One of the most powerful skills you can develop is your ability to listen.

You may have heard me say, “The best way to be interesting is to be interested. The reason this principle is essential is because it makes your customers feel important. This feeling is so powerful it will help your customers filter through your competitors to find and connect with you.

We have all met people who are poor listeners, and we judge them as being either ignorant or arrogant. And fair enough some of you may say. But just because someone doesn’t listen intently to you, doesn’t necessarily suggest they are not interested in you. It could simply mean they absorb information in a different way.

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How hard is it to find good old fashioned service these days?! I mean the kind of service that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

The type of interaction between two people that creates such a meaningful experience for you ― you just have to tell other people about it?

We all love great service. So why then is it so bloody hard to find?! Great service is not that difficult to achieve. All it takes is some commonsense and a willingness to make other people feel good. It’s that simple. In fact, it’s so easy anyone can do it and it takes very little effort.

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I live by this maxim, “Chance favours the prepared.”

We all know the festive season and corresponding break is looming, yet I’m staggered by the amount of salespeople I speak with that don’t have an end of year strategy. Be prepared for this period well in advance and don’t wait until December to think about it.

If you’re in retail and your offer is relevant, then Christmas is a busy period and you will need to have plenty of the right stock at the right price and all hands on deck. Conversely, if your product or service is not relevant, you will find the dip between early December and late January a challenging one. Some businesses find the dip deeper and longer than these two months and severely reduce costs and resources accordingly. Suffice to say ― Christmas is a tough time if you don’t have the right strategy.

You must plan or you plan to fail. My end of year strategy is not too dissimilar to my beloved AFL football. In AFL the third quarter is known as the Premiership quarter. Those that follow AFL will know the game consists of four quarters and the team that captures momentum in the third quarter carries this energy into the final quarter and has a greater chance of winning the game ― the sales game is much the same!

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