The biggest issue was that the course implied all customers behaved and wanted the same things, and so it provided sales assistants with a one-size-fits-all approach-with unnerving sales targets to match. Skeptics like myself had big concerns about their system-not least of all the capitalistic heart beating beneath a big, fluffy teddy bear outfit of positivity. It attempted to teach an in-depth, pseudo-psychological approach to sales. Working for one of the UK’s leading high street stores as a sales assistant, I had to attend a course built around such ideology. There are plenty of people willing to tell you the wrong ways to sell, often embedded within some clever immersive theory, making you think their approach is in the customers’ interests.
#Dmarket face2face how to
So the first lesson, right away, is: work out what your personal strengths are, how a customer would perceive those strengths, and how to use them to develop your own style. Fewer words and less obvious desperation for the sale (probably) suggested a level of honesty-whether that was true or not. Customers probably found me less intimidating than some of my more brazen counterparts. Now that I have a little more perspective, when I think about why that is, it actually seems quite logical. But in reality, I found I was quite successful. My natural demeanor-a bit shy, slightly anxious-makes for a terrible sales assistant on paper. The old adage says a confident salesman can sell anything to anyone, but we’ve put together a simple system to help anyone succeed at sales-whatever your personal strengths. All rights reserved.Face-to-face sales can be a tricky business.
His latest book is Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center (Berrett-Koehler Publishers).
He holds the Cleghorn Professorship of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management in McGill University. Henry Mintzberg is a well-known author, management thinker and academic. An electronic device puts us in touch with a keyboard, that’s all. The new digital technologies, wonderful as they are in enhancing communication, can have a negative effect on collaboration unless they are carefully managed. Thus, in localities and organizations, across societies and around the globe, beware of “networked individualism" where people communicate readily while struggling to collaborate.
But the heart of enterprise remains rooted in personal collaborative relationships, albeit networked by the new information technologies. Hence managers have to go beyond their individual leadership, to recognize the collective nature of effective enterprise.Įspecially for operating around the globe, electronic communication has become essential. The great leaders create, enhance and support a sense of community in their organizations, and that requires hands-on management. We tend to make a great fuss about leadership these days, but communityship is more important. But far more crucial is the need for collaboration, and that requires a strong sense of community in the organization. And this applies especially to their managers: networking and communicating, even for its own sake let alone for decision-making, is a major component of every manager’s job. Of course, all companies need robust networks, to communicate among their parts as well as to connect to the outside world. That is why, while the larger social movements, as in Cairo’s Tahrir Square or on Wall Street, may raise consciousness about the need for renewal in society, it is the smaller social initiatives, usually developed by small groups in communities, that do much of the renewing.Īt the organizational level, as I have written frequently, effective companies function as communities of human beings, not collections of human resources. Friedman added that “at their worst, can become addictive substitutes for real action". In a 2012 New York Times column, Thomas Friedman reported asking an Egyptian friend about the protest movements in that country: “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate," he replied. In contrast, the word has now become fashionable to describe what are really networks, as in the “business community"-“people with common interests not common values, history, or memory".ĭoes this matter for managing in the digital age, even for dealing with our global problems? It sure does.
#Dmarket face2face Patch
A century or two ago, the word community “seemed to connote a specific group of people, from a particular patch of earth, who knew and judged and kept an eye on one another, who shared habits and history and memories, and could at times be persuaded to act as a whole on behalf of a part".
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