There’s nothing more energising than success and nothing more tiring when things aren’t going well.

Last week I was speaking to one of my favourite friends… John Donnelly.
Now for those that don’t know John he’s one of the sharpest tools in any business toolbox. He lives in Spain where high level business people fly in to ask his advice and fly out again after a few glasses of sangria. We speak on SKYPE, as do many of his clients, and his wicked sense of humour has me regularly injuring myself when falling helplessly off my office chair.

John was reviewing one of my latest video-blog films and made some great suggestions on improving the final result. Everything he said was correct but it meant doing the film again! No problem, the result will be better and I’m energised to re-film it and send him the final (Director’s) cut.

In six months time…
On the other hand I feel sorry for another friend that’s going through a difficult time. Her new team is having great success and is delivering a first class product. As a result, however, is continually being pressured by others to produce more and more. They do this by focussing on the small areas that could be done better and just offer criticism whilst ignoring the excellent work of the project as a whole.

The result is that my friend has decided to leave and within six months will probably be giving in her notice. Having come to this decision she is finding that her tiredness has disappeared, she has a more relaxed attitude to problems at work and is becoming increasingly disengaged. In the meantime her boss keeps telling her “I don’t know what we’d do without you!”

He’s about to find out and at a most inconvenient time, I should guess. 

I’m often asked how to restructure a sales team to make them more profitable faster and how to identify and avoid recruiting order takers that eat up valuable management time.
So here’s a video I’ve uploaded on the topic and hope you find it useful

Hiring salespeople, avoiding ordertakers

As you can see from previous posts I’ve been investigating how people work on the internet.

The main surprise is just how sophisticated the medium is becoming in allowing people to trade and make money (or perhaps I’ve missed). The ability to have  a website designed in Thailand, upload one’s own or others products (by becoming an affiliate), take payment via Paypal or Clickbank and have a cheque for all that you sell sent to your bank and all within a few days has posed some interesting questions on the future of work.

Let’s first deal with the Hype! An awful lot of people are currently trading on the web and some of them are doing very well. Indeed at a seminar in London last month a parade of such people told an audience of over 800 how they were making anywhere between $2000 a month on Twitter to $20,000 in one week on Facebook. The audience were given titbits of information on “How it was done” and then offered to purchase whole programmes of products where they could do the same by following the speaker’s step-by-step fast cash formula!.

Now, before we go any further, let me say that I have the greatest regard for the organisers and what they are doing to inform people about the possibilities of making meoney on the web. I did, however, fiund the American way of selling through hype, the promise of easy riches and the buy NOW part of the sale because of product scarcity rather galling.

The problems for work and the individuals, as far as I see it, are these:

• I suspect, that it’s going to be a very few in his audience that actually succeed! This may bring depression, feelings of failure and loss of a lot of redundancy money. (More than a few in the audience were seeking to plough their redundancy money into web based sales)
• Trading on the internet is likely to become a “bubble”. Like any other bubble people are believing, being told, that having a product on-line is a path to instant and easy riches. The reality is that those who realise those riches will be the early adopters such as those on the stage at Mark’s seminar, whilst the majority will find the marketplace so saturated, with other traders as well as FREE items, that there are just cents rather than dollars to be earned.

• Another possibility is that Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and possibly governments will find a way of monetising the trade for themselves more effectively and thus reduce the potential for huge incomes.

I later attended another seminar on making money from the web where some in the audience had been selling products on the web for up to five years and barely scraped together a living wage. A few seemed depressed and disheartened and quite possibly were making themselves unemployable in the long run!

Perhaps working solely on the web should carry a health warning?