Blogs & Articles

Haven't we all been in that position where you’ve walked out of a shop, after going in to buy something specific, a suit for example, only to find yourself leaving with three bags containing a shirt, tie, belt and shoes and not knowing how you ended up with all that stuff? This is upselling at its finest!

One of the most asked questions we get asked is, how to deal with change effectively? Now the most important factor to this is, what type of change is it and what has ultimately driven the change to occur? Good change or bad change? All types of change have the same effect and impact on people, where ultimately something becomes different. However, what type of change is being implemented will also affect how your team handle the news.

Over the years I’ve known many skilled salespeople and the one thing that they all have in common is the ability to close the deal. You will see salespeople who do this with ease and ones who have to put in hard work in order to close the sale. However just because it comes naturally to some, they have all had to be coached and trained in many areas from opening the sale and building rapport to improving their questioning and listening skills.

For all new managers, the whole notion of delegation can be a little daunting; it sounds easy enough, but in practice, all too often delegation turns into simply dumping a task on an unsuspecting colleague. So, what is the difference and how can we ensure that those charged with managing our teams, whether in sales, production marketing etc. are doing the former expertly and not the latter?

For many of us, January can be extremely long and cold, causing low moods after the highs of the Christmas and New Year period. This is known as the January Blues. There is just something dreary about the constant grey sky and the knowledge that summer is a million miles away, there's just something about the post-Christmas period that puts us into a headspace that is unfortunately negative if we let it take control.

KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can be described as an umbrella of opportunities, they have hundreds of uses, needs and methods. It's not always easy to wrap your head around what a KPI should include and how you can make these useful for yourself and/or your team. There is a lot of information and varying opinions on how these should be used, and there is no right or wrong answer to this. To make it easier to understand, we have broken down the fundamentals of KPIs into 6 key points, therefore creating the acronym PAMELA to help you remember it.

During a coaching session recently a young, and recently promoted, first line manager posed the question, “What should I write into my business forecast and how can I be sure it’s going to happen?”. Well, as you might imagine, my immediate response to that was that if we knew that, then we’d all be lottery millionaires.

One of the key elements in business that always has our team arguing is writing skills. Not just the usual stuff like when to use and apostrophe and when not to, punctuation in general, grammar and spelling but also such things as general content and writing for the right audience.

There was something I witnessed recently that is worth recounting because it was an answer to a question that came from the voice of innocence, as it were. By that I mean, I was with a client in one of their management meetings recently, when the issue of what that company was going to do with their strategy going forward was raised. A junior manager then asked, “what’s the plan then?”. An honest enough question you might say, but then the young manager followed this up with “We don’t need a plan anyway as we’ll just fumble our way through it like we normally do”. Maybe it was an attempt at humour but his comments elicited a response from a a senior manager that I will try and recall as best I can, in essence at least.

We are very fortunate at Maguire Training to have an outstanding team whose main objective is to provide the highest level of service we can muster for our clients. As a consequence of that we are proud to say that we rarely receive complaints about our service, which means (happily) that we have no need for a ‘customer complaint line’ as such. That is not to say that things don’t occasionally go wrong, because they do of course, however, if a mishap occurs then we try to view this as an opportunity to delight our client rather than it be a challenge.

Everyone leads differently, depending on their industry, team and individual styles. However, there are certain qualities that a successful leader should show towards their team, that will get them on your side almost every time. There is no right or wrong way to lead as long as your method works for you and your team.

How often have you seen someone promoted to sales manager just because they were the best salesperson? It’s more common than you think and the best salespeople don’t always make the best sales managers. The result is that they end up failing, leaving, or both. This means the company loses two employees, needing to replace the great salesperson and find a new sales manager. Heres how to make sure that you don't fall into this catagory.