Achieve more in life.
Brian Tracy
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Posts by Brian Tracy
10 Reasons Why Top Sales People are Successful: Boost Your Sales Career
May 16th
The top 20 percent of sales people earn 80 percent of the money. Your goal is to become one of the highest-paid people in your profession and accelerate your sales career using the vital keys to success in sales. Fortunately, this is easier than you might think.
Key to Success #1: Top Sales People Do What They Love to Do
All truly successful, highly paid sales people, love their sales career. You must learn to love your work and then commit yourself to becoming excellent in your field. Invest whatever amount of time is necessary to improve your sales career; pay any price; go and distance, make any sacrifice to become the very best at what you do. Join the top 10 percent.
Key To Success #2: They Decide Exactly What They Want
Don’t be wishy-washy. Decide exactly what it is you want in life. Set it as a goal for your sales career and then determine what price you are going to have to pay to get it.
According to the research, only about 3 percent of adults have written goals. And these are the most successful and highest-paid people in every field. They are the mover and shakers, the creators and innovators, the top sales people and entrepreneurs.
Key to Success #3: They Back Their Sales Career Goals With Perseverance
A key to success in sales is to back your goal with perseverance and indomitable willpower. Decide to throw your whole heart and soul into your success and into achieving your sales career goal. Make a complete commitment to improve your sales career and become one of the most highly-paid sales people. Resolve that nothing will stop you or discourage you.
Key to Success #4: They Commit to Lifelong Learning
Your mind is your most precious asset, and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your sales career. Commit yourself to lifelong learning. I cannot emphasize this too often.
Read, listen to audio programs, attend seminars, and never forget that the most valuable asset you will ever have is your mind. As you continue to learn, you will eventually become the one of the most valuable sales people in your company. The more knowledge you acquire that can be applied to practical purposes, the greater will be your rewards and the more you will be paid.
Key to Success #5: Top Sales People Use Their Time Well
Your time is all you have to sell. It is your primary asset. How you use your time determines your standard of living. Resolve therefore to use your time well.
Begin every day with a list. The best time to make up your work list is the night before, prior to wrapping up for the day. Write down everything that you have to do the next day, starting with your fixed appointments and then moving on to everything you can think of.
Key to Success #6: They Follow the Leaders
Do what successful people do. Follow the leaders, not the followers. Do what the top sales people in your company do. Imitate the ones who are going somewhere with their lives.
Identify the very best sales people in your field and pattern yourself after them. If you want to become one of the best sales people in your company, go to the top earners and ask them for advice. Ask them what you should do to improve your sales career. Inquire about their attitudes, philosophies, and approaches to their work and their customers.
Key to Success #7: They Know That Character is Everything
Guard your integrity as a sacred thing. Nothing is more important to the quality of your life in our society. In business and sales success, you must have credibility. You can only be successful if people trust you and believe in you.
In study after study, the element of trust has been identified as the most important distinguishing factor between one salesperson and another, and one company and another.
Key to Success #8: They Use Their Inborn Creativity
Think of yourself as a highly intelligent person, even a genius. Recognize that you have the great reserves of creativity that you have never used. Say aloud, over and over, “I’m a genius! I’m a genius! I’m a genius!”
This may sound like an exaggeration, but it isn’t. The fact is that every person has the ability to perform at genius levels in one of more areas. You have within you, right now, the ability to do more and be more than you ever have before.
Key to Success #9: They Practice the Golden Rule
Practice the Golden Rule in all your interactions with others. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Think about yourself as a customer.
How would you like to be treated? Obviously you would want sales people to be straightforward with you. You would want her to take the time to thoroughly understand your problem or need and then show you, step by step, how her solution could help you improve your life or work in a cost-effective way. If this is what you would want from a salesperson selling to you, then be sure to give this to every customer you talk to.
Key to Success #10: They Pay the Price of Success
Finally, and perhaps more important than anything else, resolve to work hard. This is a great key to success in life. The key to success in selling is for you to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. Do the little thing that average people always try to avoid doing. When you begin your workday, resolve to “work all the time you work.” Don’t waste time. Get going. Move fast.
I hope you enjoyed this article on how to improve your sales career to become one of the highest-earning sales people in your company. If you have a key to success that has worked for you, please share and comment below!
Topics included in this article include
Key to Success
Sales People
Sales Career
How to Persuade and Influence People to Achieve Personal Power
May 14th
Your ability to persuade and influence people to help you get the things you want in life is one of the most important skills you can develop. By learning how to persuade and influence people, you can achieve greater personal power and get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Learning how to persuade people will earn you the support and respect of your customers, bosses, co-workers, colleagues and friends. The ability to influence others to do what you want them to do can make you one of the most important people in your community.
Your job is to become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in the achievement of your goals and the solving of your problems. All truly effective people have mastered the art of getting lots of other people to work with and for them in the accomplishment of their objectives. You can learn this skill set to achieve personal power and master the art of influencing others.
How Human Interaction Affects Your Ability to Influence People
The opposite of being influential is having little or no influence at all on the behaviors of other people. It is the difference between being powerful and being powerless. You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are influencing people to help them.
All successful people with personal power are persuasion experts. They give a lot of thought to how they can get other people to help them. They plan and strategize before they act. They define their goals clearly and then they choose the people whose cooperation they will need to achieve those goals. They then think about what they will have to do in return to get the other people to help them. They achieve their goals of persuasion and influence indirectly.
The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. In order to learn how to persuade others, you must find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain, and the fear of loss. The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness.
Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf and achieve greater personal power.
How to Persuade Others Through Leverage
You can learn how to persuade others by using leverage. Leverage means that you learn how to multiply yourself and get far more out of the hours you put in rather than doing everything yourself.
You leverage yourself through other people’s efforts by getting other people to work with you and for you in the accomplishment of your objectives. Sometimes you can ask them to help you voluntarily, although people won’t work for very long without some personal reward. At other times you can hire them to help you, thereby freeing you up to do higher value work.
The definition of management is “Getting things done through others.” To be a manager you must improve your personal power and know how to persuade and influence people to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things, instead, they influence people to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines, and agreed upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he has a vested interest in doing a job well, he accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.
Achieve Personal Power by Becoming an Expert
You can learn how to persuade others and can develop your personal power by always remembering that there are only two ways to get the things you want in life, you can do it all yourself, or you can get most of it done by others. Your ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, influence, delegate and interact effectively with other people will enable you to develop leverage using other people’s efforts, other people’s knowledge and other people’s money. The development of your personal power will enable you to become one of the most powerful and influential people in your organization. By learning how to persuade and influence people, it will open up doors for you in every area of your life.
I hope you enjoyed this post on how to achieve personal power by learning how to persuade and influence people. Do you think that the ability to influence people is useful in your line of work? Please comment with your answer below!
Topics included in this article include
How to Persuade
Influence People
Personal Power
How to Negotiate: Using Business Communication and Interpersonal Skills to Get What You Want
May 10th
Life may be viewed as one long, extended negotiating session, from the cradle to the grave. Learning how to negotiate and improve on interpersonal skills is an important part of business communication.
Negotiation never stops. It is the way that individuals with differing values and interests find constructive ways to live and work together in harmony. The ability to negotiate successfully with exemplary interpersonal skills is essential to success in all your interactions with other people.
Since value judgments are always subjective, there is never a right and final price or set of terms that can be decided in advance. They always depend on the parties involved and their relative scale of needs at the time of the transaction. Subjective valuations are what create the desire to exchange goods, services, money and other things. “It is differences of opinion that make a horse race.”
Your ability to negotiate well on your own behalf is the key to both personal and business success. You can always get a better deal if you know how to improve your interpersonal skills. You never need to settle for less or feel dissatisfied with the result of any negotiation. The secret to knowing how to negotiate, is through understanding that there is almost always a way that you can get better terms or prices, whether you are buying or selling. Your job is to find that way.
Here are strategies on how to negotiate the best deal possible for business success:
Interpersonal Skills for Negotiation
The word “ask” is the most powerful word in business communication and negotiation. Most people are so paralyzed by the fear of rejection and disapproval that they are afraid to ask for anything out of the ordinary. They just accept what is offered to them and hope for the best. But this is not the case with top negotiators with excellent interpersonal skills.
The top negotiators will quite calmly and confidently ask for any kind of price or term that is remotely within reason. You will be quite astonished at the better deals you will get by simply asking for a lower price if you’re buying and asking for a higher price if you’re selling. Ask for what you want. Ask politely. Ask expectantly. Ask optimistically. Ask courteously. Ask repeatedly. Ask in different ways. But never be afraid to ask.
An important thing to remember when learning how to negotiate is that everything is negotiable. All prices and terms are set by someone, on some basis. Most prices and terms are merely “guesses” at what the other person will accept. They are never written in stone.
Using Effective Business Communication Skills
One of my seminar graduates is a real estate salesman who buys houses. He works within a specific price range that looks at every home in that price range and comes on the market. His strategy is simple and he uses effective business communication and interpersonal skills to get what he wants. Whatever the asking price, he offers 50 to 60 percent of that amount in cash, with no conditions. His offers all come with a short time limit. He gets turned down dozens of times. However, about one time in a hundred, he finds a motivated seller, a seller who is eager to sell immediately, and the seller will accept his offer. His secret is simple. He just asks people to sell their houses at far lower prices than anyone else would ever dare.
How to Negotiate with Surprise and Disappointment
Learning how to negotiate with your reaction is another great strategy to improve your business communication skills for a win-win situation. Whatever the suggested price, react with surprise and disappointment. Remember, most people have plucked the price out of the air. They are always asking for more than they expect to get or offering less than they expect to pay. In either case, you should flinch and react with mild shock, no matter what the price or the offer. Appear hurt, as if the person has just said something cruel or unkind that was totally uncalled for. Then ask, “Is that the best you can do?” And remain perfectly silent. Almost every price has a built in cushion of available discount, and very often the salesperson will drop to that price with one painful flinch on your part.
Better Somewhere Else
Always imply that you can do better somewhere else. There is nothing that causes a seller’s price to drop faster than saying that you can get the same item cheaper from another source. This shakes the self-confidence of the salesperson, who immediately feels that he or she is going to lose the deal and often cuts the price quickly.
The way that you learn to improve your business communication skills for excellent negotiation is by practicing it at every opportunity until it becomes second nature. Negotiating is a great interpersonal skill that you can master with practice. Take every opportunity you can find to negotiate on smaller items, especially in situations where you don’t really care about the outcome. Go to swap meets and garage sales and offer fractions of the asking price. You will be amazed how quickly you can learn how to negotiate and become skilled at getting better prices.
When you go into a restaurant, scan the restaurant and pick a table that you want to sit at. Then, when you are shown to a lesser table, negotiate for the better table.
Whenever you buy anything from a retail store always ask, “Do you ever have this item on sale?” if they say, “yes,” then you say that you missed the last sale but you would like to buy it at the sale price at this time.
The clerk will be astonished and will tell you that that is not possible. In that case, you ask to speak to the manager. You then offer to pay “cash” for the item at the previous sale price. You will be amazed at the excellent deals that you get by using better interpersonal skills. Remember that negotiating is a game. Your job is to get in there and to play, and to keep playing, until you learn how to win every single time.
Thank you for reading this article on improving your business communication skills for negotiating better deals. If you have any other tips on how to negotiate and use interpersonal skills for business success, please share them in the comment section below!
Topics included in this article include
How to Negotiate
Business Communication
Interpersonal Skills
Waste of Time? 7 Ways Time Management Can Improve Your Work Performance
May 7th
Your interactions with others consume as much time, if not more, than any other part of your day. You can eliminate waste of time by learning time management strategies that can help you build more efficient interaction with others. You can also maximize work performance by improving the quality of your communications.
Miscommunication is a Waste of Time
A major waste of time is caused by misunderstandings between people about roles, goals, and responsibilities. People do not know what they are expected to do, how to do it, and by what time.
Misunderstandings lead to inefficiencies, anger, frustration, and unhappiness. It often requires an enormous amount of time to clear up a misunderstanding and get matters back to normal.
Most of your problems in life talk back. They come with hair on top. Perhaps 85 percent of your happiness, or unhappiness, in life involves other people in some way. Miscommunications with other people can create a major waste of time and lower work performance, but this can easily be fixed through proper time management.
Unclear Priorities and Work Performance
Misunderstandings about priorities often lead to your working at the wrong job, at the wrong time, for the wrong reason, and perhaps aiming at the wrong level of quality. Or the problem may be that you are working for the wrong person.
The single most important cause of high levels of motivation in work for increased work performance is defined as “knowing exactly what is expected.” On the other hand, the number-one complaint, or demotivator, of employees is to “not know what is expected.”
In order to eliminate waste of time and increase work performance, you need absolute clarity about your job and what you are expected to do. You need clarity with regard to results required and standards of performance. You need clarity with regard to schedules and deadlines. You need clarity with regard to the rewards for doing a good job and the consequences of failing to do good work. If you are serious about improving your time management, clarity is everything.
Ineffective Delegation and Poor Time Management
Poor delegation to others, or from others, leads to mistakes and frustration on the part of both the boss and the employee. It is a major waste of time and a good time management technique to work on.
One of the rules for success in life and work is to “assume the best intentions of everyone.” You can generally assume that each person does the very best he can at the job he thinks he is supposed to do. But poor delegation causes even the most sincere talented people to have poor work performance or the wrong jobs. Therefore, they end up feeling frustrated and unhappy.
Unclear Lines of Authority
Unclear lines of authority and responsibility leads to waste of time. People do not know who is supposed to do what job, when is it be done, and to what standard of quality. People are left to wonder, who is supposed to report to whom? Who’s in charge? Who’s the boss?
Incomplete Information
Another major waste of time in business is poor or incomplete information, which leads to erroneous assumptions and conclusions that decrease work performance. It is amazing how often people jump to conclusions or make false assumptions on the basis of wrong information.
The very best managers take the time to ask questions, and they listen carefully to the answers before they make a decision. If there is a key piece of information that suggests a problem or difficulty, they double-check on this piece of information to make sure that it is accurate.
Aimless or Too Frequent Meetings
Too many meetings, or aimless meetings that proceed without an agenda, direction, or closure, are an enormous waste of time at work. These are meetings that start and stop without any particular resolution. No problems are solved, no decisions are made, and no responsibilities are assigned. No deadlines are agreed upon for action.
Lack of Clarity Concerning One’s Job
Lack of information or unclear communications on important matters affecting a person’s work can create a major waste of time. In one survey on employee motivation and work performance, the best companies were defined as places where each person felt that he was an insider and “in the know” about what was going on in the company. The worst places to work were described as those where no one was sure about what was really going on. In this type of situation, people were unclear about their responsibilities, unsure about their jobs, and cautious about taking any risks. When people don’t know what is going on, it leads to demotivation, poor work performance, lack of time management, and “playing it safe.”
People need to know everything that is happening in the company that affects their particular jobs. The very best companies are open and honest with all employees concerning those matters affecting the health of the company.
Employees need to know what is going on and how their jobs fit into the big picture. When employees are unclear or unsure, an enormous amount of time is lost as the result of conversations, discussions, and gossip, which lead to ineffective work behaviors and poor work performance.
I hope you enjoyed this article about increasing work performance and time management to eliminate waste of time. Please comment below and share with your friends!
Topics included in this article include
Work Performance
Time Management
Waste of Time
5 Tips for Running Effective Meetings: Improve Meeting Management Skills
May 3rd
Meetings are an essential part of the life of every organization and your ability to run effective meetings with your management skills is a critical part of your success in meeting management. As a leader, there are a series of things I recommend that you keep in the back of your mind.
Meeting Management Tip #1: Begin With a Purpose
One of the most important tasks you need to do to improve your management skills and hold more effective meetings, is to begin with an outline of the purpose. When everyone sits down you say, “We are holding this meeting today to accomplish these goals and objectives.”
The opening five to seven minutes in any meeting is the most important component to conducting more effective meetings. It sets the foundation, establishes the parameters, organizes the terms of reference and tells everybody in the room why they are there, for how long, and what they need to accomplish. I also recommend that you write out your introduction word for word and read it out. This clarity will allow a person who doesn’t know you or the situation coming in to get right up to speed at the start.
Improve your management skills during a meeting by being both specific and punctual with the timing. Be sure to announce the duration. This should also be printed at the top of your agenda, but you want to restate it in your introduction. Begin right on time. Do not penalize the people who were there on time by waiting for others who are late. Assume that the latecomer is not coming at all and get right on with the meeting. This helped me so much when I first learned this.
If someone comes in late and finds out they’ve missed important information, refuse to start over for them. They will eventually get the message, be more punctual, and help you improve your management skills in a respectable manner. Many companies have a policy where if a meeting is called for 10:00 am, they lock the doors from the inside at 10:01. You only have to do that once to get people to be on time.
If you’re there to solve a problem you say, “We are here to talk about and to come to a decision, conclusion, and resolution on this problem. Here are the facts of the problem. Here is the information that we have, the alternatives we’ve considered, and our market intelligence. Now, what do we do from here?”
Meeting Management Tip #2: Encourage Open Discussion for More Effective Meetings
It’s very important that you get input from everybody; not only the people who have a lot to contribute and are eager, but also from those who are more shy and less likely to speak up. You want input from especially women and others who may be a little bit reluctant to try to compete with more aggressive or assertive people.
Remember that leaders don’t dominate. We have found that the natural tendency of meeting leaders is to speak 50 percent of the time on average. This is not for you and it is important for you to steer away from this to improve your management skills. As a leader, you should take the role as a facilitator and avoid hogging the discussion. There is a tendency if you don’t use the round-robin technique for you to speak more and more because you’re the one who prepared the agenda.
The way to avoid inadvertently dominating the meeting is to delegate meeting leadership. Whenever possible, assign the meeting management responsibility to someone else, to build subordinates skills. This is wonderful training tool that gives employees the opportunity to build their meeting management skills, organize their thought, and perform in front of a group. They will learn a lot from planning the meeting and preparing the agenda, and this will ultimately help you run more effective meetings. Very often what I’ll do in my management positions is rotate the leader position to other staff in subsequent meetings, which will help them improve their management skills.
Keep the discussion on track. A key job of the meeting leader is to keep bringing people back to the issue. Stick to the items on the agenda and don’t allow discussion to stray or wander. By keeping the discussion back to the main issue, this will help you conduct more effective meetings and save a lot of time.
Meeting Management Tip #3: Press for Closure
Once you start talking on a subject, discuss it thoroughly but press for closure on what has been decided and who’s going to do what and by when, before you go on to the next item on the agenda.
The inability to keep on track and to press for closure are the two major time wasters and major complaints from people who attend non-effective meetings.
Meeting Management Tip #4: Summarize the Main Point
An important meeting management tip to learn is to summarize at the end of each discussion point and at the end of the meeting. Set out and summarize your time and action schedules, and your implementation plan and assignments. Then have everybody in the meeting agree on what has been decided.
Something very interesting happens. There is what is called “peer pressure.” People who agree to do something in front of their peers are much more likely to follow through. If everyone heard them say that they would do something by Thursday at noon, it is much more likely that they will have an internal incentive that will save you the need to monitor, inspect and control.
They can’t come back later and say they didn’t know what they were supposed to do, because there is a group of witnesses. So getting people to commit publicly is a very powerful tool of meeting management psychologically and one of the best management skills I’ve learned to use.
Meeting Management Tip #5: Keep a Record
Finally, distribute minutes from the meeting within 24 hours. The more important the decisions that have been taken, the more important that you have them distributed in writing so that if they have questions they can get back to you. If there are no questions then they are accepting the record of the meeting as distributed. This is a final step that is very important part of conducting more effective meetings and improving your management skills.
Please comment below if you enjoyed these tips on running more effective meetings by improving your meeting management skills! Feel free to share this post with your friends and family!
Topics included in this article include
Meeting Management
Effective Meetings
Management Skills
Effective Communication: 3 Ways to Improve Your Public Speaking and Presentation Skills
May 1st
There are three components you must know in order to improve your presentation skills for better public speaking. When someone asks me how he can build effective communication skills and improve his public speaking, I quote to him the words of Elbert Hubbard, who said, “The only way to learn to speak is to speak and speak, and speak and speak, and speak and speak and speak.”
But while it’s true that the only way to become good at anything is by repetition, over and over, until it becomes second nature, there are many things that you can do to be more effective speaking in front of audiences.
The starting point in the art of public speaking is to pick a subject that you really care about. It is to think through the subjects that have had an extraordinary impact on you, the subjects that you would like to share with others because you intensely feel that others could benefit from your knowledge. With this, you have a springboard off which you can leap into your first public talk.
The second part of public speaking is preparation for effective communication. Preparing is more important than anything except caring about your subject. It’s not unusual for a person to spend many hours, days and even weeks preparing for a talk.
Planning for Effective Communication
To prepare for a talk, the first thing to do is to write out an objective statement of what you wish to accomplish as a result of your presentation. Whether it’s a 10-minute presentation or a 10-hour presentation, the statement of your objective is the same. It’s the answer to the question, “Who is my audience, and what effect do I want my talk to have upon them?”
So you need to ask, “What action do I want this audience to take as a result of the things I say to them?” Write out this action statement of your objective very clearly. Then write down everything that you think you could possibly say, one point after the other, to this audience to cause them to take this action. Remember, the reason for public speaking is not simply to teach or to share information. It’s to move people’s minds and hearts and to provoke them into changing their behavior in some way.
Once you have an outline of what you want to accomplish and some of the ways that you can accomplish it, begin to do your research, if necessary. If you don’t have enough information, begin to read and to ask questions.
If you’re giving a short talk, the very best strategy to improve your presentation skills is to write it out, word for word, in detail. Then read through it and edit it. Revise it wherever necessary. Add to it, and subtract unnecessary data. Work on it until it is polished, and then read through it several times so that you have such a good sense of the material that you can go through the entire talk prior to falling asleep or while you’re driving your car.
Improve Your Presentation Skill
If the first two parts of successful public speaking are caring and preparing, the third part is practicing and improving your presentation skills. If you have a tape recorder or, even better, a video camera, record yourself giving the talk from beginning to end. Then listen to it or watch it, and make notes on how you could make it better. If you’re using a video camera, look into the camera and use the same facial expressions and the same body gestures that you would use if you were speaking directly to someone. When you critique yourself, be very hard on yourself. Remember, the more honest and objective you can be about how you come across to others, the faster you will build effective communication skills for success.
Practice makes perfect, and perfect practice makes it even more perfect. If you practice consistently, you will find that your presentation skills have dramatically improved over time. Remember, your ability to speak effectively in front of people can do more to advance your career and your life than perhaps any other skill you can develop.
Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking
It’s normal and natural for you to be nervous about public speaking, but you must overcome that fear to improve your presentation skills. Fifty-four percent of American adults rank public speaking ahead of fear of death among life’s major fears. Most people become nervous and uneasy at the very thought of standing up to speak in front of an audience, and their hearts pound.
Speaking professionally really is not something that you can decide in favor of or against. You don’t really have a choice. If you want to realize your full potential in the world of business, you must learn how to improve your effective communication skills to better communicate with people. I have seen executives make extraordinary career jumps, saving themselves as much as five to 10 years of time working up the executive ladder, simply by using effective communication skills at a corporate meeting. I’ve observed men and women who’ve put their careers onto the fast track by overcoming their fears and developing their presentation skills.
Pay any price, spend any amount of time, overcome any obstacle, but make a decision, right now, that you’re going to learn to speak well before groups and practice your presentation skills consistently. It could be one of the most important decisions you ever make in assuring long-term success in your career.
Please comment below and share your thoughts about effective communication techniques for better public speaking. Also, please share with your friends if you enjoyed this post about improving your presentation skills for greater success!
Topics included in this article include
Public Speaking
Effective Communication
Presentation Skills
Personal Finance: 4 Ways to Save Money and Improve Your Money Management Skills
Apr 24th
Virtually every single person in America who is financially independent started off with nothing. But they acquired good personal finance habits, learned how to save money, and improve their money management skills, eventually becoming some of the most successful people in their communities. And anything that anyone else has done, you can probably do as well.
Save Money by Using a Long Time Perspective
To save money and become financially independent you must begin living on less than you earn even if you are deeply in debt. One of the most important guarantors of your personal finance success is called “Long time perspective.” Take the long view. Develop a long term attitude toward yourself and your financial future and begin thinking in terms of where you want to be in five and ten years. This long-time perspective will have an inordinate impact on your personal finance habits and money management skills in the present, and will help you save money over the years.
The starting point of financial independence is described in George Klasson’s book, The Richest Man in Babylon, as “Pay yourself first.” He says that, “A part of all you earn is yours to keep.” If you just save 10% of your gross earnings every single paycheck over the course of your working lifetime, you will become financially independent and gain personal finance success. In fact, if you saved $100 per month from the time you started work at age 20 until the time you retired at age 65, and this $100 per month earned 10% per annum return, compounded, you would be worth more than $1,100,000 when you retired, in addition to social security pensions and everything else.
The Most Important Money Management Skill
In a study done recently called “One Hundred Million Millionaires” the writers and economists concluded that it is possible for every single adult in America to become a millionaire if they start early enough, consistently save money, and actually plan their personal finance. And since it is so possible and so easy for so many hundreds of thousands and millions of other people to achieve financial independence, it must be possible for you to improve your personal finance as well.
Just imagine! If you only make $25,000 year, but you save 10% of that, or $2,500 per annum, just over $200 per month, you will become a millionaire. But in order to successfully get there, you need to make a decision to improve your money management skills.
Most economists and psychologists agree that the key to personal finance success and is the ability to delay gratification. The reason for financial ruin and failure to save money is the need for immediate gratification. People who lack the discipline to restrain themselves from spending all they earn, have no financial future and can never save money. This is a key money management skill you need to remember in order to gain financial success.
Change Your Personal Finance Habits
Your goal should be to carefully save 20 – 30% of your income each paycheck and to invest that money carefully over the years. Of course, for most people, at least initially, this is impossible. They are too deeply in debt and they have entrenched spending patterns that are consuming 100% of their income or more. So here is a formula for you. Decide today that you are going to change your personal finance habits, save money, get out of debt and achieve financial independence within the next few years. You begin by resolving to save one percent of your gross income. Let us imagine that you are earning $2,000 per month.
One percent of $2,000 is $20. You decide that you are going to save $20 each month. $20 per month is approximately 67 cents per day.
Every day you save 67 cents. Every month you put the month in the bank. And once you put the money into that savings account, you never, never touch it for any reason. This is your wealth account which you never, never touch for any reason.
A remarkable thing is going to happen to you within a few months as you save money. Your attitude toward yourself and money management will change. You will feel stronger and more confident even though you only have a few dollars in the bank. You will be adhering to a budget more closely and questioning unnecessary expenditures.
Growing Exponentially
But the best news of all is this financial accumulation account will start to grow. You will start to get little unexpected dribbles and drabs of money coming in that you promptly put into this account. Instead of the account growing at $20 per month plus interest, by the end of the first year, there will probably be more than $500 in the account. By the end of the second year, there will be over $1,500, maybe even $2,000. By the end of the third or fourth year, you will have several thousand dollars put aside, you will be out of debt, and you will not have to stress about how to save money for the rest of your life.
As you become comfortable saving one percent of your income and living on the other 99%, you then raise your savings rate to two percent of your income. You live on the other 98%. When you become comfortable at that level, you increase it to three percent and then four percent, and eventually up to 20% and up to 25%. Within three years, you will find yourself living quite comfortably on 75% of your income and saving the rest.
I hope you enjoyed this article on how to save money and improve your personal finance habits for better money management! Please comment below and share this post with your friends!
Topics included in this article include
Save Money
Money Management
Personal Finance
Goal Setting for Success! Join Brian Tracy’s 30-Day Goals Challenge
Apr 24th
If you follow my work, you probably already know the success I’ve experienced by helping millions of people to set and achieve goals.
The one thing I’ve discovered in over 30 years of researching success patterns is that a person of average intelligence who has the ability set clear goals, and has the discipline to maintain a goal-achieving mindset is 90% more likely to succeed than a genius without a plan.
What most people don’t realize is that creating an effective, logical plan is absolutely crucial to achieve goals for success. There are specific, proven steps that, if followed, work everywhere, for everyone, in virtually every country, no matter what your education, experience, or background may be when you begin.
My personal mission statement has always been “To help people achieve their goals faster and easier than ever before.” That being said, I’ve just created a brand-new goal setting challenge that includes some of my best, time-tested strategies to help you achieve your goals in a fun, inspiring way. Oh, and you could be rewarded with some really great prizes, too.
My 30-Day Goals Challenge is a new opportunity to hone your goal achievement skills and stay motivated with a healthy, competitive fire that will keep you going until the end!
Here’s how the contest works:
-Join the contest and fill out a short questionnaire–so that we can create your unique challenge page.
-Set a realistic 30-day goal – one that you can reasonably expect to achieve at the end of the 30-day contest period.
-Each week, you’ll track and submit your progress. You can document and submit your progress in 3 different ways: Blog post, photo, or video – or any combination of the 3. At least one submission per week is required in order to remain eligible to win the challenge and challenge prizes.
-At the end of each week, the progress you submit will be added to your personal challenge page.
-Finally, at the end of the 30-Day Goals Challenge, 2 winners will be selected. One will be voted on by the challenge participants, and the other will be selected by my team and me.
This entirely FREE challenge is designed to show you that by following a proven goal setting system and by staying accountable, you CAN achieve goals you never thought were possible. Even more importantly, you can apply this same formula to any goal you want to achieve in life, at any time.
Once you begin to apply the principles you learn throughout the contest, you’ll:
-Become a more positive, powerful, and effective person.
-Build a higher level of self-esteem and self-confidence.
-Experience a tremendous sense of personal control and direction.
-Apply yourself with more energy and enthusiasm than ever before.
-Accomplish more in a few weeks than the average person might accomplish in several years.
…And the list goes on!
So if you’re ready to take on the challenge of a lifetime, with benefits that can last forever, then NOW is the time!
Because as I mentioned before, when you participate in this challenge, you are virtually guaranteed to succeed.
This is your chance to sign up—so don’t miss it! Join me for the 30 Day Goals Challenge and sign up HERE!
Please share this post on goal setting and encourage your friends and family to sign up for the 30 Day Goals Challenge! Remember, the sooner you try, the sooner you will triumph!
Topics included in this article include
Brian Tracy’s 30 Day Goals Challenge
Goal Setting
Achieve Goals
Stay Motivated
Top 3 Qualities of the Most Successful Sales Professionals: How to Sell Like the Best of the Best
Apr 19th
If you think like the most successful salespeople think, you eventually get the same results that the top salespeople get. The starting point of learning how to sell and improving your sales training for greater success is for you to begin to think like the best of the best.
Over the last 25 years more than 350,000 salespeople have been interviewed to find out what it is they think about most of the time. Then their incomes have been compared with their thought patterns to determine what thoughts go along with the highest incomes.
And do you know what the most successful salespeople think about most of the time? It’s simple: they think about what they want and how to get it. They think and talk all day long about their goals and how to sell more. And because the more you think about your goals, the more positive and enthusiastic you become, the best of the best seem to sell five and ten and twenty times as much as the average salesperson who thinks about his or her problems most of the time.
The Best of the Best are Ambitious
This is so important that you could stop reading right here and you could go out and be a big success if you could just develop high levels of ambition. The most successful and ambitious people see themselves as capable of being the best of the best. They know that the top 20% of salespeople make 80% of the sales, and they are determined to be among that top group and learn how to sell like the best.
Perhaps the most important first step you take in the field of selling is to make a commitment to excellence; to make a commitment to be the best in your field. Resolve today that you are going to join the top 10% and be the most successful in your industry in terms of earnings.
Once you have decided to be the best in your field, get in line and stay in line. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep developing one new skill and ability each day, each week, and each month that moves you forward. There is nothing in the world that can stop you from becoming one of the best and highest paid people in sales if you will just get in line and stay in line.
Here is the turning point in your life. Make a decision to be the most successful salesperson you know. So you should repeat to yourself over and over again the wonderful words, “I’m the best, I’m the best, I’m the best,” until those words come true in your life. And they surely will if you don’t give up.
How to Sell More by Confronting Your Fears
The most successful salespeople work continually to confront the fears that hold most salespeople back. The two major fears that stand as the greatest obstacles on your road to success are the fear of failure, and the fear of criticism or rejection.
As it happens, it’s the fear of failure or rejection that hold’s you back. It is the anticipation of fear or rejection that paralyzes you and holds you back from doing what you need to do in the first place.
You have to remember that everyone is afraid. The difference between the hero and the coward is that the hero is brave just a couple of minutes longer. Everyone you meet is afraid of failure and rejection. But the brave person confronts the fear and does it anyway. The average person on the other hand, moves away from the fear and avoids the fear-causing situation.
Here are the most powerful words you can use to overcome your fears of failure and rejection. Just say to yourself over and over again whenever you start to become nervous or anxious about anything: “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.”
And here’s the good news. The more you repeat the words “I can do it,” the lower are your fears and the higher is your self-esteem and self-confidence. As you say the words, “I like myself. I’m the best of the best. I can do it.” you raise your self-esteem and self-confidence to the point where you feel unstoppable. This is the mindset you want to have to learn how to sell more.
The Most Successful Salespeople Commit
The best of the best salespeople believe in their companies. They believe in their products and services. They believe in their customers. Especially, the most successful salespeople believe in themselves and in their ability to succeed. There is a direct relationship between your level of belief in yourself and the goodness of your product or service and your ability to convince other people that it is good for them.
Sales has often been called “the transfer of enthusiasm.” The more enthusiastic and convinced you are about what you are selling, the more contagious this enthusiasm is and the more your customer picks it up and acts on it.
What we also know is that the more you love your work, the more committed you are to your company and to your products and services, the more you will naturally and honestly care about your customer and care about helping him or her to make a good buying decision. And since you become what you think about most of the time, keep repeating the words, “I love my work! I love my work! I love my work!” over and over again.
All of the most successful salespeople like themselves and love their work. And their customers can feel it. As a result, the customers want to buy from them, and buy from them again, and recommend them to their friends.
Topics included in this article include
Best of the Best
Most Successful Salespeople
How to Sell More
Thank you for reading this post on how to sell more by learning the top qualities of the most successful salespeople. Please share with your friends if you enjoyed this article!
Four Rules of Customer Satisfaction and Building Customer Loyalty
Apr 16th
If sales are the engine that drives your business, then good customer service and building a high level of customer satisfaction is the fuel. Your ability to satisfy your customers to gain customer loyalty is the critical determinant of your success in driving sales and growing your business. There are four levels of customer satisfaction, all based on the degree to which you meet customer expectations. The higher the level you achieve, the more you will build customer loyalty and the greater will be your success.
Rule #1: Build Customer Satisfaction by Meeting Their Expectations
The minimum requirement to simply stay in business—to survive—is to meet the expectations of your customers. At this level, your customers have no complaints. They are satisfied for the moment but at this point, customer loyalty doesn’t exist. If a competitor demonstrates that it can and will do more than merely meet their expectations, your customer will very quickly become ex-customers. Moreover, if you fail to meet their expectations, perhaps only one time, they will leave and give their customer loyalty to someone else who will. It can be instructive to observe your local merchants—true entrepreneurs.
Rule #2: Exceed Customer Expectations
This higher level of customer satisfaction is reached by surprising your customers, going beyond what they expected. Fast, friendly, and good customer service, followed up by a phone call to make sure everything is all right, might put you into this category. So does a product or service that is a cut above that of your competitors. The second level of customer satisfaction moves you beyond mere survival, building a measure of customer loyalty and giving you an edge over your competitors. It can also increase your profitability. Customers who experience the kind of service that exceeds their expectations are often willing to pay for it, enabling the supplier to raise prices and thus improve profit margins.
Rule #3: Remember, Delight Brings Customer Loyalty
Have you ever experienced a level of good customer service that not only exceeded your expectations, but actually brought a smile to your face? A customer served at this level is truly delighted. Not only have the customers’ basic needs been met, or even exceeded, but they have truly been touched on an emotional level. And once customers have enjoyed this experience, you will gain customer loyalty and it will be very difficult for a competitor to pry them away. When you delight your customers, you are on the way to creating an exceptional and highly profitable business. There are countless cost effective ways to delight your customers and build your customer loyalty. Consider the difference between first-class and coach service on most airlines. To delight your customer is to show that you care—about them. NO wonder it brings a smile to their face! The greater your success in delighting your customers and providing good customer service, the greater success you will enjoy in your business.
Rule #4: Amaze Them With Good Customer Service
This fourth level of customer satisfaction is what will propel your business into the stratosphere. It requires you to, not just meet or exceed your customer’s expectations, nor to simply delight them, but to truly amaze them. When you are able to accomplish this on a regular basis, you will be in a position to dominate the marketplace and achieve remarkable rates of revenue growth and profitability. Examine your business. How might you amaze your customers? The only limit is your own imagination.
Topics included in this article include
Good Customer Service
Customer Loyalty
Customer Satisfaction
Thank you for reading this post on developing good customer service and building customer satisfaction to improve your business success! Please share with your friends and family if you enjoyed it!