Despite the global financial situation the costs of many essential are increasing, particularly anything connected to energy. Yes, energy costs are increasing alarmingly, leading many business owners to start to knock evermore frequently on the doors of their local Enigin Distributor.

At Enigin we supply cutting edge energy saving hardware and software through our global network of Distributors. The technology Enigin have developed and gathered together into their portfolio produce a fantastic return on investment, combat the increasing costs of energy and protects the bottom line but lowering energy demand.

Domestically more and more people are being careful of their energy use, more lights are being switched off when not needs, more insulation and weatherisation is taking place in residential areas, all to at least freeze the size of an energy bill and hopefully lower it.

It can make a big difference - hundreds of pounds or dollars can be saved on household energy bills and in the business sector a huge amount can be saved, protecting jobs and the future of companies.

One recent report stated that in a U.S. school simple measures would save the cost of over one teacher per-annum. If Enigin Plc’s solutions were implemented that saving would amount to many teachers wages - yes saving energy saves jobs, companies and money.

Why do I state that? Recently there has been criticism of some corporations “Greening” their PR, in other words claiming they are taking environmental action, when in fact they are just nodding towards sustainability to improve their image.

They will get caught out in one way or another - how? They will find they may have temporary PR success but it will soon become apparent that they are actually doing little in improving their energy efficiency or reducing their carbon footprint.

Their costs for energy will be rocketing - particularly with ever increasing power costs. They will find that they will no doubt be required by their national governments to produce their sustainability results in hard figures. If those figures do not show the savings required they will probably face a tax, fine or having to buy carbon credits.

At Enigin we provide businesses and organisations with our Eniscope Real-time and Analytics and Eniscope Renewable Energy monitoring systems - which provide control over the amount of energy being used but also produce graphic reports that all can see of what energy is being used, save and generated.

Using Enigin Plc’s Eniscope systems provide genuine proof of what a corporation, small business or public organisation is actually doing, true Green PR with verifiable real-time energy use/saving data.

There is a lot of hype surround Social Media, it is vital to use it but make sure you don’t lose focus. For instance, you cannot have social media goals. It’s like having copy machine goals. The copy machine is a business tool, and if you need it, it’s there to help you meet one of your business goals. Treat social media the same way.

So here is the fourth and last of the lies Enigin will reveal to you.

Lie 4: With social media you can get people to do [fill in the blank]

Social media is about being nice. The people who are best at meeting their goals through social media are the most generous as well. When you use social media, give way more than you get. And remember that giving something that requires someone to do something for you (Download my book! Test out my free software!) is not giving.

Ask people how you can help them. Read enough about someone to understand what they need and then surprise them. Be interesting without expecting anything in return. You could think of social media as its own economy: Interestingness is the currency; kindness is the way that currency is transported.

There is a lot of hype surround Social Media, it is vital to use it but make sure you don’t lose focus. For instance, you cannot have social media goals. It’s like having copy machine goals. The copy machine is a business tool, and if you need it, it’s there to help you meet one of your business goals. Treat social media the same way.

So here is the third of four lies Enigin will reveal to you.

Lie 3: Blogs are personal journals.

A personal blog is a record of what you’re thinking, and that record will represent you online, as a high-ranking search result when someone googles you or your company. So stop using your blog as a diary.
Use a blog as an intellectual exercise to force you into thinking in a disciplined way about things that interest you (or your company). The blogosphere is a cocktail party for the intelligentsia. Make sure you are a part of that so that you can help shape ideas as they grow. There’s no better tool for PR than wielding influence as a blogger.

CEOs from companies like Zappos and Fog Creek Software are well known for leveraging their personal blogs to create the core messages of the company brand.

There is a lot of hype surround Social Media, it is vital to use it but make sure you don’t lose focus. For instance, you cannot have social media goals. It’s like having copy machine goals. The copy machine is a business tool, and if you need it, it’s there to help you meet one of your business goals. Treat social media the same way.

So here is the second of four lies Enigin will reveal to you.

Lie 2: Twitter is for conversation.

Twitter is an index of people with whom you might want to talk. It’s a great index — you can search by topic to find out who is interested in what, and then talk to them about mutually interesting topics. It used to be that you’d have to suffer through endlessly boring events at conferences striking up conversation to find the people to talk to later. Twitter makes that conference drudgery superfluous; you can talk to anyone you want, by topic or specialty, super fast.

The problem with using Twitter for conversation is that you’re going to need way more than 140 characters to make a genuine connection. So Twitter is great for finding people who have similar ideas, and for keeping track of them in a high-level way.

But you still need to go elsewhere — offline or online — to solidify the relationship to the point where you would actually care about each other in the way a solid network connection does, but Twitter is a good start.

There is a lot of hype surround Social Media, it is vital to use it but make sure you don’t lose focus. For instance, you cannot have social media goals. It’s like having copy machine goals. The copy machine is a business tool, and if you need it, it’s there to help you meet one of your business goals. Treat social media the same way.

So here is the first of four lies Enigin will reveal to you.

The best way to understand which tools will help meet which goals is to cut through the rubbish that the buzz is built on. Figure out who is really using social media to meet their goals, and how they are doing it.

Lie 1: LinkedIn is for networking.

Networking should be at the forefront of every entrepreneur’s mind. Research from the Darden School of Business shows that startups are most likely to succeed when the founder is great at networking. But

LinkedIn isn’t going to help you on that front.

LinkedIn is for displaying your network, not building it. For example, you can go on LinkedIn and find out that I’m really well connected. But most of you already know I’m well connected — I’m a print journalist, blogger, and startup founder, which are all very network-intensive jobs. Which means I didn’t build my network via LinkedIn networking tools. I built it offline.

Networks are built on relationships, which grow from conversation. LinkedIn is not for conversations. So you need to go somewhere else to build your network, and then when it’s big, display it on LinkedIn so you’ll look great.

The incivility of others can have an ongoing impact, hence at Enigin we have a policy that promotes a family feeling amongst our employees and those we deal with, such as Enigin Partners and Enigin Distributors.

New research from Baylor University shows that work stress-and the inability to leave work problems at the office, where they belong-has a more detrimental impact than we might have expected.

A co-worker’s rudeness can have a great impact on relationships far beyond the workplace, according to a Baylor University study published online in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. Findings suggest that stress created by incivility can be so intense that, at the end of the day, it is taken home by the worker and impacts the well-being of the worker’s family and partner, who in turn takes the stress to his/her workplace.

“Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress, negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences, which then affects more than their family life - it also creates problems for the partner’s life at work,” said Merideth J. Ferguson, Ph.D., assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business and study author.

“This research underlines the importance of stopping incivility before it starts so that the ripple effect of incivility does not impact the employee’s family and potentially inflict further damage beyond the workplace where the incivility took place and cross over into the workplace of the partner,” she said.

In addition, since the employee comes home more stressed and distracted, the partner is likely to pick up more of the family responsibilities, and those demands may interfere with the partner’s work life. The study also found that such stress also significantly affected the worker’s and the partner’s marital satisfaction.

The study included 190 workers and their partners. Workers were employed full time, had co-workers and had an employed partner who agreed to complete an online survey. After completing the survey, workers were asked to have their partners complete a separate survey. The combined responses from the initial contact and the partner constituted one complete response in the database. Approximately 57 percent of the employee sample was male with an average age of 36, while 43 percent of the partner sample was male with an average age of 35. Of these couples, 75 percent had children living with them.

“Unlike the study of incivility’s effects at work, the study of its impact on the family is in its infancy. However, these findings emphasize the notion that organizations must realize the far-reaching effects of co-worker incivility and its impact on employees and their families,” Ferguson said.

“One approach to prevent this stress might be to encourage workers to seek support through their organization’s employee assistance program or other resources such as counseling or stress management so that tactics or mechanisms for buffering the effect of incivility’s stress on the family can be identified,” she said.

I don’t mean they deliberately refuse to here the sounds coming out of your mouth, but when they hear and respond but do not get what your saying because they do not understand the import of your words.

They may agree whole heartedly with your sentiments but just do not apply it to themselves or their situation.

This can be the case when you try to tell a business owner about energy efficiency, which one of our core concerns at Enigin.

The business owner can agree that CO2 emissions need to be reduced for the future of the environment, he wants his kids future to be secure - but he actually thinks everyone else should do something about it, not him. His concern, he will confess, has got to be the short term survival and success of his business.

In a conversation like this you will begin to grab more attention when you start to speak about the savings to be made financially through reducing energy use - if you mention that saving money on utility bills actually goes, or at least stays, ont he bottom line, the profit, you get even more interest.

Often though more is needed to really get that listening ear, because if you are not careful they will switch off and think it is great but again not something they can deal with at this moment in time.

Which is why people working in the energy saving business need to learn good sales skills, to learn how push the right buttons for a business manager to want to save energy and then gain a commitment to act if you can show good savings can be made on energy and hence financially.

It is a case of getting the voice and language that they will listen to - remember listening is different to hearing, listening means paying attention - and if you want them to make application of what you are telling them you need to reach their heart, and for business owners that is usually their bank balance.

So find your energy saving voice and make a success of your Enigin energy saving business.

Back in the 70s people were becoming evermore environmentally aware, but apart from worries for our own health through breathing in the smog in the major cities, we were little worried about the future. Suddenly concerns about pollution and its longer term affects grew.

Rain forest depletion came to the fore, receding ice-caps and glaciers began to get our attention, but little else happened for the majority.

In Europe the environmental movement began to get a head of steam with revelations about holes in the Ozone layer and the affects of CFCs. In the States the concerns were still on the fringe of main stream society, regarded as treehuggers and hippies!

The development of evidence of global warming, evolving in to the broader climate change concerns, despite efforts of some to treat it with disdain started to come to the fore further afield than Europe.

In Asia more and more delicate environments began to suffer the consequences of climate change with rising sea levels and extreme weather - still most of the major Asian states seemed to ignore the problem - we have seen this week how China want to raise awareness of energy efficiency and climate change.

I remember talking to Enigin Distributor’s from Malaysia about a year ago and they stated then that climate change was just being heard about in their country - previously it was unknown to most of the populace, although many coastal Malaysian inhabitants were suffering.

Now news is released regularly on how Malaysia, and most other Asian states, is not only raising awareness but taking serious measures to combat harmful emissions through energy efficiency.

China, so much the center of concerns over combating climate change, is very much leading the way by taking serious action and upping the ante as far as energy efficiency measures are concerned, they still have a lot to do, but at least they are doing it. India, too, has recently been prominent in making great strides in combating climate change.

The only place where the issue of climate change remained very much on the debating table as to whether something should be done was in the most advanced country of the world, the United States.

In the past decade they certainly had major figures fighting for action, which elsewhere would have swung the balance for most people, but it very much became a political hot potato and that has held up the progress they could have made.

Fortunately under the latest administration great strides have been taken and above all there is great optimism as America’s young seem to be far more aware of what is happening to their environment, and their futures and are keen to act.

The recent proposal in the American Power act has had to be watered down but events happent hat can begin to produce a sea change - in this case it happened at sea, or rather under it.

The BP oil well leak in the Gulf of Mexico has added to President Barak Obama’s wish to evolve the State’s energy environment - it has focused the consciousness of Americans, it has obliquely made people think about energy use and their reliance on fossil fuels.

The environmental impact in the Gulf of Mexico will be great, it is real and it is on the U.S.’s news channels everyday and strangely I hope this will allow main street America to start to consider energy efficiency seriously and as something that has to be acted upon, then indirectly reducing CO2 emissions and combating climate change.

Hence, through fossil fuels a major environmental disaster has struck not only wildlife but the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people, mirroring in miniature the results of climate change. Although a disaster through the effects of the oil spill the whisper is turning into a louder, more strident voice around the globe, notably in the U.S.

Here at Enigin we have been shouting for awhile, adding our voice to a growing chorus globally. We are delighted to see evermore concern for the future of the planet and wish to see energy saving become a greater concern for all governments.

Dean Schantz of Corporate Visions, reckons one of the most common reasons that sales professionals fail to turn prospects into customers is a weak or non-existent “field message”.

Your field message is a vital sales tool.  What does this tool do, a veritable swiss army knife of a tool at that:

• Your elevator pitch — a conversational technique that sounds out a chance encounter to see whether that person you met is a potential prospect.
• Your cold calling script — a telephone technique to engage a lead in a conversation in order to determine whether or not they’re a qualified lead and, if so, move the sale forward.

Elevator pitches and cold-calling scripts are used at the very beginning of a sales cycle.  Field messages are used when you have already qualified the lead and are already involved in the sale.  (That’s why they’re called “field messages” — you use them when you’re in the field.)

For example, suppose you’ve started developing an opportunity with a qualified lead and that lead invites you to speak with his boss.  The field message is a clean and clear summary of why somebody would be interested in buying from you and your firm.

Novice sales pros often try to use the corporate marketing message for this purpose, but that almost never works because marketing messages are almost always ineffective because they’re written by people who have no experience selling.

Schantz says that an effective field message always contains five elements:

• It communicates what’s unique about the offering. If the role that your firm plays could be played by any of your competitors, your sales message is only selling your product category.
• It communicates why talking to the sales pro is of value. If the sales message would work with any sales rep, there’s no particular reason to buy from you rather than the other guy.
• It speaks to the customer’s concerns. No matter how compelling your story, if the prospect isn’t at the center of it, the prospect isn’t going to care about the message.
• It contains a “defend-able quantitative.” Your sales message must be backed up with a verifiable fact that buttresses any claims that you make.
• It is memorable in some way. You can’t just trot out a cookie-cutter replications of ideas and terms that the customer has heard hundreds of times before.

Needless to say, good field messages are relatively rare but sales professionals who have strong ones, find it relatively easy to convert leads into prospects.