Brands, stories, offerings, once successful, eventually get worn out and tired. In these tighter times, few companies know where to find customers and grow revenues.
Finding customers is the big challenge today. You need a very good website, CRM, and marketing touch system that keeps customers engaged until they buy. You need to be connected to your fans and build through your use of social media. Those are the essentials of today’s business. Don’t forget to network and be known in your community and sell like heck. Be effective – be productive.
Don’t:
Don’t depend on your CRM alone. It won’t work if your people can’t sell.
Don’t depend on social media marketing alone. It is great and exciting but someone has to customize and educate prospects as to what is best for them. Ah, yes… your salespeople.
Don’t just depend on your website – it is more like a public relations tool. It is vital because your prospects go there first. It can order-take but you want relationships.
Don’t think you are more productive because you are getting more orders from the internet. You are, but you want to keep customers. Only salespeople can build relationships and repeat business.
Don’t use just one tool to find customers. Referrals are still the number one business getter. Sales calls with helpful information is #2. Marketing is #3 with a continual six months to a year campaign to keep customers engaged until they buy. #4. Networking still matters and works for many.
Don’t sell with an old story. Your story to the market is very important. You need to educate your market.This includes what problems are out there in your industry, what a sophisticated, buyer/customer should do to get a solution to their problems, and how do you match up? It has to WOW, get attention, be real and be quick. Your story has to be backed up in print, advertising, on the web, with your inside people, on the phone and especially with your sales people. Now you are organized to succeed with all parts of your business supporting the story about your offering.
Don’t stop building, training, and motivating sales people. This is a real missing today. Managers have gone missing. Business people are getting bluffed out thinking technology is the only answer. Sales people who are creating business from internet or advertising leads are still the biggest answer. If you find a hunter, someone who finds and creates markets, love them to death, challenge them and keep them. They are golden.
Do:
Have your website with compelling, helpful messages and a great story.
Keep learning and implementing referral-getting strategies.
Update your marketing plan with a touch program that keeps prospects engaged for a year or so until they buy.
Go where the money is. Wal-mart is still excelling in Canada because a good deal is a number one motive in a tighter economy. What do your customer’s want? Find out. Don’t assume or prejudge.
What would five or six customers tell you? What else could you add to your products or service to cause your customers to give you sales? Markets move, go find the money.
For goodness sake, be an effective manager. Hire, coach and train sales people. Equip them, motivate them. When did we stop believing in that? Have a good hiring system that uncovers whether you have selected the right sales people but don’t forget to coach and train them.
We notice two things in the last five years and we have facts:
Employees don’t talk to their managers much anymore. How is it possible coaching is even going on??
Sales training has gone down significantly. How can any sales person get refreshed, refocused and retrained? Every professional needs practice or the skills and attitudes go south.
Overall, growing revenues is a critical focus in today’s economy. We all know the essentials -let’s get at them!
ACTION:
What areas of the “do’s and don’ts” need careful study to determine if those areas are working for your organization?
What are some things you will do to make them work better?
Have a great week!
As always, if you have specific questions e-mail me and I will respond quickly. kdcrone@dalecarnegie.ca
Get on the list
We are excited about celebrating our one hundreth year beginning in January 2012. As result, we created an offering to give a elected number of businesses quick and and easy ways to build their business. We are creating a list of those business people who want to be informed of this special offer in celebration of our 100 years. If you wish to be added to the list, click on my email below and we’ll keep you informed.
Overall, these strategies and techniques will help you put innovation into your organization’s DNA, set up ways to grow revenues, operate in such a way that you can hit stretch goals and improve the capacity and competitiveness of your team.
Email me to get on the list: kdcrone@dalecarnegie.ca
The good news is: Dale Carnegie’s Principles to Reduce Stress and Worry work, like a charm, virtually 100% of the time. I know, because I’ve been living them non-stop, night and day for months now.
The bad news is: the reason I’ve been living them is because in April I was diagnosed with Stage Two breast cancer (malignant and metastizing).
Monday July 4th I sat in the Oncology Department of Toronto East General Hospital while one of the very kind nurses slowly injected two enormous, horse-sized syringes of vile looking red liquid into my IV line.
“Are you very far along in your treatment?” the elderly patient seated to my left inquired. “How long have you been coming in?”
I paused to think about timelines before answering.
“Geez, to be truthful, it’s hard to say,” I responded. “In February I found a lump, in March I had a mammogram, April I had a biopsy, May I had my first surgery, June I had my second surgery and today, here I am in Chemo. It’s been such a blur – I sort of feel like I got hit by the Breast Cancer Bus.”
My nurse howled with laughter. “I’ve heard it described in lots of ways,” she gasped, “but never quite like that!”
Actually, the visual image fits the experience exactly. There I was, standing blithely in the middle of an empty open road – good health and opportunity stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction – and then WUMP! Without warning, from nowhere, came hurtling this huge bus with a giant pink ribbon painted on the side.
I didn’t so much get flattened as plastered on to the bumper and hauled along for a wild, careening ride into deep valleys (“the lump has the appearance of a cancerous lesion”) and over high hills (“we hope you can get away with a lumpectomy and radiation”) through muddy swamps (“the cancer has spread to your lymph nodes”) and dusty, bumpy roads (“You will need chemotherapy. The bad news is your hair will fall out, but the good news is you’ll go through instant menopause!”)
One of the cheerful ironies of the whole process was the fact that I spent so much time running and getting in shape last winter. I noticed that the words “half-marathoner” were penned in at the top of every one of my medical charts. Finally, unable to contain my curiosity any longer, I made the mistake of asking my oncologist why everyone made such a note of the fact that I had run two half marathons.
“Oh, because you are young and fit and healthy,” she explained enthusiastically, “we can really hit you hard!” She illustrated this by slamming her closed fist into her open hand. “We can give you the MOST toxic chemicals, because you’ll be able to tolerate it. If you were 70 and infirm, the chemo itself might kill you and there’d be much less we could do for you.”
“Wow,” I winced, trying to muster up some enthusiasm of my own. “The most toxic chemicals. That’s great news! I’m so glad. Thank you for telling me that.”
I kept as busy as my health and surgery schedule would allow in the weeks that followed. During the daytime and when teaching Dale Carnegie classes at night I could stay focused on the positive, but frequently I would awake in the wee small hours of the morning in a cold sweat, heart pounding, my mind racing from one catastrophic scenario to the next. From death or dismemberment in the worst case to ‘mere’ poverty in the best, it seemed I was subject to watching a fast-moving, unending display of horror footage that reeled out hour after hour in the early morning hours. It got so bad that soon I would be terrified just to open my eyes and find myself awake in the dark.
“Oh, no!” I would recoil instantly. “It’s 2:00 am and I’m awake! Here it goes again – the Panic Attack Nightmare Terror Episode!”
Fortunately, I got a hold of myself after a few wretched weeks. I realized I was living one of Dale Carnegie’s fundamental truths: “Most of us have little trouble ‘losing ourselves in action’ while we have our noses to the grindstone and are doing our day’s work. But the hours after work – they are the dangerous ones. Just when we’re free to enjoy our own leisure, and ought to be the happiest – that’s when the blue devils of worry attack us…when we are not busy, our minds tend to become a near-vacuum. Every student of physics knows ‘nature abhors a vacuum.’ The nearest thing to a vacuum that you and I will probably ever see is the inside of an incandescent electric-light bulb. Break that bulb-and nature forces air in to fill the theoretically empty space.
“Nature also rushes in to fill the vacant mind. With what? Usually with emotions. Why? Because emotions of worry, fear, hate, jealousy, and envy are driven by primeval vigor and the dynamic energy of the jungle. Such emotions are so violent that they tend to drive out of our minds all peaceful, happy thoughts and emotions.”
I decided I was not going to let the “primeval vigor” of emotions like worry and fear get the best of me. I hauled my copy of “Stop Worrying” to bed with me every night, along with a yellow highlighter, and committed to open the book and begin reading every single night that my eyes opened before 5am.
For several nights in a row, I woke up like clockwork at 2am but true to my promise, before I had even five seconds to start imagining radical mastectomies and foreclosed mortgages, I would open the book and start reading and highlighting. My copy now is so hightlighted that you can see yellow highlighted right through the paper of almost any page you turn to.
I found I particularly love the chapter, “How to Cure Depression in 14 Days.” In fact, I loved it so much I read it every night I woke up for about 5 nights in a row – I have huge passages of it memorized now, and not only did I never get tired of re-reading it, I found the increasing familiarity of the words so comforting that it started to have the same automatic effect upon me that the panic attacks had earlier: I was developing the habit of cultivating peaceful, happy thoughts, rather than their opposites.
Then, I stopped waking up altogether. For almost a month, I slept through every night and woke up surprised: “OhmyGod, I slept in until 6:30!” I would think, delighted and grateful.
Almost as quickly as they had come, the “blue devils of worry” were banished by a book and a consistent process to use it.
“I now know with a conviction beyond all doubt, that the biggest problem you and I have to deal with – in fact, almost the ONLY problem we have to deal with – is choosing the right thoughts,” Carnegie wrote.
“If we can do that, we will be on the highroad to solving all our problems. The great philosopher who ruled the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius, summed it up in eight words – eight words that can determine your destiny: ‘Our life is what our thoughts make it.’”
And the thoughts to which you need to pay closest attention, he might have added, are the ones you have at 2am.
During a recent election campaign, I created a “loonie jar” for our office. I typed up a label which read “As a certified Dale Carnegie instructor, I am personally and professionally committed to:
maintaining a positive attitude,
leading by example,
working with enthusiasm, and
spending absolutely zero minutes in a day criticizing, condemning or complaining.
I need your help to maintain this commitment. If you catch me griping, NAIL ME ON IT and I will put $1 in this jar for refreshments later.”
At the office, I read the label to my team and signed my name to it in front of them. Surprisingly, my most argumentative volunteer stepped forward and declared…Read full column.
Summer is over. For Canadians, this means back to work with a little more intensity. I had a couple intense conversations with some readers recently. They said that Canadians aren’t as intense about success anymore. I asked why, and they said they weren’t sure but do not see the competitive “win at all costs, being willing to put in whatever time it takes” behavior anymore. The question I asked is “Can you have the success you want without putting in the time? Can you outdo the other guy and does hard, focused work still matter?” They said that no one wants to sacrifice their lifestyle for promotions or a little more money. Getting home to walk the dog wins out over taking a course to improve your capacity to succeed, or sitting down with a successful person to receive some mentoring. You hear “I can’t, I have to go to yoga to feel better.” Is this the way it is for you and/or your people – a smaller “fire in the belly” to succeed?
One of my best mentors couldn’t see how his many companies could prosper with people operating like that. Stu would say, “Business is an intense, fun game played with producers. It is not for those who think they can succeed without putting in of focused, result producing, time.” Maybe they are the same people who buy things without earning the money first. Or get in debt with lines of credit and 20% credit cards. They just expect that they should have things because they want them or that they should be successful simply because they want to. Now Stu would not be against walking a dog (he walks his) or against yoga (he really looks after himself). It is a matter of priorities and one priority supports another. If you are working in a business or own one, then being healthy but broke doesn’t work. In business being broke isn’t an option.
In our real world of business we need to create our own success. No one else will. Your education won’t look after you even though we are better educated than any at other time in our history. Government or big corporations no longer offer total security. You just can’t act retired at 36. You need to keep learning and growing. This is in spite of how many things you want or how relaxed you want to feel, or how much fun you want. To succeed, we all have to find and meet the challenges of our work or business if business success is what we really want. This can include good friends, family, fun, recreation, fitness and stress free times, as well as money and recognition. It’s doing something because you enjoy winning and enjoy what you are doing.
Just as we shouldn’t get bluffed out by jumping on the latest fad diet thinking that it will solve our immediate weight problems, we need to see the big outcome of what it is we want (overall good health)and create the appropriate lifestyle. We shouldn’t get bluffed out thinking balance is the answer to everything. It is as if people who didn’t like watching their parents work hard, conclude that working hard is bad and stressful. They may solve the stress problem but what about the big outcome (success) they want and can have? You can solve many problems and still not have the life and success you want. Moving away from things doesn’t assure you will be pulled toward what you want. All of us have to design our workdays and life so that we do the biggest things that matter. It is not about time or work. It never was. It is about being productive with the time we have on behalf of what we want. Many who have a lack of vision think they have a better life because they don’t work too hard. The idea is to have a vision around the successful life you want and work hard to get it.
Describe what it is that you want and your priorities. Say them out loud.
What are the biggest and most important challenges of your job or business that if you faced them would support your vision and help you get what you aspire. Say them. You know them. Now get at them with all the gusto you can muster everyday and don’t mess around or get distracted or get bluffed out believing in some magic short cuts. There aren’t any. Produce. Work. Succeed. It’s easier to stand out because so few know what they want, have designed their life around priorities, and created the fire in the belly every day to compete, produce and win. They are victims of recessions, downsizing, poor management and many other circumstances. They haven’t done much to grow their skills and have taken few risks. They lowered their vision but saw a lot of good TV. Too few know the joy success can bring and too few are willing to totally commit themselves to anything.
Someone said to me that only 15% are interested in learning how to succeed. That is not you. So that means the field is wide open. Don’t listen or hang out with the 85%. Get growing and going no matter how things are right now. It is how successful people are. It is how you are. At the end of the day you will be proud of what you have done and say “I am glad I came this way”.
Let’s kick some butt in the marketplace this fall.
How is that for intensity?
As always, if you have specific questions e-mail me and I will respond quickly. kdcrone@dalecarnegie.ca
The classic book “How To Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie (pictured) was first published in 1936. This week, a new edition of the title was released, and it is packed with all new information for the digital era.
Over the past 75 years or so, while our means and ways have shifted toward the electronic, our motives have remained fairly constant. We still want people to like us. We still need people to do us favors. We still need to balance the personal and the professional in our friendships.
“One cannot argue that the fundamental techniques originally crafted by Carnegie, including how to be genuinely interested in other people, how to be a good listener and how to win people to your way of thinking by having them respect you, are not long-standing theories,” said Peter Handal, chief executive at Dale Carnegie & Associates, in an interview with VentureBeat.
“However, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogging, our workplace is forever changed. Gone are the days of building a friendship through face-to-face communications; instead we resort to email, texting, phone calls and video sessions for meetings.”
But Handal says we can still succeed in being professional, likable and helpful to others using these new media and Carnegie’s original philosophies. Read full article.
Remember the days when institutional selling (working accounts) was how we did business or selling to individuals was how companies operated? Retail selling still exists, but even that has changed considerably.
There used to be four distinct models:
1) The product peddler (a biased seller of facts and benefits), had to sell volume in order to make a living and needed leads to call. Marketing and advertising doesn’t seem to work like it used to. Peddlers are no longer as effective as they were.
2) The commercial visitor made a lot of nice guy and political calls, and was usually technically competent. They had to make a lot of calls hoping someone they met or who received a brochure, would call them back. Today with markets changing it is difficult to reach prospects and, the visit has been replaced by the Internet.
3) The consultative sales person. This person is good at uncovering the needs of prospects but, in today’s global and connected world, the prospect thinks they already know the issues, are overwhelmed with possible solutions, generally don’t believe any of them, and wind up doing little to improve. This highly talented salesperson can’t get enough appointments to work their magic.
4) The sustaining resource. This person used to own the market. They lived off high level referrals because they became like a staff member. They knew their client’s business and could add value that kept them in demand. This type of player is few and far between.
The question is what style works today?
Unfortunately nothing works well unless your business setup, business strategy, vision and current reality regarding your offering are carefully examined and re-thought. The question should be, “What is needed today to find and close the volume and kind of business we want?” Nothing works without a little thought anymore because so much has changed. For example, what could you say about your offering that is compelling and resonates with your target market and what their motivations are today?
We recently analyzed our last 16 projects with corporate clients who wanted to generate more revenue. The most successful projects were those that started with a meeting or two around this kind of re-thinking. We had to convince the client that they needed to do this and it wasn’t easy, especially when we dealt with people who were delegated the project. They were afraid to initiate a meeting where the big questions were asked. Applying training solutions without connecting to the business strategy set-up and aspirations of the organization is expecting too much. Maybe better product peddlers are needed when your offering is hot, but who knows? It’s management’s job to know. By doing some mindful thinking, you can create a project that will address the real causes of stagnant sales and then connect and train everyone, including management, to the design of what is needed to move forward. All the potential participants who need to bring the offering and story to market should get a chance to think through what they need to be good at so they are competent with what the business needs. It is definitely easier helping people change or improve when they are engaged. They have more desire to do so. Managers are required to show leadership by adjusting what they do as well. After all, they unknowingly keep the original setup of the business going the way it is in the first place. We always find that if you begin with an openness to see reality and generally appreciate your people for being engaged, then things happen naturally. Everyone likes to figure things out, perform, have fun getting better as a team, and they are surprised at the talent and potential already there.
If you want to increase sales, then I would suggest you don’t get bluffed out thinking selling is dead. Heck, even a cold call or drop by call could work today since it would be novel. The point is, selling still exists and we can all do it better. To make people better it takes more thought than pushing sales techniques.
If you want to find more customers and pull some of the potential out of your sales team, create a development project that will result in a connected, engaged, and skilled team. Here is how to make it work:
1. Have an outside, unbiased, non political training consultant engage management in a strategic conversation regarding market, customers shifting needs, what you offer and it’s match to the needs, the strategy to build the business, the story to the market and the plan to execute on it all. If the outside consultant/coach/trainer is just a product peddler, get rid of them. Find one who will do a thorough job of making sure development is connected to where you are going as a business.
2. Engage management, employees, and participants. Get them to “think out” their part, their needs, before any training. Don’t just lay training on them.
3. Make sure the training/development isn’t just a knowledge dump. The internet does that already. Knowledge only matters for 15% of the effectiveness of training. It’s the other components like analysis of needs, upfront goal setting, practice over weeks, on the job application, one on one and group coaching, reporting, follow up and more coaching.
If you short cut this, you will wind up with little impact and results.
Here are some questions to answer in the next couple of days.
• Have we looked at what is causing the need for new customers beyond blaming poor producers? (For example, shifting market, the offering, etc.)
• Have we begun a process to build and develop sales talent? (my advice is get an outsider. They are quicker, better, and know what they are doing) What is the cost if you don’t do this? My suggestion is begin looking for help…now.
Have a great week!
As always, if you have specific questions e-mail me and I will respond quickly. kdcrone@dalecarnegie.ca
This year I will be teaming up with my good friend in Pittsburgh, John Rodgers, to conduct a weekly radio and on-line show on “Waking Up Your Business.”
We will address ‘How to implement the six strategies to wake up your business, perk up your career and continually build a successful life.’ All you have to do is join us online for 5 -10 -15 minutes or for a full hour. Do it from your Smartphone, IPad or desktop. Here is the link to past shows featuring John Rogers.
Our show broadcasts Wednesdays between 4 – 6 PM Eastern
Check back here Wednesdays at 5 PM for our first interview http://taeradio.com/
The 6 Biggest Challenges In Waking Up Your Business
Look on the right-hand side for a link LIVE or later for archived shows.
You may be asked to install an add-on – it’s safe to do so.
Note: Kevin will be on the WebRadio Show Wednesday, from 4-6PM EST.
A few weeks ago my old friend Joe called to say hello. He has been an entrepreneur, investor, family man and a friend for many years. Joe divides his time between his home in Northern Ontario and the Bahamas. A pretty good life. We reminisced about past fishing trips with the boys doing guy things, our families, business, and eventually got to health.
“Nothing matters unless you have your health,” he said. He went on to say “The biggest factor is controlling stress. I got rid of a lot of it and feel wonderful. I eat well, don’t smoke, drink little and am always moving around, but stress is the biggy.” Listening to him made me wonder if everyone realizes how much controlling stress means to our lives, to achieving our goals and to saying alive and happy.
Another friend, Bruce Owen-Wahl of CIBC called. We talked about how we used to run out the door at 6:45 a.m. every day with a banana in hand (for breakfast), get home late, lay in bed with a kink or pain in our neck or chest, worrying about how we were going to survive tomorrows schedule. We didn’t take time for health at all. We just wanted to produce and build the business. There is no doubt that people are more aware of what it takes to achieve optimum well being…….
Eating right! What does it take today to know the effect of food on your body, creating the way of eating designed to give you the greatest possible amount of nutrition and avoiding foods that negatively affect your health? Too much fat, sugar, salt and processed foods are the bad guys. Eating enough vegetables, fruits, grains and proteins are the good ones. Who doesn’t know that? Anyone can look it up.
Moving our body frequently enhances your fitness and prevents or reduces the effects of chronic illness. Your future is dependent on moving regularly, walking, running, yoga, working out at a gym, whatever! We all know this.
Strengthening mental health and making smart lifestyle choices. Maximizing relationships with others, getting sleep, setting health goals and working on them with a professional. No smoking, excessive drinking, drinking more water, taking vitamins, adding probiotics. Again, we all know this, right?
And finally, controlling stress. Most diseases are worsened or caused by stress. (heart disease, diabetes, stroke, arthritis, depression) You can do all the above, eat well, move often, have a healthy life style and good career only to have stress do you in. Conversely, if you are not working on those things, you cause more stress. It’s stressful being unhealthy and can be depressing. I would guess few realize this.
Regardless, all of us need to examine how stress gets us and what we can do about it. (Read “how To Stop Worrying and Start Living” a great classic by Dale Carnegie as a place to start). As with everything, we can do something that moves us forward.
I notice when I am exercising, eating well, planning and delegating well at the office, I feel good. When I remember to laugh and make fun of many things, I feel loose. Don’t you? Now just feeling good isn’t the only goal. We still aren’t entitled to success. We certainly need to produce and put in the time to achieve.
We can also create a plan to eat well, move often, make good lifestyle choices and manage stress to go with our business plans. When we do, we have a good chance of having a healthy, happy life. Set the goals and actions for each week. It’s tough being an effective business person unless you are a healthy one. The most successful people I know have health, family, finances, relationships and business skills in good shape. It is easy to forget to update our health plans along with our business plans.
This week, invest an hour, maybe on a Saturday morning, to develop a plan. It doesn’t take discipline (who has that?) We always have to re-think, plan and execute that which isn’t second nature.
Look at your salt, sugar, fat, fruits and vegetable intake. Come on, it’s easy. What is your plan to improve?
What is your plan to exercise and move more often?
What is your mental health and lifestyle plan?
What can you do to learn the effects of stress on your body?
What is your plan to manage it?
Everyone can take an hour to reset their health and well being plan. I suggest we get it done immediately.
Thanks Joe. Good to see you have the good life. We all want it and can have it. Your plan always takes longer than you think but so what. Just begin – you’ll get there.
Have a great week!
As always, if you have specific questions e-mail me and I will respond quickly. kdcrone@dalecarnegie.ca
