Friday, June 29, 2007

Announcement! Do you know of any Sales Champion?


At Asia Sales Academy, we want to recognise the best people in our field who have contributed and make a difference to the lives of others.

Thus if you know of any great sales professionals ... insurance, real estates, MLM, automotives, or corporate (B2B), let us know. Tell us about his or her achievements. We appreciate them for their exemplary performance.

You can let us know via the comment page, or leave us a note at the web site address after my name. Help a friend who has been outstanding!

teck beng
www.coachme2sell.com

Friday, June 22, 2007

How to Recruit and Retain talents?

Recent meetings with a number of CEOs surface a challenge that all of them are having ... identifying, recruiting and retaining the best people.

Here is what I teach participants in leadership and management seminars. Sales managers (or managers to be) find this process to be very useful and effective.


How to Identify?

Before that, perhaps it is wise to think about what do we want to find out about the potential candidate.

3 things:

1) Character (driven? motivated? focus?)
2) Personality (outgoing or introvert? emotional or logical? team player?)
3) Ability (skills, qualification and experience)

In most cases, the 3rd objective can easily be met by upfront filtering - informing the candidates what is required for the position and going through the resume. During the interview, it will be the job of the interviewer to determine the 1st two.

How do we go about doing that? 3 ways too ...

1) Powerful questions such as the following can reveal a great deal ...
# why do you want leave your last job?
# what do you value most in life?
# what do you like best about ... ?

2) Profiling tools (such as DiSC, MBTI) give you insights into the inner working of the person. Sometimes, even in areas that the person is not aware of. The profiling exercise can be done on the same or different day as the interview.

3) Situational tests
These tests bring out the most instinctive response of the participants. You can tell what kind of person they are from the way they respond. Situational tests do not have to be complicated and elaborated. They can come in the form of simple games and questionnaires as well.


How to Recruit?

During this process, you are offering the position to your best candidate. So you are selling. You should go back to the fundamentals of selling - finding out the need and wants and offering something that meet them.

Unfortunately, most people do not know what they want!

For example, sales manager often ask new sales profession how much do they want to earn every month?

Say, if the reply is $10k, than the manager will help to calculate how many sales is required to make that amount of commission. The manager can also estimate how much work is required to produce these sales, assuming a standard ratio for every close within a certain number of qualified prospects.

So now, the new staff knows exactly how much work is necessary to achieve his dream. Will he or she be committed enough to do it? Yes, but in most cases, no.

Why? Well, when the actual work started, often people find it too hard, tough or even time consuming! They then "downgrade" their dream.

Or the other possibility is that their priorities may change ... they may now become less ambitious and focus on their families. Or it could the other way round, they become more ambitious and now both the job and company are too "small" for them.

This is where your profiling tools can help too. You can tell the need of a person from his or her personality type.

Together with questioning skills, you will be able to discover what each candidate wants.


How to Retain?

In the 1st place, ask why would anyone leave a team?

Well, the answer will be: their expectations are not met, and there is little (or no) hope of meeting their expectations in the future.

So, the next logical step will be: Find out what are their expectations - which you already did in step 2.

However, nothing stays constant for more than a hundred days. What you should do is continuously communicate. Create a constant feedback loop through meetings, lunches, tea breaks and gatherings so that you can monitor when their expectations changes.

Communication also builds trust.

Like all relations - the element of trust is a critical success factor. The employee must trust that they are in good hands and their expectations will continued to be met.

The main thing about trust is that the staff must find the superior dependable and reliable. This stage can only be attained after a period of working together. To achieve this, you will have to go back to basic - your consistency in words, actions and thoughts.

teck beng
www.coachme2sell.com

Saturday, June 9, 2007

With increasing consumers' expectation, how do you manage to ensure customers' satisfaction?


Today’s consumers are different from those 15 years ago ......

More than a decade ago, someone who wants to buy a television genuinely wants a television. Today, they expect it to be network enable, compatible with most PCs, digital cameras and view cams and at the same time user friendly.

Some time ago petrol stations were for people who needed petrol. Today, people not only refill their tank, shop for groceries and fill up their stomach all at the same time, they do their banking too.

Consumers these days expect one-stop shop. They expect you to have the solution to all their problems.


As a trainer who has helped countless sales professionals and business owners, what do I advise my students to do?

3 areas you can work on...

1) Use technology

This is perhaps the most obvious way to increase your ability to meet expectation ... Technology allow you to
# be contactable 24 by 7, which means you can resolve your clients' issue promptly and quickly
# track which stage of the sales cycle your client is in, which means better follow up
# track buying histories of similar clients. This gives you the ability to recommend new purchases intelligently. For example, if you observe that a specified group of your corporate clients tend to go for a particular range of product, you may want to investigate why and recommend the same range to other clients of similar background too.
# remember birthdays, name of spouse and other details, therefore able to provide more personalise service
# communicate with all your clients simultaneously through customised messages
# interact with multiple clients at the same time

Unless you tell me you have an elephant memory + a super processor between your ears, I will strongly encourage you not to leave things to chances. Embrace technology. It will definitely help.

2) Work on branding and image

A good brand image has too many advantages ... I shall highlight 2.
* branding brings the right perceived value ... or sometimes higher perceived value. People like to be associated with a good name. Very often, your branding determines how much your customers enjoy your products or services. This is because, simply by thinking that the product or service is great, the customers will start to feel that the same way too!
* Brand brings about brand extension. If people think what you are currently providing is great, than probably any recommendation from you is also good, at least in terms of quality. This is because you already established the trust with your customers. It will be easy for you to "extend" this trust to other products or services.

To many people, branding is something abstract and should only be done by MNCs with huge budget.

This is nothing further from the truth. Branding means consistency in your values and action. Branding means communicating this message to all our clients and suppliers. There is no rocket science.

3) Manage expectation
Managing people is basically about managing expectation. Customers complain because their expectations are not met. Maybe the service is not as fast as they expect, or the product did not last as long as they expect, or the staff are not as helpful as they should be ... In any case, we have not live up to their expectations.

Every one of us knows the fundamental principle of "under promise, over deliver". However, not many of us apply it.

One successful application of this is Disney Land. The same practice is also followed by many other theme parks around the world.
If you have been visited any of the Disney Land around the world, you will notice that many a times, when queuing for a ride, there will be a sign board telling you the estimate waiting time (e.g. 1 hour). The actual time is always shorter (say 45 mins). Customers are delighted at the end of 45 mins when they are served. Can you imagine, feeling delighted after waiting for 45 mins!!!

So you can see, it's all a mind game.

teck beng
www.coachme2sell.com

Can't find what you are looking for, Try Google Search

Google