5 Actionable Takeaways To Maximize your sales

1. How can you better address the “six why’s” to maximize your sales?
   There are six specific commitments when forming a buying decision; I call them the six why’s. If one of them isn’t satisfied, the sale never occurs. If a sale falls through, identify which commitments you didn’t fulfill. This practice is impactful to do together with your team because you’ll find one or two commitments are costing you over 50% of your lost sales. This allows you to strengthen your sales process to answer and gain commitments preemptively. When you do that, the sales cycles speed up, and buying behaviors increase because now you’re better aligning how you sell with how people buy. Which of these commitments are you missing from your potential buyers?
   • Why change? Until we create the curiosity for change, our potential clients usually aren’t very interested in engaging very deeply because they don’t think they need to be.
   • Why now? Why should they make this commitment right now and not wait?
   • Why your industry solution? Why do they need your industry or your direct competitors at all? 
   • Why you and your company? Why should they trust and invest with you?
   • Why your product or service? Why are you the right solution for them? 
   • Why spend the money? Why should they spend the money?
2. How can you better understand your customer’s pain points in order to better guide them through the buying process? 
   The key is knowing what to listen for. It’s challenging to get the commitments necessary to make the sale if you don’t know what will have an impact on your customer. When you glean what matters most, you are beautifully positioned to present solutions in ways that will resonate directly with their problems. This practice results in a buyer who trusts you and is more likely to buy from you than a competitor.
   
   First, you want to understand their problem. What is the reason you’re talking? Understand it in scope and in-depth to speak directly to it and connect the dots. Next, you want to understand their dominant buying motives. What would they get out of this if they moved forward? What would they lose if they didn’t Lastly, understand their buying requirements. This pertains to the buying unit. Who’s involved in the decision? It also gets into the specific product or service parameters they need. What are the timelines they have? What are the budget parameters they may have?
    
3. How can you gain your customer’s trust in an increasingly uncertain world? 
   War or economic turmoil creates uncertainty and fear in the market. Research shows that people in uncertain situations will often default to the status quo when it comes to decision making, which is ultimately to procrastinate and do nothing. As a salesperson, the goal is to disrupt that mindset and hyper-focus on creating certainty for our customers. Make a strong business case for why moving forward now, as opposed to waiting, is in their best interest. Certainty is critical – we don’t feel the need to mull it over if we are certain about the decision. Certainty and stability create a low-risk feeling, and potential buyers are more likely to proceed with a lower-risk decision when there is uncertainty around them and in the world in general. 
    
4. How can you better leverage a growth mindset to level up your sales success?
   A growth mindset matters greatly in sales. If you treat your sales skills and abilities like a muscle that can strengthen and improve, you will become more resilient when negative outcomes occur. A growth mindset will even give you an advantage over the competition because someone focused on growth will always win over time. Try using these four actionable steps to put your growth mindset into action:
   • Identify what you can learn from each situation.
     No matter if you win or lose a sale, ask yourself, what can I learn from this? How can I use this to make myself better?
   • Use the word “yet” to overcome negative self-talk.
     You can overcome self-sabotage by adding the word “yet” to your self-critiques and  allowing yourself room to grow. I’m not good at handling objections, yet. I’m not good at presentations, yet.
   • Set aside time for action.
     Schedule a dedicated time to work on areas you’ve identified you can improve. If you have a planned date and time to work on growth, you are 300% more likely to follow through. 
   • Stay hyper-focused on delivering for potential clients.
     In the sales process, everything you do should be about potential clients. You should be focusing on how every single detail matters to them, connecting all of the dots. The only person you should be focusing on when you’re selling is whom you’re selling to.
5. ​​How can you enhance your grit?
   Grit is one of the most accurate predictors of both retention and success for those working on sales. Grit is the ability to stay persistent even when facing major obstacles. You can increase your grittiness by thinking through the why. Why does this goal matter? If you can’t think of a reason, reframe that goal. Asking why helps you qualify goals so when you face difficult obstacles, you have a clear why to give you the extra oomph needed to press on. Any goal you pursue will have challenges. Recognize that the price of success is always paid upfront. You want to anticipate setbacks and not be surprised when they happen. Grit helps to push through these roadblocks and keep going. 

Jim Simons is one of the most brilliant living humans. He used his intelligence in mathematics to prove that you could beat the market and is the most successful hedge fund manager of all time in terms of ROI. He has been reclusive with the press and has never published any public material regarding his fund and for good cause to ensure it’s continued success.

At a recent dinner in Atlanta, Georgia I answered with Jim as being the person alive that I would like to have dinner with most while he is still here. A book written by the Wall Street Journals Gregory Zuckerman called The Man who solved the market had a few notes that I took and are putting here to remember.

Even Simons the worlds most successful trader wasn’t successful at first but with hard work and determination to keep on going and prove his theories right ensured his success. Let this be a reminder amongst the other notes below that you won’t always succeed at first but having conviction and the will to work hard to find a solution is one of the keys to success in this world. This is different than what I remember reading in Market Wizards about Steve Cohen who had a natural ability to trade right from the very beginning.

Matty Simons told his son Jim that “He wished he hadn’t forgone a promising and exciting career to do what was expected of him.”

“The lesson was: Do what you like in life, not what you feel you ‘should’ do. That’s something Jim never forgets and we’re thankful he got that advice and shared it.

At Age 14 Jim’s Boss Made Fun of Him For Wanting to Go to MIT

This may be the most important part of the book. A young 14 year old Jimmy worked at a gardening store in Massachusetts and when the owners asked him what he wanted to do with his life he said: “I want to study mathematics at MIT”

They burst out laughing, saying that the young lad who couldnt even keep track of gardening supplies would even have a chance to be a math major none the less be lucky enough to attend MIT.

The big lesson here is at a young age you should NEVER EVER let anybody discourage you from your goals or tell you that you can’t do something. People are cruel and will laugh at you and attack you but as Jim Simons proved it’s okay let that fuel you to succeed even further. Do not let any naysayers stand in the way of your goals.

Today he and his fund are as secretive as ever when it comes to publicity.

He has a great quote to boot:
“God gave me a tail to keep off the flies, but I’d rather have had no tail and no flies.”

Hire people for their brainpower, creativity, and ambition rather than a specific expertise or background. Researchers will find problems to work on and solve. As I said at SXSW Bad ideas is good, good ideas is terrific, no ideas is terrible.

While trying to keep the respect of Simons privacy the last note to share from the book are some pieces of advice he gave recently to a school audience in New York:

“Work with the smartest people you can, hopefully smarter than you…be persistent, and don’t give up easily.” Had Simons given up early on he woudl’ve went back to academia and not amassed the great wealth that he has today that will be plowed back into Math and Science grants that will further improve the world.

“Be guided by beauty..there’s a sense of beauty when something is working well, almost an aesthetic to it.”

1. How can you get closer to living in your sweet spot?
   I call my book The Sweet Spot because we have to find the right balance between our competing motivations of pleasure, purpose, status, morality, and spiritual transcendence. Ultimately, someone who prioritizes and makes choices just based on maximizing pleasure won’t end up as happy about their choices. Finding your sweet spot typically involves trial and error. It’s what we do as teenagers, even as preschoolers. Sometimes we forget and we get locked into something that evolutionary biologists might call a local maximum, where what you’re doing is fine, and you feel as if every way you could change might drop you down in pleasure, comfort, happiness. A lot of what really is valuable in life isn’t immediately pleasant. But what if right next to you is something much better? A way to get around this stuck place is to explore different things. Try an exercise program, try travel, try an extended difficult project, try more pleasure in your life. Most of us have some wiggle room to try these things on. I’m a big fan of what people call self-experimentation in this way. Explore what kind of balance most fits with you.
    
2. How can you find meaning in adversity and struggle?
   A good life involves difficulty–extending yourself, and struggling, and choosing hard things. Finding your sweet spot requires suffering. Some of the goals that will lead you to a sweet spot will pose difficulty. Some roots to pleasure involve pain. If you want to climb Mount Everest, you want to run a triathlon, if that’s part of your sweet spot, you’re going to have to work your ass off for them. Suffering will be part and parcel of that project. The idea of a comfort zone, sitting in the same spot comfortably, I don’t think is realistic for a life well lived. When we live our lives, the balance of different priorities is fluid. You can’t really stand still. Say you have devoted your life to your work and then boom, you have triplets, and all of a sudden things shift. You move, you get sick. It’s going to happen to everybody. You can’t sit for too long in a sort of accepted balance of these different priorities. Somebody’s going to move you. 
    
3. ​​​​​How can you enable your colleagues to be more fulfilled?
   People who are working with you don’t just want tangible things like money. They want other things. People want to be treated fairly and with respect, they want challenging and demanding work, they sometimes want variety. They want the sort of things that well-meaning managers might forget. They want things that aren’t in union negotiations and aren’t what people negotiate for when they get a job, but matter tremendously. Understanding what people want at this complexity, I think, is incredibly useful when figuring out how to deal with them and how to make their lives better.

These are the notes from the actionable interviews from joining YPO but there are other insights at my personal blog you can follow and read about.

The above was courtesy of 3 Actionable Takeaways from last week’s live session on how to master the search for meaning and happiness with world-renowned Yale psychologist and New York Times best-selling author Paul Bloom.

Politically exposed persons enter the world with great risk due to the nature in which their job operates. For the same reason Barrack Obama and George Bush need to have security detail to accompany them in the real world is similar to how PEP’s are needing help to be protected in social media and search engines from crazy people.

As there is no shortage of crazies out there and countries that are looking to rebound from their drop in tourism it was nice to see another feature for Richart Ruddie here: https://globaltimesng.com/2022/01/25/from-politically-exposed-persons-to-nigerias-best-hire-richart-ruddie-for-help-online/

Connect with Richart Ruddie through the following channels online:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richartruddiestanford/

Twitter: twitter.com/richartRuddie/
Richart Ruddie Official Blog: https://richartruddie.typepad.com/

Personal Websites: http://richartruddie.org & richartdudie.com

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Instagram are not very active.

Richart D. Ruddie Podcast about the stupid comments and lack of altruism that we see online. It’s been a wild 6 years since Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president of the united states. Since then social media has been on fire and people have spoken their minds and spread their thoughts no matter how crazy online.

It’s an idea and not sure I want to tie the facepalms into an entertainment bid to profit off of the situation that we’re in but it’s an idea that has some merit and could have some legs.

For more details read here: https://richartruddie.typepad.com/entrepreneur/2021/08/richart-d-ruddie-podcast-idea.html

Thank you to the Times of Malta, Irish Central, Yahoo! Finance, Disrupt Magazine and the others who have covered my work in the public relations industry.

https://www.irishcentral.com/business/how-man-helping-restore-travel-industry

https://timesofmalta.com/articles/view/countries-using-pr-expert-richart-ruddie-to-restore-confidence-in.853148

The Bing Search Network processed about 640 billion queries in 2020 as of data released on: December 24, 2020. It was originally published on February 27, 2018. So either “last year” refers to 2017, 2018, or 2019. That works out to 930 million queries per day. The Internet Live Stats Website -ESTIMATES- Google processes about 5.3 billion queries per day. so Google searches are only ~5.5x to Bing searches.

Sounds off to me..

Here’s a fun list of the top 20 cover songs that ended up being bigger than their original. Jimi Hendrix & Elvis Presley are top of the list but the one that always comes to mind for me is Smooth Criminal by Alien Ant Farm being bigger on the radio than Michael Jacksons version.

Here’es the list:
https://loudwire.com/biggest-hit-cover-song/

I remember when Matt Cutts used to discuss how Google searches are becoming more personalized. If you were typing in Pizza in 1998 Google you would find information about Pizza but in 2013 Google you would receive localized results based on your location. These results would show the restaurants and ratings along with their location on a map.

What Matt mentioned that Google doesnt have the capability to do at the time however was that if you typed in “Tomorrow” it wouldn’t know if you wanted to learn about the day after the current date, the song by Silverchair, or the song by Chris Young made in 2011.

Well now the personalization is getting to a whole new level thanks to a team at UCLA with their EDAM. It will see what searches you’ve done previously but also integrate viewings on Youtube and other clues to personalize the search so if you listen to Nirvana and Alice in Chains you probably are looking for Silverchairs song Tomorrow vs. Chris Young.

Special thanks to this team who will be the Amit Singhals of the engineering and search team of the future:

From the piece: Personalized item retrieval for online content-sharing platforms without any descriptive information based on the query-aware attention mechanism with external key memory and locality preservation. Experimental results and analysis on the large-scale dataset from areal-world commercial online content-sharing platform also demonstrate the effectiveness and the robustness of EDAM. The insights can be concluded as follows: (1) user history is helpful for personalized item retrieval; (2) learning external key item embeddings for estimating attention weights is beneficial, especially for the users with shorter item history; (3) sequential information in user history is sensitive for item retrieval so that EDAM with locality preservation outperforms baselines of sequence models such as ARNN.

White Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3366423.3380051