By Susan M. Heathfield

Working at Google sounds very cool. I’d be the first to tout Google as a motivating employer: free food, engineers who are enabled to spend 20 percent of their time on their own projects, and a work environment that fosters play and creative thinking. At Google, Genentech and other Fortune magazine top 100 companies, employers provide the best workplaces. At the same time, perks that enable employees to spend all of their time at work exploit people and destroy work - life balance. So, even the best employer may not be best for everyone. These are the factors that will help you find happiness at work.

1. Choose to Be Happy at Work
Happiness is largely a choice. I can hear many of you arguing with me, but it’s true. You can choose to be happy at work. Sound simple? Yes. But, simplicity is often profoundly difficult to put into action. I wish all of you had the best employer in the world, but, face it, you may not. So, think positively about your work. Dwell on the aspects of your work you like. Avoid negative people and gossip. Find coworkers you like and enjoy and spend your time with them. Your choices at work largely define your experience. You can choose to be happy at work.

2. Do Something You Love Every Single Day
You may or may not love your current job and you may or may not believe that you can find something in your current job to love, but you can. Trust me. Take a look at yourself, your skills and interests, and find something that you can enjoy doing every day. If you do something you love every single day, your current job won’t seem so bad. Of course, you can always make your current job work or decide that it is time to quit your job.

3. Take Charge of Your Own Professional and Personal Development
A young employee complained to me recently that she wanted to change jobs because her boss was not doing enough to help her develop professionally. I asked her whom she thought was the person most interested in her development. The answer, of course, was her. You are the person with the most to gain from continuing to develop professionally. Take charge of your own growth; ask for specific and meaningful help from your boss, but march to the music of your personally developed plan and goals. You have the most to gain from growing - and the most to lose, if you stand still.

4. Take Responsibility for Knowing What Is Happening at Work
People complain to me daily that they don’t receive enough communication and information about what is happening with their company, their department’s projects, or their coworkers. Passive vessels, they wait for the boss to fill them up with knowledge. And, the knowledge rarely comes. Why? Because the boss is busy doing her job and she doesn’t know what you don’t know. Seek out the information you need to work effectively. Develop an information network and use it. Assertively request a weekly meeting with your boss and ask questions to learn. You are in charge of the information you receive.

5. Ask for Feedback Frequently
Have you made statements such as, “My boss never gives me any feedback, so I never know how I’m doing.” Face it, you really know exactly how you’re doing. Especially if you feel positively about your performance, you just want to hear him acknowledge you. If you’re not positive about your work, think about improving and making a sincere contribution. Then, ask your boss for feedback. Tell him you’d really like to hear his assessment of your work. Talk to your customers, too; if you’re serving them well, their feedback is affirming. You are responsible for your own development. Everything else you get is gravy.

6. Make Only Commitments You Can Keep
One of the most serious causes of work stress and unhappiness is failing to keep commitments. Many employees spend more time making excuses for failing to keep a commitment, and worrying about the consequences of not keeping a commitment, than they do performing the tasks promised. Create a system of organization and planning that enables you to assess your ability to complete a requested commitment. Don’t volunteer if you don’t have time. If your workload is exceeding your available time and energy, make a comprehensive plan to ask the boss for help and resources. Don’t wallow in the swamp of unkept promises.

7. Avoid Negativity
Choosing to be happy at work means avoiding negative conversations, gossip, and unhappy people as much as possible. No matter how positively you feel, negative people have a profound impact on your psyche. Don’t let the negative Neds and Nellies bring you down. Take a look at:

* How to Deal With a Negative Coworker: Negativity Matters.
* Dealing With Difficult People at Work.

8. Practice Professional Courage
If you are like most people, you don’t like conflict. And the reason why is simple. You’ve never been trained to participate in meaningful conflict, so you likely think of conflict as scary, harmful, and hurtful. Conflict can be all three; done well, conflict can also help you accomplish your work mission and your personal vision. Conflict can help you serve customers and create successful products. Happy people accomplish their purpose for working. Why let a little professional courage keep you from achieving your goals and dreams? Make conflict your friend.

9. Make Friends
In their landmark book, First, Break All The Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (Compare Prices), Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman list twelve important questions. When employees answered these questions positively, their responses were true indicators of whether people were happy and motivated at work. One of these key questions was, “Do you have a best friend at work?” Liking and enjoying your coworkers are hallmarks of a positive, happy work experience. Take time to get to know them. You might actually like and enjoy them. Your network provides support, resources, sharing, and caring.

10. If All Else Fails, Job Searching Will Make You Smile
If all of these ideas aren’t making you happy at work, it’s time to reevaluate your employer, your job, or your entire career. You don’t want to spend your life doing work you hate in an unfriendly work environment. Most work environments don’t change all that much. But unhappy employees tend to grow even more disgruntled. You can secretly smile while you spend all of your non-work time job searching. It will only be a matter of time until you can quit your job - with a big smile.

by Jason Gracia

Managers around the world are committing a fatal error that is depriving their people and companies of improvement, progress, and success. While very few know of the dilemma, its solution is the most important and powerful principle that any coach or manager will ever learn.

Imagine stepping into an enormous kitchen overflowing with uncooked meals and desserts. All of the necessary ingredients for a countless assortment of dinners are there - you simply have to prepare them.

Now imagine preparing and cooking them in identically the same way. It doesn’t matter what meal you are dealing with - you follow one set of instructions without fail.

Perhaps your favorite meal is a thick and juicy hamburger. If you’re actually preparing and cooking a hamburger, you’re right on track. But what if you’re dealing with ice cream sandwiches. How well do you think throwing some ice cream onto a grill would work? Trying to flip it so both side get evenly cooked?

The Greatest Management Mistake
Preparing and cooking ice cream in the same manner as a hamburger would obviously result in failure. You can’t treat all ingredients and meals as the same thing - they are all different, requiring different methods and techniques to achieve their particular result.

The greatest management mistake should be painfully clear: many managers treat all employees as the same assortment of ingredients trying to motivate them toward greater success using one cookie-cutter approach.

Just as failure results from throwing ice cream on a grill, so too will a manager fail in inspiring his people if he attempts to do so using a single method.

The people on your team are as different as baked beans and apple pie. They each work from a unique set of motivators, responding to some with excited action and others with boredom or even anger.

It’s up to you to discover what drives each one of your team members. What elements excite them? What elements turn them off? It may take a little time and concerted effort on your part, but uncovering the powerful motivators that drive your people will be the best thing you can do for you and your team.

Remember, you may respond to financial rewards or incentives, but that doesn’t mean everyone on your team will share your sentiments. Listen to your people. Recognize and utilize their motivators. You are dealing with a wide assortment of ingredients, and following this principle will allow you to prepare each one with amazing success.

by Brent Filson

Leaders do nothing more important than get results. But you can’t get results by yourself. You need others to help you do it. And the best way to have other people get results is not by ordering them but motivating them. Yet many leaders fail to motivate people to achieve results because those leaders misconstrue the concept and applications of motivation. To understand motivation and apply it daily, let’s understand its three critical factors. Know these factors and put them into action to greatly enhance your abilities to lead for results.

1. Motivation is physical action.
“Motivation” has common roots with “motor,” “momentum,” “motion,” “mobile,” etc. .. all words that denote movement, physical action. An essential feature of motivation is physical action. Motivation isn’t about what people think or feel but what they physically do. When motivating people to get results, challenge them to take those actions that will realize those results.

I counsel leaders who must motivate individuals and teams to get results not to deliver presentations but “leadership talks.” Presentations communicate information.. But when you want to motivate people, you must do more than simply communicate information. You must have them believe in you and take action to follow you. A key outcome of every leadership talk must be physical action, physical action that leads to results.

For instance, I worked with the newly-appointed director of a large marketing department who wanted the department to achieve sizable increases in the results. However, the employees were a demoralized bunch who had been clocking tons of overtime under her predecessor and were feeling angry that their efforts were not being recognized by senior management.

She could have tried to order them to get the increased results. Many leaders do that. But order-leadership founders in today’s highly competitive, rapidly changing markets. Organizations are far more competitive when their employees instead of being ordered to go from point A to point B want to go from point A to point B. So I suggested that she take a first step in getting the employees to increase results by motivating those employees to want to increase results. They would “want to” when they began to believe in her leadership. And the first step in enlisting that belief was for her to give a number of leadership talks to the employees.

One of her first talks that she planned was to the department employees in the company’s auditorium. She told me, “I want them to know that I appreciate the work they are doing and that I believe that they can get the results I’m asking of them. I want them to feel good about themselves.”

“Believing is not enough,” I said. “Feeling good is not enough. Motivation must take place. Physical action must take place. Don’t give the talk until you know what precise action you are going to have happen.”

She got the idea of having the CEO come into the room after the talk, shake each employee’s hand, and tell each how much he appreciated their hard work — physical action. She didn’t stop there. After the CEO left, she challenged each employee to write down on a piece of paper three specific things that they needed from her to help them get the increases in results and then hand those pieces of paper to her personally — physical action.

Mind you, that leadership talk wasn’t magic dust sprinkled on the employees to instantly motivate them. (To turn the department around so that it began achieving sizable increases in results, she had to give many leadership talks in the weeks and months ahead.) But it was a beginning. Most importantly, it was the right beginning.

2. Motivation is driven by emotion.
Emotion and motion come from the same Latin root meaning “to move”. When you want to move people to take action, engage their emotions. An act of motivation is an act of emotion. In any strategic management endeavor, you must make sure that the people have a strong emotional commitment to realizing it.

When I explained this to the chief marketing officer of a worldwide services company, he said, “Now I know why we’re not growing! We senior leaders developed our marketing strategy in a bunker! He showed me his “strategy” document. It was some 40 pages long, single-spaced. The points it made were logical, consistent, and comprehensive. It made perfect sense. That was the trouble. It made perfect, intellectual sense to the senior leaders. But it did not make experiential sense to middle management who had to carry it out. They had about as much in-put into the strategy as the window washers at corporate headquarters. So they sabotaged it in many innovative ways. Only when the middle managers were motivated — were emotionally committed to carrying out the strategy — did that strategy have a real chance to succeed.

3. Motivation is not what we do to others.
It is what others do to themselves. The English language does not accurately depict the psychological truth of motivation. The truth is that we cannot motivate anybody to do anything. The people we want to motivate can only motivate themselves. The motivator and the motivatee are always the same person. We as leaders communicate, they motivate. So our “motivating” others to get results really entails our creating an environment in which they motivate themselves to get those results.

For example: a commercial division leader almost faced a mutiny on his staff when in a planning session, he put next year’s goals, numbers much higher than the previous year’s, on the overhead. The staff all but had to be scrapped off the ceiling after they went ballistic. “We busted our tails to get these numbers last year. Now you want us to get much higher numbers? No way!” He told me. “We can hit those numbers. I just have to get people motivated!”

I gave him my “motivator-and-motivatee-are-the-same-person!” pitch. I suggested that he create an environment in which they could motivate themselves. So he had them assess what activities got results and what didn’t. They discovered that they spent more than 60 percent of their time on work that had nothing to do with getting results. He then had them develop a plan to eliminate the unnecessary work. Put in charge of their own destiny, they got motivated! They developed a great plan and started to get great results.

Over the long run, your career success does not depend on what schools you went to and what degrees you have. That success depends instead on your ability to motivate individuals and teams to get results. Motivation is like a high voltage cable lying at your feet. Use it the wrong way, and you’ll get a serious shock. But apply motivation the right way by understanding and using the three factors, plug the cable in, as it were, and it will serve you well in many powerful ways throughout your career.

By Susan M. Heathfield

Want the bottom line when it comes to employee retention? The quality of the supervision an employee receives is critical to employee retention. People leave managers and supervisors more often than they leave companies or jobs.

It is not enough that the manager is well-liked or a nice person. Sure, a nice, likeable manager earns you some points with your employees. A draconian, nasty, or controlling manager takes points away from your organization. So will below market benefits and compensation. But, a manager or supervisor, who is a pro at employee retention, knows that the quality of the supervision is the key factor in employee retention.

Effective Managers Create Employee Retention
Managers who retain staff start by communicating clear expectations to the employee. They share their picture of what constitutes success for the employee in both the expected deliverables from and the performance of their job.

These managers provide frequent feedback and make the employee feel valued. When an employee completes an exchange with a manager who retains staff, he or she feels empowered, enabled, and confident in their ability to get the job done.

Employee complaints about managers and supervisors center on these areas. Employees leave managers who fail to:

* provide clarity about expectations,
* provide clarity about career development and earning potential,
* give regular feedback about performance,
* hold scheduled meetings, and
* provide a framework within which the employee perceives he can succeed.

How to Help Managers With Employee Retention

Almost every manager can increase her ability to retain employees by developing her management skills. Teaching a manager about how to value people can be more challenging. Particularly if the manager doesn’t already value people and their contributions in her mind and heart, it will be a leap for her to change her values.

These ideas will help your organization develop managers who believe in and act in ways that support employee retention.

* Integrate core values about people and a mission and vision that enable people to align themselves with the company direction. Communicate the importance of these, and clear expectations about the behaviors expected from managers to accomplish these, to every manager.

* Negotiate a performance development plan with each manager that stresses the expected managerial areas of development,

* Provide training in core management skills to every manager. Core management skills include how to:
o integrate performance management including goal setting,
o give and receive feedback,
o recognize and value employees,
o coach employee performance,
o handle employee complaints and problems,
o provide a motivating work environment, and
o hold career development discussions with employees.

# Hold regular meetings to provide management development coaching and feedback. You can assist managers to improve their management style and skills. A regular meeting helps you debrief events as they occur, while memories of the exchanges are fresh in the manager’s mind.

# Schedule and hold learning organization events such as book clubs, product training, project debriefs, and discussion and planning meetings.

# Provide funding for conferences and educational development opportunities for managers to continue learning.

# As part of a fully integrated performance management system, provide 360 degree feedback so managers know how their management style is perceived.

What if a Manager Fails at Employee Retention?

If a manager fails at employee retention, the chances are good that the manager has been unable or unwilling to develop their ability to manage and value people across the board. Managers who exhibit a pattern in which their key employees leave your organization cannot retain their management role.

If you have fairly and ethically provided the manager the learning opportunities suggested here, you can, in good conscience, remove the individual from the managerial role. My experience has been that most managers consider this such a loss of prestige and “face” that they voluntarily leave the organization.

If they choose to stay, however, they must commit to being effective, contributing employees. If the manager cannot make this leap, you will need to let the manager go before their negativity impacts the rest of your workplace.

Given the management development opportunities listed here, most managers will be able to become managers who retain their best employees. Your investment in your managers can fuel your organization’s ongoing success. After all, it is the quality of the people you employ and retain that is the heart of your business success.

by Chris Musselwhite

Motivation in the workplace isn’t about what you do for your employees; it’s about the work you empower your employees to do for you.

Like many managers, you may assume that motivating employees means doing things for them, such as paying annual bonuses, awarding free travel and giving time off. It might surprise you to learn that research actually shows that while these types of extrinsic rewards may cause a short-term burst of productivity, they also contain the seed for de-motivation in the long term.

Why? Because once they are awarded, they become expected. So when revenues dictate that bonuses are smaller and vacation days are fewer, people aren’t just unmotivated, they actually become less satisfied with their jobs overall.

This realization is at the heart of the work and research of the man known as the father of modern motivation, Frederick Herzberg.

A noted psychologist and one of the most influential names in business management, Herzberg’s research showed that while the absence of certain basic things — like good working conditions and an appropriate salary –contributed to job dissatisfaction, they didn’t necessarily increase job satisfaction. In other words, they definitely de-motivate when absent, but don’t necessarily motivate when present.

So what does motivate people to work harder and perform at their best? According to Herzberg’s research, real motivators include achievement, recognition, meaningful work, responsibility, advancement and growth. In addition, if retention is a concern, then consider that the number one reason given for leaving a job is dissatisfaction with supervisors.

No matter what type of work your employees do, you can begin to make changes in the way you manage and in your workplace that will create a more stable and motivating work environment.
Understand the difference between motivation and reward.

According to Herzberg’s research, real motivation comes from the work itself, not the rewards given for doing the work. His research shows that providing more money, less time at work and better fringe benefits in the name of motivation only motivates people to expect them and ask for more.

When you are about to make a change intended to motivate, ask yourself: how will this contribute to the person’s sense of achievement or recognition? Will it enable him or her to grow and be prepared to take on more responsibility? Does it make the work more meaningful to the person? If you can’t answer yes to one of these, then recognize that while it may make the person feel rewarded for a job well done, it probably won’t provide the long-term motivation you’re hoping to achieve.

Recognize that people are natural problem-solvers.

You’ve heard the saying “everyone has an opinion” and you know it’s true. This is because people are natural problem-solvers. We like to figure things out and determine the way things are done — especially when we are the ones doing the work.

When you give people the opportunity to express their opinions and provide input about the work process, you create buy-in and ownership of the work. When people feel ownership of their work, they are more likely to own the problems that occur and take on the daily task of finding solutions much more enthusiastically.

In order for people to provide meaningful input into the design of the work process however, they must first clearly understand the desired outcome and the parameters within which they must work to achieve it. Once this is understood, people must then be given latitude to determine how they are going to achieve it. Recognizing this natural drive to be an integral part of the solution is a critical first step to motivating people to do their best.

Build Trust: Take time to get to know your people.

Effective managers take time to get to know their people. This area can be a pitfall for entrepreneurs, who have the tendency to focus on the task and not the person. When you make people feel like you care more about the work than you do about them, you make them feel insignificant. Conversely, when an employee feels that his or her manager is as concerned about their well being on the job as they are about the job itself, they are more likely to feel the sense of trust that is critical among high performing teams and organizations.

In addition to creating this vital sense of trust, taking the time to get to know your people will provide invaluable insight into what motivates them. Different people are motivated by different things. While one person might be stoked to be designated as project manager, another might feel more achievement if they get to actually produce the desired product once it’s determined how it will be done.

This comparison illustrates how different people require varying degrees of structure in order to be happy within their jobs. One way to asses each individual’s need for structure is to ask them to bring in questions about their jobs. Someone who has lots of questions needs more structure; the person who has few questions needs less structure.

Make the transition from problem-solver to coach.

You must also recognize this human drive to problem solve in yourself if you are to make the critical transition from problem-solver to coach that every effective manager must make.

As a manager, your job is to mentor, coach and develop people so they are adequately prepared and supported to do the work on their own. Turning off the impulse to simply provide answers when your employees come to you for help isn’t easy, but you must learn to do it. When you always provide answers, you’re doing long-term damage to the person, your company and yourself.

First, you’re reinforcing the person’s lack of confidence in their own problem-solving ability. Second, you’re missing an opportunity to teach your people to problem-solve, which will make them better employees and keep your management pipeline filled with good candidates. And finally, you’re creating more work for yourself, teaching your people to continue to come to you for answers instead of trying to solve the problems on their own.

Instead of providing answers, ask questions. Asking good questions is a great way to help people learn to problem solve. This Socratic method of coaching gives people the opportunity to discover the answers for themselves, creating sustainable learning that will serve them much longer and better than any solution you simply give them, no matter how ingenious it may be.

Focus on what’s working.

As managers learn to make the transition from doing to coaching, it’s natural to focus on what’s not working. Managers who intervene only when there’s a problem are often viewed negatively by their people, who begin to fear every conversation with them. Brain chemistry research shows that this sense of fear of criticism actually triggers the fight or flight response, bathing the brain in fear hormones that increase defensive behavior and actually inhibit learning. And if you only take time to talk to your employees when something’s wrong, chances are they’ll be defensive and withholding — decreasing the opportunity you’ll find out what you need to know about the job or the person.

To avoid this all-too-common scenario, you must instead intentionally make time to focus on what is working. One way to do this is to schedule regular meetings with your people where they are invited to report their successes. Quite the opposite of the scenario where you only show up to talk about problems, this structured time together will begin to make your people see time with you as a positive experience and something to look forward to, motivating them to achieve even more.

And of course, in the process of learning what’s working, you’ll inevitably learn about what’s not working. But because the interaction starts with attention on what the person is doing right, you’ve created an atmosphere where people are open to discussion and learning can definitely take place.

BONUS: When you create time for regular positive interactions between management and employees, you also further contribute to the sense of trust between you and your people, which as stated earlier in this article, is critical to high performance among teams and organizations.

Recognize people through responsibility and advancement.

In addition to making time to let people tout their own achievements to you, public recognition is also necessary to extend that achievement into a feeling of responsibility and accountability in the workplace. When people are publicly recognized for a job well done, they experience that sense of achievement all over again, which makes them eager to get back to work and tackle the next problem even more skillfully.

Appropriate recognition for good performance can and should include the awarding of more responsibility and advancement within the company. Using responsibility and advancement as recognition is good for the employee, the manager and the whole organization.

The timing of recognition is important too, so don’t wait for the annual awards banquet. Making public recognition spontaneous and frequent will motivate everyone by creating an environment that supports and encourages ongoing learning, achievement and accountability by all.

To truly motivate your people to perform their best, you must provide a work environment that provides achievement, recognition, meaningful work, advancement and growth. You can start to create this work environment by trying out the following six suggestions. First, make sure you understand the difference between motivation and reward. You’ll make better decisions on how to do both. Second, recognize that when people feel ownership of their work, they are more likely to own the problems that occur and take on the daily task of finding solutions much more enthusiastically. Third, no matter how busy you are, keep in mind that taking time to get to know your people and what they need at work will pay off big in the long run. Fourth, remember that your job is to coach, mentor and develop your people, not to do their work for them. Fifth, make time each week to focus on what’s working. And finally, publicly recognize people frequently on their performance, awarding responsibility and advancing them up in the organization as soon as they’ve demonstrated that they can do it.

by Brent Filson

Just as we’re supposed to use only a fraction of our brains’ capabilities, so I’m convinced, working with businesses in major industries, that people get just a fraction of the results they’re capable of.

Few businesses come close to achieving their potential results.
That’s because businesses are not marketing from the heart. When I speak of the heart, I speak of that intuitive, emotional, feeling aspect of all of us.

No question: Emotion drives business success. Clearly, people in business have to be skilled and knowledgable about products, processes, and programs. But simply having rational knowledge is not enough to get big increases in results. We must have emotional knowledge too.

A fundamental truth of human motivation is that we define ourselves in terms of our emotions. Descartes didn’t quite have it right: it’s not, “I think therefore I am; it’s really, “I feel therefore I am”.

Yet most marketing strategies and programs focus on the rational — market share, target identification and validation, and customer needs analysis — and ignore the emotional. In doing so, such strategies ignore great opportunities.

To achieve quantum leaps in results that most businesses are capable of, let’s recognize that marketing as we know it has come to an end.

Such marketing served companies in relatively stable economies when businesses were like large ships, with captains giving orders to the mates, the mates to crews. But today businesses are in white-water canoeing races.

In rapidly changing markets, exclusively rational marketing can’t compete well.

What will replace marketing? To answer that, let’s understand what marketing is all about. It’s about one thing, growth. Growth happens through strategy and action.

Today’s marketing activities are superficially linked to strategy and have little to do with action. The result: businesses rattle along not hitting on all cylinders.

Strategy: We grow in business or ultimately die. So it behooves each business to have a strategy for growth.

We might develop a growth strategy. It might seem convincing on paper. It might interest security analysts. It might brighten an annual report. But unless people believe it passionately, wake up in the morning motivated by it, spend each day exciting others about it, see it as a key stimulant of their life, and zealously realize it in their work activities, then it is merely a recitation of dry postulates. It can only realize partial results.

When strategies resonate with people’s heartfelt needs, great things happen. History is replete with such strategies: Themistocles’ naval strategy for defeating the Persians; the Pilgrim’s strategy of attaining religious freedom by sailing to the New World; Jefferson’s strategy for realizing an America bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific; NASA’s strategy for putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, etc. And the history of business has its examples too: Ford Motor Company of the second decade of this century; IBM of the 1950s, Apple of the early 1980s.

There are three ways to get a motivational growth-strategy.
First, link it to what people feel strongly about.

Many leaders wrongly believe that just because they have taken the trouble to develop a marketing strategy, that strategy automatically excites others.

If you don’t root your strategy in the fervent convictions of employees and customers, you don’t have a motivational growth-strategy.

Steve Jobs’ strategy for providing a powerful, versatile computer into the hands of average people around the world, fired the imaginations and the ardent actions of his colleagues and, ultimately, customers.

Second, raise the stakes. Follow Emerson’s dictum: “Hitch your wagon to a star.” Distinguish between vision and motivational growth-strategy. A vision is the star. The strategy is how you will hitch your wagon to it. When people’s vision and strategy provide a higher purpose in their lives, their motivation is of a higher order.

Steve Jobs convinced John Scully to leave a high-level, fast-track position at PepsiCo and commit himself to the uncertainties of working at Apple by asking: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?”
Third, make the strategy simple and short. Growth can be complicated, but people’s needs are simple.

Bill Gates wrote a strategy in longhand on a single sheet of paper when he founded Microsoft. He still has possession of that paper and is still following that strategy.

The processes of putting that strategy into action may take comprehensive descriptions. Still, those descriptions should flow from simple, brief motivational elements.

Action: Motivational growth-strategies aren’t plans, they’re action. Without people taking action, results can’t happen.

Rational marketing stumbles because leaders often view such marketing as some kind of magic dust that, sprinkled out, changes behavior. But only motivated people change their behavior.

In trying to realize marketing plans, top leaders often get jammed up in middle-manager meatgrinders. Those leaders can usually persuade their direct reports to participate in the changes.

However, the far more important task is to persuade middle-managers to lead change. Because traditional marketing ignores the emotional needs of middle-managers, needs that frequently illuminate ways to increase results, those managers can and will make mincemeat of even the best-intended, rationally consistent, and brilliantly-conceived marketing strategy.

Hey, this ain’t Black Hole physics! Getting results is simply about strategy and action: making a simple, powerful motivational growth-strategy happen in the many, little actions taken daily by skilled, motivated people.

Because motivational growth-strategies flow out of the hearts of people, rather than rain down from above, those strategies get those people championing actions that get big results.

The end of marketing is the beginning of success that can only now be dimly imagined.

by Tammy Embrich

Motivation is just about the most important element for success in any work at home business. If you don’t posses this key element with your business or your websites, then it’s very unlikely that you will succeed.

Granted, it is difficult to stay motivated at all times…and we all go through low valleys with our home businesses. But it’s through these valleys that we grow and learn from our mistakes.

How do you stay motivated and focused?

There are a number of things that you can do to accomplish this…

Marketing Ideas:

When promoting your business or website, always try and conjure up fresh marketing techniques/methods. If something hasn’t been working for you, then move onto something new. The ideas are literally endless with marketing. And the most important thing…there are tons of free promotion out there for the taking. Remember, you don’t have to pay for advertising in order for it to be effective. It could be…networking on message forums, exchanging links with other business owners/webmasters, article marketing, getting listed in directories, ezine ads, signature advertising, and others. But, that’s a whole other article topic there. The idea is to always strive for fresh marketing ideas. Now, we can’t neglect the tried and true “word of mouth.” Quite effective, give it a try!

Purchase New Products For Your Business:

Now, we all know that in order for you to be a success with your business, you have to know your products and have a passion for them. You have to love the products you are selling! The better you know your products and love them, the more likely it will be that you will keep getting the sales. What better reason to purchase some of your favorite, featured, new products that are in stock? Show them off! If it’s makeup, jewelry, or what have you…take them with you wherever you go. Show the new products off to your friends and family. Be enthusiastic about your products!

The same goes with a website. If you are not a home business representative for a company, but own a website…tweak your website to your liking. Make it something you love and can be proud of! If you love your website, then you will love showing it off and promoting it. If you find yourself getting bored with it or it has become outdated, change it…update it! Whether it be content, color, theme, whatever. Tweak it until you really love it. It’s also a good idea to make your website as appealing as you can for your target audience.

Change Your Atmosphere:

Now this one may sound silly to some…but this has worked for me. If you have a particular room for an office, move the furniture around if feasible…If it is a very small room, then you won’t have many options as to moving things around. But you can change colors or themes for your office. What colors or themes make you feel most creative? What colors or themes make you feel happy? What colors or themes make you feel most productive? It’s something to think about. Purchase a new day/month/year planner. Perhpas a new calendar or a new writing notebook.

Exercise…Take A Break:
Exercise is great for both the mind and body! It’s also a great way to clear the mind when you feel overworked or stressed out. When you find yourself not in motivation mode and are lacking in that much needed gusto…take a brisk walk to clear the mind. You may be surprised at what happens. Most of the time when I take a break from my time online, whether it be a walk, lunchbreak, or just watching some TV…I come back refreshed, and even sometimes, with some new ideas.

Stay In Contact With Your Customers:

Always stay in touch with your customers. Call them up. Check to see if they are satisfied with the products they purchased. Are they enjoying the products? Offer some friendly advice. This could also lead into an additional sale for you…and that always creates more motivation! Try and get to know your customers and even establish a new friendship.

Network With Other Business Owners Or Webmasters:

If you haven’t already, join some home business or work at home message forums and get to know and network with others. Use your signature on these forums. This will not only get your business out there, but you will also find useful information on most of them. Make sure you always read the rules of the forum first though. Ask questions, offer advice on things you are knowledgeable about. Make friends and have fun.

Music:

If you’re a music lover, have some soft music playing while you are working. This isn’t for everyone though. Some people prefer not to have music playing and want it quiet. It’s all in what you like or prefer. And for some people, music can give that much needed extra push in getting started with the work day. Try it sometime. You might be pleasantly surprised.

The idea here is to do everything you can to remain focused, motivated, and even challenged for being the best you can be at moving forward with your business. Do some research and look up more motivation articles and tips. Motivation is the key to success.

by Alan J. Zell, Ambassador of Selling

A problem every business faces is where to find good salespeople. It has plagued businesses ever since salespeople were “invented.” Today, some firms use a “profile of successful salespeople” approach. They figure that if they can identify those attributes successful salespeople have, employees with the same attributes will become good and, hopefully, great salespeople. Some firms look for people with a personality that fits a format: that is, “A” types, “B” types, etc.

Seldom trying to fit a salesperson into a mold works. There is not one personality type that insures great selling, nor is there one resource for finding good salespeople. Every resource has its positive and negative aspects. When looking for salespeople, you should look at the following nine resources:

1. FROM WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION: Look right under your own nose; those already in other departments in the firm. They might be working in the warehouse, stockroom, receiving, shipping, or on the technical staff.

   Positive: They are already familiar and comfortable with your firm’s products and services and they will understand how their former job fits into the selling picture. When the opportunity arises, they will know, because of their familiarity with the internal workings of the firm, what changes can be made so the sale can be made.

   Negative: Many people went into their jobs so they wouldn’t have to sell. It may be difficult for them to become comfortable with the idea that they can sell.

2. FROM THE COMPETITION: either locally or from another area.

   Positive: The advantage is that they know already the competition, their strengths, and more important now, their weaknesses.

   Negative: It is often hard for the new person to adapt to a new way of doing business. Also, the current staff may have a hard time accepting “the enemy” into the organization.

3. FROM SUPPLIERS: Those who have been selling your firm the things that make up your products and services.

   Positive: They have a background in the industry, its problems, and customers.

   Negative: They will have to be taught a mew way of doing business and how products or services are used by your firm’s customers.

4. FROM OTHER INDUSTRIES:

   Positive: They will not have to be retrained in selling.

   Negative: If they are not able to transfer their selling skills, they must be un-trained and retrained in their new employers methods of selling. It will take time for them to become familiar with your firm’s products and services, the way your business operates, and what your customers have been buying, talking about, and looking for.

5. THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER SOLD BEFORE:

   Positive: The advantage is they can train them the way you want.
   
   Negative: You have to!

6. FROM YOUR FIRM’S CUSTOMERS: current or past.
   
   Positive: They understand your firm’s products and services from the customers’ points of view. Most likely they will be familiar with the competition’s products and services.
   
   Negative: They may have a hard time gaining the confidence of their former competitors — your firm’s current and prospective customers.
7. FROM STAFF’S RELATIVES AND FRIENDS:

   Positive: Your firm is seen in a positive light because your staff has, most likely, been telling their family and friends who are prospective employees the positive aspects of working for you. In addition, many people like the idea that they will be working with people they know.
   
   Negative: If either employee has to be disciplined or another problem arises, you have to understand that both the problem employee and their relative or friend will be reacting to management’s actions.

8. FROM FAMILY AND FRIENDS:
   
   Positive: There is an ongoing rapport that often energizes the working relationship.
   
   Negative: Friendships and families have broken up due to strife in the workplace.
9. FROM THE CURRENT SALES STAFF: Those your firm has a lot of money tied up in already.
   
   Positive: It costs a lot less to retrain and reassign job
   responsibilities than it does to try to train new people. Sometimes the devil one knows has the potential to be far better than the devil one doesn’t know.

   Negative: You may find that your current staff’s imperfections may be due to your lack of providing affordable products and services, training, sales tools, supervision, and guidance.

No matter which of these nine resources you use, salespeople can only be as good as your firm and its products or services will allow, what tools they are given to work with, and the extent of customers’ wants, needs, and ability to buy.

Building a perfect salesperson, like building a perfect building, is an impossible dream. Great salespeople, like great buildings, can be built. They will be considered great when they meet customers’ expectations. Only then will salespeople meet the firm’s expectations.

Great salespeople, like great buildings, are not built in a day, three days, three weeks, three months. Great salespeople and great buildings are the result of many years of continuous training by great teachers.

by Alan J. Zell, Ambassador of Selling

Business turns from being very “up:” to being very “down.” Any business that has been around for a few years experiences the ebb and flow of the economy. It is when business is down that businesses find the road is not so smooth. If a firm is feeling a pinch, most likely, their customers’ businesses are feeling the same downturn. Is there a solution? Yes, there is!

In a positive business climate purchases will sometimes be made of things they might need in addition to what they do need. When times are tight they will only want to buy what they need at the moment. The fact that customers are buying less is not all bad. An empty warehouse, the saying goes, leaves room for goods to be added; a full warehouse rarely has any room.

There are several ways to promote business. The first way that usually comes to mind is to run a price promotion. It’s easy to do and often fills the immediate need. Long range, it may hurt. This does not mean that price promotions are all bad. They are often good: close outs and special purchases, as examples, will help both the supplier and the customer. Promoting by price may stimulate business, but if the customer hasn’t used up the special priced goods they bought, when it comes time to sell them at regular price, the customer won’t buy anything. In addition, the low price becomes the only price.

In tough times, cash flow is even more difficult to maintain than in good times. It is possible the reason customers aren’t ordering is due to lack of cash flow. A deferred or extended payment plan may be the answer for them.

Some companies will exchange goods on a 2, 3, or 4-to-1 basis so they could get their better selling or new merchandise into their customers’ hands. When I was a buyer, I was willing to take 10% less than my cost on what I was trading back so that I could get the better selling or new items. It was a case of “the best items sell first” and what I had in stock were the slower-selling items so it paid me to get the better selling items in without having the slower selling ones sitting on the shelf.

In one trade-back program, my vendor left the slower-selling goods on consignment after giving us the credit toward the new order. It was cheaper for them to have the goods in my basement than having to handle them again. Besides, if the goods were still in my possession, there was a better chance for me to sell some of them. Surprisingly, it didn’t take very long for us to move the old goods between what we sold and then sending, at our supplier’s instructions, the remainder to their other customers.

As a vendor, helping customers over the “hump” may be a way of increasing business not only during slow times but may have a very positive effect when times get better.

The answer may be as simple as creating new methods of advertising the product. All too often, “standard” goods are not looked upon as exciting. They were exciting when they were new, so why not look at them as if they were new? Maybe they haven’t been advertised for a long time. An ad, a poster, a new display unit, new boxes or labels, ideas of new ways of use, are some of the methods that could be used to boost sales.

What is important is that you are willing to do something to get things moving. More important, any of these methods would be telling your staff and your customers that you are not sitting back and crying in your beer. Instead, you are ordering “beer on the house for everyone!”

by Gareth Morgan

The more you understand about your customers, prospects and the marketplace you operate in the more likely you are to succeed. This is where market research helps. While it does not guarantee success it is a key component of any successful business.

Market research can help maximise customer satisfaction, profits, competitive advantages and help to identify the risks to your business. It can help you to build customer loyalty, identify new opportunities, and to identify and reduce business risks.

You may already be undertaking market research. Every time you talk to a customer or a supplier you are doing some form of research. Sometimes, however, you need to formalise this process. Market research is the collection and analysing of information about people, markets and organisations. The aim is to help you make better more informed decisions for your business.

Traditionally market research is divided into quantitative (numerical) and qualitative research. Quantitative can be collected by postal surveys, telephone surveys and face-to-face interviews etc. Qualitative data is about discovering how people feel about a topic or subject. Typically this uses interviews and focus groups to find out more about customers and their views.

Then just to complete the picture there is primary and secondary data. Primary is firsthand information. When you survey your customers you are gathering information straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. It is more time consuming and costly but can also be the most useful because it is specific to your business. Secondary data is information that has already been collected by someone else. Market research organisations like Mintel. Keynote etc undertake many market studies, the government has a mass of information on population and expenditure on products, companies house has the accounts of registered companies, even telephone books are a secondary data source.

What should you research?

Your market: What is the total market size by sector both in the UK and overseas? What seasonal or fashion factors influence the market? Where are the big players? What are the trends?

Your environment: This is about the political, social and economic factors that influence your market; everything from a change in interest rates, the closure of a local business, to new government regulations can affect your business.

Your competition: Who are they and what are their services? What marketing activities do they use? What is their pricing policy? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Where is their appeal? Where do you have a competitive advantage? Also check out their financial performance.

Your product: Who uses? How often do they purchase? Is your product branded? What stage of the product life cycle is it at? Is your pricing and trading policy right? What are the returns? What new products are planned? How do they fit in with existing products? How can existing products be improved?

Your customers: How many are there? Where are they? What is their profile? What are their needs? How can you reach them?

Your performance: Regularly ask customers for their feedback on your performance. What do they like/dislike? What could you improve? Would they recommend you?

Avoid these common pitfalls

I don’t need research. I know everything. Typical comments from business owners who go on to say things like I have spent years in the industry, I know my customers. This is dangerous, as you have preconceived ideas and perceptions about your customers and their needs. You need to test your assumptions and remember the market and customer expectations are always changing.

“I like it.” Some times inventors and business owners get stuck on an idea because it appeals to them. You need to be careful when developing new products and services that they compliment what you already do and match the profile of your customers. Similarly you need market research to identify if there are enough customers for your product.

Using only secondary research. The published studies of your market place are useful and widely available from the Internet and libraries. They can only go so far and primary research with your customers can help you more effectively target customers and your marketing activities.
Friends and family. Asking people close to you for their opinion is fraught with danger. They will not want to hurt your feelings. Talk to real prospects and customers.

Try casually showing your product to people. Do they say “wow”. If so tell them you have one in your car available now, do they get their wallets out?

Market Research can help position your business for success. It can help you save time and money on ideas that will not work to concentrate on those that will. Market Research is not a one-off activity only to be used when developing new products or services it should be a key part of the marketing plan for your business.

For personal help to research your business or new product idea contact me on 01226 290288 or email Gareth@gapmanagement.co.uk