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| Sales Management Information |
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Energize Your Organization
No matter what you do, it seems, your employees do only what's absolutely necessary to get along. You've handed out raises across the board year after year. You've been as generous as you can be with various incentives. Now you are at wits end. You ask in frustration, "What will it take to motivate my employees?" The answer is not in the workers, but in your organization. Employee motivation is usually treated as a problem of the individual worker. Motivation programs and initiatives try to inspire employees to work harder, but they do nothing about the work conditions that continue to demotivate those same employees. Discover the flaws in your organizational systems that are demotivating your employees and eliminate them. For example, if your reward systems reward speed over safety, then your employees aren't motivated to work safely. Eliminate unclear or conflicting expectations. And, at the same time, add elements that motivate your employees, such as delegating authority. One of the best ways to motivate your employees is to break with tradition and reengineer processes. Motivating employees today means breaking away from the employee-as-cog tradition. Encourage employees to be active, think and take initiatives, and enjoy their work. Keep your employees productively busy. In motivating organizations, employees should leave work feeling that they accomplished something worthwhile. Don't allow them to be passive. For example, instead of letting them wait for assignments, encourage them to use downtime to carry out self-improvement activities or ways to improve their jobs. Your organizational system should encourage employees to have fun. For example, let them jazz up the physical environment with personal decorations. Part of encouraging fun is a offering a variety way of life, such as job sharing and temporary work assignments. And when you let employees make more choices in their work schedules, break times, and special projects, you'll find that productivity will go up. Motivational production systems encourage self-measurement. Use performance measurement positively to encourage, facilitate, and guide, not control, punish, or find fault. Allow employees to measure their own performance. It's the surest way of showing that the system is there to help, not "get" them. This helps create a climate of appreciation. And well thought out expressions of appreciation are powerful motivators. Traditional or "Industrial Age" organizations do all the planning while employees are simply asked to implement what management has planned. This separation between "thinkers" and "doers" is demotivating to non-management employees. We are now in the "Communication Age," where you need to involve all employees, from the executive suite to the shop floor, in both strategic and operational planning. This is a radical change from the past, and not easily accepted by management. To effectively involve employees in planning you have to maximize opportunities for employee input and planning. Employees of today are more educated and knowledgeable than ever. They often have more knowledge about many aspects of their work than most supervisors. And they are often closer to the customer than the management is. But it is important to phase in employee involvement. Start them off as consultants and eventually involve them in complex strategic and operational planning. Always involve employees in goal setting. Employees will be much more committed to goals set by themselves than by a supervisor. And never forget that employees have valuable ideas on the big questions: Who are our customers? What are our strengths? How can we improve our long-term performance? You cannot successfully reengineer any processes in your organization without providing recognition for planning efforts. Let your employees know: "You are making a major contribution to the organization." Involving employees in planning shows the company's respect for their skills, encourages employees to increase their contributions to the company, and gives them an ownership stake in what they will be asked to do in the future. The "doers" will do things better than ever before. In most employee-attitude surveys, one of the most common concerns employees have is a lack of communication. In fact, lack of communication is a root cause of the most common work demotivators, such as office politics, unclear expectations, unnecessary rules, and constant change. How employees perceive, and feel about, communication in their organization plays a large part in the motivational climate. Communication done right, therefore, is one of management's key motivational tools. When you are on an airplane and it encounters turbulence, or if the flight is delayed, you want to know why. Not knowing the whole story makes you nervous. Employees also want to know what is causing the bumpy rides in the organization. What people don't understand, they often perceive as a threat. If your employees can't find out what they want to know from you, they'll start looking elsewhere. That's why every organization has a grapevine or rumor mill to compensate for lack of information. But you will defeat the rumor mills and remove perceived threats to employees by communicating as openly as possible. If you truly want to energize your organization you need to communicate virtually everything to your employees. Employees want to be, and should be, aware of the company's strategy, goals, sales, costs, profit and loss. These things need to be communicated frequently, and promptly. If something of importance happens, don't wait to tell employees. They'll hear about it through the grapevine, will wonder why they weren't told, and start to distrust your communication. Make a point of sharing the good news. When something good happens in a particular area, let the entire organization know about it. Employees will be excited about working in a company where so many positive things are happening. But don't just communicate the good news. Employees know that the news is not always good. They will assume that you are keeping the bad news to just a select few if they never hear about it. And once again, they'll loose trust. One-way communication sends an extremely demotivating message. It tells employees that their input is not valued or important. Just proclaiming that management's "door is always open" is not enough. Management must convince employees that they are truly interested in employee feedback. You should schedule regular meetings in which senior executives sit down with employees in all areas of the company to discuss employee ideas and concerns. When you do this it is always a good idea to draft agendas for these meetings with input from employee participants. This will give employees more ownership in the meeting. Establishing a Performance Development Process is one of the best ways to motivate employees and really energize your organization. Performance appraisal is often demotivating because appraisals are linked to compensation concerns, and sometimes to disciplinary measures. Even employees that generally perform well will be defensive and fearful about any negative feedback they receive. The purpose of appraisals is to encourage development, not focus on compensation or discipline. A Performance Development Process reflects an emphasis on development over reward and punishment. By including the word "process," you are sending the message that performance appraisal is a continuous exercise and not just a year-end tally. A Performance Development Process consists of four steps: 1. Performance planning. Employees and their supervisors meet at the beginning of each performance period to discuss expectations. 2. Regular feedback. Employees receive ongoing, informal feedback on a daily basis if possible, on a weekly basis at minimum. 3. Interim reviews. Employees shouldn't have to wait for the end of the year for comprehensive feedback. Interim reviews (weekly, monthly, or quarterly) remove many of the negatives associated with one-shot annual reviews. 4. Annual reviews. This should be a simple summary of previous reviews. Any motivation program, such as an inspiring speaker, can create an instant surge of motivation. But it soon dissipates. By identifying and eliminating demotivators and establishing open and positive communication with your employees, you will create a work structure that naturally leads employees to be, and remain, motivated. Copyright© 2005 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and achieve total success. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in personal and business development. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many of America's largest corporations, on the subjects of leadership, self-esteem, goals, achievement, and success psychology. Reach Joe at: joe@jlmandassociates.com Read more articles and newsletters at: http://www.jlmandassociates.com
DGL Hotel Management Group, LLC, Announces 'No Risk Marketing Program' - PR Newswire (press release)
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Careers and Employment Getting Off The Advertising And Sales Rollercoaster Seeing the results of advertising your business can be like watching a roller coaster. The day you run your ad you see a flurry of activity; your ph0ne starts ringing, your web site traffic increases and/ or potential clients visit your store. Your hopes soar. sales go up. Two or three days pass and the response goes down. You look at the bill for the advertising and your jaw drops. Your hopes descend. Book of Lists Marketing for Pressure Washing Companies The American Business Journals produces a Book of Lists each year in their many markets, it is wise for pressure washing companies to use this book of lists to find new clientele. The book of lists, lists the top companies in size in all industry sectors. Since pressure washing companies clean almost anything, it behooves them to use the book to selectively target the top companies to do business with. Shorten Sales Cycles in Complex Sales Environments Help buyers discover the answers they need to understand and align all of their decision variables. How to Sell Strategically If you want to maximize your sales performance, take a strategic approach to selling. After all, wouldn't you agree that "the 80/20 rule" applies to customers, where approximately 20 percent of customers produce approximately 80 percent of sales? How to Develop a Proactive, New-Business Sales Team! I don't know about your business but in my experience proactive, positive, consistent new business winners are the holy grail of any sales organisation. All of my clients have their own unique ways of motivating, managing and running their sales teams yet they all have problems from time keeping those teams on target and "up for it!" In this article I am going to cover the core fundamentals of How to Develop a Proactive, New-Business Sales Team. These are the same strategies and techniques that I have used to help many of my clients explode their personal and their team's sales. These strategies all combine an exciting and proven mix of attitudinal, skills and structural development that really works and what's more they're fun so your staff will want to use them! How to Maximize Account Penetration and Jump-Start Sales Maximizing account penetration is one of the most critical functions in sales. Why? The depth of account penetration has an enormous impact on revenues and profitability. The Differences Between A Commercial Collections Agency & Lawyer If your letter writing and phone calls have all failed to resolve a debt issue, it is time to call in a professional - a commercial collection agency or a lawyer specializing in commercial debt collection. How to Keep Projects From Spinning Out Of Control Are you involved in projects that seem to go nowhere in a hurry? Sales Pipeline Forecasting Is There A Better Way? To put it mildly most companies sales forecasting just isn't delivering, a staggering 90% of the deals do not close as forecasted even when the close probability is 75% or over. Even more astonishing is that 54% of forecasted deals are lost to competitors or to a no decision. Sales Competence Isn't About Quota Performance! Compounding the problem are two myths regarding measures of competency in sales. Management by Osmosis Sales managers are an interesting breed, effective sales managers are a rare breed. Managing a sales team is entirely different than managing other groups; their role requires them to have not only above average management skills, but also above average ability to manage the overall sales process. However, in many organizations, the weak link in the sales chain is the front line management. Snowflakes Improve Holiday Sales Snowflakes are beautiful! Leadership - How To Turn The Vision Into A Reality Be clear about where you are now. Audit your strengths and areas for development It's Time For A Sales Management Revolution Are you dog tired because of the way you manage your sales team? Many managers tell me that they cannot see a way out of traditional sales management methods that keep them working like dogs, including focusing strictly on revenue goals, staying late, traveling up to three weeks a month, tightly controlling teams, and constantly reacting to emergencies. There has to be a better way. Stop Drowning: Nine Strategies For Managing Your Priorities I just got off the phone with Susan. She is a well-meaning, big-hearted, caring, effective and creative sales manager. Susan is also exhausted. Hiring--A Vital Key In Sales Management Success Recently, I was asked to spend some time on the telephone, coaching a client's administrative assistant on how to check out an employment candidate's references. After each in-person or telephone conference, I complete a brief written report going over the information discussed. The information that I gave this worker was so vital to the company's overall sales management success that I felt impelled to share the report in my periodic client e-mailings, feeling that it might be of value to others that I serve. The information is so vital to the management process, I decided to reproduce it here as well. The Spirit Of Change A Highly Conscious Approach To Business Management. For more on this topic please link to Innerwealth Web Site Rotten to the Core: The Story of How the Best and Brightest can be Ruined The objective of an incentive is to incite action within an organization using a device or mechanism that that allows the rewarding or recognition of behaviors. This can be accomplished by offering preferential treatment, money, privileges, promotions, verbal praise, or complements. With that states, I suggest the answers to the questions above are: Run a Productive Business From Your Car-Office The way we do business has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. More products and services are now being offered outside traditional premises. You no longer have to go to a bank to complete your transactions or home loan applications. Insurance brokers visit your home or office; retailers deliver products directly to your home. This change in distribution methodology has meant many of us now run a car-office. A Fracas in the Franchise - Keep Your Customers by Keeping Your Workers As a previous owner of a Franchise I know the importance of maintaining employee commitment, loyalty and enthusiasm in maximising customer satisfaction, generating positive customer perception and protecting your investment.
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