Participating effectively in trade shows and conferences requires significant investment of time and treasure. I always encourage my clients to do only as many as they can afford to do thoroughly. What does “thoroughly” mean?
Essentially, have a plan and a purpose. Start early, months before the conference. Have the right people at the conference with the time, attention, and resources necessary to work the plan. Be ready to follow up after the conference. Everyone returns from these with lots of ideas and good intentions that whither the first day back at the office. It’s up to you to pick up the thread and maintain the momentum.
Have a clear goal or purpose that is consistent with your marketing message and sales targets. One way to formulate the goal is to answer the question, “If I (more…)
Could a simple five-minute interaction with another person dramatically increase your weekly productivity?
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employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more productive, too. … “Even minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain their motivation,” the researchers write in their paper, titled Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
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the one-two punch of knowing the beneficiary’s needs and meeting him in person generated the largest impact on motivation.
Speak for yourself about yourself. Starting sentences with “I” is a powerful shortcut to this skill. You can state facts, opinions, emotions, concerns, requests, suggestions—whatever—if and only if you take ownership of them.
It is okay to carry a message or speak for someone else; just be clear about what you are doing. Label it.
Communicate to cause a result.
Stay in every conversation—whether in person, by email, telephone, whatever—long enough to learn how your communication lands with the other person and be responsible for their response. How they feel or act is your business and you should be ready to respond.
Include the whole team in team conversations. Avoid having conversations about any person not participating in that conversation. This guideline also includes those conversations you have inside your head.
This cutting edge technology from MIT reminds me of something I learned in business school more than thirty years ago.
Professor Ashenhurst told us the story of how an “efficiency expert” had reduced productivity. The expert did a classic time and motion study of some programmers. He noticed that the programmers not only spent a significant amount of time walking to and from the punchcard reader to submit their programs but that they “wasted” large amounts of time talking to each other along the way and around the card reader.
The efficiency expert calculated that eliminating this lost time would more than pay for purchasing a teletype for each programmer, so they could enter their code from their desks instead of wandering to the punchcard reader. The new equipment was ordered and installed.
Productivity plummeted. A brief investigation uncovered the problem. You probably have already guessed what went wrong. The engineers around the punchcard reader had not been engaged in idle banter. They were exchanging tips and techniques to get better at their jobs. The conversations, it turns out, were not a problem. What looked like mere socializing was actually problem solving.
Pair interaction, for example, conversation, is not a sequence of stimulus and response but a simultaneous co-creation, “both parties are processing an ongoing stream of stimuli and responding while the stimulation is still occurring.”
From the moment I could talk,
I was told that I should listen.
–Cat Stevens Father and Son
I assume that you already know and do not need to be convinced that:
Your most profitable sales and easiest growth come from existing clients.1
Unhappy customers are 5-20 times more likely to tell others about their bad experience than satisfied customers are to spread good news.2
A simple, high-return method of learning from your happy and unhappy customers, of knowing your customers better while making them more loyal to you is to listen to them. Customers are people and people love being listened to.
If you listen closely enough, your customers will explain your business to you.
You have probably heard the old adage, “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it.” Though often attributed to the very busy Lucille Ball, the insight may be as old as civilization. People who know how to get things done gain a reputation for effectiveness and have many opportunities to be busy.
My CEO executive coaching clients are very busy and receive many requests to get things done from employees, shareholders, clients, family members, churches, governments, non-profits, etc., etc. So many requests, in fact, that they often find themselves expending time and attention on things that are not their top priorities. They may also find themselves letting people down, backing out of promises, and feeling inadequate.
I often need to train my clients on how to say, “No.”
I developed my technique many years ago when I had established a strong reputation as an effective volunteer in an organization I supported. This reputation led to a deluge of requests, more than I could responsibly accept. Here is the formula:
Disputes are inevitable any time you are working with people to produce significant results. What is not inevitable is dreading or delaying the confrontation required to resolve the conflict. Here’s how to get it over within one conversation.
My 3 Rs of dispute resolution are:
Relationship,
Responsibility, and
Request
RELATIONSHIP: Early in the conversation, state plainly the quality of the relationship you want to have with the person. Invite the other person to declare their intentions, too. A client once said to me, “I hope when we’re through negotiating this and we (more…)
The Great Recession has led many of my executive coaching clients to reduce 401(k) contributions, celebrations, work hours (through furloughs), and cut other employee perqs. These leaders often explain the reductions as prudent adjustments to avoid layoffs. Employees, unfortunately, are likely to react by becoming less trusting and cooperative with their employers, as this new research illustrates.
“Even something that is not so strong as a vindictive action—something simply perceived as a negative act,” [Professor Boaz] Keysar says, “escalates quickly.”
The researchers paired up participants for several games of give and take. In one a designated leader decided how much of $100 to give to a partner. In another, leaders decided how much of $100 to take from their partners. … Subjects in the study also consistently reacted better to receiving something than to having it taken from them, even when the gift left them with less money, say $30 instead of $50.
Leaders, however, thought they were being fair … “They did not anticipate,” Keysar says, “that the other person was going to perceive them as doing something negative.” What’s more, he discovered that as the game wore on, each successive round saw partners grabbing more and more as they alternated the taking role. Perceiving the takers as selfish, the participants became less generous.
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I assume that you already know and do not need to be convinced that:
Disputes are inevitable any time you are working with people to produce significant results. What is not inevitable is dreading or delaying the confrontation required to resolve the conflict. Here’s how to get it over within one conversation.
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