by The RazorrConnect Team on July 15, 2010
If you are leading or managing a team, I guess that you want to get the best you can from that team. The reality is that, if you want to get the best from your team going forward, you need to make some changes. So if you want to get more from your team, what specific things can you do?
Set clear goals
A team needs to know what it is expected to achieve. Yet often teams are given vague goals as outcomes. As a result, they spend time trying to guess what is required rather than getting on and delivering results.
Build trust
A team without trust is really not a team at all. In reality, building trust takes time and effort. We are all to a greater or lesser extent used to being the lone ranger, looking after ourselves. Making the step to becoming trusting of others takes courage so recognize that it will take time.
Make praise a priority
Have you ever noticed how people often hold off giving feedback until something formal like an appraisal? It is easy to change this and start giving praise for both effort and achievement. Not only is it easy to do, it is one of the cheapest forms of motivation around.
Show the way
The team, how it behaves, responds to challenges and obstacles, takes the lead from you. Model the strategies and behaviours that you expect from others and you might just be surprised at the difference it makes.
Encourage and support
To help with motivating your team, make it a priority to encourage and support them. When you create safety, you encourage others to take risks and try things out. After all, it is that willingness to take a chance that creates results.
The Bottom Line: Teams have the potential to create great results. So where do you need to pay attention to get great results from your team?
By Duncan Brodie
Now I invite you to sign up for my free Weekly Leadership and Management Success Tips at http://www.goalsandachievements.co.uk/?pid=26
Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements (G&A) works with accountants, health professionals, teams and organisations to develop their management and leadership capability.
With 25 years business experience in a range of sectors, he understands first hand the real challenges of managing and leading in the demanding business world.
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http://EzineArticles.com/?How-to-Get-More-From-Your-Team&id=4616732
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by The RazorrConnect Team on July 13, 2010
Putting Excellent Customer Service in Your Business
Customer service can mean the difference between a successful and a losing business. That’s because more and more customers are becoming more demanding not just in the quality of products or services that they buy, but also in the level of customer service that is offered by the brand or company that supplied the goods or services. There are even cases where customer buying decisions are more influenced by the customer service they expect to get rather than the overall product benefits. This aspect of doing business is actually a big part of your customer relationship management or CRM. And today, there are many CRM tools being offered just to help businesses streamline the way they handle customer service. But you must think that even with CRM tools, customer service still boils down to how you or your people manage customers before, during, or even after the sale.
Great customer service in your business can be achieved if you make it a point to take out the unsatisfactory features in your product or service as soon as you are made aware of such things. Consider bad experiences by your customers as the potential Achilles’ heel in your enterprise. Having unpleasant experiences with the goods that you sell will turn off your customers. Worse, one displeased customer will tell other people and, before you know it, your business reputation is in shambles. So, always eliminate product or service features that can bring about a negative view of your company. This is actually the very essence of great customer service, making sure your customers will not have problems with your product or service.
Next, to be able to enhance your customer service in your business, you need to give your customers more options as to how your product or service will be delivered. This has less to do with the way you carry your product to your customer’s household. Rather, choice in product delivery tackles the issue of customizing your product or service according to the preferences of your target consumers. In short, try to provide a spot in your overall business process where your customers can have their say. For instance, would you offer only four flavors of pizza, or would you allow your customers to mix and match toppings according to their tastes?
Finally, the bulk of customer service in your business will happen after the sale or the transaction has been done. Your customers may not be happy with your product or service. Or your goods may have failed to deliver your promise to your customers. Whatever happens, make sure that your final efforts of communicating with your customers will leave a good lasting impression in their minds.
By: Tony Jacowski
Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solutions – Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.
Article Source: Putting Excellent Customer Service in Your Business
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by The RazorrConnect Team on June 10, 2010
In sales, everyday is not the same. That’s one of the great aspects about sales. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t plan your days.
How to plan your day:
1. Plan you day everyday. Make it a habit. Put aside about 5 to 10 minutes. That’s all you will probably need.
2. Better to plan you day the day before at the end of the day since you should know what you have to do tomorrow at that point in time. Also, if you plan your day at the end of the day, then you typically won’t go home trying to remember what you have to do tomorrow.
3. On a sheet of paper, list items that have to go into your calendar or on your task list. If you take the paper and divide it into to columns with a header for Calendar items and Task items, this will work best.
4. Looking at what you have to do, write down everything that you think you should accomplish that should be in the calendar, such as meetings, conference calls, time set aside for prospecting, etc. Do the same for tasks that you have to do during the day.
5. Prioritize every task and calendar event. Use 1,2,3 etc. or A,B,C etc. to rank what you have to accomplish in the day.
6. Put a timeframe beside each item. Make sure that you keep this written list available to reference later. A good suggestion is that you get a notebook to keep a running history of your items.
7. Realize that you only have reasonably only 8 hours in a day to work and that a couple of those hours will be wasted in one form or another, so plan for 5 to 6 hours of productive work.
8. Break your day down into bite size chunks, such as 15 minutes, 30 minutes or 1 hour time frames.
9. Figure out where you need to fit your calendar events and tasks in to get done during the day.
10. Don’t over-pack your day since you will only end up putting events or task off to the next day and you will get further behind. Plan for 5 to 6 hours of events and tasks on a daily basis. You will need the additional hours for a time buffer.
11. Remember to do this everyday.
If you find that you have a few extra minutes or hours in your day, then you can go to your prioritized list an see if you can knock off a few more items.
By planning your day, you will be able to maximize your efforts and hopefully increase your sales success.
By Chris P Hamilton
Chris Hamilton is a sales and marketing consultant helping small and medium sized business take their sales to the next level. Chris provides useful sales and marketing tips daily on his website Sales Tip a Day which is located at http://www.salestipaday.com. Sign up for the Sales Tip A Day Newsletter at http://www.salestipaday.com/p/email-newsletter.html and receive the “25 Must Have Sales and Marketing Tips”
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chris_P_Hamilton
http://EzineArticles.com/?11-Tips-For-Time-Management-For-Sales—How-to-Plan-Your-Day-to-the-Fullest&id=4427219
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by The RazorrConnect Team on June 7, 2010
Just after 5:00 p.m. on a Friday night, Rob Morgan, a Seattle executive was getting dressed for an important business event. He went to his chest of drawers to fetch his one pair of cuff links-and found them gone. They had been left behind at a hotel on a business trip the previous week. Panicked-with dreadful visions of paper clips in his shirt cuffs-he called Seattle’s downtown Nordstrom’s department store and explained his crisis to Sandy, the clerk in the men’s department who answered his call.
Sandy was just coming off shift, and had plans for the evening, but duty called. She located some cuff links that would suit her customer, finished her shift, and drove to her customer’s house to make the delivery. A lifelong Nordstrom adherent was made. Rob now goes out of his way to buy from Nordstrom.
Nordstrom’s customer service has nearly gained legend status. The upscale department store has created a service culture that gets customers and keeps customers.
The oil that will keep the gears of your business meshing smoothly is relationship. Take a sincere interest in your clients, know what they care about, understand the goals they are striving to achieve. And engage them whenever you can, listen to them, offer unasked-for assistance to help them…it’ll pay off.
Customer satisfaction is inversely proportional to the size of the gap between what your clients expect to get from you and what they actually receive. A large negative gap-they got a lot less than they expected-creates very little or no satisfaction. A large positive gap does the exact opposite: When you WOW them with way more than they anticipated, they become raving fans. Make sure you set appropriate expectations in all your communications with your clients. If anything, err on the conservative side in order to keep the gap on the positive side.
Nothing establishes trust and loyalty better than outstanding service. Extend yourself to make sure that your clients are taken care of and that you and your company are giving them what they need, both in the moment and in the future. Sincerely proving you care about your clients leads to recommendations and repeat sales. The operative word there is “sincerely.” Making your clients experience a WOW can’t be done if you are going through the motions as a means to an end. Your service has to be honestly and sincerely extraordinary, not a gimmick.
It may have become a cliché, but “underpromise and overdeliver” is the way to provide WOW service. Say you’ll deliver by 1 pm and do it by 11 am. If you “think” you can get back to your client with an answer in 24 hrs, tell them you’ll be in touch within 48 hrs – then call them sooner. And keep making every transaction better than promised.
Trish Lambert’s shortest bio is on Twitter, where she is billed as “Fervent champion of solo biz owners who want to stay solo and successful, woman of high, unmodulated energy, sometime couch potato.” Trish started 4R Marketing (http://4rmarketing.com), a home-base marketing and copy writing consultancy, in 2005 and built it into a 6-figure business in less than two years. In addition to running 4R Marketing, Trish now works with other at-home service professionals through Success in Sweatpants (http://successinsweatpants.net), her coaching practice whose tagline is “It’s all about freedom-no excuses!”
By Trish Lambert
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Trish_Lambert
http://EzineArticles.com/?Wow-Your-Clients,-Keep-Your-Clients&id=4423567
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by The RazorrConnect Team on June 3, 2010
This is a list of 10 sales tips that can use in any business in order to get more customers and close the sale faster. There is no business until it has made its first sale, and each sale after that. Therefore, you need to give yourself a big arsenal of sales tools to get yourself to where you want to be. Read on to find out all 10 tips.
1. Build relationships with your customers. You have to have long-term customers in order to grow. If you sell to a person only one time, it is very expensive to find a new customer.
2. Get the customer to accept things from you, like your business cards, brochures, free gifts, even price quotes. This act of accepting gets them into a “YES” mind frame.
3. Make sure that your business card contains a call to action on the back of it. There are way too many useless business cards floating around out there. Make sure you use both sides to create something that the customer won’t throw in the trash as soon as they get home.
4. Learn to shut your mouth and let the customer talk. People that are really talkative can end up talking their own customer out of the sale, because they shared TOO MUCH information about the product.
5. Don’t try and be a clown in order to keep the customer’s attention. Sure, you need to make the customer feel comfortable, but you don’t need to tell a bunch of corny jokes and make the situation even worse.
6. Focus on what the customer wants, not what you want. If the customer wants your most inexpensive product, then sell it to him. Don’t sell anything to anyone that they don’t want.
7. If you don’t believe in what you are selling, you won’t be able to convince your customers that they should believe you either.
8. You have to give before you can get. You need to earn your customer’s business by first offering different things that will benefit them. You might have to lose a little money on the first sale in order to close a large, profitable sale.
9. Don’t patronize your prospect. If you treat your customer like they are stupid, you won’t sell them a thing. Allow them plenty of time to ask questions, but don’t baby them.
10. Develop a killer guarantee. Use your guarantee as a marketing tool to lower the prospect’s skepticism about going through with the purchase.
Joshua Black is the developer of the Underdog Sales Bible. This report gives you 37 different methods for ETHICALLY closing the sale without tricks, gimmicks, or pitches of any kind. You can find out more and download the sales bible at: http://www.closing-the-sale.com
By Joshua Black
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joshua_Black
http://EzineArticles.com/?The-Best-Sales-Tips-You-Will-Find&id=4287488
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