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Archive for the ‘two cents [read]’ Category

When I give presentations or speeches to my staff I can see that they’re forcing themselves to listen or pretend to be engaged. How can I make my speeches more memorable and interesting?

There are many ways to engage your audience. You remind me of a restaurant manager who gave the same speech about increasing sales and improving customer service to his staff everyday. He always ended his speech with “Remember, the customer is always right”. He never listened to his staff. He never asked them for any feedback. He never changed his technique. Do you know which restaurant I’m talking about? Well, I can’t remember. They shut down. Communicating with staff or any kind of public speaking whether to motivate or to inform depends on key ingredients. Start by telling stories. You can see how the restaurant story can get your attention. Stories engage us and make the point more memorable. ...read more

People in this market are lazy. We invite customers and consumers to attend our products launches but they don’t show up. What can we do to get some attention?

We all read about the same boring corporate releases about a product launch or a new promo event. We all see the pictures that accompany these articles. You know, the ones with some executive management cutting a ribbon, pulling a fabric away to reveal the product, or my favorite, using flashing lights and smoke machines. Hurray! And we wonder why customers lose interest in attending or why the press is not eager about the event! How can anyone get energized about such events, seriously? ...read more

Our sales target is a nightmare. We keep dropping the price but it seems we’re still far from reaching our goals. Any tips?

How does the offer ‘Pay nothing and get two’ sound like? Keep dropping your prices and that’s what you most likely will end up offering to your customers. Using discount to close deals may be due to one of three problems or a combination of them: ...read more

1. Your pricing strategy is too high compared to your direct competitors.
2. You are desperate to get your commission or to avoid corporate pressure.

Almost for the entire retail market, summer season means sale, discounts and promotions. The financial crisis forced us to lower our prices below the norm. We can’t afford to go lower one more time. And if we don’t, competition will. We’re stuck. What do you think? ...read more

Training workshops have always been a way of rewarding our staff by showing them that we’re investing in them. As budgets have been shrinking we started to evaluate the impact of training on the business. We found out that most employees were not applying what they learned. Do we have the wrong staff or are training workshops useless? ...read more

When we emailed people on our list about our new product only once or twice the response rate was very low. But when we started to send them multiple emails about different products some complained about the volume of emails and others opted out from the list. What can we do to manage email marketing more effectively? ...read more

I’m new to the market. In a few months since I took the new HR Director post, I’ve had people complaining nonstop, I managed somehow to get a number of employees to hate me and I saw those who couldn’t care less about the new changes we’re trying to apply. Is this normal in Kuwait? ...read more