It doesn’t matter what industry you are in; sales are tough business. Over the past decade the way in which sales teams operate has evolved at a rapid pace leaving teams scrambling to stay on top of their game. Online business has been a major factor in this evolution, and now the way in which we handle our initial calls with potential customers have become more critical than ever!

Working in sales for over 10 years, I have derived a simple set of steps that are relevant to anyone in the business world and have helped elevate me towards winning some of the top sales awards in business. Like all aspects of running a business, having basic plan in place makes for a much smoother and more efficient sales call.

There are 6 steps that can be used to assist in create a road map and a clear goal for your call. By applying these 6 steps I am confident your sales process, engagement levels and meetings will start to show signs of improvement.

Step number one in the sales process should always be to establish a connection with the potential client. During an initial meeting with a client, one of our key goals is to gain their trust quickly, and this can be done in number of ways. The most common way to do this is by finding commonalties with your client. A quick and easy way to learn about the potential client is by using tools such as Linkedin and Facebook to find out more about the person and their company. If both of these options don’t give you results, you can also try Googling their name. The more we can learn about the client prior to speaking with them for the first time, the more we can tailor the call to match their needs and personality.

Another way to build rapport is discussing what you have learned in researching their company. An example of this is aligning the company’s vision and goals to that of your company. Finally, asking questions about the company and being genuinely interested in what they are doing and what they are working on will help to establish a relationship.

The second step in the sales process is to set expectations, or an agenda, for the meeting so that you are both aware of what will be covered throughout the call. This helps you establish control as well as staying focused during the meeting.

“Today I would like to cover a few things. First, to tell you a little about my company, then ask you some questions to better understand you and your business. Finally, I will be able to present a list of solutions based on your needs”.

The third step is to highlight strengths of your company. Some great details to mention are how many clients you have, names of high profile clients you work with, a brief company history, your vision, and how you stand out from the competition. During this stage it’s also helpful to include industry statistics or millstones you have achieved. The goal of this portion of the call is to increase confidence in your company and establish credibility.

The fourth stage is the most important, it’s when you gather information that will be used to introduce your product in a way that’s relevant to your client. The goal during the discovery stage is to learn as much as you can about the client and the problem for which they are looking for a solution.

The ideal conversation during this stage would involved the potential client taking the lead and speaking for around 80% of the time. There are a wide range of questions you can ask during this stage to prompt the answers you are looking for, and it pays to have a short list on hand as some clients may not be as clear in projecting their needs as others. Listening and preparing to address their specific needs is critical to this step, as they are telling you exactly what they’d like your product or service to do for them!

If you asked good questions during the previous part of your call, then this should be easy! At this stage you are selling the solution to the problem you have just discussed with your client. You want to clearly talk about their needs, and how your product/service can solve it. The goal is to give a clear and concise demo using features and benefits of your products and services that are relevant to helping address the clients need. Having a customized demo containing client logos and information is always a great thing to have prepared too.

The final stage of this process is closing the deal. Closing is asking for the sale, or progressing to next step in the process for making the sale. The next step on the process could be anything from a next meeting or arranging for a trial or signing up for the product or service. There are many different techniques in closing, and it’s important that you choose the one you are most comfortable with. During this stage we need to make sure that we give clear guidelines for the next step in the process, along with setting a timeline for when tasks need to be completed. Stay confident is the key to this stage, as our end goal is to get some sort of commitment.

There you have it. 6 basic steps to a successful initial sales call. Using this system, the more these steps are practiced and executed with clients, the more you will understand which elements work best for you and your company. Everyone has a slightly different way of doing things, but the underlying process remains the same.

Good luck, and go out and close some deals!

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How to improve your sales calls in 6 basic steps

Three financial service business directors are in a car which crashes. When they meet St Peter he asks “Did you have a business continuity plan that would work?”

There are over 20 policies and procedures a financial services business should have in place and a business continuity planning is one of them.

Preparing for disaster is not a popular task. This lack of preparedness not only threatens the viability of sectors around the world but also jeopardises the delivery of critical goods and services.

A business continuity plan should be a proactive process to ensure that the critical advisory businesses services or products are delivered during a disruption. It is worth documenting and implementing a plan that works for the business, staff and clients and not a canned solution to please the regulator.

Your business continuity plan (BCP) should include the following

• Plans for disaster or adverse event
• Measures to be taken
• Arrangements
• Identification of necessary resources ( including personnel, information, equipment, financial allocations, infrastructure protection and accommodations)

A well laid-out policy and procedure manual will help inform employees and also allow the financial services business to operate more efficiently and effectively, and a policy and procedures manual should be drawn up and distributed on an intranet to all employees.

An example of the effectiveness of having such a plan was shown when the Lion of Africa Insurance company had a fire that started around 2am on Saturday, 5th October 2013. By early morning, members of the emergency management team were onsite to assess the extent of the damage and coordinate the recovery process.

The BCP was immediately invoked and by midday, an official communication was sent out to all staff members and external parties informing them of the fire incident. The communication also reassured all concerned parties that business would continue as usual with no service interruption whatsoever. Due to this plan, on Monday 7th of October business continued uninterrupted.

Should the business continuity plan be prepared in fear of breaching compliance, or should it be completed to avoid risk?

The answer is all of the above. It’s also critical when preparing your business continuity plan to include the business managers, and reach out to staff members to gain their input. It is the responsibility of the board to see that such a plan exists. Emergency evacuation plans should be practiced so staff know what to expect if a disaster hits.

Business continuity plans are one of the speciality courses offered Naked Mindz through the Go1 platform.
You can enroll in our Business Continuity course by CLICKING HERE

Does your business have a continuity plan?

Selecting the right learning management system for your business isn't a decision that should be taken lightly. At Go1 we want to make sure our system meets all of your needs before you sign up. By creating an easy to use platform that integrates with all of your favorite programs, and having inline editing to make course creation simple, we have all of your learning bases covered!

Go1 is software that allows you to train your staff and customers. You can quickly create your own customizable courses, or use one our pre made courses in our growing marketplace of over 100,000+ courses to make learning easy. Whether it’s onboarding, compliance or selling courses, Go1 makes your training easy!

The most important eLearning tool that you can have is an LMS that meets your needs. Within our LMS Software we have a range of tools to enhance the learning experience including video, audio, text and interactive assessments so you can tailor your course to your staff.

Why not try Go1 Learning Management System?

Is your Learning & Development team working to up-skill your team members? If they are not, you are at risk of losing them! With more than half of the workforce stating that professional development contributes to their job satisfaction and can be a leading cause of work place stress, now is the time to invest in training your team.

Employees who derive meaning and significance from their work are more than 3 times as likely to stay with their organizations creating a more skilled and productive team, as well as developing a culture of learning in the workplace.

To find out more and sign up head to www.go1.com

Are you cultivating a learning culture in your workplace?

It’s a fact of life that at some point one of your employees will share with you that they are expecting a baby. With women making up close to half of the workforce you’re sure to have an excited employee share the news that she is pregnant. It is such an exciting time of their life and you, as their employer, need to be on board for the ride.

An employee will share their news with you orally during the first trimester so generally you should have between 4 and 6 months to prepare for a smooth transition. This seems like a lot of time but in reality this is a very quick process. This is the time where you and your employee will set in place a checklist of items you both need to adhere to in order for the transition to run smoothly. As their manager it is important that you have up to date information at all times so you can actively manage the next chapter of the employee’s life.

To help make this process easier, we have designed a course to take you through the steps in order to seamlessly manage a very exciting time in someone’s life. Managing an expecting employee involves a range of necessary checklists and paperwork. From establishing their due date, to making sure all paperwork is in order and effectively replacing them in the workplace with minimal disruption can be tricky. It’s important to get systems in place so that both employer and employee know what to expect from maternity leave.

This course will also help guide you through the steps and best practices to ensure the employees health and wellbeing is being looked after. It’s a very strenuous time in a woman’s life, so assisting in making your employee’s professional life as easy as possible will alleviate some of the stress of the overall pregnancy process. Together, you and your employee should be working towards a clearly defined (for both parties) and openly communicative working relationship in the days and months leading into the arrival of their child.

In addition to be providing your employee with a safe, comfortable and supportive work environment (before, during and after their pregnancy), it’s crucial that you are fully across the businesses own parental leave policies and procedures. Ensuring that your employee is satisfied with the working environment that they have been provided is important, however it’s equally important to accurately represent your organization, thus making sure that you have not promised something to your staff member that is outside of yours and the businesses reach.

During the maternity leave process it is imperative to have an open line of communication. So many unexpected things can arise in a women’s pregnancy that you will need to have flexibility and the ability to adapt to these situations. It may be health issues, to unexpected appointments, to extreme morning sickness, so having a flexible workforce planning strategy in place can assist both you and your employee. Being aware of this, whilst forecasting your staffing requirements will help you to avoid breakdowns in resourcing and service levels.

Having been through the maternity leave process twice myself, it was incredibly important to have a smooth transition. Knowing where I stood and what was expected of me in the workplace helped me to transition into motherhood seamlessly, without the stress of not knowing what was happening next. I was able to discuss matters with my employer and feel comfortable in the workplace. My health and safety was a top priority as I was one of those unfortunate women who’s pregnancy weren’t so smooth, but my employer always made it very clear that my health and my babies health was incredibly important to the organization.
I have recently entered the workforce again after having my second child and it was managed exceptionally well. The lines of communication were open and my employer was respectful of my needs, not only as an employee, but also as a mother of two small children.

This course is critical to organizations of all sizes, as the maternity leave process is one that needs to be well navigated. There is a lot of information out there for women who are expecting, but sometimes not enough is provided for the employer. It is important to remember that every situation is different and you, as the employer, need to have the knowledge in how to manage the process well. By doing this, you will be cultivating a supportive and hospitable workplace culture, one that will assist in staff retention and the reduction of attrition, which, as we know, is a win for all successful business.

Having an open dialogue with your employee will mean you will both know what to expect (when they are expecting) throughout the process, and may be more willing to negotiate coming back to the workplace. 

Why managers need training around maternity leave

Welcome to Part 5 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In the final part of our master class series with Steve we are taking a look into why startups and new business are critical. Due to the mining industry boom starting to draw to a close, it's now time to refocus Australia in a new direction. By shifting the focus onto high intellectual property industries, better known as tech startups, we can create a huge export industry whilst retaining our talent in Australia, and creating a better economy for everyone.

Steve Baxter Master Class - Part 5: Why Startups and New Businesses are Critical

"Why do I think startups and new business innovation is Australia is critical? Well, we have been a fantastic nation and had an amazing run of success over the past 25 years, specifically driven from the mining and resource industry. That party is over. In some respects we have been actually left quite disadvantaged from it, we've actually ramped up the cost of our society through wages and the cost of construction and everything else goes up. All of the big construction projects go away, and the wages stay high be the people  lose their job, and we're left with quite a small chain of royalties coming in. 

So we need to re orientate or refocus our country away from low productivity industries such as mining and the resource industry to the high intellectual property dense industries such as high growth capital potential companies, sometimes called tech startups. They are about 95% export if we get them right. I believe, In the Atlasssian documentation release last week they say that 90% of the revenue comes from outside of Australia, but about 70% of the workforce is inside Australia. If we can get this right it can be an all export industry and there will be a lot of people earning a lot of money which would be fantastic." 

Another interesting look at getting a new business off the ground comes from Bill Gross. Bill has founded a lot of startups, and incubated many others — and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people's, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others and shared them with us.

Bill Gross has founded a lot of start-ups, and incubated many others -- and he got curious about why some succeeded and others failed. So he gathered data from hundreds of companies, his own and other people's, and ranked each company on five key factors. He found one factor that stands out from the others -- and surprised even him.

Bill Gross: The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed

This has been the final part of our Steve Baxter Master Class. We hope you've enjoyed the series, and just in case you missed any episodes, you can catch up on them all here:

Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 5: why startups and new businesses are critical

Welcome to Part 4 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our master class Steve is going to be talking about the state of tech in Australia. With a recent change in of Prime Minister, we are already starting to see a new government looking to give our fast growing tech industry a big boost. Steve talks to us about some new policies that will have a big impact on the local innovation sector, how to make the most of utilizing government programs, revising the Australian visa system to get more skilled workers into the country, and changes to tax plans that will benefit startups.

"I'm particularly excited at the moment with the way Australia is going in the innovation space. We've got a fresh new Prime Minister, we've got a bit of a change going in ministry as well. All of a sudden we can talk openly about innovation and there's a lot of potential in this country that we're going to start to utilize more and hopefully we're going to see more Go1's and other companies absolutely kicking it out of the park and becoming global success stories.

We need lots of policy changes in Australia. One I was working on over the weekend was the NEIS Scheme. A lot of people roll their eyes when I say this but NEIS is something call New Enterprise Incentives Scheme, and it's actually a really good scheme give people who start traditional businesses, hairdressers, mower shops, all the rest of it, 39 weeks new start goal, whilst they're actually starting the business, and the income of the business doesn't count against that income support. People do use it for startups, it's actually just quite hard to do that, it's not obvious and you've actually just got to sort of close your eyes and bend to the left a bit to shape it towards a tech startup. So we're working with the government to hopefully take that and make that more available to tech startups so people can actually use it through accelerator programs. so if you've been accepted to an accelerator program, like Go1 was, you can also get 39 weeks of income support along the way. While it's not good for all businesses, it's actually helping people to move from one part of their life to another. So that one is particularly interesting at the moment.

I think we need to need to take care of our visas at the moment, our 457 visas. We need  default accept as opposed to a default deny when it comes to the appropriate skill of people on a 457 visa. I had a great idea, it's not actually my idea it's Mike Honeybrook's from about 4 weeks ago, he said that we should just look at anyone with the appropriate degree from say one of the top 500 universities in the world and if they've got it, we should tick it and let them in for 2, 5, 6 years or whatever the time is. That's not a bad basis to start from. I like getting the supply of people, along with the supply of skills which is quite important. 

I also like some of the tax plans that are around at the moment, and those tax plans and those plans are all around giving early stage investors the same capital gains tax relief that larger investors get. Right now there's a scheme where by if you have $10 million dollar to invest in certain areas, you can actually get capital gains tax exempt as well. If it's worth while, why not make it for anyone investing in one of those earlier stage companies eligible for capital gains tax exception. Lets face it, probably 1 in 10 actually work anyway so it's not like we're losing a great deal. A lot is going on in the politics space, and i'm really happy to see it being discussed at the moment." 

Recently there was also a great panel discussion at TEDxSydney discussing the challenges and opportunities around entrepreneurship and startups in Australia featuring Dr Russel J Howard, Scientist, CEO and Entrepreneur, Professor Tony Weiss, Researcher and Founder at Elastagen, Sally-Ann Williams, Engineering Community & Outreach at Google, Whitney Komor, Founder and CEO of TheBestDay and hosted by Craig Reucassel of The Chaser.

If you'd like to find out more about Steve and what you will be learning in the Master Class you can watch his introduction video HERE.

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Why Startups and New Businesses are Critical

Incase you missed it, you can also watch:

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 4: the state of tech in Australia

Welcome to Part 3 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In part 3 of this series we are going to be taking a look at Learning on the job vs Academic Training. There are a lot of people who have strong opinions about whether academic training is a thing of the past, but can learning on the job really replace years at university? As someone who didn't finish high school but has many years of experience behind him, this week Steve has a great discussion about the topic and touches on the advantages of academic programs, and why learning on the job is so important, especially in the technology industry.

"How do I rate learning on the job compared to academic training? I didn't quite finish high school so I don't have a great deal of experience in academia. But I have employed a lot of people who have those skills so i've seen that entire spectrum. I think when you learn, it's always the start to what you do. So the learning is the base of actually what occurs. In a lot of cases i'll actually look at an advanced learning, a degree or a bachelor of something or other as an indication that a person can knuckle down for a coupe of years and do something, they've got a bit of dedication in their life. Obviously those courses and degrees tend to impart some skills which is very important. But you actually want someone to be trainable and coachable. 

We're especially mostly in technology so you actually have to change with the times, and if anything changes it's technology. So if someone is too set in their ways, they're not trainable, they're not coachable, then you've got a lot of problems. There's a variety of things to look at, but on the job learning, not so much training, but learning, is very important in order to take the business forward."  

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into The State of Tech in Australia

Following on from Steve, you can also learn more about the change in academic training from Sir Ken Robinson. In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Ken makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.

Incase you missed it, you can also watch Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important and Part 2: Steve Baxter on Ideas

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 3: learning on the job

Following from my previous articles on "Culture of Innovation" and "Management Practices that Foster Innovation", this one will cover the application of the Lean Startup concept in the workplace as a means to promote innovation in existing organizations.

Lean startup is a method for developing businesses and products first proposed in 2008 by Eric Ries. The application of its methodology allows startups to shorten their product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. This concept is highly applicable in existing companies as it allows for the testing of new ideas and initiatives in a quick and cost effective manner. Additionally, the method enables a type of effective 'natural selection' of ideas and projects, permitting only the most promising to evolve.

So, what are the Lean Startup concepts that are applicable to existing organizations?

When you have an idea, you actually have a hypothesis. You have a supposition that what you have imagined will solve a problem or will create value somehow. However, the truth is, your hypothesis needs to be tested. And it needs to be tested in a fast and cost-effective manner, so that you can change it, evolve it and also test different hypotheses as many times as you can, so to ensure you have the best idea or solution that will be accepted by the client (internal or external).

Once you have your idea, project or product draftly defined, the first step in the Lean Startup framework is to "Know your customer". And customer can be external customers, internal clients/users or even yourself. 'Know your customer' seems very business 101 but, to this day, I am impressed about how many organizations do not properly understand who they want to create value for. The Know Your Customer step has 2 sub-steps: 1) Define the customer and 2) Understand the customer. 

For external customers, defining your customers means you have to identify, from the marketplace, who are the people or organizations you want to provide value for. It means you need to create a profile of your ideal customer. For an internal customer, it means you need to identify internally who your idea/project will benefit or impact. Let's take an example: let's say you have the idea to implement an online wiki system in order to host departmental policies and procedures in a way that it will be easier to frequently change/evolve them, collaborate upon them and effectively notify all people that need to know them when these documents are changed. In this case, your internal customers are the people who will both need to read the policies and procedures as well as the people who will write them.

The second subitem is to understand your customer. Talking to them goes a long way in getting to know them. Talk to as many as you can, being them internal or external customers. In the tech world, there is a saying that customers do not really know what they want until they see it (check the creation of the first iPhone as example). This is somehow true for finding innovative solutions. However, by talking to people, you will understand their needs. People may not understand exactly what they want, need or will value, but a smart person can understand the customer's underlying needs from talking to customers and they can come up with unique ways to fulfill them.

After talking with and understanding your potential customers, you usually have some additional information to already evolve somehow your idea. In any case, you need to start the Lean Startup loop so you can empirically test your idea in a cost-time-effective manner.

You start by building a very simple version of your idea to test it with your customers. The cost/time effectiveness of building it is key. You want to create a "Minimum Viable Product", something that can demonstrate the main value-adding features of your idea but that does not cost much in terms of money or time to build and test. MVPs can take many forms. An MVP of a smartphone app can be simply some basic drawings of the app interface on paper, so you can show it to your customers and check if they would buy it or if it would benefit them. Zappos, one of the largests online stores in the world, has a famous and brilliant example of use of an MVP. Zappos founder, Nick Swinmurn, to test the idea that people would buy shoes online, simply took pictures of shoes from his local shoe store and posted them in a quickly built simple website. When people purchased the shoes in his website, he would then buy the shoes in the physical store for the full price and would post them to his clients. In this way, Swinmurn deduced that customer demand was present, and Zappos would eventually grow into a billion dollar business based on the model of selling shoes online. 

In our Wiki policies and procedures example, a quick MVP could be achieved simply by entering into a free trial with an online Wiki software as a service provider, building a few wiki pages of policies and procedures and enlisting a few of your 'early adopter' internal clients to read and update the wiki documents. Their impressions would dictate if your idea would be adopted and/or how it could be improved.

When you have your MVP, you need to empirically test your idea. This means you need meaningful feedback and data. Test your MVP with early adopters, people drawn from your prospective client base that are open to accept imperfections and usually enjoy checking out new ideas. 

Most of the time, you will learn great insights from the feedback stage, which will allow you to evolve/adapt your idea to something that will actually be accepted by your client base. Sometimes you will get good insights for incremental improvements, sometimes you will even change your desired client base, sometimes your ideas will simply be proven not feasible, and sometimes you will find a completely different idea to solve the same problem. In any occasion, you create a new MVP, either evolving or changing the previous one, and continue the loop until you have something with the highest chance of success. The Lean Startup loop will allow your ideas and projects to be empirically tested and evolved. 

The main point of this article is to impress the need for ideas and initiatives to be quickly materialized and trialed in a very cost and time effective manner. People are very good at having ideas, but these are often based on assumptions that often end up not being valid. The era of large business plans with heavy budgets and long development and implementation periods for a project, just to find out that its underlying assumptions were wrong, has ended.

If an organization fosters an environment that allows for any people to lead initiatives, implement them with very little budget and test their hypothesis in a fast and effective manner, many new ideas can thus be tested at the same time by many different people. This is Natural Selection in effect in the organisation. You will foster the spawning of a large amount of ideas, throw them on the environment and the most appropriate/adapted will grow, evolve and prosper in a virtuous cycle that has been proved to create great things.

At Go1, we are constantly trying different ways of doing things. We have tested many different processes and tools to solve internal needs. We just have an open policy for people to try it out and see how it goes. If it gets traction, we evolve it and officially implement it in the remaining of the company. If not, well, we just try a different approach.

Applying Lean Startup in the workplace for innovation

Welcome to Part 2 of our Steve Baxter Master Class!

In this part of our Master Class with Steve we are going to be talking about How to Evaluate Ideas. As an investor, the ability to evaluate ideas is critical to Steve. Not understanding how to correctly evaluate ideas could be the difference between getting your startup up and running, and dealing with a range of problems that could have been easily avoided. In this episode, Steve explains how he goes about evaluating ideas, and gives you some tips so you can improve your thought process.

"G'day Steve Baxter here. I've been asked to give you some advice on how to evaluate ideas. The biggest ideas I evaluate nowadays are investments and businesses. You can probably see at the back there, we've got a couple up on the wall. Look for me on evaluating ideas, I don't tend to evaluate ideas, I tend to evaluate the person first and understand them. 

I want to know that this is going to be hopefully a relationship over many years, not too many years, and so we have to understand, can we work together? are they fundamentally good people who have the right approach to business and I suppose life and people? Then we actually look at the person. We actually look at their skill level. What can they do? what are they an expert at? and there's usually teams, and in their teams what are the relevant skills like?

Then we'll look at the problem they are trying to solve, and right at the end we'll start to look at the idea, their solution to that problem. So, we tend to make the idea the last thing in some respects. We really want to understand the people first."

Make sure you tune in next week when we will be delving into Learning on the job vs Academic Training

People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. This fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.

Incase you missed it, you can also watch Part 1: Why ongoing learning is Important

Steve Baxter Master Class - part 2: Steve Baxter on Ideas

Welcome to the Go1 blog. Helping you to achieve your L&D goals through the latest learning and development insights, trends, and technology.

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