I strategically positioned myself in the cab rank and waited in line for my ride. After a few minutes, my cabby pulled up. The driver then leaped out of his seat and charged around to my side of the car. A small Asian man bursting with energy, big teeth and a crooked smile greeted me. He snatched my suitcase, brushed passed me and lobbed it into his boot.

In broken English he introduced himself, ‘I’m Chen! Where are we off to today?’ Slightly taken aback by Chen’s lively demeanour, I responded, ‘I’m presenting at a conference at the Novotel in Manly. Stunned by this, Chen, burst into a cheer, ‘Manly, okay, this is my lucky day!’

We headed through Sydney’s Domain tunnel. The traffic was backed-up. Sensing my anxiety about being late for a speaking gig seemed to infuriate Chen##—##he profusely apologised for the delay and assured me that I would not be late for my 11 am start. Though slightly perplexed by Chen’s concern for my professional wellbeing, I got the impression he genuinely cared about getting me to my destination on time. As we cruised through Neutral Bay, we shared a joke and Chen asked about my business and the nature of my presentation. He then asked if I had kids, and if my travels took me away from my family often. I said it did sometimes. With pursed lips he glared sideways at me, and in ponderous tone, explained that he was genuinely concerned for me and that family was the most important thing in life. I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this man and his strange ways.

Chen put his foot down when he needed to, to my amusement and distress, but despite the trademark nightmare traffic of Sydney, he got me to the venue with plenty of time to spare. Chen hit the skids and the embattled cab’s breaks squealed in pain as we came to an abrupt stop. With one foot on the brake and his head cocked towards me, Chen blurted out in a proud tone, ‘We are here boss, on time! Are you happy?’

‘Chen, you’re a legend, thank you and I would like to give you a tip.’

‘No, no, boss not needed. What time I pick you up?’

‘Oh, back to the airport? Okay, well not tomorrow, but the following day at 12.30 pm?

Chen ripped a business card out of his wallet and declared, ‘I’ll be here at twelve just in case you early, and if you late, I wait. Okay?’ You can guess my response.

Two days later, I finished my speaking engagement. I was then caught up chatting with some of the participants. Consumed by the conference and still running on adrenaline I had completely forgotten about my commitment to meet Chen. It was now just after 1 pm. I exited the foyer, suitcase in tow and scanned the hotel entrance for a taxi. To my delight, my eyes quickly landed on a small man with a crooked smile, bursting with positive energy. I was thirty minutes late but that mattered little my new mate Chen.

I don’t know about you, but getting a taxi ride can either be a dreary or downright stinky experience. We have all sat in the passenger seat gagging for air as our ears bleed to the sounds of loud music.  with Chen, the  minute trek seemed to pass in much less time. Despite his cab looking shabby and like it was being eating alive by rust, I didn’t mind taking the journey with him: in fact, that added to the experience which was far from ordinary.

Chen created an experience for me that was unique and memorable. Amazingly, it cost him nothing but a positive tone, and a genuine interest in me and my best interests. Chen defies the rules and drives change by not buying-in to the poor industry standards set by other taxi drivers. Hey, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to know who I will be calling when I next need a cab ride in Sydney My man, Chen! Because he’s that good and he makes me feel that special! Forget the bells and whistles and slick marketing messages: Chen delivered me something much more important, and in return I give him my business and loyalty.

This is an excerpt from Trent’s latest book OUTLAW: Fight for your Customers and Sell without Fear.

Inspire!
Trent Leyshan

Sales Training — Customer Service Training

The Naked Salesman is new business show that reveals the secrets and stories from the world’s most outrageous and successful salespeople.

Hosted by BOOM! founder, author and sales evangelist, Trent Leyshan.

Join Trent as he explores and digs beneath the surface to reveal what really drives the world’s oldest and most influential profession.

We all live or die by selling something. From multi-millionaire entrepreneurs, to bible-belt preachers, to call girls, to be truly influential and learn how to get what you want, is for many, a dark art.

Trent sheds light on this timeless profession to take the viewers on a journey of discovery. We will find and learn from an array of quirky, interesting and some down right ridiculously successful salespeople, from all walks of life and industries.

Its time to get naked! Check out the trailer here: www.youtube.com/thenakedsalesman

BOOM!

Sales Training — Customer Service Training

One happy customer plus another should equal three. Clearly I failed mathematics at school, or is there more to it?

We all exist in a hyper-connected and transparent business world. If customers aren’t sharing their positive experiences about you with others, something about what you do needs to change. Although competition is ferocious and margins are being eroded, customers still and always will pay for value and quality service. In fact, as customers, we crave it. Couple that with convenience and you have a strong value proposition.

The most ineffective businesses commonly lack repeat customers. These salespeople are unaccommodating and the engagement process is transactional at best. Conversely, more successful companies employ methods that ensure they not only obtain a customer’s trust, but a commitment that inspires loyalty and repeat business. Despite what many people think, standing out in today’s market isn’t all that hard, given that the bar is set so low.

Meaningful interactions are hard to find, and so the companies willing to provide genuine customer service are standing out. You can effectively differentiate by doing the simple things that matter most—these are not at all that hard or expensive. Care about what you do and how you impact others. When you start caring and sharing value with customers you will find the market a lot more sympathetic to your demands.

When you stop seeing your customers as faceless numbers and start treating them as valuable assets over an extended period, they will see more value in you. This makes influencing and leading your customers to the benefits easier and more rewarding for all parties.

This is an excerpt from Trent’s latest book OUTLAW: Fight for your Customers and Sell without Fear.

Inspire!
Trent Leyshan

Sales Training — Customer Service Training

As a society, we seldom encourage others to take a path of risk and unbridled adventure because this approach is untested and has the potential to break conventions and reputations.

Who is going to pay for true innovation anyway, your employer or your customers? Hmm—good luck with that.

Most of us are trained to do things based on what someone else has already done, and that’s okay, but being led to believe it’s the best and only way, isn’t okay. To drive change you will need to circumvent certainty into the dark unknown realms of possibility.

Next time you’re in a team meeting and a colleague offers an ambitious idea― before you shoot them down in flames or passively disengage―take a moment to offer some constructive thinking around their suggestion. I encourage you to encourage a team culture that supports, not only each other, but also the development of bold and ambitious goals.

You don’t need to have your head in the clouds all the time, but being on the ground all day doesn’t serve you either. You need to have a balance of pragmatism and a willingness to see things from a higher perspective. This is one of the most effective ways to rise above what is and see the path that leads to what can be.

What holds many people back in life isn’t lack of skills; it’s their unwillingness to share more of themselves with others. They fear being rejected, particularly if what they believe in is against the commonly held beliefs of their tribe. They believe they are not good enough and fear being judged and rejected as a consequence. So, it’s up to you to inspire them to see more, feel more and be more in life. Why is it up to you? You’re a leader and that’s what leaders do.

Here are some tips to help you inspire innovation:

• Declare innovation as part of your culture and elect champions to lead it.
• Set up a taskforce responsible for implementing grand ideas and bold ideals.
• Support and encourage innovation through recognition.
• If you’re passionate about a great idea—fight for it!
• Launch one great idea or bold ideal per financial quarter.
• Reward people not only for results, but also for engagement and participation.
• Get everyone involved—inspiration can come from anywhere and anyone.
• When a great idea bombs, be accountable, and learn and grow from it.
• When a great idea flies and really takes off, celebrate and share the success with everyone.

“I dream for a living” — Steven Spielberg,  award  winning film director

This is and except from Trent’s latest book OUTLAW: Fight for your Customers and Sell without Fear.

Fight hard!

Trent Leyshan

Sales Training — Customer Service Training

2013 is going to be a big year!

A year to be better. A year to be stronger. A year to shoot first and ask questions, never.

Be true to yourself. Laugh at the naysayers. Dance with failure! Forgive, forget. Leave your baggage at the door.

This is your year, seize it! This is your world embrace it. Life is not a rehearsal, so act!

When it’s all said and done, all you will have are memories, so make 2013 a year to remember, forever.

Happy New Year!

BOOM!

BOOM! will be closed for the festive season between the 21st of December and 6th of Jan 2013.

To be honest, we’ll be too busy eating, partying and being merry to respond to your enquiries. For urgent enquires please email Santa.

However, we’ll be back on dry land early in 2013 re-charged and ready to help you launch into the New Year with a BOOM!

Wishing you all the best for the holiday season. Have a wonderful Christmas and Booming New Year!

BOOM!

Dennis the management consultant arrived late to a public sales seminar I was conducting.

The rest of the participants arrived early for their 8.45am registration and had been chatting amongst themselves. He apologised for being late, rushed in and sat down. His body language was stiff and noticeably anxious. Although now behind schedule, for Dennis’ benefit, I asked everyone to again quickly introduce themselves and describe what businesses they were in. All were happy to oblige.

A couple of minutes into the introductions I sensed Dennis’ energy. He seemed disengaged and uninterested in the stories the others were sharing. I continued into the morning break paying extra attention to him but not at the detriment of anyone else. As soon as the other participants left the room for the break, he approached me and explained the seminar was not what he had expected.

Dennis was a short man with silver-grey hair and the lines on his face told me he was in the twilight of his career. He looked stressed and his desperation was obvious. He thought the content was about generating more leads. I explained this was not advertised; the session is about the ‘sales fundamentals’ ― things that are easy to do but easier to forget. He responded, ‘No thanks, I’m really busy, I just need more leads.’ His comment didn’t make sense to me, but the resolve in his voice assured me that there was no point explaining the situation. With half a foot out the door, he promptly accepted my offer for a refund but pretended he didn’t care about the money.

When everyone returned from the short break I explained that Dennis had left for his own reasons. With a collective shrug of their shoulders, everyone quickly drew their attention to my presentation on the big screen. Unperturbed I continued with the seminar.

What Dennis missed in the next section would have provided many answers to his sales problems: the fundamentals that are ‘easy to do but easier to forget: aligning values and maximising value, buying-in and being interested in others, learning your ABCs (‘Always Be Contributing’), and the seven Outlaw Principles. We explored how to create and develop business friendships and a Retro-service culture by harnessing change while retaining the essentials of human interaction: courtesy, politeness, integrity, listening, trust and loyalty.

Also in attendance was a young girl, Taylor, who was just starting her business journey. With long blonde locks and stylish clothing, she was an attractive girl inside and out. Dennis and her worlds couldn’t be further apart. She had just graduated from high school and came along with her stepfather who owned a promising online start-up business. In a relaxed manner she listened intently throughout the session and engaged and contributed where she could. Her receptors were wide open and she devoured the content as nourishment. Taylor wanted to get into PR and marketing when she graduated from university. To her credit she is already investing in her own development. If she stays on this path her success will only be limited by her imagination.

The reality is, regardless of whether you understand the fundamentals or not, there is a world between knowing and demonstrating them. As for Dennis, he’s still chasing leads, and for his sake I hope he does catch them eventually. Had he taken the opportunity to stop chasing and start contributing he would have learnt that when you get the fundamentals right, the business will chase you.

This blog is an excerpt from Trent’s book The Naked Salesman

Inspire!
Trent Leyshan

Sales Training — Customer Service Training

We naturally sell to and buy from people we like or share a likeness with. How many of your customers fly to work in their own chartered jet?

You don’t have to be big to compete in today’s markets―quite the contrary in fact. The game has changed: big teams have been reduced and replaced by the internet. Big offices have been traded for hot-desking and home offices. And there are multi-million-dollar lounge-room operations competing with the big boys every day—and often winning!

What does being small signify? It means: being agile, flexible, responding in real-time and fast off the mark! It also means being adaptive and responsive to change, or, even better, being the person driving it! The bigger you are the less nimble and adaptive to quick shifts in the market you will be. Things change fast in today’s economy, and if you don’t respond and adapt, you could very soon be out of the game.

The smaller and leaner you are the more energy you store. Big, bloated companies burn masses of energy just to keep the doors open. They are lethargic and lack energy. If you think you’re working for or leading a company like that, hit the scales now and modify your appetite and what you think you need to eat to succeed.

I spend a significant portion of my own time helping big sales teams focus their time, and energy on increasing their output. In many cases, that provides them with skills and tools to do more with less: to help them think small and focus on small tasks, then to do them over and over again, until they are exceptional at what they do.

To attract and retain top talent your business will need to create an inspiring environment for likeminded salespeople to do their thing. Bigger is rarely better in this instance, particularly when it comes to growing your sales force. Give me the 20 per cent of high- performers, over the 80 per cent who are just making up the numbers any day.

If you can’t be small, then at least start to think small. Start by making your smallest stakeholders —your customers—big.

This blog is an excerpt from Trent’s new book: OUTLAW: Fight for your Customers and Sell without Fear

In my book, The Naked Salesman, I explored the damaging effects that crazy customers, that is to say, time wasters, have on businesses by killing precious time and diverting attention away from genuine and valuable customers.

Crazy customers can manifest from pushy salespeople who are too persuasive for their own good. Crazy customers can also be created by the right salespeople working by the wrong process or the wrong salespeople working via the right process. Some customers are also those seeking free information for their own, often deceiving, purposes. There are crazies everywhere.

Inexperienced salespeople impetuously start pounding the cash register as soon as someone calls them, believing that when a potential customer initiates the contact, they are a hot prospect and their intentions must be genuine. This is not always the case. In fact, there are perils in this belief. In a perfect (of course impossible) world, we would all rather spend our time pursuing flaming hot in-bound enquiries than to sniffing around and hunting them out.

The internet has been the greatest incubator of crazy customers the world has ever seen. Anyone, whether genuine, ambivalent or even deceptive, can do a quick search in Google or bust open and app and then blast an enquire form— not just to you, but also to most of your competitors. And this is achieved in only a few short minutes.

Treat all web enquires with a filtering process and manoeuvre them accordingly. Not all enquiries are created equal: this is where your sales process comes in.

By developing an effective qualification process that doesn’t alienate potential legitimate customers, you give yourself more chance of identifying the crazies early, which saves you time, resources and money. Understanding your existing clients will help you work out their relevance and importance to your business, so when someone contacts you, you are already armed with insights that will enable to profile them give you confidence that you are talking with the right person to then begin your sales conversation.

The insights that come from an analysis of your existing customer base are also critical for outbound lead generation activities as they provide your team with greater clarity and confidence to target more effectively, eliminating crazies expediently along the way.

This blog is an excerpt from Trent’s new book: OUTLAW: Fight for your customers and sell without fear

BOOM!

Trent Leyshan

Sales Training — Customer Service Training

The difference between one person smashing their annual target or just making their budget, or becoming a word class influencer, can be measured by the quality of the conversations they are having with the right people. Equally vital, and one of the most critical human features, is our ability to listen and tailor ourcommunication specifically to the other person.

Being “interesting” also matters, and one of the best ways you can be more interesting to others is to demonstrate a genuine interest in them. This can be augmented by delivering more meaningful and purposeful questions, based on the information you are receiving.

We have all met someone who is a poor listener, and we often judge them as being either ignorant or arrogant, we then make an assessment of their character based on that. However, when you’re selling, this is the salesperson’s, not the customer’s problem. Just because a customer doesn’t listen intently to you, doesn’t mean they’re not interested in you: it could mean they absorb information in a different manner to you.

Being conscious of these differences can help you can dramatically enhance your ability to connect with and influence people.

This blog is an excerpt from Trent’s new book: OUTLAW: Fight for your customers and sell without fear

Inspire!
Trent Leyshan

Sales Training — Customer Service Training