13 Simple Rules to become your own Sales Superstar.

IIya Pozin's article reminds us that money is not the key motivator for most people - particularly relevant at this time of year if you're planning your team's appraisals and objective setting in 2012.

As customers in customer service situations we hear alot about what people can't do for us: I wonder what kind of impact a can-do service culture would deliver for organisations... and for the customer? This article by Michael Hess reminds us of this cardinal sin.

Over the late spring and early Autumn of 2010 AJAN had the wonderful challenge to work with a series of highly skilled individuals from the world of art and culture on the topic of Creating the Compelling Case: in other words, selling your ideas in an inspiring way and positively influencing those around you.

I sat down with a hotdog and a sense of déjà vu in Helsinki's Olympic stadium. It was a warm evening on September 10th last year and I was about to watch Germany V England in the Ladies European Championship Football Final.

Here we were in Old London town; 'the home of The Beatles' as I overheard one American tourist stating the day before. It was a crisp, sunny September morning with the muffled sounds of traffic on the Thames and on the nearby streets. People were gathering around the doorway to one of London's coffee houses, close to Tower Bridge. The shop was due to open at 10am and because it was England, people were beginning to form an unofficial queue.

I was reminded recently of the old anecdote about Finnish national self consciousness:

A German, a Frenchman, a Russian, and a Finn took part in a writing competition about elephants. The German came up with A Short Introduction to the Physiology of the Elephant (1,500 pages, plus appendices). The French entry was The Love Life of the Elephant. The Russian wrote Elephants in Russia, and the Finn wrote What do Elephants Think of Me?

The Finns really do care about what you think of them.

Last summer I moved from London to Helsinki for a ‘cooler' change of scenery. This change has given me a different perspective on the country I left behind and an insider's view of Finland. One of the notable adjustments I have had to make in my new home country is that of living in a nation that spends considerable time pondering what the rest of world thinks of it. Speaking to my Finnish girlfriend this week she considered the topic and summarised thus, ‘Maybe we (The Finns) do worry what they (the rest of the world) think of us. And maybe we are clumsy communicators, lack confidence and are pre-programmed with a degree of national self doubt.'

Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work
by James L. Heskett, Thomas O. Jones, Gary W. Loveman, W. Earl Sasser, Jr., and Leonard A. Schlesinger

A growing number of companies that includes Banc One, Intuit, Southwest Airlines, ServiceMaster, USAA, Taco Bell, and MCI know that when they make employees and customers paramount, a radical shift occurs in the way they manage and measure success. The new economics of service requires innovative measurement techniques. These techniques calibrate the impact of employee satisfaction, loyalty, and productivity on the value of products and services delivered so that managers can build customer satisfaction and loyalty and assess the corresponding impact on profitability and growth. In fact, the lifetime value of a loyal customer can be astronomical, especially when referrals are added to the economics of customer retention and repeat purchases of related products. For example, the lifetime revenue stream from a loyal pizza eater can be $8,000, a Cadillac owner $332,000, and a corporate purchaser of commercial aircraft literally billions of dollars.

I think that the world's one and a half billion speakers of English have been aware for some time that the language is not only unprecedentedly widespread, but easily outstrips other tongues in terms of vocabulary. Not satisfied with its twin sources of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman French, English has, over the centuries, ruthlessly mugged languages ranging from Sanskrit, Latin and ancient Greek to Hindi, Malay, modern French, Italian and Navajo.