Replying sensibly to emails

I have spend the weekend reviewing sales letters and emails for companies and 1 thing has become quite evident in doing so.

People often provide far to much detail and don't really consider who they are sending their sales letter or email to.

golden rule of emails is your reply should reflect the original message size. ie if it is a few short words reply in a few short words. If it is 3 paragraphs provide enough detail to mirror the length of the email.

Try and understand behaivioral profiles of who you are conversing with before you reply.

Talking Brochure Salespeople

Of all of the industry's over the last few hundred years Sales has been the one that has changed the least. What is interesting is that there has been many opinions on what works and very little data.

Professor Neil Rackham conducted a massive research project of over 35,000 sales call in 12 countries over a 10 year period and found some very interesting data.

What was conclusive is that converting features to benefits is getting less and less effective. This means that Salespeople can no longer afford to be a talking brochure. With information so accessible and over 30 Billion questions getting answered on google every month sales people need to move from being a value communicator to value creators.

It is more important than ever to address this with your sales people. So what value are your salespeople creating for your clients and would your clients be prepared to write a check for their sales call.

Understanding the "Core Values" of Honesty and Integrity

Often I hear that Honesty and Integrity are core values - as they should be. Would you ever Hire someone who wasn't honest or exhibited Integrity? How often though have you employed someone to be disappointed on these values.

The challenge is that you need to go to a deeper level so your people can understand what it really means in your organisation. The words are like the outer layer of an onion and you need to peel back the layers until you get to the real "core" of the definition for your company.

In our company "Live what we teach" defines Integrity for me. We have a client who is a painting contractor that has "3 coats means 3 coats". Isn't this a lot easier for his staff to understand than Integrity.

The difinitions are different for every company. What does the inside of your onion look like for Honesty and Integrity in your company.

Core Values - Honesty and Integrity

Often I see companies with "Honesty and Integrity" as core values. While these as essential elements of any company, do your people really know what they mean.

Today with your staff ask them to write down what their definition of these two values. When you have collected all the answers how many of them are the same?

The difficulty with these two words is that they mean different things to different people. So how can you align peoples behaiviour in your business or organisation when no one is clear on the definition?

Have fun with the exercise and tomorrow I will discuss what to do about it

Karl

Core Values

I was in a consultation with a company and we were discussing Values. Values are the biggest driver of peoples behaviour and every issue with people I guaranteed he could trace back to his company values.

I Challenged him pretty hard and until he understood that until all the people in his business knew the values how could their behaviour reflect them consistently. He asked if all my staff knew ours and I said yes.

He came out of the office and went up to one of my staff and asked "do you know your company values?" She said yes and he asked "what are they?".

Without skipping a beat she rattled them off like a pro!

It was fantastic and a moment that made me extremely proud – great to have a culture where our values are so alive! One of our values is "Live what we Teach"

Imagine what would happen in your business if all of your people could do that?

Before their behaivior can reflect them, do you really know what they are?

hint - they should never include the words honesty or integrity - tomorrow I will tell you why