Ins!ghts

The difference between a great team and an ordinary team is the EAGERNESS to help and support each other.

What is the difference between willing and eager? Willing is when you asked your son (take for example) to clean up the room or else no dinner. He will be willing to do the task because he wanted to eat. Of course there will be no eagerness there. Eagerness is the passion, the energy, the enthusiastic and the persistence to carry out the task.

The role of a coach, manager or leader is to get all team members to move from the average willing to the champion eager on the eager meter. The moment you hit the champion eager, you will see your team in PASSION, PERSISTENCE & PERFORMANCE.

We all deal with whiners and complainers, they seem to be everywhere these days.  What do we do with them and how do we prevent them from sucking out energy and killing our business?  In every situation we can choose what Marsha Petrie Sue calls T.L.C .in her “Choices TLC” video.  This stands for Take it, Leave it, Change it.  Every situation seems to include people that will whine moan and complain about it, and yet there are others who simply get out there and DO IT!  This business is built by people who choose T.L.C.  When asked, what do I do to build my business?  The answer is emphatically, GO BUILD!

Today’s insight is coming form Tony Alexandra. A customer service expert.

According to Tony, there is a stair we need to climb in order to achieve customer loyalty. The first step is PROSPECT. Prospects are our potential customers who we are trying to convert to become customers. At this stage, a thorough needs analysis need to be executed with the prospect in order to find out the actual need before proposing the right solution.

The next step is SALE. This is the stage where the prospect is willing to take your proposal for good and it involves the selling process. It usually start with a sales pitch and end with a closing call. Today, the sales pitch has changed from hard sell to a more subtle question asking style in order to get the customer to see the need themselves.

Once a sale is done, the next step is REPEAT CUSTOMER. This is the stage where you need to get the customer to purchase again, of course, after they have used your solution happily. This is more relax process where not much selling is required but rather more on relationship building, taking feedback and possibly come up with excellent offer for customer to buy in bulks

Last stage is the most dfificult to achieve and it’s call APOSTLE or raving fans. The customers will go around shouting your brand and recommend it to other prospects. The best way to gauge the level of willingness your customer is willing to play apostle is to ask them this question, “In the scale of ten, one being the lowest, ten being the highest, what level would recommend our product or services to others.”

Sales = stress? This is the most common challenge faced by sales person.

I have been in the sales for the past four years and I learnt  selling through the hard way. Cold calling and got rejected. Never give up, don’t want to give me appointment, I walk in. I used to call it force appointment. Of course, most of the time, I was rejected.

• Over the years, through formal sales training and reading, I realized that why many sales person are stress out is because they do not understand about the sales process. Stress will come in when you try to jump the process. For example, when there is a request for proposal, the common reaction would be to send the proposal straight away without considering the rapport and needs analysis process. Thus when you are asked for a presentation, you try to close the sales and high possibility you will be filled with lots of rejections. That creates the stress factor. To put it in a more simple analogy, you are trying to kiss a girl on your first date.

• I had an experience when I was meeting this prospect for the first time and immediately he asked me to present to the board of directors on our customer service centric development program. Though how good you could present, I still felt that we are jumping the process too fast. So, instead of presenting, I told her it’s better for me to understand more about your training needs before going for the presentation.

In short, sales process is like a production line process and it has to follow the sequence. Every sales has to go thorough the process and don’t be stress out when you are facing some quota deficient month. Just look back on your sales process.

Last week, I was doing my usual training needs analysis visit to one of the big plantation companies in Malaysia. To my suprise, as I arrived at his office, I saw the book “The Power of Now” was on his table. Thus our conversation started on the content of the book and he told me he bought the book because he wanted to find the answer to this question below:

“I have a son who is going to sit for his STPM examination in the next two months and he seemed to be relaxed and paying not much attention on revision. As a father, I was thinking, whether I should be nagging him to do the revision or let him handle his own future. We have been seeing many examples of successful and rich person who failed miserably in schools. However, the irony is if our forefather were to chart a success path for us, we would be enjoying the fruits now. So the question is, do we as a parent need to chart the future for our children or let them decide themselves?”

Thought I am yet a father, but I did some research and talked to a few experts and I found out that, as a parent, our main role is not to  chart the career path for our children. Our role is to lay the foundation for them. The foundation is consists of good moral values, attitude of a champion, life skills, proper religious studies, good cultural practices,  interpersonal skills  and the right mindsets to live a successful life. This foundation will be the guiding system for your children to find the right path to live on and this foundation has to be consistently reminded.

• P/S: STPM exam is a government exam equivalent to A-Level

Are you living in your psychological time or clock time?

• When you are living in your psychological time, it means you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. It also means you want your past; you don’t want the present. You want what you have lost and don’t want what you have got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be ( you wanted a better future or a lost better past). This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.

• When you are living in your clock time, you have a goal in mind but you focus on what you are doing now. For example you wanted to have a passive income stream and be financially free. You focus on the action of the plan now rather than overindulge in the  thoughts of arriving there. Another good example is when you have planted a seed, you do not dig up the seed and have a look at the seed everyday and see whether it germinates or not. You focus on watering and fertilizing the soil in order for the seeds to grow.

Lastly, it’s good to know what you want and have a goal in life. At the end of the day, you only can improve your life situation but not your life. Your life is being now and your goal is you better life situation.

Ever wonder why you dread yourself waking up in the morning?

Many have been said about positive mental attitude (PMA) and the law of attraction to achieve what you want in life. However, if you do something that you don’t love doing and no matter how much PMA you have and daily recitation of the positive reafirmation statements will do little help. It’s like running with a 50kg bar bell attached to you leg and shouting “Today is a great day!, I deserve to be successful because I add value to other people’s life.”

Here is what you need to discover in order to have a happy and fulfilling endeavor.

1. First you need to find out about your passion. The things that you love doing and you would do it without feeling tensed or pressured. For example, in business, some people love meeting up with people to solicit business but some would prefer using the internet medium to do likewise.
2. Secondly, you need to find out the things you are skillful at. The things you are good at doing. For example, my dad is good at expressing excellent ideas, opinions and thoughts through writing and a sought after newspaper article writer but clumsily repairing the water taps. On the other hand, my father in law is a skillful handy man who can single handedly renovate his house and a sought after man for repairing home utilities but hardly expressing himself writing. Looking at business point of view, some people would be good at figures and facts and excellent for stock market or option trading. However, some creative ones will resort to internet marketing and multi level marketing. The point is when you do things you are skillful and good at doing, you will be doing it with a good job with less obstacles.
3. Lastly, having found your passion and skills, you must be assured that both your skills and passion coincide with market demand. You can’t do a things you love and good at but no market value or over supply at that point of time. Having said that, this third factor is with the least effect as you can find the niche easily with the help of the two prominent factors mentioned above.

In summary, the key to success is to find a business or career with the intersection of the three factors (passion, skill and demand) and you can achieve success easily coupled with consistency and discipline.

There are 3 levels of education a person need to go through in order to be successful in life.

Nowadays,  everyone has the privilege of attending academic education for example, from high school to college. Academic education provides us a basic foundation for intellectual development.

Next we settle for required education. For example, a doctor will require a 5 years of education to acquire the skills to practise the profession and so does a lawyer, accountant or engineer

The next most important education is called Success  EDGEducation which stands for “Expert Directed Guided Education”. EDGEducation will provide you the skills such as financial management, leadership, time management, communication skills, entrepreneurship, marketing and interpersonal skills. Most of the time these are the skills required to make you rich and successful in life. As the saying goes, education will find you a job but self-education will find you a fortune. Or now we should say, EDGEducation will find you a fortune.

For more info on EDGEducation, please visit www.edu-action.com

Reactive = reacting to negative outcomes of life. For example, feeling rejected when a customer rejected your sales proposal. In short we call it NEGATIVE THINKING

Proactive = seeing the positive side of a negative outcome of life. For example, you take the initiative to find out why the customer rejected your sales proposal and try to learn from your mistakes and move on to the next level. In short we call it POSITIVE THINKING

Interactive = taking advantage of any situation to achieve the result you want. For example, invite your customer to a product demo or preview session to let him or her experience the product or services before calling a shot. This we call POSITIVE SOCIAL DYNAMIC THINKING

Lots have been said and discussed about the change of customer behaviours and expectations. In order to find an answer for this million dollar question, “What do Customers Want?” I researched into this topics by consulting EduAction’s trainers & coaches and also heavy reading on mind shifting ideas books like Seith Godin’s “Tribe”, Peter Fisk’s “Customer Genius” & a few conventional customer service excellence books like “Customer is the Boss” & “Under Promise Over Deliver”

• What I have found out and managed to summarize in a diagram is what I called the 3E (Please see diagram above); Expectation, Experience & Emotion. This is what customer want! To keep it short and simple, you are able to keep and generate happy & loyal customers by first manage their expectations. Many complaints started when customer do not get what they expected or being sold on a false expectation. The boring adage of “Under promise & Over Deliver” is true and will be always true. Put it in simple

equation:Lost customer (S) = unfulfilled expectation (U)

≥ fulfilled expectation = Happy & loyal customer

• Second, Customers buy out of emotion reasons, not logical reasons. We need to constantly ask ourselves, What is the customers pain (feeling question)?, Why are they having this pain? and how we can help to eradicate the pain and bring them the pleasure. Focus your marketing and selling strategies (online or offline) by touching the feeling factors. One good example is to not to forget to use, pictures, slide shows or sound effect in your website and blog to create the value & perceptions your customers desire.
• Lastly, is the newly adopted and powerful concept of social media marketing where  you create a network for people to communicate, feedback & co-create your brand among your brand community.  Seith Godin had put it nicely called “Tribe”. You need to create the unforgettable experience your customer have after using your product or services, so much so they become your raving fans. The word they use here is “Engage”.  In view of this, you need to adopt the tribe culture and not only gaining and retaining customer strategies & lead your tribe passionately so that they can be your word of mouth marketing agents.