If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 31 Everything in Life Involves Selling Something

Mr. Herjavec is an admirer of anyone with great selling skills.

4 Qualities of Outstanding Salespeople

• They believe in what they do
• They enjoy and engage people
• They listen more than they talk
• They eliminate reasons not to make the sale

At its core, selling consists of relating to another person and persuading that person to go somewhere he or she had not planned to go.

Good salespeople know where to apply their energy with a potential customer and when to stop wasting their time on tire kickers and window shoppers.

Planning a sales pitch to a customer with my team begins reviewing all the good things that are likely to happen including reasons why the prospect will surely respond positively. The answers come, then tell me the reasons why we will not get the sale. Once we eliminate all the reasons for a prospect to say no, the only answer that remains is a yes.

Chapter 37 Humility is More Effective than Arrogance

It is never pleasant when things go wrong, but it is never wise to assume the other person is to blame either. When things do go wrong, it is a good time to learn how to improve the way you do business and to appreciate the difference between optimism and realism.

The longer Mr. Herjavec is in business, the more he realizes that success is almost never hinges exclusively on the quality of your product or service. It also involves on the people you deal with and the way they relate to each other.

A successful sale depends not as much on how well you communicate the content of your pitch as how good you make people feel.

If a pitch does not go well, try to learn call the group and ask what you did well and what you did not for the next time. Perhaps you can do better and the relationship can become one of your biggest customers.

How I Handle Customer Complaints

• Assume the client is right 99.9% of the time and move on
• Remember the role that customers play – you are in business to serve your clients, who pay the bills
• How to fix things with clients is as important as what you fix
• There is no such thing as a small complaint – address and solve all complaints
• The ultimate complaints are usually expressed silently – most do not complain, they walk away
• The first response to a complaint must be good communication
• Test your system to anticipate and eliminate complaints
• Treat your employees like clients
• Solutions are important. Blame is useless, do not finger point – solve first.
• When the problem is solved, analyze. The goal is to find ways of preventing reoccurrence.

Linking to dividend paying companies, there are more chapters and information in the book which is good to learn from. After buying your shares, you tend to pay more attention to the company and one method is how they sell and how they handle complaints. The better they do it the better the financial results.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.