Joan Charles explains the importance of rediscovering our intuitive skills and looks at a case history where intuition boosted sales.
In prehistory we relied upon our intuition to survive. We needed it to produce food, be healers, and most importantly, be aware of danger. As we evolved, we learned to harness our surroundings to our will. We discovered fire and agriculture. In addition, we developed more and more tools to aid our survival.
In the twenty-first century, survival is still the name of the game. That’s not only in our personal lives but also in business, where we need at all costs, to gain an advantage over our competition. If we don’t hone our intuitive skills, we will fail to seize an opportunity to create a critical competitive edge.
Rediscovering intuition
These days our basic intuition is sublimated to linear thinking and, more recently, to technology. However, we need to tap into this skill and make it work for us, both personally and in business. We may have lost it along the way but our intuitive armoury is easily re-learned. Intuition can give us the same edge as fire did to our ancestors. Although we may not be aware of it, we use intuition all the time. We need to realise and utilise this. In fact, acknowledging your intuition will allow you to take a giant leap forward.
American companies have been tapping into this skill for at least the last 25 years, with amazing results. Companies like Disney, Oracle and General Motors have all benefited in the past from its use. Weston Agor was ahead of his time in taking intuition to some of these companies and benchmarking the differences it made.
For the last ten years, I have brought the benefit of the art of intuition to companies in the UK. I have facilitated their employees in learning how to develop and hone this skill to help them add value to the bottom line. With the use of creative tools and techniques, the results achieved have been significant.
By using intuition to access the hidden, or unconscious, elements of any situation, you can discover new, and highly effective, paths of action that can heighten personal achievement and business success.
Case History: Application of Intuition Skills Development in Sales
In 2007, Joan Murphy won a contract with a well-established creative media company. They wanted to take business to the next level, in terms of maximising revenue. Her brief was to analyse the whole business, and decide where the development of intuitive skills could have a positive impact.
She identified the sales team as a primary target. It was quite clear to Joan that the salespeople were working within their own comfort zones. As a result, their work-related behaviours tended to fall into set patterns that they hit again and again. All of these had a negative impact on them and on sales.
For example, one salesperson would regularly panic when he felt that new proposals were mounting up. At the same time, his regular sales work had to be completed. Consequently, he felt overloaded and overwhelmed.
A second salesperson had a very positive mindset. However, every so often, he would hit his wall, which was: “What if I can’t do this?” His fear would mount to the extent that he would plan, usually subconsciously, an exit route from the company.
A third employee, as a salesperson, had a major problem: he did not want to sell. He tended to hide under regular client accounts and paperwork, offering all sorts of excuses for not bringing in new sales.
Using intuition to boost sales and team morale
So, here are three different characters with their own issues who were stuck in their present positions. They were in great need of direction. Having identified the underlying issues, Joan moved to the next stage. This was developing in these three employees, and the entire sales force, an understanding of intuition and furnishing them with empowering tools that would give them the direction they wanted.
Through gaining an understanding of their own intuitive dimension, not only were they able to develop solutions for their own issues but they became better equipped to deliver appropriate messages to individual clients as well interpreting the messages that they were receiving in return.
Joan helped them to accept the consequences of their negative mode or lack of confidence and trust in their own abilities. She led them to an understanding of the power of intuition and that, when they released this power, they could create win-win situations. In the months following Joan’s intervention, sales increased massively.
As this case study shows, by not sharpening intuitive skills we fail to seize an opportunity to create a critical competitive edge.
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