Most of us train our emotions at the door of every entrance. At work, we have slowly detached ourselves from our genuine emotions, particularly anger, anxiety and sorrow. Instead, we focus on suppressing or denying these emotions not to get recognised.
Long decades of research have shown that people struggling with mental health issues are the ones who have not been able to navigate their emotions. It becomes challenging to stay motivated and productive in such a situation, and performance at work gets hampered. Therefore, failing to address and manage our stress can further deteriorate one’s mental state and impact our physical health in turn. When we cannot control our stress levels, we can cause serious physical health issues like blood pressure, suppressing the immune system and increasing the risk of heart attacks.
We should understand that we cannot cope with stress until we are fully connected to our emotions. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the ability to perceive, control and evaluate feelings and consequently cope effectively with the demands and pressures of work and life.
Emotional Intelligence helps you navigate the social complexities of the workplace, lead and motivate others and excel in your career. It is believed to be improved with training and practice. Employees with higher scores on measures of EQ also tend to be rated higher on criteria of interpersonal functioning, leadership abilities, and stress management.
Enrol for iJaipuria’s ‘Enhance Your Emotional Intelligence’ course and master your emotions and resolve conflicts effectively to succeed in your career, relationship and life.
Design thinking, in simple words, is a human-centred problem-solving approach that takes you from the problem to a solution. This approach includes understanding the customer needs, empathising with them and finding innovative solutions through an intensive brainstorming session, prototyping and testing.
This process helps you discover new insights, define the problem, develop ideas, and deliver creatively. This approach has helped organisations such as Airbnb, Procter and Gamble, Google, Pepsico, Apple etc., to bring innovative solutions in their work. Design Thinking is widely used in different work sectors to tackle various challenges.
The tenets of Design Thinking can be implemented in both your career and your personal life. Everyone is a designer, and every job or challenge needs design thinking. Whether you are creating a new marketing campaign or working on your personal growth, if you are making decisions with a particular goal in mind, you are designing. In addition, empathy, problem-solving and innovative skills play an essential role in our careers and everyday lives.
Some of the few ways in which Design Thinking can help both your personal and professional life are given below:
1. Creates Better Products/services and Experiences
Design Thinking is all about being customer-centric. It focuses on finding the needs and addressing the users’ challenges, mapping their journey and uncovering their wants and desires. Then, through channelling the problems and possibilities systematically and engaging with end-users, we develop innovative ideas to meet the goal.
2. Generates New Ideas Quickly
Design thinking is one of the most empowering methods for generating ideas. This method allows room for collaborating ideas with people from different walks of life. Collaborating ideas with people who think differently gives a resounding impact on innovation.
3. Builds Brand Loyalty
When you use the Design Thinking method to solve problems, you consistently create innovative products/services that delight the customer. This builds your reputation as an organisation that excels in meeting customer needs. Through this process, you also begin to meet your organisation’s values aiding in building your brand value. As the Design Thinking process takes time to learn about the customer’s needs and meet its requirements, eventually, your organisation starts to matter to them beyond the simple functionality of your product.
4. Accept Our Mistakes and Uncertainties Easier
Design thinking is a process that can be applied even in our self-evaluation. This method helps us identify our thinking/working pattern and question this pattern to improve ourselves. The inherent idea of Design Thinking is that mistakes and challenges are opportunities for learning and growth.
5. Spark Personal Growth
Innovation is often more complex in one’s path than in the corporate world. The thought of taking a risk and making a mistake at our own expense is often scary and makes us think negatively. Our narratives about ourselves often tend to focus on what we cannot do rather than what we can do. The goal of Design Thinking here is to change the narrative to solution-based thinking. It helps you discover the challenges you need to overcome and stimulates you to take small steps towards your goal.
If you want to master the Design Thinking process from inception to validation, enrol for ijaipuria’s online course on Design Thinking for Innovation. It thoroughly explains the tools and techniques that create value through systematic innovation. It also gives an in-depth study of how to use design thinking and the various approaches to design thinking through real-life case studies of living organisations.
If you have been reading up on the technology sector recently, you will find that the Business Analytics course is one of the most trending courses in the market. Moreover, it is one of the hottest subjects in the industry due to its potential and rising demand.
Organisations cannot afford to make mistakes often in business. So they have to rely on an error-free method to make smarter decisions. Business Analytics has allowed organisations to make smarter decisions with its predictability of the outcome. It has also helped employees to find their way in the data-driven world as data is required in every field in today’s market.
Here are five more reasons to show you why business analytics is crucial in today’s market :
1. Drive Better Business Decisions: It drives fair and practical decision making and enhances your data interpretation and problem-solving at work through statistical and analytical techniques. It allows you to manage risks, anticipate market shifts, and understand business dynamics thoroughly.
2. Delivers Clear Insights: Data analytics gives clear insights through data visualisation. Data visualisation is representing data through graphs, pie charts etc. It helps identify trends in the data and generate relevant and practical insights efficiently. This method is also known for sharing insights and delivering ideas to a non-technical audience. Visualised data helps form clear ideas of what you want and need, reducing the chances of making errors.
3. Helps You Measure Your Progress: Measuring progress enables you to achieve your mission and determines actions needed to strengthen it.
For example, quantifying value in business improves its analytical process as it gives a definite task to follow. It also gives your employees a clear view of your organisation’s values to help them understand the objectives of your business better.
4. Keeps You Updated: The attention span of modern consumers is short. They move from one business to another very quickly. Business Analytics helps understand consumer trends and keeps you updated with the changing market trends. It helps you identify customer behaviour and know how the targeted audience thinks and behave. Business analytics help you stay on top of the game by predicting capabilities.
5. Enables you to make data-driven decisions: Data-driven decision-making is crucial as it allows you to perceive data and develop predictive insights. This allows the decision-maker to determine what is working well and what is not. Data is required in every field to come up with accurate decisions. Data analysis gives the organisation relevant data and meaningful insights that help you make intelligent data-driven decisions.
Moreover, Business Analytics helps solve business problems in almost all areas like HR, sales, marketing, finance, etc. It also helps discover relationships, predict unknown outcomes, and automate decisions using data science and analytics.
Through our course, Fundamentals of Business Analytics, you will get insights into the scope and applications of business analytics in various domains, the most popular software/tools used in the industry to explore, analyse and construct models on the dataset. It will also give you a career path to focus on in the field as a Business Analyst.
There is no greater joy than hearing “Yes, I’d like to move forward” if you are into sales. This beautiful sentence is what you hear when you close the deal that brightens a salesperson. Yet many let this opportunity slip off their hands due to the lack of knowledge.
Closing is a make-or-break moment in sales. Choosing the proper technique to close is crucial in determining whether you will be successful or not. Many salespeople think that closing happens only in the final moment of purchase. However, closing the sale encompasses all incremental agreements you secure throughout the sales process and not just the final deal.
It has even become more complex with rising competition to close sale deals. The pandemic and the competition has slowed down business these days. The prospect can quickly turn you down, go to a competitor, ask for a price you cannot deliver or take up actions to stop the sale process.
However, as a sales rep, you must close deals and make sales. The five crucial steps to close a deal that every salesperson are:
1. Do Your Research
In this 21st century, where people are flooded with information on everything, it is vital to do your homework and prepare. You need to know about your product more than your prospective customers and thoroughly understand what your organisation can offer—moreover, your prospects’ challenges to come up with the best solution. Therefore researching every angle and every process of the sales becomes crucial.
2. Tell a Story
The storytelling method is an age-old practice, yet it is still one of the most effective ways to impress prospects. As a sales rep, you have minimal time to make an impression, and you cannot waste your prospect’s time.
Therefore some of the stories you can tell are:
Personal Testimony: If your customer is worried about the brand image or the team’s competence, tell him a testimony of a relatable experience you have experienced to assure him that he is in safe hands.
Success Story: Share a quick story of a customer similar to the prospect’s problems and then tell him how he has benefitted after doing business with you.
3. Do Not pitch
Pitching with enthusiasm is a common trait in every salesperson. However, pursuing people with all the good qualities of your product or services is an old school technique and sounds a little too “sales”. So, instead of pursuing people and pitching your ideas, please find out the customers’ needs and effectively communicate how your products and services solve their needs.
4. Ask Right Questions
Closing a sale through questions is one smart way to get to the point. Effective salespeople focus on closing the deal as soon as the conversation with a prospective customer begins. The way to close the sale through a question is to address outstanding objections while gaining commitment at the same time.
5. If You Have to Pitch, Pitch the Benefit, Not the Product
As mentioned earlier, pitching the product is not recommended, but impressing a prospect is a little tricky without pitching. So pitch the benefits of the product focus on how it will benefit your customer by doing business with you. The prospect will not simply buy what you sell but the idea of how it will solve their problem. Remember the phrase, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole”.
Being skilled at closing is one of the most coveted skills for a sales representative. Our Sales Mastery program will help you
to know more about how to close difficult prospects, avoid closing mistakes, and cultivate highly effective closing habits.
