egyii blog

In one of her blog postings Some Things Never Change, the HR Bartender (Sharlyn Lauby) reports on the results of the latest Robert Half International survey, showing that “35% of senior executives felt that unhappiness with management is the top reason for losing star employees.  This figure is up from 23% five years ago.  (FYI – for those of you who might be thinking pay is the second reason…think again.  It was fourth after advancement opportunities and lack of recognition.)”

Many reasons for low employee engagement and high employee turnover are given by companies, from unhappiness about having to accept lower pay during the downturn, to high career expectations. These may play a part, but often the perception of employees by management as being less important in creating a competitive advantage than product or service innovation and marketing strategy, is bound to send the wrong signals.

When management and senior leaders recognise that in today’s tough business environment, it is their people who have the potential to create that critical competitive edge that will see companies through this crisis, only then will they change their practices.  Changing practices means honouring the untapped potential in all your people, maintaining training and development initiatives, and creatively coming up with ideas on how to place employees at the centre of your strategic plan.

Only then will businesses find that the tough times can be managed and overcome.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

“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

Welcome, Andrew, to Team Egyii.

In a nutshell, Andrew brings to clients years of hands on experience in the call centre space and in the learning and development arena, working with major banks, insurance and technology companies, to name a few.

Andrew helps clients with the effective sales conversation and the reinforcement behind it. His focus is on solutions for front line service, sales teams and management:

Frontline sales and acquisition

Frontline customer experience

Leadership and coaching development

For more on Andrew, see Andrew Sidwell and for more on the programmes he has delivered to banking, finance and the tech sector, see the following.

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

Part I: Going Out on Sales Calls after Sales Training

You have just finished sales “training.”

It could be:

SPIN Selling

Value Selling

PSS Professional Selling Skills

Etc….

(You name it – I have been through them all!)

…and now is your chance to utilise these skills you have learned.

So you line up a series of calls. Prior to the call, you need to do call preparation so you take out your planning sheets…you think about the anticipated  problems, your solutions, your products’ features/benefits, what ”open” and “closed” ended questions to ask, Etc.  

Your boss is “required” to go in tow to support the million dollar+  investment the company just made by ensuring that you are applying the skills.

You sit face to face with the client*. She is a wise an seasoned veteran. You start your process. “Blah, blah, blah…” She starts to smile (a cunning smile at that) and to grin cheek to cheek.

Why? She has seen all of this before. The last sales person came in and did a similar series of gestures. Not only that she felt like she was being “trapped.”

She knew what was going on..

The questions were not natural. The situation was not authentic. It was not from the gut.

It was phoney.

..and you were not listening to the client. Not focusing on her. You were focusing on the process, the script.

How did the client feel? How well did the call go? I will let you answer that.

Don’t get me wrong. Some people fare well in a pre-processed situation. I believe it works best to learn a few skills and build your own personal program; a  program that combines a sales process, product and technical training and program that builds a real relationship.

Carry on…

*This is a true story. It happened to me- and I was embarrassed as she asked me if I just finished sales training!

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

The Singapore Government, through the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has made a bold move into the world of Islamic Banking to step ahead of their “competitors.” Congratulations to MAS for putting egg on the faces of the Hong Kong business community (and the Malaysian banking community who has traditionally held this post in the region), as per the following posting in the HK Standard Charting a Safer Route…

The government has also instituted numerous learning and development programs in the banking community through a few of the local learning institutions to bring up the standards in the banking and finance personnel. I have heard from numerous sources that a lot of money and time has been put into this with little results.

Singapore’s business community relies heavily on the government to make decisions to protect the businesses and ultimately the working people. I am not knocking this and believe it has contributed to the success of Singapore. I am pretty sure  that the government and the business community are aware that this time around, things are different and that decisions from the top may not encompass all the answers.

Do they know the difference between the “old world” of business and the “new world” of business? Probably not as reflected in their actions. What about personal development, motivation and effectiveness skills in Singapore? These areas have been overlooked and need serious considerations.

We believe the solutions lie in the people. Your people upfront  make the difference- and that difference will move the business community ahead to an area of true cometitiveness.

For more see yesterday’s posting How to Repolish the Banking Image…

Trip Allen, Team Egyii, Singapore

How much of new learning from a training programme actually gets applied in a value-enhancing way back on the job? It’s probably somewhere between 5% and 20%. That means out of a hundred learners, only a few are actually delivering performance improvement that leads directly to business results.

The solution? Most organisations would go on a search for a ‘new’ training programme that promises to solve their immediate problems. This training will then be seen as the ‘silver bullet’ that produces the long-awaited results. Hopes are raised amid an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. And more often than not, the training proceeds according to plan, the learners finish the programme highly motivated and determined to apply their new skills, and – nothing happens. Back at their jobs they react to the same interpersonal and environmental triggers that set off their familiar patterns of behaviour, and within a few days have lost their motivation and forgotten much of what they had learnt. The trouble is, they don’t return to the same situation they were in before they went for the training. Rather, they feel deflated and exhausted, and they work with a feeling of promises broken. The impact on morale can be devastating.

Often, the reasons why the learning was not applied on the job do not lie with the training programme. Much good training has met with similar results. It is a waste of time to blame the training programme and then go on to sign up an alternative training provider in the hope that this time it will be different.

Instead, a holistic approach needs to be taken. Training on its own will never result in performance improvement. What is needed is a whole-organisation approach to performance improvement and training support. Training effectiveness is influenced by many organisational, cultural and systemic issues.

For example, research indicates that new skills will only be applied back on the job if the employee receives proactive support for the change from his line manager. In many cases, learners return to work full of enthusiasm to try out their new skills only to receive at best a lack of interest and at worst an injunction to do things the way they’ve always been done. I have received feedback many times from participants on business writing skills courses that it is all very well learning new ways to communicate, but when they produce such writing in the office their boss changes it back to the ‘old’ style of writing. What a waste!

But merely acknowledging that the learner has some new skills and passively observing him trying them out is insufficient. The line manager needs to have a method for systematically following-up with the employee, monitoring the results he produces, giving regular feedback and support, and providing the Learning and Organisational Development Department with sound evaluations of performance resulting from the training.

This is but one of a variety of actions that can and should be taken before and after the training event so that training moves from being a one-off event to a performance improvement process. It requires the inclusion of all the stakeholders, from learning executives to line managers, senior managers and employees who all need to be aligned behind an agreed set of objectives and actions to be taken.

Training done the right way is one of the most powerful methods for creating positive business results, so let’s bring it out of the closet and let it show us what it can really do.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore