In the current economic climate, consumers are finding themselves being slightly more selective about the products and services on which they spend their money. To ensure that you customer’s think of you, your company, and the services that you can offer them when they are in the market it is important that you work towards building and maintaining a solid working relationship with your business contacts.
Pay Attention To The Small Details
During the course of your interactions with your customers you should be sure to pay attention to the small details of your conversations. Perhaps your customer makes a brief mention of expecting a new baby, or perhaps your client mentions having purchased a new car – you should jot these little details down in your client files so that you can mention them during your next visit or discussion with you clients.
Everyone can appreciate someone who remembers and takes an interest in the details of their personal lives.
Keep In Touch
Be sure that you reach out to your clients on a fairly regular basis to find out if any of your new products or offered services may be of interest to them. While a good portion of business communication is handled via email in this technology-reliant world, you can add the personal touch to your professional relationships by picking up the phone and having an individual conversation with your clients.
- Be sure to keep the conversation friendly without being overly sales-driven.
- Remember your professionalism manners.
- Enquire about their family and briefly touch upon other personal aspects of their lives that they may have shared with you in the past.
Focus On Customer Service
In nearly all industries, customer service is notoriously for being an area that is more customer-no-service than it is known for being an area that is helpful to customers who have concerns. You should take steps to ensure that your business offers your clients an exceptional level of communication and service, no matter what stage they are in the purchase process. Your focus should always be on various methods of improving the business transaction experiences that you clients have with your business.
Be A Source Of Information
To further assist your clients with their own business needs, and to continually work on building your solid working relationship with them, consider making yourself an all-encompassing source of information for your clientele.
By having a complete comprehension of what your client’s needs are you will be able to ensure that you are able to meet them by becoming a steady resource of information, products and services.
Refer business towards your steady customers as an additional method of fostering a good working relationship.
Be Efficient And Prompt
To your client, time can oftentimes be something that they are in short supply of. Be certain to respond to inquiries and other customer communications promptly to ensure that your customer’s needs are met as rapidly as possible. Keep your communications concise and factual!
Taking the time to build your working relationships with the businesses and people who can help your own business stay afloat is a key part of professional success.
Work
Carefully Managing Your Work Relationships
With the amount of time that the average person spends in the office amongst their coworkers, it can be all too easy to allow the levels of professionalism drop to an unacceptable degree. While there is certainly nothing wrong with building and maintain a working friendship with the people that you work with, there are certainly limits that you should be aware of.
Keep It Clean & Professional
Unless your work environment is one that freely fosters the use of inappropriate language, then it is best to keep the words you use strictly to words that you could be comfortable saying in front of your grandmother! You definitely don’t want to be labeled as the dirty-mouthed person on the team, so it is always best to keep the cursing either to an appropriate minimum, or cut it out completely. The professional language that you use in the workplace will greatly reflect on the impressions that your coworkers and managers form about you.
Too Much Information!
It is certainly understandable to form a close friendship with some of people that you spend the better part of your waking hours with; however, you should ensure that the information you share with your professional friends is not something that could be used against you at a later point. You should stick to the idea of “TMI can really be TMI sometimes.” That may mean keeping the tales of your weekend exploits to a professional level and avoiding topics that can relate to personal hygiene or even be of an inappropriate sexual nature. It is understandable to have the desire to share great portions of your personal life with your work friends; however, you should always be acutely aware of the fact that it is in fact a work environment.
Conflict Resolution
There is little doubt that you will, at some point during your career, run into a situation with a coworker that requires a level of conflict resolution. It is important to understand and to realize that your reactions to the disagreements could reflect on your abilities to lead and potentially be promoted within the company; whether you handle the conflict with tact, professionalism and come to a suitable resolution, or you completely lose it and melt down – you need to understand the potential implications of your behavior. If it feels to you that you are unlikely to find a solution to the situation then you should give serious consideration to asking an HR representative or a supervising manager to step in and provide assistance.
Carefully cultivating working relationships with the people you spend time with at work is a great method of ensuring your day not only goes smoothly, but that you are able to interact with your coworkers on a more interpersonal level that will allow you to learn the best methods of successfully working with them. Just remember to keep things professional!
Excel At Your Work
Getting ahead at work may be a really big priority for you. This might be something that you have been striving to accomplish for a really long time, but you were not sure what steps to take in order to get ahead. If that describes you then you will want to take a few moments and read this small article. You will find a few simple tips that you can follow in order to get ahead, and excel, at your work.
One of the main things that you need to do will be to make sure you are showing your boss that you are responsible and reliable. You do not want to miss work a lot if you want to get ahead. Just because you may feel rough on Monday morning does not mean that you need to be at home. If you do not have a fever, you are able to move, and you are not contagious, you need to be at work. You should never assume that others will take care of your job for you. Assume that you are the only one that can do your job and make sure that you are there to do it. This will help your employer know that you are responsible and reliable.
If you work in an office with several people, there will most likely be some office politics. There will also be a lot of arguing, and bickering back and forth, from time to time. This is definitely something that you will want to make sure that you are avoiding and staying out of. You should never feed into this behavior and you should not be the one that is starting it. This is one of the fastest things that you can do in order to ruin any chance of getting ahead. Remember what your job is and focus on that while you are at the office. After all, that is what you are paid to do.
Finally, take some time to evaluate your job. What can be done in order to improve your job? There may be some things that can be completed that would make your job more effective. There may be reports that could benefit the company that are not currently completed. It is not difficult to become stuck in the everyday routines. This means that we find ourselves continually doing the same tasks over and over again. While this is a good thing, there are other things that can be done as well.
Taking the time to reinvent the wheel may show your boss that you are thinking ahead and that you are trying to improve the company.
Working Wisely
Almost everybody has had a job at one point or another in their life. The vast majority of us will spend almost our entire adult lives working, making our choices about a career extremely important. Additionally, our attitude and performance at work have an array of impacts on the other elements of our lives. So, how do we make this important component of our existence one we enjoy, rather than one we dread?
It all starts in our childhood, when we truly believe that we can become anything we want. We fantasize about becoming a super hero, a ballerina or a movie star. As we age, we realize that these, indeed, are fantasy jobs and we must cope with the idea of having a “regular” job. If we are lucky enough to possess academic prowess and take our education seriously, we certainly have options that others will not with respect to career choices. In the end, though, it seems that we all must settle on a realistic career that is available and can sustain us.
Since we will spend so much of our time at our job, we must consider what type of job we will enjoy and be able to perform day after day, year after year. It is never a good idea to choose a job just because it pays well or gives us superiority, even though financial security and social standing are important aspects to consider. If we follow these rationale and spend each day completing tasks that disgust us, literally or in principle, it will affect us emotionally and mentally. Such distaste for our work will certainly mold us into miserable human beings.
It is also essential to choose work that provides us with some type of satisfaction. Performing menial work tasks gives us no positive feedback, making us dejected, unfulfilled individuals. A lot of people do not have to change the world in their work to find pleasure in it. Choosing a job that gives us a sense of accomplishment, whether from completing a big project or actually saving someone’s life, is refreshing and will help us to come back the next day and feel good about doing so.
Finally, we must have the ability to maintain a positive attitude about our work and believe that our contributions are important. Employees who begrudge everything about their jobs, even the tiles on the ceiling, will find themselves feeling the same way outside of work. We all have days when we feel negatively at our worksite, but it is necessary for us to find the positive in something about our job that day. We need to feel as though our work is a direct reflection upon ourselves and give as much effort as we would if we owned the company.
These simple ideas can mean a lot when it comes to rolling out of bed and heading-off to face our work day. Even if we dreamed of being a celebrity chef as a ten-year-old, we should still be able to find satisfaction in our position as a short-order cook. Finding the positives in our job will keep us charged for success and this positivity will spill-over into other areas of our lives. Feeling like a part of our employer’s mission and fulfilling our expectations will help us live happy and healthy lives, even if we are looking forward to retirement!
How to Avoid Irritating Your Boss at Work
Everyone has had times where they may have stuck their foot in their mouth at work. This is common because no one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. But, we may actually be engaging in activities that could be irritating our boss and we may not even realize that we are doing it. This article will examine some of the behaviors that we may engage in that could be really irritating our boss and we do not even know it.
Most individuals in today’s society have access to cell phones. These cell phones are not used for simple phone calls anymore. They are like mini computers that are carried around and fit into our pockets. Because of this, more and more people are using them everywhere they go. The sad part about that is that they are also being used at the workplace. This can become very frustrating for an employer. Not to mention the fact that it is not very professional for someone to be talking on their cell phone, or sending text messages, while they are on the job. Therefore, it is most important to make sure that the cell phones are put away while you are at work. Take time at lunch, or on a 15 minute break, to check any messages. This should be the only time that you should be on your cell phone.
Having meetings with your employer may not be very exciting for many people. Actually, it can be very stressful for some, but for others it might create a lot of stress and anxiety. No matter how these meetings make you feel, you should never spend time looking for a clock or checking your watch. You must remember that the individual you are speaking to is your boss. He, or she, has called the meeting for a reason and continually checking the time can show that you are not interested in what they have to say. This can be very irritating for an employer that is trying to have a serious conversation with their employees.
How many times have you received personal calls on your place of employments phone line? This is common in times of emergency. But, it is not something that should be a habit. You are not in your home so you should not be carrying out various social calls throughout the day. This is rude and it also disrupts your work. Therefore, you will want to instruct others to make sure that they are not calling you at work unless they have an emergency. Save the chit chat for when you are at home.
You may think that informing your boss about everything that is going on in the office is the correct thing to do. It shows that you are responsible and you take your job seriously. Stop and think about that before you carry out with those plans. Many employers will view this as tattling and it is frowned upon in the workplace, just like it was in school. So, do not tattle on your co-workers. Focus on your work, and your job. Do the best that you can and then move on for the day. Only report things that may be illegal, or that could cause a safety issue.
What did YOU say YES to?
The day of our departure had finally come however this time there was a question mark over if we should stay and wait....or do we set forth on our adventure? We had already bragged about how lucky we had been in the past with the weather magically aligning its good behaviour with our planned departure dates.
A decision was made and we said yes to a departure the following morning.
Well, to cut the very long story short, three out of the four of us became terribly sea sick and the journey across the ocean to an outer most island on the Great Barrier Reef felt like it would never end! As the seas gradually increased their rage on our boat and its occupants, we all had private moments of “Get me out of here”... “Let’s go back” (even when we were over half way) and the most important question of all, “Why are we doing this?”
WHY...? Because we said yes! NO complaining or whingeing required... NO easy way out... NO control, alt, delete and start again... NO surfing the net looking for a “cheat” to this program. Suck it up, make the most of it and do what you can to solve the problems that need to be solved!
Please can I encourage you to remember and be realistic about what you said YES to! In fact, I would like to suggest that everything you are doing right now you said yes to…including your job!
When I said yes to being a Dad....I said yes to being interrupted whilst doing something that I thought was important to me by something my children thought was more important to them AND that I should drop everything I’m doing to do what they want me to do right now!
Instead of whingeing about my children...I remember that I said yes to being a Dad which realistically means being interrupted by them wanting me to play with them... right now and then only for a short season!
When I said yes to being a service provider...I said yes to doing what I can to keep the relationship positive, growing and moving forward...even on the days that I don’t feel like it.
Instead of whingeing about customers...I remember I said yes to this job, which realistically means serving customers and helping them solve the problems they have.
We already have a reputation. We will be famous for being a problem solver or being a whinger. So what are you famous for?
What have you said yes to?
Enjoy the journey!
Bruce Sullivan