SELF IMPROVEMENT AND MOTIVATION

The customer's perception of you and your company is his reality and determines his buying behavior with you. The way your customer thinks about you, talks about you, and describes you to others determines everything he does or does not do in relation to you and what you sell. Customer Perception Every product or service must be perceived positively by the customer before the customer can make any kind of buying decision. The most successful products and services are those that the customer perceives are from the most desirable and trustworthy suppliers of these products or services. Proper Positioning With proper positioning, your product or service will be seen by the customers as the product or choice, against which others are compared. Some examples of excellent positioning are Coca-Cola, Kleenex, and Xerox. In each case, these products are the standard. When you refer to a drink, you say, "I feel like a Coke." If you have a runny nose, you ask someone to "get a

The purpose of the selling process is to convince customers that they will be better off with the product or service than they would be with the money necessary to buy the product. When you make sales presentations, you are asking customers to engage in a trade.   You are telling customers that if they give you their money, you will give them a product or service in return that will be of greater value to them than the money they pay. In addition, it will be of greater value than anything else that they could buy with the same amount of money at the same time.   Satisfied Needs The customer always acts to satisfy the greatest number of unmet needs, in the very best way, at the lowest possible price. A major part of your job is to demonstrate that customers will get more of what they want, faster, by purchasing your product or service than they would get if they bought something else. Credibility Proof that the other people similar to the customer have purchased the product builds credi

Do Nice Things For Others One of the best ways to influence someone is to do something nice for him. I know many successful salespeople who make a habit of taking their prospects out to breakfast or lunch. During the breakfast or lunch, they do not talk about their products or services unless the client brings it up. They merely make small talk, ask questions and listen. They work on building trust, and they work on establishing a friendly relationship. At the end of the breakfast or lunch, they tell the prospect that they will be getting in touch with him sometime in the future with the possibility of talking to him about helping him in some way.   See Them As Friends and Partners The best salespeople and businesspeople in America today are those who look upon their customers and prospective customers as friends and partners. They always look for ways to help their partners improve their lives in ways that are not directly related to the products or services they sell. They sow seeds,

Perhaps the most powerful single factor in your financial success is your beliefs about yourself and money. We call this the Law of Belief. It says simply this: Whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality.   What Successful People Believe Whatever you intensely believe becomes your reality. That we have a tendency to block out any information coming in to us that is inconsistent with our reality. What we've discovered is that successful people absolutely believe that they have the ability to succeed. And they will not entertain, think about, or talk about the possibilities that they'll fail. They do not even consider the possibility of failure.   Positive Thinking Versus Positive Knowing You always act in a matter consistent with your beliefs. The most important belief system you can build is a prosperity consciousness where you absolutely believe that you are going achieve your financial goals. We call this positive knowing versus positive thinking. Positive think

This is the age of achievement. Never have more people accomplished more things in more different fields than they are accomplishing today. More people are becoming successful at a faster rate than at any other time in history. There have never been more opportunities for you to turn your dreams into realities than there are right now. The Seven Ingredients of Success Your ideal life is a blending these seven ingredients in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment. By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim it. You can then measure how well you're doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want your life to improve. Peace of Mind The first of these seven ingredients of success, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. In corporations, peace of mind can be measu

Time management is the central skill of success. Your ability to manage your time, to focus and channel your energies on your highest value tasks, will determine your rewards and your level of accomplishment in life more than any other factor. Save Hundreds of Hours and Thousands of Dollars in Personal Advancement Your mind is your most precious asset. You must be continually working to increase the quality of your thinking. One of the best ways is to turn driving time into learning time. Listen to educational CDs or audio cassettes in your car. The average driver, according to the American Automobile Association, drives 12,000 to 25,000 miles each year, spending 500 to 1000 hours that you spend each year in your car. That is the equivalent of 12 1/2 to 25 forty-hour weeks. This is the same as two full university semesters spent behind the wheel of your car each year. Use Traveling Time as Learning Time If you did nothing but use that traveling time as learning time, this decision alon

Here's an exercise for you; imagine that it's possible for you to earn ten times your current annual wage. If you're earning $25,000, imagine for a moment that it's possible for you to earn $250,000, a 1000% increase. Don't Sell Yourself Short The first reaction of most people to that exercise is to smile briefly and then to begin thinking about why it isn't possible. One man said to me, "If you knew how many years it's taken for me to get to what I'm earning today you wouldn't be suggesting that I could earn ten times as much." Never A Good Excuse Mark Twain once wrote that there are a thousand excuses for every failure but never a good reason. The tragedy of the average American is that whereas his or her main preoccupation seems to be money, or the lack thereof, the average person has the inherent potential to earn far more than he or she is doing currently. Is the manager earning $250,000 per year ten times as smart as the manager earni

You probably have the ability to produce and ear n easily twice as much as you are producing and ear ning today.   Put Key Ideas Into Action I have taught time management strategies to more than 100,000 people over the last few years and the successes these people have had have often been amaz ing. Many of them have doubled their output in as little as one or two days. One businessman in Philadelphia tripled his income and doubled the amount of time he spent with his family within twelve months. Another businessman from Montreal increased his income by 700% over a period of two years by disciplining himself to practice these principles every hour of every day.   Small Effects Yield Large Results The good news is that even a small effort on your part to implement the very best of time management principles into your life will yield a tremendous return in increased productivity, performance and output. It is like stepping on the accelerator of your own life and moving yourself onto the f

There are ten critical areas where your ability to think largely determines the success or failure of your business. The greater clarity you have in each of these areas, the better decisions you will make and better results you will achieve.   Key Purpose What is the purpose of a business? Many people think that the purpose of a business is to earn a profit, but they are wrong. The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. Fully 50 percent of your time, efforts, and expenses should be focused on creating and keeping customers in some way.   Key Measure The key measure of business success is customer satisfaction. Your ability to satisfy your customers to such a degree that they buy from you rather than from someone else, that they buy again, and that they bring their friends is the key determinant of growth and profitability.   Key Requirement The key requirement for wealth building and business success is for you to add value in some way. All wealth comes from addin

The most important application of the law of cause and effect in your life is this: thoughts are causes, and conditions are effects. What this means is that your thought is creative. You create your world by the way you think. Nothing in your world has any meaning except for the meaning you give by how you think about it and talk about it. If you don't care about something, it has no effect on your emotions and actions.   How to be Happy Many thousands of people have been interviewed over the years to find out what they think about most of the time. Can you guess what the most successful and happy people think about all day long? The answer is simple. Happy healthy people think about what they want, and how to get it, most of the time. When you think and talk about what you want, and how to get it, you feel happier and in greater control of your life.   How to be Unhappy What do unhappy people think and talk about most of the time? Unfortunately, they think and talk about things th

Create a Big Vision To become a motivational leader, you start with motivating yourself. You motivate yourself with a big vision, and as you move progressively toward its realization, you motivate and enthuse others to work with you to fulfill that vision. Set High Standards You exhibit absolute honesty and integrity with everyone in everything you do. You are the kind of person others admire and respect and want to be like. You set a standard that others aspire to. You live in truth with yourself and others so that they feel confident giving you their support and their commitment. Face Your Fears You demonstrate courage in everything you do by facing doubts and uncertainties and moving forward regardless. You put up a good front even when you feel anxious about the outcome. You don't burden others with your fears and misgivings. You keep them to yourself. You constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone and in the direction of your goals. And no matter how bleak the situation

The way you think about money will determine how much of it you accumulate more than any other factor. Your attitude toward money affects your emotions and your motivations.   Do You Feel That You Have Enough? In psychology, money is what is called a "deficiency need." This means that it only motivates you when you feel deficient in it, when you don't feel that you have enough. Above a certain level, when you feel that you have enough, it is no longer a motivator. Put another way, when you have enough money, you don't think about it very much. But when you have too little, you think about it all the time.   Determine Your Attitude Toward Money The effect money has on your emotional life depends on your attitude toward it. If you feel that you have too little, money can become an obsession for you. It can dominate your thinking, feelings and actions. Arguments over money are a major reason for marital breakdown. Problems with money are the primary reason for business f

"The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you."   Always control your emotions and never allow temporary defeat to prevent you from achieving your true desires. The key to success is staying in control of your emotions, regardless of the situation, and using them to propel you forward.   "Remember, a real decision is measured by the fact that you've taken new action. If there's no action, you haven't truly decided."   The choices you make in life are measured by how quickly you act upon them. If you have not taken any action, you have not completely decided on what you desire.   "To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others."   Our thoughts and actions may be different