According to the 2023 Gallup Global Workplace Report, 67% of employees in Australia and NZ reported 'quiet quitting.'

Quiet quitting is a phenomenon that describes employees disengaging from their work and organisation’s goals without expressing their dissatisfaction. As businesses globally recover from COVID and navigate rising operating costs, quiet quitting is increasingly prevalent, significantly impacting overall business performance.

Employees are facing heightened pressure to perform with fewer resources, leading to longer working hours with no relief in sight.

Anecdotally, people in general are reporting that 2023 has been a particularly tough year. They’re saying that it’s gone by far too fast, and they don’t know what they’ve achieved this year, although they seemed to be working harder and longer hours. The global state of affairs compounds these challenges.

As a business owner or team member, it's crucial to reflect on your feelings.

Are you...

Do you remember the end of last  year when you were  desperate for a break. Then you went away to relax, reset, reflect, and were ready to come back to work in January with fresh eyes and motivation for the new year. You had meetings, you planned the year, the goals, the purpose, everyone was relaxed and committed with enthusiasm. Then, by the end of February, early March, somehow we all fell back into our old habits and started working frantically again with no plan, just doing for the sake of doing. Have you wondered how that happened? 

This is not unique to you or your team. We see this in most organisations. People tend to revert to working harder, not smarter, our old paradigms take over, and we start to operate  from a place of fear. We are creatures of habit and 96 to 98 percent of our behaviour is on autopilot.  Our brains are designed that way to help us conserve energy,  so staying in our comfort zone and away from change is what we...

Welcome to the busy paradigm! Entering March, most people have forgotten their new year's resolutions, those promises they made themselves back in late December. We are back on autopilot, back to the routine of being really busy, protecting ourselves, back to the same paradigm, same emotions, feelings, actions and results. Our brains are designed to get us back into that loop because that's where supposed safety is. It's actually not safe at all, from a health perspective it's one of the worst places to be.

From a young age, we have been taught that you need to work really hard to get results. Unfortunately, common culture moulds us to believe that the more occupied we are, the more productive we become, and the more value we hold. Because of this, we have learned to value ourselves according to how “productive” we are.

The quest for productivity has become one of the longest lasting and most influential culture trends, where it seems that everything is...

Following my two articles “Mindset of a successful sales team” and “Importance of planning in sales” published in 2019, I felt the necessity to complement those two topics with one more that is just as critical to your success in sales.

Today we will focus on, and learn together, how you can improve your sales outcomes. I have been working with sales teams and professionals for many years to help them grow exponentially beyond their expectations and reach higher levels of success in their business and careers.

The sales profession is evolving every day. In the blink of an eye, new competitors emerge, copies of your products or service start competing with you, market dynamics change, new government regulations can be introduced, consumer buying behaviour continues to evolve and only the best will win in the market place.

No matter what industry you are in, what worked well in 2015 may not be good enough today. This is no time for trial and error or merely...

No. A word that novice sales people don’t like to hear. Most sales people enter into a sales conversation fearing the word. 

• What if I spend two hours presenting, and the client doesn’t like what I have?
• What if they don’t sign up with me today?
•  What if they say NO?

Most sales people’s fear of rejection is greater than the actual rejection. This fear can immobilise them and affect their motivation and performance. I have seen many sales people avoid cold calling, not turn up to calls, or avoid the sales conversation even when they do turn up, because of this one fear alone.

It makes no logical sense and can be crippling. Where do these behaviours and this fear stem from? Very simply, we don’t understand the fear and why it is showing up. Our fear of rejection is part of our primal instinct. We live in a 2020 body and world with primal instincts that send messages to the heart and mind constantly as a mechanism to...

What do you think makes a person successful in sales? Most people I speak to will say, it is the person’s ability to engage with customers and bring them on the journey of exploring their needs and then delivering to those needs. Admittedly, this is a very important factor. No argument there.  What many of us forget, is the step before all of this.  We forget that planning, once the goal is established, is the most crucial step. No matter which sales sector you are in, having a clear sales plan for execution is vital.

If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail, as the old adage would say. I recently was listening to an incredible presentation that likened the lack of planning to that of a ship in the harbour with no clear destination.  A ship with no clear destination will continue to circle around the harbour in a figure 8. And that’s what most salespeople do without the right strategy plan as well as call/territory plan.

 A sales plan allows you to...