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What do we mean by ‘downturn’? What do we mean by ‘economic crisis’?  

The meaning we attach to words such as these, and hence to events that happen to us, is a very personal thing.

I may see the ‘downturn’ as something absolutely devastating to me personally, to my finances and to the happiness of my family. My morale will be sure to be rock bottom. On the other hand, you may see the downturn as an opportunity to cut out bad spending habits and save more of your income.

Even if you lose your job, you may see it a great opportunity to re-evaluate your life and start afresh, even if from a lower income base.

The thing to realise is that we have a choice about what meaning we attach to events. We can choose to let the newspapers, our friends or our colleagues influence that meaning, or we can choose to be the masters of our meaning.

If today we allow the newspapers or our colleagues to influence how we see our situation, it is likely we will become depressed. And if we then influence our colleagues with our own depressing viewpoints, our group morale will suffer.

But if we stop and think for ourselves and ignore other people’s opinions, we can choose to interpret the situation in any way we like.

It’s simply not true that because companies are losing sales, we all have to be miserable. Companies losing sales is a fact. But what we do with this fact is just a creation we make in our own minds. We can choose to interpret this fact in a way that makes us feel OK about ourselves, our family, or the world in general.

So, my advice is: don’t get swept up in ‘group think’ which lets your morale sink. Don’t follow everyone else’s interpretation of events. Take control of your own mind and find ways to feel OK – whatever is happening in the world, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (which, of course, is just someone’s interpretation.)

For leaders, stop a moment and look inward so as to harness your personal resources. Find a new, more positive way to view your company’s situation and help your people attach more useful meanings to the events that confront your organisation.

We are fast realising that self-management is a critical addition to skills enhancement, and if we can learn to tap into our own internal resources, we will be stronger, more confident and more likely to perform at our peak.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

The following was written by our friend, Charles H. Green of Trusted Advisor to Andrew Miller:

“Congratulations on having your post selected for inclusion in the April Carnival of Trust.

The Carnival of Trust is a carefully selected list of the Top Ten blogposts for the past month having to with the general subject of trust. This month it was hosted by James Irvine and Trip Allen at Egyii, in Singapore.

The Carnival is one of the harder to get onto (only ten selections per month) and higher quality. This month, in particular—thanks in part to your post’s inclusion—-the Carnival of Trust was singled out by a Carnival Overview site, saying “This is what a very well done blog carnival is like in terms of content!”

Not only that, but your post–yours, Andrew–got the coveted award of Best Post of the Week, Anywhere on the same blog. That is of all the Carnivals in all the world.

The Carnival of Trust is my brainchild, started two years ago to showcase good writing on the subject of trust: trust in business, society, and personal life.

But that’s enough about the carnival. I just wanted to thank you for writing a fine piece of work, and congratulate you for inclusion in this month’s selections.

Sincerely,
Charles H. Green
Founder and CEO
Trusted Advisor Associates”

Kudos and congratulations to Andrew from Team Egyii.

Trip Allen and James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Your sense of identity determines how you interpret the downturn, how you interact with clients and colleagues, what you crave after…and so on.

So how do you identify yourself?

By the things you have? A fancy car?

By the things you do? A cool job?

By the people you associate with? One of the in-crowd?

By comparing yourself with others? A winner?

By the thoughts you have? I think, therefore I am?

By now it may just be dawning on you how limited these measurements are in defining your identity, and how much stress you give yourself by searching for yourself through them.

Once we all realise that we are just the person we are in every moment, and that we continually change from moment to moment, then we will stop our craving for more and enjoy being simply present.

So the next time you are in front of a client, forget about your sales target or your great expertise and just be there in your client’s world with them in that moment. Look at them. Hear them. And start building a truly authentic relationship.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Part I: Going Out on Sales Calls after Sales Training

You have just finished sales “training.”

It could be:

SPIN Selling

Value Selling

PSS Professional Selling Skills

Etc….

(You name it – I have been through them all!)

…and now is your chance to utilise these skills you have learned.

So you line up a series of calls. Prior to the call, you need to do call preparation so you take out your planning sheets…you think about the anticipated  problems, your solutions, your products’ features/benefits, what ”open” and “closed” ended questions to ask, Etc.  

Your boss is “required” to go in tow to support the million dollar+  investment the company just made by ensuring that you are applying the skills.

You sit face to face with the client*. She is a wise an seasoned veteran. You start your process. “Blah, blah, blah…” She starts to smile (a cunning smile at that) and to grin cheek to cheek.

Why? She has seen all of this before. The last sales person came in and did a similar series of gestures. Not only that she felt like she was being “trapped.”

She knew what was going on..

The questions were not natural. The situation was not authentic. It was not from the gut.

It was phoney.

..and you were not listening to the client. Not focusing on her. You were focusing on the process, the script.

How did the client feel? How well did the call go? I will let you answer that.

Don’t get me wrong. Some people fare well in a pre-processed situation. I believe it works best to learn a few skills and build your own personal program; a  program that combines a sales process, product and technical training and program that builds a real relationship.

Carry on…

*This is a true story. It happened to me- and I was embarrassed as she asked me if I just finished sales training!

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Welcome to the April 2009 Carnival of Trust.

Our theme for this carnival is ’soften up’. I don’t mean allow others in business to take advantage of you, or place your trust in everyone without thinking. I do mean that in today’s changed business world, go ’soft’ to create hard business results.

The public and our customers are fed up with macho chest-beating and claims of quality, caring and trustworthiness by business leaders. This carnival presents blogs which talk about trust in terms of simple human qualities like relationship building, putting your faith in others, and making yourself vulnerable.

It’s with these personal and interpersonal behaviours that we can gradually rebuild the trust that we have lost, and slowly but surely create the new world of business where trust is at the centre of decision and action.

I make no apologies for starting this carnival with the word  ‘love’, emphasised by John Assraf of One Coach as the key to getting hard business results in his blog The New Mantra: Love and Service. If your strategy is about “high leverage, high profit and high payoff” then you just may be a has-been in the new business world of empathy and care.

John Assaraff correctly makes the point that softening your hard business shell and approaching business growth from a sensitive, human relations standpoint may be just what you need to climb out of the crisis and prosper in tomorrow’s world.

Paying attention to your softer side may be one good business decision, while harnessing technology to create  trust is another good business decision. Ken Fischer, in Exploring the Economic Impact of Social Media, believes that although social media may be destructive to traditional industries such as advertising and retail distribution at this time, it will provide the engine of growth for new businesses as well as the economy in the future.

This is technology powered by and used to for interaction, connection, trust and relationship building. Another glimpse into the new world of business that we are all going to have to join sooner or later.

Peter Bregman makes no bones about the secret of great leadership and management: it’s trust. In The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies, he takes you intimately into his conversations with leaders in a five-star hotel and shows, line by line, exactly how trust is engendered, built and applied to achieve competitive advantage. It sounds so obvious and so simple.

The story called Trust Management by Andrew Miller, of a change project gone bad, exemplifies the destructive force of self-serving leadership at the expense of the good of the whole team.

The irony in this story is that the leadership agreed to a set of rules which brought everyone together as equals in a creative, team-based activity, and which produced remarkable results through trust. But just before the project was finished, the leadership changed the rules to fit with their own ideas.

The resultant broken trust had a consequence far beyond the confines of the project they were working on.

The sense from the previous blog is that the leaders were unwilling to give trust away, as Dov Siedman explains. His message in Trust Me, It’s Time to Fill the Certainty Gap is that while all along leaders have expected their people, their suppliers and even their customers to earn their trust, he suggests that these leaders should actually give it away.

When we give away trust remarkable things happen: transactions costs decline; co-operative, value-crating behaviours start; and at a higher level, even the national rate of investment and GDP growth rise.

But giving trust away requires that you make yourself vulnerable – are our leaders of today ready for this change? Or do we need to look for a different kind of leader?

Robert Ambrogi is absolutely clear about the reason for online networking: to build and strenthen trusted relationships. In Why Bother with Online Networking? he advises us that for lawyers, the most effective way to create new business is through client referrals and recommendations.

With consumer choice at an all-time high and trust in brands shaky, this advice can well be applied to all our businesses. Why not build a powerful online network through social media and create the trusted relationships that will be the engine of growth tomorrow?

Connecting with customers through online networking is one marketing strategy. Another is connecting customers.

In Don’t Sell the Product, Sell the Ability to Connect Customers,  Graham Brown shows us the way to market our products and services to the Youth Market through platforms, by enabling customers to connect with each other through events and other opportunities that bring them together as a society. As each brand adds value to their customers by building around their social fabric, trust is created.

Couldn’t we learn from the youth market?

Brands: Measured by Trust, the blog of Mark Ritson of Branding Strategy Insider, says that in today’s market “Can I trust you?” is the single most important brand differentiator.

This is not the trust that was formerly the backbone of brand equity, such as reliable product performance and consistent service. Today this is not the issue. A company that wants to create brand equity today needs to prove that the personal integrity of its people, and hence all it’s actions, are above reproach.

To me, this seems like an enormous opportunity for those companies that truly care about their customers.

Today we need to go through a metamorphosis from being a salesperson to being a trusted advisor if we are to hope to connect with the sentiments of today’s client.  According to Ramon Vela in What My Daughter Taught Me about being a Trusted Advisor, the key action necessary to accomplish this is ’sharing’.

Sharing our knowledge and expertise through white papers, blogs and so on not only creates trust through establishing an identity as an ‘expert’, but by making ourselves vulnerable in this way engenders another, deeper level of trust that is more personal.

Apin Talisayon bring us an Asian view from the Philippines in his blog A Value Driver behind Relationship Capital.

As a fitting end to this carnival, Apin tells us in no uncertain terms that ‘trust’ underlies the efficient operation, or threat of collapse, of our global knowledge economy. And never has there been a more important time to take this concept seriously and develop a new science and technology to understand and manage trust.

This must be our purpose and direction if we are to climb out of the crisis and enter a new world of trust-based business.

I hope you have enjoyed this carnival. Thank you Charles H. Green for allowing us to host this carnival, and thanks Ian Welsh for your help.

(For the link to Charlie’s blog, Trust Matters click here!)

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

HR-in-Action Nite- 2 April 2009
for the HR Community @ SHRI Singapore Human Resources Institute

The secret to getting good results at work is by getting control of our thinking, rather than just diving into new behaviours.

Most learning programmes try to help us change our behaviours by giving us new knowledge and skills. However, much of the time nothing actually happens because we have not addressed the things that drive those behaviours i.e. our thinking patterns. It’s like a plane trying to change course while all the time having the auto pilot set on another direction.

Yes, it’s important to learn new behaviours. But since so many of them are habitual, we need to change the beliefs, values and emotions that control those behaviours if we are to experience change that lasts more than a few days. And the funny thing is, when we do control our thinking patterns, the behaviours tend to take care of themselves.

Based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), this talk will introduce you to some of the key drivers of our behaviour as well as methods for getting control of these. You will find that you can apply this knowledge in any situation both at work and at home, and you will gain a new sense of control over the results you get.

Please feel free to click on the downloadable Slideshare version of the presentation here.

For more information, please email us at stuff@egyii.com.

Bon vivant!

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

How are the banks listening to the clients/customers today?

I have been reading blog articles by and speaking with some of the Forrester and Gartner (my former employer) analysts recently. Both companies are  research and analysis firms for the technology industry - and there is a lot of buzz around utilising technology to “listen” to the banking clients.

I am noticing two things:

The customer experience (or as we at Egyii call it “customer proficiency”) is the banks’ biggest concern.

How to address the voice of the customer?

Communities

As networks, the Internet and overall communications have evolved, the world’s voice has become global. And even though it has been global, communities have formed- both locally and globally.

Many of you are aware that traditionally communities have been formed and are a means of discussing issues and sharing ideas - as people in communities have a lot in common. The platforms could be through town hall meetings, mahjong games in HDB flats, tribe gatherings, Etc.

Today, communities can also be formed digitally and continue to be formed personally (face to face).

The Social Media Phenomenon

What is happening globally and locally? Digital communities are being formed using  social media.

Ning. Facebook. Twitter. Votigo. Linked In.

And it is just not youngsters or Gen Y.

The old folks (like me- Boomers) have the biggest, recent  uptake on Facebook.

And big and small companies are doing it , too.

So, what are companies doing to take advantage of the voice of the client today?  They are using social media to capture the voice and are making quick changes based on the clients’ immediate input and needs.  It is all very real time. A recent article in Advertising Age states “The Internet has made it easier than ever for consumers to get their opinions heard — and for marketers to listen.”

One example is Ford Motor. “Social media has helped Ford quickly achieve its goal of being a top social brand and has broken down the more conservative communications processes that were in place,” said Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford.

On a Local Level – Singapore

A recent report showed that Internet users in Singapore spent 50% of their time on social media (community) sites. Wow! How to capture their attention?

In Singapore, we are well connected and very savvy. We use communities (whether you realise it or not) to voice our opinions. Everyone is listening.

The Banking Environment

Are banking clients talking, forming communities?

You bet they are. On line and and personally (in places like kopitiams – local coffee shops, Etc). They are sharing the stories. The heartbreaks. The downfalls. The successes!

In banking, the trend to move digitally has been slow.

Because some banks are slow in the uptake of using technology to listen to the client, personal (face to face) communities or sessions can be formed to fill the gaps. Until they are” up to par” digitally, banks need more proactive events or sessions where the client is comfortable in expressing his opinion. One suggestion is a simple  face to face, one on one “community” with the client (make sure the client is comfortable). Nothing beats that.

But don’t wait to long. The clients want a digital community in banking. They want to voice their opinion. It will happen.

So, how will you build your bank’s community so that you can hear the real voice of your banking clients today? Banks need to be more sensitive to the voice of the client. If it is not done digitally, find some old world ways of doing it.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore