Blogs & Articles

A business without a solid business plan is apt to be directionless, unprofitable and ultimately doomed to failure. Creating and adhering to a business plan enables business owners and leaders to steer their business through good times and bad, helping to ensure that opportunities are taken, pitfalls are avoided and long-term profitability achieved.

No matter how good a sales manager or salesperson you may be, customer objections are a fact of life. Knowing the best strategies for responding to, and overcoming, sales objections is crucial to business success.

If your business occupies a competitive marketplace and you've worked hard to build up a good customer base, the last thing you want to see is your customers drifting away to spend their money elsewhere. The key to achieving long-term customer loyalty is to build and maintain solid business relationships and have the flexibility to continue providing exactly what they want as times and circumstances change.

Working life is full of little setbacks that can bruise our confidence: the lost sale, the fluffed presentation, the inadvertent mishandling of a difficult situation and so on. Unless personal resilience is developed to provide a coping and recovery strategy, self-doubt can creep in and, left unchecked, can affect well-being and personal performance in the workplace.

Mentoring employees who demonstrate the willingness and the potential to take on positions of greater responsibility is an important aspect of business succession planning. Taking responsibility for the professional development of staff members is an accepted part of a business leadership or management role.

The ability to ask powerful, relevant and incisive questions is one of the most beneficial tools of the trade for any leader, sales or business manager or salesperson. In conjunction with effective listening, using the correct questioning techniques can grab attention and engage the respondent, tease out vital information and even subtly persuade them to agree with your point of view.

Assertiveness is a useful trait in many areas of life, but for managers, leaders and salespeople, it is a vital skill. Many people confuse assertiveness, which is a strong and positive communication technique, with aggressiveness which is negative and undesirable.

Change is an inevitability of modern business; in order to remain competitive, companies must adapt to accommodate evolving customer requirements, market conditions, technological advances, new legislation and many other aspects which may have a bearing on long-term survival and profitability.

As a manager, it's vital to ensure that your staff are sufficiently motivated to perform their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. Once upon a time, it was thought that financial incentives were the key to employee motivation, but studies have shown that pay raises and bonuses are merely short-term motivators.