Archives for 2019

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A critical element in successful negotiations is emotional intelligence. But what is emotional intelligence and how can we use this key skill to ensure successful negotiations?

What Is Emotional
Intelligence?

In Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, he describes how this skill can be divided into two parts. Further, he asserts that in order to have a successful business deal you need to have self-awareness as well as self-control with your emotions.

What Are Emotions?

An emotion is a mental reaction such as anger or happiness. When you have an emotion, you experience a feeling that is connected to a thought.

Generally speaking, our emotions are usually directed toward a specific object or person. Moreover, they are typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.

With self-awareness we gain the ability to read our own emotions. What’s more, we begin to recognize the role that those feelings play in our decision-making. As we grow in self-awareness, we begin to gain self-control. This is the ability to manage our emotions and impulses and to adapt to changing circumstances.

Emotional Intelligence Teaches You to Manage Your Emotions

Emotions play a vital role when we’re in search of a resolution. When we have not yet learned to manage our emotions, we find it harder to come to a peaceful resolution.

A good place to start is to understand yourself, your intentions, and your behavior. Secondly, make an effort to understand others, their feelings, their intentions, and their responses.

Why Is Emotional Intelligence So Important?

Understanding emotions is critical in negotiation. That’s because you are responsible, at least in part, for the feelings of those you are negotiating with. For example, if you are doing or saying something that is irritating to the other person, cooperation will be more difficult to achieve.

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Are You an Introvert or
an Extrovert?

One of the basics of emotional intelligence is knowing whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert.

Extroverts tend to be more communicative. Further, they tend to be more emotionally open people. They are more inclined to voice their views as well as their likes and dislikes. However, extroverts have a bigger challenge when they’re negotiating. That’s because extroverts may lack the self-control and self-discipline negotiation requires.

On the other hand, introverts lean toward being more deliberate in their responses. In other words, they are more inclined to reflect, weigh, and consider before speaking.

What’s more, these are valuable skills in negotiations. The more prudent your communication, the less likely you are to give away your position by saying too much.

Play Your Cards Close to Your Vest in Negotiations

As a matter of fact, the last thing you want to do during a negotiation is make yourself vulnerable to the other party. This you can easily do by giving them more information that you need to, making your actions easier for them to guess.

Curb Your Competitive Nature

Regardless of your level of emotional intelligence, successful negotiations in business can be challenging. Therefore, it is important to learn to manage your need to win.

For example, when you’re engaged in a negotiation, do you feel internal pressure get a better deal than the one that was originally on the table? If so, learn not to let ego and greed get in your way.

This tendency can be particularly difficult to manage. Although business is all about winning and outperforming your competitors, many people lose out on good deals because their desire to win is so high.

This is why some businesses turn to experts for negotiation consulting. In this way, they train their staff on the best negotiation tactics.

Learn How to Deal with
Rejection

On the other hand, some inexperienced negotiators start with an offer that they know the other party can accept because they fear hearing the word “no.”

However, if you learn to open with a position that asks for what you want and yet is realistic, you will hear the word “no” a lot. It is part of the process, though, and you should expect it.

Keep the Dialogue Open

Whatever you do, learn to keep the dialogue open. When you do, the other party will be less likely to walk away. To do this, invite the other person to tell you how close they can come to your offer.

This keeps the conversation professional, rather than emotional. And it allows them to talk about your position as well as theirs.

Additionally, effective negotiation depends on recognizing and managing non-verbal cues. You’ll also need to learn how to sense personal and social biases. All of this comes with emotional intelligence.

Use these skills to develop trust, an essential element in communicating, especially with difficult people.

Emotional Intelligence Helps You to Build Trust

When it comes to emotional intelligence and influencing another person, we must understand how the other negotiator is perceiving us. We also need to understand how that perception matches with her or his wants, needs, and desires. This is essential to building trust, which is a necessary ingredient to any successful negotiation.

Emotional Intelligence
Can Help You Succeed at Life

Emotional intelligence can help you to succeed in negotiations. What’s more, it can also help you to succeed in life as well. That’s because negotiations are a fundamental aspect of learning to live with other human beings.

So cultivate your emotional intelligence, and learn to use it to your benefit. It will take you far in business—and in life.

Every business wants loyal customers. It doesn’t matter if yours is big or small, old or new, offline or online—this fact holds true. Fortunately, there are a number of low-effort methods for retaining your ecommerce customers.

Read on to find out more about turning one-time buyers into loyal customers in the ecommerce realm.

What Is
Ecommerce?

What is ecommerce? Shopify defines ecommerce as “the buying and selling of goods or services using the Internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions.”

Did you notice the part about transfer of data? in other words, ecommerce businesses can strategically use the data they collect from online shoppers to retarget and retain buyers.

How to Retain
and Retarget Your Ecommerce Customers

Therefore, without further ado, here’s how to keep ecommerce customers through retention and retargeting schemes.

Take
Advantage of Online Advertising

Targeted advertising is all the rage these days, and with good reason. Instead of merely buying ad space on a webpage or blog, which could be shown to anybody, you purchase the opportunity to remind specific users about your e-store.

For example, if a web user visits your store twice a day to view the same jean jacket, he or she will likely be shown an advertisement for that jacket on a third-party website through the use of cookies. This helps keep your ecommerce store top of mind. Moreover, it could motivate a purchase.

Harness the Power of Email Marketing

While social media is the talk of the town right now, you shouldn’t ignore the old standby—email marketing.

As a matter of fact, ecommerce email marketing has a reported ROI of $40 for every one dollar spent. Luckily, it’s easy to capture a customer’s email address. For example, just use email campaign subscription opt-ins or checkout forms.

However, don’t abuse this privilege. In other words, don’t send your ecommerce customers spam or other unwanted messages.

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If you want to harness the power of email marketing, there are a number of approaches you can take. The first is run-of-the-mill marketing announcements. These include store news, notices of upcoming sales, alerts regarding new product launches, and the like.

Get Personal
with Your Ecommerce Customers

The second type is personalized email messages. These should mention the shopper’s first name along with content specific to them. For instance, “Hey Jessica. Are you enjoying your new cookware? Find deep discounts on kitchen products in our clearance section!”

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The email starts by getting the buyer’s attention. Then it provides them recommendations based on their recent purchases. However, don’t get too specific. That’s because some of your ecommerce customers could find hyper-specific messages creepy.

Retarget Your
Ecommerce Customers

A third suggestion is to retarget shoppers who have inexplicably abandoned their carts before completing their orders. This doesn’t have to be a big to-do.

Instead, make it a gentle nudge reminding your customer about their pending order. For example: “Hi Tom. We noticed you had three items in your cart. Complete your order to avoid missing out on these exciting products. If you have any questions or need further assistance, see our contact page.”

A note like this one could make the difference between a successful sale and a missed opportunity.

Leverage Order Fulfillments for Retargeting Your Ecommerce Customers

Then again,
not every method of retargeting is digital. There are tactics to retarget
customers offline as well.

Consider your order fulfillments for a moment. A first-time buyer purchases something from your website and waits eagerly by their mailbox for its delivery. Once the package is in hand, she tears open the box and is delighted to see her merchandise.

She tosses the cardboard box into the recycling bin and forgets about your e-store. And this is despite the fact that she loves your product.

You just missed
an opportunity to retarget this customer.

How to Retarget This Customer

To retarget this customer, consider dropping limited-time coupon codes into the delivery box. For example, one could read, “30 percent off your next order. Good for 60 days.”

The idea is to offer the new buyer a personalized discount code that automatically reintroduces them into the ecommerce sales cycle within a short period of time following their first purchase. And since it’s a unique coupon code, you can track the efficacy of this program. Pretty clever, no?

Stay Front
and Center with Your Ecommerce Customers

As you can see, retargeting and retaining ecommerce customers is all about keeping your ecommerce website top of mind. This can be accomplished through digital advertising, email marketing, or even during the order fulfillment process.

Of course, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other methods out there. Therefore, feel free to experiment until you find what works best with your ecommerce customers.

Feature Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

70Trades is one of the most well-regarded trading platforms on the Internet.

You might wonder if it’s safe to trust any online trading platform. And, while it’s true that some are merely scams, 70Trades is set up to guide you safely through the intricacies of the forex market, as well as other markets.

What’s more, you can begin trading with 70Trades with only a minimal amount, and their customer service is second to none. While you’ll need to do the work of educating yourself about trading in foreign currencies or any other market, 70Trades is a platform that can help to demystify the process for you.

In this post, we focus on how 70Trades can help you learn about and navigate the various markets, including the forex market.

Start with a Demo Account

If you’ve never traded on an online market before, then 70Trades offers you the opportunity to start your trading with a demo account. This means you can begin making practice trades without putting up any money at all.

In this way, you can begin to educate yourself about the markets and start developing your own trading strategy. This will be important when you start trading for real.

In addition, 70Trades frequently offers contests for its clients as a part of the learning process. If you enter and play well, you could win. The prize is a premium that you can use when you’re ready to begin investing actual money. As a matter of fact, this premium could be your stepping stone to your first real income as a trader.

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With 70Trades You Don’t Have to Go It Alone

At 70Trades customers always have a professional on their side when they begin their trading adventures. What’s more, this state-of-the-art online trading platform gives you access to fast-paced news sources frequently updated by the world’s leading global trading agencies.

70Trades customers from all over the world, both newbies and expert traders alike, engage on a daily basis in the forex and other trading markets. That’s because once you have registered your account at 70Trades, you’ll have access not only to forex trading but also to CFD trading as well. In addition, you’ll also be able to explore the possibility of trading in futures and commodities markets, too.

Get a Free Bonus When You Register

At 70Trades, you’ll find only the latest trading platforms. Moreover, every transaction and every process is explained in easy-to-understand terms. Best of all, when you register, you’ll automatically be eligible for a free bonus that you can use in future trades.

Choose the Market You Wish to Focus On

When you register at 70Trades, you will have full freedom to choose from among various types of trading accounts. What’s more, you’ll enjoy an array of benefits at at 70Trades, including:

• Customer service 24 hours a day and 5 days a week
• User-friendly forex trading platform
• Multilingual support: English, Arabic, and Spanish
• Easy withdrawal process
• Online trading courses
• The latest news and updates about the various markets
• Professional analyses
• Training sessions for each level
• Webinars with investors from all around the world
• A reliable and secure brokerage service
• Scam-free trading services

70Trades Is Trusted by Customers All over the World

Have you been considering the possibility of jumping into trading on the forex market, the CFD market, the futures market, or the commodities market? Most likely, what has been stopping you is uncertainty about how to make your first move. If this is true for you, let 70Trades show you the way. Before long, you could be well on your way to becoming an expert trader in whatever market you choose.

Creating a balanced and fair schedule for your workforce might seem like a far-fetched dream. However, it is possible to make this a reality.

Having the perfect work schedule in place keeps you and your staff happy. Moreover, it boosts efficiency and profits at the same time. But how can you achieve such perfection? We’ve laid out the six tips you need to create employee-friendly workforce scheduling.

1. Be Accurate in Your Projections

When creating a schedule for your workforce, you need to anticipate the number of work hours your staff will need to complete the work that needs to be completed. Also, you need to take into account by when that work needs to be done.

Consider things like business growth, holiday peaks, and fluctuations in sales to adjust your staffing projections. Fine-tune the schedule as the situation changes.

2. Create Balance in Your Workforce

Make sure there is balance in the staff. For example, if you have a lot of new and inexperienced employees in your workforce, it can create stress on the staff and lead to unhappy customers. Therefore, make sure there are experienced staff on the schedule for each shift, along with supervisors, to keep the business running smoothly.

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3. Get It Done Ahead of Time

Your employees need time to review the schedule. Therefore, aim for completing each week’s schedule about two weeks in advance. This way, members of your workforce will have plenty of time to schedule their personal life around their work life.

Also, if extra hours become available, or the schedule needs to change for any reason, make sure everyone on your workforce is aware of those changes.

4. Know Who Your Employees Are

When you’re creating a schedule for your workforce, it is important to know your employees. For instance, a younger employee or college student might prefer night hours or a similar arrangement. On the other hand, parents likely appreciate nights off to be with their children. By creating a schedule that works for everyone, you will have happier employees. And that always translates to happier customers.

5. Make Shift Changes Easy for Your Workforce

Employees need an easy process for swapping shifts when they need to. Therefore, make sure you have clear procedures in place. This will help to avoid confusion. For instance, an employee handbook can help to easily outline the steps, such as clarifying who on the workforce needs to be informed about any changes. Also, it can let employees know how much time in advance they need to make their requests for changes to the schedule.

6. Use an Online Solution

To make scheduling easy, accurate, and quick to access, get the best employee scheduling app available. And that is Connecteam. With this easy-to-use app, you can create single, multiple, or team shifts. Or you can upload shifts in bulk with an Excel file.

Save time when you’re creating schedules for your workforce. Also, get more daily operations completed at the same time. How? Simply use Connecteam’s calendar view. It allows you drag-and-drop options, and you can easily copy the previous week’s shifts.

Does your team work recurring shifts? Or do you dispatch per jobs, clients, or projects? Whatever your scheduling needs are, you’re covered.

Plus, as soon as you publish a schedule, relevant employees receive a push notification that lets them know about it. Then, as a manager, you can see who viewed the schedule and who didn’t. Additionally, every time an employee clocks in or out, the software tags their GPS location. This helps to prevent buddy punching.

Connecteam is available for a fixed monthly price, with plans starting at $29 a month. If you need it, however, there’s a plan at $72 a month for up to 200 users. In other words, you don’t need to pay per user to benefit from all the features this workforce scheduling app has to offer. Start a free 21-day trial now.

Treat Your
Workforce Right with Employee-Friendly Scheduling

Create an enjoyable and friendly work environment by applying the six points we laid out above. All of this will lead to happier employees and therefore happier customers. And that is a real win-win.