IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF A SALES TEAM

 Request input from your team in setting quotas. If you set a target sales figure for your team, they'll often come close, but fall
short. If you ask them to provide their own numbers, many managers report that they'll actually set the bar higher than you would
have. Additionally, if an employee sets her own target, she is accountable to hit it.
 2
Divide long-term goals into more realistic, short-term goals. A territory manager for ThomasNet, Michele Micheler, suggests
salespeople break their goals down into monthly, weekly and even daily activities that will help them achieve a larger goal. If the
goal is a dollar amount, and it usually is, take some of the focus off of the actual dollars. Instead, have your staff track key
meetings and phone calls that will contribute to meeting their ultimate target.
 3
Recognize improvement as well as team leaders. The all-star salespeople often get all of the fame. Take the time to formally
recognize the team members who have improved the most in the short-term. It often takes time for the underdogs to develop their
skills and start to shine. With a little encouragement, these rising stars could overtake the frontrunners.
 4
Offer non-monetary rewards on a regular basis. Most salespeople are used to being paid on a commission basis, but other types of
recognition can go a long way at a low cost. Simple rewards like tickets to local events, a free stay at a local hotel or sporting
equipment can act as inexpensive incentives to excel. Do this spontaneously and aside from the typical promoted targets. This
will encourage members of the team to work hard at all times.
 5
Focus on team building and watch your client relationships flourish. In his article, "Building a Successful Sales Force," Michael
Phillips says, "Customers are the reason you live and die, so team members must focus on building real relationships." What
better way to model this ethic than through promoting the value of relationships within the team? Spend time with your team in a
different context, away from the office. You'll see this value translate to your customers and to your bottom line.

IMPROVING PEFORMANCE WITH REALTIONSHIP MARKETING

Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is not about having a "buddy-buddy" relationship with your customers.
Customers do not want that. Relationship Marketing uses the event-driven tactics of customer retention
marketing, but treats marketing as a process over time rather than single unconnected events. By molding
the marketing message and tactics to the LifeCycle of the customer, the Relationship Marketing approach
achieves very high customer satisfaction and is highly profitable.

The relationship marketing process is usually defined as a series of stages, and there are many different
names given to these stages, depending on the marketing perspective and the type of business. For
example, working from the relationship beginning to the end:

Interaction > Communication > Valuation > Termination

Awareness > Comparison > Transaction > Reinforcement > Advocacy

Suspect > Prospect > Customer > Partner > Advocate > Former Customer

Using the relationship marketing approach, you customize programs for individual consumer groups and
the stage of the process they are going through as opposed to some forms of database marketing where
everybody would get virtually the same promotions, with perhaps a change in offer. The stage in the
customer LifeCycle determines the marketing approach used with the customer.

A simple example of this would be sending new customers a "Welcome Kit," which might have an
incentive to make a second purchase. If 60 days pass and the customer has not made a second purchase,
you would follow up with an e-mailed discount. You are using customer behavior over time (the
customer LifeCycle) to trigger the marketing approach.
FETCHING STRATEGIES
Since the industrial revolution, technology has had a tremendous impact on the business world. Making
processes more efficient and error-proof, bringing the voice of the customer more easily to product and
service providers and enhancing communication between varying levels and branches of businesses are
just a few examples of how technology has changed the game for many businesses and for the global
economy in general. Many companies are born, thrive and die as a result of new, disruptive technologies.
Therefore, it is important for any business manager to have a high level understanding of hi-tech business
strategies
INITIALIZING COLLECTIONS AND PROXIES
A LazyInitializationException will be thrown by Hibernate if an uninitialized collection or proxy is
accessed outside of the scope of the Session, i.e., when the entity owning the collection or having the
reference to the proxy is in the detached state.

Sometimes a proxy or collection needs to be initialized before closing the Session. You can force
initialization by calling cat.getSex() or cat.getKittens().size(), for example. However, this can be
confusing to readers of the code and it is not convenient for generic code.

The static methods Hibernate.initialize() and Hibernate.isInitialized(), provide the application with a
convenient way of working with lazily initialized collections or proxies. Hibernate.initialize(cat) will
force the initialization of a proxy, cat, as long as its Session is still open.
Hibernate.initialize( cat.getKittens() ) has a similar effect for the collection of kittens.
Another option is to keep the Session open until all required collections and proxies have been loaded. In
some application architectures, particularly where the code that accesses data using Hibernate, and the
code that uses it are in different application layers or different physical processes, it can be a problem to
ensure that the Session is open when a collection is initialized. There are two basic ways to deal with this
issue:
IMPROVING CUSTOMER SERVICE IN HOTELS
1
Add people-loving people to your team. This may sound too simple, but employees who are outgoing and friendly tend to be
nice to customers and empathetic concerning their problems. Intelligence and problem solving skills are a plus, too.

Offer periodic customer service training programs. These programs often provide role plays of various scenarios which mimic a
range of customer interactions. Ongoing training like this will encourage customer-oriented behaviors and practices.

Give employees the authority to make some difficult decisions without you. Well defined customer service guidelines will
provide a basis for this authority. When employees make good decisions you can congratulate them and, in turn, encourage
further customer-oriented decision making.

Allow customers to give feedback. You can issue surveys or randomly call customers to get their opinions. Your customers will
usually be glad to share this information. Be sure to act on any feedback that can show you how to improve customer service.

Catch your customers off guard. Pleasantly surprise your customers with a bonus an unexpected bonus product along with
a thank you note. This simple step will give your customers a good experience and encourage future purchases.