Starting a new job often begins with a blissful honeymoon phase, in which someone’s best work is consistently produced. Inevitably, this comes to an end sooner or later, when the flaws of the job gradually start to reveal...
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Most people think sales is more art than science.
But there are certain rules to the game that will help improve your sales, according to a slide deck put together by business software maker Wrike.
Remember these 10 sales tips if you want your company to sell better.
SEE ALSO: Here’s what a top Silicon Valley VC firm says you need to do before offering a job to any executive
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I recently spent a week getting up at 3:30 a.m. in an attempt to replicate the morning routine of company founder Dan Lee.
You can read about it more here, but I can sum it up in a few words: it was horrible.
I became cranky, irritable, my appetite went to pieces, and I could not wait for it to end.
However there is a reason which would make me consider doing it again — occasionally. I simply cannot ever imagine doing it every day the way Lee and other business leaders do.
Time. Clearly I am stating the obvious but waking up at 3:30 a.m on a daily basis gave me nearly three hours more in my day than usual.
Free time is at a premium for many professionals in modern society. Commuting, especially in London, can be long and stressful, 9-5 shifts are not as common as they used to be, and the ability to work remotely often sees people working longer hours than ever before.
Because I was sticking closely to Lee’s routine I was required to spend my early mornings in a specific way. However in the future if I was to attempt it again I would make some changes to the routine to adapt it more to my needs.
Firstly I would definitely change the water, coffee, and smoothie binge that Lee starts his day with. Well, I say change, I would stagger my drinking as the headaches that come with taking in that much sugar and caffeine first thing were not pleasant. I would also substitute the coffee for green tea and possibly save the smoothie until after my morning exercise.
Having that time in the morning to read and ease myself into the day was far more pleasant than most peoples’ morning routines. There was no rush to shower, shave, and sprint to the bus stop or Tube station.
Admittedly the major downside of the early wake up is that by 5:00 p.m I found myself flagging and my ability to concentrate was basically zero. However once in a while this would be something I could tolerate.
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NOW WATCH: T. Boone Pickens’ strict morning routine will inspire you to plan your days better
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Gwyneth Paltrow is undoubtedly extremely successful. (She can justify a a $200 smoothie!)
But even though her trademark organic lifestyle is easy to mock, Paltrow’s Goop business has become one of the premiere lifestyle businesses — and that’s no laughing matter.
However, Paltrow has faced adversity in her rise to the top.
Her biggest struggle? That she’s a woman.
The Cut’s Dayna Evans caught a sound byte highlighting these tribulations at Marie Claire’s Power Trip conference in San Francisco.
“I think it’s really challenging being a woman in business, period. I think that we face an uphill battle just when we walk in. I think it’s just a fact of life,” she reportedly said.
“I think people really like you how they know you, and I think it’s challenging for a woman to kind of shift her shape and especially to do something that’s provocative,” she added.
SEE ALSO: Gwyneth Paltrow says this is the hardest part of being in charge of her 40-person company
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One of the biggest reasons people leave their jobs is because they feel unappreciated.
“People come to work for more than a paycheck,” says Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert, leadership coach, and author of&nb…
Business Insider recently brought you the story of Dan Lee — a company director who starts his day at 3:30 a.m.
Lee’s incredibly early start allows him to get the very maximum out of his days (he has often comp…
VaynerMedia founder and CEO Gary Vaynerchuk has a simple leadership philosophy.
“Everything in business stems from the top, whether you’re the boss of two people in a three-person team or the head of a Fortune 500 company,” he writes in his new book, “#AskGaryVee.” “And everything that happens in a company is 100% the CEO’s fault.”
CEOs, after all, oversee their organization’s leadership, which in turn makes them responsible for even the lowest-level employee down the chain of command.
When a company is successful, its CEO should praise the team members involved in a particular win, but when it’s struggling or enduring a scandal, according to Vaynerchuk’s argument, the CEO needs to handle all of the blame.
Vaynerchuk said he enjoys seeing this in sports, such as when a quarterback takes the blame for a failed play even after the wide receiver let an accurate pass slip through his fingers. In sports or in business, “People are going to fight for you when you’re willing to do that,” he told Business Insider.
But he wishes he saw this more often in his own career. “I’m stunned by how many CEOs and leaders want to throw other people under the bus,” he said.
He can’t help thinking, he said, “Are you lacking self-awareness at that high of a scale that you truly think the person you just anointed to be the director of X or director of Y and who is failing, you don’t realize that you could have prevented them from starting there in the first place, and that you’re an absolute part of that equation, of their lack of success?”
Vaynerchuk didn’t want to call out specific names, but Volkswagen America’s CEO Michael Horn was criticized for this very failure last year in a Congressional hearing over the accusation of Volkswagen’s use of illegal software in a half million cars to artificially pass emissions regulations.
Horn flatly denied any knowledge of why the software was made to game the system, and blamed “a couple of software engineers” without claiming to know who was responsible.
On the other hand, General Motors CEO Mary Barra was generally praised by the media for her handling of a massive recall that happened two months after she became CEO in 2014.
Her ownership of the crisis, which stemmed from decisions she didn’t make, inspired faith in consumers and was able to turn a potentially fatal blow to GM into a complete rebirth of the company that resulted in a record sales year.
“It’s no accident that when some companies change their CEO they go from winners to losers or vice versa,” Vaynerchuk writes in his book. “It may be the most important variable for success in running a business.”
SEE ALSO: CEO of a multimillion-dollar company: ‘Never be romantic about how you make your money’
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NOW WATCH: The high-speed morning routine of media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk
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For years, Google has used an internal grading system for employees, called OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results.
Here’s how it works: Each Googler sets a goal and three key outcomes that result from achieving that goal. At the end of the quarter, they get a grade between 0 and 1 on each key result.
The ultimate aim isn’t to score a perfect 1, but to land somewhere between 0.6 and 0.7.
The idea is that, if you score a 1, your objective was too easily achievable. If you score between 0.6 and 0.7, then you were probably thinking big.
Google’s SVP of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, recently explained the rationale behind the company’s scoring system in a talk with Kris Duggan, CEO of Betterworks:
In order to set these ambitious goals and have them be credible, you also have to realize they’re not all going to be successful. We look for that 60% to 70% success rate across everything we do.
What’s nice about that too is you don’t actually need a sandbag [where an employee sets a goal they know is easily achievable], because people know like, “I’m going to set a bunch of hard goals, I’m gonna miss a bunch of them,” and it’s okay. It’s not okay to be 60% achieving on everything forever, but if I have a bad quarter, or bad few months, or bad year, or if I’m off on a few areas, totally fine.
Bock also said that Googlers’ performance on their OKRs isn’t tied directly to their compensation or eligibility for promotions. That’s because their goals should be what Larry Page and Sundar Pichai refer to as “moonshot” goals, in which they “really swing for the fences.” Presumably, it wouldn’t be fair to penalize employees for pushing themselves.
These moonshot goals are similar to what management theorists call stretch goals, which go beyond what seems possible.
Even outside of Google, setting (and trying to achieve) stretch goals is a crucial part of employee performance. Recent research by the leadership development consultancy Zenger/Folkman found that the most meaningful behavior of top employees — according to their managers, peers, and reports — is setting stretch goals.
For employees, the takeaway here is that it’s wise to set at least one objective that you know will be ridiculously hard to achieve. Then, of course, you need to work as hard as you can to get there. It could impress your manager more than setting reasonable goals and hitting them, no problem.
Meanwhile, managers can develop their employees by suggesting goals outside those employees’ comfort zones, and showing some understanding if they don’t make it all the way there. Ultimately, you’ll probably wind up with better — if not perfect — results because you encouraged greater effort.
Bottom line? Whether you’re working at Google or elsewhere, stretch goals are one path to make sure you and your team never stop improving.
SEE ALSO: Google’s HR boss explains why he thinks managers should have as little power as possible
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Business Insider recently brought you the story of Dan Lee — a company director who starts his day at 3.30 am.
Lee’s incredibly early start allows him to get the very maximum out of his days (he has often compl…
Understanding these two accounting concepts is useful in evaluating a company.
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Is there a Pepsi to 3M’s Coke? Or is the company in a category unto itself? And if so, how can you evaluate it?
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When 23-year-old Brandon headed from Massachusetts to the Bay Area in mid-May to start work as a software engineer at Google, he opted out of settling into an overpriced San Francisco apartment. Instead, he moved into a 128-square-foot truck.
The idea started to formulate while Brandon — who asked to withhold his last name and photo to maintain his privacy on campus — was interning at Google last summer and living in the cheapest corporate housing offered: two bedrooms and four people for about $65 a night (roughly $2,000 a month), he told Business Insider.
“I realized I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in — and I was almost never home,” he says. “It’s really hard to justify throwing that kind of money away. You’re essentially burning it — you’re not putting equity in anything and you’re not building it up for a future — and that was really hard for me to reconcile.”
SEE ALSO: To avoid outlandish rent prices, one San Francisco woman moved onto a 136-square-foot sailboat
SEE ALSO: Here’s how much a family needs to earn to live comfortably in San Francisco while still saving money
He started laying the groundwork for living out of a truck immediately, as he knew he’d be returning to work full time in San Francisco. A school year later, he was purchasing a 16-foot 2006 Ford with 157,000 miles on it.
It cost him an even $10,000, which he paid up front with his signing bonus. His projected “break-even point” is October 21, according to the live-updating “savings clock” he created on his blog, “Thoughts from Inside the Box.”
His one fixed cost is truck insurance — $121 a month — as he doesn’t use electricity, and his phone bill is handled by Google.
“I don’t actually own anything that needs to be plugged in,” he explains on his blog. “The truck has a few built-in overhead lights, and I have a motion-sensitive battery-powered lamp I use at night. I have a small battery pack that I charge up at work every few days, and I use that to charge my headphones and cellphone at night. My work laptop will last the night on a charge, and then I charge it at work.”
The space is sparse and minimal, he says: “The main things that I have are a bed, a dresser, and I built a coat rack to hang up my clothes. Besides that, and a few stuffed animals, there’s pretty much nothing in there.”
As for food and showers, that’s all on Google’s campus. He eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner at work and showers every morning in the corporate gym post-workout.
Few expenses mean significant savings: “I’m going for a target of saving about 90% of my after-tax income, and throwing that in student loans and investments,” he says.
He graduated with $22,434 worth of student loans, and has paid it down to $16,449 over the course of four months. “As a conservative estimate (and taking bonuses into consideration), I expect to have them paid off within the next six months, saving thousands of dollars over the standard 10-year, or even 20-year plans,” he says.
Additionally, saving on rent has allowed him to dine at nice restaurants and enjoy San Francisco more than if he opted for living in an apartment.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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