Advice: Use financial incentives to increase motivation and productivity of the people in your company.

Despite the predominant opinion that most employees respond positively only to financial enticements, you can greatly improve employee performance in your company when you diversify the types of incentives you use.

A payment that reflects the talents, experiences and expectations of employees is a necessary condition to attract quality resources in your team. I said necessary condition. I haven’t said sufficient! Good salaries and an attractive benefits package will help you hire quality people for your company and, to a certain extent, to keep them. But these incentives are not enough to retain valuable employees!

Entrepreneurs and managers assume too often, that what motivates themselves also motivates their employees. In reality, each person has his own idea of what a good bonus from the company means. And usually, the view from the top of the company is different from the one perceived by employees. That’s one of the reasons why some people are entrepreneurs, and others are employees.

But what expectations do employees have of their employers in the 21st century? Taking the example of innovative companies such as Google, that has built a five star employer reputation by offering their workforce excellent benefits, people have rising expectations. Some employees want more freedom and flexible working hours. Many appreciate when the company makes their life easier as parents. Others will prefer a certain management style based on teamwork and merit recognition.

Use financial incentives to increase motivation and productivity of the people in your company.
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Non-Financial Incentives for Increasing the Productivity of Your Team

Here is a list of 12 things you can do to raise the level of motivation for the people in your team. The list is inspired by the methods I apply in my business; many of the ideas I started testing after I visited Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

1. Give your employees maximum freedom, let them plan their week how they think it is effective, let them explore their ideas about new products or simply try new ways of doing things

2. Allow for flexible working hours.

3. When delegating, take into account what type of tasks and activities each member of your team prefers, what are they best at?

4. If you have resources in your company, provide certain services to your employees in order to create more productive time. Allowing people to take time out some personal business like collecting their dry cleaning, picking up a package, or taking the children to school; all these will help them to be more focused on professional issues.

5. Recognize in public employees and the team’s performance(you and other managers). Make it a habit to praise an employee every day.

6. Make simple constant discussions with employees to show a natural interest in people.

7. Say “thank you” and praise people.

8. Treat every one fairly and impartially.

9. Honor your promises.

10. Assign responsibilities and always be prepared to assist employees.

11. Support, provide training and guide your team to success.

12. Challenge your employees.

Once you have implemented these measures, you can establish a way of working that will help you to keep your employees and transform your company into a more attractive place for other quality employees.

What is essential for you as an entrepreneur and manager is to understand that your trick of offering a bonus or increasing the payment will not work for an employee who believes it is essential to enjoy a flexible work schedule. To determine what people really want I recommend you establish an open system of communication with the people in your team. You have to listen, to observe, to remember individual differences and take care to give people the benefits that really drives them.

But what happens if you don’t have resources to make a competitive financial offer for the employees you want? A non-financial incentives lesson is especially valuable in this case. For businesses that are just starting out, small companies in the startup stage, the impossibility of offering generous pay may be offset by a good mix of non-financial incentives such those included on our list. In addition, offering a percentage of the business for key employees may be an excellent way of motivating employees in the running of your company.

Did you know it costs three times the salary of an existing employee to replace the employee? Think of the time required to find and recruit a new employee and the training costs at the same level of productivity. This is why it’s so important to establish what really motivates our employees!

Have a great idea that worked for you ? Write it in the comments section below.

The post How to Motivate People to Give Their Best for Your Company appeared first on Tooliers Blog.

Advice: Consider the 3 distinct stages in your buyers’ journey (awareness, consideration and decision) and adapt your communication to your client’s specific needs in each stage.

People buy when they want, not when we want to sell to them. Discover how to correlate your promoting messages to the buying stage where clients find themselves.

Everybody talks about a communication centered on client needs. Very few companies manage however, to put theory into practice. Why is this happening? Because it is not enough to adapt our messages to the general needs of our customers but we have to build our messages according to the buying journey they are on. In each stage, potential customers have some specific needs.

Unfortunately, most companies are trying to convince their clients that red wine is better than white wine, although the client has not yet decided whether he wants wine or beer with dinner. I will present a simple example to help you avoid such mistakes.

People buy when they want, not when we want to sell to them.
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Buying Is Like a Journey

Think of the persuasion process as a journey through which clients get closer to your product. Stops on the route of purchase are “Awareness”, “Consideration” and “Decision”. Our mission: to create relevant messages to specific needs in each “station”. Of course not all clients travel the line all the time, some already know what they want to buy. Most of your potential customers are just beginning the journey and if you ignore them you will narrow the base of potential clients enormously.

Let’s take an example. Biofresco Ltd sells juices made from premium ingredients in its own location and deliveries to companies. How can Biofresco reach more people and convince them to consume its natural juices? The first “station” on Biofresco’s journey is “Awareness”.

The First Station: Awareness

Never talk about the product, talk about the benefits.
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The worst thing you can do, in the awareness stage, is to sell red wine to the beer drinkers. The objective at this stage is to qualify a relevant audience. Biofresco can post on their own blog healthy lifestyle articles to make this work. An article about the benefits of taking vitamins and other antioxidant nutrients from unprocessed fruits and vegetables will attract good potential customers for Biofresco and will eliminate people who consume Coca-Cola. The presentation of a natural antioxidant juice recipe that can be prepared at home on the Biofresco Facebook page is another excellent idea. Those who wish to follow a healthy lifestyle will be naturally attracted to this information.

What we aim for at this stage is for the potential customer to want our product benefits and to associate our brand with this type of benefit. The first rule of “Awareness”: we never talk about the product, we talk about the benefits.

The Second Station: Consideration

In “Consideration”, the audience is already prepared to hear about our product but the focus is still on the benefits rather than the product itself.

Potentials drinkers of Biofresco juice can be helped to choose the drinks through a comparison table between juices and drinks that are sweetened with sugar or artificial sweeteners.

The comparison between benefits and risks may be presented as a blog article, a Facebook infographic, a poster in the store location, and / or leaflets promoting a table and include a discount coupon.

The Final Station: Decision

 Finally Biofresco is free to talk about their greatest passion: their own product. At this stage they talk with customers who have been qualified through the Awareness and Consideration stages, so they will react positively to the information that will confirm their buying decision. Nutritional information and information about the quality of ingredients used can strengthen purchasing decisions. During this station we will also present special offers and discounts.

A Compass for the Purchasing Journey Followed by Clients

You can use the following questions as a compass for relevant customers to purchase your product or service:

1. How can I help my potential customers to better realize their needs and to relatet hose needs with my brand(Awareness Step).

2. How can I help my potential customer to evaluate more easily and accurately the alternatives which satisfy their need, by informing him of the advantages and type of product / service offered by my company (Consideration Step)

3. How canI help the client to decide which solution is better and give them more reasons to choose my offer(Decision Stage)

Discover more about how to build your online sales funnel. Watch this 1-min video so you make the most of the new opportunities the Internet-driven economy has created.

The post How to Communicate with Your Potential Clients in Each Stage of Their Buying Journey appeared first on Tooliers Blog.

ADVICE: Personal branding strategy works well online because people prefer to communicate with other people rather than with companies.

The Internet has simplified the task of entrepreneurs and professional services providers. Anyone nowadays has access to social media channels such as a blog or Facebook page to reach a relevant audience. Personal branding strategies are especially effective online because people prefer to communicate with other people rather than with some companies.

People prefer to communicate with other people rather than with companies.
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The Power of Personal Branding

Have you ever heard of Robbins Research International? Probably not. But Tony Robbins? I bet yes!

Here’s an example of how powerful a personal brand can be. Everyone wants to benefit from the coaching, training and mentoring services of Tony Robbins. Millions of people follow him on Facebook and LinkedIn. Few of these admirers know that, actually, Tony owns a group of companies that develops and promotes its training programs. His companies hire up to 500 people during peak periods of activity! Why then, do we perceive Tony as a top trainer rather than as a CEO of a group of companies? Because his strategic choice was for the Tony Robbins personal brand to become the symbol of excellence in training and coaching rather than the name of one of his companies.

This strategy works well for small and medium companies and professional services providers. Whether you have a B2B or B2C business, your business is primarily H2H, i.e Human-to-Human.

You Don’t Have to Be Tony Robbins to Build a Personal Brand

You’ve already figured that I am an avid fan of Tony, whose classes I participated in religiously. This example could be daunting for you. Very few experts and professionals achieve the level of acclaim enjoyed by Tony Robbins. It’s ok. It’s important to became an expert in your potential’s eyes, not in everyone’s eyes.

The most frequent reasons why small businesses and professional services providers hesitate to build a personal brand are:

1. I don’t have the necessary expertise
2. I don’t have time and I don’t like to write books or blog articles
3. I’m not the kind of person to stand in the spotlight

Let’s take these “excuses” one by one:

1.The Expertise – Your expertise consists in what you know (and what your customers do not know and want to learn from you). These are the professional informations that allows you to deliver quality service. Positioning yourself as an expert in your industry is not just a stylistic choice but the best way to create interest in your services.

2. The Publication – All you have to do is repackage the information that you and your team already use (in sales processes, in delivery of services, customer services, etc.). If you have no one with writing talent in your team, hire someone quickly. You don’t have to start with the publication of a book. Start with the first small step: publishing a weekly article on your blog.

3.  Media Expose – Start by providing visibility on your personal blog and then you’ll get used to media exposure.

Why is it worth going out of your comfort zone to build a personal brand? Once your name is associated with excellence for services in your industry, you will create an enormous interest for your company’s services. Customers will come to you rather than you chasing them.

Let me tell you a secret. In my experience, the time invested to build Ozana Giusca personal brand was much shorter than the time I invested in activities such as cold selling or meetings with potential clients.

It’s important to became an expert in your potential’s eyes, not in everyone’s eyes.
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Instead of Conclusion

If you decide to promote your services through your own blog, Facebook or LinkedIn, it is good to understand something from the beginning. Nobody wants to read advertising! Be the “Discovery Channel” for your audience, not a commercial break. Educate your customers, put expertise in value and show them what to do to solve problems. So they will come naturally to you to help them implement these solutions.

Watch this 1-minute video to discover why you are not selling more in the new Internet-driven economy.  Watch now and get a free spot to my next online masterclass on how to create a sustainable lead-generating online presence!

The post Why It Is worth Promoting Yourself through the Internet by Creating a Personal Brand appeared first on Tooliers Blog.

For many entrepreneurs, adding a new team member is a gamble. Hiring the right person, as well as aligning the responsibilities of each employee to their skill set can be tricky. Recruiting employees because of a shared work ethic, or because we recognize their similarity to ourselves, or even hiring a family member, isn’t a guaranteed recipe for success.

James Altucher shares a great example of how small business owners can ensure they employ the right people to partner up with. By following this process you too can turn the odds in your favor and successfully build a high performance team.

How to Hire People to Love

by James Altucher, originally posted here

One time I hired a friend to help me with a writing job. Then I fell hard for her. Then she got pregnant. Then she got an abortion without telling me.

Then I found out she also had another boyfriend. And, by the way, she did a horrible job for me.

In my first businesses, one of my partners was my sister. Ultimately she didn’t like one of my decisions and she quit.

Her last email to me was, “I never want to speak to you again for the rest of my life.”

And she has lived up to her word.
When you build a business, or you are doing work that is important to you: you shouldn’t hire people you love.

Because love might hide the things that are very important for you completing your job. I might love someone who can’t spell.

So I shouldn’t hire them to spellcheck.

Claudia, my wife, works with me on a lot of projects. We even do a podcast together.

But that was after years of relationship where we got to know each other and what we were good at and what we were bad at.

If I were to disappear tomorrow, she could probably pretend to be me. If she were to disappear tomorrow, I would be lost.

So she’s hired!

But, sadly, she can’t spellcheck.

But this post is not about hiring loved ones. It’s the reverse. It’s about finding the people you love by using a hiring process.

Recently I read the book “Who”. The authors had interviewed over 20 billionaires, 30 CEOS, and dozens of recruiting managers and then developed a process of hiring.

They then tested the process over and over again to see if it brought the right people into a business.

I don’t care at all about their process for hiring. I’m glad it works for them. Good luck.

When I read their book, I realized I used their process in personal relationships!

Wife, friends, work friends, close ties, weak ties, etc.

So here it is.

A) SCORECARD

List all the features you want for a particular relationship.

Like, for a wife: I want someone who doesn’t cheat. For a friend, I want someone who doesn’t lie to me.

I make a list of ten things for each “position”.

When I was first dating after I got divorced I did not have a scorecard.

So I met women who were interested in all sorts of things that had no interest for me.

Women who were interested in dating other guys at the same time.

Women who were more focused on my belongings than who I was.

Women who liked me but wanted to see what else was better.

Women who wanted me to dress a certain way, or even women who wanted me to like having ten cats in my house and five babies.

I have nothing against any of these people. One woman I really liked once got super drunk at a party I invited her to. I have nothing against that.

But then her breasts fell out of her dress and she never noticed. I got her out of the party. And she kept laughing at me, “Your friends only like you because they think you have money. They’re
idiots and you’re an idiot.”

And maybe she was right. But we broke up.

She is now happily with someone else high up in the banking industry and I am happy for her. She is also running her own company. Very successful and a very good person.

But not for me.

I was very very unhappy. I got drunk every night. I kept asking myself, “am I crazy? Does nobody exist who has the simple qualities I want?”

So I made a scorecard. I made my list.

Did I find her? I think I came pretty close.

Argentina was originally discovered by pirates escaping who needed a place to escape the British. Well, Claudia is my pirate and stole my heart.

I use a scorecard now for everything.

Friends, acquaintances, work friends (who are every bit as important to me as friends), people who I will do business with (who are also friends, else I won’t work with them. Period.), and so on.

It’s only in the past few years I’ve realized that each role has different criteria. If they don’t fit the criteria they are probably not good for that role. Probably not good for me.

For instance, friends around the neighborhood are different than work friends. Both are very important to me. But both have different roles.

Selfishly, I only want people around me who are good for me.

Is there anything wrong with that?

B) SOURCE

You can meet a woman in a bar. In a yoga class. Or a book club. Which would you choose?

It really depends on your scorecard above.

But just because you have a scorecard doesn’t mean you will find what you want. You also have to look in the right places.

Whenever I’ve looked in a bar, disaster resulted.

Whenever I’ve looked in a chess club, I’d only meet men (who became good friends).

I meet friends by making sure I go to places where the people have some similar values to me. So I don’t go to a hockey game (there might be good friends there but it’s not a good SOURCE).

Or I might go to a conference where people are focused on improving themselves. Or , to be honest, since I so freely express my own values in my writing I tend to like the people who gravitate to my writing.

There are a lot of studies that “weak ties” (not your close friends but people who might be friends of friends or acquaintances or Facebook friends, etc) are more beneficial for your career success than your “strong ties”.

I don’t know the reasons for this. We can all guess. But I spend a lot of time cultivating my weak ties. Being there for people who I barely know but maybe have that one moment where I can help.

I keep in touch with my weak ties.

This is also a great way to build the SOURCE for people who might later become strong ties. It’s worked for me many times now.

Also, if someone falls off the scorecard, it gives me a chance to distance myself while still having them in the pool of the source.

This all sounds very clinical. Ugh. Like science.

But I do wear a lab coat when I write. So I am Dr. Love.

C) SELECT

You have a SCORECARD and a SOURCE. But not everyone in the source will fit what you want in your life.

There’s only so many “openings” to fill. You can’t have a room filled with great friends and lovers every day.

Maybe there’s only room for one lover. Three or four great friends. Ten medium great friends. And 100 weak ties.

So you want to make sure you Select well, given your scorecard and your source.

So I make lists of questions I want to know.

Given the 1000s of bad experiences I’ve had (see “face down drunk on Lexington Avenue at 3 in the morning” article or “the time I lost 7 million dollars in one day article”) I now make sure people meet the criteria.

Else, a lot of time, money, and heartbreak can be lost.

I hate heartbreak. And I hate losing time and money.

This doesn’t happen in one day, or in one interview. But many experiences with a person.

And since there are 7 billion people to mostly choose from, it’s not so bad if someone you think makes the cut, falls off after one or two strikes.

If you pick your Source correctly, then you have many people to go back to.

If you select your weak ties correctly, then there are many people to go back to.

One time I hired a friend to work for me at a company. Then I found out he went to my boss and tried to have me fired.

So, even though we had been friends for years, I made sure he got fired. Almost instantly.

There’s a saying, “Everyone deserves a second chance.”

My response to this…”not really.”

D) SELL

You have the right scorecard. You have the right Source. They’ve made it through the Selection process. Now what?

Well, you have to Sell them that YOU are a good person to love, to be friends with, to get to know better, to be a strong tie or a weak tie, or a help when they need it.

How do you do that? You can’t tell them. You can’t say, “You can trust me”.

That’s what real estate agents and stockbrokers say. Do you trust them?

You can only show by example.

I was talking to Tucker Max and Dr. Geoff Miller recently. They are about to come out with a book called “Mate”, about the evolutionary psychology behind how people choose their spouses (and other mating partners).

In the book they say that sometimes the most effective words you can say are not, “I love you” but “Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

People want to know you are effective at what you say you can do.

That you are not the Emperor who wears no clothes.

That your word is gold.

That you don’t gossip about others (because then you might gossip later about them).

That you don’t take things personally when you shouldn’t (I often do that, and when I do – I’m very hard to deal with as Claudia tells me).

So you show, through time, that you are the person they want to be around.

My favorite technique. I always try to “over promise and over deliver“.

When I’m doing anything: a talk, an event, a book, a post, a trip, lending a helping hand, I always ask myself, “am I over promising and over delivering”.

Not under promise and over deliver. That’s for corporate losers.
Over promise and over deliver means you learn, other people get helped, and you exceed even your own expectations of what you can do in your life.

You become bigger. And you earn the trust of others. And it’s scary and hard and takes you out of your comfort zone.

So I guess it all boils down to what’s good for you. Even when you SELL, you do it by improving yourself.

I guess what I am saying is: I’m grateful this post is in your scorecard, in your source, that you’ve selected read it, and I hope I am over delivering.

I’m also grateful to the random people interviewed 30 CEOs and then wrote a book about it. They accidentally gave me a technique to find my loved ones.

Maybe you can use this to choose the people you surround yourself with. Try making the lists described above.

What’s your scorecard, your source, etc.

Or you can say, “this is garbage.”

It’s your choice.

But I hope we can be at least weak ties, and maybe friends.

Article by James Altucher, originally posted here.

The post “How to Hire People to Love” by James Altucher appeared first on Tooliers Blog.