If you ask most team members if they enjoyed their staff or other business meetings, most of the answers would be a resounding no. Changing the focus and trajectory of staff meetings can be transformative. An easy button for positive change is to ask your team members what they are stuck on, claims Ron Friedman, author of The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. That simple question changes meeting dynamics from the droning of status reports to a collaborative forum for creative problem solving.
Making your brand relevant and socially useful is a goal of almost every kitchen and bath showroom. How do you accomplish this? The first stop is your website. Are you providing information that customers want? Are you making it easy to find information? Pretend you are a customer looking to remodel your kitchen. If you went to your website, would it deliver the information you want and need? Would it encourage you to call, email or make a showroom appointment? Ask yourself what you can do to make your brand more relevant and useful? This is a great place to start because recent research found that consumers find nearly 50% of all brand experiences as boring.
Henry Ford is credited with reducing the work week from six to five days. Ford was not really known for his compassionate management style, so why did he voluntarily reduce the number of employee work hours? Ford discovered that when you shorten the work week, employees make fewer errors, they tend to work harder and are more productive.
Do you know anyone who believes that they don’t receive enough emails or who want more information about anything? Daily you, your clients and customers and those that you want to be your clients and customers are bombarded in a sea of noise looking to capture attention. How do you stand out in the cacophony of digital communication?
It’s been a wild ride for most BKBG Shareholders and Preferred Vendor Partners during the last three years. Many expect the coming year to return to “normal,” or an activity level comparable to 2019. While showrooms may be expecting a return to normal, will customers feel the same way? Customer service expert Shep Hyken does not agree. He believes that customers will continue to expect more and relying on the status quo will not meet expectations.
In researching his new book, The Bezo Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman, Carmine Gallo identified common tactics transformative leaders use to effectively communicate their messages. Several include:
Seth Godin is one of the most admired and respected minds in marketing today. He is the author of more than a dozen books and publishes a daily must-read blog that can help anyone who runs a business. What makes Seth special is that he looks at the world through different lenses, constantly challenging the status quo to take fresh new approaches that often work. He was among the first marketing minds to understand that the way people purchase had changed and recognized that it is necessary to change messaging to effectively respond to the paradigm shift that had taken place.
This is the time of year that many people consider making a resolution to improve their life, business, relationships, health or a host of other reasons. However, the odds say that most resolutions won't be successful. According to one study, only 8 percent of New Year's resolutions are kept. How can you beat the odds? Recognize the reasons why most resolutions fail.
A big shout out to Mitch Joel, social media guru and thought leader, who offered advice on How to Have the Best Day Possible. It struck a chord, because most business owners have days when they come to work and find that 10 to 12 hours after arriving, they did not accomplish anything that they wanted to get done that day. That’s why Joel’s advice strikes a resonate chord.
Robert Cialdini’s Influence is an iconic work that explained how to motivate people. And that’s what showroom sales professionals do every day. Sixteen years after Influence first hit the bookshelves, Cialdini has penned another seminal work entitled Pre-Suason: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. Pre-Suason just may be better than Influence and a more than worthwhile read for anyone who wants to increase their sales, performance, and professional sense of accomplishment.
