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How Hate Takes Over

Steve Keating 9 Comments

“No one has ever gained a thing by hating.” 

That was a tweet I sent out last week. It was the truth as I saw it and I didn’t think that there could possibly be any controversy over it at all. It was “harmless” and a simple fact.

Boy, oh boy, oh boy was I wrong! 

To be sure, the majority of people who RT’d or commented on the tweet agreed with it but it was not a very big majority. I was shocked by the number of people who disagreed with it, some vehemently.

Some said I was just naive, they said that some of the most successful people in the world got that way by hating. They said their hatred “allowed” them to basically violate any law or any societal norm for their own purposes. Hatred was how they “gained” an advantage over people who didn’t hate.

As surprised as I was at the responses I was most surprised by the person several people held up as an example of “successful” hating. 

Adolph Hitler. 

They listed his “accomplishments” and said they could only have been “achieved” by hating. When I pointed out that he killed millions and then eventually killed himself two people said his suicide was his greatest accomplishment. They said he “got to” choose when and how he died and took that choice away from the allies. One person said only people who truly love themselves could kill themselves.

The responses came from all around the world but I was surprised by how many of these “Hitler” responses came from Europe. How soon people forget? 

One woman from the UK said that “Hitler had made Germany the greatest world power ever” and the Americans “ruined” it by destroying Europe. Another person from France said that Hitler didn’t die at all, his “death” was just American propaganda and that Hitler is STILL alive today. (I assume he’s working as a mechanic in Detroit with his friend Elvis Presley.)

I just started blocking some of these people and eventually gave up and turned Twitter off. I didn’t block them for disagreeing with me, I blocked them because I refuse to let hate win. I refuse to let hate take over my timeline. I refuse to let hate take over anything.

(I am going to violate a basic Human Relations Principle here but this must be said) To the people who think they have something to gain by hating, let me say this: YOU ARE WRONG! Believing that there is ANYTHING to be gained by hating allows hate a place in your life. That is how hate takes over!

Hate destroys. Hate destroys and that is all it does. It destroys families. It destroys friendships. It destroys countries. It destroys companies and teams. 

Most of all, hate destroys people. 

If you have bought into the idea that something good comes from hate then get rid of that idea now. Get rid of it before it gets rid of you. Get rid of it before it costs you valuable relationships and maybe even family members. Get rid of it before it costs you your self-respect. 

Haters ALWAYS lose more than the hated. It may not appear that way at first, it may take some time for hate to destroy but destroy it will.

Only you can keep yourself from becoming hate’s victim. It’s a decision you must make. Make it today, make it tomorrow and make it everyday.

The Dangers of Procrastinating

Steve Keating 6 Comments

The most successful people seldom procrastinate. If something needs to be done today then today is the day they will do it.

Procrastinators tend to work from behind, always trying to catch up because of the too many times they did the easy thing rather than the necessary thing. Successful people have developed the skills and discipline required to avoid procrastinating and because of that they tend to work from the front. They always look to be a step ahead and because of that they accomplish more with less stress on their lives.

Think about that for a minute. Procrastinators accomplish less and have more stress. People who don’t procrastinate accomplish more and have less stress. 

So why would anyone procrastinate? I guess we all have our individual reasons. I can tell you I seldom put off doing the things I like or the easy things in life. It’s the challenging stuff, often the most important stuff, that I put off.

But I’ve found ways to limit my procrastinating. Here is a couple of ideas that might help you do the same:

Set goals that matter! It’s amazing what the average person can accomplish when they really want something. It’s almost a certainty that if you don’t have goals that matter to you then you are not as productive as you could be. You most likely use procrastination to keep yourself from doing things that matter to other people but not to you. 

Balance is a key to avoiding procrastinating. Without balance in your life the hard jobs get harder. Work can only “matter” for so long and if you’re only working because you have to work then the hard jobs soon become nearly impossible. So set goals in all areas of your life, not only work related areas.

Reward Yourself! When you accomplish something worthwhile, especially something challenging that you may have been putting off, then reward yourself. Give yourself a little treat, just make sure that the “little treat” doesn’t include putting off another challenging task.

The most successful people procrastinate far less then the average person.  They do the hard jobs first. In fact, they do the hardest job, the thing they least want to do, before they do anything else. They subscribe to Brian Tracy’s theory that once you accomplish the hard job, everything else becomes easier to do. 

If, at any particular point in time, you’re not doing the most productive thing you can be doing then you’re not doing the thing you should be doing. You might just be procrastinating.

Success waits for no one. If you can do “it” today, then make today the day you do “it.” 

Do You Do the Waffle?

Steve Keating 8 Comments

Effective use of language is the start of effective communication. While there are additional tools like our eyes, heart and experience that we use to communicate; it all really begins with the language or words that we use.  How well a person communicates will often determine their level of success. You can have the greatest idea in the world but if you can’t find a way to communicate it to others it will likely never get off the ground. 

Successful people know how to talk with their audiences when giving presentations. Even if it’s a one-on-one meeting, you are still giving a presentation, and the same rules apply as if the meeting was a large keynote before hundreds of people.

All too often, our speaking skills distort our images as capable, knowledgeable professionals. We hem and haw, trying to find the right word. We may even discount ourselves and our ideas without realizing it, or we might unknowingly offend others with our language. Descriptive, simple language and short sentences are best.

One key to effectively using your language, whether it’s English, French, German or Pirahã, is to avoid the use of waffle words.

Certain expressions, phrases and words can rob people of their “communication power.” These “Waffle Words” should be avoided. Verbal communication shortcomings can detract from your confidence, authority and professionalism. A few examples of waffle words are:

“I guess”, “I hope”, “I think”, “Maybe”, “Sort of”, “Kind of” and “Probably” 

It’s pretty easy to get into the bad habit of inserting these waffle words into our sentences as “filler.” If you pay attention to what you’re really saying you may be surprised how often you use these Waffle Words. 

Instead of saying these things out of habit, be aware of what you say and create new, more effective habits when you speak. 

Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit.” 

Make sure your habits are good ones.

Are you a Success?

Steve Keating 8 Comments

Isn’t that an interesting question! Of course, that question begs another one; if you’re not a success then are you a failure? 

Have you ever considered exactly what it is that makes someone a failure? When do they cross the line from “struggling” to actually being a true failure? 

There are a lot of easy answers to that question. I see the easy answers to that question in motivational quotes all over the web, some of the quotes even come from me. Wherever they come from they all have the same “theme,” – “you only really fail when you fail to try again.”

I suppose that must be true, it’s said by so many, so often, that it must be true. Right?

Well what if it’s not true? 

Maybe in fact, it’s okay to not try again. Maybe the “never give up” and “never quit” mantras expressed so often are the very thing that leads people to believe they are failures. 

I believe that nothing is impossible but I know for a fact that some things are impossible for me. I could try forever and still never be able to dunk a basketball. I could live to be a thousand and never throw a perfect game in baseball. I know those are kind of over the top examples but sometimes we just have to know our limitations. 

Let’s be clear on this, not knowing our limitations is not what really leads to failure. What really leads to failure is not knowing our strengths. When we don’t know our strengths we potentially keep “trying” to succeed at things outside our strength zones. When we do that long enough and often enough we start to think of ourselves as failures. 

We’re not of course, we’re just applying ourselves in the wrong way, to the wrong things. It’s hard to say definitively that applying your energies to areas of your life that are not your strengths will lead to failure but this much does seem certain: it will not lead to success.

So, back to the original question; are you a success?  

That’s really a very personal question and one that you can only answer for yourself. Success means different things for different people and it’s a mistake to let anyone else define success for you. There are certainly some “societal norms” which come into play; there are ethics involved as well. You can cheat to come in first but you cannot cheat and be a success. If your mom wouldn’t be proud of your “success” it probably doesn’t fit the concept of success as society defines it.

Your success will clearly be determined by what you do, everyone understands that. But… your success may also be determined by what you don’t do. Perhaps by what you quit! 

The moment that you  determine you’re expending efforts into an area of your life where you cannot succeed then the successful thing to do is quit. Don’t let others goad you into “pushing on,” they may well be trying to apply their definition of success to your life.   

So let go of the guilt of quitting. Make sure you don’t quit too early, success will certainly come with challenges but also be certain you don’t quit too late. 

Knowing your true strengths will help you know when to keep pushing and maybe when to not even begin!

Advice for New Salespeople

Steve Keating 9 Comments

I received a Direct Message on my Twitter account the other day asking for advice for new salespeople. Now I can be pretty concise but geez, advice for new salespeople in 140 characters is way beyond me.

Since communicating in more than those 140 characters is why I started this blog in the first place I figured I’d answer here. So here we go!

My first and best advice is once you’ve earned the right to ask for the order always, always, always ask for the order. It is amazing to me the huge percentage of sales presentations that end without the salespeople asking for the order. It’s a fact that professional salespeople tend to get what they ask for and they always ask for the order.

My next best advice is never ask for the order if you have not earned the right. Screwing up a sales presentation and being unprepared to represent yourself and your product makes you look like a hack. Asking for the order anyway is what gives salespeople the poor reputation that we often have.

Now the tough part. How do you earn the right to ask for the order? That question alone could fill up several blog posts.  Maybe I’ll write again on this topic, but for for now let’s see how I do with this one.

Earning the right to ask for the order involves preparing for the call. Call preparation is where the majority of salespeople fall short. When you’re not prepared for the call you fail to make a good first impression, you fail to ask the type of questions to generate interest on the part of your prospect and you make such a generic sales presentation that you often miss the mark completely.

If you’re going to succeed in sales then you need to prepare for success. Preparing begins by learning as much as possible about your prospect before you make the initial call. There is more information available to you today than ever before; a simple Google search can provide you with enough basic information to know at least a little something before you introduce yourself. If your first question to your customer is “So, what business are you in?” you can be certain you have failed in what is known as pre-approach.

Next, do a little strategizing to determine what information you’ll need from your customer to help them see the value in your product or service. Determine the questions you’ll use to uncover that information. This step of the sales process, the information gathering part, is called many things by various sales training types but whatever you call it, this is the part where most salespeople lose the deal. They simply don’t have enough information about their prospect to know what they would buy and more importantly, why they would buy it.  Do not “wing” this part of the sales process, it is where business is won and lost.

Next, learn everything you possibly can about your products and the products offered by your competition. You’ll never present all of it to a prospect but knowing it allows you to piece together a presentation that “fits” with what your prospect told you during your information gathering step. If you do this well it will look like your product was made for that particular customer. If you’ve found the right prospect and selected the right product not only will it look like it, it will actually be true.

Once you’ve asked the right questions, hopefully better questions than any unprepared salesperson could ever ask, and once you’ve professionally presented your product (the right product for that particular customer) then and only then have you earned the right to ask for the order.

If you’ve earned the right and don’t ask for the order, for any reason, then you’ll likely struggle in sales as long as that’s your chosen profession. The most successful salespeople are fearless about asking for the order once they have earned the right.

If you’re going to succeed in sales you had best find your own fearless and use it everyday!

I could go on and on with advice for new and experienced salespeople alike but let me close like this:

Sales is an honorable profession if YOU make it one. There are plenty of things you can’t control about sales but you can always control yourself. You can decide how professional you will be, you can decide how honest you will be and you can decide if you’re only in it for the money or if money is just part of it.

Sales is either one of the easiest lower paying jobs in the world or one of the most challenging highest paid professions in the world. You get to decide which one it will be for yourself each and everyday!

What Do You Mean, Urgent?

Steve Keating 3 Comments

ur·gent 

Function: adjective 

1 a : calling for immediate attention : PRESSING <urgent appeals> b : conveying a sense of urgency

2 : urging insistently : IMPORTUNATE

– ur·gent·ly adverb

Well, there is the definition from Webster’s.  I think I like the first one, but the second one isn’t too bad either.

I guess it really doesn’t really matter which one we prefer as long as we have one of these definitions that we can embrace as our own. 

Now when I say embrace I mean EMBRACE!  Really latch on to it and live the meaning of urgent, live it through our words and actions every single day.  I remember attending a Dale Carnegie™ Sales Conference about 18 years ago when one of the presenters was asked about his opinion on the most serious threat facing professional salespeople at the time.  I think his answer applies more today than it did at the time: a lack of urgency. 

He believes, and I agree, that salespeople who go about their business as though a deal could wait another day are doomed to a career filled with limited successes and missed opportunities. 

Some salespeople lack a sense of urgency, urgency regarding following up on a request for information, urgency to return a phone call, urgency to make that one additional sales call a day and urgency to do the things they know would make a difference. These are the woulda, coulda, shoulda salespeople. They lament the poor business climate which the salespeople with a sense of urgency attack, maximizing the market and reaping the rewards.

Which one are you?  Do you have that sense of urgency?  Or, do you “leave a little business for tomorrow?”  If you’re a woulda, coulda, shoulda, you better hope your competition is too!  As of August 1st, there are barely 100 sales days left in 2013. You best get a move on. 

Now, go help a customer reach their goals and sell something, it’s urgent!

Do This to Succeed!

Steve Keating 6 Comments

Successful people don’t commit to do more than they know they can do. They manage the events of their day with an eye towards always doing what they say they will do.

They don’t over-promise and under-deliver. In fact, just the opposite is true; they either do exactly what they say they will or they do just a bit more.

It is no coincidence that the most successful people also make the best use of their time. They are incessant planners and plan for everything, they even have a plan to manage the unplanned. They leave an opening in their calendar from time to time because their experience has taught them to expect the unexpected.

Less experienced, and less successful people tend to think that filling every opening in their calendar will somehow push them towards success. What it actually pushes most people towards is failure and disappointment when they realize they will not accomplish everything they had hoped. Less successful people focus so much energy on being busy that the lose sight of how to be productive.

What the most successful people will tell you is that hope is not a plan. They don’t schedule things into their day “hoping” to get them done. They schedule things into their day that their plan tells them they can accomplish.

When you over-commit you set yourself up to disappoint, yourself for sure and maybe someone else as well. Never say you will and then hope you’ll find a way. Instead find a way and then commit with certainty.

One trait almost all successful people have in common is that once they commit then they are totally committed. There is no hoping required because they know they will complete the task, on time and as promised.

If you commit to doing more than you can you often end up doing less than you should. That happens when you’re so over-committed that you don’t know where to begin. Successful people do more, often much more because they seldom waste time worrying how “they will get it all done.”

Here’s the bottom line, less successful people promise, usually with the very best of intentions and often fall short. The most successful people commit and they don’t need the best of intentions because they have a plan.

If success is really what you want then never commit to something that you aren’t truly committed to do.