April 8, 2010 Edition 7
Tips on Public Speaking
By Bryan Flanagan
According to that great medical journal (The Readers Digest!), speaking in front of a group of people is still the number one fear in America today! The following three suggestions may help you deal with that fear. These will assist you when speaking to 2 or 20 or 200!
1. Preparation compensates for a lack of talent! Prepare the talk in advance. Organize your visuals, handouts, props, and material. Practice and rehearse not only the content but also the delivery. Analyze the audience by asking yourself these questions: In what are the attendees interested? What is important to them? How do they want to feel or think at the end of my presentation?
2. Your “first burst” is important! You should practice, rehearse, memorize, and/or choreograph your “first burst.” This is your opening sentence or paragraph. The purpose of the “first burst” is to grab the attention AND the interest of your audience. Using hilarious humor, quotable quotes, startling statistics, topical stories, and/or a focusing question can accomplish this. Use your imagination when creating your “first burst.”
3. Your audience is more forgiving than you are! Loosen up, lighten up, have fun when making a presentation. Don’t take yourself too seriously. The audience is not expecting perfection and neither should you! Remember: Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
One other thing: When in doubt, just get in front of the audience and let ‘er rip. The following summarizes this point. It seems a 17-year-old boy was debating whether to kiss his girlfriend or not. So, he dropped to his knees and prayed: “Lord, Lord up above, should I kiss the girl I love?’ A voice came back saying, “Sinner, sinner down below, pucker up and let ‘er go!”
When in front of an audience, remember to “just pucker up and let ‘er go!”
Bryan Flanagan is known as the Sales Ambassador. He is the premiere sales trainer and coach for Ziglar. Watch Bryan in action!
10 Mistakes in a Recession
By Grant Cardone
Recessions cause the economy to contract and make it more difficult for people to do business. What we are experiencing at this time causes people to respond in a similar manner: reacting to economic contraction with more contraction. While it may be a normal reaction to contract at this time, it only guarantees that you will be smaller when this is all over.
These are the biggest mistakes individuals and companies can make at this time:
1) People become focused on the problem, not the solution. You don’t want to shy away from problems; you want to identify them and solve them. The problems are the opportunities.
2) Respond with contraction by contracting. You will only get smaller by your actions, not because of the economy. Now is the time to expand in amounts proportionate to what your industry has contracted.
3) Underestimate the level of activity required. The amount of effort now required is and will be far greater in order to get things done, so prepare and train your organization to take more action and be more persistent.
4) Lower pricing. Dropping your price at this time is incorrect. Do the math; less volume at a lower price is suicide. Now is the time to train your people how to build value, not lower price.
5) Depend on old strategies for handling new environments. Old strategies will not work in this new economy. It will be “business-unusual” for some time to come.
6) Go into agreement with the masses. Watch what the masses of people are saying and doing and then do the opposite. The masses almost always do the “wrong” thing.
7) Over-qualify clients. Treat every opportunity like a buyer at this time. With money and credit more difficult to get, sellers tend to over-qualify their client’s ability to do business.
8.) Surround yourself with others that are focused on problems. Media runs rampant with bad news during all times but especially at this moment, and then friends, family and associates pass on bad news like the flu.
9) Being reasonable. This is not a time to be reasonable but unreasonable, to operate without logic concerning every action you take. If you try to make sense of things now you won’t even want to show up for work. Let your competition be reasonable while you are not!
10) Lack of training. Now more than other times you and your people have to know how to operate, function and persist. Now is the time to train and prepare for when the good times return. Just getting through this will require great attitudes, ridiculous persistence, and better selling skills to successfully penetrate the marketplace. Training, more than any other investment, will put your people’s attention on what they can do rather than what they can’t do.
No matter what industry you are in, now is the time to EXPAND not contract! Let others get lost in the bad news and elect to get smaller. Now is your moment to expand and grab market share by disagreeing with the responses of those with whom you compete. Your competitors are weak and broken, most unprepared and unwilling to do what it takes to get the job done, and most of them doing little more than complaining and responding to economic contraction by contracting. Train your people now to expand and conquer into the market by taking advantage of the mistakes your competitors are making.
Grant Cardone, author of Sell To Survive, is being called The Entrepreneur for the 21st Century. Starting from modest beginnings, he is now the founder and owner of three multi-million-dollar companies: a successful software company, a sales training and consulting business, and a real estate company with a portfolio valued at over $100 million. Cardone also speaks internationally to industry leaders, managers, CEOs and entrepreneurs on sales, money, finance, business strategies and business expansion. Visit his website.
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April 15, 2010
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Lighter Side of Selling
“Do you believe in life after death?” the boss asked one of his salesmen.
“Yes, sir,” the salesman replied.
“That’s good,” the boss said. “After you left early yesterday to go to your grandmother’s funeral, she stopped in to see you.”
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Thanks for all the wonderful sharings.
Regards, Josh