There is still the need to develop your staff and teams of course. But there is little money available to pay for it. Sound familiar?

Is this your training budget?

Many companies are in this situation and therefore many managers and company owners want to motivate their teams and help them develop new skills in both customer service and sales, but on limited or non-existent budgets. Many companies are forced to do some form of training, but using in-house staff and materials. However if the training is to be effective it is important to gather new ideas from other sources. Gleaned from the experts. The type of people who’ve been there, bought the t-shirt etc.

We can help, honestly. We provide a range of easily affordable audio CDs packed with top tips, years of experience and plain old good common sense. Our CDs and tips booklets are based around a number of key growth areas ;

• Customer Service
• Telephone sales
• Self-development

With prices starting from £34.99 for one audio CD, and packages of 3 for less than £70, you wouldn’t need many good ideas to make it self-financing would you?

All our products are supplied with a full money back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with the product. If you’re in the UK, simply return the  product for a refund of your purchase price. http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/products.asp is the link that will take you straight to our products page. You can buy all our products online, with payment by credit card or directly through PayPal.

Associated Learning Systems is a UK, Midlands based company specialising in products for the development of customer service, telesales and telemarketing skills.

The Marketing launchpad - easy to read book for small business

It is based around 6 key principles including how to build your brand, low cost advertising, and the secrets of effective direct mail. It inevitably touches on the benefits of search engine optimisation and how niche marketing is far more lucrative to you than trying to be all things to all people. It is available through Amazon at a discounted price, follow this link 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Marketing-Launchpad-Areas-Business-Heights/dp/1906852057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276605243&sr=8-1 for more details.

Telephone account management - growing business area

As one of our latest batch of audio products, we have a CD that guides you through all the things you need to know to add more customers and clients and equally importantly – keep the ones you’ve currently got.  How often do sales business models focus and reward exclusively new business accounts. You can find the audio training CD by following this link http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=32

It guides you through understanding what the function of account management is, how to do the key parts of the job effectively, and how you are the single biggest factor in determining outcomes !

Interestingly, 5 out of the last 7 people who have bought this audio CD, also bought the audio CD on time management too. Running your customer portfolio is partly about being well organised yourself of course too. Find more details here http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=24 All CDs are currently £34.99 + VAT and payment is easy through PayPal. You can use your credit card too.

We came across an article by Karl Bryan the American trainer who covers this area. This is some of what he says on the subject ;

“….. many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you NEED to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers.  These are people you already know to be a good sales potential. They’ve already bought from you!”

So it is important to take the time to market and sell new products to your existing and lapsed customers. Spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers, and you will see improvements in sales, customer quality and brand position. Karl Bryan offers this useful list with some added notes from us to make sure you retain your current customers ;

1. Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, and in person. Keep them posted on what you are doing : new products and services etc.

2. Post-Purchase Relationship Building: This means you need to follow up with customers. Your customers need to feel  you have a genuine interest in them and their experiences with your product or service.  How many times do sales people lose interest the minute they get the order. Something as simple as a Thank
You note with your contact or customer service information can go along way in retaining a great customer.

3. Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business and help them to get the best deals and advice. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option if their spend warrants it. It’s about making them feel special, valued. It all helps.

4. Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity and honesty go along way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of half-hearted rubbish sales people. So the more they can trust you to do waht you say when you say you’ll do it, the more the relationship will build, and the more they will trust you.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:
. Quality product/service
. Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
. Offer subjects your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offer them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success. Don’t waste all your time on new prospects while your current customers become someone else’s new accounts.

As the well known motivational speaker Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers.”

Good words Jay.

More skills for internal sales teams

 This is a product aimed at those of you who have a team of people or individuals who deal with incoming calls, but who are nevertheless expected to sell. If you want to raise your skills, or build up your selling skills this product could help http://www.associatedlearningsystems.co.uk/product_detail.asp?ProdID=31

Every phone call coming in represents an opportunity. OK, it may not always look like it – “Oh, I’m just phoning round looking for prices” or “I want to know where my goods are !” But within whatever the customer is saying there is always the seed of an opportunity.

Increasing the average order value by upselling, or switchselling the customer on to a different product if the one they want is out of stock are all important ways of ensuring you lock their business in, and don’t lose it to your competition.

Unsurprisingly most of our enquiries, orders and websites come from the English speaking world. The United States is our second biggest market. As a result and in order to make it easier for our American customers to work out the prices in dollars you will see we’ve added a click through currency converter against each of the products here.

Training CDs - ready to ship to United States

So if you’re in California,Wisconsin, New York state, Florida, Ohio, Washington, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, or Canada or any of the 50 U.S. states and you’re after some best practice advice from the U.K. on customer service, telesales or general telephone communication skills, try us out. A few clicks and the products are on their way to you.

It is a great training DVD or video and it is expensive. This is the bad news, but it is worth it, especially if your organisation is paying, and or you are able to get a fair bit of use out of it – such as using it in training programmes with many people.

Fish! dvd - the top selling training video of all time

You can watch a short clip of it around 2 minutes or so at Video Arts by following this link http://www.videoarts.co.uk/Title.aspx/FISH/FISH/FISH/

It is about the 4 key principles of good customer interaction. The 4 principles covered in the 17 minute video or DVD are

1. Play
2. Make their day
3. Be there
4. Choose your attitude

It is general good business sense and so is highly suited to customer service, telesales, customer service, contact centre, call centre, internal sales or in fact anyone who deals with customers.

Fish! is a highly recommended training product. We can also help you track it down at the best price (UK only). e-mail us info@associatedlearningsystems.co.uk for more help.

You recognise that training is important – perhaps MORE important than it’s ever been, but you’ve not got money to throw at it. Perhaps you’re reading this looking for some new ideas and new material.

It doesn’t even need to cost you anything to get started. The rise of the internet makes this possible. In fact you can cast your net (to use a fishing analogy) and see what bites. You can even do this while working in a job if necessary. You might have an outside hobby or interest that you’re wondering if you could make any money out of.

Our top tip is create yourself a business profile on a site such as HotFrog. It is completely free and you can add searchwords and build your own business listing.  Follow the link http://www.hotfroguk.co.uk/ So if you’d like to try your hand at jam making, or buying and selling cameras or floristry or palmistry, you can do all this for free. Then of course if you start to get some responses it will tell you whether you have a viable business idea.

Never has the opportunity for starting out on your own been so good. Most markets are likely to get more buoyant so if you can build an effective small scale business model that works now, your prospects should grow over time.

Everyone has skills, things they’re good at. Now is the opportunity to tap into your entrepreneurial spirit and give it a go. Best of luck !

I came across a quote from Theodore Roosevelt the other day, and while he may have said it in the last century, it still holds true today.

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”

This is a salutory lesson for all of us in these challenging times. To beat the recession, we may have to radically alter our business model, and the time honoured phrase “but that’s the way, we’ve always done it” no longer holds much credibility.

Be prepared to think outside the existing model. Talk to others, get opinions, listen to advice, get networking, have a coffee with like minded people. Whatever it is, get out there and do something. As Teddy R said doing nothing is the worst option, doing something and it being the wrong thing is still preferable. It provides learning and the chance to explore other ideas.

Tap into the intellect and creativity of others, and spend at least once a week with a blank sheet of paper and pen in the quiet working on ideas. It can be motivating and may give future focus for your business.