Month: July 2018
Do you run a sales team? Have you ever noticed that sales people are brilliant at coming up with excuses for why their promised sales didn’t eventuate. I use a simple strategy on my sales team that stopped the excuses and doubled the sales.
A couple of years ago I read a very interesting piece of research. The business school of a major university was conducting an international study into sales management. One of the amazing things they discovered was that sales people who reported to a sales manager, on average produced less than sales people who did not have a sales manager.
The reason for this was that the sales managers tended to be critical of the shortcomings of their team members and this made the sales people nervous. They became so preoccupied with having to face the music at the sales meeting that their focus was on failure rather than success. If your focus is on failure then failure is what you will get.
This is all very interesting but there is still the practical matter that most sales people are performing well below their potential. So how does a sales manager get his or her team performing without creating the problem of failure focus?
When I first started managing a sales team I discovered that sales people had an incredible talent for coming up with excuses. They seemed to be able to justify any lost sales by giving you a plausible reason why it was not possible to get the sale. While I admired their creativity I also realized that in most cases the sale was getable. The problem I had was how to get the sales person away from the excuse habit and onto the success habit.
I also remembered when I first entered the sales world, and how my sales manager had harassed myself and the other sales people at each sales meeting. I used to dread going to those meetings.
I ended up creating a solution that got rid of excuse behavior, avoided the harassing situation and led to a doubling of my sales team’s output. I made a rule that the only excuse that a salesperson was allowed to offer was an excuse that was so good that if they wrote it on a piece of paper and took it to the manager of the local supermarket that the manager would be happy to give them a week’s groceries in exchange for the excuse.
Here’s how I used the “grocery excuse” strategy. I first explained the rule to each of my sales people. Then if during a sales meeting a sales person started to offer any form of excuse I would interrupt and say “excuse me Bob, can I buy a week’s groceries with this excuse that you’re starting on?” They would say no, and then I would say “then let’s focus on a real way that we can get this sale across the line.”
This crazy “grocery rule” worked like a charm. Within a few meetings it totally eliminated excuse behavior and turned the whole focus of the meetings into positive, success oriented thinking. The result was that the teams sales figures improved dramatically and my sales team didn’t fear the meeting.
If you are having problems with excuse focused sales staff then why not give my crazy motto a try.
Someone has said that the truth is bitter. On the other hand there are people who are not able to see the truth just because of the perception. If a anyone draws the attention of these ignorant people towards the facts then there is a chance of that mistake not being repeated and in some cases the mistake can be rectified.
Most of the people especially those who buy Tissot Watches or any other Swiss made watch are not aware of some key issues which could make their watch useless.
Most of the watches are rated as resistant to water till 50 meters. This means that under normal condition of getting wet in the rain or water being sprayed on you by mistake the watch should not allow the water inside its body. This is true for the liquid form of water that will flow immediately down your body and not remain stagnant around the watch to percolate into it. On the contrary if you wear the watch and dive or if you wear the watch and enter the steam bath the watch is sure to get spoiled because the water percolates into it because of pressure or in the form of moisture or water vapor. This is sure to cause water damage under the crystal.
Usually it is seen that if you buy Tissot watches from the online store, the authorized dealers do not offer after sales service. If you buy the watch from a authorized dealer then only the Warranty is honored. Since the watch is not bought from the authorized dealer there is no question of honoring the warranty. In this sort of situation a buyer is forced to avail the services of a repairer who is not associated with the company directly. The only negative aspect of this is that if the repairer places any order for the spare parts this order is going to be fulfilled not immediately but will take some time. More over the authorized dealers want to be responsible for the things that are sold through them not through other means of distribution especially the net. Moreover the online retailer may or may not be directly associated with the manufacturer. This does not mean that things should not be bought from the online store but one should take utmost care that the online store is genuine and offering after sales service.
People usually get confused between Swatch and Tissot. The fact is that Swatch is a very big group. This group constitutes of other members such as Blancpain, Breguet, Tiffany, Omega, Rado, Hamilton, Longiness. There are other low tier brand manufacturers who are also the members of this group. This does not mean that all the members are of equal standards. ETA is one of the company’s who manufacturers spare parts of Tissot and Tag Heuer. Now ETA is a member of Swatch and so do Tissot and Tag Heuer. This does not mean that the quality standards of Tissot and Tag Heuer are the same.