Friday 2 September 2011

Getting the Boot


Appended below find some sales stories;
Postmortem of each story will give a learning experience;

Starting with a story on BAD CALL….

Adopt  for local situations.

GETTING THE BOOT
Jim's Tennessee Sale Goes South


Early in my sales career I had loads of proposals out to companies all over my region of Tennessee. My company (I'm making up a name to protect myself) was Best Insurance.

I was very busy and very happy. The sheer volume of work I'd poured into my territory was paying off. I was doubly delighted to get a call from the office manager of a very large trucking firm - to tell me she selected my proposal as one of two finalists.

When I asked what our next step was, she requested that I make a personal presentation to the president of the company. He would get his questions answered and make an immediate decision on which program he'd implement for his employees. I asked who the other finalist was. She said the name and I thanked her, hanging up with a huge grin on my face.

Knowing who my competition was, I drove up, supremely confident and happy that we would get the business.

I was surprised that both I and my competition were ushered into the president's office together. We were to introduce ourselves, our companies, and make a formal presentation.

With a smile on my face I began.  "Hi, Mr. Johnson, I am Jim P____ with Best Insurance."

Before I could finish introducing my company Mr. Johnson bellowed loudly "Best Insurance, hell! I've kept them out of this company for more than 30 years and they are not getting in now.  Young man you have 5 minutes to get off my property.  Who is next?"

I was so startled that I turned around and walked into the closed door trying to get out of there.

POSTMORTEM: Big employer in your back yard, never been a client in 30 years? There's gotta be a story behind that. What would you do? Great selling pros ask questions that others either neglect or can't think of. Wouldn't you be curious to know from an obvious prospect how they've never worked with your firm? When you ask assumptive questions like, "How is it that you haven't been a client in the past?" You imply that somehow, someday it's going to happen. Your next step is to ask, "Why not today?" And if the sale is at risk, the questions get riskier (you have nothing to lose). So I'd suggest Jim ask before leaving, "Are you telling me that all your decisions from 30 years ago are still valid today?" If you get a yes, be prepared to offer a counter example like; "Still ordering typewriters and 1978 Ford Trucks for your company?" You might still get tossed out, or you might gain new-found respect and renew your shot at a sale.


--
Regards,
Vignesh 

Friday 26 August 2011

'You've got to find what you love'


'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Thursday 25 August 2011

WELL DONE


Appended below find a list of 100 words to say WELL DONE…
It is not a limited list.. keep adding new words to it…
Use lavishly and get double/triple benefits…



"Well Done"


1. That's great
2. Good job
3. Excellent
4. I appreciate that
5. That's looking good
6. Good work
7. Great work
8. You're doing well
9. Good to have you on the team
10. You made the difference
11. Exceptional
12. Thanks for the extra ….
13. Wonderful
14. That is so significant
15. Superb
16. Perfect
17. Just what was needed
18. Centre button
19. A significant contribution
20. Wow
21. Fantastic
22. Thanks you
23. Just what the doctor ordered
24. First class
25. Nice job
26. Way to go
27. Far out
28. Just the ticket
29. You are a legend
30. Very professional
31. Where would we be without you
32. Brilliant
33. Top marks
34. Impressive
35. You hit the target
36. Neat
37. Cool
38. Bullseye
39. How did you get so good
40. Beautiful
41. Just what was wanted
42. Right on the money
43. Great
44. Just right
45. Congratulations
46. Very skilled
47. I'm glad you're on my team
48. It is good to work with you
49. You did us proud
50. This is going to make us shine
51. Well finished
52. I just love it
53. You are fantastic
54. Great job
55. Professional as usual
56. You take the biscuit every time
57. I'm proud of you
58. Don't ever leave us
59. Are you good or what?
60. The stuff of champions
61. Cracking job
62. First class job
63. Magnificent
64. Bravo
65. Amazing
66. Simply superb
67. Triple A
68. Perfection
69. Poetry in motion
70. Sheer class
71. World class
72. Polished performance
73. Class act
74. Unbelievable
75. Gold plated
76. Just classic
77. Super
78. Now you're cooking
79. You are so good
80. You deserve a pat on the back
81. Tremendous job
82. Unreal
83. Treasure
84. Crash hot
85. You beauty
86. The cat's whiskers
87. I just can't thank you enough
88. You always amaze me
89. Magic
90. Another miracle
91. Terrific
92. What a star
93. Colossal
94. Wonderful
95. Top form
96. You're one of a kind
97. Unique
98. Way out
99. Incredible
100. Ace
Hello world !!! Here is my first blog !!!


Just a small introduction :- 


I'm Vignesh ....A competent and astute professional with six years experience in Sales, Marketing, Banking & life insurance sector ..


Local Chennai boy !!! 


I love Music / Friends / Cricket / Social networks 


Wish me good luck !!! 


Cheers,
Vignesh Waran