“Image Is Everything”

“Image is everything” has been a tag line for Canon Photographic equipment for many years. This is a great tag line for business in today’s environment as well, especially when your business is uniforms.

What is image and why is it so important in today’s marketplace?

Business professionals are under constant pressure to deliver value to their customers, especially as pricing and features become indistinguishable between different companies. Image is one of your many weapons to combat “sameness” and will enable you to separate you and your organization from the rest of the pack.

Image begins with how you present yourself and your organization to customers and extends to your ability to create interdependent relationships with your clients. A professional, personal presentation and the development of customer relationships based on trust, credibility, and rapport, will lead to the ability to identify value creation opportunities for your customers.

Appearance Matters

Often times, today’s casual business environment leads to a less professional approach to business. Appearance is often a forgotten tool to gain confidence with your customers. As professionals, the greatest compliment that we can pay a customer is to take the time to be prepared from an appearance perspective. Meeting each customer interaction with appropriate energy, a positive attitude, and a clean, polished appearance is a way to demonstrate to the customer, “I care about you and I am here to do business. This is not a social call.” Bringing the appropriate Energy, Attitude and Appearance into each sales call is an integral part of your mental preparation for your solution development, which is critical to your success.

A business casual environment does not translate to “Casual Business.” The passion and energy that you bring to customer relationships is the very starting point for accomplishment. Without energy and focus, a sales call can have the characteristics and sound that the Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore, might display: “It’s not much of a sales call, but it’s all I know and I’m sort of attached to it…”

Eeyore: “Hey Frank, how’s it going? Is there anything new happening at Worldwide Wallyball Incorporated? (and the classic) You don’t need anything, do you?”

Customer: “NO.”

Unfortunately, sales professionals don’t know they slipped into a rut with the customer by becoming too casual. Create your Image of Difference and avoid Casual Business by checking your Energy, Attitude and Appearance. These practices will extend your position with your customers and help you to create valuable interpersonal relationships based on trust, credibility and rapport.

Decide to Be Great!!!

For some people, it’s always winter—dark, cloudy, and mostly dismal.  Here we are in the emergence of Spring and regrettably, winter carries over into their Spring, Summer and Fall in every effort of life, work, passion and even the human condition. They spend more time worrying about what will go wrong in their lives. We have all had experiences in our lives of turning every silver lined cloud into a black cloud of DOOM!   rather than focusing on what they can do to ensure that everything goes right.   We are thinking about all that can go wrong and people are quick to remind us of just that phenomenon.
In this frame of mind, they we see ourselves as unwelcome guests inside our own lives and this carries over to our belief that we view everyone  as an adversary waiting to pounce on us at every turn in the road. If this is the way you view yourself, count on acting out these perceptions. It will be very difficult to feel one way and act another way.
Your attitudes are built and maintained by the messages you send yourself. Tell yourself, “I am confident, competent, prepared, and ready to make an outstanding contribution. I see myself as being helpful and capable of bringing unique value to my relationships.  I am going to be great today.”   These attitudes activate a different sense of being that makes you the first and only choice.

Greatness is not a random act by the forces or nature, but a conscious choice of success.  So as great friend of mine Geoff Packwood once said:  “Don’t let the bastards get you down”.  Go be great, and we will all enjoy the glow of your success.  Please check out more about our top notch custom sales training or fill out the poll questions below.

Are We Ants Marching?

By Jeff Seeley, CEO – Carew International

I recently did my annual 1300 mile corn tour from Cincinnati to Denver and was listening to an old Dave Matthews Band tune. “We wake up in the morning, do our teeth, bite to eat and we’re rolling… never changes a thing.  The week ends, the week begins.” (Dave Matthews, Ants Marching lyrics)  It hit me that as sales professionals, we can find ourselves in a dangerously uncomplicated routine.

Particularly during these recent economic woes, we have often put ourselves in the defensive mode, sticking to the safest route, and creating a routine that repeats itself day in and day out.  After all, it is tough to be creative and innovative when we’re struggling to keep our heads above water (keeping sales up, trying to meet customer demands) while keeping our heads below the firing line (making sure that we did not risk our position).  This approach can quickly become a dangerous habit… taking fewer chances, putting aside exciting ideas until better times or the right moment.

At one point in my journey, I found myself stranded at a BP station in the middle of Illinois.  During the 90 minutes I was stationed next to a gas pump, there was never a word exchanged between the other patrons and me; each person coming and going, doing the same thing, the same way and moving on.  Again, I recognized life imitating business.  As sales professionals, we can fall into this trap of putting our heads down and dutifully marching forward — doing the same things, the same way, same time, same words, same solutions and on and on without ever realizing we become almost robotic in our sales calls.

But if we do nothing more than sit on the fence trying to be in the right place, but more importantly, trying NOT to be a problem or create issues, we become more of a target than a valued provider.  And while this approach is not very inspiring for our customers, it plays right into the hands of our competitors.

We need to shake off the routine and add some excitement to our game.  The reality is that we cannot over indulge our customers in terms of the innovation and value we bring to them.  More and more evidence is coming forth that, while we are not quite out of the woods from the September ‘08 economic meltdown, we are moving closer to the upward trend.  Understanding that the bruises of recent economic troubles are disappearing, but not forgotten, there couldn’t be a better time to get customers focused on the positive.  It’s time to take some chances and explore what might be possible, and do so with a re-engaged energy, enthusiasm and love of the art of sales.  You can start by checking out our information about sales management training and the other popular training solutions that we have available.

(Apologies to Dave Matthews, lyrics from Ants Marching copyright 1994)

Jeff Seeley is CEO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights

Carew International is a leader in sales training and leadership development; specializing in comprehensive, proven training programs for sales, sales management and customer service excellence. For over 30 years, Carew has earned its reputation of delivering increased productivity and profitability to our valued clients world wide.

PERFECT STORM… OR IS IT?

By Jeff Seeley, CEO – Carew International

This weekend I happened to catch the movie “The Perfect Storm.” As I watched the trials and tribulations of Bill Tyne (George Clooney), it reminded me of the commentary I have heard over and over about the current economic issues being caused by a “perfect storm” of economic troubles, subprime mortgages, job loss, commercial lending, wall street greed, loss of manufacturing jobs (middle class), elimination of tradition economic supply and demand curves and on, and on, etc. etc. etc.

I started thinking… when there is a catastrophe, be it a real storm, economic or other, it is always billed as the “perfect storm.”  Think about Hurricane Katrina and the levies that failed.  It took the “perfect storm” to create the failure, as the levies had held through years of rain, storms etc., but none were evidently perfect until that fateful day.  Now we have contingencies in place to create levies that are “perfect storm” proof… at least until the next unforeseen perfect storm.

Business is no different.  We think we are living this perfect storm of business adversity.  And it is that mentality which is part of the problem.  The reality is we are in a storm, not unlike previous storms and future storms, more and less perfect.

When trouble occurs in our business or with our customers, it always feels like the perfect storm; whether it is a missed deadline or delivery, project delay, economic crisis, credit crunch or whatever it is in your world that caused failure.  In reality it probably was not a “perfect storm” as much as opportunities lost by not having our best game employed.  As the storm clouds gather, it is very easy to get caught in the perfect storm mentality, i.e., assume it is out of our control.  When things are out of our control, we feel justified to take our effort out of play as well.  It makes me consider how many times I have said “It is what it is,” as if to accept my fate.

“IT IS NOT WHAT IT IS”, it is “WHAT WE MAKE IT.”

“PERFECT STORM” indeed… as if there is this whirling, out of control force in the business world that rules us like the weather.  There are no perfect storms.  There are problems.  Challenges arise for which we have no contingency plan.  Our responsibility is to weather the storm, create a plan and execute the plan in a manner that meets and exceeds our customers’ expectations.  These actions are how we earn our leadership position with our customers and how creativity is fostered.

The CNBC’s of the world can talk about perfect business storms.  Successful businesses, sales professionals and enlightened leaders are putting products, new services, and investment in their people at the forefront of their strategies; not running for cover from the business storm of the century.  Buckle up and lean into the vortex; you and your business might just experience growth.  You can start getting on track by learning about providing customer service excellence through training your team to work at its best for the company.

Jeff Seeley is CEO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights

Carew International is a leader in sales training and leadership development; specializing in comprehensive, proven training programs for sales, sales management and customer service excellence. For over 30 years, Carew has earned its reputation of delivering increased productivity and profitability to our valued clients world wide.