Friday, 6 September 2013
Saturday, 20 July 2013
Think out of the Box
Think out of the Box
These are few questions asked in HR interview! The answers are really stunning and inspiring. Thinking out of the box! A must read...
Question 1:
You are driving along in your car on a wild, stormy night, it’s raining heavily, when suddenly you pass by a bus stop, and you see three people waiting for a bus:
* An old lady who looks as if she is about to die.
* An old friend who once saved your life.
* The perfect partner you have been dreaming about.
Which one would you choose to offer a ride to, knowing very well that there could only be one passenger in your car?
This is a moral/ethical dilemma that was once actually used as part of a job application.
He simply answered:
“I would give the car keys to my Old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the partner of my dreams.”
Sometimes, we gain more if we are able to give up our stubborn thought limitations. Never forget to “Think Outside of the Box.”
Question 2:
What will you do if I run away with your sister?
The candidate who was selected answered ” I will not get a better match for my sister than you sir”
Question 3:
Interviewer (to a student girl candidate) – What is one morning you woke up & found that you were pregnant.
Girl - I will be very excited and take an off, to celebrate with my husband.
Normally an unmarried girl will be shocked to hear this, but she managed it well. Why I should think it in the wrong way, she said later when asked.
Question 4:
Interviewer: He ordered a cup of coffee for the candidate. Coffee arrived kept before the candidate, then he asked what is before you?
Candidate: Instantly replied “Tea”
He got selected.
You know how and why did he say “TEA” when he knows very well that coffee was kept before.
(Answer: The question was “What is before you (U – alphabet) Reply was “TEA” ( T – alphabet)
Alphabet “T” was before Alphabet “U”
Question5;
Interviewer said “I shall either ask you ten easy questions or one really difficult question.
Think well before you make up your mind!” The boy thought for a while and said, “my choice is one really difficult question.”
“Well, good luck to you, you have made your own choice! Now tell me this. “What comes first, Day or Night?”
The boy was jolted into reality as his admission depends on the correctness of his answer, but he thought for a while and said, “It’s the DAY sir!”
“How” the interviewer asked,
“Sorry sir, you promised me that you will not ask me a SECOND difficult question!”
___
Sometimes just thinking out of the box is all it takes!
Share with your friend and give them a special moment of thinking...!!
Its long but do read, its interesting
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
6 Qualities of a Successful Sales Pitch
6 Qualities of a
Successful Sales Pitch
Even if you
don't think you're a salesperson, you should learn the following qualities of a
successful sales pitch, because you will have to sell your brand to achieve
your goals.If you go in with the idea that you are just going to talk, talk, talk, and make the sale, it’s going to be a struggle. But if you go in with the idea that you are going to have a conversation and build a relationship with the prospect, you’ll have a much better success rate. I have come up with six simple yet effective qualities of a successful Sales Pitch, which are:
1. Confidence.
1. Confidence.
The most important factor when engaging anyone, from influential
executives to potential investors in your brand, is to have confidence in
yourself and your abilities. You need to be confident in your personality,
appearance, skills, and overall presentation and project this at all times.
2. Preparation. You should always be prepared to represent your brand; you never know when you will be placed in a situation that might be advantageous. To be prepared is to be ready for success at all times.
3. Research. Learn about your audience-whether it's a client, manager, or investor-before you even meet them. Google their name and try to learn who they are and how you should engage them. Your audience will be impressed if you can show you're aware of their achievements.
4. Delivery. To deliver a successful pitch, remember to say something concrete, important, and achievable.
5. Speed. Sometimes you are given very little time to deliver your pitch, so make the most of it. This means you have to be ready to unleash your best ideas quickly and get to the point.
6. Follow-up. Whether you succeed or fail with delivery, there is always opportunity for follow-up. Showing that you are interested in a person or the company is seen as positive.
Your audience
has to embrace your brand for you to achieve your dreams. Think of an interview
as you selling yourself (the product) to a hiring manager (audience)-if you've
developed a convincing pitch, you will be a valuable and marketable brand.
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Nine Easily Avoidable Selling Mistakes
Selling isn’t complicated.
When quotas get missed, when opportunities are lost, and when careers go sour,
most of the time it’s because the sales pro made a tiny mistake. A
mistake that could have been easily avoided.
Here’s a list of the nine most
common sales mistakes, and EXACTLY how to make sure you don’t make them.
Mistake
#1: Failing to Keep Your Pipeline Primed
Definition: Not having enough prospects (i.e. fully qualified leads)
at the beginning of the sales cycle.
Why It’s Easy to Make: Filling the pipeline often involves cold-calling (i.e.
calling people you don’t already know personally) and often plenty of
“rejection.”
Why It’s a Big Mistake: If you don’t have enough prospects at the beginning of your
pipeline, you’ll probably not have enough coming out the other end as real live
customers.
The Unintended Consequence: You may end up spending extra time on the accounts that
you DO have in the pipeline and put unconscious pressure on those prospects to
buy, thereby creating resistance and EVEN FEWER sales.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can easily schedule quality time for cold-calling,
asking for referrals and other lead generation activities.
Mistake
#2: Failing to Research the Prospect
Definition: Going on a cold call or go to a face-to-face without
knowing much about the prospective customer.
Why It’s Easy To Make: Your primary job is to sell, not to dig around and find
out things, right?
Why It’s a Big Mistake: You have a limited amount of time with each
prospect. If you spend it finding out things that you could find out
elsewhere, that’s less time you have to actually move the sale forward.
The Unintended Consequence: The prospect will know you’re unprepared and (worse) take
it as a sign of disrespect.
Why It’s Easy To Avoid: You can use the web to discover where your offering fits
(business need, organizational structure, etc.) before contacting the prospect.
Mistake
#3: Failing to Qualify the Lead
Definition: Putting a sales lead into your pipeline without being
certain that they have a need for your offering or the money to buy it.
Why It’s Easy to Make: If you get some prospects in the pipeline, your manager
will finally get off your back, right? And, who knows, maybe they’ll buy…
What It’s a Big Mistake: Every second that you spend on a prospect that won’t and
can’t buy is time you could be spending on prospects that will and can.
The Unintended Consequence: You’ll make a few sales… but your numbers at the end of
the quarter will look like crap compared to your peers who bothered to qualify
their leads.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: Have a list of qualification question and ask them early
in the sales cycle.
Mistake
#4: Failing to Discover the Buying Process
Definition: Going through the sales cycle assuming that your sales
activities will drive the sale from inception to closing.
Why It’s Easy to Make: The illusion that you can control the sales through
persuasion and manipulation is comforting in an essentially chaotic world.
Why It’s a Big Mistake: Every firm has its own way to make buying decisions, with
its own timetable for making them. When your sales activities get out of
sync, you end up working a cross-purposes.
The Unintended Consequence: Surprises at the end of the sales cycle… like contracts
and P.O.s that get signed late, or never get signed at all.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: During your initial conversations, you can work with your
customer contact to define the buying process. You then adapt your sales
activity to match.
Mistake
#5: Giving a Generic Sales Pitch
Definition: Pulling out your slides and going through a list of canned
list of features and benefits.
Why It’s Easy to Make: Marketing gave you this pitch and said it would WOW the
customer. And rumor is that it does work sometimes. Or so you’ve
heard.
Why It’s a Big Mistake: Canned presentations are not only boring, they’re vaguely
insulting. And they that you’re force-fitting whatever you’ve got to sell
into something that the customer should buy, whether or not he really wants or needs
it.
The Unintended Consequence: Best case, this “spray and pray” behavior simple wastes
the customer’s time, but the prospect will forgive you and move on and perhaps
even buy. Worst case, you can antagonize the prospect to the point where
he’s not going to buy from you, period.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: Simple. Just remember that you should never fire up
PowerPoint unless you’re presenting to a room full of people… and after you’ve
customized the deck to match the prospect’s requirements.
Mistake
#6: Trying to Close Too Soon
Definition: Asking for the business before the prospect is convinced
there is a real need or that your firm and offering is right for them.
Why It’s Easy to Make: You’re already counting your commission in your imagination,
so you misread the cues that the prospect is giving.
Why It’s a Big Mistake: You end up looking hungry and like you’re really only
trying to cut a deal - for your own reasons, not because you want to help the
customer.
The Unintended Consequence: The sale will take longer, because you’ll need to step
back and work to re-establish trust. And if you flub it again, you can
probably kiss the sale goodbye, because the prospect now sees you as a “used
car salesman.”
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can ask confirming questions. Listen to the
customer’s answers carefully. If there’s still resistance, it’s too soon to
close.
Mistake
#7: Waiting Too Long to Close
Definition: Letting the sales process go on and on, without ever
asking for the business.
Why It’s Easy to Make: You’re afraid of getting a “NO!” and finding out that the
customer doesn’t really like you, even though you’ve spent all this time on the
account.
Why It’s a Big Mistake: The time you spend unnecessarily on one prospect is time
that you’re not spending developing another. And that’s money out of your
pocket.
The Unintended Consequence: You’ll end up hustling like crazy at the end of the
quarter to close… and you probably won’t the close because you missed the
window of opportunity.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can ask confirming questions. Listen to the
customer’s answers. When you’re getting all green lights, ask for the
business.
Mistake
#8: Failure to Follow-up
Definition: You make a commitment to a prospect, but don’t find the
time to fulfill it; or you forget to check on a customer after you’ve made the
sale.
Why It’s Easy To Make: Hey, you’re busy, right? You’ve got lots of things
that need doing. And there are always other deals in the pipeline, eh?
Why It’s a Big Mistake: If it’s a prospect, you just proved that you’re unreliable
and untrustworthy. If it’s a customer, you just proved that you were
really just trying to make a sale and “so long, sucka…”
The Unintended Consequence: You’re clobbering your reputation and making it impossible
to sell to those people. And you can forget about ever getting a referral.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: With a little forethought, you can schedule follow-up
activities immediately after the contact. And schedule a series of follow-up
phone calls and email to check on each customer’s status. Then do it.
Mistake #9: Forgetting to Get a
Referral
Definition: Not getting “warm leads” from your existing customers.
Why It’s Easy to Make: You were
told that the best time to ask for a referral is when you close the deal.
That seldom works, so you stopped bothering.
Why It’s a Big Mistake: Referrals are the easiest leads to qualify and the easiest
prospects to convert to customers because you enter the sales cycle without
having to work as hard to establish trust.
The Unintended Consequence: You end up starting from scratch on every sale, which
takes time, which means that you’ll ultimately be making fewer sales than if
you had some “warmer” prospects entering the pipeline.
Why It’s Easy to Avoid: You can make it part of your regular routine. At
closing, you can obtain a promise of a referral if, after delivery, the
customer is delighted. Then, after delivery, you follow up, and ask for
the referral.
Monday, 26 December 2011
I will grant you three wishes.
The
woman once freed a frog, and the frog said, I will grant you three wishes but
that there is a condition to your wishes. Whatever you wish for, your husband
will get ten times!"
The
woman said, "That's okay."
For
her first wish, she wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
The
frog warned her, "You do realize that this wish will also make your
husband the most handsome man in the world, an Adonis whom women will flock
to."
The
woman replied, "That's okay, because I will be the most beautiful woman
and he will have eyes only for me."So, KAZAM- she' is the most beautiful woman
in the world!
For
her second wish, she wanted to be the richest woman in the world.
The
frog said, "That will make your husband the richest man in the world. And
he will be ten times richer than you."The woman said, "That's okay,
because what's mine is his and what's his is mine."
So,
KAZAM-she's the richest woman in the world!
The frog then inquired about her
third wish, and she answered, "I'd like a mild heart attack.
"Moral
of the story: Women are clever. Don't mess with them.
Attention female readers: This is
the end of the joke for you. Stop here and continue feeling good.
Male
readers continue reading.
=
=
=
=
=
=
Guess
what: The man had a heart attack ten times milder than his wife.
Moral of the
story: Female thinks that they are so very smart.
If you are a woman and still
reading this, it only goes to show that women never listen:D
Friday, 23 December 2011
There is a way to improve Your Struggling Sales Team
There is a way to improve Your Struggling Sales Team
What do you do
with struggling salespeople? It's a problem that's vexed almost
every business, assistant managers, presidents of boards and even new start-ups.
It's simply hard to know when to pull the trigger on
removing underperforming team members when it could be that the staff just
needs a little guidance, encouragement, or training to get back on track. A
little professional nudge in the right direction is a more economical choice
over the time-consuming and expensive process of hiring a replacement sales
representative. Many sales professionals would rather give their struggling
sales people a chance to improve and bring their results up to company
standards.
When you're trying to figure out whether your sales team
can get back on track, first try these strategies I gather through my personal
experience on how to lift sales team out of the profit gutter. Since i do not
have decades of experience, some might find it a childish approach, but I am
trying my best to share some advice through my own niche of experience. For me,
there are only four simple steps to overcome this challenge.
Step One:
Install a Hardcore Sales Manager
You can't have someone overseeing your sales team who is
nothing more than a glorified cheerleader, you need to employ a manager who is
not only willing to engage the team, but to also identify weaknesses and work
directly with sales staff to overcome their challenges.
It's not somebody who can just pat somebody on the back
they do only team talks and team talks aren't enough for some salespeople.
Many companies make the mistake of promoting their top
salespeople to manager positions, but often the most skilled salespeople don’t
have the coaching expertise needed to effectively guide a whole team.
In fact, sales representatives strongly prefer leading to
come from their direct supervisor. By far unless the direct supervisor is
perceived as owning that, the coaching is likely to have relatively minimal
impact, at the end of the day, people don't leave bad companies. They leave bad
managers."
Step Two: Implement One-on-One Coaching
The first step to improving sales is talking directly to
the team to find out what struggles they are facing. What makes their jobs
difficult? What could they do better? What could they be provided with to do
better?
Sometimes they're very open and they tell you a lot of
things, other times you will have to try a little by asking how they're
managing time, what an average day looks like and to describe how they run
sales call.Then he picks one problem at a time to work on to get
better results. That sometimes means removing technological distractions and
giving additional management support.My personal recommendation is to pair low-performing
sales representatives with successful ones. This strategy was a better learning
experience at my first sales job before graduation in Granton Marketing Canada.In Granton they put a sales team on a strict schedule so
they are making sales calls during dedicated blocks during the day, instead of
sporadically throughout all work hours. Limiting the coaching to specific
groups of employees is often more effective than spreading it around the
company as a whole, one should also remember that coaching is not meant to be democratic,
too many managers fall back on what he calls "spreadsheet coaching," where the focus is on whether the sales
staff is hitting its numbers. Instead, you should be working closely with the
individual sales representatives to understand the context of the problems.When it comes to coaching, they're so focused on that
number and hitting that quota, ultimately they lose sight, the way that you do
that is not focus on those outcomes but focus on behaviours. Furthermore, it is
very essential to bring a battle plan to help the employee assault obstacles to
productivity. Often times, the problem is a lack of follow through, which leads
to fizzling sales momentum. Having an action plan helps keep track of things
like that which might otherwise be overlooked.
Step Three: Put
Your Team on a Sales DietJ
It is kind of funny but like anyone leading an unhealthy
lifestyle, a sales staff sometimes needs a "sales diet" of sorts to
get some perspective on challenges.Giving struggling employees a smaller stack of calls to work
through, they can gain confidence and avoid the burnout of intense extended
sales pitch efforts.Then, work with them to analyse the sales calls to note
areas for improvement: Do they have good rapport and conversation skills? Are
they moving through the pitch at a natural pace or steam rolling right to the
point?
Setting individual benchmarks can help put people on the
right track to success, especially if you are forced to put sales staff on
probation until performance improves. But it's important to keep a balance
between realistic goals and creating too much performance anxiety.
Step Four: Looking to the Future, Hire Smart:
The best way to handle lackluster sales representatives
is to not have them in the first place, or to at least identify them early.It's really important for the management team to avoid
this situation, stay on top of the rep's performance, and intervene before they
become the worst sales person or significantly under performing.What I believe companies need to sit down and figure out a map of the behaviours that drive success before doing any hiring. If you've got a profile
of the behaviours to drive success, you'll make sure people more likely to be
aligned to great behaviours. Your company's expectations should be communicated
during the job interview so candidates know what company’s vision is. You can
test their skills by including in the interview exercises that force them to
think on their feet; or may be sending them off with a homework assignment to
see how they can prepare for a big task.
But when all else fails, you may have to come to grips
with trimming the sales team of dead weight.
At the end we should remember one thing “For true under performers, no amount of
good coaching is going to make them better at their job”.
Saturday, 17 December 2011
The Characteristics of a Master Sales Closer:
The Characteristics of a Master Sales Closer:
When you are in sales, closing is as important as your sales pitch.
Without the closing spiel, you aren’t assured of a sale and you might even
leave things hanging. If you’re in sales as your
profession then you should have a very convincing closing to end your sales pitch and
ensure that a sale does indeed happen and that you haven’t wasted your time and
getting no results for it. After analysing closely, I have come up with
some characteristic and ingredients must possess by a Master Sales Closer.
1. Shows no fear: Never ‘pushy’ and does not resolve to hard sell. No
signs of weakness and vulnerability to rejection. The master sales closer is confident and relaxed, and lets the conversation
take its own course and move at its own pace. He wants the prospect to buy but
understands the pace that needs to be at.
2. Not
selling just for the commission: Profound genuine belief in the value of what he is
selling. Matching the right people to the right product /service.
3. Never
gets down on herself/himself: Knows how to control his inner critic. May use
errors to improve but never as a stick to beat himself with.
4. Very organized
and straightforward in asking for action: “Here’s how we
will get started”
5. Understands the
prospect has doubts, fears and the temptation to avoid confrontation too: A Master Sales Closer understands
their job is to close sales more than anything else. Knows the prospect wants
him to be firm, convinced, and reassuring to help the prospect act rather than
avoid/postpone a decision.
6. Immune
to rejection: Never taking questions, objections or refusal
personally.
7. Come across like a consultant: Make sure not to pretend yourself
to be the one who just want to sell, rather be a consultant instead.
8. Avoid
all negative influences and distractions: Committed and
focused on the objective
9. Master
closers are competitive yet remarkably stress free: A master sales
closer competes with himself and his goals, records but rarely competes
against others.
10. They
celebrate success: Without guilt!
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
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