Hair loss, ulcers, lost sleep, nausea, indigestion …

Nope, these are not side effects of a medication but what happens when you lose a big sale. You may run into a situation where based on all your previous conversations you think a sale is going your way and at the last second it falls apart. A quality salesperson should know how to salvage this situation and close. You know they were really interested at one point, so you need to figure out why that changed, who made the decision, will these circumstance change soon, and determine a route to change their mind.

When have you had a deal fall apart at the last minute? Did you recover it? How?  If not, what did you learn?

-Kevin

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-most-important-sales-skill-of-all.html 

Keeping your message consistent is crucial if you are going to maintain a meaningful dialogue with your customers/users. Delivering mixed messages confuses the reader and will often times do more harm then good. As your company scales and more forms of social media are used, you need to develop a strategy for maintaining a consistent message (especially if several individuals will be managing the social accounts). 

One simple, but effective, solution that has worked for me personally is just practice. If your company has already developed a certain tone on your various social platforms, just give the new person several days to do nothing but practice writing content for your different media outlets. With enough time practicing and enough direct/honest feedback, your new employee will be on their way to developing a solid foundation. The key is to give honest feedback that someone can build off. Sugar coating it and tap-dancing around the truth will only delay the process of getting the new person up to speed. There are many solutions to bringing someone new onto your social team, but this is a good start. 

Maintaining metrics around you social media actions is necessary if you are going to keep a consistent voice and one that is effective in conveying what you want. Before you go around measuring your social media impact, how do you even implement a consistent message though? What have you done specifically to ensure new members to the social team are staying consistent and delivering the right message? Are you reviewing their content once a week? Once a day? 

-Kevin

http://www.digiday.com/brands/how-big-brands-organize-for-social/

A lot of time can get wasted quickly if you and your team jump onto a call with a few general goals and no specific items lined up. Calls just to “touch base” with people on your team can quickly spiral out of control and valuable time can be lost. Having an agenda, and goal for the conversation will save you time and make sure you cover off on what you need and are productive as possible. 

Even sending around a high level schedule/agenda before the call can keep people focused and on task. We started doing this a few months back and the quality of the calls has absolutely improved. For any calls we expect to go longer than 10 minutes, we send around, at minimum, a high-level agenda that outlines the items to be covered, what updates we need on these items, and what we need to do for each item when we come out of the call. Having a specific agenda for a call or meeting is a good framework for setting up the next steps and takeaways for each member of the group - we are covering XYZ and Karin needs to walk away knowing ABC, so she can then go to DEF. The agenda is an easy-to-implement tool that provides a lose framework and keeps everyone from getting “monkey minded.” While it’s good to catch up with employees for a bit to see how they are doing, talking for a half hour about your latest camping trip can be saved for the next happy hour. 

What things have you done to improve the quality and efficiency of your team’s calls?

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/how-to-have-a-meaningful-conversation.html?nav=pop