Copyright (c) 2011 Gavin Ingham

One of my core beliefs is that you can learn powerful lessons everywhere if you are prepared to look for them. Many of the most powerful sales training lessons and business growth strategies that I have learnt, discovered and created originated from places you might not have expected! The other day I was approached by a Head PGA Golf Professional, NLP Sports & Master Practitioner, Qualified Hypnotherapist and Professional Speaker by the name of Tony Westwood who wanted to tell me about what he did. We had an interesting chat about performance and motivation and I asked him to share a few thoughts with you about peak performance and how it applies to golf, sales, business and life..

Tony, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. Tell me, what exactly do you do… Using golf as a metaphor for sports, business and life, I help individuals and teams to play closer to their true potential. By helping them to LEARN through PLAY, creating AWARENESS, UNDERSTANDING and improving COMMUNICATION with themselves and others.

Sales courses and sales training is necessary in today’s informative and competitive environment. With every investment, there is a cost and a return. An investment in sales courses and sales training for your staff is no different. Sales training without a return on your investment may benefit your staff when they need credentials for a new job, but it won’t benefit your company. Sales courses must be chosen with an eye for return.

Investment in sales courses and sales training for your staff demonstrates that you are committed to the betterment of your company and your staff. However, if you choose sales courses and sales training programs that give little credence to your sales staff’s current knowledge and abilities, your sales training motivations will falter into resentment from your staff. Sales course content that is merely a reiteration of the staff’s current knowledge is wasted investment and will be received with deaf ears. Involving the sales team in the efforts places of sense of ownership of the sales training results, which further motivates the sales team to apply the training they have received to effectuate change. Benchmark your sales before training, and track sales for a year or two after the sales training. Training applied is ROI earned.

You’ve spent months preparing for it; you started planning and ordering merchandise before school was out for the summer; you even hired on additional help to keep the store looking good and the customers satisfied.  It’s the biggest time of the year for retail – the holiday shopping season – and it’s a race to the finish line for retailers everywhere as they hope for a better 2010 Christmas season than what 2009 delivered.

While the economy is still lagging, and consumers are holding onto their wallets like never before, there are signs that the proverbial ice may finally be melting a little for retailers.  Retailers are already reporting that traffic is up in their stores compared to the same time last year and aggressive promotions are paying off.  Customers are starting to come back into the stores instead of just walking briskly by.

So now that you have customers coming into the store how can you make sure they purchase instead of just browse?  To answer that question Randy Pickard, a retail insider of 20+ years and founder of Shopping Baskets Plus (www.shoppingbasketsplus.com), has put together 12 tips to help grow your business this holiday season.