Blogs & Articles

As a manager, it's vital to ensure that your staff are sufficiently motivated to perform their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. Once upon a time, it was thought that financial incentives were the key to employee motivation, but studies have shown that pay raises and bonuses are merely short-term motivators.

Psychology plays a surprisingly important role in the sales and negotiation process, and the smart salesperson will use psychological ploys and tactics to their advantage in order to gain the upper hand and enhance their chances of closing the deal.

In any sales scenario, a customer can make one of three choices: to buy from you, to buy from your competitor or, having evaluated the vendors, solutions and prices offered, not to buy at all. As the salesperson, it is your job to ensure that the customer makes the first of those choices, and there are several effective ways in which the salesperson can influence that purchasing decision to close the sale. Here, leading sales training provider Maguire Training shares five keys to successfully closing a sale.

Business revolves around successful communication, be it non-verbal, verbal, written, analogue or digital. Managers, leaders and salespeople all need to be skilled communicators in order to perform their roles effectively.

Everybody assumes that it is the candidate and not the interviewer who is likely to be nervous before the interview. In reality, for managers with little or no prior experience in staff recruitment, conducting an interview can be an equally nerve-wracking prospect. Business skills training specialists Maguire Training provides a range of informative and valuable courses which examine all aspects of the staff recruitment process. Business leaders or managers who lack recruitment experience will benefit from attending our Recruitment Skills course.

If you've ever heard it said of a successful salesperson that they have 'the gift of the gab', you'll understand the importance of using powerful and appropriate language as a persuasive sales tool.

In hindsight, that title isn't strictly accurate. If you've recently made the transition from worker to manager, you're clearly no dummy. You'll quickly find, however, that as a new manager, you're required to make decisions of varying degrees of importance every day.

The term 'commercial awareness' has become a bit of a business buzzphrase and, for employees seeking a move into a management career, is an attribute that is increasingly sought by recruiters and interviewers.

Life is full of surprises, twists and turns not all of which may be beneficial or enjoyable. For leaders, managers and employees at every level of business, possessing the ability to adapt to, cope with and overcome life's unforeseen and potentially stressful challenges is an essential trait for continued effectiveness.

We spend the vast majority of our time working and none of us want to spend our time in a negative environment that zaps us of energy, motivation and passion. Negativity in the workplace is an insidious influence that ebbs away at stimulation, enthusiasm and productivity. This highly acclaimed course from Maguire aims to talk delegates through an intensive and utterly fascinating programme designed to boost positivity at work.

Tackling poor employee performance is a difficult but vital aspect of any manager's role. Deterioration in performance can occur at any time and for any of a number of different reasons, not all of which may be directly attributable to the individual involved.

As Maguire Training's invaluable module KPIs and Individual & Team Performance Assessment demonstrates, the ability to implement relevant KPIs and use them for measuring business performance is an important and useful skill for leaders and managers to possess.