Francis Kong’s winning attitudes for success

BUSINESS OPTION

By FLOR G. TARRIELA

August 23, 2010, 3:32pm

At the recent PNB’s Business Managers convention for all the managers of its 324 branches, motivational speaker Francis Kong spoke on the “Winning Attitudes for Success.”

Francis’ engaging talk identified some winning attitudes of an excellent salesman to the business managers:

1. Always make good impressions. Be a sight for sore eyes.

Excellent sales people create make good first impressions. They arrive on time. They are genuine, pleasant, and easy to talk with. The best salespeople have a neat and well-groomed look about them.

Note that he does not suggest buying expensive branded clothes especially if you cant afford it.

If you go to the client selling, you are a salesman. But if you go to your client with information that can help him, then you are a consultant. Guess what? A consultant wins over a salesman 100% of the time.

2. Like people and be likeable yourself.

Excellent salespeople are liked. They want to please their customers. They go the extra mile, learn customers' preferences, and work to educate their customers and keep them informed. Generally, before you can like other people, you need to be likable your self. One way is to have a positive attitude. Who likes to be with negative, whining and cranky people?

3. Be a good listener.

Excellent sales people carefully listen to what their prospects are saying. THEY DO NOT SELL BUT THEY LEAD THE CUSTOMERS TO BUY. They are patient with prospects--not pushy. They understand the most important key to successful selling is not THE SALE TODAY but THE RELATIONSHIP TOMORROW.

4. Behave professionally.

Excellent people will always point to the product pluses and advantages they offer but will not verbally tear down their competitors. There is no need to put the others down to be up. Focus on the positive side of your product. Respect the intelligence of your clients. Moreover, excellent salespeople never bring their problems to work and let them affect their attitudes.

5. Be product and service oriented, be an expert of the products you market.

Great salespeople know their product inside and out. They can answer even the most complicated and or trivial questions from customers without having to refer them to someone else at the company.

This is why you will never see a great salesperson who is sloppy and careless. They embrace non-stop learning. Excellent sales people devote a great deal of time improving themselves.

6. Be competitive and success driven

Excellent sales people exhibit CREATIVITY and ASSERTIVENESS. They are energetic and they have a very strong work ethic and you see them putting in more hours than their co-workers because they are extremely competitive.

They do not compete against others but they compete against themselves. They have passion.

Champions are so busy prospecting, making calls and appointments, brushing up on their presentations instead of focusing on their commissions. Losers on the other hand, use their calculators all the time to compute their estimated commissions.

Commissions for winners are just by products of their passion.

7. Be customer-focused.

One thing that distinguishes great sales people is that they are able to step outside themselves and see things from the customer's point of view. They focus on the mission of their work – which is to meet the needs of their customers. Francis said that Excellent Customer Service is simply: ‘inconveniencing one’s self for the convenience of others'

We are always selling, our products, services and even our ideas. Not only the sales people of a company has customers. Everyone in the organization, directly and indirectly, affect the final customer.

We all know that change is all around us and customer needs are changing all the time with expectations rising. To meet customer demands, we need to continuously develop and improve on products and services offered.

PNB’s 2-day business managers convention led by Retail Banking Head Joven Hernandez focused on business planning, learning and fellowship in line with PNB’s continuing thrust to develop service excellence in the organization. For the key to meet and satisfy customer is the people factor, having the right people, the most important asset of any organization.

Ms. Tarriela is Chairman of Philippine National Bank. She was formerly Undersecretary of Finance and Vice President of Citibank, N.A.

Published in Manila Bulletin August 24, 2010.

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52 Practical/Scientific Reasons to go to

Church...

besides the obvious ones.

 Reason No. 2 - Answers to Prayers

People go to church to pray and worship God, but is there any evidence that prayer works? A number of experiments have been conducted on hospital patients, showing substantial evidence for the positive effects of prayer.

One such study was conducted by R. Byrd at San Francisco General Hospital. He studied 339 coronary patients over a ten-month period. The double blind study divided the patients into two groups. The first group was prayed for by church members of various denominations (Judeo-Christian). The people assigned to prayer were given the first names of the patients and asked to pray for them regularly throughout the ten-month period. The control group was well matched to the test group as to seriousness of illness, age of patient, etc.

According to Byrd, the prayer group had "less congestive heart failure, required less diuretic and antibiotic therapy, had fewer episodes of pneumonia, had fewer cardiac arrests, and were less frequently ventilated." The patients, doctors, nurses and hospital staff had no knowledge of the purpose of the study. Subsequent studies have confirmed this result.

Byrd, R.C., "Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit Population," Southern Medical Journal 81 (1988): 826-829.