Weakness comes naturally; strength comes by courage, design and great effort!
Weakness comes naturally; strength comes by courage, design and great effort!
These fights, along with many others, are something we accept, reject…or don’t even consider. I suspect that a huge number of business people, at all levels, have chosen the latter option of ignoring the call for better decisions and related effort. Here are some examples:
• Large segments of managers and sales people are either very average or awful when it comes to ‘making presentations’…to just one customer or, worse still, to groups of customers or colleagues. On the other hand I am sure that the offenders ‘would like to be good’ at presenting, or that they need to improve in this area, so why don’t they get better and better? The answer is that they have not made the decision to get better, and therefore they do not move into fighting mode…and then they make excuses for not fighting. For example, many business people will either say ‘I’ve never been good at presenting’, or ‘I’m not keen on doing presentations’…or ‘You are either the type to do presentations or you’re not, and I’m not.’ These poor presenters still have to make presentations from time to time, or on a regular basis, and because they are not fighters they get worse and worse at this task! The definition of ‘winning’ is progress through struggle, or as they in the modern idiom: ‘no pain, no gain.’
• Many companies create and sell ‘propositions’ that hardly vary from what most rival suppliers have to offer, and yet we all know that the ‘me-too’ path in business leads nowhere special. And so we now see a proliferation of values, vision statements and such like in many organizations, all of which is fine…but then one finds that too many companies fail to live up to their promised propositions, or worse still, they actually perform in an opposite manner to their promises! In my view, this contradiction occurs when business people choose a flight towards popular convention, rather than a fight to be unconventional and much better than opposing suppliers.
• The vast majority of companies are seemingly brave and forward thinking when organising a conference for staff or customers, using ‘themes’, meeting segments and external speakers that are frequently provocative and highly challenging. Then check what happens after conferences and often you will find that little or nothing changes, which reflects that many managers prefer spending big money at conferences, rather than engaging in great effort throughout each year!
The message then is clear and critical: you should be engaged in ‘fighting’ all the days of your life, in and out of business. However, the fighting won’t take place unless you cultivate a need to improve, rather than to entertain now and then ‘wants’. Wanting to improve is as weak a platform as you can find, as with the masses of people that ‘want’ to get in shape and never do! To cultivate a need involves having a damned good reason for improving, along with knowledge of what will happen if you don’t respond to the need. Another aspect of the fight is to position yourself as having no choice but to go forward; in other words if you have no choice but to improve, that’s the end of that…whereas if you do have choices, weakness will again win the battle. And remember this as you ask ‘how do I get better?’: ‘when the student is ready, the teacher is never far away!’
Weakness comes naturally strength comes by courage design and great effort - To learn more about this author, visit John Lees's Website.
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By nature, I am an ‘order-taker’ in business, meaning that there is a sizable part of me that wishes that business will come my way, consistently…without undue effort. I am not ashamed of this fact and I am most certainly not proud of it, and so all of my business life I have had to wage a fight against the weaker part of myself to move away from the ‘order-taker’ mentality. Thankfully, I have ‘mostly’ been able to win the fight, however the weakness within me never gives up, and so the battle goes on everyday…to become a ‘sales-maker’ and to stay in that persona. Away from business, these days I have to fight to stay fit, and yet there was a time in my youth when being fit ‘came with the territory’.
These fights, along with many others, are something we accept, reject…or don’t even consider. I suspect that a huge number of business people, at all levels, have chosen the latter option of ignoring the call for better decisions and related effort. Here are some examples:
• Large segments of managers and sales people are either very average or awful when it comes to ‘making presentations’…to just one customer or, worse still, to groups of customers or colleagues. On the other hand I am sure that the offenders ‘would like to be good’ at presenting, or that they need to improve in this area, so why don’t they get better and better? The answer is that they have not made the decision to get better, and therefore they do not move into fighting mode…and then they make excuses for not fighting. For example, many business people will either say ‘I’ve never been good at presenting’, or ‘I’m not keen on doing presentations’…or ‘You are either the type to do presentations or you’re not, and I’m not.’ These poor presenters still have to make presentations from time to time, or on a regular basis, and because they are not fighters they get worse and worse at this task! The definition of ‘winning’ is progress through struggle, or as they in the modern idiom: ‘no pain, no gain.’
• Many companies create and sell ‘propositions’ that hardly vary from what most rival suppliers have to offer, and yet we all know that the ‘me-too’ path in business leads nowhere special. And so we now see a proliferation of values, vision statements and such like in many organizations, all of which is fine…but then one finds that too many companies fail to live up to their promised propositions, or worse still, they actually perform in an opposite manner to their promises! In my view, this contradiction occurs when business people choose a flight towards popular convention, rather than a fight to be unconventional and much better than opposing suppliers.
• The vast majority of companies are seemingly brave and forward thinking when organising a conference for staff or customers, using ‘themes’, meeting segments and external speakers that are frequently provocative and highly challenging. Then check what happens after conferences and often you will find that little or nothing changes, which reflects that many managers prefer spending big money at conferences, rather than engaging in great effort throughout each year!
The message then is clear and critical: you should be engaged in ‘fighting’ all the days of your life, in and out of business. However, the fighting won’t take place unless you cultivate a need to improve, rather than to entertain now and then ‘wants’. Wanting to improve is as weak a platform as you can find, as with the masses of people that ‘want’ to get in shape and never do! To cultivate a need involves having a damned good reason for improving, along with knowledge of what will happen if you don’t respond to the need. Another aspect of the fight is to position yourself as having no choice but to go forward; in other words if you have no choice but to improve, that’s the end of that…whereas if you do have choices, weakness will again win the battle. And remember this as you ask ‘how do I get better?’: ‘when the student is ready, the teacher is never far away!’
Weakness comes naturally strength comes by courage design and great effort - To learn more about this author, visit John Lees's Website.
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Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
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Jeff FosterWebBizIdeas.com is a Minneapolis website design company founded to help people start an internet business by providing them with website, business, and internet resources that help foster the growth of successful online businesses and develop innovative Internet business ideas. We specialize in internet consulting & internet marketing. - Visit Jeff Foster's Website |
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Kim CastleWith nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website |
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David AchesonDavid Acheson is the founder of DCJA Consultancy. DCJA Consultancy is a management consultancy business specialising in B2B sales consultancy. They offer bespoke and packaged sales consultancy including Sales Optimisation Review, Interim Sales Management, Sales & Marketing Review, 1:1 Sales & Management Staff Analysis, Management Training, Solution Sales Training, Creation of New Pay Plan, KPI's, run Customer Feedback Campaigns, assist with Recruitment, Coaching, Appraisals and set up Strategic Marketing Campaigns. David spent his early career in accountancy and then moved into sales in 1982, working in Office Equipment, IT, Advertising, Training, Outsourcing and Consultancy. He has held many Senior Positions in SMBs and Global Organisations including Head of Sales Operations & Head of Business Development. His knowledge, skills and great experience of the Sales Industry has led to David making keynote speeches and running educational sessions to key businesses through organisations including The Chamber of Commerce and Business Link. - Visit David Acheson's Website |
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Linda RichardsonLinda Richardson is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence and she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals.” Ms. Richardson is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling and is the author of ten books on selling and sales management, including Sales Coaching — Making the Great Leap from Sales Manager to Sales Coach, and Stop Telling, Start Selling. She teaches sales and management at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Linda is a frequent speaker at industry and client conferences, has been published extensively in industry and training journals, and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation’s Business, Selling Power, Success, and The Conference Board Magazine. Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com web - Visit Linda Richardson's Website |
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Staging DivaDebra Gould, aka The Staging Diva®, is President of Six Elements Inc., an internationally recognized home staging company. Inspired by many requests from aspiring home stagers wanting to start similar businesses, Gould created the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program. Gould has trained over 1000 Staging Diva Graduates worldwide to start staging businesses. Buying decorating and selling six of her own homes in four years lead to an interest in real estate staging which she turned into a career with the launch of sixelements.com in 2002. Since then she has staged hundreds of homes in addition to teaching home staging training. Gould is the author of several home staging resources including a series of popular ebooks made up of a Design Guide, Color Guide and Portfolio Guide. For more information about Debra Gould visit stagingdiva.com. - Visit Staging Diva's Website |
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Stephanie RobeyStephanie Robey is President and CoFounder of Pivot Positive, LLC - an Internet marketing business focused on helping people start work at home ventures. Previously, she was employed at The Search Agency with over 20 years experience in graphic design and 10 years experience in online marketing. She was responsible for launching the Conversion Path Optimization (CPO) unit where she and her team have conducted hundreds of optimization tests for online companies across multiple verticals. She is a successful entrepreneur having started and sold 2 companies and remains on the board of directors of the third, PhotoSpin.com Stephanie began her career in the direct marketing realm creating and producing direct mail for many of the major cable television companies and directly attributes her understanding of Internet marketing to those early offline experiences. Stephanie is a graduate of San Diego State University with a BFA in Graphic Arts and also holds an Executive MBA from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. Read Steph's Blog Meet Steph and Dave Sign up for our Free 7-Day BootCamp: Self Employed & Rich - Visit Stephanie Robey's Website |
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