Beat competition in the summer!

How do you differentiate yourself from your competition in the summer?

Standing out from competitors and summer rest, do they go hand in hand? Summer is the perfect time to recharge your batteries. Vitamin D, socializing with family and friends and sometimes just doing nothing at all. Just empty the agenda and no obligations. Refuel!

No matter how empty the agenda, we cannot disconnect our heads from who we are and what we do. Deals we are (have been) active in resonate after. If you are an entrepreneur or commercial manager operating in a competitive market, deals in which you had to go to the limit may come up for review. What did I do well, where could I have done things differently, where did I miss opportunities and how can I be eager next time without coming across as a beggar?.

Especially during the summer period, you can use the empty schedule to make a difference on your next competition. Consider a number of things:

During summer rest, your mental and physical energy recovers

Because of the sun, we literally receive energy in our bodies. We need this to perform optimally. Our bodies benefit from this. At the same time, we are detached from targets and deadlines during summer vacation. Less stressful conditions are beneficial. This has been scientifically proven. As we relax, our mind rests and we can apply better focus. This sharp mind can be put to use again in the next battle with your competitor.

Time for reflection.

The deals, the competitive battle and or the missed orders you can run them through your mind.‘What went well and what influence did I have on that?' 'What opportunities did you miss and how could I have made different choices in this?’

You can take the lessons from this into the second semester. What will the goals be and how can you achieve them more effectively? It is precisely because you are detached from the issues of the day that you see opportunities that you did not see during your busy schedule. And because your mind is at rest, creative opportunities arise to turn the next battle with your competitor into your advantage.

Build relationships

At the beginning of the summer period many networking clubs are active with a summer drink or BBQ. During the period of more freedom in your calendar, check for yourself who you spoke to at this last event, or think about who I didn't speak to at all when it would have made sense. Find contact with people who inspire you and challenge you to think out-of-the-box. Also look at the network of your contacts. Who within their network can they connect you with?

During vacations, you often meet like-minded people. Learn from them and how they operate. Be genuinely curious and ask questions about how they are successful. It is precisely through others that you can be inspired and come up with an idea that can be distinctive so that next time the customer chooses you instead of your biggest competition.

Famed American football player TomBrady said the following about translating mental strength to competition:

Competition, defeating competitors, better than your competitor, mental strength

“Every quarterback can throw a ball; every running back can run; every receiver is fast; but that mental toughness ... translates into competitiveness.”

Mental clout is a choice. You have the opportunity to get a head start just in the summer by taking mental rest, sharpening your mind and being inspired by others for distinctive ideas.

In short, during the summer period you can mentally unload and refill yourself with energy and ideas that will allow you to be one step ahead of the competition.

Personal leadership in sales

What does personal leadership have to do in the world of sales is all about results? Targets need to be met, customers need to be convinced, and competition is lurking. Yet there is one factor that is often overlooked but which makes all the difference between an average salesperson and a true top-performer and that is: personal leadership.

Do you want to stand out from your colleagues or that competitive account manager? Learn the benefits of personal leadership and how it makes a salesperson stand out from the rest.

What is personal leadership?

Personal leadership is about directing yourself. It means taking direction over your thinking, actions and results. You don't wait, you act purposefully. You look critically at yourself, learn continuously and take responsibility for what you can influence. In other words, you are able to reflect and motivate yourself.

In sales, this is not a ‘nice to have’ - it is an absolute must.

The benefits of personal leadership in sales

1. Increased self-confidence and resilience

Rejection is part of the job. But salespeople with self-knowledge don't linger in disappointments. They recover, learn from them and move on stronger. "In what ways can I score the deal next time?"

2. Clear goals and focus

Instead of reactively ‘getting through’ the day, these salespeople actively manage their goals. They have a plan and stick to it. Goal-oriented work gets results!

3. Sincere, authentic communication

Trust is the foundation of every sale. Salespeople with personal leadership dare to be honest and authentic, and therefore come across as credible. No sales talk, but real conversations. Knowing who you are and what you stand for gives confidence and that is essential in the sales conversation.

4. Ownership and results orientation

No excuses, no victimization. This vendor thinks: “What can I do to make this work?” They take responsibility even when the going gets tough. And it is precisely on this last point that the top scorer stands out from the rest.

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5. Faster personal and professional growth

By continuously reflecting, asking for feedback and developing themselves, they don't get stuck in routine. They learn faster and score better. Just like the elite athlete who looks back at his competition to improve.

Personal leadership is not a ‘soft’ skill; it is a rock-solid success factor.

The difference in practice

Using Chat GPT, I created the diagram below that shows the difference between personal leadership and no personal leadership. You can put check marks for yourself or your sales team in what you recognize. If the result within your account team lags behind the target or if the sales people often miss out on orders in favor of the competition then look honestly which reactions apply.

Feature	With personal leadership	Without personal leadership
Mindset	Growth mindset, self-directed	Standby, externally oriented
Approach	Proactive, structured	Reactive, ad hoc
Relationship with customer	Sincere and advisory	Vendor-focused, superficial
Dealing with adversity	Learns and adapts	Stuck in excuses
Learning capability	Reflects and grows	Works on routine
Responsibility	Takes ownership	Points to others

Personal leadership is not a ‘soft’ skill, it is a rock-solid success factor. Salespeople who manage themselves, dare to take an honest look at their approach and take responsibility are the people who not only score today ... but are relevant tomorrow.

Do you want to build a sales organization with more self-direction, energy and results? Then invest in personal development. The impact is immediately visible, in the conversation with the customer and in the end result.

Looking for tools, training or guidance around personal leadership in sales? Take contact on - I'm happy to think with you.

Motivation and Positive Mindset

Keys to Success for you and your team

How to motivate employees and ensure a positive mindset?

Motivating employees and maintaining a positive mindset are essential to a successful team. Whether you are a manager managing an entire team or an individual salesperson looking to increase his or her own motivation, these strategies can help.

Clear communication:

First and foremost, realize that employees need clear communication. Therefore, share strategic plans and goals with your team. Explain why these goals are important and how everyone contributes to the success of the company. As much as possible, let your team contribute their own ideas to achieve the goal. By doing this, employees feel engaged, better understand their role and are motivated to achieve these goals.

Personal goals:

Not only the company can set goals this you can also do yourself. Write down your annual goals and make them visible. This will strengthen your focus and motivation. It may be an idea to do this together with your team members as well. Remind yourself and possibly your team why you are pursuing these goals.

How can you further motivate your team?

Engage employees:

Regularly ask for advice or opinions. Allow employees to contribute ideas and give them a voice. This promotes engagement and motivation. Moreover, your team may come up with solutions, for challenges or goal achievement, that are more logical and simple than you had thought of.

Expressing appreciation:

Show appreciation for employees' efforts. Consider a personal message, compliment or attention on birthdays and holidays. It helps keep their motivation high. Note, the trick is to continue to express your appreciation during moments when things are not going your way. By doing so, you break through a negative tenor. Moreover, you yourself also get positive energy when you give compliments to others. In other words, your actions determine your own motivation and positive mindset as well as that of others.

Team Building:

Organize team outings or activities to strengthen team spirit. A close-knit team motivates each other and works better together. You can also build the team further by knowing each other's skills. In this way, you can make use of each other's qualities and push each other to great heights.

Work-life balance:

Show understanding for employees' personal lives. Flexibility and room for personal matters contribute to motivation. Create a home team of supporters for your employee, of you and your company at the kitchen table. A good work-life balance is essential to maintaining a positive work mindset. In addition, make sure you have one or two people, separate from your work environment, who speak positively into your life.

As the individual grows, the team grows and so does the company!

Humor:

Laugh and put things in perspective. Humor helps reduce stress and maintain a positive atmosphere. For example, share funny moments with colleagues. Laugh away tension around a complicated case. One way you can do this is to take situations completely out of context or imagine what things would look like if a wrong decision developed in the extreme. If you have laughed away challenges or mistakes you will succeed better in finding an effective solution.

Further influence your motivation and positive mindset by:

Learn from mistakes and provide feedback:

See setbacks as learning opportunities and criticism as valuable feedback. Making mistakes is allowed! That's how you grow and stay positive. Teach your team to give each other feedback and to receive it. It also increases mutual commitment and motivates to look beyond one's own world. In short, when the individual grows, the team grows and so does the company!

Share successes:

Partial success stories ( e.g. positive customer experiences), success principles and quotes from team members or famous people. You can read through them at difficult times to inspire yourself or your team and keep your mindset positive.

So, remember that intrinsic motivation is not so much about pay raises as it is about engagement, appreciation and personal growth. Stay focused on your ‘why’ and believe in your own skills, the qualities of your team and the company you work for.

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These are important nutritional values for proper motivation and a positive mindset.

Do you want to build yourself or your team and work on proper motivation and a positive mindset? Get in touch via this link.

Leading your sales team

6 essential skills for success, revenue growth and a motivated sales team thanks to your leadership

As a commercial manager, you play a crucial role in managing your sales team and achieving company goals. You can make the difference in the level of success through your approach. So how do you lead your sales team? To give you an idea, we hereby share six essential skills you can develop to demonstrate effective leadership:

Vision and strategy: Share the company's mission and vision with your team. Make sure everyone understands what you are working toward and how they can contribute to it. By sharing this with your sales team, they can also take this on board in relation to existing and new customers.
Development and coaching: Invest in the growth of your team members. Offer training, coaching and feedback to improve their skills and realize their potential. Strong sales skills are essential for a salesperson in successfully going through the sales process.
Results Orientation: Set clear goals and expectations. Monitor progress and be proactive in addressing challenges. Based on Sales Colors it is possible to form a picture of which skills are best suited to achieve commercial objectives.
Communication and engagement: Listen to your team members, give clear instructions and create a positive work environment where employees feel engaged. Every team member grows when there is culture of positive feedback.
Decisiveness: Make decisions based on data and experience. Don't be afraid to make decisions. It is better to make a concrete decision based on what you do know than no decision because you feel you need more information.
Integrity and exemplary behavior: Act with integrity and act as role models. Build trust by acting consistently and honestly.

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People would rather follow a leader who is always real than one who is always right!

For the points of decisiveness, integrity and exemplary behavior, Craig Groeschel made a great statement namely, "People would rather follow a leader who is always real than one who is always right." In short be real when you lead your sales team.

Leadership is an ongoing journey. Keep learning, growing and honing your skills to lead your team to success! If you decide to develop and implement the 6 skills into your leadership style, your sales team will hitch a ride and success will naturally follow.

Do you want to grow in commercial leadership? Take contact up and let's get acquainted.

What I learn from my son's challenge

My 3-year-old male probably has TOS (language development disorder). This means that his speech does not come naturally. It is a huge challenge to teach him speech. To keep his world orderly, he has an enormous need for fixed patterns. Fortunately, he gets professional help and we get tools to deal with this.

The special thing about a challenge is that there is often a downside. In this case, a huge learning curve. Not only for him but certainly for me as well. I will give you an idea of what I learned as a result and can apply further in my life and work.

There is often a positive upside to a challenge!

✅ Patience

To understand him, to do something according to his familiar pattern, and to make something clear to him, I achieve something fastest by being patient. If I take my time with him and put myself in his shoes, we achieve the most together.

It is quite possible to teach someone who seems to be trapped in his own world something with patience. Time and patience are essential.

✅ Clearly and concisely convey a message

A jumble of words does not reach my little guy. If I make short sentences and restate the main word separately, my message arrives.

Too often we want to clarify our story with a mincing of words, hoping to make the other person understand what you mean. It is much more effective to express the core of your message concisely and powerfully.

✅ Nonverbal communication is key

Using sign language, we are teaching our little man to communicate. In the last few weeks, he is making huge leaps and discovering the value of being able to express himself in this way.

By adding gestures, you make your message audible and visible to the other person. Double a message in one go. Talk about impact.

✅ Learning from all ages

This morning my little son made a gesture I was not familiar with. Because he was pointing to a specific white object, I suspected he was gesturing the color white. After checking in the gesture app, I was confirmed in this. My 3-year-old son was teaching me the meaning of a new gesture! I am so proud of him.

Very often we want to work and connect with people with experience and knowledge. I myself sometimes make the mistake of thinking that someone must be of a certain age to have the necessary wisdom. Yet it is young people who pick up new things the fastest. This also makes them a valuable source of knowledge.

✅ Don't go too fast

If I want to do something quickly that is contrary to his familiar way of doing things, my son can become extremely sad. The familiar pattern is rudely disrupted. What was safe suddenly gives uncertainty and he cannot put words to it.

If we want to help someone and we already see the solution ourselves, too often the focus is on that. This can cause you to lose connection with the other person. If you go too fast, causing the other person not to understand you and creating chaos, so to speak, you may not be the safe teacher.

✅ Confirm that you heard the other person.

My son speaks some words and has sounds for other meanings. When he wants to make something clear he repeats this sound until I confirm him with the intended word. This way he gets recognition and confirmation of what he wants to make clear.

In our communication, repeating the other person's words or summarizing their story can let you know that you have understood the other person.

These are some examples of what I have learned and the translation to the professional world. Besides enjoying his happy presence immensely, I am learning a tremendous amount from my beautiful happy little man.

A pile of wood as a life lesson?

Have you ever made a pile of firewood? I have. The other day I had 2 cubic meters of wood brought in to fire the stove in our living kitchen. The advantage of handling that much wood is that it gets you hot twice. First to get it all in a nice pile and then when you start firing.

Sometimes it means taking what has been learned and stacking it up again for a while so that it becomes a solid whole again.

The blocks of wood I received were all different shapes. Some a little shorter, others longer. Some round and others all different angles. It is not easy to make a nice whole out of such a diverse quantity. On top of that, you have to shape the pile so that it doesn't topple over at the first breath of wind.

Synonym

As I was processing the wood, I realized that all these different blocks could be synonymous with what we are taught in terms of life lessons. If all goes well, your parents once started teaching you what you needed. Assuming there were grandparents, they also interfered with you with all kinds of good advice. The lessons of your first kindergarten teacher were sacred to you. Gradually you came into contact with adults, friends and new teachers who all taught you things in their own way. You learned every day.

The trick is to make all that has been taught into something personal. Sometimes it means turning what you have learned upside down and stacking it again so that it becomes a solid whole again. That takes effort and it can get pretty hot. It can also mean burning things from the past. That too generates heat but doing it does make it a lot more comfortable for you. It gives space and it provides opportunities to add other blocks of information. Properly considered, you always stay with what you are taught. It is important that you have or get a solid foundation so that you can firmly build on that which is taught to you.

The Sales Center likes to offer customization and realizes that sometimes it is essential to examine learned behavior. Perhaps together we can turn the whole thing upside down and lay a good foundation on which you can build existing and new elements. We will undoubtedly burn some elements and yes, that will make you hot, but at the same time it will also make you more comfortable.

Leadership begins with yourself!

There are many insights about leadership. What is leadership at its core?

According to Wipikedia is this:

Leadership is a process by which an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a certain goal. Often this is someone in a leadership position within the group in question, but this is not a requirement.

What Wipikedia describes here is that there is usually a relationship between leadership and a position. In other words leadership is hung up on a position in a work environment or a place where a group of people are active and where the group is influenced by the leader,. In my opinion, this is a meager reflection of what leadership actually means. Because the question is to what extent you as a person are able to influence the other. Do you know what to do to influence the other person?

Covey

In his book “the seven traits of effective leadership” Stephan Covey discusses personal leadership at length. In summary, it is first about yourself and leading yourself before getting to the second stage of leading others. Covey writes that it is possible to appeal to our self-awareness, imagination and conscience. By focusing on these and making changes, we are only able to expand our circle of influence. In other words, that is leading ourselves.

Leadership begins with ourselves.

An example to clarify what is meant by this. Suppose you are married. With you and your partner the sparks are no longer flying and you want to change that for the better? So you start a conversation together. That is wise but there is a chance that the conversation will not achieve what you have in mind. When you start looking at the situation from your self-awareness, you can regain a grip on the situation. You start to imagine how you would like the relationship to go. And in doing so, you imagine how your partner reacts to certain things. In doing so, you can go so far as to form an image of what you would say or do. All aimed at getting the other person to change the atmosphere in a positive way. Now that you know this from your imagination, you can decide to make the necessary change in yourself. The impact on yourself and the change you make will become noticeable in the other person.

The impact on yourself and the change you make will become noticeable in others.

Change

So leadership begins with ourselves. If we want to lead another person somewhere, we ourselves will have to have a picture of what steps we need to take to get to where we want to get out. In essence, you see that which the others do not yet see. For some, it is enough when as a leader you tell them the end goal. The listeners are independently able to reach that goal. For others, you start with Step 1 and lay out the path step by step before you get to the end goal. Sometimes you tell what is needed and other times you can create movement by asking the right questions. As a leader, you can envision what you yourself need to do or what personal change you need to make before you can influence others. That is leadership from the bottom up!