Phone Sales tips !

■Never ask if it’s a good time to talk. This gives the other person a perfect excuse to end the call. If you are unsure if the person has time to talk, then state up front that the phone call will only take 3 minutes. When you give the person an exact time be sure you time the call. After the allotted time, tell the customer you’re at the end and ask them if they would like to continue or reschedule. Using this practice allows you to demonstrate how much you respect their time.

■Ask questions. People will never hang up on themselves.

■Use the person’s name at least 3 times in every phone call. Who doesn’t like to hear their name said?

■When greeting people on the telephone, avoid using their last name. It makes the call seem too formal. Your objective should be to have a casual conversation, in the same way you would talk to a good friend.

■Use visually descriptive words to help paint a picture of what you’re saying. A phone conversation doesn’t have to be boring and stale.

■When starting a new telephone conversation, always give your first and last name. Never assume the person you’re talking to is going to recognize your voice or think you’re the only one with your first name.

■Watch your facial expressions by placing a mirror in front of you when you talk. It’s amazing how they come through over the phone.

■Add energy to your phone calls by standing up. Nobody likes talking to a “blah” person. People who have good posture tend to come across more enthusiastic than those who don’t.

■When you end a conversation, always summarize it in the same way you would end a live meeting. By doing so, you can prevent misinterpretation of your discussion.

■Always allow the other person to have the final comment or question. Just because you’ve asked all your questions doesn’t mean the other person has asked all of his.

■Avoid negotiating over the phone, use it as a means to introduce information and to follow up or confirm information. It’s impossible to truly read body language over the phone and thus you lose a major negotiating tool. A phone call however can be an excellent way to introduce a new idea you would like to receive some feedback on. Many times it will allow feedback to be gained in a less threatening manner than if it were to occur in a traditional sales call.

■Never use a speaker phone with a customer even if they say it is fine with them. Speaker phones add to the perception the conversation is not important enough to capture 100% of the person’s attention. (Only exception of course is if there is a group involved.)

Interviewing Top Talent...

When there’s a job to be filled at your company, keep in mind a few things that are critical to land top talent. Even in this job market top talent is hard to find. Yes unemployment is high but for top talent, the “passive” job candidate, he or she for the most part are not looking. Now I’m not saying that there isn’t top talent out of work in this market because there is, but even the top talent who are unemployed have options. Don’t be a jerk who thinks you’re “holding the golden ticket” when interviewing someone. This is a client driven market but don’t exploit this fact. If you want to attract top, passive candidates, don’t forget that you may need to “sell” your opportunity.

Some basics on what motivates a job candidates and why they are willing to leave their current job:

1)More money

2)Better benefits

3)A better opportunity that offers career growth

4)Less stress/pressure

People stay at their current company because:

1)Paid well

2)They like their co-workers

3)Having job security (which is really a state of mind)

4)Having good benefits

There are some interesting things at work here that are overlooked. If you understand what motivates someone, perhaps you can leverage your interview to attract talent. For a passive job candidate to leave the comforts of what he/she already has, you need to start to understand that they are interviewing with strength on their side. Keep in mind the hardest part of the process of landing top talent is to actually get someone to make a change. Change is not as easy as you think and placing job candidates for over ten years, I can tell you that one of the hardest things for someone to do is to quit their current job.

The main goal of your interview should be that when a job candidate leaves your interview, they are more excited regardless to whether they’re your top choice or not. You want them walking away saying “This would be a great place to work!” Now I know that’s common sense, but my all time favorite saying is “common sense is a rare commodity!”

Some tips that will help:

Make the job candidate feel welcome.

Spend most of the interview listening intently to what the candidate has to say.

Talk up everyone that you work with.

Coming across positive will attract someone to you.

Make sure you do what you say. If you tell the candidate that you will get back to them than make sure you do so in a timely manner.

Some tips that will not help:

No one needs to hear about the nightmares at your company. Perhaps a nightmare for you is an opportunity to others.

Nobody needs to hear if you mess up that it’s your ass. In a job that’s already implied.

Talking bad about people who work for you or who have left will only signal that you will do the same about them.

I can tell you that people hire people that they like. The same holds true on the other side. People want to go to work for people they like. A company is only as good as it’s people. What are you doing to set that stage? Really spend some time thinking about your interview process and how you can make it better. You have one shot at a good first impression.

Daughter's Birthday Celebration.

It was Princess's birthday on the 17th November, as called her close fifteen friends nearby to our society and made her day with joy & enjoyments.

Guests were also there from Calicut to celebrate the occasion,we had served them with pav bhaji & payassum. Started with cake cutting, snaps taken and lasted for 3 hours starting at 7 pm.

So, now my daughter is growing fast................

Prayers & Love to Sandra.

Identify & Recover wasted time.

Instead of watching a one-hour TV show, tape it and watch it in 45 minutes by fast-forwarding through the commercials. Don't spend a half hour typing a lengthy email when you could accomplish the same thing with a 10-minute phone call. Batch your errands together and do them all at once.

During the summer between my second and third semesters, I found an apartment across the street from campus that was slightly closer to the engineering building than my on-campus dorm room. So I moved out of the dorms and into that apartment, which saved me some walking/biking time every day. I was also moving from a two-bedroom dorm which I shared with two roommates into a smaller single-person studio apartment. This new apartment was much more efficient. For example, I could work on programming assignments while cooking dinner because my desk was only a few steps from the stove.

Trying to cut out time-wasting habits is a common starting point for people who desire to become more efficient, but I think this is a mistake. Optimizing your personal habits should only come later. Clarity of purpose must come first. If you don't have clarity, then your attempts to install more efficient habits and to break inefficient habits will only fizzle. You won't have a strong enough reason to put your time to good use, so it will be easy to quit when things get tough. You need a big, attractive goal to stay motivated. The reason to shave 15 minutes off a task is that you're overflowing with motivation to put that 15 minutes to better use.

For example, you might have a career you sort of like, but most likely it's not so compelling that you'll care enough about saving an extra 15 minutes here and there, even if your total savings might amount to a few hours each day. But if you've taken the time to develop a sense of purpose that reaches deep into your soul, you'll be automatically motivated to put your time to better use. If you get the highest level of your life in order (purpose, meaning, spiritual beliefs), the lower levels will tend to self-optimize (habits, practices, actions).