00

I read a very interesting article this week from Paul du Toit (paul@congruence.co.za)

about the two sides of the leadership coin and it reminded me of a story I read many years ago that is very valid for sales people, teachers, or in fact for anybody who would like to be convincing.

Hold up a coin in front of you. What shape is it? It is round of course (unless you happen to be in China right now and you have a very old coin).

You would argue that it is round to any person who comes past. You would bet your last rand on the shape of that coin because you know. It Is Round!

Now imagine a person standing at ninety degrees from you looking at the same coin. They will be seeing it from the side, not from the front like you. What shape would they see the coin?

Round? Of course not. They would see that the coin is straight.

The shape of the coin depends upon your point of view. The coin could be round, straight or even oval depending on where you are seeing it from and for each person who looks at it, there could be no possible argument as to the shape of that coin.

I am in the middle of a two day training course with a group in Johannesburg. Unusually the group is equally split between the major cultures in our country. We have an equal number of black delegates, white delegates, Indian delegates and coloured delegates and I, of course, am British. Because we come from different cultures we have had different experiences, we were all brought up in different towns, we are all different religions and consequently we all have differing points of view.

My challenge as a trainer is not simply to give them the facts or to outline the skills as I see them. My challenge is to understand their point of view and to help them see mine. My challenge is to hold up a perfectly round coin and expect that some people in the room will see it as straight. And they will be right!

Selling, is not a matter of just knowing your products, although that is very important, selling is all about seeing the problem from your customer’s point of view and making sure your customer knows that you are able to empathise in this way.