C-Suite Network™

Menu

Day: June 30, 2020

Categories
Personal Development Sales

3 of 7: Are you Qualifed? What do you Believe?

 

Mindful Sales Practice 3 of 7

The entire sales process consciously or unconsciously depend on what you believe.

Beliefs are strongly held thoughts that are held consciously or unconsciously to be true. 

To be successful you must integrate beliefs into the sales process.  Do you believe in yourself?  Do you believe in your product or service?  Are you willing and able to convey that belief in a convincing way to your customer?  Do you elicit an emotional reaction within yourself when you share your product or service with someone else?  If yes, is that emotion positive or negative?  If you believe in yourself and you believe in your product, you will begin to feel an emotional response when you identify the ideal customer.  This is where sales become something more than a transaction, it becomes an experience.  Our invitation is for you to transcend your beliefs into an authentic, world-class customer experience.

Qualification is, without question, the most important step in the Mindful Sales process.  This includes a series of questions you ask your customer before selling anything. There are many ways to do this.  We focus on five key areas that can be used to better understand your customer and the reason they are looking to make a purchase. 

The five key qualifying topics are:

Needs

Decision-Making Process

Competition

History

Resources

 

We use the following statement to remember them.

New Data Creates Happy Results

Use this strategy to mindfully connect to your next customer.

Eric Szymanski is a C-Suite Network Advisor and an award-winning co-author of Sell More, Stress Less: 52 Tips to Become a Mindful Sales Professional.  He is an American hospitality industry professional with extensive sales & marketing leadership experience. You can see more of his work at www.MindfulSalesTraining.com. Eric has demonstrated success in leading high-performing sales teams through planning, implementing, and monitoring actionable sales and marketing plans at hotels and resorts of all sizes, including city-center, convention district, airport and attractions areas. He has a proven track record of success at all levels through the achievement of both individual and team goals for several 1st tier, globally recognized brands such as Disney, Marriott, Hilton & Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

Throughout his career, Eric has created authentic, world-class experiences while volunteering at all levels in several meetings industry associations. In 2018, Eric was recognized with the top individual sales award in the convention sales division at The Walt Disney Company. In 2002, he was recognized as Caterer of the Year by the Orlando, Florida Chapter of the National Association of Catering Executives. He is an avid runner, choral music performer & father of twin daughters who entered college in the fall of 2019.

 

Categories
Growth Management Personal Development Women In Business

Asking Better Questions to Prepare for the New Work World

Becoming our best self is a life-long process.  Sometimes that journey is filled with many twists and turns along the way.  The thought occurred to me as to how we can expand and grow after the pandemic.  So often during our life, we are ruled by a fear of failure, disappointment, facing rejection, etc.  JK Rowling once wrote something like, “you will never truly know yourself or your strength until tested by adversity.”  It is only when our lives become challenging that we see how strong we truly are.

 

As we prepare for this new journey, we find that by asking better questions now will give you the time to prepare honest responses to ensure better results as well as educate yourself to secure a better job offer in the future. The world will eventually evolve to a “new normal” and, when it does, you need to do all you can to be able to compete in this post-pandemic world.

 

In the New Work World, if you are serious about securing a job or making a career shift, you will have to “put the pedal to the metal” to be proactive and make a strong commitment to being able to stand out above the competition.  As with any great setback in life, the real winners are those who have resilience and perseverance.  You really do have choices as to how you respond and dedicate your energies to create new opportunities for yourself.

 

The new prospective employer will not tolerate why your resume has formatting issues, why your references won’t return a call, why your LinkedIn profile is not up-to-date and professional, why you have been too stressed out with fear of Covid19, family, kids, etc.  These issues and attitudes could very well cost you the job offer later.

 

Asking Better Questions might allow you to look more appealing than the candidate with more experience who DID NOT prepare.  Doing a proper evaluation of yourself will better prepare you when you are competing for the same job with others who may be more qualified than you. Employers will be looking for a candidate with that something extra as they determine the best applicant for the job.  You can turn this into a time of reinventing yourself through discovery. Discovery will come about because of your self-analysis in preparation for re-entering the New Work World.  History has shown that gain can come out of destruction. The Phoenix will rise from the ashes.  It’s important to remember that not only are you, the applicant, going through a new learning curve on how to approach securing a new job, so are companies and employers. The qualities they are seeking are also changing.

 

Some things to consider are as follows:

 

  1. Do a realistic self-analysis to document your skills and weaknesses related to your job and desire to secure a new career.  Identify your strengths and weaknesses.
  2. Do research to target a new job or industry which will perhaps be more profitable and secure than the one you currently have or came from.
  3. Contact previous bosses, if you are NOT currently unemployed, of course, to secure reference letters, inform them of a possible prospective employer calling, and expressing gratitude for them taking the time out of their day to answer any questions about your past work performance.
  4. When asked why you might have been laid off, terminated, or furloughed in this pandemic, how will you explain? Remember to express gratitude for the experience, reserve any hard feelings about the loss of your unemployment, and omit any negative talk about a particular industry, boss or co-worker.
  5. Analyze your monthly household living expenses to see if there are ways to cut back so that you are not working for just a paycheck. You want to find employment that is going to satisfy your passion and utilize your skills. It can be worth taking a step back for perhaps a giant step forward.  Have you examined your realistic worth in the current market place?
  6. Clean up ALL SOCIAL MEDIA content. This is more important than you might imagine.  Your LinkedIn profile and social media pages should be professional.  Make sure all your content does not contain anything inappropriate.
  7. Find a trusted mentor, friend, previous boss, or family member who you can lean on for support when the stress of your job search becomes overwhelming.
  8. Engage in mindfulness techniques such as YOGA, meditation, prayer, or visualization to help you get centered and calm down during this process of seeking new employment in the New Work World.
  9. Make time to exercise, relax, and involve yourself in hobbies that you might enjoy and have something fun in your life.

 

This transformational time can be used as a very important step by re-introducing ourselves to the world as our mask is removed, and we are much more in touch with who we are and what we have to offer the world to make it a better place. We are truly finding our place within that new work world and our own world as we emerge a much better version of who we had been. In the process, we may find that our new life is better than the one we left behind.

Categories
Growth Personal Development

How Does an NFL Player Lead on the Field and in the Boardroom?

Last month, the C-Suite Network hosted a special Digital Discussion on leadership featuring former NFL safety, Bret Lockett. Here’s just a sample of our conversation.

If you’d like to listen to the complete interview, listen here.

(Questions and answers edited for clarity)

 

Jeffrey Hayzlett: What did it take for you to make the transition from football to business. And what was the process? What was that like? Which was harder?

 

Bret Lockett: It’s a lot easier to do something that you’ve been doing your entire life, right? For me, I’ve been playing sports my whole life. It was just one progression step after another. Once I finished playing, I finished with the Jets in 2013. I had to figure out the next steps. I thought I was, this football player, a top NFL athlete. I had to really dig into who I was and what my identity was and where I wanted to go. That process in itself was a game-changer. I started to intrinsically figure out what motivates me. When you think about business, one of the things that people say is fail fast. I like to say win fast. We’re always going to fail. There’s no doubt about it.

 

Jeffrey Hayzlett: We fail many times throughout business, but the key is to get to the win. In football, you have more time to dwell on a loss than a baseball player. How were you able to deal with adversity on the field? How did it help you deal with adversity in business?

 

Bret Lockett: When you look at adversity on the field, there’s no difference than being in business. When I played on the Patriots, I was on injured reserve three years in a row. I tore my groin my first year. Second year I come back, first two-a-day we had I tore my peck, out for the season.

Third year, came back, in the first preseason game, running down against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and tear my groin and lower ab at the same time.

So, you have to ask yourself, “Hey, why do I keep getting back up? Why keep doing this?”

 

I wanted to become the best NFL safety that I could possibly be. I had my mind made up that I was going to continue, regardless of what circumstances came about. The basis is, what standards do you have in your life? What standards do you have in your business?

 

Jeffrey Hayzlett: What’s the most valuable lesson that football taught you? Applying it to being an entrepreneur and being in business. What was that one lesson that was probably the biggest for you?

 

Bret Lockett: That’s a great question. In football, we all like to say that defense wins championships. That doesn’t necessarily go towards business. We can’t play defense in business because that means we’re competing with our competitors or we’re a step behind our competitors, or we’re doing an acquisition, because we’re getting blocked from maybe going into an emerging space. Playing defense in business is timid. You’re not dictating your own strategy, and you’re not really allocating your resources appropriately. We really look at strategy and business. It’s one of the main components that we have to stay ahead of. Being on offense is the best because it’s very difficult to change your strategy in business. On the football field, we can do that in a in a series. Go out on offense. (It) doesn’t work. We come back. We make adjustments. In business, it’s like an airplane we’re flying. We can turn that thing around. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort. That’s money right there in business. We have to be able to play offense, and that’s playing on our own time-tables, leading and fighting our own opportunities.

 

Jeffrey Hayzlett: You talk a lot about tough mentality, and I think right now with everything that’s going on, it’s put people in some tough situations. How do we train our minds to get tougher in order to be better business leaders?

Bret Lockett: The number one struggle that we all have when it comes to mindset is grit. (What) differentiates the elite performers from everybody else is how much we’re willing to take and how much can we take before we give up. If we want to increase our wherewithal, if we want to increase what we’re able to endure, then we have to lean in. When we lean into the unknown, it’s typically fear. Right? From a psychological perspective, we see fear when we come up against something that we don’t know we can overcome. The human brain does three things: it either runs the other way, it freezes, or we leap into the unknown. If you’re an entrepreneur, whether you have your own business or you’re running a large corporation, the more you lean in, the more your team leans in. The more you create a culture of individuals that accept that unknown, its a lot easier to start building that mindset.