Even good salespeople can make mistakes that prevent them from sealing a deal. In her Engage newsletter, Ottawa sales consultant Colleen Francis suggests you watch for these mistakes:

• Not Earning The Buyer's Trust: If your buyer doesn't trust you, 98 per cent of the time you won't make the sale. Remember that trust begins with you -- building rapport so the client likes you -- and reflects consistent behaviour over time.
  
  
• Being Afraid To Hear "No.": Many salespeople are afraid of the client saying "no" so they accept "maybe," or "let me think about it." It's better to find out exactly what your prospect is thinking, so make it clear that a "no" is allowed.
  
  
• Focusing Solely On Selling A Product: Your focus in a sales conversation shouldn't be on pitching a product but on getting clients to talk about their problems so you figure out how to help solve them.
  
  
• Hiding Behind Your Sales Material: You can't just send out a whack of sales material after the first contact and wait for the sale to roll in. You need to find out what the client needs.
  
  
• Understanding What The Prospect Really Wants: What the prospect needs and what the prospect wants are entirely different things. Wants are more emotional, and often based on whether the prospect likes or trusts you. The prospect needs a screwdriver but wants to buy it from Vandervoort's Hardware instead of Home Depot because he likes Vandervoort's better (or vice versa).
  
  

If you're wondering whether you belong on LinkedIn or Facebook -- two of the collaborative Web 2.0 offerings that have become wildly popular in the last year -- Anita Campbell says the answer is Yes! Yes!

The entrepreneur observes on her Small Business Trends blog she has been using LinkedIn for several years and getting good value from it. LinkedIn is a site that allows you to enter an online resume to use in networking. It serves as the 21st Century equivalent of a recommendation letter, as former employers and colleagues can use it to give you their support.

LinkedIn notifies you when one of your connections updates her profile, allowing you to keep abreast of career moves. You can submit questions (or answer other people's questions) so it facilitates a sharing of knowledge.

She joined Facebook recently and found it another way to connect, seeing more of the "whole" person -- the personal side and some of the professional side as well. People put up profiles, but those are more limited on work history than the LinkedIn profiles. Instead on Facebook they will add photos, personal description of likes and dislikes, and links to blogs.

"Facebook seems suited for furthering relationships and for getting to know the complete you. LinkedIn is suited for maintaining an online resume of your professional credentials and for finding employers, service providers, and those who can introduce you. My plan is to use both," she concludes.

The business language for negotiating is combative: We "strike" deals, "squeeze" the other side, "and like to be called "hard-nosed." But Britain's leading hostage negotiator, Roy Ramm, considers that language unwise, and thinks we would be wiser to follow his style as a master seducer, working hard to establish rapport with his counterparty, and even sending in pizza to be shared between the hostages and hostage taker.

"You increase your bargaining power by building a bond with your counterparty," Jenny Harris, Young Businesswoman Of The Year in Britain, writes on Management Today. "The fact that parallels exist between guerrilla warfare and business is hardly surprising. The interesting thing is that whereas we in business wield a battering ram, people like Ramm try emotional intelligence and rapport building -- and a round of pizza."

We often hear that making a mistake is OK, but aren't quite sure we believe that. In his Unleash Your Potential ezine, Kevin Eikenberry offers four criteria to determine if a mistake is OK:

• It leads to learning.
  
  
• It isn't repeated.
  
  
• It is done in pursuit of your goals and objectives.
  
  
• It doesn't violate or conflict with your values.
  
  

A mistake has to pass all four criteria to be OK. If it does, he suggests you celebrate the person who made the mistake for taking a risk -- or congratulate yourself, if it was your action -- and keep moving forward.

• You should be able to complete the next action on your To-Do list in 20 minutes. If it takes longer, break it down into a series of 20-minute (or less) actions.
  (Source: Getting Things Done blog)



• The year-end holidays (and holiday gifts) are just down the road, and this is a good time to order ahead if you plan on gifts for staff. Make sure what you select fits the individual, and is of equivalent value for each staff member even if not exactly the same for everyone. Holiday or year-end gifts are not to be mistaken for performance awards.
  (Source: Carrot Culture newsletter)



• In a turbulent world, tracking of the use of management tools globally is finding a significant increase in scenario and contingency planning. And with the increase in use has come an increased satisfaction with this approach, Bain & Company's Darrell Rigby has found.
  (Source: Harvard Business Review)



• To gauge the effectiveness of your website, measure the bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who see just one page on your site or who stay on your site for just a short time -- five seconds or less, perhaps.
  (Source: MarketingProfs.com)



• How responsible do you feel for how successful you are and will be in life? Ten per cent responsible? Eighty per cent responsible? Or 100 per cent responsible? Software developer Brad Isaac says to be successful you must raise your "responsibility quotient" until you feel largely or fully responsible for that success.
  (Source: Achieve-IT blog)

Managers and team members routinely negotiate the details of their work in an informal way. It's often fast, decisive and works well within a high-trust environment. Trying to achieve 100 per cent buy-in and consensus, on the other hand, can be paralyzing. That said, a more formal consensus-building approach makes sense to me in cases where:

• A situation has eroded to the point where it has the potential to fragment your team's working framework.
  
  
• There is a need to bring different perspectives together.
  
  
• Cooperation and support are needed from all the players, or the situation calls for a creative, multidisciplinary solution to address a complex problem.
  
  
• No single person possesses the authority or complete knowledge to make a binding decision for the team.

Larry Dressler identifies five sequential steps of formal consensus building in his book Consensus Through Conversation.

The process begins by defining the issue -- a situation analysis conducted in conversation with the whole team. Next the group must establish decision criteria (the overarching goals and principles that will decide the issue). It's important to sort out what the team members simply want vs. what they truly must have.

Movement towards consensus is then made through the iterative crafting of a proposed solution, sometimes going through several redrafts. This may involve sub-group work or a single author working with feedback from the group. A key stage comes in testing for consensus, where members set aside their personal interests to consider whether it is the best decision for the group and reflects the team's best thinking. Finally, there must be agreement on a supported solution and plan of action.

There's no point in taking a formal consensus-building approach if the issue is minor or the decision is already a fait accompli. You need to be prepared to spend the time necessary for the consensus-building process, and sometimes it helps to bring in an outside facilitator, but it can be the best approach in many complex and problematic team situations.

Over the summer we've noticed that several clients have launched projects to redesign their Internet sites. They've also made smart decisions to test their new designs with actual users.

We're strong advocates of usability testing. Given the sizable investment involved in a redesign, it's important to know that your clients, customers, prospects, staff or other users find it easy to use. Is it easy to scan and navigate? Is the content right? Are you speaking their language? Is it effective in helping them accomplish the goals that brought them to your website in the first place? Or are they getting stuck and abandoning your site in frustration? Sometimes small tweaks can make a big difference.

We can offer customized research that investigates the mindset of your users and produce a snapshot of the problems encountered on your site by the people who matter most to your success. 8020Info would be pleased to discuss your requirements and welcomes your enquiries at (613) 542-8020, or by email at watercooler@8020info.com.