Intellectual and emotional tools that truly create success

The world is inundated with sales tools: worksheets, playbooks, sales scripts, software, brochures, and so forth.But all of those sales tools put together are insignificant if you don't have the intellectual and emotional tools that truly create success.

Here are seven sales "tools" you need to develop:

1. Patience

If you're patient, you let customers decide at their own speed.  You realize that nobody ever got a plant to grow faster by pulling at the leaves of a seedling. If you lack patience, you'll be frustrated whenever things take longer than you'd like. Customers will sense your frustration and hesitate to buy.

2. Commitment

If you're truly committed to both your customer's success and your own success, you'll do whatever it takes (within legal and ethical bounds) to get the job done. You'll banish all thoughts of ever giving up. If you lack commitment, you'll consistently fail to follow through–and will often drop the ball at the worst possible moment.
                                                          

3. Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is contagious: If you're enthusiastic about yourself, your firm and your product, your customers will "pick up" your enthusiasm and believe in your ability to improve their lives.  If you lack enthusiasm, however, you'll always find yourself surrounded by naysayers and endless "objections.

4. Curiosity

Curiosity is essential to growth–and if you're growing as an individual and a professional, you'll spend time each day learning something new to better serve your customers. You'll read books, listen to audio training, take courses, and network with peers. If you're not growing, your ideas will become stale; your career will languish and your ability to compete will slowly drain away.

5. Courage

If you've got courage, you take the necessary risks to expand yourself and your business into new areas–even when you're facing enormous odds. You'll see setbacks as learning opportunities rather than failures.  But if you lack courage, you'll freeze up when things get weird, turning small failures into big ones.

6. Integrity

If you've got integrity, there's no disconnect between your stated purpose and your real motivations. Because there's no hidden agenda, customers sense the honesty and feel comfortable working with you. If you lack integrity, however, customers will have a nagging feeling that something is "not quite right"–and tend to balk rather than buy.

7. Flexibility

Life is all about change; nothing stays the same. If you've got flexibility, you can observe what's working and what's not and change your approach to match changing circumstances. If you lack flexibility, you'll pursue brittle strategies and tactics long after they've ceased to work.

How coding tricks are the secret sauce behind a great user experience.

You can take any user interface in the world, and whether it’s gorgeous and intuitive or ugly and clunky, there’s one unifying factor that will right pretty much any wrong: speed. Think about it. The load screen, the spinning beachball, the three-seconds of stutter before your click registers as a click--those are the worst experiences you’ve ever had with any user interface. And they’re all related to core responsiveness.
"These tricks give Instagram users a feeling of constant responsiveness."

This principle has led us to build faster and faster computers and faster and faster data networks, to cut the lag time behind multitasking and enable computers to wait on users rather than users on their computers. Almost everything on a modern computer happens instantly. It’s great. But what about mobile phones? How do you give this instantaneous experience when tethered to a shoddy 3G connection?

If there’s one company who could tell you, it’d be Instagram. And what do you know, Instagram’s co-founder Mike Krieger lifted the curtain on three of their backend (and UI) tricks that give the Instagram user a feeling of responsiveness, even when someone’s phone is trapped on a lousy connection. The ideas aren’t just clever; they’re so logical that you don’t need to be a coder to appreciate them:


Instagram Always Pretends To Work

What Instagram labels as “optimistic actions” really boil down to something far simpler: Always make it look like the service is working, even when it’s not. In your Instagram feed, this idea plays out to the “like” button. Have you noticed that whenever you click it, even deep down in a subway, that like button lights up? If your connection is broken, of course you can’t upload the bits of data to a central server to inform a friend that their photo of last night’s dinner was simply divine. But registering the action gives positive feedback to the user. It’s a lie, sure, but it’s a white lie. No one gets hurt banging their heads in frustration, and the like can always be uploaded later.

Loading Content Based On Importance, Not Order
When you open Instagram, you’ll spot content downloading incessantly. Even still, how can a spotty connection build a list of all your friends’ photos instantaneously? Instagram loads content, not by chronological order, but by importance. If a lot of friends have liked something, that photo will be loaded before a more recent shot by the same person that no one cared about. A user will eventually want the option to see everything, but in a pinch, they’ll have access to the content most important to everyone they know. It keeps the social service social.

Anticipating The User’s Every Move
Now if there’s any single slap-yourself-in-the-head lesson to be learned from Instagram, it’s that there’s no reason a computer should ever be waiting for the user to hit “submit” to start the data upload process. Instagram hides data transfers in screens that most people would call stagnant. For instance, when you’re captioning a photo for upload, Instagram will already be pulling potential stores and restaurants that match your GPS location for checking in, and they’ll have been uploading the photo itself (though not sharing it) since you selected a filter. This cuts down, or even eliminates, all possible lag time on the next few screens that the user visits. Just because you need a few moments to think of a funny caption doesn’t mean that your cell phone can’t tackle a few other jobs while it waits.

It just goes to show, still waters run deep. The simpler a UI feels on the surface, the more engineers that are swimming underneath, keeping it all afloat.