Top 10 Prospecting Voicemail Don’ts
How to make a memorable slide presentation
I speak of some of these tactics in my book Eliminate Your Competition but this infographic is excellent for discussing this basic problem.
Ten minutes after your presentation, your audience will start to forget up to 50% of the content. This gets worse. By the next day, your audience will have lost 75% of the content and a week later, you will be down to 90% loss.
It is inevitable that you will lose some memory of the conversation but you need to take steps to maximize the retention rate. As I discuss in more detail in my book, the human mind is best if it only remembers 3-7 items. Try to remember that as you go through your content.
The ultimate Linkedin cheat sheet
How to deal with rude people
To read more, check out the blog article series: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/rude-people/
This is likely the best commencement speech ever given
A commencement address is supposed to be a motivating speech that propels graduating students on for the rest of their life. It is supposed to be those nuggets of wisdom that the graduate can look back at and understand the secrets of success as understood by the presenter.
Regardless of your profession, be it sales, management, accountant, shopkeeper, truck driver, or construction, most commencement addresses fall short of that ideal but this one does not. In my opinion, it is one of the best commencement addresses of all time and it is applicable to any and all people in the US and the world.
The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Commencement Address, Admiral William H. McRaven Remarks by Naval Adm. William H. McRaven, BJ ’77, ninth commander of U.S.Special Operations Command, Texas Exes Life Member, and Distinguished Alumnus.
We all need this advice in life. Do the small things and the big things will take care of themselves, don’t back down to fear, and together, as a team, we can do great things.
- Make your bed – take care of the small things if you want to do big things
- Find people to paddle with you – you cannot do this along
- Measure the size of heart, not flippers – everyone is different and that is okay and it doesn’t matter to be successful
- Get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward – failure is a constant part of life just deal with it
- Don’t be afraid of the circuses – it will make you stronger
- Sometimes you have to slide down obstacles head first – sometimes it is important to take risks to get ahead
- Don’t back down from the sharks – your courage will get you through
- You must be your very best in the darkest moments – in the darkest moments is when success is the closest
- Start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud. Hope for everyone – together, we can succeed
- Don’t ever, ever ring the bell – quitting is a final act and you don’t get “do overs” in life
15 ways to beat jet lag
5 reasons your sales prospects say, “No!”
Did you know?
- 42% of sales reps feel they do not have the right information before making a call.
- Only 13% of customers believe a salesperson can understand their needs.
- 80% of prospects who eventually buy are originally marked as bad leads.
View the original infographic on the ZoomInfo blog.
Is your customer’s sprinkler leaking?
I have been following Nick Miller the President of Clarity Advantage for years (close to 20 years). He has been publishing advice about sales on a weekly basis and has earned my respect for creating glimpses of examples in life that teach the philosophy of sales. Nick is based in Concord, MA. He assists banks and credit unions to generate more and more profitable relationships, faster, with business clients, their owners, and their employees.
If you are not subscribed to Nick’s newsletter, you should be.
Most of his stories start with “In which we are …”.
Here is one of his latest articles. This particular article comes with the preamble:
In which we are reminded to meet routinely with our clients, certainly with our most significant clients, so we can anticipate and address challenges early rather than waiting for them to call us once there’s a breakdown.
One summer, a few years ago, during my morning drives to work, I noticed pools of water on the road asphalt along one side of the square. Morning after morning, water – twenty or thirty gallons, maybe – pooled in the road.
“Sprinkler head must be broken,” I’d think as I drove past the square each morning.
After several weeks of this, my internal dialog shifted to, “I wonder why someone doesn’t notice the water and fix the sprinkler? Surely they must inspect these things?” And then, as more time passed, to “I should call someone about that.”
Never mind that I’d had the thought, somehow I would forget or it would seem like too much work to figure out who to call. So, I did nothing, expecting that SOMEONE in the town maintenance department would figure this out and fix it.
Finally, one morning, I called them.
“Oh,” they said, “thank you so very much for calling. We didn’t know about it.”
And they fixed it that same day. No more road water. After several thousand gallons wasted.
My memory of this was prompted last week when I noticed a broken sprinkler on a baseball field past which I drive. Five outfield sprinklers functioning perfectly and, from the sprinkler on the first base line – water shooting 30 feet STRAIGHT up into the air. Tuesday morning… Wednesday morning…Thursday morning.
“Why doesn’t anybody notice this?”, I wondered. “Don’t they inspect these systems?”
Nobody inspects these things. I called them on Thursday morning.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT: We (as sales people) should be inspecting these things with and for our clients. We put our relationships and sales opportunities at risk if we don’t. Why wait until clients call to tell us “they have water in the road” or some other problem we could fix?
Instead, set up routine ‘inspections’ – “Annual Relationship Reviews,” “Quarterly Reviews,” “Monthly Check Points” – with clients, frequency based on their circumstances, rates of change, and risk of loss, so we can anticipate and address problems before our clients lose thousands of gallons or dollars or hours of time.
