Monthly Archives: January 2012
The Psychology of Color [infographic], via @davidmerzel’s BLOG
Interesting Infographic from holykaw.alltop.com
5 Traits of Highly Successful Salesmen
Great article from Inc.
Highly successful salespeople cultivate the following five emotional traits:
1. Assertiveness
This allows you to move a sales situation forward without offending or frustrating the customer. Think of it as being located halfway between passivity and aggressiveness. For example, suppose a customer is delaying a decision. There are at least three basic responses:
Passive: “Could you give me a call when you’ve made a decision?”
Aggressive: “If you don’t buy right now, the offer is off the table.”
Assertive: “Can you give me a specific time and date when you’ll make your final decision?”
2. Self-Awareness
You need to be able to identify your own emotions, understand how they work, and then use them to help you build stronger customer relationships. This is a four-step process:
- Identify the emotions that you’re feeling,
- Based on experience, predict how those emotions will affect your sales effort.
- Compensate for negative emotions that might hinder the sale.
- Expand your positive emotions that might help you make the sale.
For example, suppose you feel furious that an important customer stood you up. You might take a break before your next meeting in order to remind yourself of all the times you’ve succeeded in the face of challenges. Or you might, as an ice-breaker, tell your second customer that you’re having a tough day and why.
3. Empathy
This entails adapting your behavior to the customer’s moods and emotions. It begins with listening and observing, but simply knowing what the customer might be feeling is not enough. You must be able to feel what the customer is likely to be feeling.
Suppose, during a sales call, you discover that the customer’s firm just announced major layoffs. You could ignore the news and proceed with the sales call as if nothing had changed, or you could focus on your own desire to make the sale and ask your contact who will have buying authority after the layoffs are over.
4. Problem Solving
The desire to solve a problem helps you create new ways to satisfy the customer’s needs, both financial (the ROI of your offering) and emotional–such as the customer’s need to be convinced that your and your firm are reputable and reliable. Problem solving is a four step process:
- See the customer situation as it really is. (Never try to solve a problem before you fully understand it.)
- Help the customer visualize a more desirable situation.
- Devise a way to move the customer from the ways things are today to the way the customer would like them to be.
- Communicate that solution in a way that makes it easy for the customer to make a decision.
While those steps might seem obvious, they’re the exact opposite of old-school salesmanship, where selling entails “giving a great sales pitch.”
5. Optimism
Optimism helps you maintain a sense of balance when things go awry. It proceeds directly from the (often unspoken) rules that you use to interpret daily events. For example, if the first sales call of the day goes poorly, your performance for the rest of the day will be different if you have this rule…
A bad first call means that I’m off my game this will be a bad day.
… rather than this rule:
Every sales call is different, so the next will probably be better.
Note that both rules are arbitrary responses to the same event, and neither is more “realistic” than the other. Even so, if you automatically jump to the first rule, rather than the second, it will be difficult for you to remain happy.
This principle works on bigger events, too. I’ve run into about a dozen top salespeople who saw the weak economy as an opportunity to sell even more,and did so, while their colleagues were busy hand-wringing.
In future columns, I’ll explain how to cultivate these traits in your day to day life, so stay tuned.
Looking for developers in desperate need of a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone!!!
We’re looking for feedback from Belgian developers on the use of their tools, languages and platform they target. NO YOU DON’T need to be a Microsoft addict or even developing on the Microsoft platform, all developers are equal (at least for this survey ).
So thank you for taking the time to fill in our short developer survey. The survey is anonymous and no personal data will be stored.
8 Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing
8 criteria for Facebook page success as part of a larger report by the research gods over at Altimeter
Twitter in Numbers - Infographic (circa 2011)
If you are one of those still wondering who uses twitter, why they do it and how they find the time, then this BuySellAds infographic is for you.
BTW you can follow me on twitter @MichelTriana (http://twitter.com/MichelTriana) and @NinutInc (http://twitter.com/NinutInc)
Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral With This Cheat Sheet
Make Your Blog Posts Go Viral With This Cheat Sheet, an infographic. What is viral marketing and how to make your post go viral is one of the most asked question by bloggers and internet marketers
Source : http://blog.kissmetrics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/viral-marketing-cheat-sheet-sm.jpg
My Three Choices for the Top XBOX 360 Games for 2012
Would it be too soon to create a list of the top Xbox 360 games for 2012? I don't think so! We’re practically in the middle of January at the moment, the earliest month of 2012, and this is a great time as any to discuss the games that will empty our wallets and fill up our rising hours for this year.
Thanks for having visited my BLOG in 2011 and See you next Year …
Be authentic, Be yourself, Be happy. Celebrate every happy moments with your friends and famill …
Thanks for having visited my BLOG in 2011 and See you next Year …
My blog was a great way to meet new people and share ideas …
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
Madison Square Garden can seat 20,000 people for a concert. This blog was viewed about 63,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Madison Square Garden, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
