egyii blog

“I understand best when I hear, see and do!”

To be competent at any skill each participant needs to understand it both conceptually and behaviourally; have opportunities to practice it, get feedback on how well he or she is performing the skill and then use the skill enough so that it becomes integrated into their behavioural repertoire back in the workplace.

 Through eight years of successful client sales learning and development engagements I have developed the following tried and tested approach that encompasses the most effective learning dimensions to start the process of achieving sustainable behavioural change in your sales team.

To help participants acquire the skills, each Transformational Sales Module follows these steps:

Review of learning outcomes and behavioural standards and how they relate to enhanced performance in the business

Self Assessment Exercise to obtain a baseline performance level

Present Skill Concepts– either through experiential learning activities, case studies or presentations

Modeling exercise that allows participants to observe others exhibiting the desired skill behaviours

Participants practice application of skills and behaviours in structured activities based on job realistic scenarios

Participants receive feedback using the behavioural skills standards checklist to sign off as an indication of their level of mastery

Application questions to provide opportunities to check understanding of how skill behaviours relate classroom learning to real life situations

Personal Action Plans are set  to identify the development of specific personal behavioural changes to implement for successful transfer of knowledge and skills into the workplace

From my experience, this is what I believe to be a formula for learning success.

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

Some of Today’s Sales Challenges

Your company has researched, designed and built competitive, innovative and compelling products.

Money and effort has also been spent on marketing and communicating the product benefits…only to soon discover that it is difficult to sell because your competitor releases a similar product shortly thereafter.

The last thing you want to do is do anything out of complete desperation or that is overly drastic…such as dropping the price or losing the sale.

This is just an example but these and other similar challenges confront your front line sales organization daily.

What to do in these and other scenarios? How to differentiate and stay ahead of the pack?

Differentiation through Your People and  Communications Delivery Methods

Your biggest differentiator is your people and how they interact with their clients.

If your people are not prepared to face these tough scenarios and work through them with your clients, then you will have difficulty growing your business and holding onto your key sales drivers, the salespeople (who will end up quitting).

How to work through this? Some examples:

Front line telephone sales need specific skills that outsell  the competition

Salespeople need to create customer value by cross-selling and up-selling

Sales needs to have high impact sales conversations with the customers

They need to present the value proposition in the right manner

How do you ensure that the skills are applied and properly utilised?

The team needs to be motivated and management needs to be aligned. Reinforcement also needs to be applied.

Motivation and Management Alignment Programmes

Examples. To enhance the sales team climate you need:

Interpersonal and team communication

Management needs to motivate the sales team, lead change and build the right team

Management needs to run effective performance appraisals and provide motivational feedback

Leadership needs to be developed through sales performance coaching, coaching the disengaged sales staff, and leading the sales team to success.

Reinforcement Methodologies

Without reinforcement, you lose the skills you have learned quickly. You need to treat learning and development with a five stage process to ensure business results always follow initiatives. Result: each initiative translates to measurable execution by learners which produces concrete business results. As follows:

Align the learning  to desired business outcomes and target behaviours

Involve all in the design of a holistic learning experience

Deliver using the right tools and practicing 80% of the time using realistic scenarios

Embed through active support  and reinforcement through direct managers

Form learning groups to act on barriers that impede performance

Lead with your people and ensure the skills they learn are embedded and utilised.

Andrew Sidwell, Team Egyii, Singapore

Last week I allowed the business environment to ‘get to me’. In the face of a challenging sales scenario I looked to the future and saw black clouds. This perception affected my drive and I started to become despondent. The change in my mood in turn affected my behaviour and even my speech became slower and less decisive. This, of course, affected the response I got from people I do business with.

Have you noticed any change in your thinking, mood and behaviour? Perhaps you just experience an underlying tone of anxiety as you go about your business. The problem is, this change directly affects the way others feel around you and about you, creating a knock-on effect on all kinds of results. If you’re client-facing, their experience of you might affect their attitude towards your organisation.

What’s happening here?

This is why it is critical for every executive to understand what’s happening to them and get control of it. John Assaraf, in his book Having It All, says “We don’t see everything there is to see; we only see what we are conditioned to see.” What this means is that we interpret information coming to us through a very personal filter. And this filter is made up of what we believe about the world around us and the kinds of things we tell ourselves all day long.

Our perceptions of the world are unique to us, and we can either allow these perceptions to de-motivate us and affect our performance, or we can look at our beliefs and internal messages and understand how they control us.

How important is this?

John Assaraf goes on to say “We talk, act, and pretend out of the prejudices of our beliefs. As a result, our beliefs and habits affect our self-esteem, our relationships, our prosperity, our job performance, our mental and physical health, and even the way other people treat us, because people treat us exactly the way we see and treat ourselves.”

What can we do?

It is essential to our performance that we find the time to sit down on our own and think about what we truly believe about ourselves and others and link these beliefs to our present thinking, mood and behaviour. It is an awakening when we realise that a belief we developed many years ago is controlling our performance today, even if that belief is no longer relevant.

It is also important to realise that these beliefs are just thoughts that we have created in our own minds. They are an illusion. And as such, we are free to eliminate them and replace them with new beliefs that serve us today. This point is crucial – we all have the ability to control what goes on in our mind, and being able to do this on a constant basis is the secret of mental and emotional strength and ultimately, success in what we set out to accomplish.

Back to my story – I realised that my despondency was the result of a belief that I did not have control over my destiny. Changing this belief into a more empowering one meant that I was able to turn my mood around and become less stressed and more productive.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

Yesterday I had a meltdown.

It started with me receiving a request to perform a series of computer tasks that I was unfamiliar with. Being a relative latecomer to the world of internet marketing, I panicked. I saw myself taking a whole day to accomplish what someone else might accomplish in half an hour.

The result was a series of mistakes that let to a waste of time and effort, until I stopped and looked inside, at my state of mind, rather than outside, at the task that confronted me.

I realised that my mistakes had nothing to do with ability and everything to do with my state of mind. And my state of mind was brought on by a belief which said ‘You’re no good at working with IT’.

I then asked the following questions:

Where does this belief originate from?

Where is the evidence to support this belief?

Where is the evidence to the contrary?

What will happen if I continue to hold this belief?

What  could happen if I believed the opposite?

In what way is this belief ridiculous?

What would be a better, more empowering belief to have?

The result of this analysis was not a new belief saying ‘You’re good at IT’, but one that said ‘You can do anything you put your mind to when you are calm’. It was my ability to manage my state that was the crucial empowering factor.

The result was that I finished the task in a short period of time thereafter with no mistakes, and actually felt elated as I was doing it.

There are many ways that we can change our state, from thinking about something different to exercising to doing a different task to talking to someone.

Whatever it is, there has never been a more appropriate time for executives today to look inward for the source of their frustrations, failure and fear, and to harness the tools of the mind to secure their future.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

In his new book Aligning Training for Results, Ron Drew Stone says, “It is vital that training professionals understand performance in order to identify needs and design, develop and deliver training solutions. …Training professionals should adopt a different thought pattern and a different performance framework that will allow us to see and communicate training and performance in a more results-centered way.”

As a training professional, what are you doing to ensure that your training leads directly to performance improvement on the job and that this improvement leads to tangible business results? In today’s budget-conscious, turbulent business environment it is vital that every dollar spent on training leads to some form of improvement in the following:

• The cost of doing business
• The profitability of the business
• The quality (effectiveness) of the organisation’s business products, processes and services
• The output (quantity) of products and services
• The time (efficiency) it takes to complete tasks and business processes, address and correct problem areas, and service the customer

It’s time for change.

Time to move on from a focus on learning requirements and participant evaluations, to a focus on execution. Do you have plans in place to identify the specific business results you want to achieve, the performance gap between where you are and where you want to be, and the execution needed to close that gap?

Have you identified all the various internal factors that need to be addressed to ensure that you are doing whatever it takes to achieve execution after the training is over?

It’s no good gaining knowledge, understanding, skills and a positive attitude if there is no execution, because this is the only thing that will lead to performance improvement and business results. If you can achieve all this, then you deserve to be sitting at the top table.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

It’s at times like these that I find re-visiting classic pieces of writing about performance and success worthwhile. Yesterday I took another look at Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which included this item written in 1934:

“One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people.”

Fast track to 2008 and Joe Takash says in his book Results Through Relationships, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m called on to deal with dysfunctional teams, to coach a talented but flawed leader, to increase profit, or to improve productivity and morale; there is always a relationship issue. There may be other issues contributing to the problem, but relationships always play a large part in the cause of the problem… and its solution.”

I know that obtaining degrees and certificates helps to qualify you as an expert in a particular field. I also know that the way most businesses are organised, you are spending the vast majority of your time dealing with tasks such as emails, reports and research. Yes, knowing your business inside out and dealing with everything that lands on your desktop are critical. But isn’t this time of economic turbulence a great opportunity to step back and assess what areas need a laser-like focus to bring you career success and your company growth and profitability in the next few months and years?

The secret is relationships. Your ability to deal with people is now the critical success factor. In fact it always has been. And the only way to deal with people effectively and to get them to do anything, is simply to give them what they want. And what they want is, as John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers said, “to have a feeling of importance”. I doesn’t matter what situation or task you apply this to – what will enable you to forge lasting relationships and influence people is to make them feel valued and recognised. And this, above all else, leads to results.

So let’s spend some time thinking about our people skills and how we are going to use them to achieve much more than we ever thought we were capable of.