How Well do you Sell Yourself? The 12 x 12 x 12 Rule

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

If you are in business and it’s success depends on your ability to sell, then you may need to take a close look at yourself because peoples’ perception of you will directly reflect the success you achieve.

Consider the rule of 12 x 1 2 x 12

1. How do you look from 12 Feet Away

  • How professional do you look – do you reflect the best in your industry
  • How do you hold yourself and how do you walk – What does your physiology say about you?
  • How aware are you of your surroundings and how present are you?

 

2. How do you look from 12 Inches

  • How is your greeting and handshake 
  • How is your attitude and does it reflect your positives or negatives. Will people want to spend time with you
  • How focused are you on what is going right in your life?
3.What are the first 12 words that you say?
  1. Every professional must be able to present themselves succinctly to the point that what you say, triggers a question from the person you are speaking with.
  2. Your message must be simple and not contain more than 1 or 2 items
  3. Your message must be relevant to the other person in the conversation.
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How Resisting Change Can Kill Your Business

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

Your ability to embrace change, make decisions and take massive action will directly affect the progress your business takes in the next 3 months.

In fact it will have a greater effect on your business than any external force such as recession, people not spending, people being scared or people looking for cheaper goods and services.

To counter these external influences, we as business people must react and we must react in a way that will have a positive effect. Simply doing nothing is not an option, but that is what most people are doing. And they are doing this out of FEAR. Fear will kill your business.

You see, a business is like a tree, its either growing or dying. If you business is not growing or it is stagnating, then you must make some changes today.

To assist you in making these changes, we suggest that you start off with a plan. Where do you want your business to be in 3 years time and what will it look like? Then where do you want it to be in 1 year?  Then where do you want it to be in 90 days from now? Where is it right now? The steps that you have to make to get it to your 90 day objective should be obvious Its just a matter of putting them into practice. one at a time.

If you decide to make one change per week in your business, it will probably be done

If you decide to make 2 changes in your business per week, they will sometimes get done

If you decide to change 3 things in your business per week, they will rarely get done.

Choose to change one thing every week.

“Coached Businesses Grow Faster than Business without a Coach” – According to a study carried out by Cogent Research in June 2011.

 

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T.E.A.M – Together Everyone Achieves More

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

T.E.A.M. – Together Everyone Achieves More!

Peter Drucker, the legendary management consultant and author says this about leadership:

“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ They don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we;’ they think ‘team.’ They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit…this is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

I work with business owners helping them to build high performance teams – Contact me today for your FREE Business and Team Assessment

 

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10 Ways to Build Resilience…

Posted on August 14, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

“10 Ways to Build Resilience”, – American Psychological Association 2010

(1) maintain good relationships with close family members, friends and others 

(2) avoid seeing crises or stressful events as unbearable problems

(3) accept circumstances that cannot be changed

(4) develop realistic goals and move towards them

(5) take decisive actions in adverse situations

(6) look for opportunities of self-discovery after a struggle with loss

(7) develop self-confidence

(8) keep a long-term perspective and consider the stressful event in a broader context

(9) maintain a hopeful outlook, expecting good things and visualizing what is wished

(10) take care of one’s mind and body, exercising regularly, paying attention to one’s own needs and feelings and engaging in relaxing activities that one enjoys.

Hard to argue with any of these points but you do have to work on them. The same is true for your business. Could your business tick the boxes on all of these?

Contact Derek O’Dwyer for a FREE Business Evaluation – email @ derekodwyer@actioncoach.com

 

 

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You will have to contact head office….

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

After a 6.5 hour flight with 2 children, my sister was informed by the rental company that the car she had booked was not ready and that she should wait in the lounge and they would call her on the tannoy. Not what you expect first thing in the morning!

When she expressed her dis-satisfaction, she was told that this was the busy time of the

"Do we look like we care? 'cos we don't!"

year and that there was nothing they could do about it.

When she suggested that they should probably have had some buffer stock in place and that they knew it was going to be busy, they just shrugged their shoulders and suggested that she email head office.

When she suggested that it was their responsibility to raise it with head office they simple said – “They dont listen to us”

When they were asked what their role was – they said it was to handle the abuse from customers! -

Another member of staff said that it was like working for disney – just a pure joke!

"It was such a busy day in Shannon"

Incidentally, Disney is far from a joke in terms of well run companies.

The situation about the car not being ready was bad, but could have been handled so much better. They simply did not care and indicated as much – it was as if to say – “suck it up – you chose to arrive in Ireland on a busy weekend”

If businesses want to survive and thrive – they have to make sure that the whole team cares about what they do, how they do it and pass this to the customer. Indifference will lose your company business.

To look at how best to train your team, email or call us today.

 

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Summer Business Blues… – Discipline Required

Posted on July 30, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

Summer often offers business owners the opportunity to take a break, get refreshed and re-energised and ready for a fresh assault on the world of business. However, it also offers business owners the opportunity to offer up excuse after excuse about why their business is not where it should be:

“No one buys anything in the summer”

“No Point Marketing Now – there is nothing happening”

“All the staff will be on holiday now – I cant make any changes until they come back in September”

Many businesses lose momentum in the summer and this can have a huge impact on the bottom line over the course of a year. If you or your business tend to suffer from the summer time blues here’s what you can do:

1. Plan your summer business activity well in advance identifying things that you can do every week.

2. Work on marketing to your database during the summer – its easy and its low cost

3. Make sure that you business is not impacted too badly by scheduling summer holidays properly  - you will need some rules for this.

4. Plan in a break for yourself as well so that you can enjoy the holidays as well.

5. Keep the team focused on sales, service and results.

For expert results orientated coaching, call Derek on 087 222 0720

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Applying for Jobs – Getting Past Stage 1

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

Over the past 6 months, I have been involved in the recruitment of about 10 people. This is very positive as most people were filling new posts.

I usually just use FAS.ie as my advertising medium and receive up to 100 applications. This requires a lot of work so naturally, I am looking for ways to deselect candidates and have to be ruthless as follows:

1. When there is no greeting or cover note accompanying the CV – I just delete it.

2. When there is no reference to what job they are applying for – I dont rate them highly

3. When there are references to other jobs they have applied for and it is quite simply a copy and paste job with different colours and fonts – I dont rate highly.

4. When they fail to give their attached CV a relevan name – Best option is to call it “your own name” cv. doc. Receiving latestcv.doc 50 times means that I have to rename and re-save – easier to delete

5. Spelling and Grammer mistakes plus txt language is not appropriate on application

6. Screening calls or not answering your mobile when on the hunt for jobs is crazy – you are either looking for a job or not.

7. Not replying to emails in a timely manner will affect your chances.

8. Mis-spellings in the CV

9. Badly prepared CV with irrelevant information – I’m not bothered that you did a manual handling course in 1981! Keep it current.

These are just the reasons why you will not stand a chance for first interview – and you have full control of this.

Its tough out there – but don’t make it tougher on yourself….

 

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New VAT Rate – why not to pass it on…

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

July 1st – new vat rate of 9% on a broad selection of  of services connected to the hospitality and tourism sectors. The rate drops from 13.5% to 9% as part of the Jobs Initiative and the Government hopes it will help to stimulate the struggling sectors.

There is pressure on businesses to pass this reduction immediately on to the customer. I’m suggesting that businesses should hold on to this saving and use it to grow their business as follows:

  1. It will give them an opportunity to improve service levels which will improve business.
  2. It will give businesses an opportunity to reduce debt
  3. It will give businesses an opportunity to invest more in marketing
  4. It will give businesses an opportunity to invest more in training
  5. It will give business an opportunity to gain a firmer footing – too many businesses are on the brink.

Passing on price reductions to the consumer is populist and while it would be better to be for the consumer to buy cheaper – it would be better long term if businesses stay in operation in a profitable way – It has to be ok for businesses to make a profit. Its not a crime and for too many years now, some businesses have not been in a position to do this.

 

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Book Buzz – Get it working for your organisation

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

We had the pleasure meeting with Ron and Alan from Book Buzz on Friday in Dublin – they shared their concept of new innovative thinking for businesses. Really good stuff. I look forward to applying it with my own clients..

Here is a clip of the lads on Newstalk…

Enjoy -

Reminder as well about GrowthCLUB on Friday July 1st at the Harbour Hotel in Galway…

Click Here to Register

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Suffering Sales Rejection – Build your “Rut”

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Derek ODwyer

As a professional, have you ever been rejected using the “time” excuse? Even if what you are offering seems way better than where they are right now. i.e.

Build your Rut - Attend the Next Growth Club

“I don’t have the time for this right now”

There are 3 reasons that you may get this excuse:

1. They genuinely do not have the time to consider an alternative – Thats a problem in itself.

2. The Time Excuse is a natural defence mechanism to new things and is often bandied about -

3. They do not think that you have something to offer them that would justify their time.

In any of these situations, the problems is yours because you have not made a sale. Here’s how to deal with these objection.

Build Your “RUT” first – and what we mean by RUT is your routine. We often call is a positioning statement. Many of your existing happy customers may also have felt this way prior to working with you. And working with you has been good for them. So you need to start your sales “RUT” with the following:

Before I was involved with this service, I was way too buy in my job, I did not have the time for anything, I used the time thing then as en excuse for myself so that I became untouchable and because the concept does take a few minutes to grasp, it was easy not to see value in something because I only gave it 30 seconds of my time. But what happened for me is this….

And off you go. Build Your Routine first, before you start to make sales…

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