Career Bliss released its "10 Happiest/Unhappiest Cities to Work In" survey less than a month ago. My initial thought on reading it was all the top-10 unhappiest cities would be in bitterly cold regions, or places that don’t see sunlight as much as say, California. But then I read through it and found three cities in Florida made the unhappy list?! That’s what I get for assuming.     Florida? Palm trees, ocean views, and sandy beaches.  I mean I I know it rains every once in a while and yeah there is that hurricane season but come on, it’s Florida. The weather’s nice and most of its major cities have beautiful beaches to tide workers over during their lunch break. Even Sacramento, CA made the unhappy list, too.   So what makes or breaks this list? The happiness survey was less about location and more about an employee’s relationship with their boss, their work environment, job resources, wages, workplace culture, career advancement, and other markers.   Then what makes Cincinnati, OH less desirable than San Jose, CA? Throw out the weather and extracurricular opportunities like beaches that employees could factor in as "schedule flexibility." Now what are you left with? Do employees in unhappy cities loathe management more than California workers? I doubt it.   With the exception of employee salaries, most of the talking points in that survey could be improved with a better approach to communication between the company and its staff.   Here are a few ways better communication can turn frowns upside down and help make any city in this country a happy place to work in.   Mend Management-Employee Relationships   Happiness between an employee and their manager begins with better trust and understanding of what must be done at work. 1 in 3 employees admit their boss isn’t doing an effective job, while 50% of employees insist they could do their manager’s job better than them. Now most employees wouldn’t say this out in the open for fear of retribution or loss of their job. But there needs to be a better way to approach honest communication.   If management isn’t aware of the issues, how do you expect them to fix them? If employees aren’t coached on how to move past it, there will just be more growing resentment, and in some cases, those employees will leave. A series of communication courses taken by both parties is the first step.   With better trust , the next step is for management to communicate job expectations, and then supervise from there. Using Thinkzoom, you could create quick courses every month that issue a list of objectives you want an employee - or team of employees - to focus on. Define their goals, how they’ll tackle them, and leave room in the message asking for their feedback.   Involve your employees more and you increase engagement, co-worker relationships and build a better team in the process.   Communicate Company Policies   You can’t move from zero transparency to complete transparency about workplace policies overnight. But you must start to communicate your workplace’s rules and regulations if you haven’t already. Handing them a company brochure and expecting them to read it cover to cover isn’t a solution; video communications that break up company policies into segments is a better avenue. With a knowledge sharing platform, leadership and HR build a series of quick videos on what their policies are, how to abide by them and which department to send questions to (because you know there will be some).   It’s better to have 10 short videos on how corporate policies affect employees than to not have any sort of concrete measure in place.   Communicate Why Culture Matters, Not Just What It Is   59% of women - and 53% of men - cite their healthy relationship to the work environment as a reason they stay.   How does your company communicate its foundation, its heart and its message to employees? You can’t just say your company is a "fun-loving, bean-bag filled adventure… where work happens." You need to send a clear message to your staff about why your company is where it’s at today, maybe talk about how it has evolved since Day 1, and how the employees are central to so many moving parts moving the way they need to.   For instance, if you have a culture of open, honest communication, say so. Explain the values behind why open feedback between employees, departments, etc., can work wonders because it fulfills "X, Y and Z" for the business. And if you don’t have an open, honest communication policy, then admit that as well.   You can’t have employees guessing at what defines the workplace. Everyone’s in this together and they need to be told why.   Final Thoughts   Ok, so maybe if we all worked from lawn chairs on white, sandy beaches and the weather was a perfect 75 degrees, than maybe, just maybe we’d all be happier at work. Truth is, you could have that nice weather and perfect office location and still feel the sting of unhappy employees if communication is poor.   When you improve communication, you develop better performance improvement levels from employees, who become more satisfied with their work, which helps build that happy workforce your company craves. The post How To Achieve Happiness Working In Any City appeared first on .

Nearly 139,000 private sector jobs were added to the workforce this past February. And if every one of those companies that hired failed to fully support each new employee, 77,840 of those new hires may be walking out the door as quickly as they walked in. That’s because 56% of new hires grow frustrated and mull leaving their post if the company shows little, to no, support right out of the gate.     Even if they’re thinking of leaving, your company’s already facing an uphill battle. With that said, what’s your company’s average training cycle for new hires? How do you know when they’re ready? What sort of new hire training curriculum is available, and how’s it being administered?   These are valid questions and if you want to keep your turnover low, you must have good answers to these questions. Even if you have a new hire with a sparkling resume - they’ve got a great skill set, worked in a similar industry before, performed similar job duties, etc. - don’t assume that person will just work autonomously on Day 1. Every new hire needs support. While the amount of support might vary, they need to know it’s there when and IF they need it.   Here’s how you can support your new hires.   Role Play: Do They Know Their Job?   A paltry 29% of new hires are given the full briefing of what’s expected of them. Not surprisingly, those employees who received it said it was the most valuable aspect of their job from the get-go. There are plenty of steps in the new hire process, but none are more valuable than making sure they know what they’re doing and why it matters.   Open Enrollment Made Easy   Not many employees get excited about having to fill out forms, update contacts, and perform other enrollment duties. But it’s all necessary. It’s a necessary evil. But how pain free do you make that process? Are you stacking walls of papers and brochures all over their desk and walking away with a dramatic "dusting of the hands" motion?   You need to communicate important dates on when certain forms are due, not just health benefits after the first 30 days, but other related forms that fall on different dates throughout the calendar year. Using Thinkzoom, you can easily attach a custom message that covers every date they need to know, then make other videos specific to each date, make note of popular FAQs that employees have about the forms, and relate other information. The important thing is you’re building that line of communication from the get-go.   Showcase Your Company, Or Someone Else Will Show Theirs   What makes your company the way it is? What are your company’s policy regarding sick-days and other corporate policies? Why is your company’s culture intoxicating to everyone who works there?   All of these topics must be addressed to every new hire. Communication is about forming a bond where there wasn’t one before. If new hires only read about your company, but don’t have a full understanding of why it matters to them and how you’re both going to make a difference together, you start the alienation process by accident. Make a quick, custom video that’s universal to this new hire and every single one that follows him or her. Keep new hires away from the shadows by opening up about every policy that’s important to their schedule, both inside and away from the office.   Get Them Compliant   From anti-harassment to employment law courses, new hires need compliance training, and companies need an easy way to administer it to them. When administering a series of courses on how to prevent sexual harassment at the office (a new series we’ve recently updated, by the way) or showing anti-discrimination courses, the process must be divided up to get their undivided attention more easily.   That’s why our compliance courses are great for many reasons: They’re short (10 minutes or less) and completely mobile for new hires to access whenever, wherever - and the message is clear and relevant to the audience.   Give Them a Mentor to Lean On   Mentoring applies to every business. A new waiter at a restaurant shadows a seasoned waiter for a few shifts. The new clerk leans on a reliable clerk to learn the register, when to contact management for additional assistance, and how to view and handle customer requests or complaints first-hand. A new sales member is brought up to speed by their manager to explain how to use the CRM, inform them of their territory, and may sit in with them on a few cold calls and prospecting processes.   Without some sense of a mentor, new hires will feel lost and confused. Make sure you’ve assigned a fellow employee or manager to help new hires get comfortable around the office.   Final Thoughts   The 30-Day burn of training can go two ways, swimmingly or catastrophically. You don’t want to have to go back to the drawing board if they leave - that dings the company wallet significantly. You need new hires to learn and apply their training quickly and know that there’s room to grow their skill set.   From delivering compliance courses to creating your own company message, make the first 30 days easier for your new hires with ej4′s Thinkzoom. Try it free for 15 days. The post The 30-Day Burn: Are Your New Hires Adapting Properly? appeared first on .

Salespeople devote nearly 11 hours a week to administrative duties. That’s 11 hours of a 40-hour work week!  And how is this time spent?  Typically, it’s spent on organizing calendars, setting up last-minute calls, browsing through CRM, and other miscellaneous housekeeping functions that aren’t the meat of your sales process.   Think about how much time you could save throughout the year by simply cutting that average in half? Instead of only doing 1,508 hours (the equivalent of a year’s worth of 29-hour work weeks) of actual selling, you’ll have nearly 1,800 hours. How do you get there?   Here are a few ways you can be better organize and prioritize every week.   Don’t Go Overboard With Calendar Details   It’s good to be meticulous with pre-call planning, cold calling, and remembering important details from a face-to-face meeting; it’s not good to waste time and energy fluffing up your calendar with unnecessary information.   Let’s say you’ve got 20 prospects targeted for the week. All their names are assigned to a date and time. But you use the ‘Notes’ section to go overboard with notes, suggestions and other fillers that offer nothing to prospecting. Don’t get me wrong - you need some notes to help you know what to target when the time comes, but don’t go over the top.   If you have a call with Bob, the VP of Sales of a major trucking company that you want  to sell engine parts to, don’t spend time writing down their entire company history and how both of yours intertwine somehow.   Write the name, their title, the company and the top needs analysis question:   "Bob Smith, VP of Sales for ‘X’ Company. Ask how much they currently spend on maintenance and repairs and what engine parts they seem to cycle through the most."   That’s it. Don’t go any further unless that information realistically increases your chances of making a sale.   Control Sales Meetings   We’ve practically clobbered this meetings about meetings topic, but that doesn’t make the point any less relevant. Meetings that run over, meetings that are a 50/50 mix of off-topic and topical, meetings that have no moderator, meetings that don’t have a process - they must be cut down immediately.   Yes, you have to have meetings to go over sales goals, what your targets are for the next month, and how you plan to hit them. But limit the amount of time each person talks. Say - and write down on the meeting agenda - that each person has 5 minutes max to get their points across. Anything over that and it should be discussed off the phone.   Give yourself time to make more money. It’s that simple.   Mismanaging Your CRM   It’s critical that you learn everything about the CRM, but it’s even more critical that you use it wisely.   Do you go into the CRM looking for prospect Jane and come out having looked at the company leaderboard, what your sales funnel looked like in 2013, and other areas that have nothing to do with prospect Jane? Some might argue that reviewing the leaderboard helps motivate sales reps, but if you’re mired in numbers that don’t directly affect prospect Jane and how you’re going to cold call/email her shortly, then you’re making poor use of your time with the CRM.   Even worse is waiting too long to log a contact’s information into the CRM - their LinkedIn profile, job title, phone numbers, last time contacted, and information stating where you and the prospect currently are in talks. Once you end a conversation with ANY contact, you must immediately go to the CRM and enter in all the information that helps put together that person’s B.A.N.T. (Budget, Authority, Need, and purchase Timeframe).   Identify (And Eliminate) Procrastination Habits   What’s the biggest roadblock to a sales rep’s administrative duties? Some argue it’s workplace distractions, but every employee has that. For sales, there’s a different kind of procrastination present: Deviating from your 9 to 5.   Things like putting off your morning habit of cold calls, saying you’ll get to it in the afternoon. Getting lost in off-topic emails or internal phone calls to other employees. Taking too long to fill out a sales proposal. Waiting an extra day or two to follow up because you want there to be some "breathing room" for the prospect to think about your last call. Talking more to a prospect to avoid hearing a potential "No" when you’re better off hearing it and moving on.   There are plenty of missteps, and each one throws off your calendar for the day and forces you to reorganize when you shouldn’t have to. Clamp down on these bad habits that ruin your day and your schedule.   Final Thoughts   Routines are necessary. You have to plan your days, weeks and months around how to open up more opportunities and close. But a lot of that time is spent poorly. Trim down your times, become more efficient with the extra hours and become more productive as a result.   Learn more about efficient organization soon with our brand new, 36-part series, Territory Development! With courses like "Utilizing CRM" to "Personal Management Tracking" to "Prioritizing Your Territory," our new series provides the best blueprint to control your sales territory and your time.   Coming April 1st, 2014 to the ej4 learning campus!   The post How Sales Reps Can Fix Their Administrative Duties appeared first on .

Have you considered the cost of poor project management on your organization?  When I say "cost," of course I mean the bottom line, but I’m also including the soft cost: people costs.      I get to cap the week off with statistics about the costs of poor project management. So let’s get right to the numbers, shall we?   Below are two separate studies on the costs behind inefficient project management.   First off, there’s the study done by PricewaterhouseCoopers.  During their lengthy study on 10,640 projects from over 300 companies, across 30 countries, they found that only 2.5% of the companies successfully completed 100% of their projects.   OK, but what about when you focus on a specific industry?   That’s what the Harvard Business Review did with their research. They concerned themselves with project management trends in the IT industry. They analyzed around 1,471 IT projects and discovered that 1 in 6 projects had a cost overrun of 200%, and a schedule overrun of nearly 70%.   However you try to analyze it, that’s a lot of wasted resources!   But what’s that equate to in dollars? Well, it’s estimated that the rate of IT project failure falls between 5-15%, with total labor cost losses between $50-150 billion in the United States alone. That’s money wasted because projects aren’t managed tightly enough to be completed on time or within budget.   And beyond dollars, poor project execution impacts many parties. An unsuccessful project can break trust with customers. Lose that trust, and you might as well hope for the best on future business with that customer. Trust is also lost internally when a project fails. Members of project teams begin pointing fingers, creating animosity, losing respect for one another, and building grudges against stakeholders or project managers. Failed projects break morale, and create disruptions in future projects before they start.   Project management can break down in many places. But it has been in my experience that ultimately, a project fails for two reasons: either from poor planning or poor communication, or maybe both.   I’ll admit, I’m sometimes guilty of rushing through the planning phase to get a contract signed or a project launched, only to realize later that hurrying through the details meant dealing with larger issues midway through the project.   On the flip side, I’ve worked on projects where we carefully hammer out specifics with stakeholders and team leaders, and keep communication lines open and efficient as possible. Nine times out of ten, those projects should, and do, run smoothly. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise, either. Projects with thorough planning and reliable communication have the ability to remain successful even when occasional hiccups try to derail progress. And let’s face it, there’s always potential for some part of a project to stall or not run according to plan.  No company’s immune to it.   With that said, what are some other hard or soft costs you’ve experienced as a consequence of poor project management? More importantly, what steps have you taken to prevent similar costs in the future?   For more tips, check out "Managing and Tracking" from our Project Management series on Thinkzoom. Start your free 15-day trial now!   The post The Cost of Poor Project Management appeared first on .

A lot goes into making off-the-shelf eLearning impactful for the viewer. From subject matter experts to scripting to shooting and editing, take a look at how ej4 creates short, engaging off-the-shelf eLearning that sticks.     Have a look at our off-the-shelf library right now with a free 15-day trial of Thinkzoom! The post Watch How Off-the-shelf eLearning is Made at ej4 appeared first on .

In an effort to combat lifestyle diseases and improve the health of employees, many companies now have a workplace health and wellness program.  The post Keys to a Successful Workplace Health Program appeared first on .

Taking control of your territory is a big responsibility. You must master the ability to manage and prioritize your territory, determine the best way to keep your CRM updated, network with people in the community, and oh yeah, continue to sell and pitch clients!   With our new sales series, Territory Development, you’ll find the answers and techniques to help grow your sales territory the right way. Get a sneak peek at our largest sales content release this year!     Sign up for now for a free trial of Thinkzoom to view one of the courses, "The Realities of Selling in the 21st Century." The post Check Out Our New Sales Series, Territory Development! appeared first on .

Can you believe it?  I don’t know about you, but Q1 flew by for me!  Time flies when you’re having fun and when you’re in the zone!  So how did everyone do? Have you looked at your workplan or Q1 goals to measure progress and effectiveness?  Were you able to close last-minute 2013 prospects that rolled into 2014? Did your cold call volumes increase? Did you increase the number of face-to-face meetings with prospects?   If you missed your goals or quotas then it’s time to look at what went wrong.  It’s better and easier to determine what went wrong now, and it also gives you the remainder of the year to fix it.     Here are some things to take a look at as you prepare for Q2.  First, take a look at your sales process - where did you get "stuck" the most?  Talk with your supervisor or co-workers and see if they are experiencing similar problems and what solutions they’ve deployed.  Next, take a look at your targets - were they qualified targets?  Did you lose time running down leads when you really should have passed?  Take a look at the leads in your pipeline and make goals for each prospect.  Now, be honest, were hot stumped with objections that you received from the prospects?  You know real "selling" doesn’t begin until you heard the word "no".  By researching your leads, determining their buying motivation and really listening to what they say ( and don’t say) you can better guess at what kind of objection you’re going to hear.  This allows you to be better prepared to address the objection and move the sale to close.   Here are some other tips you can use to combat the Q2 sales blues.   Create a Sense of Urgency   How many times have you called a prospect and they said, "YES!"  Yeah, it doesn’t happen that often.  Not everyone’s a buyer at first. It’s part of your job to convince them that your solution not only meets their needs, but they will see additional beenfits on top of that. Sometimes this calls for a sense of professional urgency versus hard closing. Let‘s take a look at both tactics.   Professional urgency is knowing how to get from the initial call to the close in a quick, but respectful manner. That means keeping a consistent, friendly tone every time you follow-up. That means carefully crafting emails that are well-thought out reminders, not threatening demands of  "Hey, do it!" You need to move each prospect carefully and quickly through the  sales cycle.   The other side of urgency is the hard close. It’s trying to force the issue, force the sale with a barrage of emails that annoy instead of inform. It’s taking a terse or condescending tone when you leave a voicemail. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes, when done correctly, a hard close can work and not come off as rude.  However, most of the time, all a hard close does is drive your prospect into the arms of the competition.   Put Rejection in Your Rear View   Like I said, usually when you call on a prospect, the first thing you hear is "No." No one likes being rejected, but it comes with the territory, sales territory that is.  Cold calling will leave you mentally exhausted and ready to give up because you’ll hear "No" more times than you’ll hear "Yes."   Sales requires a thick skin to battle the gauntlet of rejection. You have to forget about the hang-ups and and rude behaviors.  Remember the benefits of being persistent? Persistence pays off in sales just like it does in other areas of our professional and personal lives. But persistence doesn’t work if you’re rehashing the days of rejection with your co-workers.  Putting yourself down, holding a grudge or dwelling on the negative with peers will only dig a bigger hole in your Q2 productivity.   Keep a positive attitude while remaining professionally urgent with missed Q1 opportunities and turn Q2 into a bright spot for not just your quota, but your overall performance improvement.   Have you seen the latest addition to our award-winning sales content, yet? Check out our brand new series, "Territory Development"!     See the entire clip of "The Realities of Selling in the 21st Century" right now with a free trial of Thinkzoom! The post How to Avoid The Q2 Sales Blues appeared first on .

Last year, the American Psychological Association (APA) conducted  a stress study and determined the top 7 causes of stress in the U.S.   As this Statistic Brain screenshot shows, everything from job pressure to poor eating habits to excessive media consumption can create stress.     Understanding stress can be just as difficult as stopping it. Stress is tricky, something that is a trigger for one person, isn’t a trigger for another person.  There are things that don’t stress you out but they send your co-worker into a panic.  It’s important to identify what sets you off so you can better handle your stress.   Bringing stress to work or leaving with it is not healthy in the long run.   Sometimes we get so busy with our day to day, keeping our head above water, that we don’t pay attention to some of the signs that we are really stressed out!  We do things to "manage" our stress so we can keep producing but we don’t focus enough on the root cause to eliminate the stress.     You don’t have to change all your stress-inducing habits too quickly (because the thought of transition can be stressful in its own right), but you should at least be aware of what makes you more irritable at work, why you’re easily fatigued when you get home, and what exactly causes stress to go from being a one-time thing into a worrisome pattern. Once you know, then work to eliminate the stress over time.   Find more helpful answers in the first part of our Stress Management series, which you can view in its entirety right now as our Featured Course of the Month! The post April is National Stress Awareness Month appeared first on .

Asking questions when pitching an idea to clients shouldn’t be thought of as a secret weapon - because it’s one of the most valuable assets for salespeople. So it must be common sense, right? Wrong!       So here’s a challenge for Q2: Ask your prospect questions about themselves, and just do that.  Chances are your competitors aren’t doing that and you will see a difference.  But it’s going to be hard for you not to jump in with your own stories or information about your product.   Start off with questions that build rapport.  Get the prospect talking about themselves - people love talking about themselves. Shine the light on them and let them give you a need that you never thought was there.   Here’s a great example.   In one of my first jobs out of college, I worked as a marketing manager. I once had someone sell me without saying what their company did beyond the name. His name was Joe and he introduced himself as a salesperson for "X" software company. He never said one word about why they were the #1 "blah, blah, blah" in their industry. Or how they sold over $9 million memberships last year.   He just asked questions the entire time in a stealthy manner of budget, authority, need, time (B.A.N.T.). He asked what the company I worked for spent on advertising last year (Budget). I said I didn’t know but I’d probably be able to look. He then asked what I did in that department, and what I liked most about the job (Authority). Then he asked if I could share a little bit about what the company did. He asked about our customer base. I told him we dealt mainly with e-commerce and sold "X" products to "Y" customers from all over the world. In talking about the company, I hinted at how targeting the right buyers quickly was hit and miss sometimes. How we had a cool promotion one month and a goose egg promotion the next (Need). Then I went on about how the holidays were still five months away, but we like to get a head start on planning so the department isn’t running ragged from procrastination (Time).   The whole thing took probably 20 minutes.  The best part, was that it didn’t FEEL like a sales call.  Just a conversation with a nice guy.   Then he put his company’s software to work to show me exactly where the company was missing out. It was a simple .PDF showing red areas (bad) and green areas (good). How we were throwing away money at "X" and should devote more time to "Y." He knew he found a hook and just had to move toward talking about his company just an inch, not a mile.   Curiosity from a prospect will be the driving force if the questions and attention make them feel at ease. That curiosity soon manifested into a deal with Joe’s company that helped move more product online in, during and after the holiday season. And if I had to guess what the word count totals were between Joe and I, I’d say it was something like, 200 to 20,000, with myself as the unanimous winner.   All because the questions asked were not only the right ones, but they were continually about me, the client, and not about them.   Learn more tips on asking the right questions with our brand new, award-winning sales series, "Territory Development." Sign up for a free trial of Thinkzoom to watch "The Realities of Selling in the 21st Century" now.   The post It’s Not About You: How to Ask The Right Questions appeared first on .