The rule in business is to stay clear of religion and politics, because you risk alienating a chunk of your audience who hold different views to you. That is clear and sensible. What about other points of view (POV) however which are more related to business itself. This could be…

How good is your Mongolian? Well, I don’t know even one word in Mongolian, but I learnt a powerful lesson about presenting and communicating, when grappling with this language recently. I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie and most of my time is spent working here for Japanese clients…

The request has been made to give a talk on a certain subject. The date and time are fixed and now the work begins on the preparation. Here is how not to do it! Start with plundering previous slide decks for re-usable content and create new original content for this…

Self-awareness, self-belief, self-direction, self-discipline — there are a host of these “self” aspects to who we are and often related to who we are not. If you grew up with a silver spoon firmly in your mouth, went to expensive, exclusive private schools, extensively travelled abroad with your parents at…

In the good olde days we could have multiple public personas in sales. We could be the professional salesperson, but that image was entirely separate to our family life. We could enjoy boozy celebrations and getting off our face with relative anonymity. We could accumulate customer complaints and deal with…

For the last two and a half years business networking has been dead. The usual suspects who hosted live networking events migrated everything online, so you become totally restricted in your ability to create any relationship with the people attending the event. The hosts kick it off, the speaker speaks…

In our presentation training classes we ask the participants, “how long does it take for you to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time?”. How about you? How long do you take to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time…

The most common complaint we get from clients about their sales team is that they are too passive. They are great at farming, but not great at hunting, growing the size of the existing business and finding new buyers. “It is as if they were working for the buyer and…

Useless salespeople who cannot sell get fired. But are they really useless or are their sales managers useless or their companies useless? There are some industries which are notorious for the up or out mentality and recruiting certainly comes to mind. There is a lot of rhetoric floating around about…