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36 - The Oakville Beaver, Wednesday May 17, 2006 OAKVILLE CHAMBER of COMMERCE Sponsored in part by THE BUSINESS THE THE TAX ADVISORY INCORPORATORS ADVISORY MINDING YOUR BUSINESS Success in Sales What does success mean to you personally? How do you measure success? In delivering our various training and coaching programs, the associates of The HRD Group have found that participants who consistently define their own measure of success dramatically increase their chances of achieving it. Here's a little self-administered test that will help you define your own measure of sales success (or any kind of success for that matter) and thereby put yourself on the right road to achieving it. Think of the most successful salesperson that you know, or anyone whom you feel is successful. Think for a time what it is that makes them successful. Now get a piece of paper, something that you can keep for awhile, and start writing down all the ideas that come to mind as to what makes this person so successful. Don't try to do it all at once. What do they do? How do they think? What personal qualities do they possess? What are their top qualities? If stagnating, ask your friends or family to participate. Keep building your list until you have 20 different items. Now put the list to the side for the time being. In our business we have found that there are four key elements required to get positive lasting results in any endeavour. For salespeople it is Product Knowledge Selling Attitude Selling Skills Selling Habits For other disciplines you only need to replace the first word in each of these groupings with (for example) Leadership, Managing, Personal etc. The four words Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, and Habits remain the same. We now create the acronym KASH out of these four words. Now return to your own list of attributes of highly successful people and place one or more of the appropriate letters (K.A.S.H.) as is best applicable to that attribute. Take some time here to really think about which of the four elements best describes the attribute. You will find that some of your items on the list require two or perhaps three letters. That's O.K. Now comes the moment of truth. Add up all the K's, A's, S's, and H's. If you are like everyone else who has ever taken this simple test, you will find that you have maybe 1-3 Knowledges, 3-5 Skills, 13-15 Habits, and 15-18 Attitudes. It is blatantly obvious that success in sales is highly dependent upon both Attitudes and Habits, and for those of you who have taken one of my programs you know that I often state that Attitude is really only the Habit of thought.. Let me ask you this question. Where do companies concentrate the majority of their internal sales training? Is it not Product Knowledge? When your company hires outside sales trainers, what do these organizations focus on? Is it Selling Skills? As a sales professional, what percentage of your time do you spend on learning about your product and your competitors' products? How much time do you devote to improving your sales technique? Here comes the tough question. As a salesperson, how much time do you spend developing your own personal sales attitudes and turning positive sales behaviours into results oriented HABITS? That's what the most successful of all salespeople spend the vast majority of their development time on. Now begin to write your own personal definition of SUCCESS. If you are still having trouble you may borrow, with my compliments, a definition included in some of The HRD Group training programs. Success is choosing, developing, and achieving personal accomplishments and GOALS in a balanced, pre-determined, and ethical manner. Bill Weis is President of The HRD Group in Oakville, and is an active member of the Marketing and Education Task Groups. Five ways to make sure your business plan attracts funding (NC)--A business plan is your most important tool when going after financing, private and government. Here are tips to make your business plan stand out from the crowd. 1. The process is as important as the plan itself. Do it yourself, and you'll come away from the experience with a more in-depth, more organized and more crystal-clear vision of your business. If the investor sees that you've invested the time, energy and unified effort to develop your own business plan, you're already past the first hurdle. When you're done, you might consider a review by a consultant, who can give you a critique based on the investor's point of view. 2. Hook them in the first two minutes. The person reading your plan is busy, confronted with dozens of plans each month. Make it look good, with a clean attractive design. Organize it so readers can find what they're looking for immediately. And spend a lot of time on your Executive Summary, so it hooks the reader into the story of your business and why you'll be a success. 3. Always answer "Why". Every time you make an assertion, explain the underlying reasons. For example, if you state that your local market will see a surge in the next few years, explain that it's because booming residential development is driving new young families to the area. 4. No matter how much you expect sales to grow, it doesn't mean a thing if you're not profitable. Use accepted accounting principles, and don't forget to explain in detail how you will control costs. 5. No matter how optimistic you may be about your company's future, don't kid yourself into believing that your estimates are "conservative". Never use the "c" word when describing your sales projections. 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