PDN Thoughts: Communication and Getting Appointments

Today I wrap up a week of sales training focusing on communications and getting appointments. I have had several meetings this week with existing customers and at least one of them has already turned into a great short-term contract for services. Another also opened up opportunities for referrals and a possible strategic alliance, while others simply expressed where I am in my business and life right now, and made some friends aware of the bigger picture of my life.

COMMUNICATIONS

1. Effective communication only happens when both parties understand their own thoguhts and can express those thoughts in a way that the other party can also understand. A combination of empathy, high self-esteem, confidence, and non-verbal communication give me many avenues to increase the effectiveness of anything I have to communicate.
2. Listening is a skill that can be developed. It gives me more opportunities to fully understand, while also giving the other party an awareness that I care about what they have to say.

GETTING APPOINTMENTS

1. Getting appointments with potential new clients is not as scary or complicated as I'd like to make it out to be, if I will only look at it as a system... as a process. There is one step after another to follow, and while I must discover how those steps work for me, my personality, my business, and those I will communicate with, it is no longer something I can just not do because it's too hard. It will require me to come up with an overall plan and methods of tracking what works and what doesn't, as well as a determination and awareness that it can be done.
2. The point in getting appointments is to build the appropriate amount of business to reach my goals. It is not to "grow the business" or to "meet a quota." Those may be means to those goals, and while growing the business itself is a goal, the primary function of that is to attain more personal levels of satisfaction, fulfillment, and met purpose. This is important to remember during this transition time I am in right now, because while I must be concerned about the upcoming future, I must also not neglect opportunities that are right in front of me.

A FEW GOOD QUOTES:

• "How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but by how well we are understood." - Andrew S. Grove, Intel
• "Successful communication requres feedback that indicates understanding, value recognition, the benefits of taking action now, or the consequenses of not taking action now... Before ideas can be accepted and acted upon, they must be known and understood clearly by the listener."
• "Make your goals big enough and exciting enough to stimulate your desire to achieve them."

QUESTIONS

1. Just how important are face-to-face meetings, versus phone call appointments, online meetings/presentations, etc.?