Just wanted to let you know about one of my absolute favorite websites called www.selfgrowth.com. It has one of the most comprehensive libraries of motivational and self-help articles, videos, websites, and more, and it is a great place to spend a few minutes early in the morning before the work day. If you are a fan of the site, let me know by hitting the LIKE button above.
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Category Archives: leadership tips
Keeping the Peace at Work-Conflict Resolution from a Boss Perspective
Steele Steadiman is a boss… (not a leader or a manager) and is in an eternal conflict with human resources. If you are looking for leadership training or to be a good coach with your direct reports, it’s a good idea to just do the opposite of what he suggests. However, if you are looking for a very entertaining keynote speaker, Steele will get your group fired up.
A survey by Accountemps indicates Managers spend an average of 18 percent of their time intervening in employee disputes. That is more than seven hours a week or nine weeks per year. Past Accountemps studies from as far back as 1991 show very similar results.
These survey results show what it is important to be a Strong Boss. Employees’ personal problems are messy and like a tidal wave of emotion can eat up a lot of time. The touchy, feely folks at Accountemps offer five tips for minimizing personality conflicts. I have added my own suggestions.
1. Know when to step in. You don’t want to interject every time a minor issue arises, but you can’t afford to turn a blind eye to problems that jeopardize the group’s output… Steele says, “Punish all parties involved in the disruption. This will keep employees from bothering you with their petty problems.”
2. Don’t let one bad apple spoil the bunch. When friction is clearly stemming from the actions of a single individual, remind that person that the ability to collaborate and treat coworkers with respect is a requirement of the job. Steele says, “Collaborate?!? No, Elaborate your dissatisfaction with the employee twice and then fire the troublemaker.”
3. Help employees get to know each other. Provide opportunities for your staff to interact in non-work activities, such as lunches or volunteer activities; familiarity can breed greater understanding. Steele says, Oh please! Strong Bosses don’t get involved in familiarity. Remember familiarity breed’s contempt. Keep your distance from employees and don’t waste time on socializing.
4. Reward positive role models. Dole out praise, promotions and choice assignments to individuals who contribute to a supportive work environment. Recognizing staff for being team players sends a clear message that how they interact with others is as important as their job performance. Steele says, “You can tell eggheads from Human Resources are involved with this suggestion. Nothing is as important as job performance. To suggest that being a team player is the same as being the top producer is just silly!
5. Make good hiring choices from the start. Hiring individuals with excellent interpersonal skills who are a good fit with your organization’s culture will reduce the potential for future conflicts. Steele says, “It is a big mistake to look for interpersonal skills in hiring. People like that talk too much and want to be happy. I think you look for the best talent with the least interpersonal skills. This way the new employee keeps their mouth shut, head down and focuses on the work in front of them.
Steele Steadiman is a Bosses’ Boss. After a successful career in the business world, he is committed to showing weak leaders the path to control. Steele is the author of “Squish Creativity Like a Bug.” He lectures and travels the world helping bring managers and leaders to his level.
Do You Really Know How To Motivate Your Team?
Leadership, And Management Skills Are Not Coded Into Our DNA. Do You Really Know How To Motivate Your Team?
Leadership and management skills are not coded into our DNA. But you hear people say, “He or she is a born leader.” Well….not really. They may know less about their own team and what motivates it than they imagined. Just ask managers what motivates workers and they will pop off a list that is topped by “recognition of good work.” Sure that makes sense. We all love praise. But have you talked to your team about what truly motivates them? Their answers may be very surprising, and certainly enlightening.
A research team at Harvard put diaries in the hands of employees. What came back was a picture of the psychology of the employee and what motivates them.
§ Making progress at work
§ Figuring something out
§ Completion of difficult tasks
Think back to the last time your boss said, “Good work.” What does that mean? Did it feel good? Or did it feel like a cursory observation?
A strength-centered compliment has a lot more motivational power. “Ah, you figured it out! Your intelligence and determination, is obvious by the way you made the details talk to get the answer.” Now it feels like all of your hard work resulted in a higher level of appreciation, and more importantly, you know you accomplished something, figured it out.
A young Albert Einstein was always trying to figure things out. Throwing a spit wad at another boy in front of the class produced a scientific “Aha…moment” for him. He realized that gravity had a role in the speed of the spitball. His teacher did not care what he learned or achieved, and rewarded him with expulsion. A small acknowledgement of his discovery may have been worth a little behavior modification.
The Harvard study, part of the Breakthrough Ideas for 2010, offers fitting advice when an employee makes progress, a discovery, or solves a challenge.
“Negative events generally have a greater effect on people’s emotions, perceptions, and motivation than positive ones, and nothing is more demotivating than a setback—the most prominent type of event on knowledge workers’ worst days.”
Good management and skills must be fostered, practiced, practiced more, and used frequently. If you want to work more effectively with your team, listen to them. There is nothing in DNA coding that makes any of us a natural leader, who motivates and leads well. Your team has the answers to motivation. So listen.
Lycee Francais New York, Educating the Educators, Creating a Team Culture
Lycee Francais. In the heart of Manhattan sits an educational gem. Children from more than fifty nationalities walk through the doors of, Lycee Francais, to share cultures, learn to be bilingual in French and English, and become better citizens of the world. 
That belief in education carries over to the continuing education and enlightenment of faculty and staff. On a day when students were at home or on holiday with parents, it was back to school for the support staff and teachers. I had the opportunity to teach school leaders how to Create a Stronger Team Culture. It is a Leader’s Institute program that turns a day of learning into a fun and rewarding learning process.
We focused on how to be better, more-effective leaders, how to communicate on a much effective level, and laughed while we did it.Learning how to take a step back and recognize each-others’ strengths, become more cooperative, and far less judgmental of each other, was the lesson of the day. And it was all done in a very interactive way that also helps strengthen memory, by thinking in the way the brain really thinks – in pictures.
You might say that it is most of the good and kind stuff our moms taught us. Somewhere along our path to leadership, most of us learned to be managers – with subordinates, and processes, rather that leaders who inspire and guide. All you have to do to make the change, to become an effective leader, is be willing to change. Yes, there is learning how to undo a lot of bad stuff that we have learned over the years. But Creating a Better Team Culture, by creating more effective leaders will take any team into a stronger, more enjoyable future. All you have to do is open your brain to the possibilities and learn. Connie Timpson is a Sr. Instructor with The Leader’s Institute.
Connie, your session was a big success!
We will want to have you back.
Lauren Bedell, Lycee Francais.
Speed is the Key to Small Business Lead Generation Follow Up
By Doug Staneart
Many small businesses pay thousands of dollars for pay-per-click ads for lead generation, and then, when the leads come in, blow it by waiting too long to follow up with them. When people look for information, products, or solutions on the internet, they want instant gratification. If they have to wait for you to send back an email or wait for a phone call from you, you’ve probably already lost them. If they have to wait for you to send them something in the postal mail, you never had a shot anyway.
The first time that I realized just how critical this was, I had been in business for a few years, and my company was a preferred vendor for a training website. Every day, people would visit this website, and because it was so comprehensive, it was very difficult to navigate. As a result, a lot of people would just fill out the form on the website requesting whatever type of training that they were looking for. As soon as someone filled out the form, it automatically got posted onto the secure side, so if you were one of these preferred businesses, you could login at any time and see what had been posted.
To help us all out, though, the owner of the website would send out a summary at the end of the day, so every evening about 8:00 PM or so, we’d all get an email with a list of all of the leads that came in that day.
I responded to hundreds of these leads without any success whatsoever. Then, one evening, there was a lead for a public speaking class in Dallas. (I owned a company that taught public speaking classes in 50 cities around the world, but we were based in Dallas.) I thought, “Oh, I got this one.” And I responded to it. The next morning, I called the person and introduced myself, and she was the most cold and distant prospect I think I have ever talked to. She just said, “We’ve already chosen someone else,” and hung up. I was totally confused.
So I thought about what I should do to try and close some of these leads, and I figured that I really needed to know what everyone else was doing. So I went onto the site and created a posting of my own. It was about 10:30 AM, and I put into the posting that I would only accept email proposals.
By 11:00 AM, I had already received three proposals. The first was just a generic email with a HUGE attachment that took quite a while to download. It was about 20 MB of brochures in eight separate attachments that I never really went through. The second was just a simple email saying, “If you still need help, call me.” (Okay it was a little more involved than that, but not much.) The third, though, was a beautiful, professional looking proposal. After glancing at it, I had pretty much decided that if I had really been buying a public speaking class, I would have hired that company.
By 3:00 PM, I had about 25 proposals.
By 6:30 PM, I had received almost 50 proposals.
By 8:00 PM, the time that I was typically receiving the summary email from the website, I had received over 72 proposals.
The next morning when I woke up, I had received 143 proposals. After the first 20 or so, I didn’t look at any of them – not even out of curiosity.
When new proposals kept coming in the morning (less than 24 hours since I posted the listing,) they just ticked me off. I was thinking, “What a loser! You’re number 150 on the list.” But remember, that less than 24 hours prior, I was consistently number 73 or 74 on the list every single night.
I met with my team that day to share what I found out. We made a commitment to be the first to respond to every request. We only had six people working for the company, but we decided to assign one person every day just to wait for the phone to ring, one person just to wait for individual email leads to come in, and another just to wait for corporate contract requests to come in.
Our goal was to call any email inquiry back in less than five minutes. The most common comment that we started getting when we made those phone calls was, “Wow! I just hit send. You guys are really fast.”
That year we went from a small half-million dollar company to almost one and a half million dollars. The next year we doubled sales again. The only thing that really changed was the speed at which we were following up with potential clients.
Typical Web Surfer
Typical web surfers will usually do something like this. They have a question and quickly do a Google search. They will scan the first page that pops up looking for a listing summary that most closely relates to what they are looking for. If they find one, they will click the link to see if an answer can be found.
Not finding the answer right away, they might fill out a web form requesting additional information.
Then they will go back to Google and look at the next listing. This one has an FAQ page, and they read a few of them and feel comfortable enough to fill out another form to get a second opinion.
Then they will go back to Google and look one more time. This time, the website has a blog with dozens of helpful articles and a few videos that look really nice. They now pick up the phone and end up getting a voicemail.
They might look at a few more listings, but most will not likely to fill out any more forms. No one wants to be bombarded with spam from a lot of websites, so they will probably be cautious about filling out more forms. They will probably only call additional listings from here on out and only if the website is very compelling.
So here is the big question…
Who is most likely to get the business?
If the owner of the third website had answered the phone instead of having the call go over to voicemail, then that person would have had a tremendous advantage over the other two companies. In fact, if the person replies to the voicemail right away, that owner still has an advantage.
In reality, the person who makes contact with the prospect first and builds rapport with the prospect is always in the driver’s seat.
However, if you respond to the email the next day, the person will answer the phone saying, “Huh? Who are you again?” The person typically forgets entirely that he/she requested the information in the first place.
If the person gets a brochure in the mail a week after sending the email, well… you get the picture.
Speed is your friend in online sales. If you can’t personally follow up on the requests, then hire someone. If you can’t hire someone, then at least invest in a good email follow up system.
Don’t make your good prospects wait for you.
Move quickly. Move nimbly. And make a ton of people happy and a ton of money in the process!
Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute Entrepreneur Boot Camp author of the book Cultivating Customers, Small Business Lead Generation in a Digital Age. His small business seminars help entrepreneurs generate new customers and build small business infrastructure. Visit the Entrepreneur Boot Camp website for details about his programs.
Contest for Entrepreneurs who are US Veterans
By Doug Staneart, CEO of The Leader’s Institute
A couple of good friends of mine (and extremely successful entrepreneurs) have recently decided to partner up to help US military veterans who want to start their own businesses or who are already entrepreneurs and would like a little help growing their small businesses. Phil Dyer and Larry Broughton are both pretty famous entrepreneurs in their own right. Larry is an author, former Green Beret, and founder of Broughton Hospitality Group. He owns a chain of lavish boutique hotels and was named Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year. Phil is an author, a West point graduate, and certified Financial Planner who has specialized in helping entrepreneurs grow strong, financially sound businesses.
Six People will Get to Mentor with Gunny R. Lee Ermey (You Jackwagon!)
They are offering a contest for six seats in their upcoming mastermind meeting, and details are available on their Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/#!/Vetrepreneurs?v=app_178983045459393. The contest is open to any military veteran looking for help with his/her small business.
Closing the Sale: Big Mistakes that Cause Your Customers to Buy from Someone Else
By Doug Staneart
Closing the sale can be one of the trickiest parts of the selling process if you make a few mistakes. You’ve worked really hard to get tons of new people looking at your website and all of those great leads start flowing in. Now the most important part takes place. You have to turn those leads into sales. Unfortunately, this is the part at which most entrepreneurs fail miserably. Most small business owners have an expertise in their own industry, but they often don’t have a lot of first-hand experience in how to close the sale – especially when they are first starting out.
Below are some of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make in the follow up process that keep them from closing the sale. Avoid them, and you will increase your closing ratio dramatically and turn more leads into sales.
Mistake #1: Thinking that All of Your Leads are Ready to Buy Right Now
Remember that just because people who search you out have a challenge or a problem, doesn’t mean that they will be ready to buy right now. However, if you keep in touch with them, avoid pressuring them to buy, and continue to educate them, they will often come to you when they are ready to buy.
You or your sales team will want to provide information for potential clients that help them solve their problems, build a relationship with these potential clients, and follow up until they are able to make a buying decision. It is a process, and in every step of the process, the trust level between you and your potential client should grow.
Granted, though, if you are getting thousands of leads every month, it will be impossible to follow up in detail with every single lead forever. You will also need some type of automated follow up system so that no one falls through the cracks.
An email follow up system can save you a lot of time.
Mistake #2: Giving Up on Leads
Most professional salespeople give up on prospects before they turn into business. Most entrepreneurs have an even lower closing ratio, but if you change the way that you follow up with your potential clients, you can turn things around very quickly.
When an initial lead comes in, for instance, someone comes onto a website and requests information via a form on the website, most small business people will do one of these things.
Most entrepreneurs will likely email the prospect with tons of sales literature and follow up via email a dozen times or so, and then quit trying with a “that’s not a real prospect after all” mentality.
Others might make a phone call and leave a voicemail and just wait for the person to call back.
Others will call and leave a voicemail and wait. Then call back and leave another voicemail. Then call back and leave another voicemail. And when the client doesn’t call back, they quit trying with a “that’s not a real prospect after all” mentality.
A very few will send out an expensive sales kit to the client via FedEx and wait a week or two to call them again hoping that the sales kit closes the deal.
By the way, any of those techniques will work every once in a while, but none of them will close a high percentage of deals for you.
A better process is to create different tiers of potential leads.
The first tier might be what I call email address leads. These are people who got free information from you and gave you their email address in return. If all you have is their email address, then you only have one way to follow up with them. So create an email follow up system in your CRM that combines education (information that they need) with offers to buy stuff from you. You might want to start with something small and build on it. If you are using a CRM system with an automatic email follow up, your follow up is turn-key.
The second tier might be website form leads. This is where someone comes onto your website and fills out a form requesting information or a call back from you. These are much higher quality leads, so they deserve a phone call. They are more likely to close more quickly, so be persistent in getting them on the phone. Don’t just leave a voicemail and wait. Based on your conversation with them, you can determine whether you want to create more follow up calls with the person or just divert them over to your email follow up system.
Your highest tier might be call-in leads. Typically, when people call you, they want immediate results, so they will close much more quickly. Spend more time with these folks and follow up with them one-on-one for a longer period of time. Don’t quit on these leads.
Whatever system you decide to use, DON’T QUIT! They requested information from you for a reason. You can help them.
Mistake #3: Giving a Sales Pitch
Don’t deliver prospects a standardized sales pitch. Instead, find out why they requested information from you. Once they tell you their problem, oddly enough, they will assume that you can solve the problem.
Here are a few phrases that will be gold for you.
* Do you mind if I ask you a few questions so that I have a better idea of what we should be talking about?
* So why are you interested in (fill in the blank with whatever product or service you sell)?
* Has something happened recently that has moved this up on your priority list?
Those should help you get started on the right foot with your new prospect. The more that they talk, the more they will want to buy from you. Fight the urge to jump in when you see an opportunity to sell to them.
Example:
Business Owner: “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions so that I have a better idea of what we should be talking about?”
Prospect: “I guess so…”
Business Owner: “So why are you interested in getting some advertising specialties made for your company?”
Prospect: “Well, the company that we bought pens from last time increased their charge and then messed up our website on the pens. We had to send them back, and we didn’t have any for our big tradeshow.”
Business Owner: “Well let me tell why that won’t be a problem with our company…”
Arrggghh… That is a BIG mistake. Your prospect is now venting to you about how bad your competitor is. Don’t cut her off. Encourage her to tell you more instead. Try something like…
Business Owner: “Gosh, that sounds terrible. What do you think that cost you?”
After she vents a little more, ask another question like, “Is there anything else about your current vendor that you’d like to improve?” etc. etc.
Continue asking questions until you feel like you have a few challenges that she has experienced that you think that you can fix for her.
So if you really want to close the sale and not push those leads away, realize that many of the people who contact you are not necessarily buyers now, but will become buyers in the future if you build a relationship with them. Keep following up with your leads and get an email follow-up program to help you turn those leads into sales. And finally, don’t come rushing in with a sales pitch. Instead ask questions of your prospect that gets the person to tell you what the real problem is, then offer a solution. Do these three things and you’ll close the sale more often.
