Personal Leadership Is Where It Begins
17 July 2019
Leadership is how you get the best from people. Personal leadership is how you get the best from yourself. What’s that phrase? If you can’t lead you, please don’t try and lead me.
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Trust is Fundamental to Modern Selling – 4 Principles to Get You There
22 May 2019
Trust is fundamental to modern selling. To be a successful salesperson in today’s market you must sell not only solutions, but advice, confidence and dependability. You must be totally reliable to deal with in every respect. That’s what becoming ‘a trusted consultant’ is all about.
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Develop an ‘I Will Show You’ Mindset: ‘Becoming’, by Michelle Obama
9 April 2019
As part of the LDL Learning Review, we are encouraging all of our team members to get involved in discussing the latest ideas and insights in the worlds of sales, management, leadership, negotiation and presentation skills training. This month, LDL’s Office Manager Catherine Hibbert has nominated herself to make a contribution. A great believer in
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What If Your Sales Differentiators Are Elusive?
19 March 2019
Selling against competition is all about selling the difference: what is so special about your product or service and what do these ‘differences’ mean to your customer? But this is relatively conventional wisdom. It poses the question – what do you do when your differentiators are elusive – when your product or service is pretty
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How to Develop a Learning Culture
13 March 2019
A few years ago, Pat Wadors – who was senior vice president of global talent organisation at LinkedIn at the time – published an article for the Harvard Business Review, in which she argued that to stay relevant, companies and employees had to keep learning. “My hypothesis” she wrote, “is that for organizations to win
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5 Voice and Speech Tips – Learning from the Italians?
8 February 2019
On this blog, Nick Evans, Senior Consultant at LDL, offers five presentation skills pointers inspired by a recent trip to Italy. A recent event reminded me again of the power of verbal communication when selling or seeking to influence others. Visiting my sister, who has run a company in Florence for a number of years,
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Want To Make Larger Sales?
24 January 2019
Like most salespeople, you probably started out making relatively small sales. You worked hard learning about your products or services and how to sell them. You worked on yourself and achieved significant success. But you now want to make larger sales.
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ROI For Sales Training
12 December 2018
Most companies have a sales team. They make calls, organise meetings, speak with prospects, and aim to hit monthly targets. And most of the time, they do fine. Sufficient guidance can be provided internally, by line managers or more experienced team members.
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Take the Side of Your Customer: Consultative-Partner Selling and the Stakeholder Approach
4 October 2018
We recently published a longer than usual, but hopefully interesting blog which asked the question: ‘what is a good organisation?’ A difficult question to answer conclusively, but on the blog we used the stakeholder model to suggest that while a good organisation will inevitably mean different things to different people, an organisation that aims to
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What is a ‘Good’ Organisation? Profitability, The Stakeholder Approach, and Employee Engagement
30 August 2018
Is there such a thing as a ‘good’ organisation in today’s marketplace? And what does it mean to be one? It depends of course on the criteria we use to judge whether an organisation is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Profitability is perhaps the most obvious criteria – an organisation is not going to last very long
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Measure What Matters – How to Set Goals Like They do in Silicon Valley
15 June 2018
When Bill Gates gives a book review, you know that the book is probably worth a read. Well, the second wealthiest man alive recently posted a review of venture capitalist John Doerr’s new book on his Gates Notes blog. Titled Measure What Matters Doerr’s book is about an approach to setting goals and achieving operating
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What’s Your Communication Style? 4 Tips To Increase Effectiveness
4 May 2018
When communicating with others, whether colleagues or clients, on the job, in meetings, or on the phone, we all tend to stick to our habits. But often those habits are unhelpful. Perhaps we rarely take the opportunity to speak up and give voice to our views and opinions – finding it difficult for example to
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Is Yours an Agile Organisation? How Management Training Can Help You Make the Transition
20 March 2018
The recent March-April 2018 issue of the Harvard Business Review provides a guide for the way the concept of ‘agile’ is changing how organisations hire, develop, and manage their people. A concept taken from the tech world, ‘agile’ refers to a set of innovation methodologies which have been revolutionizing the IT and tech world over the
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Leadership, Self-Leadership & Emotional Intelligence – an Interview with Jonathan Forrest
22 February 2018
At LDL we are always on the lookout for exceptional individuals to join our consultancy team. With his last major corporate role as a Director at Goldman Sachs, Jonathan Forrest is one such individual, and we are delighted to announce that he has recently joined LDL as a leadership and personal development consultant. To introduce
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi – 4 Leadership Lessons, Quote by Quote
5 January 2018
Welcome to January! We hope that 2018 is going to be a prosperous year for you and your business, and that you are excited about the year ahead. But whatever your goals for the new year we can still hold on to the memory of the festive season – including its more memorable cinematic experiences. For the
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Leadership Training – 5 Tips to Help You Move Beyond the Carrot and the Stick
23 October 2017
On a previous blog post, our neuroscience for leadership specialist Dr Maryam Bigdeli spoke about the need for organisations to move beyond the carrot and the stick principle in their approach to performance management. Maryam explained that the problem with such systems is that the fear of the ‘stick’ can easily override the rewarding pleasure
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Presentation Skills Training – A 3 Step Structure for any Presentation
15 September 2017
Three decades of management and sales training have convinced us that there is one skill any high potential must master – become an effective presenter and speaker. Nothing, but nothing, will build your confidence more effectively.
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Negotiation Training – How to Tell if Your Client’s Price Challenge is a Ploy
2 August 2017
One of the most effective tactics available to buyers is the price challenge. It is very simple to use, and can be very effective. Perhaps you have heard one of these before: “I like your proposal, but this is all I’ve got.” “What? You want to charge how much? That’s much more than we had
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Customer Service – 3 Tips to Drive Customer Satisfaction
7 July 2017
“Don’t promise what you can’t deliver”. This might be the most important principle of effective customer service. Because there is quite simply nothing more frustrating than finding out that something does not live up to your expectations. Take the recent Hollywood blockbuster La La Land for example. Now you were probably aware of all the
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Consultative Sales Training – Closing Still Counts
24 April 2017
Some people say that in the era of consultative-partner selling, closing is no longer necessary. An article recently published in a management journal quoted a trainer who wrote, ‘Forget about those closing techniques.’
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Coaching and Feedback – Why, How, What?
24 March 2017
As a training consultancy we know that one of the most important things an organisation can do to engage and develop its people is to embed regular practices of feedback and coaching. The question for managers and leaders is: are you or your organisation missing out on the gains? According to a recent article in
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Neuroscience for Performance Management – an Interview with Dr. Maryam Bigdeli
3 March 2017
Spring has arrived, and with the appraisal meetings and performance ratings which often occur at this time of the year, it is a great moment to reflect on your organisation’s approach to performance management. In particular, what can neuroscience teach us about this vital aspect of leadership? We asked LDL consultant and PhD neuroscientist Dr.
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Leadership on Film: 5 Lessons from Star Wars: Rogue One
6 January 2017
Perhaps over the course of the festive season you had time to indulge yourself in a few trips to the cinema. If so, then you might have seen Disney’s latest addition to the Star Wars saga, Star Wars: Rogue One. The new film is designed as an immediate prequel to the original classic, A New
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Black Box Thinking: Towards an Organisational Growth Mindset
2 December 2016
No one ever sets out to fail or to do a bad job, and yet inevitably factors can conspire to turn even the best-laid plans awry. How do you and your organisation handle failures when they occur? The answer is more important than you might think. In his recent book, Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed
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Sales Skills for Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups
8 November 2016
In today’s high-tech age, many entrepreneurs and start-ups do not think sales skills are particularly important. The idea is that a product or service should be good enough to sell itself, and if it isn’t – if you need to invest in ‘sales skills’ – then you should probably go back to the drawing board or
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How to Build the Perfect Team: The Importance of Psychological Safety
12 October 2016
At the National Sales Conference last week, Will Greenwood spoke about the England Rugby World Cup winning team of 2003. As you may already know, England’s team at the 2003 Rugby World Cup was one of the best sporting teams that the country has ever produced. Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio, Jonny Wilkinson – it was
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Making The Appointment
8 October 2016
You have a lead. How do you get through to the decision maker or key influencer and make the appointment? No matter how you sourced the lead, it pays to plan the call, not just to have a stab at it.
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How To Write A Good Linkedin Profile
2 October 2016
You may or may not be a social media aficionado but to be an effective salesperson or modern manager you must know how to write a good LinkedIn profile. 238 million professionals are members and it was only founded in 2003!
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Why Social Media is Good for Business
6 September 2016
Social media is hard to ignore – it’s everywhere. People use it to communicate, to share, to speak with their friends, to build their networks, to seek recommendations, to follow and make decisions around brands. It doesn’t look set to go anywhere soon – the number of reported social media users was up 7% last year.
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Storytelling in Sales – 4 Steps to Craft a Compelling Narrative
19 August 2016
According to many of the world’s most pre-eminent cognitive scientists, an appetite for storytelling is hard-wired into the human brain. From ancient legends and heroic folk tales to modern-day TV boxsets, we humans have been telling each other stories for thousands of years. And as new research has shown, we don’t do it simply
