I was consulting with a company that had education centers all over North America they taught various technical courses to high school graduates. This company had a fair number of salespeople whose job it was to sell these technical courses, which sold for about $9,000 at the time, to people who had graduated from high…
Don’t be nice to people just because you want something from them. Make it a point to be nice just to be nice. It costs you nothing, it make you feel really good about yourself and the payoff is incredible. Why? Because, when you’re nice to people, they’re nice to you in return. Make being…
Not long ago, I was staying at a hotel near the Toronto airport. When I arrived in my room, I noticed a placard on the bathroom counter. The card read: Dear Guest: As a responsible citizen, you are probably concerned about doing your part to help preserve our fragile environment. If you are, the management…
Everyone of us is motivated by the exact same thing. It’s something called self-interest–what’s in it for me. This is nothing new; we all know this. But here’s the big secret: nobody takes it seriously–99 percent of the people ignore this simple, obvious fact 99 percent of the time! If you want to get people…
Negotiation is not a contest to see who wins and who loses. Instead it’s a cooperative activity designed to make everyone better off. How does this work, you ask? It all begins with trust. Once the people involved trust each other, information can then be freely shared. When that occurs, the pie automatically expands and…
Most people look at caring as the expenditure of time and effort to benefit someone else. In reality, caring about others actually benefits you–big time! The reason is that when you care about others, they care back. And the more you care, the more they care back. Give people any indication at all that you…
The key to working out successful agreements is to first talk to the other person about what they want (their win) and then show them how to get it (your win). If you can learn to do this, others will follow you just about anywhere. – Ross Reck, author of Instant Turnaround!
Negotiation is all about people who are sensitive, have delicate egos and are concerned about feeling good about themselves. That’s why Win-Lose doesn’t work–it makes people feel bad. When you make people bad, you motivate them to work against you instead of with you which makes your life difficult as well as miserable. Win-Win, on…
My Example of the Week Several years ago I was flying on American Airlines from Albany, New York, through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to Phoenix. The flight out of Albany was two hours late because of a mechanical problem, which meant I would miss my connection on the last flight of the evening to Phoenix and…
People have an insatiable need to be appreciated. If you can satisfy this need, you will have them eating out the palm of your hand. One very easy way to do this is to complement people, in a sincere way, for any number of reasons: things they have accomplished, the outfit they are wearing, how much you like their…