Howard Shore

All posts by Howard Shore

Stop Wasting Time! Avoid These 12 Things

time

Your time management habits need to be improved. I’m not trying to single you out, but seriously, most of us could improve the way we manage our time. Especially leaders. In my long tenure as a leadership coach and trainer, I’ve noted that time management is one of the biggest challenges most leaders face and is one of the easiest to fix. What I’ve noticed is that the same daily tasks and activities are sucking time away from leaders. See if you can spot the ones that are sucking up your time: Interruptions: telephone and personal visits. Meetings: the long,…

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4 Ways to Create Linsanity on Your Team

Working in Office Cubicle

Do you have a Jeremy Lin on your team? You might. You may think you understand the potential of every person on your team but the truth is, you could have unbelievable, untapped talent sitting “on the bench” just waiting to be discovered by you—or your competitor. As company leadership we must think like championship coaches and learn to recognize and develop game-changing talent.

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3 Tips for Better Cold Calling

cold calling

As a sales force development consultant, I have worked with sales teams of all shapes, sizes and industries. Every team thinks they are “different” when it comes to their product and how it should be sold. And while I often hear “our industry is unique. We rely solely on referrals”, I can tell you that every company in every industry relies on word of mouth—yours is no different.

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3 Ways to Give Underperformers a Kick in the Butt

performance

On every team there are “A” players and under-performers. My guess is, you know who those people are, but may be struggling with how to deal with the latter. It can feel like a complicated problem, especially when you are dealing with under-performers on the sales team. In my time as a corporate sales trainer, I have found that there are three simple ways to effectively manage sales force development and performance.

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Why Phone Calls Are Better Sales Techniques Than Handshakes

sales technique phone

They attend an event with 100 people, where there may be 10 good candidates. From this event, they usually walk away with zero meetings and maybe a few people to call about future meetings. From all those handshakes, one might be a real prospect. In those three hours, all they accomplished was marketing the organization and possibly setting one future meeting.

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Want employees to care about the bottom line? Set the example.

employee of the month

As a leader in your company you are the foundation of the company culture. Like many business leaders, you may be struggling with how to build a sense of fiscal responsibility within your team. It’s a challenging thing to try to get entry-level employees to care as much about the bottom line as you do. What is the number one way to get employees on board with penny-pinching?

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Customer Retention is a Business Strategy

loyal customers

Retaining customers is vital to your business development efforts, and has far more impact to your bottom line than getting new ones. Companies with a great new business funnel don’t necessarily outperform those who keep clients long-term. I’ve seen companies that effectively use marketing materials to tout how different they are from the competition. They focus on how they add value to justify their price point and close a lot of new business. These companies however, tend to turn over their clients every 2 to 3 years.

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10 Questions to Ask Yourself Regularly

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After spending time with many business leaders, I’ve learned that knowing your industry, finding investment capital, and hiring good people is not enough to succeed. There are many keys to success, but one in intelligent introspection—asking the right questions. Asking and answering the right questions on a regular basis optimizes your business by ensuring that your answers are still relevant. As we enter a new year, this is a perfect time to ask those questions to make sure that we have the right foundation for success.

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How 15 Minutes Can Change Your Business

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A truly effective executive keeps his/her time commitments. Regardless of your industry, position, function, or company size, it’s critical of your reputation to be on time. In addition, I believe that if you don’t get to meetings 15 minutes early, you’re losing big opportunities. While being on time and keeping your meetings is necessary, being 15 minutes early can be a virtual gold mine.

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Greed is Still Good

greed

Ever see the movie Wall Street? The most famous line in that movie, which was also the tagline in the movie poster, was “greed is good.” I may be inviting Occupy protestors to install an encampment in my parking lot, but I still think Mr. Gecko is right. Greed is good, and let me tell you why. It creates progress.

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Achieve More Goals the SMART Way!

Woman Writing in Daily Planner

The first step in successfully executing a goal is to state it properly. You know your goal is well stated when anyone who reads it knows exactly what you are trying to accomplish and in what time frame. The better a person states the goal, the easier it is to create the action plan. An acronym commonly used for stating a goal properly is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistically high, and Time-based).

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Commitment to Change

dailyblogma

Just like the people who work for them, CEOs and leaders come in all different sizes, shapes, styles, and backgrounds. As you can imagine, those variations influence how their people behave, who they hire, the systems and processes they use, and the strength of the team they have around them, etc.

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Motivating Your People

dailyblogma

Knowing the individuals that work for you and knowing their goals will make it easier for you to motivate them. Making sure they are in the right place and involved in the right tasks for them will help project completion and help your business to run smoother overall.

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