Robert Kiyosaki on the Oprah show discussing Direct Sales and Real Estate Investing

Source: Robert Kiyosaki Blog

I am able to announce that the May edition of the Top Sales magazine is now published

As with all of our Top Sales initiatives, our primary objective with this monthly magazine is to provide you with inspiration, and the opportunity to expand your commercial bandwidth.

This month we are delighted to offer you exclusive comments and pearls of wisdom from the most significant sales blogger and author Geoffrey James, in conversation with Linda Richardson.

We also have articles from Jeffrey Gitomer, Dave Kurlan, Tamara Schenk, and Samara Pope.

Then for our highlight, we announce the much anticipated “Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers for 2012″ — carefully selected from an original long-list of one hundred and fifty potential candidates — let’s see if you agree with our choices?

As usual we announce the “Top Sales Article of the Month” complete with ten new nominees for April, and you can also catch up on all of the past month’s highlights over at Top Sales World and Top Sales Management

Finally, Dan McDade is in the spotlight, oh, and I am trying to persuade you to be in London on June 7th!

You can download your copy HERE

I am also delighted to announce the launch of a brand new feature over at Top Sales World

Linda Richardson’s Sales Rescue: Linda has recruited a small team of trusted colleagues and friends to provide a free online and interactive service for frontline sales and marketing professionals â€| For example:

“My customer changed priorities after three months. What can I do?”

“My prospect has gone silent. Any advice?”

There are sales stoppers at every turn and you want to keep going, but how?

Your Sales Rescue team is no further than your smartphone, ready to answer your questions 24/7 – and Save Your Sale!

Now launched on Top Sales World, so do please pop over and participate as often as you need to.

News: Tomorrow, “What Makes a Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencer?”

Source: Jonathan Farrington’s Blog

I understand and appreciate that many frontline sales professionals — and senior executives too, for that matter — are not comfortable negotiating. I enjoy it very much, and I have always particularly relished the final act, where things can get very tense.

The closing stages of any negotiation are vital to the overall success of the final deal.

There will come a time when both parties can sense an outcome is possible and each negotiator needs to be careful not to be too eager to close – or else, the other party will be tempted to hold back for further concessions.

Once a likely outcome is seen, either party may define outstanding issues, compare arguments and objections, review the position to date and agree a deadline for agreement. If one side avoids making these decisions, the other must probe to find out the reason and deal with it effectively. Negotiators must be careful at this stage to identify tactical delay, which deliberately attempts to force further concessions.

The best solution to aim for always is one where both parties feel they have done well, despite having to concede on certain issues. This is called a “win-win” solution.

Once either side feels they have arrived at the final deal, it is important to signal this to the other party.

Body language can say as much about what you are thinking as speech. If you have made your final offer, look as if it is your final offer.

Simply gathering up your papers, looking at the other side directly in the eye and saying “That is my final offer” can do this, and silence can be a powerful tool in convincing them you mean what you say.

Be wary of splitting the difference. If you offer to split the difference, you have, in effect, given the other side a concession that is one-sided. You have said you are prepared to move without asking for commitment in return.

The final consideration is when you have done the deal and both parties are in agreement. Record the details and agree with the other parties involved that your interpretation of events matches theirs. That way there will be no unexpected comeback in the inevitable post-negotiation period when either side reviews how well or badly he has done. Again, this will be minimized if the solution you have arrived at benefits both parties.

A final word of caution â€|

The closing stages need to be approached with caution. It has been shown that the majority of concessions are given or traded in the last 5% of the time allocated for negotiation. That means if you negotiate for one hour, the last three minutes are when you are most vulnerable.

News: As I hinted last Friday, this week is going to be pretty frenetic, and it all begins tomorrow, so do stay alert, please.

Source: Jonathan Farrington’s Blog

Image by KevinLallier (license).

“Unnatural work produces too much stress.”
Bhagavad Gita

“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”
Sydney J. Harris

Keeping the stress away in life isn’t just about the big decisions and challenges like the career, your most important relationships, money and health.

It is also to a large degree about what you do each day and week. Those small habits that you may forget about or neglect that when added up make a huge difference.

Here are 10 of them that are having a wonderful impact in my life and have had a very positive effect for many people.

Write it all down.

Use your mind for better things than remembering what to do. And the mind is often like a leaky bucket. So write down all your great ideas, insights, and thoughts before they go missing somewhere and add what you need to do to a to-do list.

One thing at a time.

You’ll get better results and feel better and less stressed if you do just one thing at a time. So instead of multi-tasking, get your day started with doing the most important task of the day until it is finished. Then continue with the next task that is now the most important one for you.

Ask instead of guessing.

Reading minds is hard. So, instead ask questions and communicate. This will help you to minimize unnecessary conflicts, misunderstandings, negativity and waste or time and energy.

Don’t make mountains out of molehills.

Before you start thinking too much about something and building it up something big in your head, ask yourself “am I making a mountain out of a molehill here? And if you get lost in victim thinking in some way then ask yourself “does anyone on the planet have it worse than me right now?”.

Pack your bag before you go to bed.

Then you don’t have to get stressed out by that in morning and you are less likely to forget something.

Set clear boundaries for your day and week.

I have to have limits to properly balance fully focused work with relaxation. By doing things this way I have discovered that I become more productive when not everything is about being productive. And life, in my experience, does become more pleasurable too. Three ways to set boundaries for your day and week are:

• Set at stop time and start time for work. I do not work after 7 o clock in the evenings and I do not work before 8 o clock in the morning.
• Plenty of breaks each day. Take breaks during your day to stay sharp and to have energy for the evenings and weekends too. I usually work for about 45 minutes and take a 15 minute break per hour. During that break I get away from the computer and do something different like going out for fresh air, eating something or watching half an episode of the Simpsons. Then every third hour or so I take a longer break for lunch, a snack or something like that.
• Don’t work on weekends. I try to stay away from the usual impressions and routines during the weekend. I usually take one media- and internet free day. I rarely check my emails on Saturdays or Sundays. Instead I spend time with my girlfriend, friends, family, a good book or movie or I do some other fun activity.

Keep everything in its place.

If everything has its own place then it is whole lot easier to keep your home reasonably ordered and decluttered from day to day. And to find the keys, wallet and cell phone as you are heading out the door.

Be 10 minutes early.

This very simple tip has transformed those traveling times during my day into relaxing breaks instead of passages of time and space that only up my levels of stress and other negative feelings.

Keep a very simple workspace.

By keeping a very simple workspace you minimize the distracting and stressing clutter. And your attention becomes easier to focus in a natural way on what is most important. So think about how you can create such a place to work in.

One suggestion is to just have small desk with a laptop, a pad of paper and a pen and something that inspires you on one of your walls like a list of your top priorities or dreams, a good quote or a meaningful photo that gives you a jolt of energy and positivity.

Just breathe.

When stressed, lost in a problem or the past or future in your mind breathe with your belly for two minutes and just focus on the air going in and out. This will calm your body down and bring your mind back into the present moment again.

PS: If you are interested, then Only72.com are starting one of their rare sales today. $1005 of courses and books on doing what you love, creating your own small business, freelancing and helping people – including Chris Guillebeau’s brand new book “The $100 Startup” – for just $100 during the next 72 hours. Click here to learn more. (affiliate link).

Source: The Positivity Blog

As the US heads into the presidential primary in south carolina, the most recent republican debate featured Newt Gingrich defending his moral values — his marriage – , Mitt Romney defending his tax returns, and Rick Santorum defending his sweater vests, is there anyone is is actually making real sense in terms of dollars and [...]

Source: Robert Kiyosaki Blog

Financial Freedom for Women Video from Kim Kiyosaki Kim talks about the different people and personalities you need to be aware of in today’s world. This quadrant will help bring awareness, and possibly, provide a strategy when talking to the different people who fall within this quadrant.

Source: Robert Kiyosaki Blog

When so much time and money is spent on training people about the need for constructive relations with customers, why is it often so bad?

For much the same reason that when so much money has been spent on telling people that smoking kills you, they still insist on smoking.

No, the issue is the environment.

There used to be spittoons in bars. What is a spittoon? It’s a bowl or bucket into which people spit.

Oh yes, people used to spit into spittoons. They spat because they chewed tobacco; they spat because they had — please forgive the term — phlegm. For whatever reason, they spat. And so there were spittoons.

So long as the environment accepted people spitting, there were spittoons. Once that environment changed, the very idea was repulsive.

Which gets us back to relations with customers. So long as the environment in your organization is tolerant of taking a patronising, competing or negative attitude to customers, some people will do just that.

What does that mean?

Jargon obscures. There are various terms used such as Customer Relations; Customer Care; Customer Service; Customer Support — and a few more besides.

Customer Relations refers to the principles and practice used by everyone across the board in a company in developing and maintaining a certain quality of relationship with customers and prospective customers.

Customer Care refers to the techniques and attitudes necessary to deliver a high quality of service to customers.

Customer Service / Support / Helpline refers specifically to a department set up to field enquiries and complaints from customers so that operational departments need not spend time dealing with them. The term ‘Customer Relations’ may also be used for this function.Technical Support performs a similar function for technical reasons.

In discussing customer relations we are not just discussing the work of a Customer Service Department. We need to look at the whole company wide approach to Customer Relations.

Have you ever taken the time to calculate the cost of first identifying; then approaching; qualifying; selling to, just one of your best customers?

I bet the figure is considerably more than the investment you have made in keeping and developing them?

Business development is not just an exercise in winning new business, it also refers to building brick walls around our most important customers – that is the area of selling that is the Achilles heel of so many sales organizations: It is far more exciting to go chasing after new opportunities, after all, if a customer has bought from us once, they’ll call us if they need anything else, won’t they?

Probably not, if you do not continually work to earn the right to their business, and their loyalty.

We will only be remembered for the quality of our last interaction with our customers, and as the man said “The less I see of what’s his name, the more I forget him”

On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your company’s ability at customer retention?

Then ask yourself – whilst looking in the mirror – would your customers score you that highly?

Have you ever asked them?

News: Imagine starting with a list of 150 names and needing to get down to just 5o? I can share with you that reducing down to 100 was pretty easy, given all the statistical information we had to hand. Indeed, agreeing the final 60 was achieved without anyone coming to blows. However, it has been those last few places that have given us the most difficulty, in the certain knowledge that somebody, somewhere, is going to be miffed. Ho, hum, we have made our final choices and we will share the “Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers for 2012″ with you next Tuesday.

That’s it for yet another action packed week - do have a great w/e wherever you are, and ready yourself for a really exciting Top Sales week, starting on Tuesday - JF

Source: Jonathan Farrington’s Blog

The Center for Women in Business at Bentley College is holding its inaugural event, Moving from Conversation to Action, tomorrow. Tom will be there to have a lunch discussion with founder and leader, Betsy Myers. The event will be webcast live, to join in, visit this link and click on Join Webcast. The most exciting part of this event is that it features organizations who are already working to intentionally advance women in the workforce. They’ll be sharing best practices as well as the challenges involved. Hope you can listen in.

Source: The Tom Peters Weblog

Virtually every single person in America who is financially independent started off with nothing. But they acquired good personal finance habits, learned how to save money, and improve their money management skills, eventually becoming some of the most successful people in their communities. And anything that anyone else has done, you can probably do as well.

Save Money by Using a Long Time Perspective

To save money and become financially independent you must begin living on less than you earn even if you are deeply in debt. One of the most important guarantors of your personal finance success is called “Long time perspective.” Take the long view. Develop a long term attitude toward yourself and your financial future and begin thinking in terms of where you want to be in five and ten years. This long-time perspective will have an inordinate impact on your personal finance habits and money management skills in the present, and will help you save money over the years.

The starting point of financial independence is described in George Klasson’s book, The Richest Man in Babylon, as “Pay yourself first.” He says that, “A part of all you earn is yours to keep.” If you just save 10% of your gross earnings every single paycheck over the course of your working lifetime, you will become financially independent and gain personal finance success. In fact, if you saved $100 per month from the time you started work at age 20 until the time you retired at age 65, and this $100 per month earned 10% per annum return, compounded, you would be worth more than $1,100,000 when you retired, in addition to social security pensions and everything else.

The Most Important Money Management Skill

In a study done recently called “One Hundred Million Millionaires” the writers and economists concluded that it is possible for every single adult in America to become a millionaire if they start early enough, consistently save money, and actually plan their personal finance. And since it is so possible and so easy for so many hundreds of thousands and millions of other people to achieve financial independence, it must be possible for you to improve your personal finance as well.

Just imagine! If you only make $25,000 year, but you save 10% of that, or $2,500 per annum, just over $200 per month, you will become a millionaire. But in order to successfully get there, you need to make a decision to improve your money management skills.

Most economists and psychologists agree that the key to personal finance success and is the ability to delay gratification. The reason for financial ruin and failure to save money is the need for immediate gratification. People who lack the discipline to restrain themselves from spending all they earn, have no financial future and can never save money. This is a key money management skill you need to remember in order to gain financial success.

Change Your Personal Finance Habits

Your goal should be to carefully save 20 – 30% of your income each paycheck and to invest that money carefully over the years. Of course, for most people, at least initially, this is impossible. They are too deeply in debt and they have entrenched spending patterns that are consuming 100% of their income or more. So here is a formula for you. Decide today that you are going to change your personal finance habits, save money, get out of debt and achieve financial independence within the next few years. You begin by resolving to save one percent of your gross income. Let us imagine that you are earning $2,000 per month.

One percent of $2,000 is $20. You decide that you are going to save $20 each month. $20 per month is approximately 67 cents per day.

Every day you save 67 cents. Every month you put the month in the bank. And once you put the money into that savings account, you never, never touch it for any reason. This is your wealth account which you never, never touch for any reason.

A remarkable thing is going to happen to you within a few months as you save money. Your attitude toward yourself and money management will change. You will feel stronger and more confident even though you only have a few dollars in the bank. You will be adhering to a budget more closely and questioning unnecessary expenditures.

Growing Exponentially

But the best news of all is this financial accumulation account will start to grow. You will start to get little unexpected dribbles and drabs of money coming in that you promptly put into this account. Instead of the account growing at $20 per month plus interest, by the end of the first year, there will probably be more than $500 in the account. By the end of the second year, there will be over $1,500, maybe even $2,000. By the end of the third or fourth year, you will have several thousand dollars put aside, you will be out of debt, and you will not have to stress about how to save money for the rest of your life.

As you become comfortable saving one percent of your income and living on the other 99%, you then raise your savings rate to two percent of your income. You live on the other 98%. When you become comfortable at that level, you increase it to three percent and then four percent, and eventually up to 20% and up to 25%. Within three years, you will find yourself living quite comfortably on 75% of your income and saving the rest.

I hope you enjoyed this article on how to save money and improve your personal finance habits for better money management! Please comment below and share this post with your friends!

Source: Brian Tracy’s Blog

A Sales Leader’s level of success or failure may be determined by their ability to influence people within their own organization, as well as those operating in other companies.

Sales Leaders who use their influencing skills well are exciting to be around and they exude a positive energy that attracts people towards them. Your ability to influence others can empower people development, accelerate results and ultimately ensures an easier working environment.

Influencing is about understanding yourself and the effect or impact you have on others. Though, it can on occasion be one way, the primary relationship is two way, and it is about changing how others perceive you. Truly excellent influencing skills require a healthy combination of interpersonal, communication, presentation and assertiveness techniques. It is about adapting and modifying your personal style when you become aware of the effect you are having on other people, while still being true to yourself.

Behavior and attitude change are what’s important, not changing who you are or how you feel and think. You may try to exert your influence through coercion and manipulation. You might even succeed in getting things done, but that isn’t really influencing. That’s forcing people to do what you want, often against their will. You won’t have succeeded in winning support. Pushing, bullying, bludgeoning or haranguing DO NOT WORK! Like elephants, people will remember the experience.

Indeed, if you force someone to do something you want without taking their point of view into consideration, then the impression that person is left with is how they will see you forever. You’re stuck with it, unless you deliberately change what you do in order to be seen differently.

People are far more willing to come halfway (or more) if they feel acknowledged, understood and appreciated. They may even end up doing or agreeing to something they wouldn’t previously have done, because they feel good about making the choice.

What Makes An Effective Influencer?

Find alternative ways to influence others and demonstrate high levels of flexibility. This means that if the approach they are taking doesn’t get them their desired results they try a different approach. If this doesn’t work they try another approach. Ultimately, the person with the greatest flexibility will always have control over the situation:

• Listen attentively to what others say because this improves mutual understanding and conveys respect for the opinions of others. Giving good attention to people makes them more intelligent. Poor attention makes them stumble over their words and seem stupid.

• Uncover needs and wants because they appreciate that every individual is unique. They have their needs, their own set of problems and their own motives for doing what they do.

• Empathize continuously and are able to adopt different perceptual positions to connect with the feelings of others in different situations. Not only do effective influencers manage to put themselves in their customers’ shoes, they are also able to wear the shoes of individuals in their sales team.

• Have developed high levels of sensory awareness. This means that their senses are fine-tuned to pick-up on the smallest details include non-verbal signals that are sometimes different to what a person is saying.

• Create and maintain rapport throughout their communication that enables them to deepen relationships, build higher amounts of trust and minimize resistance.

• Eliminate weak statements from their language and are able to create multiple positive associations by avoiding negative words and using negations in a positive way. For example; “I’m not going to say that this strategy will be totally successful.” The unconscious mind has to think about the strategy being totally successful, irrespective if the word ‘not’ is contained within the statement.

• Base the success of their communication on the response it produces in others. If other people don’t respond in the way that the influencer was wanting, they accept responsibility and change their communication until they do achieve their desired outcome.

So you see, the “winners in life” certainly know all about influencing!

News: Next Tuesday – May 1st – is going to be a particularly exciting day! To begin with, we are publishing the May edition of Top Sales Magazine, featuring some great articles from Jeffrey Gitomer, Dave Kurlan, Tamara Schenk and Samara Pope. We will also be announcing April’s Top Sales Article of the Month - together with May’s ten nominees.

Linda Richardson interviews Geoffrey James, the most prolific and successful blogger ever in the sales space: Dan McDade from PointClear is in the spotlight, and I will be trying to persuade you to come to London in June!

But of course the highlight will be the announcement of the Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers for 2012. We have finally managed to reduce the long-list down from 150 names to just 50 – no mean task. Will there be some surprises? Probably.

Tomorrow, I am going to give you full details of another incredibly unique initiative, which also launches over at Top Sales World next Tuesday – “Linda Richardson’s Sales Rescue” … more tomorrow.

Source: Jonathan Farrington’s Blog