The Salesby5 Blog

There are likely a few of you left in the office today, looking for something to do.  While your competition is out, why not take this time to craft a PR strategy for your company?  Here are three ways to get started:

1. Write an article for your newspaper, as an expert, to gain some exposure.
2. Check out a free service like HelpAReporter.com that emails you leads for reporters looking for people’s help.
3. Watch this video from Cameron Herold then pick up the phone and make a call!
4. BONUS! Sign up for twitter.com, start some conversations with bloggers on there and do a guest blog post!

The opportunities await, are you willing to step out and do a little footwork?  The pay off can be gigantic!

photo: bcbeatty

Attending the Gazelles/Fortune Small Business Growth conferences for the past 4 years, I have noticed that the recent MBA’s there are always upset that they hadn’t already learned all of this content during their education.  For example, even Jim Collins’ Good to Great was missing from their required and suggested reading lists.  In working at a local University’s business school, I found that upon my suggestion, they started making that book part of the required reading.  My biggest surprise came last night when a current MBA student told me that his professor had not mentioned blogs or social networking when explaining marketing platforms. This student asked the professor if was aware of these tools, and he said yes. Then, the professor asked the student to please explain them to the class; what they are and how to use them. I am more and more concerned as we interview students with a public relations education, and find that they do not know anything about media relations, or students with marketing degrees that don’t know how to use Google.

The #1 way to increase creativity and learning in the majority of the population is stimulus. (For the top 4% of the highest IQ population, it is meditation).

What are you doing for you and your employees to keep them ahead or at the top?

We offer:

1. Strengths training that teaches dramatic team productivity, on the job happiness, and lower turnover.

2. Full company training on how not to de-motivate at all levels. (You can find this in the research from Jim Collins.)

3. The tools to sell more product or service with less effort by 5pm, daily. (Data and implementation from thousands of research papers with a future focus.)

The top growth companies in the world are using the following check list to plan, organize and evaluate their quarterly goals as well as where they are on their way from good to great. Here it is for the last quarter of the year or if you are like many, planning the first quarter of 2009.

checklist photo by eoshea

The 3rd quarter of 2008 is coming up fast.  Quarterly meetings focusing on key initiatives for sales and marketing are crucial. This review should include what 2nd quarter initiatives were met, still need to be done and hopefully recall those that were exceeded.

Use the Gazelles checklist for your meeting. If you don’t use it during the meeting, at least use it yourself to check off throughout the year.  Remember, these are habits.  They take time to turn them into habits and are easy to break if you don’t make them a habit.

Now, a giant way to increase sales fast is a 5-10 minute daily huddle with sales and marketing together. Marketing learns news from the field and they all learn each other’s priorities, but most importantly the hurdles. Marketing gets excited by seeing what is really going on in the field.  Sales gets excited seeing Marketing finally get the fact that Sales is not like making toast or doing a Google search - a mindless process.

You are three working days away from July 1st. Are you gaining momentum? These tools, used by the best of the best, will help you.

Huddles seem to be one of the most underrated and misunderstood habits that we prescribe to new and old clients.  The reasons excuses are endless:

1. “We have 70 people.” or “We only have three people.”
2.  “How can you solve problems in 10 minutes?”
3.  “We don’t have time for another meeting.”

With huddles, it doesn’t matter the size of your team because they’re scalable.  We started with three people on our huddles, we’re now up to six and they continue to be of high value.  Our friends at The Scooter Store have over 1500 employees with cascading huddles across states and time zones.

During these huddles, the entire focus is on communication, not problem solving.  It doesn’t matter if people are in front of you or on the phone.  In our huddle we talk about personal or business news, today’s top 3 priorities and hurdles.  We make adjustments according to hurdles and will move priorities around when changes are needed.  If problems arise, we take them offline to be solved after the huddle.  Huddles are not for solving problems.  Bottom Line:  For C-Levels, managers and supervisors, the huddles teach them where the hurdles are as well as the priorities versus making assumptions.

The use of huddles is actually a more efficient use of time instead of people sharing news and priorities individually throughout the day.  Why not communicate everything at once, in an efficient manner instead?

Get started with your huddles this week.  Pick someone to run them.  Then, pick an unusual time (preferably in the morning, never the afternoon) - ours is at 9:15 AM.  Have everyone stand up to keep the huddle moving.  Give it a shot, then come back and tell us how they’re working for you in a month!  See what you’re missing.

Huddle Agenda

How are you doing with a checklist for your company?  Take a look and send us the number of boxes you are able to check off.

If pilots at Continental Airlines didn’t use checklists, people could die!  They use them and so should you.  Use this tool quarterly.  Need help?  We are certified coaches and help companies nationally to dominate their market.

"No one has achieved peak performance without a coach."

Verne Harnish - Author, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits

Download sb5_rh_checklist.pdf

See Alan Rudy talking about using the checklist