How to become positive about stress and make it less of a mess with Graham Agnew

Graham Agnew is a professional communicator and a proven leadership expert, as well as an outstanding leader himself.

He has been a leading pastor in the large Churches of Christ for 40 years at Brooklyn Park and Marion in South Australia and on the North Shore in Sydney. He has co-chaired leadership study tours to the US for 20 years for up-and-coming young pastoral graduates. He is invited regularly to coach and guide congregations across all denominations when they need an outside consultant.

Outside of the church Graham has been a professional speaker at business conferences and has served as a hand-picked lecturer for the Dale Carnegie Institute for 25 years, teaching business people the skills of leadership, speaking and self management.

In this interview he and Colin Pearce talk about the prevalence of stress and its many forms. Graham presents two groups of questions you can use to ease stress and manage your life better.

 Learn a foreign sales language: Benefenglish

This episode is a companion to the 4th module in the course flagship course Sell more, easier, faster in the Colin Pearce Academy.  It is available to members of the Academy along with the other Courses, Coaching and the Community forum.

Every salesperson I have ever met says they know they should be about the benefits of owning their product or service. 

Every salesperson!

I've even had people walk out of seminars snorting that the topic was old hat, and below their dignity to have to listen to.

Later of course during mystery shopping events, they failed to demonstrate that they knew anything about the benefits of their product and consequently could not explain them. They could bang on about, parts and engineering and colours and shapes and sizes and complications and  'things too fierce to mention'. 

After a briefing session was forced on them and they were drilled on the benefits, they still couldn't explain them in words any other person could appreciate. 

They might have been arrogant in the way they scoffed at the seminar, but the truth is that speaking in benefit terms appropriate to the listener is actually really hard work. That's why listening to this episode will help you come face to face with one of the biggest challenges in sales.

Colin Pearce interviews Jerry Crockford on managing his distributed team.

Jerry Crockford (normally interviewed for his insights on marketing) maintains he is not an expert on distributed teams but the experience he shares will be helpful to leaders of groups in a large system or any small business.

Colin Pearce presents a live session: Off the wardrobe

This presentation was recorded at a networking conference in Singapore where people were aspiring to manage their own group members. It is one of his more low-key presentations driving at the heart of a leader.

Listen as Colin Pearce explores one of the not-so-often-discussed principles of Leadership: advocacy.  

Managers and leaders are often told to have vision, purpose, drive, motivation, goals – all essential components of leadership. 

In this presentation Colin explores one of the so-called soft skills where a leader needs to read the mood of the team members and at significant times, come alongside folk who are struggling – whether that struggle is related to workload, customers, relationships at home or inside the workplace.

This presentation is a good companion to the Speed read people in a blink course in the Colin Pearce Academy (www.colinpearceacademy.com)

Marketing copy that works with Jerry Crockford

Jerry Crockford, marketing practitioner and copy-writer unpacks fundamental marketing concepts in this second interview with Colin Pearce.

You will hear Jerry explain the Rule of Seven and how it applies to different offers you need to make at certain times, depending on whether your buyer is at the awareness, consideration or decision stage of the buyer's journey.

You will see the three basics of marketing in the three questions:  your target market, your creative content, and your offer.

Then Jerry will ask you where your target market is in the buyer's journey (as he mentioned in Episode 004) and get you to adopt a method of engagement called progressive profiling. 

This will all affect the timing and intent of your business strategy and if you apply the ideas you should see a lift in your responses.

Colin Pearce presents 'Speed read people in a blink'

This episode makes a good companion to the extensive and fun course of the same name in Colin Pearce Academy ( www.colinpearceacademy.com).

Speed read people in a blink is one of the courses for members of the academy.  Membership fees are charged monthly to access the Courses, monthly Q&A Coaching calls, and the Community Forum.

In this episode, Colin explains the ages-old view of temperaments as conceived by the old Greek doctor, Hippocrates. Without the decoding of the human genome or an election microscope the poor guy had no idea what really makes people different but his summary of the differences as they manifest themselves is quite telling and has lasted some 2,400 years. Many adaptations of Hippocrates rationale have surfaced and you have no doubt come across personality and temperament tests in your education and working life.

Colin treats this topic with humour and stories to help you accept the fact that you are quite normal – different(!) but normal – and so is everyone else. If you can live with your own differences, making adjustments for the differences of others you will be well on your way to living happily ever after. As for business-team relationships, this is fundamental stuff to build a cohesive team and one which will lead to time savings and staff retention..

Set and monitor your goals for success with Bob Beaumont

Goal setting was seen as a great tool for progress and achievement when it became the rage in the 70s and 80s. For unfathomable reasons, it has fallen out of fashion for the normal run of people and only gets mentioned in the professional sporting arena.

Bob Beaumont is the exception and is an exemplary goal setter. He explains how he learned goal setting from the late James Rohn in the 80s and has been an advocate of goals in business ever since. 

He is serious. He takes time out between Christmas and New Yea's day to review the past year's progress against the goals he set the previous year and lays down new goals for the ensuing year. In the interview he explains how he does the same thing in his monthly mini-review, giving himself a score on his progress so far.

Could you imagine setting a goal to have a turnover of $10,000,000 by a certain date – and achieve it? Bob did.

Ten years to 'Who's Who' and ten minutes to 'Who's Through' - Michael Harrison's story

Michael Harrison’s story is remarkable.

In this interview, he tells Colin Pearce about his schooldays at Timbertop – a campus of Geelong Grammar School – his early sales apprenticeship selling women’s shoes, and his success as a computer services salesperson in the earliest days of commercial computing.

He relates how he was rated Top of the Table for 14 years in the insurance services Million Dollar Round Table fraternity and through vision and his freewheeling entrepreneurial thinking became the owner of Australia’s first private bank.

Follow his frank and honest tale about how that all came to nothing in the great crash of 1989 and how he took life in his fists and dug himself out of the hole and rose to even great heights.

Today Michael is a recognised financial services expert, a respected professional speaker, and Chair of the large independent Financial Services group, Synchron.

Jerry Crockford, knows the power of the right message given to the right people gets the right response. It also has to be the kind of message that catches your potential buyers at the right stage of their journey. This leads to understanding the popular marketing jargon 'funnel'. 

It's more than sticking an advertisement in the newspaper and hoping customers fall in the top of the funnel and pour out the spout leaving loads of cash behind them. You have to rate and grade them before they even go in the funnel and then again as they go through. 

Jerry and his wife Sandy own Crockford Carlisle, a marketing agency with a dozen employees in Brisbane. You can find them at www.c-c.com.au

Since 1993 Jerry has used the power of words and emotions to generate multitudes of leads and more profit for clients who include builders, retirement homes, financial services, dentists and lawyers. 

The six not-so-observable characteristics of motivated people. A studio podcast with Colin Pearce

When you are motivated, you do stuff, you get on with things. It's the drive to start a project and complete it once started. 

It might not be manifested in loudness, flourishes, announcements, perspiration and puff. 

You take action because you have a clear picture of a cause calling you on. Is it a medal, a promotion, a championship ring, a grand final cup, or is it preparing a meal for the family night after night, saving for a gift, writing a chapter of a book?

Motivation is seeing the benefits of asking someone out, applying for a job, completing your studies, giving up sugar, reducing alcohol intake, eating less, taking up walking or bike-riding. These are all carrots dangling on a stick in front of you calling you along a path.

When you don't feel motivated you don't do anything. It's a simple formula. No motivation = no get up and go.

Colin shares his observations of what gets motivated people up and going.