New Site, 2 London Events, and an Accelerated Learning Sales Tip!
Pay-off: save time learning about your customers and kick start your new journey of learning how to learn fast
Investment: < 3 mins
We have lift-off!
- The launch of my new ‘learn to learn fast’ site
- Two free London events in May on sales and learning you might like to attend
- A practical tip to get a snapshot of what’s important to your customer’s, the language they use, and the big picture of where they’re at
Introducing..
My entire life, and previous business has been rolled together and updated in to this new site and the services I’ll offer through it. The site is really in development and currently speaks to those in L&D, but I’ll be adding ideas and tools for individuals, smaller businesses and freelancers too. So if you want to learn the “King of all Skills” – how to learn fast – and future-proof your business or career, then you can start here. Make sure you’re signed up to this blog which you can do at the top of your screen if you scroll up.
2 London Events – Sales and Learning
I’m going to both and would love to say hi if you’re there. The challenge is, typically, they’re on exactly the same date. I’ll split myself in half and do both.
Learning: The CIPD L&D Show Conference, London Olympia, May 13 and 14
Sales: The Sales Innovation Expo 2015, London Excel, May 13 and 14
What’s more important, learning or sales? Well, in my humble opinion, they’re the TOP 2 MOST IMPORTANT SKILLS FOR YOUR FUTURE which is why I blog about both. And conveniently, learning either massively enhances the other. (For those contemplating the top skills for the future, I’d say that learning and sales are in the top two since they are life skills as well as business – they will literally change your life in more ways than you can imagine. And in business, I think marketing and coding surely have to follow. Investing in yourself in any of those four is surely a wise move!)
If you’re going to either event, direct message me on twitter @MisterMarkMoore or contact me using the tab on the right and we can compare notes when we’re there.
How to Learn Your Customer’s Language Fast
If you’re researching a new customer, market or industry or if you’re applying for a job and want to get the gist of what’s important to your employer, you can try this trick I came up some months back. I keep using it to great effect.
So how can you learn the big picture of your customer, what’s important to them, and their language/jargon that you’d do well to align yourself with – all in an accelerated learning way?
You can create a ‘word cloud’. I used to put the odd word cloud on my blogs years ago. I created this one below from my old blog about ‘accelerated learning in business’.
The size of the words represents how often those words featured across all my blogs. You can see that I mentioned ‘performance’, ‘learning’ and ‘business’ most . Makes sense doesn’t it? I mostly wrote about increasing your performance in business by learning fast.
If someone wanted to connect with me, learn my language, and get on the same page, they could have ran my blog through a free word-cloud service like Wordle and learned very quickly what I’m all about. Remember, the bigger the words, the more frequently written. Talk to me about those things, and I’m listening!
So how can you use this?
If you’re applying for a job, either drop the link of the job description into Wordle (there are other word-cloud creators online too) OR select as much text as you can from a strategically chosen document (an annual report, a Wikipedia article, an industry survey, the blog of an industry expert) and dump that into Wordle.
Then generate the word-cloud and don’t forget to tweak your settings to limit the number of words and make it easy to read. In wordle, you can limit it to say, the top 30 words, and arrange them all horizontally for ease of reading.
Sometimes what you end up with is obvious and less useful. But sometimes you dig up gold.
Then you can mirror your approach, your language, conversation or resume/CV to match and get yourself on the same page as the person hiring. Do this and you’re one step ahead (in that area at least) of your competition.
If you’re researching new customers or opportunities, consider finding their blogs, or an industry white paper or survey. I found a useful survey the other day on current Learning and Development challenges. I turned it into a word-cloud, pulled out the top terms, and used them to form the basis of a communication I’ve sent out to prospects.
Here’s another example taken from my site: HelpPeopleBuy.com If someone was interested to connect with me, they’d do well to use the larger words in conversation. The more they use them, the more they’re tuning in to my frequency!
Hope this makes sense and you get some value from it. Got any questions? Ask me via the contact tab on the right. If I’ve been unclear, I’ll update the post accordingly. And if you have feedback or questions on the new site, I’d really appreciate hearing from you.
I’ll also be working on a new product to help people rapidly learn to speak their full customer’s language fluently. The tip in this post gives you a 1 minute overview, but a more thorough approach would be useful to become fluent in speaking not just your customer’s language, but the language of their industry and the language of ‘business’ too. And you can learn it faster than you’d think. Coming soon!
Finally if you found this useful, please share using social media tabs on the left (or bottom if you’re mobile). Thanks.
