Business and Money Tips

Most managers are promoted based on their technical expertise.  For example, if you are a good engineer, you will be promoted to an Engineering Manager. After being promoted, managers are expected to perform their managerial and leadership roles well, on top of also performing their technical roles well. And when managers have problems, they often consult their bosses.  Unfortunately their bosses too have no formal training on management and leadership.  Even if they have a MBA, it is the day-to-day people management issues that make bosses headache. For example, many companies until now still cannot cope with the tightening of foreign labour .  Unable to find locals to take up jobs, they choose the obvious route: cut down business.  That's why you see Robinsons shrinking and many restaurant groups reducing their outlets.  Other than people issues, managers are always in a conundrum: how to balance the competing different interests of t

Find their hot buttons, press their hot buttons, we have heard these thoughts before; but what do they mean? Is it to say that as a salesperson you should try to discover their primary areas of interest? How do these hot buttons help you close sales?  What is a Hot Button? Hot button is not to be confused with Benefits or Emotions, nor is it about Fear and Force. In sales, a Hot button is a Trigger that once activated, the person will not go back to the original state of mind. This means that when you press the hot button, a sale will result. You do not need to close the sale as the sale is already yours. Note that different people have different hot buttons, and they too differ at different time. Also note that You as a Salesperson is also a hot button , the same goes for your company marketing, branding and positioning.  As I learnt from Barry Feig: author of best-selling book Hot Button Marketing, there are at least 14 hot buttons: #1: Hot Button, The desire for control

Sales trainers like to teach people the concept of overcoming objections.  To me, objections are a waste of time. When salespeople start overcoming objections, they are placing themselves in conflict with their customers when they should be establishing collaborative relationships instead.  Often overcoming objections set the stage for polite disagreements and respectful differences of opinion, forcing salespeople to defend their solutions.  At worst, it turns the sales process into a battle in which the salesperson goes into a battle an attack mode to 'win' the sale.  In fact, words like 'persist', 'convince', 'persuade' all imply such aggressive behaviour.   We all know that you could win an argument and lose the sale.   It doesn't have to be this way.  Salespeople can choose another approach: prevent objections instead of overcoming objections.  How to prevent objections?   Attract Customers to Buy from You.  When you attract people, peo

The past one week of mourning for Singapore's founding father and first prime minster Lee Kuan Yew teach us one thing: never order people to do anything. Get them to volunteer instead.  To manage the big crowds of people queueing to pay their last respect to Mr Lee when his body was lying in state at the Parliament House from Wednesday to Saturday (25 to 27 March 2015), the government did not: Issue orders to the SAF soldiers to work overtime  Ask the private sector to donate food, drinks and umbrellas to the people in queue Get any ministers to speak to ask people to come out and help Ask people to queue up orderly for 10 hours Issue any rule on how to behave while in queue (like what clothes to wear, not to take pictures or videos etc) Instead what we saw were: Non-stop queues of people forming 24 hours since Wednesday 25 March 2015 until Saturday 28 March 2015 Many thousands in queue for more than 10 hours just to pay less than 10 seconds of respect No one comp

Since we spend over two-thirds of our waking hours working and living around work, it is more important to be happy at work than happy after work.  Although many consider work to be a necessary evil, work is actually a necessary happiness, only if you know how to be happy at work. The 7 most Frequently Asked Questions on  how to be happy at work: 1.  Will higher salary make one happier at work? Unless you are trying to make ends meet, money will not be a great motivator. Once you have enough to live a life that you are used to, unless you have some new expenditure, more money will give you a disproportionate amount of happiness.  For example, if you get at 10% salary raise, you will be happier by less than 10%. 2. Does Achieving Progress at Work Make Me Happier? Definitely.  Achievement is a sense of self-worth and all progress, no matter how small, will make your work happier.  Note that the same principle for money applies: once you achieved a certain amount of su

The 5 Leadership Lessons of Lee Kuan Yew include: Build Winning Teams .  Lee not only built one strong team, he built many strong teams. Most importantly, the teams went on to win many battles, be it the unions, business associations, tertiary institutions or Government-linked companies like Capitaland and DBS.  Lee's legacy is unprecedented Stubborn Yet Flexible .  Lee was stubborn to his goals yet was flexible if times have changed.  Like he pushed for the merger with Malaysia, yet changed his position two years later when things didn't work out Win People Over with Ideas, not Ideals .  Lee won the hearts of many with his far-sighted yet pragmatic ideas.  The US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were his admirers. Yet he welcomed debates but would not hesitate to point out you are wrong if he thinks so. In the end even his opponents like Opposition Leaders Chiam See Tong and Lau Thia Kiang spoke highly of him.  Leading a Very Virtuous Li

Everyone knows how inspiring the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew was.  In fact some called him the greatest statesman Asia has ever known.  In the business community, he is highly regarded as one of the top salesman: for he has promised and delivered on his promises and most importantly, made his clients (Singapore) very rich.  The 5 Sales Success that we can learn from Lee Kuan Yew include: Grab Opportunities Fast.  LKY grabbed the opportunities the Western multi-nationals were looking for in the 1960s and attracted them here.  In the 1970s and 1980s, he sold many Japanese companies to invest in Singapore.  In the 1990s, he sold Singapore successfully as a business haven to the Chinese, Koreans and Arabs.   Passionate, Energetic and Full of Conviction . These 3 attributes are the must-haves for any salesperson and Lee demonstrated all of them in his fiery speeches and thought-provocative interviews Relentless Pursuit and Never Let Go .  Lee reckoned before that 'even in my deathbe

By now over several million of people from Singapore and the workd have paid their tribute to the late Lee Kuan Yew, who passed away on 23 March 2015.  Lee Kuan Yew loves the world, especially Singapore, very much.  In 1965, he shed tears in front of national television when he announced the separation of Singapore from Malaysia. Fifty years later in 2015, the entire nation shed tears for him.  Singapore and the world are showing Lee now how much they love him too. The funeral on Sunday 29 March 2015 reads like a 'Who's Who's' of the world leaders.  No other world leader's funeral has attracted so many visitors, not even the late Princes Diana in 1997.  How does Lee Kuan Yew love his people?  Many young people may not appreciate what he has done for the nation, because they perceive him to be a strict and fierce parent.  One thing for sure: he does not love them by spoiling them, he loves them by developing them.  From watching over hundreds of hours of video

In 1965 when Singapore went independent, it's per capital income was US$1,500.  In 2014, it has grown to US$59,000.  Many people would consider Lee Kuan Yew as the father of modern Singapore for he is the one that turned Singapore from third world to first world in 4 decades.  But is this what Lee himself consider as his greatest achievement? Lee revealed to us that his greatest achievement was actually able to combine what Easterners and Westerners do: marry the woman you love and love the woman you marry. It appeared that Lee's wife was more than a wife. During the early years of his career in the 1950s when Lee was still in the opposition, Lee's wife was supporting the entire family with her income as an owner of a law firm Lee and Lee.  Lee's wife also took good care of the family and brought up three children very well.  Their eldest son Lee Hsien Loong has been Singapore's Prime Minister since 2004.   Being dyslexic, Lee relied on his wife to help to

Never marry the woman you love, love the woman you marry. This is because if you marry the woman you love, your love for this woman may not last.  What happens years later when she is old and ugly?  Do you still love her anymore? On the other hand, if you love the woman you marry, you are committed to this marriage.  You will do whatever it takes to make the marriage a success.  Your love for the woman will last longer. Same as the workplace.   You don't take up a job that you love.  You love the job that you take up. Not many of us can make our passion our vocation.  Because we need to make a living, many of us have to settle for a job that we may not dislike, but we also don't love it either. In other words, there is little passion in the job that we take. But if we can love the job we have, we will make every effort to ensure that our job will be a success. We will do whatever it takes: be it acquiring new skills, improve our communication, learn how manage peop