Spread The Good News

IMAGINE you have just received an amazingly positive testimonial from a superbly happy client. After you have basked in the glow for a moment of two, you immediately add it to your website, right?

Actually, if you are anything like most business people, you probably won’t do anything with it. Some people might print it out and file it away in a “Nice Feedback” folder that almost never sees the light of day.

Some might even go so far as to add it to the “Testimonials” page on their website. But most won’t do anything with it at all.

Testimonials and endorsements are massively valuable. Research suggests they are at least eight times more powerful and persuasive than an advertisement or anything businesses or individuals say about themselves. So why don’t we use them more effectively?

For some people, it’s not in their nature to talk about themselves. They are flattered by the feedback but don’t feel they should shout too loudly about it. 

Some may feel slightly embarrassed, others simply take it on board and either don’t know how to, or simply don’t find the time, to use it to their advantage.

Testimonials and feedback from clients and others are so valuable that if we ignore them, not only are we doing ourselves an injustice, we are also likely to do our current and potential clients an injustice.

If you provide outstanding products or services that meet people’s needs, surely the more people who know about you and can benefit from you, the better?

If you want to reduce the amount of time and money you spend on advertising and promotion, and positively profile yourself more effectively, you need to gather testimonials on an ongoing basis and make them work hard for you.

Finding the right space

So where should you put them? Depending on the type of products or services you provide, consider using them in or on:

Fliers, brochures and advertisements: Stop talking about yourself and let others speak for you. Ensure at least 30 to 40 per cent of the space available is taken up by testimonials from happy clients.
Your e-mail signature: Add a short testimonial (perhaps changing it monthly) beside your contact details to turn your e-mail signature into a significantly more powerful promotional tool.
The back of your business card: Stop promoting your features and benefits, or worse, leaving your business card blank. Instead, let a happy client explain why someone you give your business card to should get in touch with you.
Every page of your website: Ensure there is at least one testimonial on each page of your website so no matter what page someone is on, he will see what others are saying about you (especially if he fails to click on the “Testimonials” page).
Your testimonials page: This almost goes without saying, but you may be surprised how infrequently testimonial pages are updated. Ensuring you have recent testimonials on your website will also help your search engine optimisation.
Proposals and pitch documents: Back up what you are saying about how marvellous you think you are by including relevant feedback from others at appropriate points throughout the document.
Annual and other reports: If you report regularly to a board or any kind of stakeholder group, include plenty of testimonials to demonstrate just how great you are and remind the people you are reporting to, to continue to support, recommend or fund you.
Invoices and estimates: A single, powerful testimonial on an invoice or estimate is a  reminder of why the company or person about to pay the bill should engage or pay promptly without you having to spell it out directly.
Posters for your wall: Seeing a growing range of positive testimonials every day will encourage you to continue doing a really great job and also provide assurance to visitors to your workplace.
Appropriate signage: A few short words on the back of your car or company vehicle may make the difference between the driver behind making a point of remembering your web address or forgetting it completely.

This is not an exhaustive list but a prompt to help you think about how you might benefit from including or displaying testimonials and endorsements.

No doubt you will be able to think of others that may be more relevant to you. Be creative. Get into the habit of asking yourself: “Could a testimonial enhance this?”

If the answer is “Yes”, and you have permission to use it from the person who gave it to you, then add it in.

Article by Hannah Samuel, columnist, author and international award-winning speaker with Training Edge International. 

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Touching Hearts and Minds

A business leader can be anyone who owns resources and is able to expand the value and profit of that resource. However, a leader can also evolve from just managing people to achieve the goals of the organisation without owning any resource. Here, people management is paramount.

In TouchPoints, authors Dough Conant and Mette Norgaard shared that “getting to the touchpoints of employees will lead to higher productivity and greater growth as a leader will be ‘tough-minded and tender-hearted’”.

Building on touchpoints for productivity improvement requires hard work and dedication. A leader has to be clear that it is the problem to be solved and employees to be inspired.

Here are eight productivity improvement touchpoints that leaders can utilise to manage employees:

Separate the employee  from the problem. People make mistakes in the workplace. As a leader, you should focus on the problem rather than on the employee — even though the problem was caused by the employee.

Refrain from bias. A leader will need to be objective in his investigation of issues at hand. He has to move away from office politics or conflicts, and focus on problem-solving.

Invent options to solve problems. A leader with a visionary mindset can develop multiple strategies to solve any problem. There is no such thing as there being just one solution. If you think hard enough, there is always a Plan A, B, C or D. It is all about creativity and inventing options.

Base it on objective criteria. As a leader, look for best practices, precedence and established standards which will strengthen leadership positions. These can be uncovered from internal and external sources.

Master your commitment to your organisation. A leader can create the energy and direction to improve the performance of employees by simply showing his commitment.

Often, leaders implement change and move on to other organisations. When employees see that you are indeed interested in the organisation’s development and direction, they will become your pillar. As you move up the ladder, this can become a challenge because each time you are promoted, you will need to engage a more experienced group of employees.

Channel energy into fact-based process improvement. Avoid telling employees, “My way or the highway!” This leads nowhere and arouses resentment in your employees. Instead, develop a proven system of improving processes.

Every organisation has its own process-improvement programme.

A Japanese business leader could focus on the 5 Ss: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke. They stand for sorting, straightening, systematic cleaning, standardising and sustaining. The American business leader could focus on six sigma. The strategy is to adapt a process improvement system to grow the company.

Implement change management strategies without the pain. In Fred Harburg’s book, The Corporate Athlete Advantage, he said that effective growth and change programmes should embrace four characteristics — intensely personal, deeply meaningful, highly relevant to employees and strongly supported by organisational culture.

Hence, a leader should not import change programmes for the sake of change. These programmes should lead to goals without the need for painful restructuring initiatives.

Look for a model that best fits your organisation. The market is flooded with business models that have served other organisations in an excellent manner. Ask which model best fits your organisation. In TouchPoints, the authors shared how the Campbell Leadership Model was crafted.

A visionary leader can draw best practices and create a company-specific value and business model. It will inspire employees to follow the model and create new values.

Employees are expected to adapt to changes year after year and these demands can affect performance. When managing multiple projects and diverse groups of employees, it is essential for any leader to win the hearts and minds of his employees.

Deploying these appropriate touchpoint strategies will help a leader to secure commitment, improve productivity and, at the same time, develop highly motivated teams.

Article by Maler Vilee, international director of Training Edge International. She has over 14 years of experience in coaching, mentoring and leadership development. Call her on maler@trainingedgeasia.com and visit www.trainingedgeasia.com

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Profit from Ties

THERE are two very different generic perspectives on sales — either salesmen are heroes who make sure the business survives, or they are rather sad figures who expose the fallacy of “capitalism”.

In Philip Broughton’s book Life’s A Pitch, he argues that “we are all selling all the time” — not just in business, but in our relationships with others, when building friendships, buying and selling goods every day. In almost everything we do, there is an element of “selling”.

Whether we like it or not, selling is as old as trade itself, and trade is as old as mankind. As soon as our forefathers started trading with each other, selling was essentially born.

The same goes for relationships. When our very early ancestors began to realise that their survival rate increased when they organised themselves and began to live in small communities built around relationships that would help everyone to survive better, the idea of social relationships were essentially born too.

It is, however, important to note that these early relationships were mutually interdependent and were essentially about survival.

In modern times, some of these social relationships seem to have moved to Facebook and other social networking sites, but these relationships are not necessarily interdependent, and therefore the more traditional values around friendship and relationships are not necessarily the same either.

It is thought that since people started to live in communities, evolution helped to develop our brains to build strong relations with up to a few hundred people at maximum, with whom we could relate to personally and about whom we could remember lots of details.

However, as sophisticated as we have become since, evolution is not that fast and we can still only hold enough data for a certain number of close friends and family.

Research has shown that among the top five happiness factors, “family relationships” comes up top, followed by “financial situation” and “work”, followed by “community and friends”.

The work factor is not so much about salary as it is about providing meaning and the relationships we build at work, and making friends is generally very important to most people too. In essence, we need other people, and we need to be needed. We build relationships with people around us to fulfil that need, and these relationships are generally positive.

With regard to the connection between sales and relationships, we may not like the idea that relationships can be profitable, but in business, things that don’t make a profit don’t survive — it is as simple as that!

During the 1990s, marketing people came up with the idea of building lasting relationships with customers, and today we refer to it as “customer relationship management” or CRM.

CRM is basically a marketing, database and relationship-building tool, which hopes to build relationships that help the business to launch products that the customer actually wants, improve its service system, build customer loyalty and, therefore, gain more sales and opportunities for cross-selling too.

The database element is essentially managing all the data and knowledge, which gets accumulated for potentially up to millions of customers. The knowledge we as individuals store in our brains for our personal relationships now gets data-mined and stored on computers for customers. CRM is big business and many companies are pondering about how to manage their customer relationships.

The Chinese term “Guanxi” is often claimed to be the lifeblood of how Chinese business is conducted, and the equivalent in the West would probably be referred to as “personal relationships” or “connections”.

It is widely recognised that relationships in general are important for conducting business — whether in the West or in the East. However, the importance and expectations of the personal relationship may vary greatly.

There is no doubt that relationships are important for us as individuals as well as for business, and in business the aim is to provide profits through sales. If sales are built on relationships with customers, then these are essentially profitable relationships.

It is therefore fitting to conclude that if all businesses are built on sales, then sustainable sales are built on profitable relationships.

Article by Niels Kemp Rasmussen, senior consultant, Training Edge International. He specialises in helping clients uncover hidden potential and increasing performance in their organisations. 

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Win You Customers' Trust

Some 96 per cent of all sales professionals agree that trust is critical to their sales success.

However, few know exactly what customers need to trust them for, and how to build the dimensions that are critical to trust. This means that sales professionals lack the ability to maximise the trust factor and are therefore unable to provide customers with what they value most.

A recent global survey conducted by Huthwaite International showed that sales professionals had a clear understanding of the importance of trust.

Findings of studies across Asia-Pacific, conducted by Mext & Duxton Consulting, show that if customers trust a brand or product, 83 per cent will recommend it to others; 82 per cent buy it more frequently; 78 per cent turn to it first for things they want; and almost half are willing to pay a premium for it.

Further studies show that just a 20 per cent improvement in trust can improve buyer behaviour by a whopping 400 per cent.

Building trust

It is critical for sales professionals to understand exactly how to build trust for their specific company, for their product and for themselves.

A very simple example: human beings go through various “tensions” when it comes to decision-making about whether or not to trust a person.

For those who are married, think back to when you were looking for a spouse. On the one hand, you wanted a person who was stable, gave you comfort and made you feel prepared for all the future. On the other, you also wanted someone exciting, someone who made you laugh, motivated you and maybe even introduced you to something new, exciting and unknown.

Depending on your needs, you would have trusted someone either very exciting, or very comforting or someone who could combine both in a unique way.

This is just one of the three tensions people go through when making a decision whether to trust someone (or something).

However, think about how powerful it would have been for any of your past romantic dates to actually know what you were looking for. This would have given your date a very good chance to make you fall on your knees and pop the question.

Take the same tension (stability/comfort versus excitement/progress) and think about Google ad sales professionals versus Yellow Pages ad sales people.

By default, Google sales professionals have to emphasise much more on stability as they already sell a very exciting and progressive product or brand. There is a good reason for Google to heavily promote their founders in public relations to gain the “stability” that most old school brick and mortar companies have by default.

Yellow Pages, on the other hand, is a long established company or brand with a very physical product. The company would need to emphasise much more on the progressiveness of their product and its salesmen to gain the trust of their customers.

For example, they need to understand their customers’ business much better than anybody else and be able to support their customer with progressive ideas to improve their business.

The other two tensions work similarly but with different trust dimensions. Once all three tensions and six dimensions are worked out, you will get a very clear picture about where you stand, and what you need to develop to increase the level of trust in your company and products.

There is a clear guideline on how to train your sales staff, adapt your message and even analyse your product portfolio. This approach to trust has been used with clients widely across countries and in various industries.

It works in any industry, any country and any context. After all, understanding your customers or business partners and building a trusted relationship is the golden key for trust and business success.

Article by Laurenz Koehler, international consultant with Training Edge International and managing partner of Duxton Consulting. E-mail him at Laurenz@trainingedgeasia.com or visit www.trainingedgeasia.com 

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