Timelapse movie documenting the construction of the Sainsbury’s building at ProLogis Park Pineham.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPE6eYpAik&hl=en
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Second child born, song required. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nk5tsnGLUc&hl=en
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Managing diversity isn’t just a moral and legal obligation, it can present tangible business benefits as well.
What is diversity?
We in the UK are fortunate to live in a country which is rich in the diversity of its population. Nowadays, your work colleagues might be any age, male or female, from any ethnic, religious or cultural background, married, single or living with a partner of the opposite or same sex, able-bodied or not. This has many advantages, but also presents organisations with the challenge of getting the best out of such a diverse workforce, while at the same time meeting their legal responsibilities. It is therefore important that companies give due consideration to how to achieve this if they want to maintain their place in the market.
The moral and legal case for diversity
In the UK:
o Women make up half the workforce, but just 9% of management grades and 2% of senior management (The Observer, September 2003)
o Ethnic minorities make up just 1.5% of management, and are almost non-existent at senior levels (The Observer, September 2003)
o By 2011, only a third of the workforce will be male and under 45. (2002-based projections issued by the government.)
o By 2014, the working age population will increase by one million, and ethnic minorities will account for half that increase. (2002-based projections issued by the government.)
Introducing and promoting diversity is morally the right thing to do. Diversity not only assumes that all individuals are unique and different, but that difference is ‘value added’. It acknowledges that everyone has the right to express their views and beliefs in a manner that is sensitive to those around them (i.e. free from racism, sexism, ageism and other forms of prejudice). Everyone should have the right to contribute to activities and grow within their workplace. A diverse work environment also demonstrates an organisation that it is a caring, inclusive and respectful.
While there is no one specific piece of legislation covering diversity, there are several Acts of Parliament, European laws, Regulations and examples of case law which together make up the legal framework for diversity. (The Equal Opportunities legislation in particular makes it mandatory.) Although the following list is not exhaustive, the key legal frameworks include:
o Pay discrimination (1970)
o Sex discrimination or marital status (1975)
o Race discrimination (1976)
o Positive action [1986]
o Disability discrimination (1995)
o Human Rights Act (1998)
o Gender reassignment (1999)
o Age discrimination (1999 code of practice)
o Genuine occupational qualifications [2000]
o Equality in sexual orientation (2003)
o Equality in religion and belief (2003)
The business benefits of diversity
According to a study published in 2003 by CREATE, an independent research centre (’Harnessing Workforce Diversity to Raise the Bottom Line’), a more diverse workforce improves business performance. The study, which involved around 500 companies operating in the UK, USA and Europe, uncovered a range of business benefits including:
o Higher staff retention
o Reduced recruitment costs
o More satisfied customers
o Access to a wider customer base
o Better supply chain management
o Access to new ideas on process and product improvements
Diversity is also key to success in global markets – any organisation that wants to expand internationally cannot hope to do so effectively without a detailed understanding of the cultural background of the new markets in which it hopes to succeed. The study did however find that diversity management is a long-term process with no quick fixes. Two obstacles in particular were being widely experienced:
o Ingrained attitudes that make it difficult for senior managers to manage people who are very different from them
o The culture of long working hours, which makes it difficult for women to aspire to senior management positions
The report concluded that diversity produces maximum financial impact when it is linked with business strategy and has the support of senior executives. According to Professor Amin Rajan, chief executive of CREATE and co-author of the report, companies are beginning to see that diversity in the workplace pays. Rajan says “Instead of thinking about diversity as about equality, that is, in terms of the law or compliance, companies are now seeing it as an issue of merit and merit alone”. For instance:
o Customers want to be served by a company they can identify with, so a white male sales force might be too limiting
o Teams made up of mixed ethnicities, backgrounds and genders are likely to be genuinely more creative than teams made up of the same type of people
Other benefits of diversity are that diverse organisations will:
o find it easier to recruit as there will be a far greater market to choose from
o enjoy access to a greater wealth of experience, skills and talent
o gain improved public image – as an employer and as a service provider
o experience increased staff motivation
o encourage and develop entrepreneurs
o develop role models, thus helping future growth in management
o increase their market penetration
o show better overall financial performance
An additional spur has been the rash of multi-million dollar discrimination lawsuits brought against pillars of the US corporate establishment such as Texaco (a racial discrimination case settled for $176 million in 1996) and Wal-Mart (various disability discrimination cases settled for in excess of $7 million, plus a pending and potentially very expensive case alleging sex discrimination involving large numbers of both past and current female employees).
The keys to diversity
A diverse group inevitably draws on a wider range of experience, background and culture; but also benefits because, in the presence of diversity, the mind is encouraged to stretch and dares to move.
The key to making diversity work is self-esteem. People have to like who they are; they have to take pride in themselves and draw on what they know to be true from their real experience. If they are ashamed of the group from which they come, they will try to blend into the dominant group and nothing interesting will happen. But if, on the other hand, they think and speak proudly as themselves, they will communicate with greater range, depth, freshness and insight.
Diversity is inclusive. It is about ensuring that the ideas, opinions and contributions of all are heard regardless of race, colour, culture, creed, sexual orientation, disability, age, religion or gender. Making diversity pay involves real and difficult choices. For instance, to attract more women, City and consultancy organisations are having to tone down ‘long-hours’-dominated cultures and pay attention to unfamiliar concepts such as mentoring and work-life balance.
Diversity has become a very important and profit-sensitive business issue: research findings such as the above show that well managed diversity potentially has a positive, practical and productive value to almost every business. Every organisation must therefore have a clear understanding of what it intends to achieve in living and working with its own diversity.
Developing a diversity strategy is a central part of this – with commitment from senior managers being absolutely critical to success. This could be expressed, for example, through the inclusion of statements related to diversity within an organisation’s corporate values; or the setting-up of special teams to set targets for diversity, drive the process forward, and monitor and feed back the results.
Implementing a diversity policy
Research by Penna Consulting (2002) suggests that organisations that want to be successful in implementing diversity will need to adopt a practical approach including key elements such as the following:
o Analyse your business environment. How diverse is your organisation, and is it representative of the local population? Does your workforce mirror your customer base? If not, you could be missing out on significant business opportunities.
o Define diversity and the business benefits. What will be the tangible benefits of implementing a diversity policy, both for your organisation and its employees?
o Include your policy on diversity within your corporate strategy and values.
o Embed the policy within your core HR processes and systems. Make it part of your everyday operations.
o Ensure leaders implement the policy – and give it their full commitment.
o Involve staff at all levels. Implement awareness training, together with initiatives such as the creation of a diversity handbook, mentoring schemes, diversity councils etc.
o Communicate the content of the diversity policy and success of diversity initiatives.
o Understand your organisation’s needs. Depending on its size, understanding of diversity and ability to change, it may benefit from external support.
o Monitor and evaluate. Benchmark your organisation’s progress and the impact of diversity internally and externally.
How can external organisations help?
Many organisations try to tackle the issues of managing diversity simply by providing their staff with a series of training sessions, as though it were an add-on skill that can be easily absorbed. Managing diversity means more, however, than just training your staff. It has to involve the organisation’s culture, processes and systems, and may well involve the need for externally-managed initiatives including:
o diversity audits
o the development of a diversity strategy
o policy writing (an Equal Opportunities policy is mandatory as laid down by the EEOC)
o training and development
o coaching
o recruitment and selection
o practical help and assessment on a continuing basis – to measure the benefits of cultural diversity within the organisation.
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Cold-calling is a NATURAL and ESSENTIAL ELEMENT of almost every business development strategy. However, a lot of salespeople and business owners are uncomfortable putting it into action. This usually leads to procrastination, nervousness; lack of planning and unfortunately, bad results. This then feeds back negative feelings and reinforces why people don’t like cold-calling.
At some point every sales professional or business person is going to have to do some cold-calling. Whether it’s ringing totally new clients or prospects, chasing leads, getting referrals, networking or even just following up names from an exhibition, being able to cold call in a relaxed, confident, professional and effective manner will open up a whole new income stream and assist you in being more in control of your pipeline, your sales figures and income. Today I want to share with some ideas and strategies to enable you to develop cold-calling skills, a mindset and action plan that will produce the desired results. We will look at your attitudes, your beliefs and emotions, and ultimately your habits to enable you to become a peak performer. You will become persistent and not pushy and a listener, and not a chatter box.
When I’m training and the subject of cold-calling comes up, I tend to get asked the same two questions quite often.
1 Be honest Paul, does cold calling work? What they mean by this is, ‘please tell us that it doesn’t, and then we don’t have to do it’. 2 Can you give me a script? What they mean by this is, we don’t want to cold-call, but if we have to, can you do the hard bit, and create a structure for us to copy.
I always find that if you have this, then you sound like you are reading the script, the whole script and nothing but the script and the most important part of the conversation will be missing. That is you, your personality and the way you deal with customers, the warmth you inject into a conversation by being attentive and listening to the customer properly.
When we think about cold calling most people think of FEAR, or even SOUNDING FOOLISH and every session I’ve done on effective use of the telephone, the big one REJECTION.
Think about a 15year old thinking about going to a prom or school disco as it was in my time. Planned everything the limo the outfit and then asks that special person if they want to go to the prom with them. What if they turn them down? That is rejection, and we are allowed to be miserable or grumpy. Think about a business person who calls a company. You have never met them before, if they say no, you will never meet them. What if they say ‘no thank you, we don’t want to do business with your company’ that’s not rejection, but we process, i.e. search round in our unconscious for a feeling to attach to this and come up with rejection with all the early feelings associated with this from our early years. I want you to think about going for a job interview…………..
I’d like to show you what fear really is, and how it affects our behaviours, and therefore our outcomes. What I’d like you to do is imagine we had a plank of wood on the floor. A normal plank of wood, a typical scaffolding plank, probably a foot wide and 12 feet long. I want to ask you how comfortable would you be, walking along that plank turning round at the end, and coming back? Give yourself marks out of ten. Now, if we suspended the plank on two desks, now, how comfortable would you be, once again give yourselves marks out of ten. Let’s imagine that plank is now suspended 100ft up in the air on a crane, for example. Not windy, not swaying, so it would wobble and you would fall off, now, give yourself marks out of ten. So what happened then? We looked at the same task, but in our minds, we predicted radically different outcomes. The higher the plank was off the floor, the worse the potential outcome, thus the lower the comfort rating. Let’s imagine we could transfer this strategy to telephone calling and reframe the experience with a more desirable outcome. If we can produce in our minds a positive perception of the outcome we would create a different set of habits. Think about a great phone conversation you’ve recently had with a good client, it may well have had a good outcome or just a good positive relaxed conversation. I want you to think about how you felt just after the call. Imagine how you would tackle and feel about cold calling if you imprinted that emotion, that feeling as your predicted outcome. That would make cold calling feel much safer.
Define you Purpose of the call
Some cold calls are specifically, just to make a sale, some are designed to gather information, but most cold calls are to arrange an appointment. I want to run through eight ways to improve your appointment making skills.
1 Plan and prepare opening statement.
Having made thousands of calls and listened to hundreds in my training and find that most sales people want to speak too quickly, to get to the point too quickly, tell customers how brilliant they are too quickly and ultimately fail to engage the customer. A great opening statement needs to introduce the purpose of the call, introduce what’s in it for the customer, customer focussed benefits and bridge into a good open information gathering question. While your talking the customer is thinking, ‘what could this call potentially do for my business?’ And ‘why should I care?’ A good opening statement should go along way to answering these questions and also show the customer what value you potentially can bring to their company. Do your homework on your target customers. Understand their needs and challenges. Having a prepared opening statement sets the tone for the call and will enable you to keep it brief.
2 Expect success
If you see cold calling as bashing the phones, doing the numbers or even just a tick in a box to say you’ve done cold calling then you are focussing on the process and not on the out come.
As I said before expect every call to have a good outcome. That doesn’t need to be an appointment or sale. That’s thinking about you. Think about the outcome that the client might want think how they are going to enjoy or experience your product or service. That’s true success. I once asked a salespeople on one of courses ‘what type of people are you ringing’ he said ’stressed people’ can you imagine his inner dialogue when he is expecting people to be too busy, too stressed, not interested and basically he is just annoying them. No wonder he hated cold calling.
3 Know why we are cold calling
Workout your goals, work out your desires and motivations why are you making the call? Why is cold calling important to me? How can it link to your goals and you dreams? Clearly define your reasons. You can set realistic objectives and targets for your telephone sessions and define how you are going to measure them, whether it is weekly monthly or daily.
4 Practice the delivery
Practice the words and also practice the deliver, pace, pitch and tone. Compared with face to face sales where 55% of the message is body language. On the telephone, this element is missing. This means the message is delivered in the words and how you say them. Customers will ‘read between the lines’ So what is the message behind your message, is it that you are bored, are you on a mission to make commission, or are you telling them that you genuinely want to discuss an issue they may have and help them by coming up with a solution. Practice the deliver in an enthusiastic, engaging and interesting manner. Record yourself, get someone else to review you.
5 Plan and prepare relevant questions
All of selling is based on questioning. It is never more important then here, where are trying to uncover pain, needs, issues and challenges faced by the client. Ensure that you are asking relevant open questions. All too often sales people try to ‘close’ when you customer is not fully ‘on board’ for example ‘is that something that you would be interested in? Or ‘would you be interested in meeting up then?’ these question will almost always get a resounding NO. How about asking questions such as Have you had any difficulties with? Or how do you currently go about? I like to get customers to think about the problems, issues or challenges they are facing before I even talk about a meeting.
6 Set Times for Cold-Calling
A specific time to do cold calling will solve a lot of key challenges. Get rid of distraction, only have support tools on your desk, your phone [not mobile, switch that off] your computer if you book onto electronic diary or appointment book and your prospect list Clear your desk and ask other people not to disturb you. I prefer to book appointments onto a white board. Set a time and stick to it. You should be cold calling for no more than 2 or 3 hours at a time. Thursday morning from 10 until 12 is a great time to approach most businesses by phone. Be disciplined. Don’t take breaks between each call. If the last call went well, pick up the phone again, if it went badly pick the phone up again. If things go badly we feel inclined to take longer and longer breaks if they go well we celebrate. To overcome this I suggest that you don’t put the phone down. And I have worked with teams who use head-sets and they say that the number of calls they make goes up.
7 Master your peak physiology
Now that we have ’set the stage’ for our best performance we need to set ourselves. I find that standing up is the best way to set me in cold calling mode. It makes me feel more positive, more excited and generally more productive. What is your best facial expression? put on a big bright smile, SMILE WHILE YOU DIAL. It all adds up to the best message coming down the phone.
8 Ask for the appointment
Ask for the appointment at the appropriate time. Have a diary in front of you. Discuss a problem, issue or challenge with the customer. Don’t promise to solve the problem but suggest that you would like the opportunity to discuss it further, provide two appointment times, and wait.
Everything that we have just discussed works. However the most important aspect of it is that we use it. Not just once or twice to ’see if it works’ but enough times for us to become professional at using these ideas. Enough times for us to become unconsciously competent.
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Going through the car buying process can bring with it a mixture of excitement, enjoyment, annoyance and aggravation, as well as the fact that it’s likely to take you a lot longer than you thought it would, no matter how well prepared you are.
Whilst there are various factors that can affect the whole process, one of the most prominent is the cost of the vehicle.
Although it’s strongly recommended that you set yourself a budget before you go out looking for a car, this budget can go completely out of the window when you start looking. You might realise, for example, that the type of car you want isn’t available within your budget or.
Whatever category you fall into with your budget, there’s one thing you have to always, always got to remember – never agree to pay for the car with the first price that’s offered to you. And the simple reason behind this is that this will be the price which the dealership would like to sell the car for and not what they can sell the car for. The problem is that a lot of people are aware that car dealerships advertise their vehicles at a higher price and are willing to drop it if asked, but they just don’t know how to go about getting the best deal possible for the car. In fact, it was recently reported by Sainsbury Bank that 60% of British people don’t haggle on car price. If you’re one of these people, you have to ask yourself “what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen if you try and haggle?”. Are you worried that you won’t get the car at the price you want or that the car salesperson might become agitated and try to get you to buy the car at a price that you can’t afford or don’t want to pay?You’re certainly not going to get thrown out of the dealership and therefore it’s important that no matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel – it’s only going to be for 20 minutes – you need to barter with the salesperson to try and get the price down as low as possible.
If you’re not sure how low you could go, a good starting point is 20 percent lower than what the car is currently being offered for. Anything If the salesperson says they can’t sell it at anything under the stated price, you can simply walk away if you don’t want to pay the reduced price.
It’s worthwhile keeping in mind that you might be able to secure a better sale price if you utilise some car finance deals that the dealership is offering. This is because, the dealership is likely to make money through a commission paid by the finance company..Therefore, they are often flexible and will mix and match cash and car finance.
Haggling is not something that everyone is comfortable with, but it’s absolutely imperative to securing the best car finance deal on the car that you’re looking at. If you’re not too happy with haggling, take a step outside of your comfort zone for a few minutes – you might feel awkward to start with, but you’ll soon be glad you did when you save yourself a lot of money on the cost of your new car.
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