More often than not, sales managers have a hard time pinning down the root cause. I hear a variety of reasons why it takes so long to take action. “I don’t want to be too hasty.” “I want to make sure I afforded them every opportunity…” or the one I hear most; “If they fail I feel I have failed”.

The failure typically happens in one of two areas, people or process—sometimes a combination of both. You may have hired the wrong person. They aren’t a good fit for the demands and activities the job requires, or the sales process isn’t clearly defined.

When it comes to hiring and training sales people, too often sales training takes the form of product or service knowledge. The actual sales process is often referred to as “soft skills”. They either have “it” or they don’t. You may have hired the right person: someone with the right attitude, someone with an ability to learn. You taught them about the product or service and application. Little or no time was spent training on the various steps of the sales cycle. Then you turn them loose on prospects and things unravel. You can’t put your finger on exactly where they come up short.

All sales transactions follow the same basic cycle or process:

Lead Generation: Finding those people most likely to need or want your product or service.

Connection: Understanding what the other party is trying to accomplish and why it is important to them.

Motivation: Discovering the prospect’s motive to take action or not take action.

Anchored Value Proposition: A proposition anchored to what the prospect values.

Communicating Value: Reinforcing in the prospect’s mind that they are getting the best possible return on their investment.

Asking for the Business: Most commonly referred to as closing.

What if you could assess a persons understanding of the sales cycle regardless of the product or service you sell? Before you hire them?

What if you could quickly and accurately pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses, as it relates to the sales cycle, of your existing team?

What if you knew exactly where to go to work when training and coaching your people? Would it be worth pursuing?

Now you can! Sales Coach International can help you assess your team as well as prospective candidates. Within minutes you’ll know exactly how strong a person’s skills are in PROSPECTING, CONNECTING, QUALIFYING, PRESENTING, INFLUENCING and CLOSING.

Take the guesswork out of coaching and focus your efforts where you’ll get the highest return. Contact our office TODAY for an introductory offer on this invaluable tool.

Sometimes you wish other people kept their opinion to themselves.

Criticism hurts.

No matter how thick a skin you have, it’s hard not to get worn down by other people’s negative opinions.

You can spend weeks, months, even years being the best at what you do and it all seems to fall apart when that one person misjudges your priorities and mocks your intentions.

It makes you angry. You’re frustrated and confused.  It makes you want to give up.

But that’s what the critics expect from you.  They want you to go away. Which leaves you only one option

To beat the critics at their own game.

Instead of running away, you have to change how you look at criticism.  You have to reframe the negative feedback to your advantage.

Here are a few ideas to help you:

1. State your intentions more clearly (up front) next time.

2. Practice what still feels uncomfortable.

3. Apologize if you’ve offended someone else (even accidentally close).

4. Take notes on what did not get criticized.

5. Resist the urge to defend yourself publicly.

6. Be brutally honest about how much preparation you actually put into the project.

7. Ask for professional help (i.e. pay for a coach or therapist).

8. Write down how you’re going to do it the next time.

9. Spend time each day meditating on your mission.

10. Try it again (and again and again and again).

11. Focus on helping someone else instead of staying mad.

12. Take a breath.  Let off some steam.  Take another breath.

Beating the critics isn’t really about the critics at all.

It’s about you.

It’s about how you feel when things go wrong. It’s about your motivation. It’s about your reason for doing what you do.

It’s all too easy to just do things because people agree with you. That’s easy.

What is hard is to practice and prepare day after day until you get it right.

But that’s also the way you beat your critics.

You beat your self.

You beat back the fear and frustration and your pain and focus on “why” you do what you’re doing.  And an amazing thing begins to happen.

The clarity of your focus and the extra hard work combine to not just build your own confidence but allow you to see the people that you’re actually helping.  And then it doesn’t matter what the experts say.  Because you can see the good that you’re doing all around you.

You can see you’ve beaten the critics.

What do you think? Should parents openly display favoritism and scrape goat one child again

In the course of my 25 years as Movement Therapist and Holistic Life Coach, the mostpopular problem that clients brought up was lack of self-esteem. Many even expressed self-hatred. That was shocking! “Hatred” is a very strong word, and individuals who are consistently self-critical always sabotage their personal and professional success.

I knew that my client’s lives would change if I could help them turn the energy of  thatnegativity into a positive force. I set out to understand the origin of their lack of self esteem to help them get rid of it. My work was cut out for me, but it was worth it.

Though it’s quite puzzling, what I discovered is that people are actually ashamed offeeling wonderful about themselves. They create unrealistic goals of perfection in order to earn self-love, and when they fall short, they lose confidence and berate themselves.

Does it make sense to expend energy finding fault with ourselves and feeling inadequate?Of course not! That’s a sure recipe for failure. To achieve success, it’s important for us to acknowledge and appreciate ourselves and not concentrate on feelings of inferiority.

The only way to overcome a pervasive lack of self-esteem is to learn to honor and enjoyour unique gifts and the precious life we’ve been granted. We have to give up unrealistic standards of perfection, and stop worrying that we’ll be judged as conceited and shallow. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Is it conceited to feel you are wonderful and special? NO! Everyone is wonderful andspecial in their own way. Sure, it’s easy to find fault with yourself, and to find something tocomplain about. But, If you keep viewing yourself as a failure, it’ll turn out to be self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’ve found that when clients, friends… even I, stop being self-critical, true beautyemerges. Being brave enough to appreciate and love yourself blesses your life and the lives of those around us. That’s true success!

One of my favorite Hattietudes is:

Love is contagious… Go out and start an epidemic!

I urge you to take on the challenge of developing Self-Love. As you genuinely

appreciate the unique individual that you are, greater success in your life is sure to follow.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want to be young and fit. Do you? And, just incase you think it’s only older people who are afraid of aging, I assure you that even young people are worried about growing older. No one wants time to take away their spirit, energy and sexuality.

Well, I have good news! I promise that you do not have to be the victim of time.Being youthful, fit, and desirable is something everyone can achieve.

You may well wonder how I can make this promise. Well, it all started when I admitted that I was terrified of becoming old and getting out of shape. Luckily, this fear became the springboard for me to discover wonderful ways to maintain youth in body, mind and spirit. And, miracle of miracles, I got the results I was seeking. In my Senior years, I am youthful, fit, and bubbling over with energy.

Now, my life is dedicated to inspiring others to achieve life-long youth.

How can you make your dream of life-long youth come true? It all starts with a radical change in attitude. Sure, exercise and eating are important, but attitude is the key to creating your own fulfilling style of aging. Each time you alter your mind-set, you transform aging from a dreaded inevitably into an exciting adventure for your entire life.

In your journey to lifelong youth and fitness, it is my hope that my attitude-changing “Hattietudes” will act as booster shots to provide optimism, determination and joy to your life. My favorite is:

The opposite of old isn’t young… It’s NEW!

Because of this manufacturing contract shortage, many factories are being transformed into clean, well lit, ergonomically friendly showplaces and plant managers lead the show.  Today’s plant manager certainly needs to be aware of the latest safety requirements, personnel practices, and financial expectations.  But in order to step above the competition a plant manager has to be a quality minded visionary, versed in technical leadership practices such as Lean Manufacturing, Continuous Improvement, and Error Proof Principles.  He or she also has to be capable of imparting that mindset plant wide.  The state of mind that one defect is too many and one line stoppage is intolerable must be understood and internalized to all employees from top management to the assembly worker.

A terrific training platform for plant management is manufacturing engineering.  A manufacturing engineer has to have his or her finger on the pulse of every aspect of a smooth running organization.  Safety, quality and productivity are the manufacturing engineer’s mantra and that is precisely what is needed for plant management.  Technical leadership is the key.  Manufacturing engineers lead projects, budgets, process safety, and key metrics but none of this is occurs smoothly with out skilled technical leadership.  Unskilled engineers may fumble and bumble their way through tasks but only the true leaders will deliver seamlessly and those are precisely the credentials that make for solid plant managers.

1.  Have your been hit on the head?  If yes, seek medical attention; if no, go to the next step.  2.  Have you taken a pain reliever?  If no, take one now; if yes, go to next step.  3.  Have you eaten today?…and so on until it would end with either a solution or advise to seek medical attention.

The State of California recognized the growing and menacinng presence of Sexual Harassment in the workplace environment and took very precise and well-defined steps (algorithm) to circumvent this crisis.

Califiornia has now joined with other States such as Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusettes, and Maine that have passed Sexual Harassment Laws.  Dane Gottwals has stated:  “…California’s law is modeled after Conneticut’s exisiting Statute.”

California’s AB 1825 required as of January 1, 2006 all supervisory employees must receive a mandatory two hours of Sexual Harassment training every two years.

AB 1825 also states that all businesses with 50 or more employees must have Sexual Harassment Training.

MVP Seminars is dedicated to helping companies meet the State of California’s mandatory compliance training.  We will assist your company with comprehensive training, follow-up and consultation with your Human Resources Department.

The answer lies somewhere in the middle, depending on the circumstances. In any case, I never recommend acting like it never happened, and hoping that no one will remember who caused the mix-up. Maybe no one will, but if someone does, all they will remember about you is that you screwed things up once and tried to cover it up. And they might just tell others what they remember.

So once you’ve realized that you created an issue for someone else, the best thing to do is to follow 3 general steps.

First, acknowledge it. Keep it simple, as in “I realized after the fact that I shouldn’t have expressed myself the way that I did in the meeting.”

Second, continue with a professional apology. As in “I regret doing so, I apologize for this, and hope that I haven’t created any undue harm that can’t be mended.”

Third, the remedy. Ask the person or persons if there is anything that they would like you to do to help rectify the situation, then do it (assuming it’s a reasonable request).

When that discussion is complete, you move on. Don’t repeatedly apologize or try to get them to say everything’s okay. Just move on professionally from the issue. If the other party brings up the issue again at a later time, you can address it with a question like, “I can understand your feelings, however, when we last discussed this, I asked you what I needed to do to rectify it. Has that changed since our last talk?”

Sometimes you make mistakes. It happens. Apologize quickly and professionally, and then move on, so time can help the healing.

He said, “This situation reminds me of a similar problem we had in my country as I was growing up“ and then went on to describe how the problem was solved. Everyone marveled at his wisdom because this solution happened to fit the problem with which we were concerned. At that point I became a staunch supporter of a viewpoint supporting diverse genders, ethnicities and religions whenever possible being brought together in order to solve common problems. A quotation that verbalizes this thought is as follows:

“No single tradition monopolizes the truth. 
 We must glean the best values of all traditions
 and work together to remove the tensions between traditions 
in order to give peace a chance.”   Thich Nhat Hanh

As I employed this philosophy in my business I found we were able to expeditiously solve many problems and that the solutions came from multiple members of the team assembled. All I had to do was create an environment in which these team members felt comfortable in contributing to the group. In other words, it was the differences in their past experiences that made them valuable to the team, rather than their similarities.

As I have grown older and reflected through the years I still find this philosophy on diversity to hold true. Oftentimes we focus on our differences and allow those differences to drive a wedge in our commonalities. I have often said that if 2 people agree about everything then one of them is unnecessary. Our past experiences have a direct influence on how we view life and how we view life creates our reality.

The point I am making is that 2 similarly qualified people with diverse backgrounds can look at the same problem from different perspectives.  In reality this then gives us 2 potential solutions. I believe that we should celebrate our differences and not hold them up for criticism.

You see, it does not matter if we are Republican, Democrat, black, white, brown, red, yellow or green; we are all in the same boat and are faced with many of the same problems.  Just as it takes many different strands to strengthen a rope, it is our diversity that makes us strong.