Mike Crandall

Let’s face it motivation, or motivating others is hard, especially if they are employees of yours. One of the most common things I hear from business leaders is “our people just need to be motivated.” Now, in all honesty, this may be a true statement. 

As a professional speaker one of the most common requests I get is to come in and speak to “get our people motivated” – although this sounds easy, it is not. Most organizations that make this request, we find out, have hired other “motivational speakers” before and it either did not work; or, if it did work, it was short term, and it wore off very quickly.

In our firm, one of the top requests we get is to help write or re-write scripts for companies. Each time we get this request I smile, because we know scripts simply do not work.  There are four key reasons why scripts don’t work.

Frequently people ask me how do I get better? How do I grow? How do I improve? Which are all good questions – and if you don’t ask yourself these questions – you should!

Setting goals is an important part of sales, management, and leadership. But frequently we try to accomplish them by ourselves. We don’t live in a vacuum! But when we run into obstacles, we make the mistake of acting like we’re alone. When something gets in the way of your goals, it doesn’t always work to ask, “What do I do?” Sometimes, you need to ask, “Who can help?”

Having the guts to ask the important questions can really pay off. In the case of one of my clients, it recently dramatically increased his importance to a referral partner.