Before his death in 2012, Zig Ziglar was one of the world’s most popular sales trainers and motivational speakers. He was born in rural Alabama and grew up in rural Mississippi. He went from a small skinny kid with a funny name to leading a worldwide sales organization, based on his simple philosophy, “You can have anything in life you want, if you help enough other people get what they want in life, first.”
Thanks to new technology that allows researchers to measure the brain’s responses to learning stimuli, the science of learning is advancing faster every day. We now know more about how the brain learns that at any time in human history. Despite all this new technology and research, there is one stubborn fact that troubles the teaching community, people will only learn to the level to which they are motivated to learn. In other words, it is a personal decision as to whether you are willing to learn something new.
Group meetings are just one of the Four Formal Methods of Communication in a Professional Organization. As a leader within your organization, learning how to conduct an effective group meeting can help you drive team participation and achieve greater objectives.
Are your salespeople getting the training they need to achieve their career goals with your company?
According to a worldwide study of over four thousand companies in seventy different countries across twenty different industries, IBM found that eight out of ten corporate leaders feel their employees do receive the training they need to achieve their career goals.
Role-playing is the standard training method in the military, police and fire rescue and especially, sports. Role playing is essential in professions where quick decision-making is necessary. That’s why role playing should be a regular component of your sales training.
Advertising attribution is the hot topic of the day. Advertisers want to know whether their advertising is working and if they are getting a return on investment. Media want to show attribution in order to sell more advertising.
The definition of a Return on Investment (ROI) is the gain or loss generated on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. ROI is usually expressed as a percentage. This post will help you learn how to calculate an ROI on your advertising.
According to an IBM Workforce Study, 71% percent of the CEOs in the survey cited human capital ahead of products, customer relationships and brands as the leading source of sustained economic value.
The same study found that employees who do not feel they can achieve their career goals at their current organization are 12 time more likely to consider leaving than employees who do feel they can achieve their career goals. Even worse, this number skyrockets to about 30 times more likely for new employees.
The study reveals a wide disconnect between company leaders and training recipients when it comes to the usefulness of the company’s training. Seventy eight percent of the CEOs believe new employees in their organization are getting the training they need. However, only 58% of the training recipients feel they are getting the training they need.
Consider for a moment what is happening at your company. Does your company have a similar gap between what you think your training is providing and what your employees think?
How much do you spend annually on employee training? How much time and effort do you spend on recruiting and then, the time lost to filling the same position again? The real cost to your bottom line can be significant.
The Gallup Organization estimates that U.S. companies are losing a $1 trillion every year due to voluntary turnover. The most astounding part is that most of the cost of employee turnover is largely company self-inflicted.
Voluntary turnover is costing you money. You also know that turnover has many other costs that don’t show up in your P&L. When you lose a salesperson, there is always a transition period that is sometimes marked by billing and collection problems and lost relationships.
Voluntary turnover also affects internal morale because it may cause those sitting on the fence to decide that they too should leave your company. Remember the statistic, employees who don’t think they can reach their career goals at your company are 12 more likely to leave than those who don’t. New employees who don’t think they can reach their career goals are 30 times more likely to leave.
This is not just the normal turnover.
Gallup found that 52% of employees who left said their manager or the company could have done something to prevent their decision to leave. Fifty one percent say that in the three months before they left, neither their direct report or higher ups talked with them about their job satisfaction or how they felt about their future with the company.
Wow!
In three months, nobody asked these employees how they felt about their job? Nobody talked with them about their future? It’s no wonder that they decided they didn’t have a future with the company.
You may be thinking to yourself these statistics don’t apply to you and your company. You could be thinking, “We meet with our sellers all the time, especially every week in their one-on-one.” The real question is, are you talking with your employees or are you talking to your employees?
Here is a suggestion. Structure the format of your one-on-one meetings so that the first half of the meeting is devoted to whatever the salesperson wants to talk about. The second half of the meeting is for your agenda. Encourage your salespeople to keep a folder at their desk where they can store notes about things that are important to them. You should do the same. We call this the One-On-On Meeting Folder System.
Students of Stephen R. Covey and the Eisenhour Time Management Grind know that we all need to spend more time in the Important but Not Urgent quadrant. That’s were the truly fundamental work is done.
Now before you start thinking that the salesperson will take up too much time and you’ll never get time to run through the numbers, believe me, it won’t happen like that. You should be so lucky to have salespeople with such foresight. After the first meeting or two, you will need to remind them to come to the meeting with the things that are important to them. If they don’t come prepared, you should have some questions designed to get them talking about how they feel about work, their lives, their dreams.
It is critical to the success of your team to train your managers to have frequent, meaningful conversations with employees about what really matters to them.
Let me know if I can help. Talk to you soon.
In Radio advertising sales, you will inevitably encounter a prospect who says they don’t need to advertise because they have all the business they can handle. For most salespeople this can be especially frustrating because your whole premise for the sales call is to help the business owner grow the business!
The first Radio commercial was broadcast on August 28, 1922. The station was WEAF AM in New York City. It was owned by AT&T. The commercial was for a real estate development called Hawthorne Court Apartments in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in the borough of Queens. The apartment complex was owned by the Queensboro Corporation. The apartment complex was named after Nathaniel Hawthorne, on of America’s great writers.
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