As a leader or manager one of the most common questions we get asked is how do I focus on keeping staff motivated as part of my job?
The answer is both complex and simple all at once. The nature of how people are motivated is unique, individual and highly personal, meaning that there are many different considerations to take into account for each person and a multitude of answers to the same question for a team of people.
Read More “Leadership Series – The Psychology of keeping staff motivated”
This is the most skilled aspect within solution selling. In many cases when products or service are required to be actively sold, the most successful and consistent sales people will have the skills and behavioural competence to position what they offer against the identified needs and challenges the customer faces.
Read More “Tips from a Sales Trainer – Part 4 – Needs Analysis”
Understanding your customer’s problems requires you to not focus on your product or service.
If you haven’t read it already, then have a look at our Tips from a Sales Trainer Part 1 – Rapport building – A game of chance or a key skill to develop?
Typical sales training has a focus around understanding your product or service, what it does, how many bells and whistles it has as well as how to position it with a client with the assumed expectation that they will salivate uncontrollably as the slickly honed patter is trotted out by the sales person.
Read More “Tips from a Sales Trainer – Part 3 – Understanding your customer’s problems”
The power of a customer focused verbal agenda
In our first post, we looked at building rapport. You’ve now mastered that and built good rapport, and you now want to move the conversation to a business focus, which is easy to get wrong and lose the opportunity very quickly. We now move to turning it into business.
Read More “Tips from a Sales Trainer – Part 2 – Moving from Rapport to Business”
There is no doubt that rapport building as a sales skill seems natural to some and alien to others. Our differing personalities contribute heavily to this point, and as a sales trainer with over 25 years in the game, I still see experienced sales people struggle to demonstrate natural rapport building skills.
We love it when we get feedback from our clients. We love it even more when the feedback is as good as this.
Comms-care is a leading provider of channel network & server support solutions. They work with over 700 channel partners and provide support to over 30,000 active contracts. Our role was to provide additional focus to their team’s selling skills and provide the additional tools and skills to enable team managers to become more effective leaders.
With recent Barclaycard research finding that 82% of UK SMEs have been negatively affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, employers will inevitably have some tough and uncomfortable decisions to make in the coming weeks and months – indeed these may have already been made.
My Manager has called another in a series of virtual meetings.
Question. Was your last conference call amazingly useful, well managed, succinct and full of actions that you all implemented successfully?
Likely Answer. Not completely no!
Many of you will work in rapidly changing businesses, or at least have progressive views on the use of tech within your businesses. Which means that some of you will be very familiar with virtual meetings already – but that doesn’t mean everyone in your teams and contributing to your projects are. Often this spectrum of familiarity can lead to issues on getting the most from your virtual meetings.
So before we look at some simple things you can do, always remember that a virtual call is different than a face to face meeting in that we don’t get as much chance to use our body language so what we say is much more relevant.
Sometimes getting a direct and forthcoming response to your questions can be a struggle, which should remind us to use people names: Asking open questions usually results in stony silence and by using people’s names it lets them know who should respond and who you want to hear from – at least that will start the ball rolling, as some people are less willing to get involved on a virtual conference call than they would be in the office!
5 more ways to make your next conference call better:
How can we improve the experience with a little better preparation – particularly if we are organising them?
Virtual meetings will likely constitute larger and larger parts of our collaborative working now that many of us are working from home- so try these tips out and let us know what other tips you have to making these calls more enjoyable, productive and useful for everyone?
