Giant start with baby steps

By Francis Kong

There are celebrity sales people who bring in tons and tons of sales and as a result they make tons and tons of money. These are the giants in the industry. And then there are those who would make a sale once in a while and then wonder, what is it with these people that make them continually rake in the sales and make the money?

Is it luck? But no one gets lucky all the time they way they do. Is it connection? Maybe. But how do I get myself to increase my own netwok too? There must be something behind it. And so the question pops out in your mind. “How do these people continue to make six or seven figures and here I am struggling month by month just to reach my quota and make ends meet?”

I have been in the human potential development for so long I see things in common among all successful performers whether they be people in sales or in any field of business.

First of all, successful professionals see themselves as who and what they really are. They are professionals and they hold their craft. They have confidence and they know they can achieve greater things.

Secondly, these giants of the industry continue to learn and stretch themselves. They network with people. They serve in their community. They join service clubs, they serve in church and the more they are in touch with people the more they build their network of friends who may just become their clients one day.

I have handled sales people, I have a network of people who are in sales. And it’s extremely rare for me to find person in this chosen field to actually read a lot of books. Rarer still do I find sales people who would invest in attending non-company sponsored seminars. And in many occasion, the same people who do not perform well are the same people who complain that their companies are not providing them support. Amateurs carry this kind of mindset. They have mastered the art of blamestorming.

Not so the giants because they are professionals. Professionals are of a different breed. They’ve got classy upbringing because they bring themselves up. (pun intended) Sales professionals invest in knowledge, they read magazines, they can’t get enough of web portals dedicated to sales and they do invest in attending seminars and conferences. They buy books and they actually read them. And then a wonderful thing happens. They sell more, they earn more and they are more fulfilled. Here’s the common thread woven in the fabric of the professional’s success journey. They work harder on themselves than they do on their jobs. The hungrier you are for knowledge, the wiser you become. Your self-respect increases, your confidence built and opportunities come by your door waiting for you to open.

Your desire to be successful has to be bigger than a 9-5 job. Giants begin with baby steps and you should begin right now. Invest in knowledge; put the seeds in the small steps and continue to water your skills with actual experiences and information you seek. And when the time of harvesting comes, you will have the fruits of your efforts in front of you. Do not waste time. Always find something to do that would add value to what you want to achieve in life. Whatsoever you sow, you shall reap. This is Scripture Truth that continues to operate everyday of our lives.

Never forget. The road to success is marked with many tempting parking places. Say this to yourself all the time: “NO PARKING!”

Soft is Hard and Hard is Soft

By Francis Kong

Tom Peters is one business guru who does not mince words. I remember attending his seminar many years ago when I saw him and heard him rants about the need to “Innovate or Evaporate.” His background is engineering and therefore logic, analysis, synthesis, mathematics and measurement are important to him. And to read his latest orange colored thick and pricy hard bound book entitled: “Little Big Things” becomes quite of a shocker to me.

Peters says that the one of the most important things for business people to know today is that “Soft is hard and hard is soft.”

For so long soft skills training has been undermined and undervalued by many hard-nosed business executives who stick to hard skills training. And as I have been saying all along, how could anyone invest on training that covers subject matters branded as “soft?”

As I attended the latest World Business Forum held in Radio Music Hall in New York Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, every single speaker extols the virtue of leadership, innovation, teamwork and team play as highest need for business organizations to survive the current atmosphere.

Jim Collins, author of best selling books like Built to Last, Good to Great and his latest “How the Mighty Falls” worked on empirical data and pointed out to the audience that one of the main reasons why businesses fail is that the leader exhibits arrogance due to his successes. The same Collins also mentioned that what his date revealed is that successful companies that have stayed successful through the years exhibited the irrefutable fact that the leader demonstrated humility and that the same virtue carried the companies through prosperous as well as difficult times.

The Illustrious former chairman of GE Jack Welch, evidently older now is like good wine becoming even better with age. Welch is feisty. Welch speaks his mind maybe because he has nothing to prove. Welch says “My main job as a CEO is to develop talent.” He says just like a baseball team, the team with the best players win.

At one point he became serious and quiet and then with a pathos I can identify with, looked straight at the four thousand leaders and executives gathered from 126 countries all over the world and said: It is unbelievable that leadership development is still very low in many company’s priority even today.” And then he cited cases after cases of businesses that are failing and pointed straight to the fact that the same companies do not invest in leadership training on their people.

Rio de Janeiro born Carlo Brito of Anheuser-Busch Indev was emphatic when he said that the success of his companies even after going through five major mergers is to develop and build a performance culture. He says something simple yet profound. “Companies are built by people and he has never heard of great performing companies say, “We are here to hire average people.”

And I have been doing leadership training all over the country and some abroad but what I heard from him made a lot of sense for me. Brito says: “When you have complacent people in your organization, great people walk out of the door.”

Charlene Li, author of the famous book “Ground Swell” talked about the impact of Social Networks today and its effect on business. Li lamented the fact that most businesses still do not know how to mine the potential of social networks while those who do are reaping in the profits.

Martin Lindstrom made a pitch for his book “buyology,” came up with slides after slides and film after film that are cleverly and expensively produced emphasizing the need to understand how the human brain responds to buying and marketing. Bill McDermott, Joseph Grenny, David Gergen completed the line up of the speakers for the first day.

The second day featured Steve Levitt of “Freakonomics” fame, Joseph Stiglitz, former US vice president Al Gore, A.G. Lafley of P&G, Renee Mauborgne, Vijay Govindarajan, Luca Majocchi, Nando Parrado and James Cameron of Avatar fame. I don’t even have enough space to share what I learned from the second day of the seminar.

Filled with fresh and new information and my mind spinning with new ideas, I walked back to my hotel in Manhattan and realized that the money invested in the learning is just too little compared to the benefits of what I have learned. And I just can’t wait to work on the information, process them and apply them to my trainings back home.

Soft is hard and Hard is soft. Things like values, attitude, behavioral, motivation, inspiration and other “soul” issues do count these days and guess what my conclusion is? They have always mattered through the ages.