One of the measurements was to read a book on personal or professional growth per year and share our learnings with the team. One of our other measurements is to find different and better ways of doing things in the functions we manage, so I chose a book by Seth Godin, called ‘Poke the Box’. The reason for this is that it’s about starting ‘stuff’, doing things differently and ultimately ‘poking the box’ to see what happens if a change is made.

I feel very inspired after reading ‘Poke the Box’. The blurb describes it as a ‘manifesto about producing something that’s scarce, and thus valuable. It demands that you stop waiting for a roadmap and start one instead…’. It is basically saying; stop waiting for tasks or things to do and start ‘stuff’ yourself.

Key Learning
My key learning from ‘Poke the Box’ is that ‘initiative is scarce and therefore valuable’.

There could be many reasons why initiative is scarce. For example; fear,  lack of time or capacity, in general people are happy to let others do the work and if people don’t initiate things then they don’t need to take the blame if it doesn’t work.

It is therefore valuable to be an initiator, but equally it is valuable to be a company that embraces initiation and provides space and resources to enable employees to initiate / do things differently. As proven by some of our value measurements I feel that SK Chase is one of these companies, but is in the minority.

A really interesting example given in the book, was that Starbucks started off as a coffee bean and tea leaves store under the vision of Jerry Baldwin, who believed that the beans were the point and not the coffee. Howard Schultz, however. was obsessed with espresso and took a trip to Italy, which made Starbucks the coffee shop we know today. However if Jerry Baldwin had not started the original store then it wouldn’t have developed. The lesson is, that starting something doesn’t mean it will be right first time and is not a straight line to success, but gives potential to become something great.

This came to light in a project SK Chase are investing time and money into at the moment; our system rebuild project. We had the first few development cycles planned but then our developers advised they had to stop the flow and concentrate on some research, which could potentially change the whole flow of the project and ultimately even the outcome. But without initiating and starting the project, no improvements would be made and the system would just get more and more complex.

It also emphasizes that things will go wrong more often than not when you start things, unless you are super lucky. But not to be afraid of being wrong, you’ll always learn something from it and move on.

Jan the Initiator
‘Poke the Box’ also made me want to be an initiator personally as well as professionally. A few days after reading this book I got a plasterer in to plaster my hallway. I had wanted to decorate it since I moved in a year and a half ago! And I now love my hallway and enjoy welcoming people into my home (see some photos below).

I now say every morning when I wake up – I am an INITIATOR (say in the style of Gerard Butler in 300 – This is SPARTA!)

Ok, maybe that’s a bit too far…but I hope this inspires you to start something too.

In January:

Although Christmas feels like a distant memory now, we have all been reflecting on this time to see if there is anything we can do better.

It’s our busiest time of year (around 30% of our clients’ yearly gift voucher sales are made in December) and so much planning goes into ensuring everything runs smoothly during this peak period.  We’re all over the moon that we enjoyed such successful time – both in a commercial sense, and culturally too – our team enjoying their work over Christmas, not getting stressed out and having fun! If you look back at our facebook page over December, you’ll see we had lots of it!

We hope all our clients enjoyed a successful Christmas too – and that people who gave and received gift vouchers from all the lovely hotels and resorts we work were delighted with their gifts.  And we’re going to make it even easier to buy gift vouchers in the future!

We’ve embarked upon a new System Rebuild Project, which involves making improvements to our gift voucher application, as well as introducing new features and services – over the course of the next 12 months.

This will make our system more intuitive, streamlined and easy to use for our clients and their customers buying gift vouchers.

Steph (MD) has been devoting some time to sharing the Save / Spend framework with the team.  We went into implementation with this as a business at the start of our new financial year (November) and some of us are now taking the learning into a personal space, which is great.  The framework enables us to pro-actively manage our money.

Kate and Jan have been settling into new roles and tasks. Kate as head of Risk & Compliance and Jan had an overview of the Legal Function with one of the founders, Kaye and is looking forward to getting more involved in this function and helping to breathe some new life into it over the next few months.

And on a personal note:

• Kaye had a 10 minute conversation in Italian with a courier company on the phone  – a BIG milestone for someone learning Italian.
• Ben is working his way through a ‘Flexibility for Martial Arts’ book and the idea is to come up with a series of 15 minute stretching workouts.
• Catharine is looking forward to The Mighty Deerstalker (a night time off road adventure race) in March!
• Jen is heading to New York in 6 weeks and is enjoying reading guide books and planning her adventure.
• Kate has been the driving range with her fiancée (part of her personal challenge to learn to play golf). She didn’t have a great success rate at hitting the balls (mostly thin air) but Kevin is actually a good teacher and was very patient.
• Steph has been learning about Chakras and how they affect our mind/body/spirit/emotions and has started to practice Jai breathing which is helping her connect with herself and tune into her intuition.
• Jan’s hallway is now complete – and she loves it - a career in interior design beckons.
• Dani is on holiday…
• And me – I’ve just started a ‘retro’ fitness class which involves exercising with a hula hoop while dancing to Wham! Now where are my legwarmers…?  :-)

A couple of months back I was reading an article about family life and came across a quote from a mother that really got me thinking.  It read “When you become a parent you’re no longer in the picture, you become the picture frame”.

At first I thought, “Yeah, I can relate to that. I am the frame”.  At the time I was experiencing very little sleep due to my 18 month daughter going through a teething stage and it did feel like I was simply revolving my life around her sleep patterns!  I also get that when you become a parent your life does dramatically change and your needs definitely take a back seat, however after a bit more thought I wasn’t sure that I was ready to be relegated to the frame just yet or even at all.

As a result of poor quality of sleep, I was finding it hard to concentrate and focus at work and I didn’t seem to be getting any time to myself to do any of things I enjoy as I felt too tired.  So as a result of all of that I had low energy and other than getting more sleep, I couldn’t see how things could improve.

Context

I was feeling frustrated and was talking it through with Kaye one day when I had a realisation; in order to be the best version of me that I can be, I need to give myself space.  As soon as this fully dawned on me I felt a massive relief.  I also felt a little bit sad that I had put myself to the bottom of the pile again. I think most of us probably experience this to some extent in that you’re so busy looking after everyone else that you forget about yourself.  I decided to hold a personal context of ‘space’ to support me bringing this into my life.

So as I started to paint a picture of what having space would look like for me I had another realisation; I have lots of support around me and it’s OK for me to ask for extra support.  I have a fantastic support network and as soon as I asked for more support it was there.  In the past I’ve felt guilty about asking others for help although I now realise that people are happy to help out especially when they can see the benefit.

What is ‘Space’?

For me it was important that I actually got really clear on what space means to me before I set off on my space voyage!  In the past, when I thought of giving myself ‘space’ it conjured up images of relaxing in a fluffy robe in a luxurious spa – not something I can afford to do every day.  To get clear on my terminology I now class this as ‘me time’, which is equally as important, but on a less regular basis!

So I knew why I wanted space but what exactly does ‘space’ mean to me? When exactly would I give myself space? What time would I need to get up so that I could have some space? (I was already up between 4am-5am, would I need to set my alarm for 3am?!)  Is 10 minutes enough ‘space’ time?  Can I have some space every day?

After some calls to book in extra child care and a quick reshuffle of my work diary I managed to ‘book off’ a couple of hours worth of space each day.   So now that the space is there, what do I actually ‘do’ when I’m in this ‘space’ time? The answer:  whatever I want!  How free does that make me feel? The answer: very!

At work, giving myself space means giving myself a bit of thinking time or breathing space or space to be creative.  So it may actually look like I’m doing nothing but this is where the magic happens!  This is when I feel most inspired and come up with ideas and solutions.  Most of the time I actually consider one of our focal points and it tends to be in a broader sense rather than thinking about the detail.  I feel switched on and fully engaged with the business. I also sometimes choose to use this ‘space’ time to get caught up on stuff – the point is, I get to choose what to do with this time.

In my personal time, giving space also means choice.  I may choose to exercise, meditate, learn something new or actually just do nothing at all!  What I love about exercising is that it makes me feel truly alive and grateful for my health.  Meditation and learning help me grow my ‘inner’ space and I feel open and free.

With Eilidh, my daughter, giving myself space means being truly present and tuned into her.  It’s really easy to go through the motions of everyday stuff like meals, bath and bedtime and for me it’s more challenging to just ‘be’ together and when it does happen it feels truly amazing and really connects us – even at 5am!

Reality

The reality is that sometimes I can only fit in 10 minutes of ‘space’ and sometimes that means just sitting doing absolutely nothing.  What I do have now is an awareness of space and how by choosing to grant myself space can affect the person I am.

I’m also aware that it’s a good idea for me to continually check in with this to make sure I’m still getting enough space.  It’s very easy to get caught up in the daily ‘stuff’ and to forget to take a step back.

A final note is that over the last couple of months I’ve had periods of only 3 – 4 hours sleep and have still managed to give myself space – sometimes just a couple of hours guilt-free kip in the afternoon!

When I started my career with SK Chase in December 2008 I had only recently graduated from university and had spent the last four years going through quite an intense learning curve (both educationally and personally). I did not really have a plan as to where I was going or what I wanted to do, I was a fresh graduate who needed a job. My job title was Customer Services Administrator, which meant dealing with customer queries and general administration. At first I was really energised by this role, however as I settled in to the role I started to find myself feeling a little stunted, and I was not sure where I could progress from there.

After a year of being in this role, I was given an amazing opportunity by the directors at SK Chase to become an Accounts Administrator, and learn the financial side of the business. My training for this began in December 2009 and I felt instantly energised again by learning all of the new processes, and I also gained a deeper understanding of the business. At the time this did feel a bit daunting, however I felt a sense of freedom being able to pick up all of these new skills, and I enjoyed the everyday tasks I was carrying out. When I was given the opportunity to step up and become Finance Manager at SK Chase I jumped at it, again it fuelled my intent to grow, and seemed liked a natural progression. After some time in this role I started to realise the tasks that I really enjoyed when I first learned them were starting to give me some down energy and I realised that this was because they had become part of the norm, there was nothing new to be done with them, or as far as I thought nothing new.

This is where the “what next” question came in to my head and rather than feeling that I had reached the end of my learning’s,  I identified that there were so many opportunities for me to grow the finance function at SK Chase. It was not all just about me growing myself, personally and professionally, it was about how I could also enable growth, in my function, in other people and so on. By training other people on the finance tasks, this not only helped their growth, but it freed up energy for me to be able to take the time and space to start focusing on learning new skills and tasks within the business, and also new skills which applied to my personal life and relationships.

Out with work, I have learned to identify ways which I can grow as well, and I recently followed a strict protein diet for a number of weeks . Initially I just wanted to do this to lose weight (which seems a bit juxtapose to growing J), however I have had major key learning’s along the way about myself and also my eating habits, these learning’s I can now apply to my daily life, and have encouraged me to continue to undertake personal challenges.

Having a deeper understanding of my intent has really made me embrace it more, and identify characteristics in myself which I may not have addressed or followed up upon had I not been so aware of it.

For me, I feel that the only way is up from here, and the world has a wealth of learning’s for me to embrace, even if it is not always clear at first sight, I know that my intent will guide me

By Kate Taylor

In November:

We are all getting ready for Christmas!

We have two new recruits called Jenny & Jerry who are working in Service Delivery helping hotels & gift voucher buyers with any queries they may have. Jenny is here full-time and Jerry is working over the festive period. 

Ben, our Service Delivery Manager’s vision, is that Christmas will be fun for everyone working in the team, and it looks like they are on their way judging by the snowmen made with play doh pics on Facebook. Check out the winner’s sculpture below…

Speaking of Facebook, SK Chase are launching their first ever competition there on Tuesday 6th December to thank their existing followers, and hopefully add a few more – watch out for an amazing prize!

We had our first online training sessions in November which we received great feedback (especially Ben – average satisfaction score of 10!!)!

And finally, Kaye has taken responsibility for the ‘System rebuild’ project – we’ve decided to rebuild our application, introduce a WebService (which means that clients will be able to do some fun things with gift vouchers) and introduce some exciting new features and a new product!

And on a personal note…

• Ben completed the 8 week fitness course designed by Georges St Pierre, a world champion Mixed Martial Artist.
• Dani has signed herself up with workshops organised by the London College of Spirituality as a way of expressing her personal intent “to heal” her goal is to become a Reiki healer.
• Catharine has joined a cycling club – Hervelo
• Kate is taking up golf and is looking forward to playing with her fiancée.
• Jan went on a forest holiday to Keldy Cabins in North Yorkshire.
• Jerry is planning non stop mince pies and cheesy tunes in December!
• Kaye has decided to see how many hotel gift vouchers she can buy as Christmas presents this year

Back in February we together agreed a new set of values; to be courageous, to be true and fair to all. That’s not because we’d had enough of being open, honest and fair(!), more that we had realised that these values had become so firmly ingrained in our culture that we were no longer challenged by them.

Having values act as a guide to the business, keeps the team aligned and enables us to make sure that when we recruit someone new that we can attract a great match (both culturally as well as commercially).

The challenge is that everyone perceives values in different ways (my ‘courageous’ could be your ‘taking risks’) and we recognised that we needed something more tangible for our team to subscribe to that brings them to life in a way that we can all relate to.

This is why we spent time together, away from the business, agreeing how people who hold these values, of being courageous, being true and fair to all, express themselves. And once we’d identified this, we could then agree a set of measurements relating to our values that we can use to appraise our progress.

This was an interesting process and it was reassuring to see how much alignment already existed within the team as to what each of our values meant.

The expressions that most resonate with us are to push boundaries; to be aligned with our personal intents; to be open to improving; to manage expectations; to try something new (i.e. do something differently and better); to be open and flexible to changes; to trust ourselves and others; and to value ourselves and others.

And to support us further we agreed on the SK Chase Ten Measurements – which relate to these ‘expressions’ which has inspired the team no end.

It’s vitally important that people who work for SK Chase retain their quirkiness and individuality. Yes, we all share common values but it doesn’t mean that we walk around as clones of each other. So weaved into our measurements are things that relate to us as individuals – personal goals and aspirations.

An example is to undertake a one-off personal (or professional) project which pushes boundaries.

Ben has made a head-start on this one and is already part way through a massive personal challenge that is pushing his physical boundaries to the limit by committing to an intensive 8 week fitness & nutrition course designed by Georges St Pierre, a world champion Mixed Martial Artist, combined with regular taekwondo sessions.

After week 1 was over Ben shared that “7 weeks now feels a lot longer than 8 weeks did before I started!”

And Jan recently reported that she’s currently enjoying another of our measurements – to read a book on personal or professional growth and share learnings – and is half way through ‘Poke the Box’ by Seth Godin which is all about doing things differently.

What’s great about having values is that they inspire others. As soon as we came up with our measurements my mind immediately started thinking about all the amazing things I could do – and how much more motivated I felt knowing that my colleagues were going to do the same.

I’ve taken some time out to consider how I’m going to contribute to this project over the coming 12 month – and it’s really helped me focus on the things that are really important to me – and got me excited about things that I’ve been daunted by in the past. Why is this? I think it’s because I’m going to get the opportunity to share my experiences with my colleagues. That I’m going to publicly announce my intentions – which will inevitably act as an impetus to complete the challenge and finally, that we’re all going to be in this together.

First personal challenge: Learn to speak Italian.

I’ll let you know how I get on

In October:

• Our new Online Training Shop went ‘live’, allowing our clients to view and book training sessions online.
• Steph is focusing on risk management and is about to start a new project paper and review our risk management strategy.
• Heather has been sending out the SK Chase ‘Twelve Weeks of Christmas’ emails – One thing our clients can do each week before Christmas that could really make a difference to their hotel’s gift voucher sales over the festive period.
• Dani is focusing on setting up lots of new lovely clients before Christmas.
• Catharine is getting all our clients’ gift voucher stock ready for the festive rush!
• The Blue Team (Business Operations) had a ‘Vision Workshop’ where they agreed their context for the forthcoming year: together
• We have started working with our new accountancy partners JS Accounting
• Jan is carrying out an audit to ensure our clients are maximising the benefits of the SEO functions available in the web management system used to build and manage gift voucher portals.
• Kate has bought a new car!
• Ben is almost half way through an 8 week fitness course designed by Georges St Pierre, a world champion Mixed Martial Artist and is taking part in the Scottish taekwondo championships.
• Catharine enjoyed a week at home in France and Jan is getting organised for a trip down to Keldy Cabins near Pickering.
• Steph completed her 10Km run on 2nd October in 1 hour 10 mins – see her photo below.

If you are solely interested in the ‘How to’ part – read our PDF here.

And for a short story on why I’m an expert in this, read on…

A few months ago SK Chase decided to set up a business page on Facebook – for a number of reasons:

• To be present on the main social media channels and share who & what SK Chase is
• To be where our customers are, stay in touch and deliver value
• To build a community of people/businesses who are interested in our area and talk to people people/businesses we know & would like to know

When you first set up a business page on Facebook, you’ll be given a URL that looks something like this:

www.facebook.com/#!/pages/business-name/157351280398741

A vanity URL allows you to customise your Facebook page, to something like this:

www.facebook.com/skchase

Why set up a vanity URL?
It’s clean, simple and looks good! And it makes it easier for customers to find you, for you to share with others and allows you to claim a bit of social media space for your business, giving you a distinct website address for your page.

I had set up a business page on Facebook and was aware that in order to create a ‘vanity URL’ we would need to have 25 ‘likes’. ‘Social Media Day’ was a few days away and the idea was to launch our Facebook page to our clients on that day – to harness the buzz around social media that this day would bring.

I woke up early on ‘the day’, checked our Facebook and ‘hurrah’ we had over 25 ‘likes’ – it was all systems go to create the all important URL.

I had printed off ‘instructions’ from the web on what to do to create our own vanity URL and had these to hand so I could follow these carefully, as I was aware that if you set the wrong name, you were not able to change it.

Facebook state:

Once you have claimed a username by clicking the “Confirm” button, it is not possible to edit it, or to transfer your username to a different account on Facebook. Additionally, when an account is removed from the site, its username will not be made available to other users for security reasons.

At least I thought I followed the instructions….

If you already have a Facebook business page set up, you will know that in order to have a business ‘page’ you need to have an individual user profile to navigate the site and administer the business page.

I have a Facebook page for personal use and I didn’t want to use this to navigate the SK Chase page, so I had set up a new user profile on Facebook with my work email address. 

I didn’t realise that you must first assign a username to your user profile before you choose a name for your business page. When I tried to assign a name to our business page, Facebook stated that I had to switch to my user profile to do this, which I did and happily confirmed the name ‘skchase’

And I assigned the SK Chase name to my own personal profile that I had set up to administer the page!

(and it appears I’m not the only one to do this, judging by all the comments about it)

The horror! The horror!

When the realisation struck that the skchase name was assigned to the profile I set up administer the page – my heart sank and panic set in. I kept checking & rechecking – yes – www.facebook.com/skchase went to Heather Rae’s profile page.

I woke my boyfriend (who luckily happens to be a very talented Software Engineer for IBM) and whimpered to him ‘Fix it’. 

He ‘looked into’ things while I got our two children up and dressed, but no amount of his expertise could undo what I had done.

With a heavy heart, I emailed my boss (who is also one of the founders of SK Chase) to let her know what had happened and we agreed that we wouldn’t be launching our new Facebook page until we looked into things further. ‘Look’ my boyfriend said sympathetically, pointing at her email, ‘She’s not angry – she put kisses on her email to you’.

It wasn’t a good day – they say things come in three’s and sure enough they did. Later that day, the fridge door came off in my hand and I crashed the car in the car park at the swimming pool. But these two events paled into insignificance with my ‘error’. I was broken

That day I contacted Facebook and I really didn’t expect them to be able to do much, as their website clearly states that once you have set a username you are not able to change it and they have 800 million active users, so I didn’t expect a response. But I’m a great believer in trying – and it was a genuine mistake on my part.

Success
Facebook looked into my request – and they changed the URL to the business page within 24 hours!

I was over the moon and can’t thank them enough.

As I Paul Gillin & Eric Schwartzman point out in their book ‘Social Marketing to the Business Customer’:

‘Today’s most admired social media marketers – Dell, Cisco, Starbucks and Google to name just a few, have adopted a philosophy of open experimentation layered upon a culture of risk tolerance. But one thing they all share in common, is that they all had the good fortune to making high profile, public mistakes.’

So now I feel almost proud to have made this mistake and to be in such good company – and it reinforces what I already knew:

Experts are just people who have made all the mistakes

In September:

• Ben & Dani are hosting SK Chase’s table at the AA Hospitality Awards in London next week.
• We’re getting ready for Christmas! Ensuring our Fulfillment Partner JEM has plenty of gift voucher stationary & stock for each hotel & resort that uses our Gift Voucher Application so we can fulfill all gift vouchers ordered.
• Dani has been setting up new clients so they can benefit from Christmas Gift Voucher sales and has been working on our new ”Online Training Shop’ so our clients can purchase and book training sessions online.
• Kaye is busy working on our new product (P2) which is taking shape. We’ve now moved from the ‘Concept’ stage into the ‘Design’ phase and has already learned so many valuable lessons and has benefited hugely by taking time to talk to our existing partners and clients as well as people who have supported us in the past – and is extremely grateful for their contribution and feedback.
• Jan has been carrying out more research for P2  and is a proud Auntie to baby Seren.
• Kate is now getting married in less than a year  ♥
• Heather is attending a training course this week called ‘Copy Editing and Proof Reading’.
• Ben is starting an 8 week Mixed Martial Arts fitness and diet regime.
• Catharine is running the half London Marathon on Sunday.
• Steph is going to Tenerife for a well deserved girlie holiday on Friday, then back to do a 10K run and then off to Portugal! (what fit employees we have here!)
• Kaye is extremely excited as she has purchased the most beautiful pair of Ski Boots (see pics below) and intends to use them as much as possible during winter

It’s a two day workshop and the main goal of the training is to learn how to use my voice and body language as an instrument to connect with my audience and for me to leave an impact with my clients after each sales meeting.

We are started off at the workshop giving a short introduction of ourselves. We are being recorded during each exercise and are then invited to watch the tape after and receive expert advice from Ed Percival and his assistant on how we have done during each presentation. The exercises are all geared towards showing more of our personality!

I am doing really well, the first exercise is fun having to introduce myself. The feedback I receive is that I’m very fun, enthusiastic and energetic and it’s easy for me to keep the audience engaged. Watching myself on video feels strange and is fun at the same time, I’m actually surprised how fun and engaging I am. At this point I’m thinking – wohoo this is going great!

On the second day of the workshop it’s time for the last exercise, a 10 minutes presentation and if we want we’re allowed to use power point slides to back up our presentation. The idea however is to limit the use of slides during the presentation – the lesser slides the more of an impact!

Having used a power point presentation consisting of 70 slides in the past when going on sales appointments to make sure we cover every aspect of our product and manage our clients expectations at the first meeting, shrinking my presentation down to 23 slides feels like a major achievement and actually quite nerve wrecking, as I realised how strong my attachment is to the slides! I’m not sure if that’s down to the fact that I’m a cancer as star sign and we’re suppose to be quite attached to “things”? I find it always hard to throw away my old clothes too LOL!

Ahem – anyhow back to the story, so it’s my time to shine now and I’m starting to present. I can feel how anchored I am to my previous way of presenting the slides and how difficult it is for me to use the slides and present them in a new structure with limited slides available and speak freely. I can feel that this exercise is far more difficult than the other ones, as my mind is focusing on the content of the slides and what I’m supposed to say and in what structure and I’m losing touch with the audience!

It’s time again to watch the tape and to receive feedback. This time I can see a noticeable difference in my energy when watching myself on the video, I’m less enthusiastic and less energised and I’m focusing on the slides. The feedback is that my personality is less alive and I’m less expressive when I’m using slides, as power point slides take away my focus from establishing eye contact and rapport.

So I make a conscious decision NOT to use power point slides during any in person meeting with a client – anxiety comes up!

A week after the workshop I receive an enquiry from a new 5 star hotel in London. I’m meeting the Marketing Manager of the new hotel for my first sales meeting where I’m not using my slides. It’s a few minutes into the presentation and I’ve just finished sharing our story about how we found our business intent and mention that our intent is “to set our clients free – so they can focus on what they’re good at”. I’ve never told that story to any client before during a sales meeting, but being on the workshop I’ve learned that story telling is a great way of making people remember you i.e. the more stories you tell, the bigger the chance of them remembering you!

All of the sudden the Marketing Manager of the hotel stops me half way into the meeting to say “I can see you’re a very good sales person and I want to be set free”.

WOWZER!  Hearing those words from her gave me goose bumps in that moment!

Never before have I had a client say to me that they think I’m a great sales person and never before have I had a client use our personal intent in that way and say “they want to be set free”. It felt really powerful and good and it reconfirmed everything that I had learned in the “How to make an impact workshop”.

The 3 key learnings I had from the workshop that really changed the way I interact with our clients during sales meetings now are:

“People don’t buy from slides – the buy from you”
 What I’ve learned from Ed during the workshop, is that limiting the use of power point slides during any one to one meetings or even not using them at all means “there’s more of me available during the meeting”. Focusing on slides takes me away from being in the moment with my customer or whoever I have on the receiving end. Listening to our customers, focusing on their needs and creating that magical relationship is more important than the slides and the content I might have “rehearsed” when using those slides! When listening to my clients, I find that I know exactly what I need to say without the use of slides and I can focus on what my client really needs to know in that moment and not what I think they are going to ask or say before the meeting. I find that although I’m selling the same product at each meeting, the questions asked are always different and hence I realised it works best to adopt my approach and focus on giving our clients only the information they need.

“Painting a picture”
As most of us have learned, some people are more visual, some people are more auditory and some people are more kinesthetic, meaning that visual people like to have slides and images to support what’s been said, auditory people learn by hearing sounds and words and kinesthetic people are feelers, they like to experience and feel things. My first thought was that if I’m not using slides, I’m going to lose the attention of the people who are visual. However Ed proved me wrong. He said that I don’t need slides to paint a picture, I can do this with words too! So where normally I would have used a graphs or images in my presentation, I am now describing that image with words instead! It really works!

“Emotions win over logic”
What you say doesn’t matter as much as how you say it; it’s your state, personality and the emotions you evoke in the people when you present that matter. Ed shared a statistic which said that 60% of our state is important, 30% of our structure and 10% content during any presentation or meeting. Meaning that our brain makes decisions first emotionally and then logically. So I found it useful not to focus on my content and focus on my state instead to make sure I’m feeling confident and ready for success! Success doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to convert that lead, but it means success in the sense that I’ve presented our product well, given the client all the information they need to make a sound decision whether our product will be a good investment, provides long term success, adds value

and

last but not least

sets them free so they can focus on what they’re good at!