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Coming to terms with solitude & overcoming isolation
You’re sitting at your desk when you feel the rumble of a hunger pang. You look at the clock and realize it’s 3:00 PM and you haven’t moved for four hours, nor have you had contact with another human being since you kissed your spouse good-bye as he left for work this morning. Working on your own as a home-based employee or busy small business owner can be an isolating experience, and long periods of isolation can lead to burnout, loss of perspective, overwork and depression. Unfortunately, solitude is the nature of the beast when you work for yourself or you are working from home for your employer. Most entrepreneurs…
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3 tele-sales tips
First, should you use a script or not? Rhetorical question: there’s no right answer. On the one hand, if you are supremely confident and know exactly what you want to say, then not using one maybe the best way to go. But if you have even an iota of doubt, a script can sometimes help ensure you cover all the points you need to make, especially when selling a new product or service. The key is, if you do use one, it should never come across as a script and you should allow enormous flexibility so that if the prospect interrupts you, it doesn’t throw you off kilter, or make…
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Does your integrity bear scrutiny?
That’s an in-your-face question. It almost slaps you across the face with its audacity. How dare anyone cast aspersions on you or your company’s integrity. Your knee-jerk reaction is to undoubtedly to say, 100%. But, is anyone 100% honest and ethical all the time? Is any company that honest and above board? What about shades of grey? Would every one of your employees score 100% on an integrity meter? What about you or your management team? Now for a scary thought: what about your advertising and promotional literature or your hiring practices? The problem with integrity is that there is no sliding scale, you either have integrity or you don’t.…
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Email – How Not to Get it Wrong
There are so many ways to screw up email and even when you don’t actually screw it up, email etiquette lies in wait to mess with you. A big faux pas, for instance, is when someone sends an email to a dozen people and includes all the addresses in the “To:” line. If you do that you are sharing what may be confidential contact information with other people without their permission. This can tick people off and make you very unpopular. The way to overcome this is to BCC (blind carbon copy) everyone and only enter your own email address in the “To:” line. Unfortunately, that is only the tip…
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Can Your Business Be a Recurring Revenue Business?
Do you remember the days when you used to go to Staples and Office Depot to buy software like MSWord? You got a box with a CD, went home and installed it on your computer and kept it for years until eventually the company stopped supporting that version and you had to trundle back to the store. Several years later you could download it from the internet—no box, no CD. Today, many people have a monthly subscription to the software they use which entitles them to regular software updates and a bunch of other ongoing benefits and support. This is called SaaS (Software as a Service). Note the terminology; software…
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The New-Age Salesperson
Times they are a changing, unfortunately a lot of salespeople are not following suit. There are old-school salespeople at work everywhere; if you’re not convinced, visit your local big box furniture store, or car dealership, and witness them in their natural habitat. That’s not to say that there aren’t good salespeople out there too; there are, but even the good ones could be better. Here’s a quick run-down of the characteristics of a new-age salesperson. The new-age salesperson is informed, they sell to people who want to buy and discover what their customer needs. They know the objective of each sales interaction and partner with buyers in the decision-making process.…
