Whether you’re right or wrong, winning an argument can be a challenge. Luckily, with a few simple tricks, you can learn how to debate like a pro.
For starters, rather than coming off aggressively, start a conversation. Having a two-way discussion will show the other person that you’re open to hearing their ideas, and in turn, they’ll likely be eager to hear yours. You should also always let them speak first and ask them open-ended questions.
Next, mirror your opponent and mimic the way they are positioned. Be sure not to make it too obvious, but if you see them sitting cross-legged, then do the same. According to research, people are more likely to believe someone who is positioned the same way as them. Of course, always make direct eye contact, and once they’re finished speaking, repeat some of the most important points they were trying to make so you know that you fully understand their point of view.
Now it’s your turn. When it comes to making your case, make sure you have all of your facts straight, use evidence such as studies to support your argument, end your questions with affirmative questions such as “right?” and “wouldn’t you?” and of course, never raise your voice.
To learn how you can always win an argument, check out SavingSpot’s infographic below.
They looked at the effects of three specific phases of sleep — rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, light non-REM (NREM) sleep, and deep NREM sleep.
When the participants woke up, they were given a series of tests to see how well they recognized the sounds that they had been played.
They researchers found that if they had heard the noises during REM or light NREM sleep, they were more likely to recall what they had heard than if they had been played the sounds during deep NREM sleep. But it was also harder for them to re-learn those sequences than it was to retain new sounds when they were awake.
The researchers explained in their findings that this was an early experiment that could lend itself to a better understanding of how we learn.
“Understanding why both REM sleep and light NREM sleep favor learning while deep NREM sleep suppresses it could provide a unified view of the impact of sleep on memory formation,” they wrote in the study.
Ultimately, it seems that if you aren’t getting a good night’s sleep, you’re not allowing your brain the fully process all of the information that you get in a given day.
Do yourself a favor, get the full eight hours and let your mind decompress.
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Gone are the days when salespeople focused all their attention on courting every single prospect that hit their in-box. Thanks to the internet, the pool of potential clients is now global. While that’s inarguably a great thing for sales, it has also transformed lead-generation into a more exerting scientific process.
For starters, you must weigh whether a lead is worth your investment of time and resources. The time element is particularly important: Consider that 57 percent of salespeople surveyed in HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2017 report said they spend up to an hour each day on data entry alone.
For many companies, this poses a problem, especially when those data points are used to size up potential clients. There’s so much noise in the market — and so much data — that businesses often stumble just trying to qualify a lead.
Collecting information is an important function, of course, but any number of factors — name changes, location changes, personnel changes, etc. — can throw off your numbers. Businesses that can prepare for those shifts, build them into their processes and better understand the information will find the search for present and future customers more fruitful. Here are some tips for better data management:
Take the leads.
Even when you buy data lists or subscribe to a business-information service, success still comes down to data management. Otherwise, you can’t act on the data you have at hand. In fact, 93 percent of executives surveyed by Oracle said they believed their organizations lose an average of 14 percent of their revenue because they’re unable to serve customers effectively.
Here’s the thing: If you manage your data and continually work toward improving its quality, you develop a clearer picture of potential clients. You can then more effectively and efficiently qualify leads and pair them with the right people in your sales organization.
This brings up an important question: How exactly do you uncover the right kind of data in order to streamline the lead-generation process? The following tips may help:
1. Watch out for a rat’s nest. Bad data can slow you down, trip you up or bring an entire company to a screeching halt. Increase efficiency and save time by clearing your data of duplicates: dirty and dead accounts, a.k.a. the rat’s nest of data. Once clean, accounts can more easily be scored and distributed to the correct sales reps.
At my company, we arm our customers with the right information, such as company size, annual revenue and media content; this allows sales reps to better understand where an account is on the buying journey and map the maximum amount of leads with the highest coverage possible.
At the end of the day, isn’t your goal one of finding and extracting revenue from customers as efficiently as possible? It stands to reason that the cleaner the data, the more quickly you can qualify and process leads.
2. Streamline your system. According to an internal survey by Ungerboeck Software, its decision to prune its multiple data-entry systems to just one system saved workers three to 10 hours of work per week.
Most systems refer to accounts by name or ID number. But manually entered company names are prone to human error: Where one person enters in a company’s full name, another uses an abbreviation, leaving the system with multiple entries for one account. Meanwhile, ID numbers are nearly impossible to commit to memory, so you’re just one poorly aimed keystroke away from pulling up the wrong account.
The best way to keep data clean is to use a globally known, unique identifier. We advise using URLs as unique identifiers because they’re free and globally recognizable and can be pinged for signs of life. Linking to the primary URL lets you bypass both potential problems, leaving you with clean, duplicate-free data. Instead of many entries, root each account in one identifier that all your leads can hook into.
3. Live in the now. Let’s say your company does business only with organizations that generate more than $20 million in revenue. Do you have the technology in place to automatically alert reps when an account hits that threshold? If not, when will they get the green light to work on the account?
A McKinsey & Company study found that 59 percent of respondents within high-performing companies felt equipped to handle unexpected real-time data, while only 12 percent of those at low-performing businesses felt ready.
Considering the fact that data is integral to business operations, have your salespeople work off the most up-to-date information available by utilizing real-time data integration technology. Reps will become more responsive to time-sensitive opportunities, giving your company the edge over the competition and insights into the target audience.
4. Hone-in on the target. No one needs to tell you how important it is to tailor your marketing to your audience. Carefully curate the right data to map out an account-based marketing strategy rather than using spray-and-pray marketing and hoping to lure in accounts. Account-based marketing is a personalized campaign designed to resonate with each individual account.
A SiriusDecisions study found that 92 percent of B2B marketers surveyed said they saw ABM as vital to their efforts. Furthermore, when companies align sales and marketing, they generate as much as 208 percent more revenue, according to HubSpot. Accounts represent the clients you want to bring in, meaning that clean data and an ABM approach can give your team a one-way ticket to optimal leads.
In the end, the quantity of information you gather on prospects will never be what makes or breaks your business; it’s the quality that counts. Salespeople do their best work when they’re talking to high-quality leads, so manage your data to guarantee that when your folks speak those right words, the right ears prick up.
Fourteen billion dollars. That’s how much U.S. companies spend annually on leadership development, according to McKinsey & Co. Despite these significant investments, 30 percent of U.S. companies report a lack of “enough leaders with the right capabilities” to capitalize on business opportunities, McKinsey said.
And it’s not just the corporate world that is struggling with leadership development: Whether you’re an entrepreneur building your first team or a small business owner, you need to understand good leadership. So, why do leadership-development programs fall short; and what, if anything, can businesses do to develop the effective leaders they need?
I sat down with Jessica Parisi, CEO of the consulting firm BTS USA, to discuss effective leadership development. BTS advertises itself as a global professional services firm supporting businesses with strategy execution, leadership development and sales transformation.”
And, as the company’s principal, Parisi said she’s strived to build BTS’s reputation on people-first talent development. That’s the opposite of the traditional approach some consulting firms take: emphasizing strategy and process rather than a company’s constituents.
Parisi, who has been with BTS for over 13 years, added that she is attuned to the pitfalls of traditional corporate leadership problems. “Too many training initiatives rest on the assumption that leadership will be the same regardless of company culture, strategy or market dynamics,” she told me. “A brilliant leader in one situation may struggle in another. Leadership training must be relentlessly contextual and tie development to real, on-the-job needs, not just theoretical exercises.”
To develop your own leadership skills, Parisi advised, you need to first understand what makes a successful leader. Here’s how Parisi’s leadership essentials can apply to your own leadership development:
1. Leaders grow with their business.
Effective leaders perform and transform. They’re willing to change not only behaviors, but also the mindsets underlying these behaviors. For example, if a manager were struggling to delegate tasks, simply telling that manager to be less of a “micromanager” would be insufficient, Parisi said. The leader would need to proactively confront the mindset that was causing this behavior in the first place, such as fear of losing control over the business or a false belief in the need to personally make every decision.
Only by challenging these beliefs can a leader truly evolve and grow with his or her business.
On this note, Parisi said, she recently worked with a global software company that needed a fundamental shift in executive strategy, starting with leadership beliefs. “The company was suffering from low employee engagement and weak internal trust scores,” Parisi said. “We worked with the company to reset internal expectations, create new accountability systems that would support this leadership style change and develop 7,500 company leaders.
“In 18 months, the company’s employee trust score went from 28.5 percent to 52.3 percent, and employee engagement increased by 3.11 percent.”
This engagement increase might seem small to some, but Parisi said the company’s finance department equated the change to “an operating profit increase between $124 million and $171 million.”
Your takeaway:Being an effective leader requires more than just changing behaviors. You need to be willing to confront the belief systems underlying these behaviors.
2. Leaders create a context in which everyone succeeds.
As Tammy Erickson from London Business School has written, being a great leader today is less about being “best” at a single skill and more about “creating a context in which others can succeed.” This starts with building your organization’s capacity for collaboration and ensuring that the organization has a continual infusion of new perspectives.
Parisi agrees. “When we are doing strategy, leadership or change work, we operate from a core belief that leadership is relentlessly contextual,” she said.
Great leaders don’t dictate a single path forward, Parisi said. Instead, they frame challenges facing their organization in ways that are “evocative and inspiring” helping all employees to feel personally invested in solving these challenges. They build frameworks to shape questions on and make sense of disparate data.
Your takeaway: Lay the groundwork for success by providing talented employees with the opportunity to form strong, trusted relationships that empower their success, rather than pitting peers against one other. Continually ask yourself, “How can I create a context in which everyone succeeds?”
3. Leaders serve and empathize.
Parisi said she attributed much of her professional success to the lessons she learned in her youth. Holding many roles in both student government and sports groups, she said, she developed an early understanding that the foundation of leadership is service. She also credited her father, a prison warden, as a mentor who significantly influenced her approach to power.
“I could tell how much compassion and kindness he exuded towards the inmates,” she said. “I could sense that the inmates felt respected by him. It was a great example of bringing grace to a position of power and not abusing it.”
Your takeaway:Empathy is the ability to experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions or experience of others. Empathetic leaders spend more time listening than talking. They don’t let feelings control a situation’s outcome. They’re attuned to the concerns of others; and, as a result, their employees trust and respect them — driving engagement, productivity and passion.
When Gillian Stollwerk Garrett (aka Gilly) was a young girl, you could find her mixing up lotions, potions and makeup in her parents’ pharmacy when she wasn’t helping customers. Fast forward to today, the wife and mother of three says she knew she eventually had to make her hobby a career after all of her products sold out at a school fundraiser. Gilly’s Organics can be found in boutiques and Whole Foods Market stores around the country. In addition to showing up time and time again to pitch, and demo, her product, Stollwerk Garrett believes crowdfunding through iFundWomen.com has given her brand broader awareness as she scales.
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Earlier this year, United Airlines became the subject of multiple controversies due to the way its employees treated customers. Those employees received a lot of criticism, but the real root of the problem goes much higher than United’s workforce.
The employees, as it happened, acted to enforce policies without thinking. They didn’t take initiative or rely on their own judgment. The fact is, a culture built on principles and values — rather than blind obedience — might have empowered those employees to behave in an appropriate way. But perhaps they needed stronger role models because, in a company setting, people model what they see.
Defining “true leadership”
If United Airlines had practiced “true leadership,” the company likely could have avoided the public outrage.
True leaders are the pinnacle of what they expect from the people around them. And by setting an example, true leaders encourage their people to aim for that. The most powerful example of a true leader I can think of is a warring tribal chief back in the days of the frontier wars between Indians and settlers: A chief drove everyone else to be better for the sake of the tribe and modeled what that looked like.
Richard Branson is a great modern-day example of true leadership. He knows the culture he wants to curate and makes sure his companies have it. Before this group of companies was sold, interacting with any Virgin company — whether you flew Virgin America, shopped at Virgin Records or worked with Virgin Mobile — you almost felt like as though you were working with Branson himself.
In his companies, it was always clear that people understood leadership and culture and held it in high regard.
Practicing true leadership: boss vs. leader
Leaders need to behave in the way they want their employees to behave, and to continually ensure they have what they need to do that. At my company, our first priority is to always check in with people and make sure they have all the resources they need.
Here are some other ways to practice true leadership:
1. Pull the rope.
I love the image of a “leader” versus a “boss” during a tug of war. The leader is at the end of the rope, pulling along with his team. A boss is yelling at everyone else to pull the rope harder.
In a study highlighted by the Harvard Business Review, 38 percent of global leaders polled said that a good leader cultivates a feeling of failure and success as a team. That’s the difference between a “boss” and a “leader.” Leadership is about doing the job, not just telling others how to do it.
The leaders of Daimler Greater China exhibited this characteristic last year when they removed a manager for insulting Chinese people. The incident was a private situation, but Daimler felt it didn’t reflect well on the company to have high-level leadership behaving this way. After all, if high-level staff could do this, so could everyone else.
The takeaway? If you want your people to work hard, work hard yourself. Whatever you expect of your team, take it on yourself and set the example. Never stop pulling the rope.
2. Be the provider.
A true leader supports the team with time, energy, thought and actual physical support. Whatever needs to happen to keep up with your people, provide: additional meeting opportunities, Q&A sessions, informal happy hours — whatever it is. Be the support system for your team’s success.
At Hawke Media, we want to give people a comfortable place to work hard. That’s why we call our office the most comfortable place to be uncomfortable. We have couches everywhere and dogs running around, and now that the team likes hanging out there, we expect them to get things done.
We also provide constant education. One study by Rypple found that 23 percent of employees surveyed said they wanted career development opportunities, and a true leader will listen to that. We provide that through initiatives such as “Hawke U” every Friday. My business partner reads a book each week and then presents his takeaways in an hourlong presentation: short, sweet and highly effective.
3. Become a “personal trainer.”
Just as a great personal trainer gets more from clients than those clients may have expected of themselves, a true leader does the same. Never hire or fire based on experience because things change too fast. Instead, see yourself as a coach for your team.
We hired someone out of a retail store background who was smart but had no experience in marketing, but she quickly became a top-notch Facebook advertising manager, grew a team of Facebook advertisers and then became our VP of operations, running a team of 80 people. This took her just three years.
We got her there by hiring for attitude instead of experience. Then we sat with her for months, basically having her work hand in hand with a trainer. In the early days, we mentored her in tactics, and today we continue to teach her what we’re learning so she can take on more responsibility.
True leadership is about helping employees become the best people they can be. You do that by setting the example, doing the work and training others to come along with you — beside you.
With these tactics up your sleeve, you’ll never end up in the news, the way United did.
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Lord Darling had been chancellor for less than a month when the financial crisis started
Ten years ago the then chancellor, Alistair Darling, was on holiday and had walked to the shops to buy bread rolls for breakfast.
He picked up a copy of the Financial Times. It stopped him in his tracks as he walked home.
The lead story was about a French bank, BNP Paribas, which had been forced to close two of its hedge funds, admitting they were in effect worthless.
There were similar problems at some second-tier German lenders. Mr Darling – now Lord Darling – thought something must be seriously wrong, and that given the connectedness of the world financial system, it was probably heading his way.
He hadn’t been in the job long. He arrived at Number 11 in July 2007, and as he recalled in an interview with the BBC to mark the 10th anniversary of the banking crisis, there was no mention of problems with financial stability in his briefings from Treasury officials.
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Media captionAlistair Darling warns regulators to “stay vigilant” on Today
The anniversary date for the financial crisis is generally regarded as 9 August – the day of the events that made the front page of Lord Darling’s Financial Times.
The closure of the BNP Paribas funds sparked a sharp escalation in the cost of credit for all banks, created a panic in financial markets, and led directly to all the other tumultuous events of the next year – the run on Northern Rock, the demise of Lehman Brothers, and the shocking bailout of Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds/HBOS by the British taxpayer, at the cost of tens of billions of pounds.
There were, however, plenty of earlier warning signs. In January 2007, HSBC warned about a sharp rise in mortgage defaults at its US offshoot, a lender called Household.
Household had – perhaps more than HSBC knew when it bought it – specialised in the “sub-prime” loans that eventually triggered the crisis.
About the same time, Darling now ruefully recalls, the Financial Services Authority, the British banking regulator, produced a report questioning the business model of Northern Rock.
The report noted that Northern Rock was over-reliant on what was called “wholesale” funding – ie large amounts of money borrowed from other financial institutions, rather than funds that came from customer deposits.
Image copyright Getty Images
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The crisis at Northern Rock saw concerned account holders queue to remove their funds
In the unlikely event that the wholesale markets dried up, Northern Rock could face difficulties. The study attracted little attention, but turned out to be remarkably prescient.
In June of 2007 came a much clearer warning sign. Bear Stearns, a venerable Wall Street bank, had to stop customers withdrawing money from two of its investment funds. The funds had specialised in the financial products that had been created on the back of those sub-prime mortgages.
These products were, in theory, designed to spread risk; individual loans were packaged up into new types of securities called collateralised debt obligations, or CDOs.
These packages contained a mix of loans; the plan was that because it was highly unlikely that all the loans would fail, they were safer.
But Wall Street built a financial pyramid on top of them, creating new derivative trades that piled risk and leverage on top of the basic lending. When a few of the loans started to go wrong, the panic spread.
Bear Stearns found, suddenly, that it could not find a buyer for any of its investment funds; at that moment, they were worthless.
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Staff at Lehman Brothers lost their jobs
The events at BNP Paribas fanned the flames, and by the end of the year the markets were in full retreat. As 2008 unfolded, those at the top of the big institutions feared the worst.
Sir Win Bischoff, the veteran British banker who was chairman of Citigroup through the crisis, and went on to be chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, told the BBC that at the start of the rout, he and others had “probably not” known how bad things were. “There was, I think, an element of wishful thinking.”
Sir Win soon became convinced of how serious things were when Hank Paulson, then US Treasury Secretary, began discussions in earnest about a programme of American government support for the big banks.
“That was a moment at which I thought it could be really bad. We took some comfort though that Merrill Lynch [another big Wall Street bank] had been saved by a merger – although it was a reluctant merger – with Bank of America.”
The crisis peaked with the demise of Lehman Brothers, another Wall Street bank that, like Bear Stearns, had piled aggressively into investment banking and trading. Its boss, Dick Fuld, remained defiant until the end, but had had a premonition of his own downfall.
Andrew Gowers, the former Financial Times editor who was working as an in-house PR man at Lehman Brothers when it went under, told the BBC he had attended a meeting at Davos, the annual meeting of business leaders in a Swiss ski resort, in January 2007.
There, Mr Fuld had told a surprised audience of journalists that “this was the year that markets could crack”. “They were aghast,” Mr Gowers said.
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Some analysts say that high levels of debt remain a concern
The ripples of Lehman’s demise in September 2008 spread rapidly to the UK. Lord Darling suffered some heart-stopping moments, particularly when Royal Bank of Scotland, which was at that stage the world’s biggest bank, came close to running out of cash.
“I was at a meeting of European finance ministers when I took a call from the chairman of RBS. He said the bank was in danger of running out of money. I said, ‘ok, we have plans in place, how long have you got?’. And he said, ‘a few hours’. That was chilling.”
Lord Darling said there was little alternative to the giant, government-funded rescue plan for RBS and Lloyds/HBOS. “If the plan hadn’t worked, I don’t know where we would have been. Where would we have gone? The International Monetary Fund (the lender backed by the G7 group of the world’s largest economies) isn’t big enough.”
A decade on, banks are better capitalised, and, most think, better regulated. Lord Darling says, however, that vigilance is necessary. “It’s just when you think things are fine that complacency creeps in,” he said.
Gillian Tett, the US managing editor of the Financial Times, and a close observer of the banking crisis, says that while individual banks might be on a sounder footing, the wider problem is debt.
“What has happened is a reliance on private debt – heroin, if you like – has been replaced by a reliance on public debt – morphine. The system as a whole is still unbalanced.”
Sir Win Bischoff, who after decades at the top of the banking system has seen more crises than most, believes the system is safer than before. “But ask me again in 10 years’ time.”
Npower’s parent company, Innogy, has reported a loss for its UK division, but gained more customers in the first half of the year.
Npower posted losses in underlying earnings of 12m euros (£11m), compared with a profit of 85m euros in 2016.
It also expects the division to make a loss for the whole year and warned of regulatory intervention.
It said cost-cutting helped combat “fierce competition and political pressure” in the UK energy market.
It lost UK customers in the first quarter because of price increases on variable tariffs, but attracted 50,000 new ones with improved deals in the second half.
Innogy said earnings were hit partially because it proved harder to pass higher costs on to UK customers.
“The situation in the UK retail business remains very tense due to the fierce competition and political pressure.
“Measures to reduce costs within the scope of the restructuring programme will help to partially offset negative market effects,” Innogy added.
Price cap
Last month, Ofgem, the energy regulator, proposed a price cap to protect about two million vulnerable customers.
The company said potential price caps were causing uncertainty and a decline in sales to commercial and corporate customers also had a negative effect on earnings.
Innogy, which is majority owned by RWE, has been undertaking a major restructuring programme at Npower after losing thousands of customers because of billing issues and competition from new entrants.
At the end of June, Npower had 4.757 million retail electricity and gas customers in Britain, up 1% from March.
The German company as a whole reported adjusted earnings before interest and tax were 1.7bn euros (£1.54bn) in the first half, in line with expectations.
It was 4% higher than last year owing to earnings growth in the first quarter in its grid business.
Operating profit at its German retail business was 340m euros, up 23% from a year ago.
A tenth of young adults shun cash and rely instead on cards and digital payments for their day-to-day spending, figures suggest.
More than one in 10 people aged between 25 and 34 used notes and coins no more than once a month last year, according to UK Finance.
The trade body for financial providers said nearly three million people rarely used cash.
But, across all age groups, cash remains the most popular way to pay.
The figures show that 6% of the UK’s adult population used cash no more than once a month last year, but this increased to more than 10% for 25 to 34-year-olds. The proportion drops to 2% for 55 to 64-year-olds.
At the opposite end of the scale, 5% of the UK adult population (2.7 million people) relied almost entirely on cash to make their day-to-day payments during 2016, UK Finance said.
This was relatively evenly spread across different age groups. However, people with lower household incomes were far more likely to rely mainly on cash compared with their more affluent counterparts.
More than half of all consumers who relied predominantly on cash during 2016 had total household incomes of less than £15,000 per year.
Cash accounted for 44% of all payments made by consumers across the UK last year.
