Becoming as master in anything can be a daunting task. However, as always, if you have a system, there is an almost sure way of getting there. One of the first step to take on your journey to becoming a master (read competent) in anything you do, is to understand the 4 levels of competence, a concept popularised by Tom Hopkins, the Sales Guru. Understanding the path ahead can allow a budding market master to plan his or her development path in a more realistic manner, while at the same time helping to reduce the risk of developing unrealistic expectations.

According to Tom Hopkins, the world-famous sales trainer, the 4 levels of competence (which originated from the work of Maslow) are as follows :

1. Unconscious Incompetence
2. Conscious Incompetence
3. Conscious Competence
4. Unconscious Competence.

Here is a description of each stage of competence everyone has to go through in the journey to become a Master of anything.

1. Unconscious Incompetence

Unconscious incompetents are people who do not know what they do not know. This is the stage of a raw beginner.

A good analogy of this could be little kid living in the farmland of a remote village in China. He watches his parents toil all day using their hands and the help of animals. He has never seen a motor vehicle and don’t know that they exists. He doesn’t know that motor vehicles such as cars and tractors can do the job much better than animals can and as such, as he grows up, he continues to depend on these farm animals to help him do his job. He does not know what he does not know and as such progresses no further.

Many of us go through this stage when we first learn anything. We don’t know what we don’t know!

2. Conscious Incompetence

Conscious incompetents know that they do not know. According to Hopkins, this is where they think to themselves “this is nothing like I thought it would be”. This is arguably the most frustrating stage in the life of master-to-be but yet, it is also one of the most important step he needs to go through. It is only when you know what you don’t know, can you really start your journey to being a master!

Take the case of the boy above. As he grows up, he makes his first trip to city with his parents. This is his first experience seeing cars on the roads. His inquisitive mind starts to whirl and imagine how he can control these motor vehicles like he’s seen people in the city doing it. He now knows there is such a thing as motor vehicles and vows to learn how to drive one of these vehicles. He now knows there is such a thing as motor vehicles and knowing this allows him to take his first step towards learning to master one of the machines.

3. Conscious Competence

Conscious competents know what to do, as long as they think.

Again let’s take the analogy of this boy. He’s now grown up and he made his move to the city. He scrapes together enough money to learn how to drive a car. He know knows how to drive a car but each time he drives a car on the road, he needs to think of what to do each time. When he comes to a junction, he needs to remember to flip his signals. When he sees a traffic light that is turning red, he must remember to slow down and change down his gears and depress his clutch and brakes at the lights so that the vehicle don’t stall. He’s in a stage of Conscious Competence. He knows how to drive a car, but he has to concentrate hard to make sure he takes all the right steps in the right sequence.

4. Unconscious Competence

Unconscious competents are highly trained and highly skilled people.

Again using the analogy above. This man now owns and drives a car for some time now. He is comfortable now and can chat and talk to his passengers when he drives. He does not need to think as hard as his actions now come naturally to him. He reflexes are now instintive. The moment he steps on the brakes and his car slows down to a certain speed, he left leg automatically depresses the clutch just at the right instant to prevent the car from stalling. He is now in a state of Unconscious Competence as far as casual driving is concerned.

Does the above sound familiar to you? Was it the same the first time you learn to swim? As a kid who’s never been to a swimming pool, you never knew that a person could learn to swim(unconscious incompetence). Then comes your first trip to the pool, and you realised that people can actually swim and swim fast too(conscious incompetence). Then you decide that you have to learn and once you have learned to swim, you know exactly what to do but you still to concentrate on each action. If you lose concentration, you start to struggle and choke but you know that if you maintain your concentration, you can conquer your fear of water and get to the other side of the pool safely (conscious competence). Then after some months, you can swim really well. You can even play with your buddies while swimming and sometimes you can even talk to them if your head is above water. You no longer have to think to stay afloat (unconscious competence).

Experts say there is another level. The level of Conscious-Unconscious Competence. You see, to most people who have mastered the art of something, such as cycling or swimming, they do not know who to teach it. If you ask them how they do it, they will have a hard time answering your question because their reflexes has become so instinctive to them that they do not know how to describe it.

However, true masters also know how to teach their art. When you become a true master, you analyse what made you successful and come up with the system to teach others to be successful. You are Conscious of your Unconscious Competence… and this is the stage of a true master!

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A few articles ago in “Presenting your way to Success!“, I shared about the importance of being able to present well in order to be successful in life. Presentation is all about communicating your message across in a convincing way. I also broke down the steps to identify the 3 major types of presentation and also the 3 P’s (Prepare, Practice, Present) and 4 P’s (People, Place, Point, Purpose) of presentation so that it becomes an easy system to prepare your next presentation.

Like most people used to say, “Knowing it is easy, but what do I prepare?” Well, let’s see how we can put it across in a simple, systematic way.

One of the major mistakes I’ve witnessed is the lack of a proper Agenda. Many presenters just jump straight into the topic, assuming that the audience knows exactly what he is talking about. Over the years, I’ve come to learn the importance of leading the audience gradually into the key points of your presentation, and the easiest way to do this is to have a proper agenda.

What should an Agenda look like? Very broadly, an Agenda should have 3 major parts :

1. Introduction
2. Body
3. Conclusion

What this amounts to is that we keep emphasizing and re-emphasizing our point until it gets into the head of the audience. Of course, it helps if your topic is something the audience is interested in in the first place. If they are not, it becomes your job to make it interesting for them. I hear it all the time… “This is such a boring audience!” The truth of the matter is, there is no such thing as a boring audience, there are only boring speakers!

Ok, so now that we know our Agenda comprises 3 main parts, what do we tell them in each of these parts. Well, the answer is really quite simple. In the “Introduction”, you tell them what you are going to tell them. This will then lead you to the “Body”, where you just tell them what you said you would tell them. Finally in the “Conclusion”, you just tell them what you have just told them! Simple enough? This triple emphasis technique works everywhere with a little variation.

In the next article, let’s look at how we can achieve these 3 steps.

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Well, I have been really busy of late and have not posted alot of information in the last few weeks. However, recently, I came across a video which is really cool. It’s about marketing and how you can do it better to outhink, outperform and outclass your competitors.

Here’s the link to the video… a must watch for all sales and marketing people

http://www.brand-mastery.com/freevideo/

Enjoy it!

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Whether you are running your own company or just a sales employee, we’re all familiar with the fact that we have to increase our sales almost every year, just to keep our business alive or to keep our jobs.

However, many people depend a “miracle” to increase their sales. This could be a new account, a new project or some new lucky unforecasted sales just dropping in. A few will work alot harder, not focusing in any particular area, and yet others will focusing on increasing their own sales skills, hoping to become a more effective sales person.

While all these will work to some extent, most people forget that sales is a numbers game. The more potential customers you see, the higher the potential of increasing your sales. However, number of customers is just one aspect of the numbers game. there are really a few major areas. Let’s take a look at some of these.

Sales Revenue is a function of all or some of the following :

1. The number of sales calls or customers you see per day (or per month or per year) - A
2. Your average hit rate or conversion rate - B
3. Your average size per order - C

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example. Assuming your sales revenue is affected by all of the above. Then lets assume that you make on average 3 sales calls a day, have a closing rate of 25% and an average order size of $5k. What does this work out to  as far as sales revenue is concerned? Well 3 sales call per day works out to 15 sales calls per week (5 working days per week and 20 working days per month) and 60 customers seen per month. Out of the 60 customers you close 25% which means 15 sales orders averaging $5k each. This works out to $75k per month or sales. And if you consider that in a year, there are 12 months, this will work out to $900,000 per year of orders.

Now let’s assume that you were able to incrementally increase all three areas of the above, by working harder to increase the number of sales calls and taking up some sales courses to increase your hit rate and average sales per order. Now let’s assume that you worked a little harder each day by getting up a little earlier and staying at work a little later and was able to increase your average sales call per day to 4. Also the selling skills course you took and put into practise increased your hit rate from 25% to 30%. You also learnt some upselling tactics which enabled you to increase your average order size from $5k to $5.5k. What would the sales revenue per year increase to?

Doing the usual mathematics, 4 sales call per day works out to 20 calls per week and 80 calls per month. You closed 30% of the orders and this works out to 24 orders. At $5.5k per order, your monthly revenue would now be $132,000 and your yearly sales revenue will now be $1.584M, a 76% increase!

Don’t you think that is impressive? Well that’s not all… assuming you were getting a1% commission in the past. With a sales of $900k, your yearly commission would be $9,000. However, just imagine if you were able to convince your bosses that if you were to be able to exceed $1M in sales, they should increase your sales commission by 10% to 1.1%. Now with your new sales revenue at $1.584M, your sales commission will be a hefty $17,424… an increase of almost 94% or close to double!

So there you see it. Working harder in a particular area or improving your sales skills may improve one of these areas but not all of it. However, if you were to just work on incrementally increasing all areas just by a small margin, the power of compounding works for you and allow you to almost double your sales commission.

The good news is that in the hypothetical example above, we only use 3 areas of influence on your final sales revenue. Depending on the nature of your work, you should be able to come up with at least 5 areas of potential improvement where you can work on.

Looking at it this way, doubling your sales isn’t all that tough, is it?

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It’s been often said that public speaking is the number one fear of most people, even more so than death! However, we all know that it is a skill worth polishing up because it’s the single most important skill which will bring you to the top of the corporate ladder. Have you ever met someone outrageously successful without this ability to speak well in public? I bet not.So if you intend to be successful, this would possibly be the most important skill to learn. But where do you start?

Well, most of us get our first taste of public speaking quite early in our working life, either doing some form of training, sales or product presentation. And this would be a great place to start polishing your speaking skills because this is possibly one of the easiest areas of public speaking. Why? Because you usually have a captive audience and the objectives of the presentation are usually very clear. In fact, knowing your audience and the objectives of the presentation is the most important first step to making a great presentation. Many of us start presenting from a set of “canned” powerpoint slides without first finding out who the audience is, what they want to hear and what you are trying to achieve.

Here are some simple steps to identifying these.I’ve made them easy to remember by starting most of them with the letter “P”.

The first thing to remember is that there are 3 steps to a great presentation. They are as follows :

1. Prepare
2. Practice
3. Presentation

Obviously, of the 3 steps, the Presentation phase is the most important. There are obviously people who can do a great presenation with minimal preparation and practice. However, we know that the majority of us are also not in this category and as such, the first two steps of Preparation and Practice are equally important. So, where do we start the preparation?

The first step to preparation is to know the 4 P’s of presentation. These are as follows :

1. People - Know who you are presenting to. This is important because different people have different expectations. For example, presenting a new product to a group of engineers is different to presenting a new product to the senior management of a company. For the engineers, they are interested in technical specifications, features and benefits while the senior management will probably be looking at Return-on-Investments, profitability etc…
2. Place - Knowing the place where the presentation takes place will help you prepare the right kind of Audio-visual aids. Why prepare powerpoint slides when the room you are presenting at does not have a projector?
3. Point - The point of the presentation keeps you in focus. Too often, we stray from the point of the presentation or meeting as the participants starts to ask questions. So, if the point of the presentation is to introduce a new product to the audience, keep at it.
4. Purpose - This answers what you would like to achieve at the end of the presentation. Would you like the audience to walk away with new knowledge, or do you want them to go back to their purchase department to immediately put up a purchase requisition for your product?

What’s important about knowing the 4 P’s of the presentation? Knowing the 4 P’s allow you to prepare the right presentation aids to be effective so that you can achieve your purpose at the end of the presentation.

Now that you know your 4 P’s, what kind of presentation should you prepare. In essence, all presentation can be divided into 3 major types as follows :

1. Persuade or Convince - This is the typical sales pitch designed to persuade or convince an audience with the ultimate objective of wanting them to take a particular action. In a typical sales pitch, you want your audience to be so convinced that they will part with their money for your product. If you were convincing an audience in an election speech, you would want them to vote for you. In some cases, a presentation to convince may not necessarily lead to an action. If you are presenting your company’s performance to the board of directors, you may just want to convince them that you are doing a good job, without them having to take any particular action.
2. Inform or Teach - Another common presentation type is when you are trying to impart knowledge ie to teach or inform. In theory, there are only one group of people who should really be doing a presentaton to inform or teach… Teachers! Many times, we may be doing a product training thinking that this is a presentation to inform or teach but in commercial product presentation, there is a big part of convincing and persuading built into every product training. The Product people have to convince the trainees to sell their product!
3. Ceremonial - Many times, you come across a presentation which does not seem to achieve any of the first two. For example, if you were the guest-of-honour at the opening of the public library. You have to deliver a speech or a presentation which is purely ceremonial in nature. You’re not necessarily convincing anyone or persuading them to action. Neither are you teaching or informing them of anything in particular.Such would be an example of a Ceremonial Presentation type.

An easy way to remember the 3 different types of presentation is with the acronym, P-I-C representing Persuade/Convince, Inform/Teach and Ceremonial.

Once you have decided on the above, you are ready to prepare your presentation in a way to that will achieve your purpose with maximum impact!

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