ICON :: INDIVIDUAL WORKSHOPS AND SEMINARS

We understand that the training needs as well as the approach for training vary from company to company. That is why besides offering a complete corporate training program; we also deliver individual focused workshops and seminars that can be applied to produce quick and effective solutions for your company’s present needs.

Below is a list and description of workshops and seminars we offer. Workshops are designed to be highly interactive and therefore can not have more than 24 participants. Seminars are designed for the audience of over 24 people.

Year at a Glance

People say “I have to work,” I have to go to that meeting,” I have to take care of this problem.”

“I have to” has become a regular phrase in many people’s vocabulary without realizing how dangerous that phrase really is!

The key to a thriving and growing business as well as personal success is to avoid being under pressure and schedule the activities in a way that the phrase “I have to” is substituted by the phrase “I want to!”

The ICT “Your 2005 Year Plan” workshop will guide you through a series of specially designed activities that will show you how to accomplish the day-to-day tasks without feeling the usual pressure. You will be in control of your days and be motivated to accomplish your well scheduled activities.

You will become proficient on how to schedule your time around your values as well as around your people first.

The activities of the “A Year at a Glance” workshop include:

Mapping out personal values
Creating a “self” mind map ™
Learning the tools for setting attainable goals
Learning and practicing the techniques of visualization and affirmations
Creating an individual, usable and effective action plan
Scheduling the actions using “ICT Year-at-a-Glance” wall calendar

In between these life-changing activities you will discuss topics such as

Success with happiness
Designing your own life
Decisions and their consequences
The power of planning and taking immediate action

When you learn to schedule around your values first, taking care of your personal needs, your morale, productivity and creativity will soar while negative attitude, sick days, and low energy will plummet!

One day dedicated to planning and designing your life will reap immeasurable results and an eagerness that will drive you in your day-to-day life for years to come, almost setting you on auto-pilot for success.

Discover Your Inborn Genius

In today's age of information overload, knowing how and where to find the right information as well as to process that information quickly and effectively is what gives people the leading edge. The essential skill of today and the future is learning how to learn. It is this key ability that makes everything else possible.

With constantly changing technologies, it's possible for a multi-million dollar factory to become obsolete almost overnight. However, that can never happen to your mind unless you allow it to happen. You can walk across the border of any country with a multi-million dollar idea and in terms of capital and goods have nothing to declare!

Discover Your Inborn Genius is a 4 or 8 hours workshop that offers the tools which will allow you to tap into the unlimited possibilities and potential that you possess. It presents a method that makes learning anything faster and easier, shows how to use your brain more effectively by learning how it works and how to retrieve the information easily from your memory on demand. You will also discover your own unique learning style and learn how to increase your intelligence.

The workshop is delivered using Accelerated Learning Techniques, which involves using visual, audio and hands-on activities as well as getting the participants in the right state of mind through background music and relaxation techniques. Also, we believe that the best learning happens during friendly discussions rather than a lecture and we encourage participants to interact with each other and the facilitator expressing their ideas and opinions.

Stop for a second, and take a quick look around you, look at all the different products and services that have made their way into your life; look at your PC, the clothes that you wear, the insurance policies and investments you and your family own, the books you read, the movies you watch, even the paint on the walls in your home or office… from the moment all products and services are conceived as ideas to the time that you acquired them they will have been through the sales process several times.

The sales industry is the backbone of any self-sufficient society, yet society in general looks upon the sales industry and at salespeople as an annoyance or an industry people get into when they can’t find real work.

Sales people need to know how important their work is to the society and why they are often the highest paid individuals in the world.

So why is it then that some salespeople earn enough money to feed a small country whilst others hardly make enough to feed themselves or their families?

Usually it is simply because most people in the sales industry have never been shown how to be successful at selling—they never learned the fundamentals and the process behind selling.

In this workshop you will get an inside perspective of what really lies behind successful selling, and how success in sales is purely a matter of choice and not that much more demanding or time consuming than what you are currently doing on a daily basis.

Extensive research has shown that success in selling is not determined by level of education achieved, social background, upbringing, or the people you might be fortunate enough to know. It is the thought process that goes on in the salesperson’s mind, and the belief system he has developed that determines how high he can soar.

A good example of this, if not a proof, is when Sir. Roger Bannister, on May 6 1954, succeeded in running a mile in less than four minutes. For centuries prior to his triumph, it was thought that running a mile in less than four minutes was humanly impossible. The interesting fact is this, during the twelve months after he broke the new world record over fifty people succeeded in running a mile in under four minutes. Today it is achieved daily by track teams around the world.

So, why are so many runners today can achieve what was thought to be humanly impossible just a few years ago?

Well, it is not that the mile got any shorter. It is simply that people act in a manner that is consistent with their beliefs and their thoughts.

In this workshop we focus on the belief system, and the thought process which you must have in order to be successful at selling. If you will get nothing else but this out of the workshop, you would be set apart from your competitors and start producing the results you want.

What you sell is very important, but how you sell is going to determine your future in the sales industry.

Developing a sales presentation that is effective, benefit orientated, and sensitive to clients’ needs is the first step in promoting your product or service in a way that it will generate the kind of results you want.

This workshop focuses on how to structure and write a sales presentation that is designed around the benefits your product and service offers and how to adapt it to the different markets and clients you sell to.

You will be shown how to identify the benefits of the products and services you offer, rather than the features, and how to develop a sales presentation that is involving, attention grabbing, and allows you to keep control over the presentation.

One thing that sales people never have enough of are leads. The lead is where the foundation for building your sales business starts. But how good your leads are will depend on how well you source and qualify them.

Selling in itself is time consuming and energy draining, yet so many sales people are willing to devote a huge amount of time, effort, and company resources selling to non qualified leads, only to hear at the end such things as, “I need to speak to the board”, “We are cash poor right now”, “I need to think about it”, “We will get back to you” etc…

How you source and qualify your leads will determine how many “exit routes” you leave open for your prospect to leave the sales presentation uncommitted.

In this workshop you will learn to eliminate as many “exit routes” as possible, by setting high standards and strict guidelines as to what is a qualified lead and what isn’t. By committing to only selling to highly qualified leads, your efficiency, closing ratio and sales figures will increase dramatically.

It is amazing how many sales are lost or not made, just because the salesperson is afraid of hearing “no”.

Hearing “no” is just as much part of the sales process as closing deals.

So many salespeople make wonderful sales presentations, go through all the key benefits of the product, get the potential buyer enthusiastic, but end their presentation at that - to avoid getting rejected and hearing “no”, they never ask the prospect to buy!

Not being able to accept and deal with rejection is one of the major forces that prevent most salespeople from becoming successful. The first step in dealing with this fear is by realizing that rejection in sales is inevitable and never personal - it is not the salesperson being rejected but the offer or the product.

Success in sales is going from rejection to rejection without loss of enthusiasm.

In this workshop we confront the fear of rejection head on. The objective here is for you to realize that if a career in sales is what you have chosen then you are going to face rejection day in and day out whether you like it or not. You will learn how to convert rejection from a stumbling block to a stepping-stone because effectively dealing with rejection will determine your level of income, achievement, and overall success in the sales industry.

The whole point in making sales presentations is to close deals, but it is surprising how many sales people go through entire presentations without attempting to close once. The main reason apart from fear (addressed in the workshop on Fear of Rejection) is that they are very rarely armed or equipped with good quality, and effective closing techniques, and often are not very effective at delivering or using them.

How to close? When to close? Should you close? These are not questions that have generic answers and will vary greatly in each sales situation. But having the ability to sense and detect buying signals in a sales presentation and being equipped with numerous closing techniques, allowing you to deliver the right close at the right time, will highly affect the sale and will often be the key factor that will determine whether you leave the presentation with or without a deal.

Being a good closer will determine your future in the sales industry. How good you are at closing will affect your income, what kind of relationships you have with your clients, how fast your clients will develop and how much you enjoy selling as a whole.

In this workshop you will be given numerous closing techniques that relate to, and work with your products or services, and the markets you sell to. You will be given the opportunity to practice and role play ways to make closes as well as develop awareness for what are buying signals and how to detect and sense them.

Every business has a common purpose, and that is to have and to keep customers.

There is more to successful selling than just being able to close deals. From the moment a person or organization has committed to purchase your product or service they must then be taken through the development process.

Customers are the individuals you start doing business with. For them it is the testing ground. They have listened to your presentations, and have decided to commit to or buy the benefits your product or service can provide them. The next step is to lead this account from a customer to client.

Clients are customers that continue to do business with you based upon how well you deliver on the promises you made during the initial presentations as well as how well you treat and service them. Generally you can start classifying your customers as clients after they have made their third purchase from you. By then, unless you are offering a product or service that cannot be purchased anywhere else, they are most probably purchasing from you based upon the relationship you have managed to cultivate.

The objective of all salespeople should be to lead their clients to the point where making a purchase is a comfortable and trusting experience and not just another transaction. Once you reach this point with your clients it is time to start networking for referrals.

Referrals are an important part of being a successful salesperson, but the timing for getting referrals can make the difference as to whether you just get a name and a phone number to call on, or a proper introduction saying what wonderful service you offer and how pleasant and reliable it is to do business with you and your organization.

When clients get to the point that they have trust and are comfortable in doing business with you and your organization, only then they will be in a position or feel comfortable introducing you into their circle of contacts.

How and when you are being referred to your client’s friends, family, and business contacts, will determine how much trust, confidence, and how comfortable your referred customers have in doing business with you and your organization and how quickly they eventually develop as clients.

In this workshop we go through how customers evolve into clients and how the evolution goes on until they become part of your network. You will be given different strategies for developing clients and how to build a network of clients that ends up having a conveyor belt effect for generating new business. Not having contacts will not determine your level of success - but not developing them will.

It is pretty clear by looking at the world around us that we are in the height of the information age. With the Internet, satellite TV, encyclopedias on a single CD ROM, online universities, magazines and books on thousands of different topics… information is spreading and it is spreading fast.

With having so many different sources available to us to choose from, the true value in information is in how well it is communicated.

People are constantly communicating, they are communicating with themselves, their colleagues, employers, employees, clients, suppliers… communication is everywhere especially in the business world.

How well you communicate in the world of sales is going to be a major factor as to how successful you become. Successful salespeople realize that clients and potential clients not only have a choice as to who they buy their products and services from, but also who they are willing to listen to for more than 20 seconds.

Salespeople that have achieved success are constantly fine-tuning their pitch or presentation. They pay close attention to what statements work and benefit them and which don’t.

To be successful at selling you must realize that a buyer or potential buyer of your product or service will probably make his initial purchase from the salesperson that can best communicate to him the benefits of the product or service they offer, and the reasons why they should purchase it from them.

In this workshop we focus on how to be most effective at the different forms of communication. We cover such areas as, cold calling, pitching over the phone, dealing with secretaries, face to face presentations, as well as the best ways to communicate with your colleagues, employees, employer and the people around you.

Where we are today in our lives, is a direct result of the choices we have made in the past. Each time we make a choice whether conscious or not we set a new direction for our lives.

Successful salespeople are well aware of this fact, and chose to take control over where they are heading, by constantly making conscious decisions and evaluating what they do or don’t do before they do it.

In today’s business world full of emails, faxes, internal and external meetings, telephone and conference calls…, it is easy to loose track of where we are heading, and the old fashioned way of organizing your day by having a “to-do” list, an “inbox” and an “outbox” just does not work anymore.

To take control over our lives, we need to first and foremost be selective about the activities we do and the ones we don’t do. Once decided; what used to be your “to-do” list must now be broken down into:

After deciding which activities go into which groups, you must then set a priority to them, because not all activities have the same short, mid and long term value, or outcome.

In this workshop you will be given various techniques to manage your time in a way that is effective for you. You will learn how to evaluate, set values and prioritize different tasks and activities. You will see that by taking control of your day, you ultimately take control over your life.

Having the “know how” is not enough, it is necessary to get motivated, take action, and follow through.

So how do you get motivated? Well motivation does not just happen. It is an actual state that each human being has the power to create for him or herself. To be motivated is to have motives, or goals, and the more motives we have, the more motivated we become.

It is time for you to take control of your sales, and no longer blame market conditions, the competition, or not enough resources.

In this workshop you will go through a step by step process for setting goals. You will analyze what drives you and what you shy away from as an individual. You will determine where you stand now, where you want to be and how to best bridge that gap.
Once you have gathered all that personal information, you will set long, mid, and short term goals that are both measurable and workable. Each goal will then be broken down into monthly, weekly, and daily sub-goals, creating a blue print for success.

Being able to stay focused on the small things that will determine our long-term success and our motives for wanting to succeed are the main challenges we face.

Taking regular quality breaks, gives us the opportunity to get refocused and re-energized, allowing us to move forward at full force towards our goals, and preventing a very common trait among salespeople - burnout!

It is totally natural for the human body to need proper rest and get a chance to recharge itself. What is surprising is how so many salespeople think they can fight this law of nature and end up burning themselves out continually. They fail to see that they have a choice to either plan their rest and use the time wisely and effectively or they rest through burnout resulting in depression, low energy levels and all other kinds of illnesses.

In this workshop you will learn how to best schedule, and how to use your time off so that it is consistent with your goals and objectives. You will be shown various relaxation techniques, helping prevent the potential of burnout. Time off is the time to reflect on what you have achieved, and to set goals and make plans for the future.

• How to generate better ideas through the unique concept of ‘Free-Thinking Zones’
• The instant power of Lateral Thinking skills
• How to become a highly effective Thinker
• How managers can lead more effectively not just manage
• How leaders get better results than managers every time
• True leadership increases profits!
• Create a personal Leadership Action Plan for each participant

We believe that a culture of true leadership creates sustainable growth of profits through sustainable development of and with your people. Achieving this involves Inspiring your People.

We not only demonstrate why ‘leading’ is more effective than ‘managing’ but show your people in this workshop how to apply their new skills to achieve better results from staff every day.

The Transformational Thinking for Leadership workshop is a great opportunity for you to create leaders that are better decision-makers and better motivators. It will lead to more success stories!

Transformational Teamwork Skills
Transformational Service Skills
Transformational Problem Solving
Transformational Conflict Management