Simply do one major thing from your to-do list before you do anything else each day. That means before you check email or phone messages, before you do the social rounds at work or stop by the water cooler. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, do not start playing Monopoly or Angry Birds. Do not do anything else until you've moved ahead a major project or goal in your life.
- Craig Ballantyne, Early to Rise
Topics: Business Skills, Goals, Time Management
Avoiding the things you need to do doesn't actually help you avoid stress. That math test is still going to be there tomorrow.
-Trevor Romain & Elizabeth Verdick, Stress Can Really Get on Your Nerves!
Topics: Business Skills, Time Management, Managing Stress
It is a very competitive and fast paced consumer world. For your business to thrive, you must take the time to learn (and know) your product, competition, market trends, economic factors, and current events. Customer relationships have to be built and accounts must be qualified.
How can you qualify and build customer relationships? First, inquiring about the customer’s key needs and objectives are questions that must be asked during the sales process. Then, by understanding the needs of the customer, your sales process and pitch can be custom designed to match his/her key needs. What's better? Your customer will know that his/her needs are being met when you take the time to uncover his/her wants. This will lead to loyalty and ongoing sales, which also results in a strong relationship.
Topics: Business Skills, Confidence, Sales and Selling
Never assign blame. When you offer your solution, do not fault the customer. For example, how would you feel hearing the following: "If you had scheduled your appointment the first time you called we would have come out." Statements like this will put the customer on the defensive. When you are trying to help a difficult customer, blaming serves no purpose. Likewise, never blame another employee or department. Saying, "The first employee you spoke with should have scheduled your appointment," may relieve you from blame, but this statement serves no purpose. To the customer, you are the company. Use I or we when referring to your company to show you are accountable.Topics: Business Skills, Customer Service, Customer Experience, Problem Resolution
Rule: You can get your time and your life under control only to the degree to which you discontinue lower value activities. For you to do something new, you must complete or stop doing something old. Getting in requires getting out. Picking up means putting down.
Creative procrastination is the act of thoughtfully and deliberately deciding upon the exact things you are not going to do right now, if ever. Most people engage in unconscious procrastination. They procrastinate without thinking about it. As a result, they procrastinate on the big, hard, valuable, important tasks that can have significant long-term consequences in their lives and careers. You must avoid this common tendency at all costs. Your job is to deliberately procrastinate on tasks that are of low value so that you have more time for tasks that can really make a difference in your life and work.
-Brian Tracy, Eat that Frog
Topics: Business Skills, Goals
Now that you've delivered all the good news - the ways in which your employee has shone in the past year, the positive expectations you have established together for the coming year, the road map you have outlined for fulfilling those goals - the timing is opportune to raise any and all problematic issues you need to address. The key is to lay our your case in language that is straightforward yet not withering.
- Beverly Ballaro, Dealing with Difficult People
Topics: Business Skills, Quality Assurance, Leadership and Management