We don’t often post sales training information on this site but this article by our Singapore Sales manager, Radu Palamariu, demonstrates self leadership and communication skills.
Ask the tough question
“Send me some more information!”
“Let me think it over!”
These are the two statements that most prospective clients use on sales people. And unfortunately, most of them get away with it.
1) Unfortunate for the sales person, because he or she will need to call again to chase the prospect/client for an answer whilst having no guarantee of the result.
2) Unfortunate for the prospect/client, because they will be called again and will have to spend valuable time either reevaluating or fobbing off the sales person.
Since we all know this happens, why are people still doing it? Continue Reading »
I just got a call from Australia, from James who needed a coach for one his bank’s people in Singapore. The reason I got the call was that James had heard about me from Yuvi who had previously used me for some communication training and the reason he used me is that he had heard about me from Carole who had been introduced to me by Stephanie who I met at a conference in Kuala Lumpur!
In my leadership development programs I usually share lots of real life stories but this story came to me via Alysson at Yahoo! who got the story from her CFO, Tim. And what a great story it is, maybe it will inspire your creativity, innovation and customer focus.
The Square Watermelon
Japanese grocery stores had a problem. They are much smaller than in other countries and therefore don’t have room to waste. Watermelons, big and round, wasted a lot of space. Most people would simply tell the grocery stores that watermelons grow round and there is nothing that can be done about it. That is how I would assume the vast majority of people would respond. But some Japanese farmers took a different approach. If the supermarkets wanted a square watermelon, they asked themselves, “How can we provide one?” It wasn’t long before they invented the square watermelon. Continue Reading »
I bet you have a story about receiving lousy customer service, I know I have a few. On the flipside – do you have a story about giving lousy customer service? Ouch, this is more difficult to contemplate because we naturally see the world from our own point of view.
Whatever work you do, you have customers – whether they pay you directly or not. If you work in an organisation you will have internal as well as external customers.
The word customer contains the word custom which means habit. So a customer is someone who buys or interacts with you more than once, and this suggests some kind of relationship. Just like other relationships, customer service can be good or bad depending on the mindset you bring to it.
When I was about 12 years old I started working in my father’s hardware store. I was an enthusiastic young man and began to learn about the products, becoming knowledgeable and therefore important (in my mind). One day I got into an argument with a customer about the ‘proper’ definition of a product, my father stepped in, agreed with the customer and sold the product. I was furious because I knew I was right and confronted my father about this. His response was, “Son, I know you were right, but do you want to be right or do you want to be rich?”
The famous sales trainer Zig Ziglar said it this way: “If you help enough other people get what they want, you can have anything you want.”
With this frame of mind we can prosper by meeting and exceeding the customer’s expectations.
If you give enough presentations, there’s a good chance that someday you’re going to find yourself the target of an uncooperative or hostile audience member. As in most crisis situations, you will be in good stead to have a plan of how to respond. There are many verbal techniques available which will help you handle hostile or difficult audiences, some of which I am able to outline here. These are all tried and tested over the course of the last 10 years during my own personal training and presentation courses. Use them with confidence – they really work! Continue Reading »
Have you ever wondered why some people get what they want and others don’t?
Can I make a suggestion?
Remember a time when you really wanted something; something you couldn’t have right away but something you would have to wait for, you pictured it in your head, you imagined what it would feel like to possess it and you could feel the pull.
Communication skills are the glue that holds together relationships and the oil that lubricates business and sales.
Good communication skills are essential to lead yourself and influence others. Poor communication causes pain, conflict, loss of productivity and profit.
I have just returned from a client meeting, where the client needed to train its sales people to effectively increase sales.
Increasing sales is one of the key actions that is going to help this client weather the recession and profit afterward. After identifying the urgent need to train trainers to equip the sales team with product knowledge and values based selling skills across 14 countries, the business development manager told me, “Yes, we need this but I was told yesterday that there is a freeze on discretionary spending.”
I wanted to yell, “Since when is learning discretionary?” Continue Reading »
Japanese grocery stores had a problem. They are much smaller than in other countries and therefore don’t have room to waste. Watermelons, big and round, wasted a lot of space. Most people would simply tell the grocery stores that watermelons grow round and there is nothing that can be done about it. That is how I would assume the vast majority of people would respond. But some Japanese farmers took a different approach. If the supermarkets wanted a square watermelon, they asked themselves, “How can we provide one?” It wasn’t long before they invented the square watermelon. 
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Have you ever wondered why some people get what they want and others don’t?
Communication skills are the glue that holds together relationships and the oil that lubricates business and sales.
I have just returned from a client meeting, where the client needed to train its sales people to effectively increase sales.