Personal Touch Your Way to Success

Personal Touch Your Way to Success:

No matter what position or role you play in a company, personal touch matters. How are you putting a personal touch on things with your co-workers? Your suppliers? Your customers? Sure people all send out those chocolate boxes or a fruit basket this time of year. What about next month in January? Adding a personal touch is something you need to do each day, week and month. It doesn’t have to be big things. Here are ideas you can use no matter what time of year or what position you are in:

1. Personalized notes – attach a little handwritten note of thanks whenever you send papers out.
2. Personalized cards – send a card out saying thank you, great job or sharing some admiration. You appear more human than an email ever will.
3. Bring Food – send cookies to a client and watch the reaction. Bring donuts to the Monday meetings and show someone you thought of the team.
4. Send Kudos to the Boss – send a message to the boss letting him/her know what a great job was done by them (they’re people too).
5. Magazine subscription – get a client a magazine subscription they will love. It’s a gift that gives for 12 months!
6. Inspirational Sayings – put some inspirational message in the kitchen or the boardroom for people to read and appreciate
7. Wrap it Up – next time you send a report, a book, a part – wrap it up like a gift. Amazon does it with books and people love it.
8. Gift cards – send someone a gift card every week with a note telling them how they impact you.
9. Take Someone for Lunch – who never seems to leave the office? Take them out for lunch on you and get to know them.

Use little extras like this to make a big impact on people … during this festive season but also in all of 2010.

Abdication Versus Delegation

So many times when we work with clients in our coaching programs, we start to move the owner to a higher level of management - getting them away from all the day to day issues. This means more and more decision making and responsibility gets shifted to the team. This works great every time, except when we start to ask the newly time-rich owner details about where things are at. It normally starts to sound like this - "So how are sales this week?" "I'm not sure, I don't generate the sales reports anymore." "How are your largest two accounts and their project launch dates?" "I am not sure, I haven't heard back from the team."

You get the idea that instantly, through leveraging your management team, your distribution of responsibility and decision making can be lost. It is key to delegate those responsibilities and roles but still retain a feedback loop so you are in the know. Delegation ensures there is reporting and updates regularly so you know what is happening - without having to do it. Abdication is the hand-off of responsibility without any feedback or response - someone else now handles it and you don't know what is happening.

So often the next step of business owners and managers that abdicate is to realize they have lost all information flow and to take it all back. All the decisions, all the responsibility and all the long hours. Don't do it! Delegate everything you can to others with strong training and a regular reporting method so you know what is happening but don't need to be doing it.

Sales Tip: Invite Old Clients Back

Have you ever been in a conversation about a past or old client and suddenly thought or said, "I wonder what happened to them?" Apathy or perceived apathy is still the number one reason people leave a supplier. Beyond price or service. The easiest way to overcome this is to constantly invite old clients back. Make them feel welcome over and over. Your past clients should become your base of VIP’s and should be the easiest sales in the world. Too often we take those past relationships for granted or forget about them all together.

If you are doing a decent job then most of your clients will be willing to purchase again … so invite them back to the table to work with you over and over. Introduce new products to them first and have a circle of people that always buy and continue to refer you year after year.

Leadership Tip: How Are You Today - Your Thermostat for Success

Many times leaders and managers want to get a sense of where their team is operating and how they are feeling. People have an easy way they project their level of energy, enthusiasm and optimism. It is when they answer, how are you today?

Choose people for your team that are “great today” or “excellent this morning”. Stay away from hires and people that are “okay”, “not bad”, “I’m not bleeding” (one of my favorites). When someone answers that question you know their whole approach to their job, their project and their life in an instant. Get your team thinking about how they are setting their bar for the day – fine, good, great, fantastic or beyond. It shapes the way people feel and how they perform for their leader and team.

Post-Stampede Networking - now is the time!

So today is the day people wander back into the office from days of Stampeding and whooping it up in tents, bars and hotels (ballrooms and conference centers I mean). You look in your pockets and on your desk and see all sorts of cards from the last 10 days. Business cards, scraps of paper with names and numbers. Now is the time to act!

You can take the approach of most people - can't completely remember where you met each person, didn't make any notes on their cards and generally feel a little uncomfortable with just the idea of randomly calling people. No real agenda or reason to call (that you remember). So the cards will sit until next week. Hopefully then you will have more initiative and courage to make those re-introduction calls. Or maybe not.

Then there's the approach of people following our Stampede networking tips. You, like everyone else, return to your office with a stack of business cards and phone numbers. You have made notes on everyone of those cards and can at least piece together where you met each person and what you talked about. Now is a critical point ... what are you going to call about?! Too often people call with the "Hey, I am just touching base" message. Completely ineffective! So with each person you are going to call, plan to:

a) Remind them where you met;
b) Make reference to what you talked about in the beer tent (regardless of if it was personal or work); and
c) Give them a reason for you to keep talking, get together and build a relationship.

If you use these three keys and get back to each of the cards you have this week (starting Tuesday because Monday might be a little quick to pounce) then you are going to find business in those cards! Guaranteed!

Don't waste the opportunity to make use of all those great Stampede moments and contacts! Now is the time to act with a great offer and strong confidence that, even sober, they need what you are selling!