As a sales manager how do you coach for sales results and how often do you coach? When and where do you coach.

Sales coaching for sales results should be a daily behaviour for sales managers. Remember, it is also your target and you are in your job to coach your people to getting the sales results.

Spending your time with your management, and not your team, will not get you the sales results you are looking for.

Sales results comes from ongoing support and sales coaching. Sales coaching is guiding people through a self discovery sales results process. That means continuously asking questions so the sales person comes up with the answer to all of their issues and strategies.

When the sales person comes up with the answer, they take ownership and their level of commitment to getting the required sales results will increase.

By you asking questions, you are also demonstrating how to engage people in getting sales results. In turn the sales person will do as you have done - Monkey see, monkey do.
They too will engage the customer by asking questions, listened and get the customer to buy increasing their sales results and relationships.

Sales coaching should be a daily behaviour for sales results. Sales coaching can be done one on one or in teams. Sales coaching can be done in the morning, before meeting customers, during the day - before and after a prospect interchange, and can even be done over lunch.

The main objective behind coaching is to coach for sales results. Those sales results will come by engaging the sales person and asking them questions which would lead them to discovering the answers for themselves.

The more often you conduct sales coaching, the more you will be demonstrating this engaging behaviour to which the sales person will also follow on their journey to getting the sales results you are looking for.

The Bottom Line – Sales coaching is all about getting sales results. Everyone needs someone to talk to, and more importantly to bounce ideas off of - someone to listen. By demonstrating engagement strategies, asking question and listening, the sales person will also follow through and engage their prospects resulting in higher sales results.

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Let’s understand that a sale starts the moment you meet someone. They will have to buy you, before any sales will be made between the two of you. So, would you buy you?

This is the A in sales - Attitude. Do you believe in you, do you believe in your organization, it’s products and services, your team players and the market that you are making sales in?

If you do not believe in one, or any of these elements, nor will the customer. It all starts by believing in yourself, and the organization that you are making the sales for.

Buyers are sharp when it comes to sales. They know how to read body language and your level of belief is indicated through your body language.

The B in sales is for behaviour. Our behaviour is our habits when it comes to sales. Are you demonstrating appropriate behaviours / habit for sales by asking questions to qualify the prospect or are you demonstrating traditional sales behaviours of show and tell and wasting everyone‘s time?

The behaviour you demonstrate leads to perceptions. Someone doing a show and tell is definitely perceived as a sales person. However, someone who is asking questions, showing concern, listening and taking notes would be perceived differently - as an advisor or consultant perhaps, and still getting the sales, while maintaining a relationship.

How do you want to be perceived. What behaviours must your demonstrate so that you can be perceived as you want to be, while still getting the sales results you so need.

Behaviour is also knowing your sales numbers and where you sales time is spent and where you are getting your best sales results. What behaviours get you the greatest sales results- telephone, networking, e-mail, trade shows, etc.

In order to generate X sales this week, how many No’s do you have to get to get to a sales yes. How many sales prospects do you need? To get that many sales prospects, how many people do you have to make contact with?

Sales can also be targeted - another behaviour. Knowing the 80/20 rule can lead you to focusing on sales and relationships at the top end, as opposed to the bottom end.

Having a personal marketing plan to position yourself in the marketplace as a sales expert can be part of your pull strategy. Stop chasing and start pulling in sales.

Focus on building rapport when you meet someone. Build a relationship on trust and soon the sales from them, and others will start flowing.

Ask questions, listen and make the other person feel important and comfortable, before trying to make a sale.

Set some ground rules to work by, so that there are no sales surprise. Be present in the moment and sales will flow.

The Bottom Line. Buyers are everywhere. What are you doing to help them buy? Start by taking control of your attitude and behaviours and then engage people. Sales are more likely to be made with people are engaged and listened to.

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Time Management Tip 1
Block off times to process your e-mail. Twice per day should be enough. Avoid the temptation to check e-mail more frequently.

Time Management Tip 2
Check the spelling of your e-mail before sending it. Spelling errors seem generally accepted in e-mail. Go beyond acceptable. Aim for excellence.

Time Management Tip 3
DON’T TYPE IN ALL CAPS. This is perceived as shouting.

Time Management Tip 4
Re-read your e-mail before sending it. Writing quickly often results in awkward grammar.

Time Management Tip 5
Don’t copy documents from other programs, such as MS Word. Odd characters such as apostrophes can show up as gibberish. Special formatting will be lost and your e-mail may become illegible or visually unappealing. Instead, send the original document as an attachment.

Time Management Tip 6
Use the edit and paste commands as you would in word processing. This is helpful in repeating information or creating a type of form letter to be sent to various participants.

Time Management Tip 7
Just say no. If you’re on a mailing list for which you have no interest, reply by writing “unsubscribe” or “remove” in the comment box. Be careful though. Sometimes mass-mailers use your response to confirm that you have an address, and send you more stuff. Use a filter to prevent mail with features that are repeated from being downloaded.

Time Management Tip 8
Place items in separate e-mail folders as you would with paper items. Don’t use your Inbox or Sent Mail as catchall holding tanks.

Time Management Tip 9
Sort incoming e-mail by subject, key word, or author so you can process related mail together.

Time Management Tip 10
Consider carefully what you write; it’s a permanent record and can be easily forwarded to others. Never accuse people, call them names, suggest they aren’t being smart or criticize their spelling. Assume their intentions are genuine. Avoid sarcasm. Be polite and assertive if necessary (i.e. to spammers), but not vindictive.

Time Management Tip 11
Don’t attach large files without getting permission from your recipient first.

Time Management Tip 12
Write descriptive subject lines. Many busy people will only open messages with captivating subject lines. Think creatively.

The Bottom Line - E-mail, when properly used can be a major asset in time management, as well as in business. Use it wisely

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To start the personal development journey, you need to get to know yourself. What are your values, what are your strengths and weaknesses, what motivates you, what de-motivates you, what are your fears and what have they stopped you from doing, what are your ineffective habits and the list goes on?

By knowing yourself, from the inside out you are taking control of your life and your personal development plan. By knowing your beliefs and removing those inappropriate beliefs you are working on yourself - that in itself is personal development.

By identifying your fears and doing something to face them in order to remove those fears is personal development.

By identifying your ineffective habits and changing them to effective habits in personal development.

By identifying your motivating factors and using them appropriately is personal development.

By identifying what de-motivates you is also personal development from the point of view of avoiding these activities, comments or reactions.

To be aware of, as you may be, and do nothing about it, is not personal development. You know what you have to do, now you just have to do it.

To know and not to do, is not to know, your know?

Personal development is under your control and no one else‘s. You have to make the decisions in your life. Just the act of making a decision is personal development.

If no decision is made, because of fear, or whatever reason, nothing will happen. Procrastination follows indecision and paralysis follows procrastination.
You are better to make a decision to do something, than to make no decision at all. Afterall, it is you, the decision maker that will make the decision work.

Will you take personal development seriously and start now?

The Bottom Line – Personal development starts with the simple act of making a decision to improve. Personal development is under your control and starts from within. When was the last time your invested time in yourself, for yourself, from the inside -out?

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You got exposed to the outside world and let a lot of negativity, doubt and fear enter your life. By letting the outside come inside, you have created yourself as you are. You have lowered you self confidence by letting the outside in. You are not only the most important person in the world, but you are also your greatest enemy, by allowing your self confidence to diminish.

You have created your own fears, doubts, limitations and barriers. You have created who you are and only you can renew you and increase your level of self confidence.. It is time for your to do a review on your life, and remove those destructive beliefs within. Your self confidence could be higher than what it is simply by removing some of the negative baggage that you are carrying around and replacing it with some positive actions. Actions that build self confidence, not destroy it.

What do you, and most of the population in the world do when they fail? Right, they beat themselves up. They criticize themselves and in the process lower their self confidence, self esteem and self respect.

We all know that you have the right to fail. You also know that you have to fail often to succeed. You also know that success comes from good judgement. Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from doing things, and most importantly from failing and learning from those failures.

Why not use this to increase self confidence instead of destroying self confidence.

However, society has lost track of the benefits of failing and the lessons learned when one fails. Instead of recognizing the good with get out of failure, which can be used to build our self confidence, we end up being critical of ourselves and destroying our self confidence.

Self confidence is your level of belief in yourself. If you do not believe in you, will anyone else believe in you. Stop being critical of yourself and start doing the opposite of what you have been doing. That is if you want to build your self confidence.

When you fail, accept that. However, don’t be critical. It takes less energy to find a lesson learned than to be critical. Once you have found the lesson learned, congratulate yourself and tap yourself on the shoulder for having the courage for trying something your never did before. This simple act will build your self confidence. As you build your self confidence, your courage will return.

Give yourself permission to have at least ten learning opportunities a day. That means permission to fail ten times a day. Then you can congratulate yourself by tapping yourself on the shoulder and build your self confidence more often during the day.

The Bottom Line – You have to fail often to succeed once. How your react to failure is under your control. Why not react in a positive manner and build up your self confidence instead of being self critical and lowering your self confidence. The higher your level self-confidence, without it going to your head, the higher your level of courage will be.

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Time Management Tip 1 Do you know where you want to go in life? If not, then you are wondering around aimlessly and wasting time. You will not find the time to do this most important task. You have to make the time.

Time Management Tip 2 What is your most productive time of the day - morning, day or night? Whatever it is, make it a discipline to invest at least one hour of your most productive time with the most important person in the world. This investment in time, will allow you to live the life you wish to live, and will give the discipline to make the most out of your time here on earth.

Time Management Tip 3 Review your goals - where you want to go -morning, noon and night before going to bed. Make it a discipline - doing what you have to do, even when you do not want to do it. You will become more focused in the process, reduce time wasters and do the things that will get you where you want to go.

Time Management Tip 4 Don’t procrastinate - do it NOW! Don’t put off to tomorrow what can be done today. Tomorrow may never come.

Time Management Tip 5 Take notes. Note taking saves time in a number of ways, including reducing the need to check back with people and eliminating the fear of forgetting things. It also cuts back on misunderstandings that might consume your valuable time.

Time Management Tip 6 Make appointments. Playing telephone tag is a time-waster. So why play? Make a change by setting telephone appointments and honouring them. If you can’t take the time to talk with somebody who just called you, say so and set an appointment to call them back, rather than just say, “I’ll call you back.”

Time Management Tip 7 Create a results list. Add power to your life with a “Results” List. A “To Do” List encourages procrastination because it’s only a list of intentions. To be effective, build a results list at the beginning of each day and label it as such! This is a list of outcomes you will create with the investment of your time and energy. Make the listed results absolutely specific. For example, “call twenty clients”, not “call clients” or “complete 3 pages for history term paper,” not “work on history paper.”

Time Management Tip 8 Activities Rule… Not the Clock! An activity is something we do. Results are determined by the activities we choose and how we arrange to get them done. How well do you choose and arrange your daily activities? In business or at home, you should always select activities that are essential for the existence, continuation, and the well-being of your organization or your family.

Time Management Tip 9 Avoid trivial activities. Here are four activity selection questions you can apply on a daily basis:
Is this activity a step toward the achievement of a goal?
Is this activity a good time investment?
If I don’t do the activity, whom will it affect? Will anyone suffer?
Is the activity necessary for the existence, continuation or well-being of the organization? My family?
Knowing what to choose and what to refuse is what it’s about.

Time Management Tip 10 Be punctual and don’t waste other people’s time. Exceed expectations and arrive early. Set your watch five minutes ahead of actual time if you have to. If you are going to be late, at least announce it before hand. People value people who value time. No one appreciates time wasters.

The Bottom Line: It is your time, and it is ticking away a you read this. Are you making the most out of your time?

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Self Motivation Tip 1 - Have you taken the time to ask yourself where you want to go, what you want to be, do or have. The foundation of self motivation are your dreams. You have them, you just have to invest some time towards getting them out.

Self Motivation Tip 2: release all of your dreams in writing and that will start the crystallization process. Consider your pen, pencil or keyboard as a magic wand - nothing is impossible, and only what you write down can become a reality. This is bound to give you a lot of self motivation

Self Motivation Tip 3 Group, categorize and prioritise your dreams. Determine what your top priority dream is.

Self Motivation Tip 4 Determine if you are willing to pay the price - effort, time, education, money, etc. -to make that dream a reality. If so, move on.

Self Motivation Tip 5 Create a S.M.A.R..T. goal. Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and tied to a timetable.

Self Motivation Tip 6 Define the outcomes - pretend the goal is now achieved. What would you see, feel and hear?

Self Motivation Tip 7 Before success comes a brick wall - what are some potential obstacles that can come up along the way? What is your contingency plan should that obstacle appear? It is better to have a prepared mind.

Self Motivation Tip 8 Define the skills and behaviour required to make that goal a reality.

Self Motivation Tip 9 Determine the people or groups of people who can help you achieve that goal

Self Motivation Tip 10. Create an action plan from the end result backwards

Self Motivation Tip 11 Commit to your action plan

Self Motivation Tip 12 Implement the actions identified. It all begins in the doing.

Self Motivation Tip 13 Recognize and reward yourself for doing what you said you were going to do - for being disciplined - doing what you have to do, even when you do not want to do it.

Self Motivation Tip 14 Monitor and measure your progress on a daily basis.

Self Motivation Tip 15 Be thankful - take the time to count your blessings and accomplishment.

The bottom line: The foundation of Self motivation are your dreams. It all starts with you, the most important person in the world. Taking the time to pull out all of your internal life dreams, get them in writing and taking an organized approach to making your dreams a reality. If fail to plan, you plan to fail.

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If you have already written all of your life dreams of what you want to be, do or have, congratulate yourself. That is a major accomplishment towards setting goals.

The next step towards setting goals is to reduce your list of life dreams to the most important dreams that you would like to realize. To do that, pretend you were just told that you had six months to live.

Based on only six months left to live, underline or highlight the life dreams that are most important to you. These will reflect your true values and bring out the most important of all dreams. This too needs to be done before setting goals.

Setting goals for every dream listed would be a lifetime of work. This exercise is meant to reduce the dreams to the most important dreams that you would like to realize. With this short list, we can then move on to the next step towards setting goals.

Next, we need to group, categorize and prioritize our dreams, before we set goals. You will probably note that there are few dreams that can be placed under one category heading. For example, I found that most of my dreams fell under the following categories: Family, financial, career, personal development, travel and business.

You may have other categories as well such as music, hobbies, religion, education, etc.
The main thing is this step towards goal setting is to group all like dreams together under one category. This exercise should be done before you can set goals.

The next step towards setting goals is to prioritize each of the dreams in the category. For example, I prioritized all of my dreams relating to family as follows - build a house, have children, graduate from university, married, grandchildren, etc.
Do the same within each of your categories, ranking them in order of priority or in chronological order. This is getting your closer towards the effective setting of goals.

Next, look at your categorized list and all of your top priorities. Which dream stands out most, that will get your started on your journey. Whatever it is, this is were you start setting goals.

In my case, it was under the career category. If I got a national marketing job, it will satisfy my career dream. That in turn would satisfy a financial dream, which in turn would make a family dream a reality - a house. That career would also satisfy my travel need of seeing Canada from coast to coast, on expenses, before visiting other countries and the job could provide me with the personal development training that I was looking for.

Now that I have identified the most important dream, I moved onto setting goals to accomplish that dream. Over time, it all fell into place, and it all started with a dream, that became the first step towards living the life of my dreams.

The bottom line - The process of having dreams in writing, grouped, categorized and prioritized are a significant part of the process towards setting goals that will become a reality.

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Goal setting has kept me focused, helped me better manage my time and has kept me motivated, even when I was down. It was through goal setting, that I now realize that I was the author of my future. I became what I have wanted to become, which at one time was only a dream - impossible at that.

Before goal setting comes something even more strategic, and that is getting inside of the most important person in the world and bringing out all those internal dreams and desires. The goal setting formula is simple, it just requires you to dedicate a time period, up to 24 hours, to the most important person in the world.

Before goal setting, comes dreams. Those dreams are in your head and will always remain there, unless you let them flow outwards and take action. To do that the first step in the formula is to dedicate a time period to write out all of your life dreams as if nothing is impossible, no barriers, no limitations. Everything can become a reality.

Imagine your pencil, pen or keyboard is a magic wand and everything that you write down will become a reality. If it is not written down, it will not become a reality. Just the mere act of writing it down crystallizes the dream. This is a discipline before goal setting.

So, invest the next 24 hours to the most important person in the world and write out all of your dreams and desires of what you want to be, do or have. Write like you have never written before, get it all out! This exercise will be the foundation to successful goal setting and is the first step in the formula.

When I was twenty two, I called into work sick and dedicated a day to writing out my dreams. I wrote all day, slept on it, woke up and added more and then went to work the next morning.

I never felt so good in all of my life. I let the inside out, in writing. I now had a bit of a road map towards my future. This has to be done before goal setting can be effective.

The next steps in the goal setting formula, along with all the necessary forms and tools are located in Discipline # 5 - 11, in my book, Online for Life: The 12 disciplines to living your dreams.

The Bottom Line - Investing time in the most important person in the world, is where you get the best R.O.T.I. - Return on time invested. The goal setting formula starts with getting the inside out. Write out all of your dreams and desire as if nothing is impossible, no barriers and no limitations. This will form the foundation to effective goal setting.

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Most people think that money is the biggest motivator of all, but it is not. Everyone loves money and money is the first answer you will get when you even ask the question, why do you go to work. Most people think work and motivation is all about money.

However, money falls into the category of external motivation. External motivators are temporary - they don’t last long. They are never lasting. The worst part about them, is that no matter what amount you give, the more they are going to want the next time round. And if it is not more it will not be motivating, but de-motivating.

The same applies to all external motivators - motivational speakers, gifts, incentives, etc. Once they experience one, they want a better one next time round.

The only true form of motivation is internal motivation. Internal motivation is everlasting.

The top three ranking factors contributing to employee motivation are:
1, Praise and recognition in the workplace.
2. The feeling of being in on things
3. Help on personal problems.

The funny thing about these three factors is that they relate to internal employee motivation, although they come from an external source.

Each of these motivating factors affect people internally. No praise and recognition let’s their self talk tell them they are not doing their job properly. Add criticism to it and you’ve got a de-motivated employee.

Turn that around to sincere recognition and praise, and you will have motivated employees, because you are building their self-esteem and self confidence. That is what people are looking for. Everyone wants to feel better and that is why praise and recognition are ranked as the number 1 motivating factor in the workplace.

Have a meeting and exclude a couple of people. What do you think you are telling them. They are not able to contribute. Maybe you think they can, but you did not invite them. In their minds, they feel they are not worthy of contributing. This kind of behaviour leads to de-motivation.

Everyone in the organization wants to contribute to the success of the organization. Exclude them, and they will feel unworthy, and go against everything you do. Include them to motivate them.

Finally help on personal problems requires only an empathetic ear. Do you have one, or are your quick to give solutions. No body cares how much you know, until they know who much you care. Ask questions and listen. Show you care.

The Bottom Line: Make motivation in the workplace internal for lasting results. Use praise and recognition as a tool, as well as inclusion and listening. Combined they will motivate your employees beyond your expectations.

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