Lukasz Gogolewski | 8 Tips To Developing Good Business Management Skills

The  Business Management provides a basis for a career in business while being flexible enough to let you pursue areas that particularly interest you. It is designed to gear up you with the skills and self-confidence to effectively manage and adapt to a wide range of competitive and constantly changing business environments.

The business management was delivering quickly outstanding results for the firm so we decided to bring in another team member to grow the business even more.

Definition of a business is an independently owned and operated company that is limited in size and in revenue depending on the industry.

Being good at business management will allow you to come up with new ideas and find ways to handle them properly.

You can build on these by selecting one or two areas including advertising, business economics, business information systems, human resources, international business, marketing, real estate and development, and sustainability.

Starting a business means you will have to manage a range of projects, such as setting up a website, arranging the fit-out of your premises and developing a range of policies and procedures. Knowing how to completely manage your resources, including time, money and staff will help you to achieve your goals.

Time management :

Managing your time effectively mean responsibility to someone else in the business or outsourcing. Time management will help to complete your goals and Identifying who you can delegate tasks to allows you to concentrate on those tasks that generate revenue. Having management skills and time management will help you to run your business benefit and also protect your all financial investment.

Networking:

Building  good relationships through networking will help you to grow your business and give you the support you’ll need.

Problem solving:

However much you plan, you will encounter problems in your business. This means you need to be able to make good decisions, sometimes under pressure.

Marketing and sales service:

It is important to be able to promote your products or services effectively. Providing  good customer service and having a marketing strategy in place will help you to generate sales.

Financial management:

Being able to effectively managing your finances is a critical. You will need to be able to forecast your cash flow and sales, as well as, monitor your profit and loss.

Communication skills:

Having effective and good communication skills will help you to better working relationships .You will need to communicate and negotiate with your suppliers, potential investors, customers and employees.. Every communication should reflect the image you are trying to project.

Leadership:

If you employ people leadership will be a key skill. You must be able to encourage your staff in order to get the best out of them and improve productivity. Allocate time to mentor your employees.

Project management and planning:

Having management skills will help you to run your business profitably and protect your financial investment. It allow you to develop core business skills.

Lukasz Gogolewski | Social Selling for the Modern Sales Professional

The social selling revolution is upon us. And as the B2B landscape evolves, strategies need to adapt accordingly. The social selling approach has been bouncing around the sales space for a while now, but what does it really mean?

In short, social selling refers to placing focus on building relationships and adding value to prospects selflessly. Sales increase because of genuine trust and personal capital. While not always, it often involves a sales rep’s use of social media throughout the sales process to engage and collaborate directly with prospects for the purpose of driving revenue.

Social selling doesn’t mean abandoning your traditional sales strategies; rather, it is an evolution that accommodates changing buyer behaviors and the technological advances in the sales space. Social selling – and along with it, the use of social media – is also not replacing the need for traditional tools and strategies – it can work in tandem with and enhance your more traditional sales processes. Let’s look into the use of social media as part of your social selling approach.

Who is the Social Buyer?

In today’s increasingly connected world, the power of social media can help sales teams relate to and engage more intelligently with buyers and enable them to build stronger relationships. B2B buyers have become more connected, socially empowered, and highly informed decision makers. Research from IDC reports that social buying is directly correlated with buying influence – the social B2B buyer is more senior, has a larger budget, makes more frequent purchases, and has greater control over the final decision. In fact, an IBM study shows that 75% of B2B decision makers and 84% of C-level and VP executives use social media to inform their decisions. Not to mention that second opinions are practically on-demand.

For the B2B seller, this means shorter selling cycles, larger deals, more productive sales teams, and increases in revenue. Indeed, the numbers don’t lie:

• Sales reps who leverage social selling in their sales process are 79% more likely to attain their quota (Aberdeen Research Group)
• 79% of salespeople who use social media outsell their peers (Forbes)
• Social selling leaders have 45% more sales opportunities (LinkedIn)
• 54% of those using social selling have closed a deal as a direct result of social media (A Sales Guy Consulting)
• A lead developed via social media is 7x more likely to close (IBM)
• Organizations using social selling have seen a 10-20% increase in win rate, 20-30% acceleration in cycle time, and 10-15% increase in revenue (KISSMetrics)

A Social Selling with Social Media: Tips for the Modern Sales Rep

Despite these successes, only 1 in 4 sales reps knows how to integrate social media into their sales process. Imagine the impact (and effect on the bottom line) if reps knew how to use these tools effectively.

These tips will help sales reps start the new year with a solid social strategy that is ready to implement:

1) Researching: Explore the wealth of information

Social media gives reps access to unique behavioral data about their target customers that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, such as what they like, what they do, what’s happening at their company, what’s going on in their industry, and where they encounter pain points. These insights offer guidance for targeting prospects with relevant and meaningful content and help reps stay up-to-date on industry trends.

2) Prospecting: Network more effectively

The use of social media in sales allows reps to engage with prospects without interrupting their daily lives with cold calls and hard sells. Buying behavior has changed drastically over the past few years. Traditional means of selling are no longer as effective as they once were, with as many as 90% of C-level executives blocking phone calls and ignoring emails.

A key prospecting rule is to go where your customers are, and today that means social media. If done well, social media offers a non-intrusive way to generate and contact leads, particularly with the advanced search criteria offered by engines such as in LinkedIn. Sales people are able to get involved with prospects while they are still in the early stages of information-gathering and from that point guide the selling process.

But remember that social media is not the same as social selling. Social media is one tool for social selling, which is why #3 is so important.

3) Engaging: Have meaningful conversations

By getting involved in the conversation, sales reps have an idea of what their prospects are talking and asking about, and they are in the right place to help solve the problems at hand. Add value by contributing relevant, non-sales-oriented insights, answering questions, re-tweeting posts, and commenting on blog articles.

An added bonus is that reps are positioning themselves as subject matter experts and establishing themselves as a trustworthy resource, adding credibility to both their personal brand and their company. In fact, 92% of buyers are willing to engage with a sales rep who is known as an industry thought leader. Keep in mind that social selling is about building trust and credibility, nurturing relationships, and staying top-of-mind – it is not the time for a hard-sell.

4) Advancing: Share relevant, value-add content

Despite other changes in the B2B selling space, content still plays an important role in the buying process. In a 2015 Demand Gen report, almost 2/3 of buyers (and an overwhelming 82% of senior executives) indicated that the winning vendor’s content had a significant impact on their purchase decision, and over 80% of buyers reviewed a minimum of 5 pieces of content.

5) Following-Up: Obtain valuable feedback

Prospects offer valuable insights on a daily basis – it’s more than likely that they are sharing their opinions and needs and expressing their frustrations. Sales reps just have to know where to look and then pay attention. What questions are prospects asking? Who are they asking (is it another vendor)? What pain points are they venting about? The more reps listen to what’s going on and being said, the more informed they are to offer a relevant value proposition.

About the Author

Lukasz Gogolewski is the Senior Marketing Manager 

Lukasz Gogolewski helps to build Identifying Management of your Faculty portfolio

Management is not just about managing people, it includes your day to day work, meeting objectives in your appraisals or managing processes and projects. To some degree, everyone has some experience in these areas.

The organisation that you work for will have its’ own standard of practice. For example, key performance indicators, such as the target time that medicines reconciliation must be completed. Lukasz Gogolewski found that understanding the development descriptors was key to mapping competencies correctly.

If you’re going through the Faculty process with colleagues, I recommend you discussing your entries with them to gather their feedback. If there is no one in your workplace undergoing the Faculty process, then get feedback in other ways! Talk to the Faculty Team at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and find out if there are any workshop events or Faculty Champions in your area. There are also articles in the Pharmaceutical Journal articles and a portfolio building support discussion group and webinars on the Royal Pharmaceutical Society website.

Lukasz Gogolewski lead on an audit which was based on Alert 18 from National Patient Safety Agency: Actions That Can Make Anticoagulant Therapy Safer. One of the actions stated that there should be an annual audit on anticoagulant use, therefore this was implementing a national priority. Recognising standards of practice for the safe use of anticoagulants was necessary to benchmark the compliance of prescribing, monitoring, counselling as well as for documentation. ‘Managing performance’ was met here, as I completed an audit as part of my personal development plan, gathering the knowledge needed to understand anticoagulants.

Lukasz Gogolewski delivered the results of the audit to the doctors within my organisation in order to meet the ‘managing risk’ competency. I also used this as an opportunity to present the principles as supporting good anticoagulant prescribing. There were key deadlines of the phases to the audit;  data collection, analysis, report writing and presentation of the results, they also met  the ‘project management’ competency. My report included recommendations to improve data collection rates for future audits. The recommendations required liaising with other members of the team to prepare for the change, thus meeting the ‘strategic planning’ competency.

Take a look at all of your pieces of evidence and decide whether they can be mapped to any of the other management competencies. My audit, which by its’ nature would be mapped to competencies in Cluster 6: Research and Evaluation. While it’s important to describe the piece of evidence and how you meet the competency, you also need to reflect on your experience. The portfolio is yours – so always remember talk about you and what you did!

Lukasz Gogolewski feel that reflecting on the achievements in my career to demonstrate how I met the competencies made me feel more confident when dealing with large projects. Receiving the personal development plan and reading through objective feedback from the assessors on my achievements was also a great feeling. The assessors also gave feedback on how to progress to meet the management cluster competencies for Advance Stage II.