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Dear Tricia, Please accept my sincerest "thanks" for your readership throughout the year. I am truly privileged to communicate with you every four weeks and I will continue to do my very best to bring you the valuable information you need to be successful in your hiring efforts. If this is your first issue, then welcome! I appreciate the opportunity to share best practices in leadership, management, personal and professional growth, recruiting, retention, and other areas critical to your success. Again, thanks for your readership. Enjoy your newsletter!  Tricia Neves
This is part three of a three part series on effective collaboration. If you missed any of the previous articles please contact us today. Collaboration will be most effective when there is communication, coordination, and cooperation. Thinking about how they interact and what distinguishes one from the other helps us understand collaboration better. Communication is the cornerstone of collaboration. It can be established through written words, sound, signal, or body language. How well the communication is received – seeing it visually, hearing it audibly, or feeling it kinesthetically – is the ultimate measure of the transaction. Communication is understanding. Feedback is the only way we know what the receiver heard, or what they think we have communicated. It is important to note and evaluate verbal and nonverbal communications. Verbal and nonverbal should always be sending the same message. When verbal and nonverbal conflict, whatever is being communicated nonverbally will be what is "heard" and remembered. Make sure you pay attention to both your verbal and nonverbal messages. Written communications are excellent for reference or clarification and should be concise, clear, and easily understood. Verbal communications should also be clear, concise, and easy to understand. When communication does not exist, or there are mixed messages or unclear understanding, there will be poor coordination and cooperation for the task at hand. Coordination starts with practice for mastery of individual skills – running, throwing, catching, blocking...or selling, managing, resolving conflicts, computing, or analyzing. These skills are studied and mastered individually before interacting with others in a coordinated activity. Then the individual skills are practiced with others. Some activities take a great deal of interactive practice to find coordination. Fortunately for us, coordination itself is a skill that may be transported to new disciplines and can be developed with practice. Cooperation is a less explicit contributor to collaboration, it results from conscious intention, just like communication and coordination, but cooperation is the ingredient that gives meaning to collaboration. The outcome is determined by the complementary use of talents and skills by two or more collaborators. Collaborators may work together at the same time, or they may work separately at different times. Either way, in a smooth collaboration all efforts are coordinated through cooperation to achieve tangible output. Adapted from Executive Leadership, Resource Associates Corporation. All rights reserved worldwide. Permission granted to and adapted by Sorrell Associates, LLC.
Many sales professionals know that a positive attitude is a key element, perhaps the most important element, to success in sales. Even though they know this, most sales professionals find it extraordinarily difficult to maintain a positive attitude all day, every day. The reason? Most likely because they believe that their attitude is the result of external circumstances rather than something that is within their control. Here are some tips to help you stay positive: 1. Create a new definition for yourself of "external circumstances." You might think that hitting a few red lights on the way to an important meeting with a prospect could be seen as "bad luck" and put you in a bad mood. Definitely not a mood you want to convey to your next potential client! However, if you view those red lights as an indication to yourself of how wise it was of you to leave early, they take on a whole new meaning. If you are late because of those lights, take it as an opportunity to collect yourself and brainstorm a damage-control strategy. 2. Begin every day with 15 minutes of positive input. If you fill your mind with positive thoughts, you'll have a larger library of positivity to pull from when your day might not quite go as planned. Read an inspirational book or listen to motivational CD's in the morning. We happen to know where you can get a few of those! Might we suggest popping in your Sales Development CD's on your way to prospecting meetings? (If you need one contact us today) 3. Choose your news. You get bombarded everyday with a news media that believes in the mantra, "If it bleeds, it leads!" followed by commercials designed to make you feel better. Our media strives to ramp up your feelings of anxiety by highlighting horrific stories and follows them with advertising that helps you to buy comfort food or medications to relieve the pressures of everyday life. Unplug yourself from this negative imagery. Find alternative sources to keep yourself up to date with the day's events, such as public radio or print news. It's easy to choose what to read and listen to. 4. Surround yourself with positive people. Business associates, friends, and relatives who have a negative view about life can make it hard for you to maintain your positive attitude. These people can drain you mentally and physically. Wherever possible, avoid them or at least limit your contact with them. If you cannot avoid them, don't get drawn into lengthy gripe sessions. Listen empathetically and turn the conversation to a more positive topic as soon as you can. On the other hand, positive people can enhance your life and help to keep you upbeat and with a good outlook on your world.
"The service we render others is the rent we pay for our room on earth". Wilfred Grenfell Last evening I saw a stand up comic go through his customer service routine. He was very funny and had the audience of about 200 people roaring with laughter. But I found myself thinking of his basic premise as being very different from my research and experience. He said that, by definition, a customer needs something (I would add, or wants something). And that anyone who needs something is vulnerable. Therefore customers are vulnerable and you (the business or organization) need to treat them with care because of this vulnerability. Yes, customers may need or want something; but in this day and age, that makes them anything but vulnerable. (Unless you are the only one selling water in the desert.) Customers are actually empowered: they have the power to give or take business from you; to give you a piece of their mind; to go somewhere else for what they want; to bargain for prices; to cost you business with a careless comment; and other forms of customer power. So, as I see it, the element of customer service is more about surviving in business than it is about acting out of the goodness of your heart for the “vulnerable” customer. Although the paradox is that sincerity and genuine care are critical for the best customer service. This boils down to identifying customer needs; providing solutions; keeping the focus on the customer; dealing with complaints and bad moods without taking things personally, and most of all – not taking yourself so seriously. Source: Dr. T. Elaine Gagné. © Copyright 2005 Engaging Change. All rights reserved.
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