What’s missing from your strategy isn’t some learned technique. Sometimes, it’s not your abilities that let you down. It’s doubting yourself. “When I was first getting clients, it felt like I had to fight objections in near hand-to-hand combat with the prospect,” Joshua Centers, founder of Clicks on Command, told me once. “They’d eventually tap out, and I became disheartened. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sell; it was that I doubted whether I could pull it off. I was not confident, and it was affecting my sales.”
This experience is very common with entrepreneurs, and though sales isn’t everyone’s forte, it’s possible to get better at it. You may feel you’re bad at sales because of your lack of experience selling, and you’ll try to make up for it by taking courses, reading books and watching videos to close that gap.
However, the best way to improve your sales performance — and performance in other areas — is actually to improve your confidence first. Confidence has been shown to positively affect performance in many areas, from school to athletics to the workplace. Here are three ways to boost your confidence and sell more.
One of the reasons you may feel less confident in sales is not because you don’t know sales, but because you don’t know your product well enough. When you need notes or even a presentation to sell a product, you don’t know it well enough.
This doesn’t mean that visual or written aids can’t help you sell. But if you couldn’t talk about the product without using these aids, then there’s a problem. The more comfortable you are with the product, the more confident you are in your own ability to talk about it.
Take the time to learn about your product. What does it really do? How does it work? How has it helped your current clients? What do they like about it? Being able to handle the details of the product and speak about it more qualitatively will make a huge difference.
Even further, this familiarity comes across in your sales conversation, making you appear more relaxed, knowledgeable, and assertive — all of which help you sell.
2. Build an arsenal of what already converted
There’s a reason companies use case studies to sell: They work. People like reviews, unboxings, data and evidence that a product actually does what you say it does. However, beyond being more convincing, knowing what already worked can help your confidence.
Instead of making an empty promise to a customer in your sales pitch, bring up examples of when you used the product to successfully grow another client. In digital marketing, I can present a funnel that I know has already converted leads for my clients.
The more you believe in your own product, with actual examples and evidence to back you up, the more confident you’ll be in it — and in your ability to sell it.
Centers, who I quoted at the beginning of this article, uses a method he calls the DIP Method to organize and close his sales conversations. DIP stands for Discover, Identify, Position.
The DIP Method focuses on finding your customer’s needs and targeting them. Instead of jumping into why your product is so great, you should find the reasons why your customer needs your product and how it can be the best solution for their problems.
Discover: Ask your customer some questions. How many leads do you have right now? What is your offer? What marketing efforts are you currently conducting? Don’t interrupt them or answer for them in this part. Let them talk to you about what they’re doing in their marketing and lead-capturing, without filters or expectations.
Identify: Based on their answers, you should know what problems they’re having. Do they have little to no leads? Do they have a problem converting leads? Are they not running any marketing at all? Identify the problems and relay them back to your customer so they can confirm them. Often, the customer may not recognize them for themselves, but since you’re basing it on the answers they gave, they can easily accept them to be true.
Position: Here’s where you shine. Position your product or service to solve the problems you and the customer identified. Tell them you and your product can help and explain how. This is where you make your sales pitch, getting into benefits, features and pricing. However, it should always be focused on solving the problems they’ve identified.
Following the DIP Method gives you confidence, not only in your process but also in knowing that your product can actually help your customer. If you’ve built confidence in your product, your process and yourself, you can more effectively sell and promote your product and business.
Mission statements remain key aspects of businesses since they remind employees and leaders of what the business stands for. These mission statements can inspire people and help them become unified, so a business needs to know how to create one. This means you must review the approaches and strategies available, so you can craft a great mission statement to help your business.
How to Come Up with A Good Mission Statement
1. Know What You Want to Accomplish
If you plan to craft a mission statement, you need to understand what your business plans to accomplish. For example, some businesses want to help people feel happy and beautiful while others want to get people to find their own homes. While your business wants to make money, it needs to have another point it can focus on.
This means you need to consider the position of your business, so you can find an ideal mission statement based on the situation. The statement won’t work if your business doesn’t identify one related to it. Because of this, you need to form a connection between your statement and business by working towards a goal.
2. Look at the Big Picture
Once you identify the goals you plan to accomplish, you need to look at the situation from a larger scope. This means identifying why your business wants to reach a goal, so you can see the situation with the bigger picture in mind. For example, if your business wants to encourage people to purchase homes, you need to figure out why you want to do so.
For example, a life coach mission statement can mention wanting people to succeed, so it does this by offering its services. This means you need to understand how your business benefits its customers, so you can build your statement around it and understand the bigger picture.
3. Make it Relatable
Not only do you want your mission statement to point towards a goal, but you also want it to stand out as a relatable one. This means you need to identify one that customers and average people understand and want. You must get your customers involved and invested in your mission statement to help you succeed.
You want your customers to feel invested, so they gain a reason to support your business. If they want to see you fulfil your mission statement, they’ll continue to make purchases and support your cause. That way, your customers can feel good about helping you out while your business continues to make money.
4. Focus on Simplicity
As you craft a mission statement, you can focus on simplicity to make it better. It needs to catch the attention of people, so you can’t make them too complicated or long. This seems unnecessary, but doing so can make your mission statement strong overall. Mission statements should stick to one idea expressed in a single sentence.
If your mission statement drags on for multiple sentences, it becomes overwhelming and unappealing. When this happens, customers and employees forget about it since it becomes too long to remember. Instead, you need to make the mission statement a single line people can easily memorize and remain focused on to help your business out.
5. Ask for Suggestions
Developing mission statements helps businesses succeed, but some people struggle to create them on their own. You don’t have to think of a mission statement since you can turn to people in your business for assistance. This means you need to take the necessary time to talk with people throughout your business to receive suggestions.
You can talk with the leaders and ask them what they think might work as an effective mission statement. You can also ask customers and employees for their opinions, so you can identify more options for your mission statement. Once you find one, make sure you give credit to the person who came up with it.
Conclusion
A mission statement allows you to represent your business through a simple phrase and idea. Make sure you focus on creating a mission statement, so you can find one to represent your entire business. As you focus on this, you can impress your customers while encouraging your employees to work towards your mission statement goal.
The physicist Richard Feynman believed that simplicity was the key to learning. Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project when he was only 20 years old. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics, along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.
Feynman believed that truth lies in simplicity and that things are easier to learn and retain when they’re simpler. When your knowledge of something is full of complex explanations and terms taken from textbooks, you’re less likely to grasp it.
He’s famously been quoted as saying, “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The goal of learning is to understand the world better. But more often than not, the way we learn doesn’t help us to achieve this.
You end up memorizing something exactly as it’s written in a book or as the teacher explained it to you, so it doesn’t take long for this knowledge to disappear. This is where the Feynman technique comes in.
The idea is to make things simple enough for anyone to understand. In doing this, you can acquire a deep understanding of the topic you’re studying. The Feynman technique has four steps.
1. Choose a topic and start studying it
Feynman’s technique isn’t limited to mathematics or physics. You can apply it to anything.
2. Explain the topic to a child
This step allows you to establish whether you’ve learned what you studied or you just thought you had.Explain the concept in your own words as if you were trying to teach it to a child.
When you try to break things down into simple ideas with plainer vocabulary, you’ll realize whether or not your knowledge of the subject is sufficient. This makes it easy to identify any gaps in your knowledge.
3. Go back to the study material when you get stuck
Only when you can explain the subject in simple terms will you understand it.This means the knowledge will stick with you and not disappear, as it can when you try to memorize something.
Review your notes and study material for anything you still don’t understand.Try to explain it to yourself in an easy way. If it’s too difficult or if you have to use terms from a textbook, then you still haven’t got it.
4. Organize and review
Don’t stop until you can deliver a simple, natural explanation.Go back to steps two and three as many times as you need. It probably won’t take as long as you think.
Classroom-based experiments in productive failure. Expanding the space of cognitive science: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Boston, Massachusetts, July 20-23, 2011. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 2812–2817.
Could an AI program be preventing you from landing a dream job? New York’s city council wants to make sure that’s not the case for people looking for work in the Big Apple. The council recently passed a bill that would require providers of automated employment decision tools to recruiters in the city to have their underlying AI algorithms audited each year and share the results with companies using their services.
If the measure is passed into law, it will be one of the first significant legal moves in the U.S. that attempts to ensure AI-driven software tools don’t have biases embedded in them that discriminate against people on racial, ethnic or other grounds. If more measures along these lines are passed, they could spark a boom in demand for digital bounty hunters who use computers to track down their quarry.
Many companies now offer cybersecurity “bug bounties,” which can sometimes reach hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, to people who help them find previously undetected security flaws in their software. The business has grown to the point where it has spawned startups such as Bugcrowd and HackerOne that help CIOs and other executives launch bounty programs and recruit ethical hackers to work on them.
Now the platforms say they’re seeing growing interest in programs that reward ethical hackers and researchers for flagging unforeseen algorithmic biases. As well as leading to prejudices in hiring, such biases can affect everything from loan applications to policing strategies. They can be deliberately or inadvertently introduced by developers themselves or by the choice of data sets algorithms are trained on.
Almost all the AI bounty initiatives to date have been kept private, with small groups of hackers invited to work on them so companies can get a feel for what’s possible. “There’s a lot of tire-kicking going on,” says Casey Ellis, founder and chairman of Bugcrowd.
Twitter bounties
One business that has gone a step further and run a public experiment is Twitter. In July, the social media giant launched an algorithmic bias bounty program that paid rewards of up to $3,500 for an analysis of a photo-cropping algorithm. The company had already acknowledged the algorithm was repeatedly cropping out Black faces in favor of white ones and favoring men over women. Those findings came after a public outcry over potential bias led Twitter to launch a review of the algorithm.
Some critics saw the subsequent decision to launch the AI bias bounty program publicly as a PR move, but Twitter’s engineers argued that getting a diverse group of people to scrutinize its algorithms would be more likely to help it surface biases. The company ended up awarding $7,000 in bounties, with the top prize going to a person who showed that Twitter’s AI model tended to favor stereotypical beauty traits, such as a preference for slimmer, younger, feminine and lighter-skinned faces.
The company stressed that one reason the exercise had been valuable was because it pulled in a broad geographic spread of contributors. Alex Rice, the CTO of HackerOne, which helped Twitter run its program, believes bounties can help other businesses identify issues with algorithms by subjecting AI models to this kind of broader scrutiny. “The idea is to put as much diversity as we can on the problem in the most real-world environment we can create,” he says.
Although Twitter hasn’t committed to run another program yet, tech research firm Forrester predicts that at least five major companies, including banks and healthcare businesses, will launch their own AI bias bounty offerings next year. Brandon Purcell, one of the firm’s analysts, thinks that within a few years, the number of programs will start growing exponentially and says CIOs will likely be key promoters of them, along with human resources directors.
Wanted: AI bounty hunters
To meet future demand, the world’s going to need many more AI sleuths. Cybersecurity experts are in short supply, but there are even fewer people with a deep understanding of how AI models work. Some security-focused hackers are likely to hunt for AI biases too, assuming the bounties are big enough, but experts say there are key differences that make bias-hunting more challenging.
One of them is that algorithms evolve constantly over time as they feed on more data. Cybersecurity systems morph, too, but generally at a slower pace. AI bias hunters also need to be more willing to look at how algorithms interact with broader systems within a business, whereas many cyber challenges are more circumscribed.
Some ethical hackers who’ve also hunted for security bugs say those challenges are what makes AI bias hunting so intellectually stimulating. “It’s more of a creative process and less of a logical process that involves going through trying to break something using a lot of predefined methods,” says Megan Howell, one of the bounty hunters who took part in the Twitter challenge.
People with deep industry expertise in areas such as credit assessment and health screening but who don’t yet have AI skills could help to close the talent gap. Bugcrowd’s Ellis points out that some of the most accomplished security bug hunters in the automotive field are car enthusiasts who got so interested in the safety issues facing the industry that they taught themselves to use coding tools.
“The idea is to put as much diversity as we can on the problem in the most real-world environment we can create.”
While bounty programs could be useful in identifying bias, CIOs say that they should never be treated as a first line of defense. Instead, the goal should be to use tools and processes to build algorithms in ways that enable companies to explain clearly the results they produce. For instance, training algorithms using supervised learning, which involves feeding them prelabeled data sets, rather than unsupervised learning, which leaves algorithms to work out the structure of data by themselves, can help reduce the risk that biases will creep in.
Tech leaders in sectors such as banking are paying especially close attention to how their algorithms are built and perform. “Our industry being regulated . . . naturally lends itself to being more stringent with AI models,” says Sathish Muthukrishnan, the chief information, data and digital officer of $16.8 billion market cap Ally Financial. “We start with developing supervised models for customer-facing use cases.”
HackerOne’s Rice agrees that plenty can and should be done to eliminate biases in AI models during their development. Still, he thinks bounty programs are something CIOs and other executives should still be considering as a complement to their upfront efforts. “You want to find [biases] through automation, scanning, developer training, vulnerability management tools,” says Rice. “The problem is that all of these are insufficient.”
I am the editor of the CIO Network at Forbes, leading coverage of the rapidly evolving role of senior technology leaders. I also develop topics and programming for Forbes CIO events.
The 5 Biggest Blockchain Trends In 2022 Adobe Stock
Blockchain is one of the most exciting tech trends at the moment. It is a distributed, encrypted database model that has the potential to solve many problems around online trust and security. Many people know it as the technology that underpins Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. However, its potential uses are far broader, encompassing digital “smart” contracts, logistics and supply chain provenance and security, and protection against identity theft.
There are countless others – blockchain evangelists say it can potentially be used to improve security and integrity in any system that involves multiple parties sharing access to a database. During 2022, spending on blockchain solutions by businesses is forecast to hit $11.7 billion. Here are some of the trends that will be driving this and some thoughts on how this will impact more and more lives over the course of the next year.
Green blockchain initiatives
Blockchains can potentially use a lot of energy and create high levels of carbon emissions – this fact was behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s decision to temporarily stop accepting Bitcoin in payment for his cars earlier in 2021. For this very good reason, during 2022, we are likely to see a great deal of emphasis on attempts to “greenify” blockchain. There are a few ways this can be done, including carbon offsetting, although many people consider that this often equates to simply patching up a wound that shouldn’t have been caused in the first place.
Another is by moving to less energy-intensive models of blockchain technology – typically those that rely on “proof-of-stake” algorithms rather than “proof-of-work” to generate consensus. Ethereum – the second best-known blockchain after Bitcoin – plans to move to a POS model during 2022. Another route to a greener operating model is the one championed by Cathy Wood, CEO of tech-focused hedge fund Ark Invest. This posits the view that growing demand for energy will lead to greater investments into generating renewable energy, which will then be used for other applications as well as operating blockchains.
NFT expanding beyond online art
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) were the big news in the blockchain scene during 2021. Astronomical prices achieved by artwork such as Beeple’s The First 5000 Days created plenty of headlines, placing the concept of unique digital tokens residing on blockchains firmly in the public consciousness. It’s also firmly taken hold in the music world, with artists including Kings of Leon, Shawn Mendes, and Grimes all releasing tracks in NFT format. But like blockchain in general, the idea has potential beyond it’s first publicity-grabbing use cases.
Distillers William Grant and Son recently sold bottles of 46-year-old Glenfiddich whisky alongside NFTs, which are used to prove each bottle’s provenance. NFTs in gaming are starting to take off in a big way – monster-breeding game Axie Infinity allows players to “mint” their own NFT creatures to send into battle and currently has around 300,000 concurrent players (Fortnite, for comparison, has around 3.5 million). Dolce & Gabbana and Nike have both created clothing and footwear that come with their own NFTs. And the metaverse concept – championed this year by Facebook, Microsoft, and Nvidia – brings plenty of opportunities for innovative NFT use cases.
More countries adopt Bitcoin and national cryptocurrencies
2021 saw El Salvador become among the first nations to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, meaning it can be accepted across the country to pay for goods and services, and businesses can use it to pay their employees. According to many commentators, during 2022, we will see a number of other countries follow suit.
Alexander Hoptner, CEO of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX, predicts that at least five developing countries will start to accept Bitcoin next year, driven by global inflation and growing remittance fees from financial “middlemen” organizations used to send money home by overseas workers.
National cryptocurrencies – where central banks create their own coins that they can control, rather than adopting existing decentralized coins – are another area where we will see growth in 2022. These projects typically involve digital currencies that will operate alongside existing traditional currencies, allowing users to conduct their own transactions and manage their custody without relying on third-party service providers, while also allowing the central banks to keep control of the circulating supply – keeping the value of the token pegged to the value of the country’s traditional currency.
While the UK government-endorsed Britcoin is unlikely to be ready for launch during 2022, others, including China, Singapore, Tunisia, and Ecuador, have already done so, with more, including Japan, Russia, Sweden, and Estonia likely to join soon.
Blockchain and IoT integration
Blockchain is hugely compatible with the idea of the Internet of Things (IoT) because it is great for creating records of interactions and transactions between machines. It can potentially help to solve many problems around security as well as scalability due to the automated, encrypted, and immutable nature of blockchain ledgers and databases. It could even be used for machine-to-machine transactions – enabling micropayments to be made via cryptocurrencies when one machine or network needs to procure services from another.
While this is an advanced use case that may involve us traveling a little further down the road before it impacts our day-to-day lives, it’s likely we will start to hear about more pilot projects and initial use cases in this field during 2022. Innovation in this field is likely to be driven by the ongoing rollout of 5G networks, meaning greater connectivity between all manner of smart, networked equipment and appliances – not simply in terms of speed, but also new types of data transactions including blockchain transactions.
Blockchain in vaccine manufacture and tracking
It’s now clear that tackling the Covid-19 global pandemic will continue to be a priority throughout 2022 and a key use case for many of this year’s top tech trends. Blockchain technology has several important potential use cases in vaccine tracking and distribution.
In a world where counterfeiters are known to be creating and selling fake vaccines, blockchain means the authenticity of vaccine shipments can be proven, and their distribution can be traced to ensure they are arriving at their intended locations. There’s also a need to ensure integrity at every point of the supply chain – for example, to ensure batches of vaccines are consistently stored at the correct temperature, as is needed by many of them.
IBM has created a system to allow coordination between the many different and varied agencies and healthcare authorities involved with vaccine distribution, using blockchain to unify recording of vaccination rates and efficacy across the various tools and platforms they all have in use. A pilot project also showed how blockchain could potentially speed up the ability to recognize where a product recall might be needed – for example, in a case where a batch seems to be causing an unusually high occurrence of side-effects – from three days to just a few seconds.
Breakthroughs that come about due to the unprecedented response to this pandemic are likely to go on to enable more use cases for blockchain technology in the manufacture, distribution, and management of vaccinations in 2022.
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies.He helps organizations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, blockchains, and the Internet of Things. Why don’t you connect with Bernard on Twitter (@bernardmarr), LinkedIn (https://uk.linkedin.com/in/bernardmarr) or instagram (bernard.marr)?
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However, the best way to improve your sales performance — and performance in other areas — is actually to improve your confidence first. Confidence has been shown to positively affect performance in many areas, from school to athletics to the workplace. Here are three ways to boost your confidence and sell more.
Following the DIP Method gives you confidence, not only in your process but also in knowing that your product can actually help your customer. If you’ve built confidence in your product, your process and yourself, you can more effectively sell and promote your product and business.
