Business and Money Tips

Mention the words 'hot buttons' and most salespeople who have gone through the usual sales training will tell you, 'emotional hot button'. But we know that human beings act base on emotions 80% of the time, the other 20% of the time we act on logic.   So hot button selling is not just emotional selling.  Three Steps to Finding Your Prospect's Hot Button  1. Let the prospect talk Just let people talk. Be patient. Be interested in listening to them.  It is easy to find your prospects' hot buttons once you have gained their interest. Let them enter the conversation and invariably, they will "spill" the hot button of the moment. When someone walked into my education centre, I do not ask them "What course do you have in mind?"  I just simply say, "Hi, welcome to our centre, how's your day?"   Once the exchange of names is over, I go straight into the point by asking them a simple question, "If you have one...

"I want you to train my salespeople to become powerful closers better than the insurance people." "Can you train my sales team and get them to increase their closing rate?"  "Andy, I want you to come and train my sales guys on how to hit and exceed their sales targets"   The above are the three most common requests I hear from my clients and prospects.  It seems that in this weak economy, every company wants to focus on sales and they think that sales training is the fastest way to increase sales.  But is this true? As a full-time trainer, consultant and coach since 2001, having trained tens of thousands of people in 15 countries, my answer to the above questions is simply, "Yes".   But we know deep down inside that sales training is just one aspect in sales. For a company to increase its sales, there are 5 major factors. Macro environment: Is the industry going up or down? What stage of the product or industry cycle are we in? Are w...

Whenever we work on something important, something that is out of the ordinary, or something that is not our daily routine, we will encounter one and only thing - resistance. Regardless of how experienced or prepared you are, you will bump into this wall of resistance. With resistance all of a sudden your fire blows off and you are back to where you started - no progress. Sounds familiar? Many people hate resistance and think that resistance is the cause of their failure.  However, if you understand Yiqing, you'll know that resistance is a natural thing. Like a magnetized needle, resistance will unfailingly point to the north, meaning that calling or action it most wants us to stop doing.  That's why we can use this resistance as a compass. Instead of letting resistance stops us from achieving what we want, we can let resistance guide us to our calling or purpose.  Today I shall share with everyone the proven 8 ways to make resistance work for us: Don't thin...

By now the Pokemon Go craze has swept the entire world except Iran. For those that may not be familiar, Pokemon Go is a free mobile game available since July 2016 that integrates your location service with your camera.  To play Pokemon Go is very easy: you just have to look for Pokemons that could be hidden in your everyday life, like your garden, park or even office.  When you find and catch them, you will be recognized in the world. You will be motivated to go to the next level and find further joy!  In short, Pokemon Go combines social interaction with individual patience and alertness to win not points or money, but recognition. I had my very first game on Saturday 6th August 2016 in Singapore. I only played for 5 minutes but on Sunday, I caught a Pokemon sitting at the 7th month dinner table that I was attending. The strange thing is that when I moved across the table, the Pokemon was gone!   Three Reasons Why Pokemon Go is So Popular and How ...

As we know, social media marketing is about social first and marketing second. Same for Sun Tzu Art of War: it is about art first and war later.   'Art' in Sun Tzu Art of War refers to how we do things, while 'War' here refers to winning in the business battlefield. Social media marketing is about how we do and not what we do.  For example, it is not about how nice your photo is on FaceBook but how you post your photo: do you post it with a positive or negative angle? On the surface, Social Media is a 201x thing, while Art of War belongs to 2,500 years ago. Yet they both share a common origin: the Yi Jing (or Book of Changes) written 5,000 years ago: life is about evolution. Social media is always evolving, while Sun Tzu Art of War is too evolving with the times as Sun Tzu advocates flexibility as the key winning strategy. Today I shall look at the 5 Elements of Sun Tzu Art of War and they can be applied in our Social Media Marketing.  Know Yourself Know Your...

What is Social Selling?  It is definitely beyond social media selling and is beyond selling. Together with Heart Selling, Consultative Selling, Key Account Selling and Attraction Selling, Social Selling is considered more effective. It is definitely way above Hard Selling and better than Problem Solving Selling.  Social Selling has 8 key elements: You Sell without Selling , because you are never selling and only Socialising. Make friends, not make sales.  Share, not Sell. You share matters that people are most concerned with, and people will be connected with you. When people are connected with you, they will buy from you without you selling at all. Making friends take priority over making mone y . So you would rather lose the sale than lose a friend You have to put making a sale or presenting out of the back of your mind . In other words, you simply make friend and that's it. You don't make friend because you want to present your friend with something, right? G...

Everyone knows today’s economy is very different from 2015 or even January 2016. Not only are the costs rising, selling prices continue their downward spiral. These factors, coupled with labour shortage and Brexit factor, make many businessmen wonder: where is the future? As we know, every crisis produces winners. We need to ensure that we are the winner and not the loser. To do that, we must adapt fast and evolve with the rapidly changing markets. This means that we need to move to higher gear: innovate fast and ramp up productivity. As we know, innovation is about strategies and tactics and productivity is about people.  We can learn from people who have done it before: people who have won numerous battles for thousands of years using a proven formula: Sun Tzu Art of War. Background information and Why Sun Tzu is powerful : Sun Tzu (or Sūn Zǐ in pinyin) was a 500 BC Chinese general and military strategist. He led his country won numerous battles against its stron...

We know that leadership makes the difference between an organization’s success and failure, and there are many types of leadership. There are leadership from the heart, leadership by KPI (Key Performance Indicators), leadership by command, coercion and control the opposite, leadership by consultation. Among all types almost everyone say that the best leadership is leadership by example. Unfortunately most people don’t understand what leadership by example is. To many people ‘leadership by example’ means that the leader must set an example. For example, if the leader ask people to work hard, he himself must work hard not just now but forever. Some say that to lead by example, a leader must be flawless and posses all the attributes that he advocates.  The leader by example must do what he says and says what he does. Otherwise he is just a hypocrite and will lose credibility as a leader. Is this true?  It seems that this is the common understanding of leadership by...