Despite the compelling reasons we might offer for introducing coaching we can expect to encounter many barriers. We need to understand what the barriers are and how we might help others develop their understanding of coaching so that these barriers may be removed.

"We've got enough on our plate as it is."

Most organizations these days seem to be working at the edge of chaos. Change is abundant and managers are rightly worried that one more change will prove to be 'the straw that breaks the camels back'. Seen in this way, coaching, as just one more stand-alone initiative, is bound to take a back seat. But coaching should not be seen in this way. Coaching can be the glue that binds change initiatives together. After all, we know that all change programmes have a people element and that if staff and other stakeholders are not carefully guided through the changes, failure is quite likely.

Where managers are equipped with good coaching skills they are able to assist their staff in comprehending both the underlying reasons for change and the unsettling feelings that result. More importantly managers who coach will be able to empower their teams to find their own coping strategies rather than crowbar them into prescriptive methods that usually provoke rebellion rather than commitment.

"Now is not the right time."

If people are claiming this then, paradoxically, it is absolutely the right time for coaching. Good, effective coaching raises awareness, generates responsibility and builds trust. There is never any sense in delaying having access to these qualities.

If we leave coaching until 'other things have settled down' it's like saying we'll put the umbrellas up once it's stopped raining.

Our Team Leaders have a high level of skill anyway

No doubt this is true, but skills need to be developed and adapted to emerging trends and changes.

Coaching, it seems, is one of the skills of management that is expected to manifest itself in the manager by some kind of osmosis. In other words the expectation is that of course managers can coach - they're managers! But again this is not the case. Whilst most managers would claim that they undertake coaching, few would be able to offer a precise definition of the term or differentiate coaching from counselling, teaching, mentoring or most other forms of people development. However, as we've seen coaching is quite different; essentially it is about helping people learn rather than teaching them things. Learning to coach requires guidance and practise. It is not difficult but it is a very potent intervention that can cause problems if used carelessly.

We would not let our Team Leaders loose on a new IT system without proper training so why let them loose on their teams?

"It will cost too much."

Much depends on how the costs are calculated. Whilst there is an up front investment of time and money in having managers and team leaders trained as coaches this can be saved over and over again by the consequent improvements in team performance.

Compare the cost of one manager being trained as a coach so that he/she can help the team members become effective at personal organization against the cost of sending the whole team on time management courses.

Deciding whether we should implement coaching in an organization can be compared with clearing a forest. Do we stop from time to time to sharpen the axe and clear the forest more quickly and effectively in the end or do we keep hacking away with a blunt blade so that we can 'just get to the end of this next tree'?

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

"Pray for potatoes, but pick up a hoe." Anon.

Despite all the energy we have put into coaching in the first four stages of the coaching ARROW we have so far accomplished very little. In truth we have thought, pondered, intellectualized and navel gazed but changed nothing.

This is why the final part of the model - Way Forward - is so vital, because it's where we turn thought into action.

If we've coached well to this point we should begin to see a rise in energy levels of the people we coach as they realize that they are resourceful and can move their own issues forward and become excited at the prospect of doing so.

It can be really useful if we, as coaches, mirror this excitement to signal our belief and to encourage a definite course of meaningful action.

Many coaches report that this part of the process is largely automatic and it is often simply a matter of making sure people plan their actions in a sensible and logical way.

In many ways coaching for a Way Forward is akin to the kind of action planning that most people are used to anyway. We need firstly to have the coachee outline exactly what it is they intend to do. Detail is crucial here so challenge any vague responses. I also recommend having them state exactly when a planned action will begin and end. Such a date does not have to be considered irreversible; it can be changed as things move on. But without at least an aspirational completion date there can be no real commitment.

Next we should encourage the coachee to consider whether anyone else needs to be aware of their plans and how and when they will inform them. We should also invite them to think about any other resources that may be required and create a plan for getting them.

Throughout the Way Forward stage the emphasis is on what they WILL do rather than what they COULD do.

Towards the end of this part of the conversation it's wise to check that the course or courses of action decided upon will deliver the aims established at the start of the session. Any assistance that we feel we can provide as a coach should be offered rather than imposed.

I like to end by asking the person being coached to rate their commitment to taking the course of action they have thought out on a scale of 1-10. We might think that because we have gone through the model thoroughly and carefully that the answer here will always be ten but this isn't necessarily so. Sometimes a person will be reluctant to move forward despite a well-constructed coaching session and when this happens it is usually because of a barrier somewhere.

Perhaps it's because the person believes that other parties involved in the issue will not play their part in moving things forward. Sometimes it's because people are absolutely clear about what needs doing and certain it will work, but lack the courage to put the plan into action. Generally speaking, if we get an answer to the final question of anything less than 7, then the chances are that the person will not take action and our coaching session will have proven ineffective.

We need to discover what the barrier is by asking a further question - "What would make it a 10?" In answering this question the person being coached will come to understand what's preventing full commitment and we will perhaps have uncovered a more deep-rooted coaching issue. Sometimes by the time we get to Way Forward we find that the person has articulated the same solution two or three times in the session. This is perfectly okay and suggests that such a solution is one to which the person will be most committed. In this way, going through the coaching ARROW is rather like going up a spiral staircase. We will see the same things each time we go round but always from a slightly new perspective and so we build a more complete picture.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

We now need to help our coachees think through the various options they have in dealing with their issues and moving towards their aims.

The greatest pitfall here is for the person being coached to grasp the first idea that comes to mind. It may well be that this proves to be absolutely appropriate but the good coach will encourage their people to be highly imaginative and creative in considering options and to be constantly alert for new insights.

'Stuck' thinking

Most days I walk into my office via the front door and take the same route to my desk. I have done this for years and it can be evidenced by the carpet between these two points being markedly more worn than elsewhere. Imagine I was being coached on how I might arrive at my desk more alert and stimulated for the day's work. It would be very difficult of me to think of any alternative to my tried and tested route of the straight line from the door to the desk. In fact if any one suggested a different route to me I would be likely to say "It would take to long" or "it's a waste of time" or "I've never done it that way before" or "that's just not how it's done here". All of which may or may not be true.

But if my coach encouraged me to think creatively I might consider walking round the edge of the office past the window. As I thought about it I might realize that this would give me an opportunity to look at the river which I always find stimulating. In other words I will have hit upon a novel approach to achieving my aim.

Similarly, because I'm enjoying the coaching session and feeling free to allow my thinking to run a little wild I might think about moving from the door to my desk in a figure of eight. As I thought about that option I might realism that this would take me right past the table where I keep the books and articles I keep meaning to read but forgetting about, past the kettle which I could switch on as I went and finally past the computer printer which I don't normally pass and end up having to get up again to switch on later in the day.

In other words I have developed fresh insights and found new benefits just by unsticking my existing thinking.

New thinking almost always leads to new benefits:

In the early 70's Art Fry a technician at 3M wanted a bookmark that would neither fall out nor damage his book. He knew that a colleague, Dr Spencer, had developed a glue that could stick to most surfaces but that left nothing behind after removal. Art applied a little of this glue to a piece of paper and the Post-it note was born.

Breaking assumptions

Similarly people labour under certain assumptions about what is actually possible within situations at work and we tell ourselves that "there isn't enough time" or "we haven't got the budget" or "I don't have the authority".

Again these thoughts may or may not be true but it is very useful in a coaching session to allow people to be free of these constraints to see what other options might become available. So we might ask "What if you had more time, what could you do?" or "What if you had more money...?" and so on.

Of course we cannot pretend that there aren't any barriers or restrictions but what we're really trying to discover through coaching is whether these barriers are genuine or just assumptions. It's even possible that what was a restriction some time ago may not be the case any more - we just assume it is.

A distribution manager wanted to reorganize the routes his company used to supply dairy products to a number of grocery stores in their region.

He was told his new routes would not work because the stores furthest out wanted their deliveries on a Monday and would not accept any other day.

However, the distribution manager spoke to the storekeepers and discovered that, although they wanted a fast reliable service, they were not concerned about which day of the week their deliveries took place.

Sometime later, at a social event, a retired delivery man explained that deliveries to the outermost stores had always been made on a Monday because the horses were fresh after their Sunday rest!

In my next article I will examine how we decide which option to pursue as we map out the Way Forward.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

The reflection part of the coaching ARROW provides the person being coached - often called the coachee - with an opportunity to reflect on what's been discovered so far. Depending on the underlying issue and how much time is available for coaching in one session, Reflection may prove to be a major or minor piece of the whole process.

It is often in this part of the coaching process that true enlightenment happens; what some have described as 'ah-ha' moments.

Time can often be useful here and some coaches have had great success in stopping a coaching session after Aims and Reality and giving the person being coached certain Reflection questions to think about before they meet up again to explore Options and the Way forward.

It's important to realism that the coaching ARROW is simply a questioning framework, and it is not possible for us to coach effectively simply by reeling off the questions. The model must be used flexibly and at all times the needs and agenda of the person being coached must take priority.

We must use the Reflection stage particularly carefully, as it may be that the person being coached has already reflected subconsciously as they have answered the questions under Aims and Reality. In truth, it is worth encouraging the people we coach to reflect continuously throughout the session and if necessary refine their aims or review the reality of the situation. Reflection is conveniently located between Reality and Options because it helps spell ARROW, but reflecting, revising, going back over and jumping forward are perfectly reasonable and indeed essential steps of working flexibly with ARROW or any other sequence.

Let's now consider the sorts of things coaches can encourage their coachees to reflect upon. When using Reflection as a defined step in the sequence I like to ask my coachee to consider how big a gap there is between their Aims and their Reality. It may be that the Aims now seem over optimistic or equally a little conservative. A new timeframe may need to be decided upon or some shorter term, milestone type aims generated. Similarly Reflection may expose a lack of detail in appreciating the current Reality. It is at this stage that awareness is most raised so it can be worthwhile to reflect and understand Reality more vividly.

I find the Reflection stage is also a good time to explore any assumptions the coachee is making. Comments like "I've tried that before and it didn't work", "senior management will never agree" or "I'm just not able to do that" need challenging because they are not facts. Just because something was unsuccessful previously does not render it impossible for ever more. Senior management may not sign off the proposal but if we don't ask them the answer is already no. Nobody can know for certain that they are incapable of anything until they try. Remember the old saying; to assume makes an ASS of U and ME.

Coaches that allow their coachees time to reflect create an opportunity for a greater degree of honesty to emerge. If I ask you "Are you being totally honest with yourself?" I am not really accusing you of lying rather I'm encouraging you to go deeper. People who are unused to answering coaching questions can give superficial or lightweight answers in the first two stages (Aims and Reality). Here we can provide permission and encouragement to give more.

My personal favourite Reflection question is "What's really going on?" I have lost count of the number of times I have asked this and been greeted with a coy grin or a shake of the head. The answer that follows is invariably a more truthful, emphatic and revealing answer than what has come before.

My next article will build on this step by exploring how coachees can generate options.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

The most important thing we must recognize as we coach people through the Reality stage is that it is all a matter of perception.

We are all constantly interpreting our environment based on our own experiences. As a result we construct our own unique model of the world which then serves to guide us through life without having to deal with every interaction we have as if it were a new experience.

Our model of the world gives us patterns so that we can recognize familiar objects or events. So that having seen a tree in England we can recognize the same thing if we encounter one in Switzerland. However, not everything will be interpreted the same way by different people. Draw a curved line on a piece of paper. Is the shape is concave or convex? Of course there is no right answer; it's all a matter of perspective. Some will see the shape as convex others as concave.

What has all this to do with coaching? The important perspective in coaching is that of the person being coached - it is their version of reality that counts. I have a story that illustrates this point: John was a sales person who was seeking some coaching on how he might better answer customer objections during the sales conversation. He approached Mary for some coaching on this and having discussed his aims they began to explore the reality of John's situation. John was very concerned about this aspect of his sales technique and rated himself as one of the poorest in the team in this regard. Mary disagreed. She insisted that John was one of her best performers as far as handling objections was concerned and suggested that John should think of another performance area on which to be coached. John thanked Mary for the encouragement but explained once more that this was his number one issue effecting his performance overall. He instinctively knew that if he could get over these feelings his performance would really soar. Mary became so irritated with John for failing to see what she saw as the reality of the situation that she ended the coaching session and suggested that John might like to return when he had something sensible to discuss. She had failed to help John raise his awareness, she had reclaimed the responsibility for John's learning and she had shattered the relationship of trust. Needless to say, John did not seek her coaching again. So we can see that we need to be alive to the possibility of different perceptions and perspectives.

Draw a picture of a square. Divide it into quarters by drawing a line down the centre and a line across the middle. Similarly divide each of those squares into quarters. How many squares can you now see? The correct answer is 30:

1 whole square

16 individual squares

9 squares of 4 units

4 squares of 9 units

Look again until you can see all 30. This gives us another important lesson when we're thinking about reality. Namely that the true picture of reality often only emerges after we've looked several times and that it is worthwhile spending some time in a coaching session on the Reality stage.

We should welcome the fact that the people we coach may see things differently to us. It creates a sense of diversity and can throw up all sorts of new ways of taking a situation forward that would never have been uncovered if we all thought in the same way. Coaching is a powerful tool for improving performance in any area. In an organizational setting we should never use it only as a means of addressing poor performance. Sometimes even the best performing team members are still operating below the level of their potential and they too deserve to benefit from coaching and see how much better they might become.

However, coaching is also a valuable tool for problem solving and dealing with difficult issues and it would be true to say that the majority of coaching that goes on at work is used for these reasons.

As such, it is possible that when we are coaching someone through the Reality stage that things may get quite downbeat as they come to realize how big a task or challenge they face. It may be necessary to encourage them to think through all the things that are going well in a situation - there will always be some! - to help them get a balanced picture.

This is not the same as imposing our view it is simply encouraging the other person to recognize that an accurate view of reality includes acknowledging what's going well. More importantly, it sets a positive tone for discussing solutions later in the coaching session.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

We all have a variety of aims in every aspect of our lives. We might aim to be effective parents or good managers, or we might aim to lose weight or achieve a certain level of income.

One of the most useful things you can do as a coach is to help your coachees make sense of their aims and to encourage them to commit to a course of action that will help them achieve these aims. However, there are different types of aims, with some being quite vague and others being very precise; and certain aims are more useful to focus on than others.

Let's take the example of Olympic athletes. They will probably 'dream' of an Olympic gold medal but it would be dangerous to focus too heavily on this as, no matter how good an athlete they may be, they cannot legislate for what the competition might do. Instead athletes tend to set 'performance goals' such as personal bests. In this way they focus on the goals over which they have some control, such as running a race in a certain time or achieving a certain distance in a jumping or throwing event. However day by day it is most likely that they will concentrate on processes. For our athlete this might mean working on technique, or building stamina. In other words the detailed steps necessary to achieve the performance goal that will in turn give them the best possible chance of achieving their dream.

The same is true in business. We might dream of being the top performing salesperson in the company this year, but we cannot control how the other sales people will perform. So we might set a performance goal of achieving 5% commission income this year instead, in the hope that such a performance might be good enough to achieve our dream. However the only way to achieve our performance goals is to concentrate on the processes, e.g. questioning technique and handling objections. So we might set an aim of, say, asking twice as many 'open' as 'closed' questions, or responding to an objection twice before admitting defeat.

In summary, whenever we think about our aims in life we need dreams to provide the inspiration, performance goals to provide the specification and processes to provide the mechanism for achievement. We'll now look at each of these aspects in more detail.

Dreams

As a coach you are there to encourage your people to dream and to think big. Remember coaches believe in the vast reserves of potential in all people and as we begin our coaching conversations by discussing aims it is vital that we encourage people to stretch themselves.

At no point must we ever pour scorn on people's high aims and dreams.

More often than not the thing that holds people back is a set of limiting beliefs and these have a habit of becoming true. If, for example, our parents continually wince every time we sing a tune as a small child then we are likely to believe that we cannot sing and therefore we will never be inclined to learn and make changes in order to be able to sing. Vocalists pass air over their vocal cords to make a noise, there is no reason why any of us should not be able to do this and sing well given time, support and practice.

As coaches we can be our team's advocate constantly encouraging, supporting and helping people to believe that they can achieve their aims.

Performance Goals

Typically, in a business setting, we will need to concentrate, in the main on performance goals. These will usually come to us via our organization's performance management system and will include the various standards and targets we are expected to achieve in the coming year or so.

We need to think about making sure that a performance goal is formulated in such a way as to give us the best chance of success.

Most people know the mnemonic SMART and its many derivatives, but the point is to create a detailed 'end-point' to provide focus, not to follow a model slavishly.

We can use coaching questions to make sure that people have constructed well thought out and balanced performance goals.

Processes

Processes are the building blocks towards achieving performance goals and are an incredible way of helping us focus on the small steps that in turn will lead to the big results.

We are concerned with using our coaching skills to help others make changes and improve their performance. We cannot do this by asking them to change dreams; we cannot do it even by tightening up their performance goals. Change, and therefore improvement can only take place at the level of process.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular mini-guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

We know that to be an effective coach requires us to have certain skills and knowledge, and to have a healthy, positive attitude regarding the nature of people at work and their potential to grow, develop and become the best they can be.

The most effective coaches concern themselves with helping other people to raise their levels of awareness, encourage them to make positive choices and to take meaningful action. Effective coaches build trust by coaching with an open mind and with great sincerity.

To become an effective coach we need to develop and practise our skills in asking probing questions and actively listening. The ultimate aim of coaching being to provide an environment in which the people we coach can engage in high quality thinking. Everything we do as human beings is preceded by thought and it follows that the quality of our actions and decisions is totally tied to the quality of our thinking. This is where coaching can have its most profound effect.

Coaching of such quality provides direction for our thoughts and enables us to focus. Through focus we will become even more aware of the things that affect our performance and make lasting changes and improvements without the need for someone else to suggest that we do so.

What's needed though is a framework for putting this all in place and navigating through a coaching session.

In previous articles, I've explored the various qualities which good coaches develop and shown how coaching is a particularly powerful development tool because it works on state of mind as well as knowledge and skills.

How do we bring this all together in a framework that is easy to work with and to remember? There are many such frameworks around and you might like to explore them after you've read this. However, we are going to use a framework I developed known as the coaching ARROW. Those of you familiar with the ubiquitous GROW model will recognize the origins of my approach, however I hope that the ARROW sequence provokes fresh thinking.

We know that we can develop individuals quite powerfully by raising awareness and generating responsibility in an environment of trust and that this is achieved by asking questions. But what sort of questions and in what order? How do such questions promote focus? And how can we guide people towards a positive outcome in a coaching session. Consider the following conversation:

Wife:

What shall we do about a holiday this year? I fancy some time in the sun.

Husband:

Yes, I agree, and preferably soon.

Wife:

Well, I could get a few weeks off in September.

Husband:

I can get time off when I like, but I think we'll need to save up.

Wife:

We should be able to save enough by September.

Husband:

You're right. I'll find out how much we've got saved at the moment.

Wife:

I reckon we can have a week in Florida or two weeks in Spain.

Husband:

Great, we'll go to Florida for a week in September. Let's both book the time off work tomorrow and I'll call into the travel agents on the way home.

You may not have recognized much coaching going on, but that was exactly what this couple was doing. To begin with they thought about what they were trying to achieve - they established their Aims. Then they thought about how the situation stood at the moment - they considered the Reality. There was then some Reflection on the gap between the aims and the reality. Next they pondered on the Options they had and finally they committed to a course of action - the Way Forward.

Whether they realized it or not they were using the coaching ARROW

Aims - Reality - Reflection - Options - Way Forward

The coaching ARROW provides a simple framework around which to construct our coaching questions. Watch out for future articles where I'll examine each part of the model so you'll know exactly how use it to best effect.

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Matt Somers is a coaching practitioner of many years' experience. He works with a host of clients in North East England where his firm is based and throughout the UK and Europe. Matt understands that people are working with their true potential locked away. He shows how coaching provides a simple yet elegant key to this lock. His popular mini-guide "Coaching for an Easier Life" is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

Over the years, clients and friends have talked to me about their desire to improve their sales presentations and closing ratios. Your sales presentation, closing techniques and tactics can make or break your marketing. Therefore, it is not enough to do launching effective marketing campaigns to obtain new customers and to continually market to your existing database for more referrals and repeat business. In addition, you must be able to ask for and close the sale. Otherwise, it is a waste of time and money!

How is your sales ratio? Is it 50%, or 1 out of every 2? Is it much higher like 85%, or 8.5 out of every 10? Your sales presentation and process can play a large role in your ability to increase your total number of closes.

It is okay to obtain help to improve your sales but it is not something people usually consider when they think about their marketing approach. Instead, they just assume the advertisements (or other marketing) are not working (not bringing in the 'right type' of person. In fact, even the best salespeople listen to CDs, read books and attend presentations that teach salespeople how they can improve. Why an average salesperson chose NOT to do this as well? It probably has a lot to do with the fact that he/she does not believe that he/she is a good salesperson or that he/she does not have ample time to do so.

These days, you do not have a choice; you must make the time to brush up at least 2 - 4 times a year in order to learn new strategies. The market is not the same as it was 5 or 10 years ago where it was all about where a business placed its advertisements and what the advertisement said. Now, it is all about personality and if the potential customer likes you or not. .Those old car salesperson tricks are going to work as they did 5 years ago. In fact, your prospect will laugh you right out of the room if you try these techniques, or he/she will talk negatively about you once you leave. The following are a few closing techniques that you can use in your sales process. However, remember, it needs to be real, you cannot be a fake. They will see right through you and move on to the next person if you are. Use these techniques with caution as they may increase your sales!

The following are 5 of my favorite Closing Techniques:
1. Assume the Sale
Assume they are going to buy and be shocked if they tell you no.
2. Fear of Loss
Make them feel like they will really be missing out if they do not buy from you. Make them want to have your product and/or service.
3. Sense of Urgency
Create a sense of urgency. Make them feel that they need to hurry up and buy before the product and/or service is gone.
4. Optional Close
Give them a choice. Try asking them which product they would prefer to purchase - "this one or that one?" Another option is to ask if them if they would like to pay by check or credit card.
5. Indifference
Make them feel that it does not matter to you whether they buy or not. Explain that it is not a big deal and that the sale is up to them. This will help to ensure that they do not feel the pressure and will allow them to believe that they made the decision on their own.

The following are 10 Sales Presentation Tips.
1. Sell the outcome, not the product - instead of telling them what you want to tell them, tell them what they want to hear and how the product and/or service will benefit them.
2. Ask questions to find your prospect's 'hot' buttons.
3. Only talk about their 'hot' buttons.
4. Do not 'feature dump'. Do not talk endlessly about all your products or services; instead, focus.
5. Listen to the prospect more than you talk to them.
6. Dig deeper when the prospect gives you objections. Cautiously dig to find the real reasons. Next, only address those reasons.
7. Ask for the sale at least 4 times before you give up. You can do this in a variety of ways so that most likely they not even notice throughout the presentation.
8. Build relationships and nurture them during and ongoing well after the presentation.
9. Understand whether your product or service will likely require a long or short sales process. Next, work it accordingly and do not expect a miracle right off the bat with a long sale. Do not let yourself get disappointed. Remember, the cold calling average indicates that it takes an average of 10 calls to get one sale.
10. Be sure to send thank you notes or emails before, during and after the sales process.

Some of you might be wondering where I got all of this information. Seriously, from my many years of experience in a variety of fields, I compiled a list of techniques that I devised and found to be effective. In addition, I have learned much from my participation in numerous sales training programs and seminars.

I used to do door-to-door sales. I used to sell oil change certificates and restaurant coupons door-to-door in residential neighborhoods and to businesses. "Do you want a $5 oil change?" was my big opening line; I made a killing back then!

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(c) Copyright 2008 K.Sawa Marketing. Katrina Sawa is an Award-Winning Relationship Marketing Coach who's helped hundreds of small business owners take dramatic steps in their businesses to get them to the next level in business, revenues and life. She offers one-on-one coaching, group coaching and do-it-yourself marketing planning products. Go online now to get started with her Free Report and Free Audio at http://www.jumpstartyourmarketing.com

There are some very simple SEO techniques available for you to improve your search engine ranking. In the course of my normal analysis of competitors' websites, I find an amazing number that does not employ all of these techniques, yet every one can help you get closer to that coveted #1 position.

Using these will not in itself allow you reach the top position for your keyword, but they definitely help, and there is no single factor that will enable you to hit the top. A #1 position on Google is attained by a combination of many factors, such as internal and external linking strategies, relevance of your content to the keyword and the overall look and feel of your site. Plus those detailed below.

So let's get started on these: these are the nuts and bolts of SEO, and if they are not right then you are starting off on the back foot. These are the essential SEO techniques that you must have as a minimum if you want to improve your search engine ranking, and although intended mainly for beginners, many established web pages do not contain every one of these.

I write 'pages' deliberately, because Google and the other main search engines list web pages, and not entire domains. That means that every single page in your website should be optimized in the same way: each should contain every single one of the SEO techniques listed below.

TITLE TAG

The title tag is contained within the 'HEAD' tags of your HTML, before the 'BODY' tags. This states the title of the page, and must contain the major keywords of the page. The contents of your title tag do not appear in the text of the page: its purpose is to inform the search engine spiders what the topic of your page is, and what words are important (i.e. your main page keyword). For example, the TITLE tag of a page based on this article would be "SEO Techniques - Improve your Search Engine Ranking".

DESCRIPTION TAG

The description Meta tag is used by Google, and other search engines, in the search engine listings. I have tested this with them all and Google uses it as is, while Yahoo uses part of it. You should provide a description of what the web page is about, and a simple check of the descriptions in other sites using your keyword on Google will show you how many words you can use to have the whole description included. About 20 words are fine.

KEYWORD TAG

Search engines rarely use the keyword Meta tag: Google ignores it completely. However, it doesn't hurt, and can help in a small way. Include your brand name and your own name. That way some engines might show your pages if somebody is looking for your name. The other Meta tags have no SEO value, and do not help to improve your search engine ranking whatsoever.

HEADING H TAGS

Heading tags (H1, H2, . . .) are used by Google to determine the importance of the text contained in your headings. Use H1 tags for the main title of your page (you also use it in the TITLE tag, but that isn't seen by readers, only by the spiders). Put subtitles in H2 tags. You can change the font size of the text within these tags.

TEXT FORMATTING

Text in bold, italics and underscored are seen by the search engines as having greater weight, and so will be used in determining the relevance of your site. Always bolden your titles, and it also helps to underline it if it doesn't make it look out of place.

WRITING STYLE and CONTENT

Do not write for algorithms (spiders): write for your readers. Always write for humans and you won't go wrong. If your page content reads well, and has good vocabulary relating to the topic, then it will have a better chance of a higher listing than if you stuffed it full of keywords. I rarely use more than 1.5% - the keyword densities of the terms 'SEO', SEO techniques' and 'search engine ranking' (the main keywords) of this article are 1.5, 0.87 and 0.87 respectively. Too many keywords is bad SEO, and could result in a poor listing for your page - if it is listed at all.

So there you are: six simple SEO techniques to improve your search engine ranking. It is surprising how many experienced webmasters fail to apply all of these: there is no excuse, and they are failing to get the nuts and bolts properly fitted and tightened on their web pages.

Apply these to every page and not only will you improve your SEO, but also your chances of a good search engine ranking. It is amazing how many web pages lack these basic SEO techniques.

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If you would like more advanced SEO techniques to help improve your search engine ranking considerably, check out SEOcious where Pete show you screenshots of how got two of his sites listed at #1 in the main search engines against strong competition.

I recently saw a very engaging article called "Do Mercedes Salespeople Stay Up Nights Worrying About Low Kia Prices?". It's a very good question.

At a recent seminar I went to the presenter graphically demonstrated the risks, and the potential, to impact profitability by changing prices.

Let's say your business operates at a gross margin rate of 30%. Let's say you feel pressured for whatever reason to drop your prices by 10% - maybe your client is playing hard to get or is complaining about "your high prices", or maybe you're just feeling generous. Your profit is going to drop by 10% as well, isn't it?

WRONG! Your costs aren't going to fall just because you choose to charge less for the same service. The result of dropping your prices by 10% is to reduce your profitabilty by around 33%. To stay in the same place and earn the same gross profit, you are going to have to do a whopping 50% more business to cover your discount costs!

In other words, you are going to have to be assured of some pretty dramatic increases in sales to justify that level of discounting.

This is all well and good, I hear you say - but I'm being told that I have to drop my prices to retain the customer. So it makes sense to drop my prices, doesn't it?

WRONG AGAIN! Studies show that no matter what customers tell you, only 14% buy on price alone and not on value. You rarely buy something for reasons of price alone and neither do your customers.

Objections based on price are often false objections, unless you have made price the rod for your own back by disclosing price too early. As the adage goes, never tell the customer your price until they have already fallen in love with your product.

Customers generally raise the price objection because they know it is the easiest one to use. It is the objection that many salespeople convince themselves is true and the one salespeople give up with the easiest.

It is essential to understand who your customers are and above all which customers are your good customers.

Good customers are the ones that cause you the least grief, that you most enjoy working with and which ultimately bring you the most profit. According to the Pareto rule, they are probably the 20% of your customer base that bring in 80% of your profits. They are also the ones that are least likely to talk to you about your price, unless you bring it up first.

The ones that do talk about price all the time are likely to be the 80% of your customer base that generate only 20% of your profit.

So do yourself a favour. Don't discount - raise your prices instead - it will force you and your customers to reassess the value that you represent to each other and ultimately help you to focus on the customers that really are the bedrock of your business.

Stephen Oliver is Director of Expraxis Limited, a consulting company that works with academics, entrepreneurs and inventors who need help bringing new ideas to market. We help people set their priorities, plan for their business, build relationships with partners that can help them, and work with them to help turn those ideas into reality. Expraxis has long experience in cost analysis for services businesses and has a range of analysis tools to assist companies in understanding their marginal cost base.

For any aspiring entrepreneur, building a successful business plan can seem daunting. Many small businesses ask themselves: Do we really need a plan? Well, if you have a business or want to start a business, you NEED a business plan! "Winging it" never worked for any successful business. Even well-established businesses need a business plan, or need to drastically modify their business plan when the situation changes.

The first step to building your business plan is determining your goals and objectives for your business. Imagine where you want to be in a few years. Do you want to remain a small business, or are you more adventurous? Also, consider your personal goals and objectives. How much work are you willing to put into your business? Is this a business that will provide a livable income, or more of a hobby? What tasks and jobs are you willing to delegate to your employees?

Second, determine what you bring to the customer. What distinguishes your business from your competitor? You must come up with the key attributes of your business that will draw customers to you again and again. Without proper brand development and recognition, your customers will glaze over your website and you won't have appropriate levels of business to sustain.

Third, consider your budget. How much money will you need to start up your business? Are you going to take out a business loan, or find investors? Do you want to allow investors in on your important business decisions? Also, consider what happens as your business changes and grows. How are you going to spend income? Are you going to re-invest in your business? Finally, how much income do you need to support your personal lifestyle?

When you have these essential elements, you can consider your business strategy. Basically, this is a plan of how you're going to market, design, and operate your business. In any business plan, you will usually open with an Executive Summary and Business Description. After that, you get to the "meat" of your plan.

The third section of your business plan is your Marketing section. Consider your target audience and how large your customer base may become. Then, consider how you will reach your market (how feasible it is to actually contact your customer base). Will you use website only? Or perhaps television and paper mediums? This will help define your pricing, distribution, promotion and marketing methods. Once you have this section completed, you can see how you measure up with your competitors. You should aim to outperform and outlast your competitors, and draw their customers to your base.

The next two sections are the overall design and operations plan of your business. How will you design your business' brand? What are your most visible attributes? Also, how many employees do you want, and how will your business flow? Will you delegate tasks or handle most of it yourself? A lot of this section is highly personal and gives you a chance to show your passion about your product or service.

Finally, you must come back to your finances and determine what is feasible for your business. Also, try to examine what your future financial goals will be as the market changes and your business grows.

With a business plan, you can ensure your business has a solid foundation in reality and what you can feasibly expect from your venture. This is essential to business success and will maximize your profits!

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Let us help you to build your business plan online. Our business team, online sales, and marketing development planners have all that you need to create a successful plan. Go to Global Web Expressions.

The most important part of your business image is your "brand". Your brand is basically the most recognizable part of your business advertisement. Brands become an integral part of your customer's expectation set. If you can associate your brand with positive attributes, then your customers are more apt to return for business. You want your customers to see your brand, and immediately recognize it for quality and efficiency.

There are key attributes of every successful brand. As a business owner, your success lies in the choices you make early in your business development plan. Developing a business recognition plan is one of the first things you should do when you establish your business. For example, almost everyone recognizes the Starbucks logo, or the Coca-Cola logo. Why have these brands had such great success? There are certainly other coffee shop and soda options.

Brand recognition success is rooted in your own business image. As a business owner, you must first determine what unique qualities you offer to your customer. Do you offer expedient services, at the last-minute? Or do you have a special product at a great price that customers can't find anywhere else? Or do you offer special complimentary services that set you above your competition?

Capitalizing on your unique services/products you bring to your customers is the first step to successful brand recognition. You can capitalize on what you offer by utilizing great design in your website. Great design is attractive, consistent and easy to use. You must use up-to-date and modern graphic design in order to have an attractive website. Also, your website must be consistent. It would be foolish to use a different logo or template on the different pages of your site!

Finally, your customer wants a website that's easy to use. The easier it is to use your site, the more business they can complete with you. You can improve your site's usability with easy-to-use navigation sets that are consistent throughout your site. Some of the worst sites are those that have constantly changing toolbars and navigation buttons. This turns your customers away and frustrates them when they're trying to purchase products/services from your site.

Once you have your site up and running, don't think that you can just let it go! The more you update your site, the more "in touch" your customer will feel with your company. Customers will see the often updates and immediately recognize that you're dedicated to your business. A great way to utilize updates is to update your site for the seasons. If it's November, a Thanksgiving theme is great to connect to your customers! A great example of a brand that utilizes this is Google, who changes their overall "Google" logo every season and holiday.

Once you have a memorable and unique design, you can begin advertising your new business logo. Putting your brand out in the public's eyes immediately draws customers to your site. By using good business practices, your customers will associate your brand with the positive qualities you bring to the market and keep coming back. As they are satisfied, they will spread the word of your site, and you'll find that your brand recognition plan is a success!

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For more information on brand recognition and other business concepts, visit Global Web Expressions online. If you need help in developing a plan for your brand recognition online, go HERE.

It isn't the part of my career that I'm most proud of and I can remember it all too clearly.

It was the summer of 1996. I was working for Microsoft in Paris in the newly-created Internet Customer Unit. Microsoft (not for the first time) was caught on it's back foot by an upstart new company called Netscape.

The World-Wide Web was all the rage and everyone wanted to stake their claim on the new market. Microsoft had a rudimentary browser product called Internet Explorer (2.0), but the market's imagination had been captured by Netscape's Navigator.

Why? Because for the first time in years, a company that wasn't Microsoft was producing a ubiquitous and truly vendor-agnostic platform for application development. By providing a simple, accessible and extensible environment in which developers could engineer a consistent user experience regardless of the machine on which the browser was running, the operating system effectively became irrelevant.

The significance of this was not lost on Netscape; in fact they "got it" before Microsoft. In their own words, Netscape "would reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers". An aspirational statement, certainly, but it also amounted to throwing down the gauntlet. And as a young, under-capitalised, one-product company standing up to the biggest software company in the world, slightly rash.

To understand how it felt from where we were, you have to appreciate that Microsoft itself was only 15 years old at that time and most of the "movers and shakers" in the company had joined at a time that computers and business machines were made by IBM or NCR and software wasn't a separate business. Microsoft had always been the upstart outsider and still had the start-up company's "street fighting" mentality. Although Netscape never had the resources to mount a realistic challenge, Microsoft wasn't going to sit back and ignore a direct challenge.

So we took them on. No dirty tricks, mind you, nothing illegal: We focussed on our strengths and enhanced the IE platform to create a more compelling development environment that reasserted the importance of the operating system. All well and good. But we also used our market strength in a way that we knew Netscape couldn't find an answer to.

As my boss said at the time, we "cut off their oxygen supply", which broadly translated into outspending them. If they spent $1 million, we'd spend $5 million. It was easy; we had the money, we knew they didn't. What they spent on marketing, they couldn't spend on product development or developer relations. We raised the stakes to the point that they just couldn't compete. And of course we won. In a year we grew from around 5% market share to around 75%. It was over as soon as it had started.

But was that right? Should we have competed in that way?

I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable at the time, but never to the point that I had the courage to call the tactics into question. I was too caught up in the enthusiasm of the moment to listen to my conscience and ask if we had the right to behave in that way.

I forgot that we were no longer the David of the industry, taking on the industrial establishment: We had become the establishment; we were the Goliath. We should have realised that the rules had changed and we should have moderated out behaviour. And I should have said so.

Of course we weren't the first to find ourselves in that position and I'm sure we won't be the last. Concentration of economic power can even be a force for good: Matching Reagan's "Star Wars" strategy (albeit a bluff) was one investment too far for the Soviet Union and precipitated the domino collapse that ultimately liberated East Germany and the Warsaw Pact states.

But it still requires conscience and the maturity to acknowledge that sometimes the rules change to the point that you have to keep your own behaviour in check.

This was brought home to me with stark clarity as I watched the shocking images of the devastation in Gaza recently. Listening to the arguments of politicians and ordinary people in Israel, it is clear that they haven't yet moved on from the Sabra mentality of independence, when they were the refugees, the forgotten ones that were desperately fighting for their existence using begged and borrowed materiel.

The pendulum has now swung the other way, giving Israel scope to work in a different way. Just because you can crush your opponents doesn't mean that you have to do it, no matter how convinced you are of the justice of your own cause: 150 dead Palestinian civilians (to use Israeli numbers) is a huge price to extract for 3 dead Israeli citizens.

Hamas in Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon don't only fight with rockets, even if they undeniably do resort to violence from time to time. They also build the schools and hospitals and provide the social infrastructure that nobody else does. I sometimes reflect on the comparative cost of a school in Gaza and the fuel and munitions for one F16 sortie, and wonder whether there is any hope that Israel will one day seek to exert influence in that way. It wouldn't be easy, but it may be worth finding out one day.

My life is thankfully much more mundane. Usually I am dealing with partners or customers where relative strengths are comparable. What I have learnt, however, is that the way that I interact with other people isn't simply predicated by my needs and wants: I have to consider who it is that I am working with and how they can interact with me.

I like to think that, if I was thrown back into Microsoft in 1996, I would have behaved in a different way. Maybe there was common ground somewhere that we could have sought. Maybe if we had competed with Netscape in a different way, accepting their successes, then new opportunities would have appeared for us that we never even considered.

Or maybe we could have just remembered, for a moment, what it was like to be the underdog, and asked ourselves what we would have thought of our own actions in their shoes.

What an interesting week that was!

After publishing my article on iPhone connectivity to Exchange and experimented, I deleted the Exchange profile on the iPhone and tried to rebuild it.  Not to be recommended.  2 days later, having completely wiped and rebuilt the iPhone 3 times, exported and rebuilt my Exchange mailbox once, deleted and completely rebuilt my Active Directory identity once, deleted and rebuilt my Outlook offline folders twice and having rummaged deeper into the depths of Exchange 2007's Management Console than I ever care to do again .... it all works.  Apart from the occasional EXCDO Event 8206 and 8207 errors on Exchange.

I'm not pointing fingers here.  I have probably read over 50 threads on the topic this week, mostly written by Microsoft MSCPs but some written from the Apple camp, and I think the blame has to be shared equally.

Apple don't seem to have implemented the ActiveSync protocol completely correctly, that's for sure.  I don't just mean the absence of any Task/To Do functionality and the loss of item richness in Mail and Calendar.  Its error handling is poor and it seems to time out far too rapidly.  It loses email account settings too - in fact the concensus in the Apple camp seems to be if you are going to use Exchange, you had better Jailbreak the iPhone or just hope you don't need to do any debugging at all.

Also DON'T GET ME STARTED on iPhone security (root and identity certificate key chains) - if you load certificates manually, you seem to have less than an even chance of the iPhone recognising the keychain, and unless you Jailbreak you have NO means of managing certificates on the device.  In the end I went back to using Apple's Enterprise Deployment Tool just to install the certificate chains, because that way you can force things on the PC. (The problem with this tool is that the profile on the iPhone cannot be edited by users, so any configuration change has to be made on a PC/Mac and then redistributed to the iPhone, which risks losing data on the iPhone).

The Microsoft engineers are split 50-50 on the iPhone.  Most dislike it or prefer Blackberry or WM6 devices, particularly when it comes to bulk deployment, the rest accept that the iPhone is very compelling.  All regard iPhone 2.0 as pretty much as Alpha product  when it comes to mission critical business deployment:  It can be made to work, but at a cost in terms of lost time and hand wringing that is hard to justify.

In reality, as someone who really values Microsoft server platforms but is dubious about recent desktop OSs from Redmond, I have to admit that the problem with the iPhone is that it is a magnifying glass for any lurking inconsistencies in your Exchange data that have been there all along, but that Microsoft apps seems to be able to cope with. The EXCDO errors are a case in point -it's actually just dirty recurring appointment data.  If your data is bad, it's bad.  Most of the time Exchange can cope with it - it simply goes out of focus and will eventually be deleted. Unfortunately turning the focus back by doing something like rebuilding an OST file or Archiving an OST file then starts generating database errors on Exchange that slow the system sufficiently for the iPhone to start having serious problems handshaking with ActiveSync.

The biggest problem apart from dirty appointment data has been getting at device partnership data inside the Exchange Mailbox.  It's there, but the UI is arcane to the point of absurdity and still has undocumented features.

For example, if you manually set Mobile Device policy to the default policy, Exchange considers that to be a non-default policy and this seems to block some aspects of new device pairing.  The parameter for this in the set/get-CASMailbox command is "ActiveSyncMailboxPolicyIsDefaulted:$False" but of course there is no explicit command for doing this - you have to do a Set-CASMailbox -identity [user] ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy:$nul, at which point ActiveSyncMailboxPolicy still says "Default", but in fact that is just because it's nul and the ActiveSyncMailboxPolicyIsDefaulted is now True.  Still with me? Well, don't worry, at least you have had a glimpse into the dark art of Exchange 2007 system maintenance :-).

Anyway, it's now all back up and working fairly smoothly.  Lesson learnt: once it works, leave well alone.  Oh, and don't forget to archive your Outlook Calendar data regularly to get rid of those old recurring reminders that seem to be at the root of the EXCDO error and poor Exchange 2007 database performance.

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Most large corporate deployments will rely on Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility (available from http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/). This tool, available in versions for both OS/X and Windows, allows IT departments to set up template deployments with pre-defined settings and also to distribute certificates to iPhone users via iTunes.

For most small businesses or standalone users, however, this is not an appropriate way to go and it is easier simply to set up the device by hand.  This is quite straightforward for non-SSL accounts and relatively straightforward if you use SSL connections to Exchange (optional with Exchange 2003, "mandatory" or at least hard to work around in Exchange 2007).  Let's take the easy case first, configuring without SSL.

First of all you need to create an email account on the iPhone:

1. On the iPhone, choose "Settings", and then choose "Mail, Contacts, and Calendars".
2. Choose "Add Account".
3. Choose type "Microsoft Exchange".
4. Enter your Email address
5. Enter your Exchange Login ID (Domain, Username and Password - the Domain is the part of your login that appears before the backslash "\"). This is the same ID that you would use to log into Outlook or Outlook Web Access.
6. Enter a Description (option).  The field will probably be populated automatically with your Email address but it can also be left blank.Tap "Next" to start the configuration process. 
7. A new field for "Server" will pop up. In theory, if you Exchange server is correctly configured it should detect most of your settings automatically using the Autodiscover feature, but I have generally had to step in at this point and manuually enter the name of my Server.  This is usually the same server name you would use to access Outlook Web Access.
8. The iPhone will verify your account information and if everything has been set up correctly you will see a screen offering to set up Exchange for "Mail"; "Contacts"; and "Calendars".  All switches should be in the ON position. Hit "Save".

To tweak different features, go back to "Settings" and "Mail, Contacts, Calendar.".  Features that you can adjust are:

• Generally, how many emails are shown in each folder,
• Within "Accounts", how many "Mail days to sync" (how long emails are kept on the iPhone). The default is only 3 days so you may want to increase this to 1 month.
• Within "Accounts" and "Account info" whether SSL is turned on or not.

If your Exchange server requires SSL connections, there is an additional step to take to install the appropriate certificates on your iPhone in your "Profile".  This can be slightly more complicated and is covered in a separate article.  Once installed the certificates they are visible on your iPhone in "Settings", "General" and "Profile".

I took delivery of my iPhone at the start of September, the start of a trying month personally that saw me out of the office for very long periods and only in touch with the world via my phone.  It was a baptism of fire for me and the device.

You will have seen the adverts, played with it in phone shops, looked over fellow commuters' shoulders, borrowed your friend's ... great isn't it?  Or is it?

In this article I touch on some of the things about the device that have really irked me.  Just a bit or quite a lot.  And to maintain the celestial karmic balance I have a companion article on some of the things about the iPhone that I absolutely love.  There's enough material for both articles, I assure you!

So here we go, in reverse order, the 10 things that you should hate about the iPhone!

10. Grubby fingers and the onscreen keyboard

The iPhone's onscreen keyboard is surprisingly effective and doesn't take long to get used to. 

Just remember to wash your hands before you do so, however!  This isn't just cosmetic: For some reason I manage to leave a sticky mark under my right thumb that attract dust, biscuit crumbs, or whatever, right over the erase key.  Usually the crumb lands there just as I finish the 2 page email and starts to rub out the whole message character by character! This is not an exaggeration!! It is, however, not a daily occurrence!!

9. External memory

I went the whole hog and took the 16GB iPhone immediately.  I don't regret it!  I haven't been selective with my music collection and have more or less all my ripped CDs stored on the iPhone.  That's 14GB.  Which leaves precious little for real data.

On other devices this is rarely a problem and non-volatile storage is usually flash memory of some description, the size of which obeys Moore's law and doubles in size and speed every 9 months or so and halves in physical size every 2 years or so with a new "mini" or "micro" format.  I have yet to run out of space on a mobile phone or smartphone, even with an address book of over 500 names.

The problem on the iPhone is that there is no external memory slot and no way (short of wielding a soldering iron) of expanding the internal memory.  A shame. The iPod Touch has recently spawned a 32GB version and I imagine that the 32GB iPhone is on its way.  When that happens the legacy user base will be left wondering what to do next.

8. Battery and battery life

The iPhone is sleek - barely a centimetre thick and enticingly smooth with those rounded edges.  There are few buttons, no little doors to come open and break off in your pocket and no memory slots to fill up with fluff and dirt. 

One of the reasons for the smooth design is that the iPhone does not have a user removeable battery.  The battery can be changed by a service centre, and over the two years I will keep this device I expect to have to change the battery at least once, but I cannot do it myself.  Also the battery is surprisingly small - it has to be to fit into this neat little package.

The price you pay for this is battery life.  My device is now 6 weeks old and have been fully cycled about 5 times (I tend to keep the battery on charge but allow it to run flat at least once a week).  If I am not using the device constantly, just checking the device twice an hour and answering calls, using 3G and Push, I can rely on a full working day of 10 to 12 hours between charges.  If I turn on WiFi this drops to 6 or 7 hours.  If I use the GPS without WiFi, autonomy drops to 4 or 5 hours.  If I wanted to be really frugal and last a full 24 hours, I would need to turn off both Push email and 3G, and reduce screen brightness to a minimum.

For some people this is a major issue.  For me, since I usually either have a PC on and can trail a USB cable, or spend the day driving with the iPhone hooked up as an iPod and being charged by the car, it is less of a constraint.  But it remains an annoyance.  I haven't yet seen an iPhone equivalent of the Dell Latitude "Slice" - a battery "back pack" for the iPhone that could more than double autonomy with minimal extra thickness, but I assume that someone, somewhere, is working on an aftermarket device.

7. Document management

There is no equivalent of the Windows Mobile File Manager or Mac Finder on the iPhone so no way of manipulating file objects on device. 

Admittedly the iPhone does a credible job of shielding you from the need to do any file level manipulation: For example the Camera has a photo album that is also accessible in other applications that need to access images (for example, the iBlogger application I use to write short articles on this site).  But there are still occasions when you need to manipulate individual file objects.

One is during installation and set up when installing root certificates for SSL so that the device can talk to an Exchange server: Unless you use Apple's enterprise deployment tool (which locks down the device and prevents further configuration changes, so not always desirable), the only ways to set up the device for Exchange are to set up a temporary IMAP account and download an attachment that you open, or to set up a website with the root certificate and define the appropriate MIME types on the web server (I could not get this to work, incidentally!).  How much easier it would be to download the certificate onto the device using Windows explorer (connecting to a PC via USB exposes the devices memory as an attached storage device) and to be able to open the certificate file from memory on the iPhone.

The other key need for this functionality is when manipulating attachments on email messages.  There is no way of saving attachments, or attaching documents selectively to a new or forwarded message.

6. Navigating through email folders

I tend to keep a lot of emails in my mailbox.  I archive once a year, and usually towards the end of the following year.  I'm also fairly busy and work on a dozen consulting and business development projects at a time.  That means two things: a lot of emails, and the need to organise those emails sensibly.

I organise my emails into trees - consulting projects in separate folders and these folders organised by client, all kept separate from companies I'm invested in and from my personal stuff.  Probably 40 or 50 folders.

On Windows Mobile devices I can organise this quite cleanly, with the ability to expand or collapse sections of the folder tree.  The iPhone recognises the tree, but gives me no means of collapsing the hierarchy.  The Inbox is always at the top: Junk email is always at the bottom.  Moving incorrectly junked emails means traversing the whole tree, which is a nause even with the classy flick scroll gesture.  It's clumbsy and unnecessary.

5. Filtering offline email content

The other side of this complexity is managing how much of my "online archive" to take with me. 

There is no need (and no space) to take it all with me: I am quite used to placing sensible limits on the section of the mail folder to take with me.  Windows Mobile allows me to take 1, 2 or 3 months worth of email with me, to say whether I take attachments with me, all the email or just the headers.  I can even select which folders to take or leave behind.  And I don't need to worry if I go away and find I am missing a crucial folder - I can change the parameters and the device will download what's missing.

The iPhone is far less flexible.  It won't let me download attachments pre-emptively: It will always load the message header and leave the attachment behind unless I select it manually.  Even worse, the only filter I have is the number of messages to show and this is across ALL folders. 25, 50, 75, 100 or 200 messages.  That's it.  So if I get 200 messages in one day (which isn't commonplace but does happen), I can only access 1 days worth of emails remotely.  There is no way to browse back and recover older emails.  This regularly proves to be a significant limitation.

4. Message management and Exchange

The worst problem with message management on the iPhone is actually specific to Microsoft Exchange.

I am an expert user and really love Microsoft Exchange.  It isn't just my mail server: It's a full collaboration engine, with group and resource scheduling, rich address book, "to do" lists, journaling, contact histories etc.  I don't use it for fax and voice mail yet, but that is just a question of not having made the time to buy the interface box to the PBX and turn that feature on.  So I am up there with the other 60% of enterprise mailbox users that are hooked on Exchange.

When the iPhone first appeared the Exchange interaction story was weak.  It could do IMAP, but that's just a fraction of the story.  No problem, that wasn't Apple's intended primary audience either, but the enterprise users clearly wanted the iPhone, so Apple got to work.

To be fair to them, Apple have done a lot with iPhone 3G to improve the Exchange story. Most of the security protocols are there, including critical features like remote wipe and SSL, and it supports Push. Enterprise deployment is straightforward too with a dedicated enterprise setup tool that supports remote device configuration.  Unfortunately Apple seem to have stopped halfway through the API and a lot of Exchange functionality is overlooked.  Some of this, like losing some data richness within calendar and contact items, doesn't affect all users equally.  Other elements are more critical, however.

The best way to describe this is how you forward email messages with attachments.  The Exchange API permits clients to forward the message without the message content being stored locally: You can forward the header and the server will attach the attachments and other rich content before forwarding.  The iPhone doesn't understand this: First it has to download all of the message and attachments from the server to the iPhone, then it has to add the forwarding address and send the entire message back to the server.  Moving a message between folders is the same and involves the same telecommunications overhead.  A nuisance for me, but no more than that: If you aren't on a data bundle and pay by the MB then you need to be wary of this.  

[Another side effect of this issue is that server-side disclaimers and signatures get placed at the end of the forwarded message, rather than under new message text.]

3. Reading HTML and rich text messages

I love HTML emails.  I know that is considered a cardinal sin in some quarters, but as someone once said, if email had been invented after http would email have been done any other way?  HTML is ubiquitous, it is clean and it works.

And of course being the best mobile web device on the market, the iPhone should be a fantastic HTML email reader, shouldn't it? 

Well, it very nearly is.  It does some things really well.  It gets the layout, it renders inline graphics, it'll even show some background.  But what if the text is really wide?  It'll wrap won't it?  No, it won't.  It'll shrink the text to fit.  It'll make the text really, really small.  And you can't cheat by rotating the device, making the screen "wider" and the font larger, because the mail client doesn't support landscape presentation (why???).

Of course you can zoom in, because it's HTML, but then you have to scan the whole line, whizzing across the page to the end of the line, then whizzing back again to get the start of the next line.  Oh dear!

2. Task switching

The iPhone is a lovely, clean design.  And part of the cool, clean look comes from the absence of nasty short cut action buttons. 

The iPhone has only three buttons on the edges of the device: the on/off button on the top, the volume up/down toggle on the side and the excellent single button mute button above the volume toggle.  That's it.  The only other button on the device is the "home" button on the front, below the screen.

The home button stops whatever application you are engaged on and takes you to the home page of the device - the pretty page full of icons that start up each application on the device.  Good job it's pretty, because you see an awful lot of it.

There is no way to jump straight to your calendar, or address book, or email. Apart from the one "double click" action (user configurable to either select phone favourites or iPod controls), the only way to start a task is to go back to the home page and up again into the application you want. Find an interesting URL in an email that you want to look at in Safari?  Memorise it well, or write it down, because unless the text has been created as a link you'll have to go back to the home page, start Safari, type the URL, realise you've got it wrong, press the home button again, start email, open the email, find the URL ... and start again. 

Or you could just select the URL and cut and paste it into the browser address bar ... except ...

1. How on earth do you cut and paste?

Once Xerox had invented the mouse, the GUI and WYSIWYG editing, it was up to Apple to take that technology and make it affordable with the Lisa and the Mac.  And Microsoft to make it ubiquitous, of course.

One of the joys of using the mouse, or any pointing device, is that it gives you a third dimension as you move around the page.  You aren't constrained by the line or the word or the paragraph - you can jump straight to any part of the document.  And you can select parts of a document by dragging over a word, a line, a paragraph, and do something with it.  Like cutting it out.  Or copying it.  Or dragging it.  It's normal.  That's just what you do.  You don't have 3 hour seminars and training courses on using a mouse (or a stylus) to point and select, click and drag.  You demonstrate it once, the student understands and does it. 

But the company that helped the mouse escape from the lab and get into the shops seems to have forgotten all about it.  Get out your iPhone.  Write a sentence.  Write another one.  Oops - that second sentence would make more sense BEFORE the first one.  I'll just cut and paste the sentence. Oh no you won't!! Because there is no cut and paste on the iPhone.  Hear that? No? Well, I'll say it again! THERE IS NO CUT AND PASTE ON THE IPHONE.

Google around a bit and you'll find dozens of articles on the subject.  You'll find surprise, indignation, humour.  You'll even find brave Apple gurus explaining sagely that you don't need cut and paste because the iPhone gives you more direct ways of using information, like linking URLS, or detecting phone numbers, or, er, something.

The most likely explanation is that once Apple has decided to do away with the stylus, the only UI metaphor was to use two fingers and drag that over the page to select some text.  But that metaphor had already been taken with the excellent pinch zoom movement used on large documents and web pages.

There is a way out, however.  Some very credible proof of concept demonstrations have been put on the web showing how a sustained point and drag with single finger (like the stylus selection action in Windows Mobile) would be workable and not conflict with any other screen action on the iPhone. 

Let's hope that the concept demos work and we see cut and paste implemented in an upcoming firmware release. In the meantime, at least twice every day I bet every iPhone user will silently curse, shrug and give up writing that urgent memo because they just can't be bothered to type it all again.

 

So that's it.  please don't get me wrong, I think the iPhone is a wonderful, iconic and transformational device.  As with the Mac, it has changed our perception of what a mobile device should be.  Mobile phones and smartphones will never be the same again. 

It's just that for all it's brilliance, it remains flawed.  The iPhone is the product of a prolific and brilliant yet highly introspective group of engineers.  Left free to innovate, unrestrained by any notion of reality or practicality or what the user currently thinks he or she wants, Apple have created a concept device. I'm grateful they have, but I fear that it will be up to other companies, with a clearer grasp of what the user can use, in particular what ELSE the user is doing, to take the iPhone to the next step.

I took delivery of my iPhone at the start of September, the start of a trying month personally that saw me out of the office for very long periods and only in touch with the world via my phone.  It was a baptism of fire for me and the device.

You will have seen the adverts, played with it in phone shops, looked over fellow commuters' shoulders, borrowed your friend's ... great isn't it?  Or is it?

In this article I touch on some of the best things about the device that have wowed me completely.  Or even just a bit.  And to maintain the celestial karmic balance I have a companion article on some of the things that drive me absolutely nuts.  There's enough material for both articles, I assure you!

So here we go, in reverse order, the 10 things that you should love about the iPhone!

10. Voicemail organisation

One of the cutest features of the device is the way it organises your voicemail for you.  No more phoning the voicemail number, listening to all the messages in your mailbox in the order they arrived to get to the ones you want to hear.  There they are, in a list, with real names instead of phone numbers when the number is in your contact list.  You can go straight to the message you want and avoid the junk calls. 

You aren't limited to the time limit on saved messages that your phone provider imposes - they will stay on your device as long as you need them.  It's even got deleted file recovery, with deleted messages staying in your trash can until you commit the delete.

9. SMS text organisation

If you like the way the iPhone manages your voicemails, you'll love the SMS organisation even more.  SMS messages are organised by third party name as before, but even better when you drill down by third party the messages themselves are displayed, in order, as a series of quotes like an instant messaging dialogue, so you can see the whole conversation.  So good, so obvious, so why hasn't it been done before?

8. Onscreen keyboard

One of the things that strikes you about the iPhone is the absence of any keyboard or stylus.  In fact it's almost devoid of buttons altogether, which is one of the criticisms I would level against the iPhone.

The absence of a keyboard was one of the reasons I delayed switching to the iPhone in the first place.  I work out of the office probably 60% of the time and my PDA is often my only link with my business while I am out of the office.  Sending email via a T9 keypad is not ideal, and most soft keyboards I have see to date have been frustratingly slow.  I have had a couple of PDAs with slide-out keyboards and these can be satisfactory, but they also make the device heavier, thicker and less attractive as a telephone handset.

The iPhone soft keypad is surprisingly good.  I watched some demos on YouTube before I ordered the iPhone yet had nagging doubts about how realistic they were.  I need not have been concerned, however: It really is as good as the demos suggest.  The auto-correction works by comparing what you type with the keys around the key you strike, so if you hit an "h" instead of a "g" it will pick this up and correct your mistake.

It isn't perfect, however. I have consistent problems reaching the space bar and seem to hit the letter "b" instead. The correction picks up faulty key presses, but won't necessarily correct a mis-spelling if you put too many or too few letters into the word. You also need to be around 60-70% accurate with your key presses or the algorithm gives up. Rejecting an auto-correction suggestion requires that you hit the miniscule "x" at the end of the suggestion, rather than a dedicated key or backspace as in most Windows applications, and this can be really difficult. 

But overall the keyboard works well and, I have to admit, is more usable than the keypads on most of the Windows Mobile PDAs I have had.  I'm still not sure whether I prefer it to handwriting recognition with a stylus, but I can live with it.

7. iPod on a phone

Although it lacks the intuitive touch wheel interface of the original and best iPod, the iPhone, like the iTouch, makes up for it with its full screen iPod player interface that gives you faster and more direct access to media stored on the device.  I prefer the wheel of the iPod, but I admit it's 6 of one and half a dozen of the other. 

Although the 8GB or 16GB memory of the iPhone is shared between the iPod features and other storage-dependent applications, I can still store over 3,000 songs which is more or less my entire CD collection.  I can play movies too, and the display is more than adequate for doing so, but a typical movie takes up to 2GB of storage so of course I have to "budget" for it. 

All in all the iPhone serves me well as a media player, especially as my BMW has the direct iPod interface built in to the iDrive, so I can access my music library through the car's steering wheel controls and navigation display.  

6. Motion sensors and landscape mode (to a point)

The iPhone is jam packed full of sensors.  Proximity sensors so it knows you are using it as a phone.  Light sensors to adjust brightness.  Motion detectors to know you are waving the thing around (used to great effect in "Lightsaber Unleashed" - a free demo game on iTunes). 

The motion detectors are used to greatest effect to in Safari and document browsers to detect when you tilt the screen to view it in landscape mode.  Document too side to fit readably onto the screen? Just rotate the device and it will change the screen orientation. Cute!

The only problem is that implementation of the feature seems to be application dependent and is not consistently deployed across all applications on the device.  So reading and typing mail does not benefit from the feature, for example, while email attachments (see below) do.

5. Full web browser on a phone

I'm not a great Safari fan in general, preferring Firefox on the Mac and IE on the PC.  That said, the implementation of Safari on the iPhone is without doubt the best mobile browser I have seen to date. 

It supports CSS and Javascript and will support Silverlight in the future, but it does not support Flash at present.  With the screen rotated to landscape mode you can generally read most websites directly on the iPhone screen, while the "pinch" metaphor (placing two fingers on the screen and moving them together apart) zooms in or out to allow small text or fine detail to be viewed.  Touching on-screen controls like text boxes and menus zooms in onto the control making it easy to complete browser-based forms. The whole browsing experience is smooth, intuitive and engaging.

4. Native support for PDF and Office document formats

As a "dyed in the wool" Microsoft user, this feature has wowed me more more than almost anything else on the device. 

The iPhone renders all "standard" Office formats (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) as standard, without any plug-ins.  And not just Office 2003 - the extensible Office 2007 formats are supported as well!  The iPhone supports rotation to view documents in landscape format, complete with pinch zoom. 

Sadly you cannot edit Office documents as standard, although a number of publishers are planning to offer document editors and spreadsheets in the future. However for 80% of remote working scenarios I find the device suits me perfectly.

3. WiFi and 3G stacks

The original iPhone whetted appetites for mobile computing but soon disappointed Europeans due to its lack of support for 3G.  That of course is a thing of the past with the Mark II device.

I have been more impressed by the device's WiFi capabilities, however.  Although battery consumption is less than ideal with wireless switched on, the WiFi stack performs really well, particularly in larger office and public environments where you move in and out of range or between access points, sometimes using different protocols, on a constant basis.  It supports a number of security protocols including certificate-based WPA-2 and TKIP and can interact with Microsoft-centric enterprise security deployments. 

You configure the device to join new networks automatically and of course once you have set up access to a network it will reconnect automatically the next time you are in range. It works really, really well - so well that frankly you can afford to forget all about it.  Which is how it should be, frankly.

2. Ease of adding applications

The basic iPhone provides basic email, calendar and contacts management alongside the Safari web browser, camera and iPod application. It also has a superb aGPS and Google maps which is surprisingly good, although the battery consumption with location services switched on renders the device almost unusable in my opinion. In other words, the iPhone offers a fairly reasonable set of basic mobile productivity applications.

So what do you do if you need more? The answer is iTunes AppStore, an online service accessible from the iPhone that enables you to search and download applications that are charged against your iTunes account.  So far I have mostly downloaded sample applications and free utility ware, which is enough to get a feel for what is out there and appreciate the very straightforward installation and updating process.  I have only bought one application so far - iBlogger, a generic blogging writer to connect to my CMS and blog.  The process is seamless and transparent, from the user's standpoint, and exactly what the user needs.

The idea of extensibility is a good one.  This is where the crossover from computing and PDAs into the world of the mobile phone really has benefited the consumer.  But for the consumer to benefit completely there has to be adequate choice.

To date Apple has been successful in attracting software publishers to the game with a powerful development kit and simple distribution model.  I appreciate the concerns that some publishers have over the stranglehold that Apple maintains over the distribution channel, rather like Sony with the PlayStation, and time will tell whether the Apple developer engagement model continues to attract the best developers.

Right now what the iPhone lacks as standard is a task management tool that interfaces with Microsoft Exchange and a more advanced set of editing tools that offer basic features like cut and paste (that's right, iPhone does NOT allow you to cut and paste text while editing). I don't know if any such applications exist on the AppStore and I haven't looked yet because frankly I would expect these to be provided by Apple as standard and hope that a future firmware update will provide them.

If my impatience gets the better of me I will go and look in the AppStore and I will probably find what I am looking for.

1. Great design (to a point)

Apple has done a phenomenal job with the iPhone.  It is gorgeous!  My iPhone is probably the most elegant and iconic object I have ever owned. That's right, not just the most elegant phone, or PDA, or mobile computer - as an exercise in pure physical design it excels. 

The glossy surface is hard to keep clean and within minutes is covered in finger marks, but I find that wiping with a barely moist chamois leather is enough to restore it to its full glory.

Difficulties in keeping it clean aside, it is also pretty robust and usable day to day.  I have dropped it a few times onto hard floors with no apparent ill effects and it feels really solid in the hands.  I don't bother with a case and simply slip it into my jeans pocket (front or back) and usually forget that it's there. 

The user interface is remarkable - mostly.  The pinch zoom and fast list scrolling are excellent.  Adding, deleting and moving application icons on the home screen is intuitive and can be mastered in minutes. 

However the good parts of the UI are so good that the gaffs in design - the inability to collapse large directory trees in mail folders, the absence of a file manager, the lack of a cut and paste feature - stand out even more starkly and underline the genesis of the device.

 

The point is that the iPhone is the product of a prolific and brilliant yet highly introspective group of engineers.  It is design untrammelled by any notion of reality or practicality, particularly in the corporate context.  In most respects, and I mean probably 80% of the product in this case, the outcome is wonderful.  The 80% is so good I can almost forgive Apple the 20% of absolutely essential features that are missing.  For now!

Computers systems have internal real-time clocks that are notoriously poor at keeping accurate time. Hence, the time on all computers and network devices can drift away from one another at different rates. This can be a real headache when trying to synchronise time-critical processes. However, it is quite simple to synchronise every device on your network to an accurate time reference - a NTP time server.
NTP servers are Internet, or locally, based time references that maintain a highly precise time and make this time available to client computers. These time servers obtain accurate time from external reference clocks such as GPS, radio time and frequency sources or other NTP servers.
NTP, or Network Time Protocol, is used by the Internet to distribute accurate time information to network time clients. NTP has been an important part of the Internet for over 25 years. The protocol was developed because of the need to provide synchronisation of critical processes. Most operating systems in use today, including Windows XP, 2003 and LINUX have the built-in ability to synchronise time with a NTP Server. Additionally, there are any number of Internet based NTP Time Servers with public access that can be used to synchronise your network infrastructure.
Microsoft Windows XP/2000/2003 has pre-configured SNTP, Simple Network Time Protocol, client software that can synchronise time with a time server. This is achieved by simply entering the domain name of an Internet NTP Server in the time properties tab or registry entry. The Windows machine will then contact the NTP Server and synchronise the system time to the specified reference at periodic intervals.
LINUX based systems have a NTP daemon that is available from the official NTP website. The NTP daemon runs constantly in background and monitors specified NTP servers. The daemon reads a structured list of NTP servers from a configuration file and periodically synchronises time with a selected reference.
To summarise, NTP time servers are dedicated network time servers that obtain time from an accurate external reference, such as radio or GPS, and provide an accurate timing reference. Time servers are often rack-mountable devices with external antenna's and an Ethernet connection. The devices obtain time from a radio or GPS timing reference and maintain an accurate internal time. This time is then distributed to time clients over an IP network. Dedicated NTP servers often minimize the set-up and configuration effort required to get a NTP time server installation up and running.

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Dave Evans is an experienced technical author with many years experience of NTP Server and Time Server systems and solutions to ensure accurate time on computers and network infrastructure. Dave has been heavily involved in the architecture of dedicated NTP time server systems, synchronised digital wall clocks and atomic clock timing products. Please visit our web site to find out more about time server and NTP Server systems.

Although many salespeople feel their competitors or suppliers cause any price problems they experience, our company has found that there are many other factors from our own beliefs, to the words we use to timing and more that actually cause our price challenges.

In this article, I wanted to raise an important question. Do Mercedes salespeople stay up all night worrying that people will discover they can buy a Kia for about 20% of the cost of a Mercedes? I mean those Kia people are selling for 80% less! Man if that gets out, no one will buy a Mercedes right?

I am sure you will agree that statement is wrong. Mercedes salespeople are well aware of the value they provide that is far different from Kia, Ford or used vehicles that cost far less. I think you will find these salespeople are very confident and that they sleep like babies.

If you had a competitor that sold for 80% less than you would you be as confident? You should be, because studies show that no matter what customers tell you, only 14% buy due to price alone and not value. You don't buy for price and neither do your customers. Take your home as an example. Do you live in the absolute cheapest home you could buy or rent in your town, despite condition, neighborhood safety, size, schools etc? I doubt it.

Do you have on the cheapest shoes you could have purchased at the lowest cost thrift shop in your county even if they are not your size or don't match? Again, probably not. You do not buy exclusively for price, but for value and so do your customers.

You are probably wondering why price objections come up so much if price doesn't matter. The answer is that consumers know it is the easiest one to use. Our training for our clients covers many objections and many ways to deal with them but price is definitely a consumer favorite. It is the objection many salespeople actually agree with (deep down inside) and the one salespeople give up with the easiest.

Let's look at one way we may cause our own problems with price...the words we use.

Have you ever said something like "the list price is". As soon as we say that, we are telling the customer in code that we don't really expect that price. If we say the "list price is", it implies that there is another (lower) price. Try not using that phrase and you will see an immediate difference in how much price objection you face.

Another foot shooting phrase might be "we just got a new price list and of course, everything is going up with the price of oil." The problem with this phrase is that it is depressing. It makes the customer feel that the price you are going to quote is high. No one wants to pay a high price. Now, imagine if you said, "I have very good news. Everything we talked about today is only $XXXXX.XX." It's not a big difference but I hope you agree that the feeling imparted is much better. It's more optimistic. It's a price there is more of a chance the client will want to latch onto.

Timing is important too. As we say in other articles and videos, Never Tell Them The Price Until They Fall In Love With The Product. Telling the price too early is very bad. Timing is extremely important and so is the control it takes to reveal the price on your schedule.

This article is designed just to make you realize that having competitors with low prices is not affecting you any more than it affects those Mercedes salespeople. There are lots of techniques that will make a difference and they are certainly worth spending the time and effort to master.

Few objections come up as regularly as price objections. How much training have you had from experts on how to turn those objections into sales? We hope you agree it will be worth the effort.

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Sales training article discusses how to deal with price objections and how Mercedes salespeople are not concerned about competitors. It teaches how to sell for more and technqiues required to close more and overcome price objections. For more information on our DVD visit http://www.pricedoesntmatter.com or www.salesandmanagementsolutions.com