A recent Danish study showed that 62% of all danish employees have felt stressed at work in the last month and 15% have had to report in sick at some point because of stress. The Danish ministry of work states that up to a quarter of all absenteeism is due to stress.

Stress is a serious problem that costs businesses a lot of money and, even worse, can ruin employees’ lives. However, the typical solutions used to combat stress don’t work – in fact they often make matters worse.

The typical solution is, of course, the stress management training. Typical content includes:

• What is stress
• Symptoms of stress
• Health implications of stress
• How to fight stress

This will typically be presented by a stress consultant. In Denmark that consultant may even come from the unfortunately named Center for Stress (shouldn’t that be against stress?).

Are you getting it? Stress, stress, stress, stress and more stress. If I wasn’t stressed before, I certainly will be now. In fact, one study indicated that employees who attend stress management training become more stressed.

You know how people react when they read about some exotic disease? Suddenly they’re convinced they have all the symptoms and that they in fact suffer from dengue fever. When presented with a long list of symptons of stress, people can easily convince themselves that “Wow I must be really stressed too.”

What’s needed is a fundamental shift in approach – you do not fight stress by talking about stress. that just stresses people more. You fight stress by talking about peace and calm instead. That’s the solution to stress: To give employees tools to stay calm in a busy work environment.

The Chief Happiness Officer’s three simple steps to calm at work

Forget about stress for a moment. What can you do to stay calm even when things are moving fast at work? Here are three simple steps that anyone in any position can use.

Examine when you stay calm
Examine previous situations at work where you were busy but calm. What happened? What allowed you to stay calm? How can you use this in future busy situations?

Stop and feel
Once a day, take five minutes to stop what you’re doing and notice how you’re doing. The greatest danger is stealth stress, where you get a little more stressed day by day but never notice it because it sneaks up on you in small increments.

The antidote: Take five minutes every day to do the following:

1. Go to a place where there are no phones, computers and interruptions. The bathroom works in a pinch.
2. Sit down, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. Take deep, slow breaths.
3. Pull back your attention from wherever it was and focus on yourself.
4. Ask yourself the following questions:
   • What is my body feeling? Notice any good feeling or any tension or pain.
   • How am I feeling? Happy, sad, stressed, angry, energized, tired?
   • What am I thinking? What occupies your thoughts?

You don’t need to do anything about it while you’re sitting there. Don’t expect any solutions to come to you. Just sit there and notice what’s going on in your body, emotions and thoughts.

Enjoy your achievements
Appreciate the amount of work you do, and don’t berate yourself over the tasks you don’t manage. It’s a fact of work today, that there’s always more work. You will never clear your desk and if you do, more work will find you. So you must remember to feel good about the work you do and not beat yourself up over the tasks you haven’t yet finished.

These three tips can be used by anyone in any job. They take very little time and effort and can help employees keep their cool even in the busiest work environments. Try them out!

(sign from a Copenhagen shoe shop)

I got sick and tired of sales people at one point. There seems to be some unspoken agreement among them that all sales meetings must run like this:

1. Boring company presentation, including their org chart and last 5 years financial statements.
2. A pre-planned presentation of all their products, including some that could never, ever interest me.
3. 5 minutes at the end for them to try to figure out what I would like to buy. Which’ll be nothing.

There’s gotta be a better way! And there is. Sales meetings don’t have to be an unpleasant affair in which pushy salespeople use every trick in the book to convince reluctant customers to buy their stuff.

I developed a better format for The Happy at Work Project for two reasons:First of all, with our name and our products we were forced to come up with a way to make sales meetings fun, or we would have lost all credibility right there. (If you’ve never heard of us, we do workshops, presentations, conferences and board games to make people happy at work).

Secondly I’ve tried being the victim target potential customer of many traditional sales pitches, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of inflicting that experience on potential, unsuspecting customers.

When using the meeting format described below, I have repeatedly seen clients switch from a defensive, arms-crossed, you-can’t-trick-me-into-buying- nothing-buster posture to a relaxed, positive atmosphere where they’re asking me interested questions – rather than me trying to ram information down their throats. Simply speaking, sales meetings become fun.

Here’s how I do it.

1: You’re not there to sell

First of all, we don’t call them sales meetings, we call them customer meetings. This is not just semantics, the point truly isn’t selling – the point is to meet a potential customer, to learn about that customer and to let them learn about what you can offer.

You’re not there to sell – you’re there to help the customer make a wise decision (this idea is courtesy of my Iowan friend Mike Wagner). Of course you’re there in the first place because you believe in the quality of your products/services and you believe the customer needs what you can deliver. If this isn’t so, why did you approach this customer at all?

And that is the fundamental difference: Is selling a matter of salesman vs. customer or is it a matter of working together. Our meeting format creates a setting where seller and buyer work together to create value for both.

2: Frame the meeting

I very briefly introduce myself and my company, and then take a little time to frame the meeting.

Time: All our meetings are planned for a 1 hour duration, but I still always start by fixing the time frame, saying “I’d planned to finish no later than X o’clock. Is that OK?” Sometimes the customer will say, “That’s fine I have a meeting right after” and then I always offer to end our meeting 5 minutes early.

Content: Then I explain that in my experience, the meetings go better if I can spend some time asking about them first. I can talk for a long time about our products, but if I don’t know something about the customer, I may not say anything that’s relevant to them. Then I ask if that’s OK.

Agreeing to these things up front puts the customer in charge of the whole process. While you will of course be running the meeting, you do so with their full consent.

3: Ask a lot of good questions

This meeting is not about you. It’s about the customer. We have a list of good questions to ask, and the first question is always this: “What made you take time for this meeting?”

This is an amazing question, because it goes right to the root of why you’re talking to that customer. We’re all busy people, and there’s a reason this person has taken an hour out to talk to you. The entire point of the meeting is to find that reason. So why not ask up front?

Also, our last question “What benefits could your organization achieve, if people were happier at work???? is crucial, because right there, the customer will supply you with all the selling points. Substitute your own argument instead of “happier at work” here.

Asking questions is important, because successful customer meetings are the ones where the customer does most of the talking. Also, this means that whether or not the meeting results in a sale, you will still walk away with new knowledge.

4: Present your offerings on 1 (one) page

We then present one sheet of paper that describes our work and our products. Yes, that’s right, one single, solitary sheet.

At this point many customers are expecting (or dreading) a 20-slide corporate PowerPoint presentation, and they’re unfailingly relieved and happy when I pull out just this one piece of paper and explain our offerings based on that.

“But my products will never fit on one page” I hear you cry. Oh, yeah? Well if you can’t describe yourself and your products simply enough to fit on one page, then you’re not ready to talk to potential customers yet. They deserve that level of clarity and simplicity.

Our presentation focuses on what we do, i.e. the actual products and services we can deliver – and very little on who we are. The paper also contains a short description of how we work and some (great) customer quotes.

Of course, having just learned a lot about the customer, it’s easy for met to connect our offerings to their business and to focus more on products they can use. It becomes a targeted presentation, tailored to that specific customer – and boy, do they ever appreciate that.

Remember to constantly stop and ask the customer “How does that sound?” or similar. Don’t go into your entire spiel and then ask at the end. You might ask after every product: “How could you apply this in your business?”

5: Wrap up the meeting

We always end the meeting a few minutes before the agreed time. This shows respect for the customer’s time, and avoids that fidgety few minutes at the end where the customer is subconsciously wondering whether the meeting will end in time for her to make her next meeting/appointment.

There seems to be an unstated belief among sales people that long meetings = good meetings. That the longer you can keep the meeting going, the more interested the customer must be. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

At the end of the meeting, we ask:
“How did you like the meeting? Did you get all the information you need????
“Would you like to be added to our mailing list so you get our newsletter????
“How would you like me to follow up on the meeting? Should I call you in X weeks????

This ensures customer commitment on whatever follow-up we decide on.

Step 2 takes just a couple of minutes, while step 3 (asking about the customer) should take about 25 minutes of a one hour meeting. You then have 20 minutes to present your products and let the customer ask questions about them and 5 minutes to end the meeting.

If you find yourself dreading sales meetings or find yourself uncomfortable in a traditional salesman role, give this method a shot. Not only will you enjoy meeting customers this way – you’ll also sell more.

If you liked this post I’m pretty sure you’ll also like these:

• Selling by giving
• Top 5 business maxims that need to go Part I – Part II