Commodities

New Copper ETFs Are In Demand

Copper ETFs are set to be the next big thing in commodities trading. Latest estimate says that China will triple its consumption of copper to 20 million tons by 2020. China will account for 49% of world copper sales by then. With ETFs getting active, copper price is going to be bullish in the coming months. Base metals analysts have predicted that copper price might rise by 50% to $12,000 a metric ton in the next 12 months.

Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, and BlackRock are leading investors behind new Copper ETFs that would trade on leading stock exchanges like NYSE, while investors derive prices from LME copper index and comex copper futures.

There are already a few Copper ETFs listed across exchanges in the USA, like:

  • First Trust ISE Global Copper (NASDAQ: CU)
  • Global X Copper Miners ETF (NYSEArca: COPX)
  • iPath DJ-UBS Copper (NYSEArca: JJC)

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FAQ, Healthcare

Preventing Renal Kidney Problems When You Have Diabetes

One can get more information on renal kidney problems with the help of the content described below. The kidneys are a very important organ of the human body which is so essential that if they stop working, you will die.

As one of the most vital organs, you must take care of it. The kidneys can be infected by diseases if you don’t take the proper precautions. But what if you don’t know about the types and reasons of certain, specific diseases?

If you have diabetes, understand that diabetes can and will eventually cause renal kidney problems, and affects your kidney functions in a very big way.

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Sales Coaching

How to Spend Less Time and Get More Results for Your Sales Coaching

Kathy has just been promoted as Sales Manager of her team, and she just found that being a Sales Manager is quite different from being a Sales Person. More importantly, there seems to be tons of people issues that she would have to help resolve through coaching.

For instance, there’s Sam, who’s a new sales person and showed a lot of promise during his initial training with the company. When he went on his work, he also put in lots of effort. Still, after 3 months, there wasn’t any results generated.

Then there’s Susan, who’s one of the better sales persons in the team. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been producing much results lately. When asked about her performance, she replied that the customers just need a little longer time to make the decision this year..

And there’s Simon, whom had been in touch with a prospect for quite some time. He had seen their decision makers, technical buyers and even end-users. While responses were positive, there was no further progress in the customer’s buying process.

To make things worse, Kathy hadn’t even received much coaching from her former manager when she was a Sales Person, and hence don’t even have a role model to emulate when she needed to coach her team. The good news for Kathy is that coaching for Sales People is not as difficult or as daunting for newly on-boarded Sales Managers. The concepts are simple and easy to master, although it will require some practice to get the best results!

Where You Are, and Where You Want Your Team to Be

The approach that most Sales Managers take when coaching team members is that they tend to look at low-performance incidents sporadically and just give advice on how their team member needs to do to correct that behaviour. This action is what is known as “Corrective Feedback”, which could be part of coaching, but is inadequate to equate it with coaching.

To make coaching really deliver desired results, we can borrow concepts from the Six Thinking Hats to formulate an effective coaching strategy. Here are the first steps:

1. Blue Hat – What do you want your team member to become, and how you want to go about achieving this.

2. White Hat – What current information (e.g. sales results, prospecting effectiveness, selling prices etc.) do you have about your team member? What other information do you need so as to really understand where he/ she stands right now?

Conveying Your Coaching Message

Although coaching your sales team is really about what you want your team member to become, you will need that team member to agree to your goals and objectives for him or her. Coaching is a 2-way street, and hence if your “coachee” does not agree or buy-in to your goals, the coaching will fail.

As such you will need to communicate your Blue Hat with your team member clearly, and be open to feedback if there are any disagreements or modifications to your original plan.

During your coaching session, you will need to communicate the following:

1. Yellow Hat – Give affirmation on the strengths and positive contributions of the team member. Coaching is as much about helping team members to correct mistakes, as it is about helping them to strengthen or improve on their existing strengths. In any case, team members ALWAYS feel good when their bosses tell them something nice about them.

2. Black Hat – Let your team members understand which are the areas that need correction or improvement. One thing to be clear in such communication is to make sure the team member understand that you are not picking on their mistakes. Instead, they have to be clear that you are helping them achieve better results.

3. Green Hat – Instead of telling them what they need to do to get better results, invite and engage them to suggest creative suggestions to help improve their own performances. You will be surprised by the ingenuity of the suggested solutions, and best of all, since your team member suggested the solution, you will get the full commitment of that team member to implement the solution that he or she suggested!

4. Red Hat – At suitable intervals, find out how your team member feels whether he or she is OK to continue with the coaching, or if he or she is comfortable with the conversation between the two of you. If at any point of time your team member feels uncomfortable, that could be a sign that the coaching is moving in the wrong direction. You may then want to stop, and re-strategise for a different coaching session the next time.

Despite your best efforts, not all coaching will turn out in the way you envision it to be. But that’s OK. What is more important is that you adapt different coaching strategies to different team members based on their:

* Desired behaviours and performance;
* Current behaviours, traits and performance metrics; and
* Temperaments and communication styles of each individual.

Achieving Sustainable Results

While MOST sales managers agree and believe that training and coaching team members is very important for boosting the team’s performances, FEW actually took systematic steps to train or coach their team members.

The key word here is “systematic”. Coaching your team members, while very important, is usually NOT urgent. That is, if you don’t coach your team members today, nothing catastrophic is going to happen tomorrow. Hence, with the heavy workload and the number of more urgent matters to attend to, most sales managers keep on postponing the required coaching for their team members until it’s way too late.

Hence, to achieve sustainable results with your coaching, you will have to:

* Schedule the appointment with your team members and everybody will have to treat it as important and urgent as a key customer meeting;

* Put on your White Hat prior to the coaching session to gather as much information of your “coachee”, and also make a list of questions for the information that you would like to know;

* Put on your Blue Hat at the end of each coaching session to set mutually-agreed action plans on what behavioural changes that your “coachee” needs to make; and

* Listen to the feedback given by your “coachee” and determine what changes that you need to make too!

The steps to being an effective sales coach are simple. The difference between a good sales coach and a mediocre one boils down to: practice. Just like any new skill, the initial practice is going to be awkward. However, with more practice, you can be an expert sales coach real soon.

C.J. is the world-class sales force effectiveness (SFE) expert who have helped international companies achieve quantum improvements in sales profits in China and beyond. So far, c.j. Is the 1st and ONLY Asian sales force effectiveness expert to have been invited to speak at the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) International Convention. c.j. has helped:
• International hospitality chains such as InterContinental Hotels Group, Sofitel and the Ascott Group to onboard their newly promoted Directors of Sales to make the transition from sales people to high-performing sales team leaders
• Leading pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche and Merck to improve their senior managers’ leadership skills so as to excite their people to exceptional performance
• World-wide leaders in the construction market such as Philips Lighting, Saint-Gobain, Ingersoll Rand to develop competencies in their sales force so as to achieve quantum leaps in their sales results.

Prior to this, c.j. was Asia Marketing Manager for a Fortune 500 logistics company, as well as Corporate Training Manager for Ringier AG, Switzerland’s largest media group, in China, where he was responsible for sales team development, and helped increase the percentage of new hires to close their first sales within 2 months by 30%, as well as increase overall sales targets by more than 50%. Visit http://www.psycheselling.com/page4.html for more details.

c.j. is also a certified facilitator of Six Thinking Hats® and Why Should Anyone be Led by YOU TM training programmes

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/CJ_Ng/131282

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Sales Coaching

Increasing Sales by Reinforcing Progress

To get the biggest impact out of every coaching session you must commit yourself to reinforcing progress. Doing so will accelerate your salespeople’s development and increase sales.

You can’t fully measure the impact of a coaching session until the actions and commitments made during the session become a reality. Your job is to make sure that the skills and practices you discuss during the coaching sessions become a part of how your salespeople do their job. If you find your coaching sessions are return trips to the same problems, you are probably making one of five basic mistakes.

1. Failure to set up clear and specific expectations or not letting the salesperson know exactly what you want done differently.

2. Giving the salesperson too much to work on that he/she become overwhelmed.

3. Failing to develop the salesperson’s skills to perform the assigned tasks or responsibilities.

4. Failing to give a reward for doing the new behavior.

5. Failing to provide negative consequences for continuing to use the old behavior.

Helping salespeople learn and apply new skills requires regular and specific monitoring and reinforcement. To get what you expect you must inspect and reward the behavior you want. This requires a discipline and commitment to identifying the key behaviors that have the biggest impact on your people’s performance.

One point to keep in mind is that salespeople can’t develop a new behavior until they have performed it successfully and are rewarded for doing so. Major behavior changes require frequent successes and considerable rewards.

Effective managers know that it is important to reward progress as well as absolute attainment of a goal. Recognition for making progress reinforces the change that has occurred and keeps the salesperson focused and motivated to continue changing.

Trainers of killer whales start training the whales to jump out of the water by first teaching them how to cross over a bar at the bottom of the pool. As the whale becomes more confident and trusting of the trainer, the bar gets raised higher. First, they learn to cross the bar under the water, and then above it. After each successful attempt the whale receives a reward.

A manager once asked me, “Is it really necessary for me to make a big deal when my salespeople make progress?” I answered him by saying, “Only if you want them to fully succeed.”

To increase sales you must have salespeople who are well-trained and perform at a high level. Your job as a sales manager is to train, develop and coach them until they perform at the highest level possible. Reinforcing progress along the way is essential for making sure the salespeople achieve their full potential.

To learn more about increasing sales through sales coaching go to: philfaris.com

Phil Faris is a business development consultant, coach, speaker and author. He is president of Phil Faris Associates a firm that specializes in helping organizations hire, train, develop, lead and retain the sales talent required to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Phil has developed a reputation as a “performance improvement doctor” for his ability to help organizations improve their financial health by diagnosing performance issues and then prescribing strategies that produce measurable results.
Phil is the author of the following books: Hiring Winners, Building Customer Partnerships, Training Winners, 50 Activities for Sales Training and Upping the Down Side. He has also written numerous articles on sales, leadership and personal development.
For additional information on increasing sales,profits and customer loyalty go to: philfaris.com

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Phil_Faris/1116556

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FAQ, Healthcare

Four Costly Mistakes Many Cancer Patients Make – Part 1

 

Overview

In my work with cancer patients, I’m privy to the common mistakes made by many patients which routinely harm their health and may cost them their lives. I write this article in the hope these mistakes can be avoided. This article is derived from observations made in a sample group comprising 16,000 patients over a period of 40 years.

Lest the article appear too negative it is worth mentioning that cancer patients in 2016 are living longer and there are many wonderful advances in cancer medicine. In fact patients will do better when forewarned of these common mistakes and at our institute we consider it a part of ‘preventative medicine’ to do so. Please pass this article around to anyone with cancer.

 

1. The most fundamental mistake is a failure to understand the nature of cancer

Sadly, perhaps due to fear of the topic, this is widespread, not only among the cancer patients we assist but among some naturopaths we encounter. Failing to understand the nature of cancer will influence all your treatment choices. The following is a brief outline.

At the time of diagnosis, cells will have been detaching themselves from the primary tumour, entering the blood supply and seeking to establish a ‘new’ colony. This process may have been going on for years before the first tumour is evident. These ‘seed cells’ called circulating tumour cells (CTCs), may lay dormant for years or activate and settle down at a site of least resistance and grow into a tumour. CTCs begin circulating when the original tumour increases in size from 1.5 – 2mm, about the size of a grain of rice.

It is worth remembering that cancer is a systemic disease from the onset and the tumour its late stage symptom. Cancer cells can only thrive in a specific environment such as impaired mechanisms of regulation and repair. Cancer can enlist and the body’s bio-chemistry such that the body thinks it is part of itself and thus the immune system will not attack it.

 

With a better understanding of cancer, patients will realise they must act quickly and activate a sensible treatment plan. This sense of urgency and fear of conventional cancer medicine may cause patients to seek alternative therapies; as an alternative to conventional treatments (allopathic) and we do not recommend that path. We do however, support proven complementary therapies done with knowledge of the allopathic doctor and/or oncologist.

Communication and transparency between our institute, the patients and the doctors and oncologists is crucial because there are many times when even accepted complementary supplements can clash with cancer medicines. (See 4.)

The good news is that in 2016 the new breed of ‘targeted therapies’ used by oncologists are getting excellent results with lower side effects and people are living longer-up to 95 % of certain breast and testicular cancer patients will be alive after 5 years.

When integrative medicine is added to the scientific advances it combines the discipline of modern science with the wisdom of ancient healing. It can transform the physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the lives of people living with chronic or life-threatening illness.

Proven complementary therapies such as touch therapies, mind-body therapies, acupuncture, sound nutrition, physical activity and fitness, and dietary supplements are worthy additions provided they are not substitutes for mainstream medical care.

When used in concert with medical treatment they can help alleviate stress, reduce pain and anxiety, manage physical and emotional symptoms, and enhance quality of life for cancer patients. Some touch therapies can help the patient ‘feel human’ again while undergoing hard treatments.

2. Second deadly mistake – a failure to understand the nature of ‘Dr Internet

This mistake can powerfully influence patient treatment decisions. There is a huge cost in believing ‘that which is repeated often enough must be true.’ The internet is dominated by stories of unproven alternative cancer cures.

However the unsuspecting patient they may be inclined to believe the websites which are increasingly sophisticated and emotionally convincing websites. The following Google searches were conducted on Firefox and illustrate how difficult it is to find balanced scientific papers on alt/med products or therapies. The following searches (on Firefox in early June) yielded these ‘results’…

 

· Google search for ‘black salve’ – last week May 2011 = 8.5 mil results – this week June 4th = 9.2 mil results – June 8th = 9.34 mil results – June 14 = 10.5 mil (Up 2 million results in just over two weeks – what will it be next week?)

· Google search – ‘apricot cures cancer’ = 5 mil results

· Google search – ‘Gerson Diet cures cancer’ 1.8 mil results

· Google search – ‘nature cures cancer’ 320 mil results

· Google search – ‘alternative cures cancer’ = 6.5 mil results

· Google search – ‘wake up cure cancer now’ = 2.5 mil results

· Google search ‘science cures cancer’ = 6.25 mil results. In this case I was looking for scientific papers but the results ‘flipped’ to ‘cannabis cancer cures’ (it took over the search). This did not happen in quite the same way for Internet Explorer

· Google search – meditation cures cancer = 3.9 mil results

· Google search – cancer cleanses = 11.4 mil results (June 14 = 12.7 mil (up by 1.3 mil results in over 2 weeks)

As you can see, ‘Dr Internet’ is often biased regarding alt/med. Most of the Google results are from sites with commercial interests or those promoting an ideology such as ‘raw foodism.’ Good medical science results from respected bodies like the National Cancer Institute of America or Memorial Sloan Kettering of NY are not so easy to locate. Both have excellent research papers on complementary and alt/med products and therapies.

 

3. Third deadly mistake – Buying into the prevalent conspiracy paradigm that ‘Big Pharma’ is greedy and evil-

that it’s a tool of the wealthy who want to keep ordinary people sick so they can make more money. Whilst the medical system and industry is not perfect, it is at least regulated and under scientific scrutiny and rigor.

Such theories create unhelpful extreme polarisation and are an attempt to invalidate advances in cancer science, medicine and pharmaceutical commerce while emotively promoting alt/med or a nature ideology. These beliefs can border on fundamentalism. The victims, as always, are the unsuspecting cancer patients.

The theory is also very imbalanced-nobody is mentioning the greed or dishonesty of alt/med practitioners or supplement sellers. Some of our patients have spent up to 1.2 million AUD on unproven or even disproven alt/med therapies and regimens. Many of these treatments are kept secret. Patients at a ‘cancer cure expert,’ a naturopath, were told not to tell anybody of the ‘secret’ treatments (costing $1100 a week) because the evil AMA or Big Pharma wants to stop them ‘curing’ cancer patients so they can continue to ‘slash, burn and poison.’ A recent patient in Queensland spent over $20,000 with a local ‘inegrative doctor’ on treatments we have never seen reduce or slow the progress of cancer.

 

4. Fourth deadly mistake – A poor understanding of nutrition and basic biology

 

A belief that ‘more is better’ can be dangerous for cancer patients. The mistaken belief prevails that if certain foods or supplements can boost your immune system, enabling your body to fight off the cancer, then large doses will be more effective. Patients fail to consider that supplements are very concentrated and quite unnatural as the following study shows.

A study from the US National Cancer Institute in 1994 published in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the effects of beta carotene, a well-known anti-oxidant with cancer-fighting properties, on the incidence of lung cancer in men. One group of men were (sic) put on a balanced diet high in fruit and vegetables high in beta- carotene or pro-vitamin A, found in orange foods such as carrot and sweet potato.

The next group was given beta-carotene supplements and the final group was given a placebo. Not only did the group with the fruit and vegetable intake get a lower incidence of cancer, but the group taking the supplements had a higher incidence of cancer than the placebo group and the trial had to be terminated.

In our sample group we have commonly found patients imbibing toxic levels of some elements (selenium, copper, oestrogen), trace elements, minerals and fat soluble vitamins. Some supplements commonly taken can impede or undo the allopathic cancer medicine prescribed, hormone blockers such as Tamoxifen or Arimidex and some chemotherapies, for example.

ALSO – The ‘chemical cocktail effect’ is an unknown. It refers to the unpredictable effect of concentrates in supplements, herbal medicines mixing with concentrates in other supplements, potentially creating metabolic mayhem. A result we observe in the blood diagnostics in many of our patients.

The remaining 3 common mistakes made by cancer patients will feature in part 2 of this series.

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