SBC APRIL 2006 MEETING
Another great little
venue…
For the April Surrey Business Club Meeting we continued
our recent nomadic tendencies by trying out yet another
new venue - the very smart, lottery-funded meeting centre
next to St John's Church in Merrow, Guildford. The light
and spacious upstairs room was ideal for our purposes,
with a central divider allowing us to section off the
front half for Paul Cawthorne's early evening guided
networking session. Those guests and Members not taking
part were left to gaze longingly at the splendid buffet
laid out at the back of the room by Sue Sanders of Merrow
Savouries.
When seven o'clock finally
came round, everybody fell upon the repast with gusto,
and caught up on each other's news with a mixture of
social networking, and - let's face it - gossip!
Professional telephone
skills
Our main speaker for the evening was David Festenstein,
an old ouzo-drinking buddy of our Chairman from the
days when they both worked as holiday reps for the same
Greek Island specialist tour operator. David went on
to a career in the telemarketing industry, and has since
established his own highly successful training consultancy,
Teleopen (www.teleopen.com).
David helps mainly medium
to large organisations optimise the effectiveness of
their staff in using the telephone to win and retain
customers, and to save time and travel costs by conducting
productive telephone meetings. Many of the techniques
involved can be equally effectively employed by SMEs,
and David's presentation to us was appropriately entitled
'Talk Your Way to Success'.
Getting better results
from every call
He used a combination of amusing anecdotes, mental and
physical exercises, and practical tips and tricks, to
demonstrate how classical 'cold calling' is not necessary
(or indeed appropriate) for service businesses, which
made up most of his audience. We learned how to 'warm
up' an initial call to a prospective customer, and use
NLP techniques and even breathing exercises to ensure
we are in the best possible 'state' before we even pick
up the phone to make the call in the first place.
Just as useful were David's
tips on getting past gatekeepers (by recruiting them
to ur cause) effective research (and how David used
it to get through to the Customer Services Director
of BT and get his Mum's phone problem resolved), qualifying
prospects, establishing rapport and using telephone
meetings effectively.
Another successful
professional skills workshop from SBC!
Feedback from attendees was unanimously enthusiastic,
showing what a good job David had done, and our thanks
are due to him for a great evening and plenty of practical
lessons in using the phone in our own businesses.
A special offer
worth up to £2,000!
At the end of the session, our Chairman Keith Grover
introduced an opportunity for those present to get an
excellent deal on the new book on business networking
by our old fiend Andy Lopata, Managing Director of BRE.
Simply by buying this very practical £15 volume
on amazon.co.uk within the next 24 hours, they could
claim from the publishers a host of downloadable self-improvement
articles, ebooks and audio presentations from guru's
such as Peter Thomson and Ecademy Chairman Thomas Power,
with a nominal value of £2000. This alone would
re-coup the value of your SBC sub many times over if
you acted quickly!
After the meeting,
the beverage circle adjourned for a refreshing pint
of ale (Marston's Black Sheep) in the adjacent Horse
and Groom pub, where Club Member Ian Hamilton was 'adopted'
by a very young quiz team, amazed by his impressive
knowledge of rock music and sports events of the last
century! |
