DeepSmarts™ - transforming potential into performance

Delivering more from less is today’s critical business requirements. Your people are expensive to employ and demanding to manage. They are often talked about as being an organisation’s greatest asset but redundancies and pay freezes indicate a more challenging perspective.

Your people can be a (the?) major component of your competitive advantage strategy. Structured Training has spent the last 40 years successfully helping organisations with their people development. We have brought all this experience together for today’s market-place, forming a powerful tool that can align your own organisation with the three critical areas of focus, each containing two success drivers.

We call thisDeepSmarts™ – Transforming potential into performance.

The major benefits of a DeepSmarts™ approach compared to conventional people development/training approaches are:

• Improved productivity


• Increased customer retention rates


• Sales growth


• More effective ROI on people development

There are several ways to find out how a DeepSmarts™ approach can transform your organisation.

Attend a DeepSmarts™ Overview. This free, 3 hour session shows you how to orientate your organisation towards a DeepSmarts™ approach, plus giving you a snapshot of how your organisation could change its people practices to more DeepSmarts™ orientation.

Receive The DeepSmarts™ Report. This short report will give you a set of clear indicators, showing how your organisation measures up and where improvements can be made. Using our DeepSmarts™ structured diagnostic process we’ll spend two to three hours talking with you to understand not only the people symptoms you’re seeing right now, but their underlying causes, as well as identifying any concerns and opportunities which may be just over the horizon for you. You will then receive The DeepSmarts™ Report free of charge, on a no obligation basis.

Many clients however then go a stage further and commission a DeepSmarts™ Project. Below is a selection of some successful DeepSmarts™ Projects:

• We developed a more effective sales process which led to an improved customer engagement model resulting in increased profitability


• We created a more engaged workforce which led to increased morale resulting in fantastic service scores and a more loyal customer base


• We developed a team interaction process which led to increased communication and constructive conflict resulting in high performing teams


• We facilitated the development of a purpose framework, which gave employees a clear view of how they could make a difference, resulting in a more engaged and productive workforce


• We engaged the senior team to help them address the issues between them, creating a forum for debate resulting in stronger, more coherent leadership

DeepSmarts™ is Structured Training’s proprietary methodology for really transforming potential into performance.

To arrange an informal discussion, reserve a place on the next Overview Day or arrange a meeting to talk around your own DeepSmarts™ Report, please contact Claudine McClean on 01789 734300.

What DeepSmarts™ Delivers Versus Conventional People Development Approaches

• Lasting Impact rather than a ‘good for one week’ effect
• Increased Organisational Capabilities rather than just binders of unused reading matter
• People mobilised to change rather than to complain ‘we are not allowed to’
• More Motivated people, including the awkward squad
• Engaging as well as interesting
• Measurable as well as enjoyable
• Real, usable tools instead of just memorable anecdotes
• Joined and integrated instead of a series of disconnected events
• Improved performance not just invoices to pay

DeepSmarts™ Delivers

What Does High Performance Sales Management Look Like? (And What It Doesn't!)

Why do we employ sales managers? An apparently obvious question gets more interesting when you look a bit deeper. Many sales managers are seemingly employed for the following reasons:

• to simply act as a span breaker between the sales director and the sales team
• to stop them leaving by promoting them into a sales management role, without thought as to their management abilities
• to curb their earnings as salespeople
• to manage house accounts (to stop other salespeople earning too much bonus on the biggest clients)
• so somebody is making sure salespeople are doing what they should be doing
• to check salespeoples’ expenses
• to pull the teams activity data together into a monthly report for the sales director
• to organise hospitality days
• to organise and run a monthly sales meeting
• so the sales director has somebody to kick around

All of the above reasons we have seen in our work. For one unfortunate sales manager we talked to in pulling this article together, he felt virtually all applied to him!

Sales managers should be employed because they create a performance premium, i.e. the team would perform to level 'X' without a sales manager and perform to level 'Y' with the sales manager in place. In our experience there is a significant minority of sales managers to deliver a reverse premium, their leaving would increase the performance of the team.

Let’s look at the those things added value sales managers are doing:

• getting the right people into the right roles so they can excel
• setting high standards of performance, activity and behaviour
• constantly coaching
• not tolerating mediocrity
• always looking for ways to optimise the sales process
• seeing their role primarily as one of motivating and enabling
• fighting to get their people the best equipment, resources and information - first
• supporting their people with good systems and minimum bureaucracy
• not trying to be the best salesperson on the team but the best manager
• auditing their own contribution, making sure they focus as much on leadership behaviours as they do on management activities
• protecting their people from ‘upstairs’ interference as much as possible
• obsessing about the relationship between the quality and quantity of sales activity and never getting the emphasis muddled up
• prompting sales excellence by recognising best practice champions in the team
• making the sales job as enjoyable as possible

If you would like to learn more about all of the above in greater detail and more besides, why not attend our High Performance Sales Management course which is next due to run on 21-22 July 2009.

For further information or to book a place on any of our courses please contact us.

Turning Difficult Customers Into Lifelong Fans

Do difficult times produce difficult customers or have they just always been there? We recently received this unsolicited testimonial from a participant on one of our sales training courses.

“I took the bull by the horns and contacted my ‘difficult customer’. I used open questions to all his objections, utilised the cycle technique and pinned him down to an appointment. Success! ……… it has made me realise, that the techniques learned on the course, do actually work. I thought you would like to know this.”

On the course in question (Selling...The Essentials For Success) we had spent some time looking at specific issues affecting sales people and the ‘difficult customer’ kept coming up. Maybe we have a preconception that the ‘difficult customer’ is a particular type of creature that needs handling in a particular kind of way? Or do we just overlook why that person is a ‘difficult customer’ in the first place?

On the course we looked at different ways to approach new and potential customers where everything from understanding your Unique Selling Point to your personal presentation, makes the best possible impact and pre-empts any ‘difficult’ responses. We also explored the relationship-building elements to sales and different techniques to help maintain strong, supportive and mutually beneficent relationships that minimise the possible areas for confrontation.

Of course, receiving this sort of testimonial is always very rewarding and it was no coincidence that we had also discussed the strategic importance of obtaining references and referrals from existing customers. One of the most powerful ways of moving your business forward is through the recommendations of your happiest customers. If they are delighted with you, they will be your best advocates. We discussed ways of getting testimonials and their place in your approach to promoting yourself, your offer and your business. But the unsolicited ones are by far the most satisfying!

If you feel that you would benefit from help in turning your difficult customers into lifelong fans why not give us a call to talk through some options. Or perhaps you'd like to attend our Selling...The Essentials For Success course? For further information or to book a place on any of our courses please contact us.

Government Funding For Real Training

Do you have 5-249 Employees? Would you like free structured training?

In these tough times the UK Government recognises that the way to future success is through proven, impactful, commercial training and is offering funding for such training. The type of funding available is for courses such as the Sales, Management and Leadership Training offered by Structured Training.

The qualification criteria are simple. You qualify if you have:

• 5-249 Employees

Structured Training’s range of courses all fall within the scope of the grant as they all provide a high quality cost effective training input that increases business skills.

The grant programme starts at £500, which is fully funded. Where the training cost is above £500 the government will match your spend 50-50 up to £1,000. So if a course costs £1,000, the government will reimburse your organisation £750. It will only cost you £250.

Where you need to spend more, for example on a management training or sales training course for a team, or a leadership programme, individual cases are considered locally on their merits.

The specific rules and contacts vary throughout the United Kingdom. Structured Training has experience of helping organisations gain access to this funding. Therefore to find out more about the rules in your region and find out how you can benefit from government funding for your training contact us.

How Would You Rate The Significance To Your Organisation (In The Next 6 Months) The Following Business Development/Survival Strategies?

We ran a survey last month with the above title asking people to rate the importance of a range of business development techniques from irrelevant to critical. Below we post the aggregated results, from most to least significant.

1. Getting customer service right (most significant)
2. Launching new products
3. Reducing costs
4. New ways of working
5. Web based activities
6. Field sales optimisation
7. Changing the culture
8. Tele-sales optimisation
9. Recruiting new people
10. Off-line marketing
11. Reducing prices (least significant)

Commentary

• Getting customer service right was way out in front, over 80% of respondents rating this as critical. This still seems an obvious win, yet so many organisations still struggle with delivering any kind of memorable (for the right reasons), consistent customer focused service experience yet don't really understand why. Working with our sister company SalesPathways we would suggest it’s to do with two factors. Firstly not aligning with and designing service as part of the strategy. And secondly, not engaging with the frontline effectively. The combinatory failure creates mediocre service.
• Next, look at answers 2-5. What is the one organisational capability required to make an impact is these areas? Innovation. So few organisations are consciously competent when it comes to creativity and innovation, many have it as a key value (mostly more in hope than reality). Competitive advantage comes from either doing things clearly differently from everybody else, or from doing things materially better. To innovate, either incrementally through continuous improvement or radically through implementing step-change ideas will enable you to launch new products, reduce costs, and implement new ways of working and web based activities.
• There seems to be a recognition that online is now more significant than offline marketing activities.
• The field saleforce is still seen as a major influence on business performance, from our experience one of the quickest wins in boosting the numbers it to improve the activities of the sales team.
• Changing the culture is not a quick win but this seems to be a (relative) recognition that many organisations don’t have the cultural norms to come through the recession. This will be a real challenge.
• Recruiting new people is not bottom. Something to gladden any recruitment company.
  It’s interesting that reducing prices is bottom. There is a look of evidence that prices are under pressure so this is interesting. It might be about the fact many organisations are reducing prices but only as a condition of play rather than with any sense that it will make much of a difference. The other factors in the list being more significant.

Can we thank our newsletter readers who took part, and we hope you found the survey results a useful counterpoint to your own economic coping strategies.

100 Days Of Management

Barack Obama has just completed his first 100 days as President of the United States. He’s put in place a $787bn economic stimulus plan, put 2m acres of wilderness under federal protection, set in place a major reform of healthcare and acquired a new dog. A Gallup poll indicates that a majority of Americans feel he has done a good or excellent job so far. At the same time former President George W. Bush has spent his first 100 days out of office raising funds for his Presidential library, after 100 days he’s at $147m, ahead of expectation and well on the way to his $300m target.

100 days is an interesting marker to see how well someone is doing in a new job. Some people set themselves 100 day action plans, clearly setting out what they intend to do each day to build success, others set themselves 100 day objectives, visibly publishing what they will have achieved at the end of 100 days without specifically identifying the markers to get there.

Unfortunately many managers set themselves a lower goal of using the first 100 days in a new role to settle in, find out how things work, get to know everyone, and think about what changes might be appropriate. This strategy rarely yields significant results. At the end of 100 days the new manager is able to explain the current situation, justify why things are the way they are and rationalise any failures in performance.

To give managers a real chance of succeeding, they need to feel excited about their new management role, and confident in their ability to carry it out successfully. In too many cases a person is appointed or promoted to the role of manager with no clear idea of what their responsibilities are and no clear mandate to manage. Structured Training’s Fundamentals of Management course is a great way to invest 3 of those all important 100 days, taking time to decide what kind of manager you are (and want to be), what your key challenges will be, what your objectives are developing strategies to really deliver on your management promise. Don’t worry if you’re already in role. Your 100 days can start here.