Do not be too pushy

People hate salespersons that are too pushy and keep on nagging to sell. They are sure turn offs. Never consider your prospects as a disposal box of your product. If you find your prospect is not interested in your product, leave it there. If you become too pushy, you may end up losing the prospect forever and incur bad perception of your brand.

Don’t lose hope

With a failed trial or series of trials do not lose hope, it will show on your face and you may appear boring, sad and cold to a good prospect too. If you are not enthusiastic about your product or service, you can’t expect your prospect to find interest in it too. Staying motivated from street to door, under every circumstance, every atmosphere is important as it’s you who are ‘face’ of the brand. So appear enthusiastic, pleasant, motivated, and persuasive. Remember, your prospect is literally a ‘prospect’ for you, not your customer, so don’t expect him or her to be too receptive. They are the people who are not actively looking for your product and your visit is unexpected, interfering. Conversion rate in this type of sale is low, so accept the fact. In a failed attempt, just think it was a bad one and move on to the next with a winning attitude. Celebrate each successful sale, and stay motivated.

Little planning can be helpful

Rather than being random and ringing all doorbells on your way, with piled up rates of failure why don’t you start planning a bit and secure more chances of success? Good planning and research may help you. Know who is your target audience, where they are located, what promise they expect from you, what is their trust level, when are they available and receptive to your presentation, what motivates them etc. Choose locations accordingly. So before starting with your sales call do a thorough research on the demography and psychograph of the desired target group. Also, do not reach them in inappropriate time. Strike a balance between quantity and quality of calls.

And you are there. Go and shoot, win and celebrate.

What with the age?

Well, it has less to do with the age, and more to do with the newness in technology and failure of mid-aged individuals to deal with them. As it often happens, people in their mid-to-late forties tend to become slow on learning.

Another thing that keeps people in mid-to-late forties away from job is the salary they seek. I am not saying that you should not be compensated fairly, or at least you should get the sum you need to pay your bills and put some amount in savings.

But, this is not how people running businesses think. They are less inclined towards humanitarian goals, and more towards raking moola and increasing profit. Young people, despite their inexperience, are considered more apt for this goal as teaching new tricks to new horse is comparatively easy and so is taming them.

Then how to get a job in 40s?

This is the question that keeps people in 40s and jobless awake at nights. These are the people who have family to support, and maybe kids to send to university. Unemployment in such time is very difficult to deal with.

But, fortunately there is a way out and in this series I will tell you what to do to get hired. The advices shared will be workable. Do not treat this series as a read-and-forget series. Work on the suggestions shared. If I were you, I would have subscribed to the RSS feed. Do it now and stay up-to-date with the series.

Mantra 1: Prepare to fail

Nothing tastes sweeter than success, and nothing prepares you for success like failure does. Success in nothing but a journey from smaller failure to a bigger one with a scope for introspection and analysis at every juncture. If you want to succeed then do not abstain from failing. The more you will fail the more experienced you will have.

Mantra 2: Persist

What turns a failure into a success? Is it skill or is it tenacity? Be tenacious and exercise persistence until you succeed. A person is not a loser or cannot be deemed  as a loser until he quits.

Mantra 3: Grow

People who are afraid of growing never succeed. To succeed in your chosen field, you need to keep yourself apprise of the knowhow of your field.

Mantra 4: Dare to do

Do not get caught in the analyzing mindset. There will no better time than “NOW” to take action. Do not become victim of analysis or paralysis.

Mantra 5: Help others

There is a difference between one who touches the sky and the one who sniff the soil all their life. And that difference lies in the willingness to help. Keep helping people, and you will learn many things in the process.

Mantra 6: Network

Helping others selflessly is how you build network of trusted friends. Be willing to give, just asking for something in return will not help you build a network.

Mantra 7: Do not lie

Be honest to yourself and others. Do not brag or lie.

Mantra 8: Avoid overpromising

Nothing backfires as strongly as does overpromising and under delivery.  Do more and promise less.

Mantra 9: Own your mistake

Indulging in a blame-game is a typical mindset of loser. If you have erred, accept it, learn from it and move on. There is no point in playing blame-game. As it is, no one is going to believe you.

Mantra 10: Learn to say no

Saying no is very important. If you do not know how to effectively say no without antagonizing the recipients then you will either end up having more foes than friends, or you will end up wasting time doing things that does not matter to you.

You’ll want to take that business idea and fully flesh it out before you begin to gather support for your concept.  Make an outline of your plan, and how the idea fits into accomplishing your goals.  Think of how you can make this concept work for you, and how you’ll carry it out.

Now bring in your friends and even family, ask them to take a look at your outline and see what they think.  Take their input seriously, and make notes of the points they mention.  Whether they see a flaw, or something you could change to work for the better.  Any criticism is good at this stage, and will help you bring about a stronger business idea.

Once you’ve got that idea validated by those close to you, and you’re comfortable with what you’ve got, it’s time for the next step.  You need to find business entrepreneurs.  These are the people that will give you the input you need to be successful, and also the people you can inspire to be interested in investing in your business idea.  They will give you the pointers you need, and expose any holes in your idea that make the business a less than viable success option.  After that you plug up the holes, and keep at it with the entrepreneurs and try to find yourself an investor, so that you’ve got some start up money to really get your idea off the ground.

Plus now you’ve proven your idea is viable, and you can focus on your target market.  Use what you’ve learned to your advantage, and make things happen.

A similar need has risen in the wake of the current corporate fiasco. This time the reason for the failure is the greed and shortsightedness of the corporate executives, of the managers who run the company and the world economy under the disguise of inspirational leaders. Their greed and focus for short term profit led the whole world to the economic crevasse, a crevasse so deep that coming out from here is very tough and will require the strength of character that is lacking in today’s’ business executives, and even if we come out of this crevasse and the economy revives, the world will never be the same again. The base has already shifted, and now an altogether different type of management style is needed to run business; now we need some truly inspirational business leaders who can pull us single handedly out of this fissure.

If the time is good, movement is easy, and when we do not need to exert ourselves to move ahead then we need someone just to look after the entire process, and to point out if something goes wrong, which rarely does. In such times we need a manager, who does not need to be inspirational or charismatic, he should only be diligent.

But, if the time is not favourable, and things started falling apart, these managers render themselves useless. In situation like these we need true leaders. The leader who can pull even the last one of us out from the deep crevasse we are stuck into by the sheer strength of his character. In such situations, we need someone to inspire us, someone to motivate us and instill the lost self belief in us. This is not the time, when dictating task and measuring the performance records will fetch any result. These tools were made for the time when things were normal, not for the time when everything has fallen apart. They will not be of any more use, but unaware of these facts today’s business managers are continuously using the same set of tools, which led them to this disaster, and the more they use it the deeper we fall in the trench.

This is the time when a fresh thinking is needed to assess and deliver the solution that was never heard of before. We need to understand that we cannot solve the problem with the mindset in which the problem was created. We need to shift the paradigm, we need to do away with the managers and their old way of thinking, and replace them with visionary leaders and their innovative ideas. We need to look for the leader who has a deep understanding of the situation and who is not scared of trying new things. We do not need those pretentious “been there done that” managers, rather we need an honest leader who accepts that he has not been through everything, and one who has the courage to accept that he doesn’t know the solutions to all the problems, but still he believes that if we work together we can get out of this economy crevasse. This is the style of leadership, which is needed. We need Leadership 2.0 to solve our problems. Like Web 2.0, Leadership 2.0 should also stand for every change that is forthcoming.