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Bitrix24 Blogs
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We are continuing our interviews with cold calling and inside sales experts. Today we are talking to Ron LaVine of ColdCallingTraining.com who's been teaching others how to sell over the phone for over 17 years1. What is the biggest mistake or mistakes people do when they try cold calls?
They make a call to someone without doing any pre-call research and planning about the person, their company and industry.
2. Skype, Viber and others are replacing traditional phones quite rapidly. Are there any important differences to keep in mind when making cold calls via messengers vs regular phones?
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Getting better at what you do isn’t something that just happens; it’s something you make happen. By understanding and incorporating the principles of deliberate practice, you become more adept in your work. And practice makes it easier to slip into the state of flow: intensely focused and enjoyable work.
What Is Deliberate Practice?Deliberate practice is a term coined by psychology professor Anders Ericsson, and it refers to the habit of consciously putting planned time and effort into building your skills. The essential elements of deliberate practice, according to Ericsson, include, “specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction.” (Source: http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Excellence-Acquisition-Performance/dp/0805822321)
In other words, deliberate practice is not about working more or even working harder. It is a process:
- first, identifying the skills that are key for doing your work,
- then identifying the weak areas you have in those skills,
- then deliberately working on getting better at those weak areas in your key skills.
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We've added two more comparison charts, one for using Bitrix24 as free Salesforce alternative and another one as free Podio alternative.
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Bitrix24 partner Anton Dolganin has added a free Form Constructor app to Bitrix24 marketplace. After you install the app, you will be able to create forms for your website or social media page that automatically import data into your Bitrix24 CRM. The only requirement is ability to insert js-code into the web page where the form has to be located.
Here’s how it works.
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Yes, you can use Bitrix24 as free Trello alternative. See the feature comparison chart for details.
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Working on-the-go can be more of a hassle than a help if you don’t get savvy about mobile productivity.Mobile Productivity Don'ts
Don’t try to make mobile work like office work.
You simply can’t work mobile the same way you do at home or in the office. You don’t have the desk space, the elbow room, and sometimes you don’t even have the wifi or the power outlet. Instead of trying to make mobile productivity conform to your office expectations, embrace the challenge of working lean. Save the bulky, complex work for office time. Focus on what you can do quickly. Let go of the need to get everything set up the way you like it. If you spend much time “setting up” a home away from home, you’ll barely get any work done before you get interrupted or realize it’s time to board your flight.
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Note - this article has been originally written for TheNextWeb.
PR is hard. And expensive. Most of the time, you get nothing out of it. And when your company finally is mentioned in an article, even in a big publication, the results can be disappointing. Like that time when we got a whooping 169 visitors after getting into ZDNet.
Over the past two years, I’ve made a lot of PR mistakes. I’ve also got Bitrix24 into Forbes, VentureBeat, ReadWrite, PCWorld, PCMag, TechRepublic, CIO, ITWorld and 200+ other tech publications. I’ve learned that what you do with the article AFTER it’s published is frequently a lot more important than what do you before. And I am happy to share my insights with you.1. Pay for LinkedIn Inmail.
LinkedIn Inmail is the cheapest and most effective way to pitch journalists. My account cost me $100 a month and at least 50% of all mentions of Bitrix24 in the press are results of LinkedIn pitches. The most amazing thing about LinkedIn is that once you find one or two journalists, their network will actually show you who else to contact –editors in the same or other publications. It saves you a lot of time. Also with Inmail the results are guaranteed, you pay only for those messages that got read by their recipients.
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Ideas are worthless unless implemented. To make the most of those creative brains on your small team, you can’t have a brainstorming session and leave it at that. You need to have a system in place to manage ideas from the initial burst of insight to complete execution.
The Three Stages of Idea Management
There are three essential stages in idea management:
Stage 1: Capture/Input Stage 2: Feedback/Analysis Stage 3: Decision/Action
All three stages are necessary. With a smaller team, you can move more quickly from one to another, but you still need to work in the right order to manage ideas effectively.Stage 1: Effective Collection
The best ideas are often the ones that sound a little crazy. Sadly, those are the ideas we are most likely to reject because they sound, well, a little crazy. It’s important to create a truly open space where all of the ideas can come out and introduce themselves. Welcome all ideas equally in order to keep getting a lot of ideas. Quantity produces quality; let your team members know that all of their ideas are welcome. The more the better. It’s a lot like panning for gold: you have to sift through a good bit of silt to find that nugget.
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Cornelius Fichtner is a PMP, CSM and noted project management expert. Since 2005 he has interviewed over 150 project managers from around the world on The Project Management Podcast, with topics covering all areas of project management like methodologies, PMOs, earned value, project leadership, Agile, certifications and many more. The interviews are available for free at www.pm-podcast.com . We asked Cornelius to share his insights on what's currently going on with project management.Project management world has been radically changing with socialization and consumerization trends. Asana grew out of Facebook in a way and is catering to that very same audience. Bitrix24 is popular in PM community because it combines project management with social collaboration. Trello monetizes through stickers, and so on. What do you make of this trend and what does it mean for 'old school' solutions, like Basecamp or MS Projects?
This trend can mean only one thing: The 'old school' tools like Basecamp and MS Project will start developing and integrating social collaboration in their offerings. In fact, we have to say that they will add "even more social collaboration into their tools" because these companies have seen the trend and have responded by adding social features for some time now. Asana, Bitrix and Trello on the other hand were developed with the social crowd in mind. It is at their core. But they are the newcomers in the field of project management and collaboration software. And they do not (yet) have the large customer and user base that many of the "old school" tools have. So the question really shouldn't be "what does the trend for social collaboration mean for the 'old school' tools", but instead the question has to be "Will the newcomers have enough 'staying power' once everyone is offering social features in their project management software"?
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Is email dead? The answer is still being debated. But one thing is certain: While ESNs (enterprise social networks) are probably not going to completely eradicate email usage, they are fast changing the way people in the workplace communicate, share ideas and collaborate. Here are three ways ESNs are better than email:
1. ESNs increase work efficiency and foster better knowledge sharing.
If you’ve experienced working for a company without a knowledge management system in place, email may sometimes work like this: If John needs information he thinks Ellen has, he emails her, to which Ellen replies – if John types in the correct email address and the email doesn’t get trapped in the spam filter, that is. If Ellen unfortunately doesn’t have the information he needs, John sends an email blast to his department’s distribution list. If nobody in the list can help John, he emails another department. If that department can’t offer anything helpful, on and on goes the quest for the missing information. In the event one of John’s emails finally finds its way into the responsible person’s inbox, there’s no guarantee that John will get an immediate response, particularly if the said recipient still needs to weed through 3,108 emails that include invitations from lunch buddies and discussions about the most recent Game of Thrones episode that are in no way tied to work. (Yes, email abuse does happen.) The scenario may seem a little extreme, if not depressing, but it’s not too far removed from reality, either. One good thing about enterprise social networks is that threaded conversations are visible to participants, and people who can’t directly help can tag or invite those they think can, quickly finding the experts and making knowledge sharing more effective. Plus, any time the same question or issue crops up, discussions are archived for review.
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Calendar management is an essential skill for productive teams. Are your team members using their calendars effectively?Create a Single Access Point
Multiple calendars make it easy to overlook events and deadlines. A single access point helps you to see everything you have ahead. Seeing all of your responsibilities, events, projects, due dates, and scheduled activities in one place enables you to avoid the dangerous practice of overbooking yourself. If you have multiple calendars for family, personal life, team projects, and your work schedule, do what it takes to get them all funneled into one, single-access place so you can see the big picture.
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Keith Burton on why email will never die, how to turn employees into company ambassadors and what happens when millennials grow up to become CEOs.
Dmitry Davydov 24 July 2014Over the past 20 years, Keith Burton has been the leading industry practitioner in employee communication and change management. As partner at Brunswick Group, Keith leads a global group of counselors within The Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG) who are focused exclusively on improving organizational performance by building employee trust, improving internal communication and affecting overall change at many of the world’s leading corporations. We talked to Keith about what internal communications professionals can do to improve employee engagement and collaboration inside their companies.Let’s start with the beginning – employee onboarding. What resources should internal communication and HR specialists make available to new hires in order to speed up onboarding process?
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How Aspirational Meetings Boost Team Productivity - Interview With Chester Elton
Dmitry Davydov 23 July 2014We continue our series of interviews with team productivity experts. Today we talked to Chester Elton, one of world's top experts on employee motivation and change management, and the author of All In, The Carrot Principle and The Orange Revolution.We see that simple things like replacing emails with group chat or private social network can significantly increase team productivity. What other simple, cheap and quick to implement things can companies do to receive immediate and noticeable productivity boost?
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Neen James is a high energy, Aussie leadership expert focused on productivity who delivers engaging programs that have educated, and entertained audiences with real-world strategies that apply in all roles at work and home. The author of Folding Time™ and Secrets of Super Productivity, Neen also provides one-on-one mentoring to leaders. We talked to Neen about team productivity strategies that work.
We see that simple things like replacing emails with group chat or private social network can significantly increase team productivity. What other simple, cheap and quick to implement things can companies do to receive immediate and noticeable productivity boost?
Use the phone no one does that anymore! A phone call can save multiple emails and meetings. Leverage social media tools and text messaging. It keeps conversations short and targeted.
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So you are planning to launch a company intranet or want to replace your fossilized SharePoint portal. There are more than 30 intranet vendors to choose from and you are lost. After all, intranets aren't cheap and you don't want to make a mistake. Don’t worry, this intranet evaluation checklist will help narrow down your intranet choices to only the best solutions:1. Cloud AND self-hosted.
You ONLY want solution that gives you these two choices and most vendors do. Cloud-based intranet services are usually very inexpensive and require no involvement from intranet developers who charge a pretty penny. That’s a plus. However, cloud intranets have few customization options and some, like Yammer, are known to have regular and prolonged outages. You want to have an option to migrate to cloud (if your intranet budget is slashed) or go from cloud to server (if you need customization or for compliance in your industry) any time you want to. Stay away from vendors wh ere you have only one choice.
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