Hello, I’m Gary Shotton and I’m here to encourage you in business and our major theme is “Inspiring Better Business”. And today I’m going to talk about “Don’t Talk Too Much”. This is kind of a lesson I have had a little trouble learning myself. You’ll know if I hear somebody’s truthful with you they’re going to share their mistakes along with their successes and I will tell you that I am one that has many times, “talk too much”. I’m not talking about just rambling on and on and on. But sometimes I will get into a discussion, or maybe be upset with somebody a little bit, or maybe drive out a point, and I’ll just carry that a little too far. I should not have talked quite so much. We’re all probably have a few little issues and so we’re again we’re not perfect on this. But I want to just give you some examples of how someone that can’t control their communications, especially with their customers will get themselves into trouble. And one thought reminds me back many years ago when I had a Salesman and I’m moving in storage business. I can remember this older couple coming in and frankly they were just ready to go ahead and make a deal and hires to move them. But my salesman was so bent on sharing his whole sales pitch he went from start to finish. He got them confused. He could have just easily stopped and listened to the. Listening is a big deal!! You shouldn’t be talking but about a third of the time you’re listening to the other person. And not talking so much that you can’t hear their needs. It’s a great tool in sales and marketing. You’ve got to be able to listen. And when you’re listening go right to the source, right to the point. Don’t be over explaining something to the point that it could confuse somebody. Now again, I have failed in this many times. I’m embarrassed to say that. I know of places and times and I might have made a sale or might have made a deal. And, I just taught myself right out of that. Well, there’s a place where it really comes into play that that in in dealing with my customer. And just recently I was talking with my customer and and we had talked over internally in the office. And we had determined that we should raise our prices with this customer, just slightly just in a bearable way as a part of a team. And we discussed it internally and says you know you don’t have to give a whole lot of reasons for raising your price. You can be most of the time sometimes I want to know that’s for sure. But, don’t over explain. Many times you can just say, “we have a rising cost of expenses and this is our new price that we need to be successful and continue servicing.” You don’t go into detail the material went up, and the price of labor went up, and the energy cost went up. Because pretty soon many people will start analyzing that and questioning your reasoning for why you gave them that increase. You know just give it to them. Now it’s not one shoe doesn’t fit all. I understand but many times that’s the case let’s talk about this recently we gave pay increases to virtually everyone in the company. We didn’t talk too much. We had a full evaluation we did communicate openly and there could be a time that you, for example, we need to dismiss somebody that’s not working well for you. I’m not a believer in just giving the whole, long list of the exiting plan. What you should have done better. You should have done this better. You should have done that better. You know, you’re too late for that. You should have been doing that months ahead of time, giving that information and letting them know how they could have improved. Their service to you as an employee at the point of exiting, that’s not a time to lay this all on them, and be critical, and tell them how they screwed up. And what was wrong with them. I would like more to say something like this, “you know, we’re just not compatible anymore and I think you would do better at another company”. And leave it at that. Oh, they’re going to want to know a little bit more. “No, we had a review six months ago and you can look back at that if you want but to be honest with you we think that you will do better at another company and we need to make this switch because we’re just not that compatible as employer-employee relations” and try to leave it at that. People will dig up, dig up things and over-analyze if you’re not careful. Well I want you to know that this idea of being willing to have accurate communication is vital. That’s one of the skill sets that I think is now being evaluated with employees hiring new people. It doesn’t have to be all verbal. I got an incident just yesterday or really just a day where I wanted to talk to this customer and have a meeting and I thought well I go ahead and create an email and try to express it through a short email my thoughts about something, and they I was totally misunderstood. And, I regret that I sent that e-mail. That’s a bad communications. I should have held that communications when I could have talked one-on-one or giving them a phone call or went visit them. It wasn’t that important but I was misunderstood. Because, when I put something in writing you can’t give the verbal emphasis that you might need to get your point across. You see, there’s a lot in communications and those that can learn to communicate accurately, concisely can be on point, stay on point They are going to succeed faster than the others. If somebody is really insecure, sometimes that’s a sign of insecurity, that they’re trying to just remember everything and actually share too much. Share way more that needs to be shared. There’s some things (we’re never talking about hiding something) we’re just saying that in order to make a good decision sometimes less is more. Well I hope these are helpful to you. I hope you enjoy these. I hope you’ll share these with others. We thank you for being a part of “Inspiring Better Business” you can find this is at IBBTalks.com. And please consider be a volunteer there, if you would. There’s several ways to do that we thank you for being a listener though. Thank You!!!!