Thursday 26 February 2015

The Secrets of a Waiting Room Jedi

 Tim Hurson
Author: Never Be Closing and Think Better

The Secrets of a Waiting Room Jedi
By Tim Hurson and Tim Dunne

It happens all the time. It’s happened to us, and it’s happened to you. 
More than once, guaranteed. It goes like this:
You’ve finally scheduled a meeting with that prospective client you’ve been after
(or maybe a first meeting with a new client—where you’ll set the tone for your relationship).
And you’re ready.
You’ve done your research, both online and off.
You’ve consulted with your analysts and your colleagues back at the shop.
You’ve thought about what you can offer that your prospect might value.
You’ve refined and rehearsed a short script or two.
You’ve got your initial questions lined up.
You’ve left yourself ample travel time to compensate for unexpected traffic.
You’ve even used the facilities by the elevators, just in case.
You arrive at reception, you give your name, and you’re told by the employee behind the desk
that unfortunately your meeting will be delayed because Ms. Bizzee is still on a previous call.
So far, not unusual. The question is, what do you do next?
If you’re like 99% of your competitors, you take a seat and do one or more of the following:
Review your notes for the meeting
Flip through a waiting room magazine
Pull out your smart phone and check your emails
Check your mobile contact manager
Listen to your voice mails
Check Facebook
Make a call
Complete your half-finished Sudoku puzzle
Check your email again
Hey, you’ve got some time to kill. Why not kill it?

Really?

One of most important sales skills we address in our book Never Be Closing is art and science
of discovering what’s useful to your client. In our experience, your potential usefulness is
the most important thing you can communicate—and the thing that will most likely win you the sale.
But the concept of usefulness goes way beyond your conversation with your client.
It’s threaded through everything you do in the sales process.
In fact, we suggest asking the simple question, 
‘Is this useful?’ about every aspect of your own sales or business behavior.
If your answer is ‘no’, ‘maybe’, or ‘not sure’,
we suggest you seriously consider deleting that behavior from your repertoire.

Behavior Testing
Let’s use this simple test on the list of behaviors above.
Reviewing your notes for the meeting could be useful, but if you’re not familiar enough with them
by this point, another few minutes probably won’t do you much good.
Flipping through a two-month-old waiting room magazine is decidedly unuseful. The exception here might be the possibility of finding a relevant article in a recent industry or corporate publication.
Checking your emails, your contact manager, or your voice mails?
Psychologists would call these conditioned responses to having time on your hands.
But useful? Who are we kidding?
Checking Facebook? Ditto.
Making a phone call?
Maybe, but chances are you’ll have to say a quick good-bye, so is it really worth it?
And re-checking all of the above is about as useful as finishing that Sudoku puzzle.
In other words—not.
So if none of these behaviors are particularly useful, the next question becomes,
what could you do that would be useful?


Seeing with Jedi Eyes
Your clients’ offices—including reception and common areas—are their habitats,
filled with clues about the company, its culture, the people you’ll be meeting.
Sure, you’ve done research online and with your colleagues,
but where better to begin to truly understand the people you’ll meet
than where they spend the majority of their working—and waking—lives?
Being in your clients’ territory affords you the best possible opportunity to get to know
who you’ll be meeting. You’re exposed to information and resources that simply aren’t available
in company reports or on the internet. That’s pretty special, considering all your competitors
have access to that same internet information.
Once you appreciate the value of spending time in your clients’ space,
you’re ready to practice the art of the Waiting Room Jedi.

The first thing a Jedi needs to understand is the power of the Force.
And in business, the Force is Connection.
Anything and everything you can do to increase the connection between you
and your potential client is a step in the right direction—a step toward the sale.

Finding Hidden Connections
If you had a first appointment with an important potential client and a friendly leprechaun
offered you the opportunity to meet someone who knew your prospect,
and who might be able to give you some useful information about them,
you’d be delighted, wouldn’t you?
Well, today’s your lucky day.
Because have the opportunity to do just that—every time you arrive early for a client meeting
and every time your client is late.

Introduce yourself to the receptionist. We mean really introduce yourself.
There’s a good chance the receptionist knows your prospect.
If they’ve been with the company a while, receptionists can be a great source of useful information. They know who comes and goes. They know the culture of the organization.
They know if times are good or times are bad.
They know if executives and managers are part of the team or if they ride above it.
They know when it’s an up day or a down day. Furthermore, receptions are often invisible
in the waiting room, treated as just another piece of furniture.
If they’re not too busy, they may really appreciate a chance to talk. Imagine standing face to face 
with a resource like that and deciding to check your email instead of talking to them!
How do you probe for information from the receptionist?
Just ask. Clearly, your chances of getting under the sheets are limited (nor do we suggest you try; 
you risk coming off as inappropriately nosey, and even sleazy), but you can open the tent.

Here’s a list of simple starter questions that most receptionists should be able
(and often happy) to answer:
How long has the company been at this location (or on this floor)?
What was the reason for the move?
How many people work here? What kinds of jobs do they do?
This can often lead to great follow-up conversations.
If the location has both engineering and marketing in it for example,
you can observe that that’s an unusual combination. Any reason for that?
What’s the biggest department or division in this location?
Is everyone always this (relaxed, friendly, energized, busy) around here,
or is something special going on today?
What do you like best about working here?
Are the principals usually around, or mostly on the road? Do you get to see or talk to them much?
These are the kinds of questions you can work into almost any conversation
and which can provide you with useful ways to make connections later in your meeting.
Imagine in your meeting with your prospective client being able to say something like,
“I understand you’ve only been in this location for 18 months and you’re already bursting
at the seams. Sounds like things are going well. Must be challenging to manage that kind of growth.”

Searching for Other Threads
Aside from these general starter questions, there are clues to the personalities of the company
and its employees literally littering the walls.
The artwork, the trophy case, the plaque, the photo of the ribbon cutting, the mission statement, 
the free (or maybe not free) soda machine, even the building itself if it’s company owned.
All of these are data about the founders, the principals, the charities, the activities,
the culture of the office and the organization.
Each is a conversation starter with the receptionist or others you may meet.
And each is a thread of a possible connection to your client. The more threads you discover,
the better your chances of weaving them together into the beginning of a relationship.

Curiosity Killed the Can’t
The skill of being a Waiting Room Jedi is to transform a series of waiting room habits
—checking email, posting on Facebook, and flipping through magazines
—into a deliberate process of exploration and discovery.
More than anything else, being a Waiting Room Jedi is about being curious.
The more genuinely curious you are, the more you learn, and the more you learn,
the more likely you’ll be able to make connections with your client.
The attitude and skill the Waiting Room Jedi is one of a series of interlocking steps
that form what we call the Productive Selling process.
It starts with knowing who you are and why you’re selling.
Then moves into finding, making, and developing connections.
The next step is earning the credibility required for your clients to feel comfortable answering
the tough, probing questions you’ll need to ask so that you can understand their situation.
Once you truly understand your clients’ issues, itches, and challenges, the next step
is to demonstrate your usefulness.
Once you’ve done that, you can start developing a productive business relationship.
And after all, isn’t that what the best selling is all about?
_____________________________________________
We hope you found the ideas in this post useful. They’re culled from our book Never Be Closing
recently featured by the Oprah Winfrey Network as one of the top fifteen self-improvement books.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141206100715-599719-the-secrets-of-a-waiting-room-jedi

Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com                this takes advantage of the experience and expertise of others. 
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com     describes the steps to reading in the way your mind prefers.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com          just for fun.
Advanced Reading Skills FaceBook group

To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”

Thursday 12 February 2015

The art of the bounce back.






Need to bounce back from grief, pain, financial setbacks, or an illness? A definite must watch if you feel you're in a rut. This is really inspiring and replicable.

Thursday 5 February 2015

Treasures in Your Mind

I chose this photo of an old end-of-life tree stump because it has been given
new life through passers-by embedding it with coins and providing it with a new interest and purpose.
If I remember correctly this stump was found in Tarn Hows,
The Lake District National Park, Coniston, Cumbria. UK, M'reen


Treasures in Your Mind  
By Roger A. Johnson, C.Ht., Ph.D., B.C.E.T.S. 

Do you have unharvested treasures in your mind simply waiting to be discovered?
When you make and realize your personal goals they will enrich your life greatly.
Not only is the reward of the goal itself of value to you,
but the process of achieving it enables you to grow and become a better,
more effective person.
Most people have goals.
Unfortunately, many have not learned effective methods of achieving them. 
Many others actually find that they repeatedly set themselves up to fail in achieving 
their goals. Consciously, they really want the goal, but for some very frustrating reason
their behavior is not what is necessary to make their goal become reality.
They even don’t finish their therapy sessions – at this time.
Effective thinking is absolutely necessary to achieve your goals.
Having a goal without effective thought processes and a real plan is like taking a vacation
with no map and no clear idea of how to get to your destination.
Let’s say you decided to spend your vacation on a nice driving trip to Chicago.
You have no map and only a vague idea that Chicago is sort of east and a bit north of you. Without having a route clearly defined, you could spend your entire vacation
driving aimlessly on routes that perhaps seem to go in your general direction, but then veer off in a different direction. Without a clear plan your might never reach your destination.
Goals that do not have a clear plan to achieve them are only dreams.
Now, we certainly do need dreams and dreamers.
Without dreamers and their dreams humans would never have achieved civilization. 
Without dreamers I believe we might very well have destroyed our species long ago. 
Dreams have magic to inspire us. But if they remain only dreams, they remain insubstantial and fade just like the dreams you had last night faded in the light of today’s reality.
To truly have power and become goals that can become part of our reality,
our dreams must be clearly defined and have a clearly delineated route to their realization.
With these things in place your dream has become a goal that has a chance 
to change the entire world, or at least your personal world. Your goal still has a way to go
before it becomes reality. Many people have reached this point,
yet never realized their goals. To live your goal in life you must make it real in your mind.
You must live it, dream it, get excited about it, talk about it, think about it
and make it the focus of your life. You must make it a done deal in your subconscious mind.
If it is not important enough to you to get excited about, save your energy and quit 
playing games with yourself. Put that energy you are about to waste 
into something you really want. Your goal must first LIVE in your mind.
If it is only something you would like to have, but don’t really get emotionally involved in, 
it is only a dream that will, in time, fade to nothingness.
No, it’s more than emotionally involved, it’s real.
Making your goal real in your mind can be done by imagining the achieved goal, all of the details of the end result and the physical and emotional rewards of this achievement. Visualize the goal, dream about it, use hypnosis if you are experienced in using it.
You will have the opportunity to be.
Give this goal your mental energy that will focus the power of your subconscious mind
and make it become reality. I mentioned earlier that there was more treasure than the goal itself. One of the primary functions of the subconscious mind is to achieve your goals. 
When we have goals, and overcome the obstacles and difficulties that must be dealt with
to achieve them, we are at our very best as human beings. We are empowered and spiritually energized. We are here to accomplish things. It feels good when we do. 
Achieving goals is the very life-blood of our spirit and soul. Achieving goals is what we do.
I can guarantee you that the day you awaken with absolutely no goals in life
you will become deeply depressed. There are other reasons for depression,
but this is the most common.  To be a happy, mentally and physically healthy human,
you must have and achieve goals. Without them you feel like you have no reason to exist. 
This is just a brief overview of goals, their achievement and their importance to each of us. These simple ideas will help you make your goals become reality.
Never start a day without something to accomplish. 
It will energize you, body, mind and spirit.

Perhaps you’d like to check out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com            gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of life
www.turbochargedreading.blogspot.com       describes the steps to reading in the way your mind prefers
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com            just for fun
Advanced Reading Skills FaceBook group

To quote the Dr Seuss himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the more places you'll go.”