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Wednesday 5 February 2014

Are Twitter and Facebook eroding your salespeople's abilities to THINK?


How many boxes  of the five boxes would you tick for your team’s sales role?

[]             Do your salespeople need to set up personal and company credibility with clients for the purpose of realising benefits from the relationship?

[]             Are they required to effectively connect with clients in conversation and embark on the process of qualification, with the objective of gaining an understanding of the client’s needs?

[]             Do they need to generate initial interest from the client in your application, products or service and start the process of building rapport?

[]             Do they need to work in a structured way, with clear objectives, plans and reports in order to achieve goals and beat targets?

[]             When create value for the client will they need to negotiate and gain commitment?

 More than 2 ticks then they will need to develop both their analytic and reflective thinking skills with rigour. As likely as not,  your team's sales role could well be more complex than the 5 areas mentioned above.

The use of social networking sites through the plethora of multi device learning devices such as smart phones and tablets has been fantastic.

However my love of tech solutions for certain sales training  got a jolt today.

Daily Mail 5th Feb 2014 story on erosion of THINKING
Fellow  Learning Technophiles perhaps  we need to heed a warning low quality analytic learning that the rise of mutli-device learning using social networks are endangering.

Daily Mail  5th Feb 2014 page 5 Science Correspondent Fiona MacRae commented on some published work by Edinburgh University’s  Dr. Iyad Rahwan on a study of 20 people  in the way information is shared on social networking  sites Twitter and Facebook .

It appears that users are finding it more difficult to think analytically.

The study involved using three trick questions which despite being presented repeatedly,  participants tended to stick to their original answers and only got them right 25% of the time.
The same set of questions was show to a group  who were allowed to see each other’s responses. On the first quest they realised  someone else had the correct answer and changed their answer.

But on the second and third question they did no better than the original group despite being able to share information.

Dr Rahwan said this suggests the volunteers were copying each other without any real thought.

He added that there is danger that the rise of information sharing website such as Twitter and Facebook will makes us rely more and  more on the opinion of others, eroding our ability to think critically and making us unwilling to reflect. 


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Are you after some material to engage the ' little grey cells' ? (as Hercules Poirot might say )



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