Archive: Jun 2016

Richard Denny Your Success Coach

 

1. Believe in your product or service:
   Be enthusiastic but don’t be in love with it.  Welcome constructive criticism particularly from customers and people with real knowledge and or experience and continue to look for improvements and development.

2. Be customer led:
   Develop a customer led culture.  Base your strategy and planning on what your customers or potential customers want.  Not what they need but what they want.

3. Be sales driven:
   Develop a sales driven culture.  One of the two major causes for businesses going bust is that they don’t know how to sell – they don’t want to sell – or they cannot sell their product or service.  Successful businesses are sales driven from the MD down with a passion.

4. Don’t sell your products or services:
   Now that is a contradiction.  What you should sell is what your product or service can do.  Here lies a very big difference.  People don’t want your product or service; they want what it can do for them.  My training company does not sell training.  It sells increased sales, or increased profits, or managers that deliver, or staff that perform.

5. Get paid on time:
   This is the second biggest reason businesses go bust.  They don’t get the money in.  They let their customers use their business as a lending bank.  It is not difficult to operate a very strictly controlled debtors book.  (For information please give us a call)

6. Don’t be the cheapest:
   Try not to be the cheapest.  Business history has shown that the cheapest do not stay in business for long.  The most successful supermarkets are not the cheapest.  The cheapest car is not the biggest selling car and so on.  Sell value not price.

7. Give a money back guarantee:
   In business terminology this is known as risk reversal.  You will take market share and increase your profits by operating a full no quibble money back guarantee.  It builds confidence in your customers but also exercises an automatic product/service quality control.  Every one of my books almost uniquely has a money back guarantee.

8. Share your success:
   Your staff will be more loyal, more committed and more productive if you share your success with those who help the business to grow.  It will reduce costly staff attrition and also focus the mind of everybody when they have a chance to share in the profits.

9. Invest in your people:
   This is a grave error that British companies’ consistently commit.  They expect their people to perform effectively in a continual pressurised competitive marketplace and yet they fail to up-skill them, to re-inspire them and to help them to acquire the tools for success.  The small investment in really good training (and it must be good) will reap exponential benefits.

10. Deliver outstanding customer care:
    This is possibly the cheapest and easiest to do.  You don’t have to have the best product or service; you don’t have to have the best prices but if you deliver outstanding customer care you will reap untold rewards.  The judgement of customer care is what your customers say not what you believe you do.

 

 

Richard Denny Your Success Coach

If you have never spoken in public before or had to make a wedding speech, or even a vote of thanks, you more than likely dread the thought of it. Maybe you’ve had a bad experience and now you have a crisis of confidence, if that is so you are just like me and millions of others. Let me assure you these fears and more can be overcome. I personally was terrified of having to make a speech until I was 36 and then learnt how to do it and have since given literally thousands of presentations around the world. The most common fears are these:-

Fear of drying up                                               Fear of forgetting                                            Fear of not sounding right
Fear of boring people                                                 Fear of trembling hands and trembling voice
Overall can be summed up by ‘making an ass of myself’
So here are 10 tips that will get you started and will overcome those fears:
1. Prior to writing the speech/presentation collect ideas, stories, interesting facts or anything that you may be able to use.
2. When you write the speech there must be a beginning, a middle and a close.
3. The beginning is to get their attention and to achieve that you can have an interesting fact or a people story. Try to avoid a weak joke.
4. The middle is the content, this is where you make your case and present your theme.
5. The close is the call to action suggesting something that everybody can do or take away.
6. Illustrate the speech with people stories, genuine case histories and examples are excellent.
7. Avoid streams of facts and figures. If necessary, they have to be on a hand out or easily read from a screen.
8. Always take some deep breaths before you start as this will settle your nerves, and say to yourself ‘I’m going to enjoy this and everybody else I’m sure will enjoy it’
9. Always have some notes with big writing, your notes must be your aid – not a trap.
10. Speaking and presenting is not an ego trip, your message is for the benefit of everybody else. So remember the six P’s – Proper planning prevents particularly poor performance.