Are you new to customer service? Or maybe you are already in customer service and would like to sharpen your service skills? Or perhaps you are employed in the back office & you would like to gain a better understanding of your customers or the servicing process? Whatever your reasons, 'Why Selling Sucks & Building Relationships Work', is a guide to providing exceptional customer service. Geared toward frontline staff and helpful for anyone who is involved in serving customers, the book will help you to: - Better understand your customers so you can service them to their satisfaction - Build better rapport with your customers, colleagues, and suppliers - Communicate more confidently and be more persuasive with your customers - Develop business relationships with your key customers so they keep coming back to you with their business - Manage difficult customers and complaints efficiently - Manage your stress levels - Apply closing techniques - Field customer objections more proficiently - Enjoy your work and grow rapidly within your organization. Written in simple language, and loaded with case studies, self-assessments, and real-life examples, this guide provides practical advice to make sure your customers keep coming back to you.
Let's face it: there's a lot of sucky selling going on in the world today. Sellers have been trained to use artificial tactics in pursuit of the sale. Like a woman in a bar bracing for another cheesy, tired pickup line, customers are now warier than ever. In ''Love and Selling,'' Dan Smaida uses the Lens of Love to call out all those cheesy, cringe-worthy 'tactics' and offer more authentic alternatives. The book uses the simple lessons we all understand about love and relationships to transform the way we think about selling. No 'sales processes,' no seller-centric models, just tried-and-true behaviors that work in business . . . and in love. When sellers ditch the tricks and focus on developing true relationships, they create real partnerships with customers, enjoy their jobs more, and see better results.
Selling: The Profession is the roadmap to a rewarding sales career! Today, more than ever, it is all about relationship building in a digital world. In the 8th edition of this field-tested guide to selling, you will learn to: -Appreciate that you are selling every day, regardless of your career. -Use social media to connect with potential customers. -Make good first impressions and build rapport. -Recognize social styles and nonverbal signals. -Effectively manage your time. -Uncover needs by asking questions and listening. The authors have taken a refreshingly practical and modern approach to professional selling. The 8th edition is divided into two parts: -Part 1 explores "Selling Success Fundamentals" by examining the foundational strategy pieces needed for building a long-lasting career. This includes how to manage your time, read nonverbal cues, communicate with others within and outside your company, and recognize what drives people to buy. -Part 2 is all about the "Relationship Selling Cycle." The eight-step process will walk you through every interaction with potential customers--from prospecting and pre-approach to the close and extend to the actions needed after the close.
The guide that proves your meetings don't have to suck! There's a big dull elephant in the boardroom: this meeting! Most of the millions of meetings held in the world today are a monumental waste of time and talent. Worse still, most of the so-called solutions and books for boring meetings are twice as boring. Boring Meetings Suck provides tips and tactics to deliver "Get-In, Get-It-Done, or Get-Out" style meetings, while also tackling what most prefer to avoid; that you don't have to BE in charge of a meeting to TAKE charge of a meeting. This entertaining and take-no-prisoners guide is full of easily deployed SRDs?Suckification Reduction Devices?that will help you make your next meeting both efficient and effective. Empowers attendees to politely speak up and get a meeting back on track, or graciously get out, without being fired Shows how hosts can capitalize on technology, learning to crowd-source problems and increase participation Defines surefire methods to get meetings to start and end on time and not have the speaker read the slides STOPS over-invitation syndrome The author has appeared before many major corporate clients, and was named a "Top Business Professional Under 40" by American City Business Journals Your meetings do not have to bore, nor must they suck. Instead, get the winning techniques in Boring Meetings Suck, and make your meetings awesome in their engagement and productivity, or stop having them!
New York Times bestselling author and leadership expert Ken Blanchard’s popular TrustWorks! training program is now available in book form! Trust Works!: Four Keys to Building Lasting Relationships is an insightful guide designed to help people navigate one of the most complex issues that affects all areas of our lives: trust. In Trust Works!, Ken Blanchard, Cynthia Olmstead, and Martha Lawrence demonstrate how to get along better with those around us. In today’s polarized society, building trust—and sustaining it—has never been more important or seemingly elusive. Trust Works! provides a common language and essential skills that can replace dissension with peace and cooperation and help us all work together productively and in harmony. Learn how the apply the “ABCD trust” model to address the factors that lead to discord, including low morale, miscommunication, poor response to problems and issues, and dysfunctional leadership.
While a Vice President at Salesforce, David Priemer had an epiphany during one of the company's high-pressure selling periods: the very sales tactics they were using were not working on him. Yes, the numbers still showed results, but through brute force rather than elegance and efficiency. Priemer also discovered that his sales colleagues were spending far more time on leads that did not convert to sales than on those that did. His company--and his entire profession--was acting with more than enough gusto, but without enough awareness and empathy. They were not selling the way they buy. Sell the Way You Buy is about much more than putting yourself in the customer's shoes. Customers don't always know what they want or need, or they may be seeking a solution for something that isn't their core problem. They suffer from status quo bias, from recency bias, from confirmation bias. And meanwhile, the state of overwhelming choice has most products and solution providers adrift in the "Sea of Sameness." In today's world, almost everyone is in sales, but as Priemer realized, we don't teach it. Sell the Way You Buy will show you how to ask questions, how to listen, how to tell a compelling brand story, and how to talk to customers (how to talk to people). Priemer reveals scientifically supported methods to understand the customer, identify their needs, and move them toward the right solution--all the while teaching you to avoid all the reasons why the average person doesn't like salespeople. In short, to sell the way you buy.
Drive more value from all your marketing and communications channels--together! Demolish your silos and sync all your messaging, strategies, and tactics (really!). Optimize every medium and platform, from iPad and Facebook to TV and direct. This book is a must-read for every senior marketing, communications, and PR decision-maker. It’s not about social media. Or new (or old) media. It’s about results—and there’s only one way to get results. You must finally bite the bullet, tear down your silos, and integrate all your marketing and communications. That’s how you choose the best platforms and messages for each customer. That’s how you make research and metrics work. That’s how you overcome today’s insane levels of complexity and clutter. You’re thinking: Oh, that’s all I need to do? “Just” integrate my whole organization? Are you nuts? No. We’re not. It can be done. This book’s authors have done it. They’ve shown others how to do it. And now they’re going to show you. Step by step. Strategy. Tactics. Research. Metrics. Culture. Social. Mobile. Direct. Broadcast. Print. All of it. With you, the marketing/communications decision-maker, right at the center...right where you belong! Even now, organizational silos prevent most companies from conversing coherently with customers, delivering the right targeted messages, and building real synergies across all their marketing and communications programs. Now, Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston show how to finally break down those silos, bridging traditional and newer disciplines to drive more value from all of them. You’ll learn how to create a flexible marketing hub with integrated spokes including sales, PR, advertising, customer service, HR, social media, and the executive team. Then, you’ll learn how to use your hub to speak cohesively with each customer through the tools and platforms that deliver the best results at the lowest cost. Dietrich and Livingston guide you through hands-on strategic planning, illustrating key points with real case studies and offering practical exercises for applying their principles. You’ll learn how to perform baseline analyses of media from iPad apps to radio, optimize resource allocation, change culture to overcome siloed behavior, use measurement to clear away obstacles, and gain more value from every marketing investment you make. Pull it all together--finally! How to successfully integrate your tactics, tools, messages, and teams Better goals, better results: beyond “SMART” to “SMARTER” Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluate, and reevaluate Better listening: stakeholders, customers, and research that works How to make sure you hear what really matters Four powerful ways to market in the round When to go direct, come from above, use the groundswell, or execute flanking maneuvers
The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.