To earn more, you must learn more. You are “maxed out” today at your current level of knowledge and skill. You cannot get more or better results by simply working harder to apply your present abilities. If you want to earn more in the future, you must learn and apply new methods and techniques.

Continuous learning is like an ongoing mental fitness program for sales champions, where you prepare and keep yourself in shape for intense competition. This competition is what the field of professional selling really is to the highest paid people in the business.

There are three key parts of a continuous learning program in selling. Consistent, persistent work in these three areas will lead inevitably to your becoming one of the highest paid salespeople in your field, with no exceptions.

Leaders Are Readers

The first principle is simply for you to read continually in your field. Get up earlier each morning and read for one hour in selling. Put the newspaper aside. Leave the television off. Instead, read, underline and make notes in a good book on selling strategy and tactics. Look for practical ideas you can use immediately. Turn them over in your mind. Imagine using them in your sales activities. Then, throughout the day, practice what you learned in the morning.

Sometimes people ask me what books to read. The answer is simple. Begin by asking other top salespeople for their recommendations. Almost all top salespeople have their own collections of sales books. There are more than 4000 books on selling in print today, with 50 to 100 new books coming onto the market each year. Begin building your own collection today.

If you read in sales for one hour each day, that will amount to about one book per week. One book per week will add up to 50 books per year. Since the average salesperson reads less than one sales book per year, if you were to read 50 books per year, that alone will give you “the winning edge” that will move you to the top of your sales force.

Listen And Learn

The second part of continuous learning is for you to listen to audio programs in your car. Audio learning has been described as “the most important advance in education since the invention of the printing press.”

According to the University of Southern California, you can get the equivalent of full time university attendance by listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place. Turn your car into a learning machine, into a “university on wheels.” Enroll at automobile university and attend full time for the rest of your career.

When we were teenagers, we got into the habit of driving around with our friends and listening to music. We formed the association that driving around was for friends and fun. There are many adults who never get over this conditioned behavior. Instead, at a time of incredible competition, information explosion and obsolescence of knowledge, they are still floating through life, driving around, failing to take advantage of one of the very best learning methodologies ever discovered.

Don’t let this happen to you. Never let your car be running without educational audio programs playing. Make every minute count. One great idea or technique can change the course of your career, and dramatically increase your income.

Learn From The Experts

The third part of continuous learning is for you to take all the training you can get. Attend seminars and courses on professional selling. Ask advice from others on the most helpful courses they have taken. Be aggressive about seeking them out in your community, and be prepared to travel if necessary. Many of the top salespeople I know will fly hundreds and even thousands of miles to attend sales conferences. And the difference that it makes in their sales results is amazing.

My life, and the lives of many of the highest paid professionals I know, has been changed dramatically as the result of attending a single sales course, boot camp or seminar. Sometimes the ideas and strategies contained in one program has catapulted a person from rags to riches.

I have countless friends around the country and throughout the world who started off at the very bottom in selling and who are today earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as the result of continuous learning. And anything they have done, you can do as well.

I hope you enjoyed this post.  Feel free to share it with a friend and leave a comment below.

Source: Brian Tracy’s Blog

Why do you want to learn how to be a loser? you ask. We learn from both examples and warnings. This post provides you both.

It’s good to know how to be a loser so, 1) you could do the opposite and 2) you can check to be sure you aren’t doing those things yourself.

I remember Jim Rohn saying that it’s too bad failures don’t give seminars. He would say, “If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you’ve just got to say, ‘John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me? Tell me how a good-looking guy like you with a beautiful family, everything going for him messed up his life so bad. What did you do? What do you read? What do you eat? What type of people do you hang out with? What do you do with your free time? What TV programs, newspapers, and radio programs do you spend time with? Wouldn’t that information be valuable? Find out and then DON’T DO those things.” Great strategy.
 
Here’s some loser training tips to get you started:

Take it day by day. Don’t bother with setting goals, making plans and preparing. Just wake up each morning and figure out what you want to do then.

Seek comfort. Growth and progress requires work, stress and struggle. Forget it. Stay comfy instead.

Don’t believe in anything. It’s easier to be… CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Source: Darren Hardy, Publisher of SUCCESS Magazine

(Note: The Financial Times published a column of mine on 29 August. Editors must edit—and they did. All writers think editors are heartless; some writers, lucky enough to have blogs, can post the version they first submitted. Here it is, 1,200 words rather than the 700 that eventually appeared in print.)

There is no logic to this column.
Which is precisely the point.

I was initially trained as an engineer. (And have an MBA as well.) That essentially means that I am a slave to linear, logical analysis. Hence my presentations start at the start and I carefully build a logical structure for all that follows.

Fair enough. Except I frequently find that critical things I want to say get left out or buried. Hence, about a year ago I threw off my logical halter and decided to say what I thought was important, come what may, at the top of my remarks.

Consideration of business strategy, approaches to product development, and the like, are of the utmost importance to enterprise success. Yet there are other factors—perhaps mundane at first glance—that are the true differentiators between mediocrity and excellence. I’ll touch upon four, which I call “First Things Before First Things.” Most will agree that each one is important. But my goal is to induce you to convert them into strategic obsessions.

Front-line managers. If the regimental commander lost most of his 2nd lieutenants and 1st lieutenants and captains and majors, it would be a tragedy. If he lost his sergeants it would be a catastrophe. The Army is fully aware that success on the battlefield is dependent to an extraordinary degree on its sergeants. Does industry “get it”?

Research by the likes of Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, reported in First, Break All the Rules, demonstrates that the first-line manager is the single most important key to employee satisfaction, retention—and productivity. No matter how fine the organization, if the employee is sour on his immediate boss, her or his performance will significantly suffer. I am not suggesting that execs don’t take the front-line boss seriously. I am suggesting that, unlike the Army, they are not obsessed with developing their full cadre of front-line managers as a primary strategic asset and engine of enterprise performance! For starters: Are your font-line boss selection and training and mentoring processes unmistakably “knock-your-socks-off”/”best-in-class”?

Cross-functional excellence. Look at any organizational failure, and poor cross-functional integration is more often than not the chief culprit. Within an engineering company, for example, research, marketing and finance are routinely at each other’s throats. The result is a critical new product comes to market 18 months late. Or take the local police and federal police: Each have the fight against terrorism as their pre-eminent goal—but frequently refuse to share all their data with one another. I chose in introducing this topic the word “excellence,” as in “cross-functional excellence.” That is, the idea here is not merely about “removing barriers.” It is about what I believe is no less than the #1 opportunity to achieve competitive dominance—e.g., cut new-product development by, say, 50 percent or even more.

I have the utmost respect for Oracle and SAP. But this is not primarily a software issue. Or, rather, it is—but a softer form of software. Secret #1 (yes, I’ll go that far) is “Let’s do lunch.” In fact I insist that bosses literally measure their direct reports on the number of lunches per month they have with members of other functions!

It works like this: Joe in procurement invites Sam in finance to lunch. Odds are high that along the way they discover a host of connections—e.g., both have eighth-graders in the same school. Joe will still tenaciously represent his “function” and Sam his—but the tenor of interactions is likely to change significantly, if not dramatically, from “gotcha” to something approaching “How can we jointly add maximum value?”

I call thing like “doing lunch” the “social accelerants” of cross-functional excellence. I can muster a list of 25 in a flash—e.g., present small weekly awards to those in other functions who have helped your team-function move forward. One should not promise miracles lightly, but taken together these notions can lead to miracles of the first order.

“Strategic” listening. Harvard M.D. Jerome Groopman wrote a fascinating book titled How Doctors Think. Dr. Groopman claims, not terribly surprisingly, that the best source for a doctor concerning the patient’s complaint is—the patient. Yet he goes on to cite research showing that on average the doctor interrupts the patient after … 18 seconds. I’ll bet you a bundle that the average manager does not surpass the 18-second mark!

Like developing first-line managers and trying to improve cross-functional coordination, most bosses would agree that listening is “important.” But, again, do they make it a strategic obsession? Because beyond a shadow of doubt that is precisely what listening per se should be.

I made a list of the things that flow from effective listening (“strategic listening” or “aggressive listening” as I prefer to call it). Listening is …

the heart and soul of engagement,
the heart and soul of recognition,
the heart and soul of strategic partnering,
the heart and soul of learning,
the heart and soul of customer connections.
And on.
And on.

As with all things important, the key is becoming a serious student and practitioner. In fact I’ll go so far as to say that listening per se is/can be a “profession” … as much as playing the cello or flying a commercial aircraft.

Meetings. Find me a boss (or non-boss) who doesn’t constantly bitch about “too many meetings”—I’ve never found one. But here is the irreducible fact of “boss-world”: Meetings are what bosses do. There is no escape. And if that is true, then, also by definition, meetings are therefore the principal platform, or theater, in which every boss projects her or his leadership skills.

Immutable “bottom line”: Every meeting that does not stir the imagination and curiosity of attendees, and increase bonding and co-operation and engagement and sense of worth, and motivate rapid action and enhance enthusiasm is a permanently lost opportunity. Call that a stretch if you wish—but then please explain to me why it is not the self-evident truth!

Let me be clear: This is not a rant about “conducting better meetings.” This is a rant about the heart and soul and hour-to-hour reality of leadership effectiveness. One obvious implication: Prepare for a meeting/every meeting as if your professional life and legacy depended on it. Because it does.

There they are: “First things before first things.” None, I strongly suspect, would disagree with the fact that all four are “important,” even “very important.” But it is my claim here that the four are in fact the “guts” of effective organizations—and, in fact, sustainable competitive advantage. Make each of these an “obsession”—and watch the bottom line soar.

Source: The Tom Peters Weblog

Just before the summer I launched a course on simplifying the major parts of life called Simplicity. The news is that you can now get my Simplicity Course as a monthly membership course.

The six-module course is then split into four parts, and you get one new email each month with the download links for the written guides, the workbooks and the audio guides.

Here’s what you’ll learn each month:

Month #1: The Principles of Simplicity and Simple Productivity

The first month you get two modules focused on the basics of simplifying your life and on simplifying your work and effectiveness. And on lowering your stress levels and stop feeling overwhelmed.

A brief summary:

Module 1: The Six Principles of Simplicity

• What you should use your precious attention for in life.
• The three keys to making simplicity and improvement into a reality instead of just a dream.
• Principles that will always help you to find calmness and focus in today’s chaotic and complex world.

Module 2: Simple Productivity

• How to change your habits in the easiest way.
• Learn about the three habits that have helped me to triple my productivity and effectiveness in the past few years.
• Find out how you can overcome the common stumbling blocks in personal development and motivation and make your success guaranteed.
• How to handle email and other routine tasks in the simplest and quickest way you can.

You’ll get:

• The Six Principles of Simplicity Guide
• The Simple Productivity Guide
• The Simple Productivity Workbook

And these 6 audio guides:

• The Six Principles of Simplicity
• Habits and Rituals for Sustainable Change
• The 3 Habits of Simple and Relaxed Productivity
• The Simple Guide to Overcoming Procrastination
• On Motivation and Making Success Guaranteed
• The Awesome Morning Ritual (and Other Rituals)

Month #2: Simple Thinking

The second month is focused on the simple thinking and mindfulness. Some of the most important things you’ll learn are:

• How to simplify your thought habits and find calmness and inner peace in everyday life.
• The most effective ways to handle common thought complications such as worrying, pessimism, low self-esteem, a victim mentality and overthinking.
• Learn how to adopt what I believe is one of the most valuable and versatile habits one can have that will transform not just your thinking but your social life and relationships, your effectiveness and many other vital areas in life.

You’ll get:

• The Simple Thinking & Mindfulness Guide
• The Simple Thinking Workbook

Plus 5 audio guides:

• On Optimistic Thinking
• Slow Down into the Present Moment
• How to Stop Worrying So Much
• On Fear, Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem
• How to Stop Overthinking and Overcomplicating

Month #3: Simple Social Skills & Relationships

During the third month we focus on simplifying your relationships and simple ways to really improve your social skills.

Some the most important things in this module are:

• Find out how you can give more and deeper of the perhaps most important thing in any relationship. It’s a simple thing, but making real improvements here will totally change your social life.
• Learn how to make your relationships simpler and lighter and to overcome common stumbling blocks that make any relationship harder and more complicated than it needs to be.
• How I overcame shyness and social nervousness and how you can too to live a freer and richer social life.
• The essential keys to simpler social skills with anyone and powerful dating tips that I applied and that really changed my life.

You’ll get:

• The Simple Social Skills & Relationships Guide
• The Simple Social Skills and Relationships Workbook

And these 4 audio guides:

• On Value
• How to Improve Your Conversational Skills
• How to Reduce Social Nervousness and Shyness
• On Dating

Month #4: Simple Health and Simple Living

The last month of the course you get two modules of content: Simple Health & Fitness and Simple Living. Start with the one that feels most important to you at that time.

Here are some of the essential parts of these two final modules:

Module 5: Simple Health and Fitness

• Learn about three of the most important aspects of a happier, simpler and more energetic life.
• Identify energy leaks that drain you each and every day and make life so much heavier in subtle and not so subtle ways and learn how to plug these leaks.
• The easy way to establish a workout habit for life.
• Find out about the simple, no-nonsense steps that helped me lose 26 pounds.

Module 6: Simple Living

• Find out how you can change your relationship to things, stop making unnecessary purchases and reduce clutter in your life.
• The few, essential habits that will keep both your home and your workspace clutter-free every day.
• Discover how you can cut down on unnecessary costs, more consciously spend your money and simplify your financial life.

You’ll get:

• The Simple Health & Fitness Guide
• The Simple Health Workbook
• The Simple Living Guide
• The Simple Living Workbook

You will also get 6 audio guides:

• Simple Health
• Simple Fitness
• How I Lost 26 Pounds
• What Do You Really Need?
• Simple Money Tips
• How to Keep Your Home and Workspace Clutter-free

How to sign up for the Simplicity Monthly Membership Course right now and start simplifying your life today

If you want to sign up for this monthly course for just 13.97 dollars per month and get your first email containing the download links for first two modules in just a few minutes then follow the simple instructions below. You can cancel your membership at any time during the course and no more payments will then be drawn from your credit card or PayPal account.

1. Click the add to cart button below.
2. You will be taken to a Paypal page where you sign up and pay for your first month of the subscription with your credit card or with money on your PayPal account.
3. After you have paid please just wait for a few seconds and you will be taken to a page where you sign up for the private Simplicity email list. Follow the instructions on that page and enter your email address and click the Submit button.
4. After a few minutes you will get a confirmation email in your email inbox (be sure to check your spamfolder too). Click the link in that email to confirm your subscription. A few minutes after that you will get the first email in this course containing all the download links for the first month’s guides, workbook and audio files.

P.S: If you have any questions, please send me an email via my contact page. And you can of course still get the whole course immediately today if you like. Click here to learn more about that and about the Simplicity Course.

——————————————————————————-

If you want to learn much more about living a more positive life, increasing your focus, effectiveness, simplifying your work and greatly reducing your stress at work or in school then have a look at my in-depth premium guides:

Copyright 2006-2011 Henrik Edberg.

Source: The Positivity Blog | Increase Your Happiness and Awesomeness

For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about The 5 Levels of Leadership, my book coming out on the 4th of October. Last week I shared an overview and description of Level 1. Here’s the overview of the book again: This week, I’d like to continue discussing Level 1: Position. Leadership traditionally begins with [...]

Originally posted at: John Maxwell on Leadership
Copyright 2009-2011. All rights reserved.

Follow JohnCMaxwell on Twitter.
Or visit John’s Facebook page.
Introducing a new daily video program, A Minute with Maxwell. Sign up here. It’s free!
Level 1 – Position: It’s a Great Place to Visit, But You Wouldn’t Want to Live There

Source: John Maxwell on Leadership

When teen-agers start taking completely responsibility for their lives, they take a giant step from being a child to being an adult.

Like the rest of us, the more teen-agers accept responsibility, the more they are in control of their lives and the more confident they feel. And deciding what they want and working to achieve it is a key component to being a responsible person.

I wrote DREAM Book for Teens to help teen-agers unleash the champions inside of themselves.  (Find out how to get your teen a DREAM Book here.) They have unlimited potential to be, do or have anything they want although right now they only are tapping into a fraction of what they are capable of. Dreams and goals will help them unlock this incredible potential if only they refuse to let circumstances, excuses, fear or limiting beliefs keep them from achieving those dreams and goals.

It takes a lot of hard work, focus, dedication, discipline and persistence. It involves of investment of their times – to properly define their dreams, set their goals and work their plan. In short, it takes commitment.

My questions for your teens: What is their dream? What do they want to achieve in the future?

My message to your teens: I’ve never found a better way to achieve dreams and goals than by using a Dream Book. It will take you step-by-step through a simple process that virtually guarantees you will accomplish your goals if you will just put the information into action.

When you fill out your Dream Book and specifically define your dreams and goals, it’s like magic. Good things will start happening right before your eyes. And as you make the journey to your dream life, your Dream Book with become one of the most valuable resources you have. It will be the one place where you can find everything you need to help you accomplish your goals and live your dreams.

The best thing about The Dream Book for Teens is that it is simple to use. All you have to do is follow the pattern by filling in the blanks. The key to making The Dream Book for Teens work is to just do it! And the more you do it, the better you will get at it, and the more success you will achieve.

Source: Billy Cox Blog

News station turns teleconference solution in wake of downturn.

Source: All SUCCESS Channels

In less than two months, my new book, The 5 Levels of Leadership, comes out! Last week I shared an excerpt that explained why I wrote the book. Today, I’d love to give you a quick overview and description of Level 1. In the book, each level is explained in its own section, where you’ll [...]

Originally posted at: John Maxwell on Leadership
Copyright 2009-2011. All rights reserved.

Follow JohnCMaxwell on Twitter.
Or visit John’s Facebook page.
Introducing a new daily video program, A Minute with Maxwell. Sign up here. It’s free!
What are the 5 Levels of Leadership?

Source: John Maxwell on Leadership

One of Tom’s frequent themes is the need for all businesses—that is, all, miniscule to gargantuan—to conduct themselves like Professional Service Firms. Furthermore, Tom recognizes David Maister as the world’s leading authority on the management of professional service firms. So, in the second of the Best of the Cool Friends series, we’d like to revisit the interview Erik Hansen did with David Maister in October 2000, which contains some very up-to-date insights. If you’d like to catch up with David’s more recent work, you can do so at his website, or check out his latest book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker (meaning: some habits are hard to change!).

Source: The Tom Peters Weblog

Most entrepreneurs are motivated by ideas, concepts, hopes, desires, and optimism. They like to interact with people, to market and sell. They enjoy negotiating, communicating, and persuading. They are action-oriented and like to be in continuous motion. They start early, work hard, and stay later.

But most entrepreneurs are not “numbers” people. They have little patience for the details of financial statements and accounting. They are eager to get on with the business of meeting with people and selling the product. In fact, for most entrepreneurs, dealing with numbers is irritating and frustrating.

But nonetheless, for you to move solidly along the way to wealth, to become a successful entrepreneur, and eventually, a self-made millionaire, you must master the numbers in your business. You can hire bookkeepers, accountants, and financial advisors to help you, but you can never abdicate the responsibilities of fully understanding every penny and every dollar that comes in and out of your business.

Get the Facts

It is absolutely essential for your success that you know the financial facts of every aspect of your business, especially your costs to produce and offer your product or service and the prices you charge for what you sell. It is amazing how many businesses, large and small, are operating on the basis of false assumptions and incorrect numbers. Sometimes they joke and say, “We lose money on everything we sell, but we make it up on the volume.” But this is not a joke.

Determining Your Costs

Often the person who makes the fewest mistakes in business is the one who succeeds the most. You don’t have to be an entrepreneurial genius to be successful. You just have to master your numbers and know what you are doing.

You have heard the old saying “You can’t get there from here.” When you do an accurate cost analysis for a new product or service, you will often find that, based on what you can change for that product or service in the current market, you can’t make a profit on it. It makes no sense to go through all the time and trouble of bringing this product to market because the return is too low. The potential for loss is too high. The possible profits are not as great as you could earn by offering something else.

There are several costs that you must consider:

1. Direct costs: These are the costs of goods sold. If you make a product or buy it from a manufacturer or distributor for $5, including all costs of shipping and transportation, insurance, and delivery and you sell the product for $10, your cost of goods sold is $5. This is fairly easy to calculate.
2. Indirect costs: These are the costs that are attributable to all of the products or services that you sell, not any specific ones. Indirect costs can be costs of salaries, rent, telephones, utilities, marketing, advertising, shipping, delivery, and many others.
3. Fixed costs: These are the costs that you incur each month whether or not you sell a single item or generate a single dollar of revenue. Your fixed costs include salaries for your permanent staff, rent, utilities, many operational costs, and the costs for outside services, plus your own personal income from the business.
4. Variable costs: These are the costs that increase or decrease depending on your level of business activity. These costs are incurred only when a sale takes place. They can include costs of goods sold, sales commissions, delivery costs, and other costs that can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to the cost of each product or service you sell.
5. Sunk costs: These are expenses that you have incurred that are gone forever. They can never be recovered. They are like an unattached anchor thrown overboard that sinks to the bottom of the ocean and is irretrievable.

Building a business is often a sloppy affair. No matter how smart you are, you will buy products that you cannot resell, that no one wants at any price. You will buy furniture that will turn out to be of no value to you. You will run advertisements and engage in other costs that, in retrospect, were a complete waste of money. In building a business, these mistakes are inevitable.

But it is essential that you recognize them for what they are–sunk costs. The money is gone forever. You cannot recoup it. You must not spend a single dollar attempting to compensate for a financial mistake in the past. Focus on the future and on sales and profits. Let the sunk costs go.

I hope you enjoyed this post.  Feel free to share it with your friends and leave a comment below.

Source: Brian Tracy’s Blog